Aaron Friedberg on The Rise of China and the Strategic Threat to the US

ladies and gentlemen let's get started this is the program on constitutional government and our guest today is Aaron Friedberg Aaron Freiburg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton he's been since 1987 and he's he also has experience in the government he was he served as deputy assistant for national security affairs in the office of the vice president from 2003 to 2005 that was bridging the first and second administration's of of George W Bush and he's written books is the author of the weary tire Titan Britton and the experience of relative decline in 1895 to nineteen five and in the shadow of the garrison state America's Andes statism and it's Cold War grand strategy another book a contest for supremacy China America and the struggle for mastery and Asia then Beyond air-sea battle the debate over US military strategy and Asia and most recently a book the authoritarian challenge from Russia and China that came out in 2017 he's also written articles for The Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post Weekly Standard and he was the first occupant of the Henry Kissinger chair in the Library of Congress so this is Aaron Freiburg and he's going to talk on US and China a new Cold War question mark thank you very much our beads it's always a pleasure to be back at Harvard oh yes I forgot to say he's a Harvard graduate from 1978 and he got his PhD in the government department in 1986 the most important qualifications I didn't have this good sense to study with professor Mansfield when I was here but I did live in fear of his one man can't to reduce great inflation in the 1970s so it's a particular honor to be asked to address this seminar although I have to say even 40 years on it's a little bit daunting so I'd like to proceed in in four steps in order to avoid any accusations of false advertising I want to begin by trying to address the question that's raised at the title of my talk then I'd like to turn to a consideration of how we got to be where we are now looking first at what I think is increasingly recognized as a failed US strategy towards China that we've been pursuing since at least the end of the Cold War then say something about my views of China's evolving strategy for dealing with the United States and then close by offering some thoughts on where we may be going with a particular emphasis on adjustments in US strategy that I think are now underway so are we or will we soon be engaged in a new Cold War with China I think the kind of respectable opinion on this question is no we're not for various reasons and it's a good thing that we're not but I think in fact the answer is more complicated than that there are similarities as well as differences and these historical comparisons are useful I think only to the extent that they can help to eliminate both similarities and differences so let me say a little bit about both I think there are five similarities at least and then three notable differences so the similarities as was true of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union the emerging rivalry between the United States and China is shaping up to be intense global multi-dimensional with a strong ideological component but like the Cold War it will also probably be constrained and is therefore likely to prove to be protracted so intense each power I think will increasingly be have as its principal strategic preoccupation the other I think this has been true of China really for quite some time certainly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's starting to be true the United States now with respect to China global from an initial focus on the Asia Pacific which was really the core of this rivalry and still is in many ways the US and China have begun to compete for influence and access all the way across Eurasia all the way to Western Europe down through the Middle East into Africa across the Atlantic into the Western Hemisphere north and south to the two poles beneath the Seas and into space so it's really in every direction in addition to geographic expansion like the Cold War the current competition has broadened out across domains so it now includes military economic technological espionage counter espionage diplomatic and information or political warfare elements ideological what's beginning to unfold is a struggle for power and influence like previous years of great power competition but as was true of the Cold War it's more than that at its core I think it's a rivalry between a liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime with what I would describe as totalitarian aspirations so a contest between contending models or alternate alternative ways of organizing political economic and social life for all of its obvious intensity this rivalry too is and will likely remain constrained after all among other things it's being played out under the shadow of nuclear weapons and an awareness on all sides of the potentially enormous costs of direct military competition or confrontation given the strengths of the forces propelling it and the fact that it's unlikely to be resolved through some kind of decisive clash of arms I think it follows that barring a radical shift in policy by either side which can't be ruled out the us-china rivalry is likely to drag on for some time for years and maybe for decades after all it took 40 years for the US Soviet cold war to play out we're just in the early stages of this one I think so those are some similarities there are also differences between then and now just note three first and most obvious in marked contrast to the Cold War relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union the US and China are deeply interconnected in terms of flows of goods capital but also people ideas information data and at least until very recently it was generally assumed that these linkages created strong incentives for cooperations cooperation on both sides and were an additional constraint on the possibility of confrontation and conflict I think that starting to to change somewhat second largely as a result of its economic engagement with the United States and the other advanced industrial nations China's been able to grow far more rapidly than would otherwise have been possible and to advance to the point where it may be able to pose a serious challenge to the United States in ways that the Soviet Union was never able to do the overall output of the Chinese economy depending on human how you measure it either already does or will soon exceed that of the United States when that happens it'll be the first time since roughly the 1880s that the United States hasn't had the world's largest economy and I think the first time since the early 19th century that the US has faced a potential opponent with aggregate resources greater than its own by comparison the Soviet economy never got to be much more than a third the size of the United States in addition to these sort of aggregate capabilities in contrast to the Soviets who started out closer to the United States in terms of their technological capabilities in the aftermath of the Second World War in the 40s and 50s but then for various reasons tended to fall further and further behind the opposite appears to be happening with China it's rapidly closing the gap in a number of areas and it's doing so in part through its own efforts but also by exploiting the openness of the United States and other Western economies to acquire technology through a variety of means including business investment recruitment of scientific talent and theft using both cyber intrusions and more traditional means of industrial espionage and what this may mean among other things is that in future it'll be more difficult for the United States to rely on its preferred approach to deterring and if necessary defeating potential rivals by maintaining a wide qualitative edge or an advantage of technological capabilities third and last are extraordinary openness and our deep economic engagement have given Beijing access to and leverage over our society and our political system that the Soviet leadership can only have dreamed of this is partly a matter of deliberate influence operations that are designed to shape the perceptions of our people and our policymakers but it also reflects the normal functioning of a pluralistic democratic political system the existence of a variety of influential companies groups and individuals who for a range of usually legitimate but often self-interested reasons have lobbied strongly in favor of preserving a good relationship with China almost regardless of Beijing's behavior and the effect of all of this I think has been to slow our reaction to China's growing power and it's increasingly evident ambitions and to delay the formation of a political consensus on the necessity of doing so and I don't think such a consensus is has yet formed so these three factors taken together I think mean that the emerging rivalry is actually likely to be even more difficult and challenging for the United States than the Cold War so how did we wind up in this situation for the better part of four decades certainly since the end of the Cold War the United States has pursued what I would describe as a two pronged approach to dealing with China one that combined balancing with engagement on the one hand the US has sought to engage China and every conceivable domain diplomatic cultural scientific educational and of course above all economic and the economic relationship has become enormously important at the same time after the end of the Cold War and certainly from the mid-1990s onwards successive US administrations have worked to maintain a favorable balance of power in the asia-pacific region and they've done that by strengthening us forward based forces and bolstering traditional u.s. alliances and also developing quasi alliance relationships with other countries to whom the US doesn't extend the security guarantee but who share with it that some degree of concern about the implications for their autonomy and security of China's rising power and that includes very small countries but significant ones like Singapore and some very large countries like India the goals of this two-pronged strategy were essentially to preserve stability to discourage aggression or attempts at coercion even as China grew stronger which of course was expected to do while waiting for engagement to work its magic on China in effect to tame and ultimately to transform China engagement was supposed to encourage China's leaders to become the term of art in the Bush administration was and want them to be a responsible stakeholder in the existing us-led international orders welcomed them into that system and that will cause them to see their interests as lying in the preservation of that system rather than its transformation or disruption and at the same time this process of engagement is going to set in motion or encourage forces that will lead progressively to the liberalisation of China's economy opening movement towards a true market-based economic system and eventually this will lead to the democratization of China's political system that was rooted in theory and this mixed approach promised economic as well as strategic benefits for the United States it had strong domestic support on both sides of the aisle everybody is now sort of in retrospect and not everybody but many people saying well this was a mistake it was foolish we we didn't want anything like this in fact that's not true basically everybody was for it and it was not from the start an obvious mistake but I think in retrospect it's clear that it a gamble and it's become increasingly apparent in the last decade or so that the gamble hasn't paid off at least not yet China has clearly become richer and stronger but instead of loosening its grip the Chinese Communist Party or CCP regime has become even more repressive and were militantly nationalistic instead of evolving towards a true market-based economy Beijing continues to deploy and in certain respects has expanded its reliance upon state-directed market distorting mercantilist trade and industrial policies and meanwhile from an American perspective and not only the US China's external behavior has come to be seen as more assertive and even in certain respects aggressive in my view the the simplest explanation for the failure of US and Western strategy is that it underestimated the resilience the resourcefulness and the ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party and its determination to hold on to domestic political power so even as they opened up and began to enjoy the enormous benefits of trade and investment with the US and other Western countries China's rulers worked diligently to retain control over the direction of their national economy and to preserve their grip on the Chinese people through an evolving mix of surveillance and repression but also co-optation particularly in form of economic benefits and also nationalist propaganda and indoctrination so they found a way to enhance their wealth and power without having to fundamentally alter their economic and political systems were to abandon their ambitions and without up until quite recently triggering a powerful counter reaction from the United States in short they developed the strategy that at least for the moment has successfully countered and neutralized our own let me say a few words about that strategy over the last 40 years arguably since the founding of the People's Republic its rulers appear to have had three broad objectives first and foremost has been to maintain the control of the Chinese Communist Party in a way that's that's job one two three you you name it the list extends that's the principal preoccupation of the leadership and I think it explains what they do domestically as well as in their foreign policy second it appears that China's leaders have for some time had the ambition to restore China to what they see as its proper historic status as a preponderance turn Eurasia and third although this I think has only begun to emerge more recently the desire to become a truly global player with power presence and influence on par with and perhaps eventually superior to that of the United States during the first two decades after the end of the Cold War the CCP regime adopted a generally cautious and defensive approach one that focused on avoiding confrontation while building up all of the elements of China's so-called comprehensive national power and this is a term or a concept that's used by Chinese analysts to refer to a mix of all of the various elements of national power military diplomatic economic technological in recent years Chinese analysts have spent a lot of time wondering what soft power is which has tied them up in knots but they see the United States has this why is it how do we get some so they were cautious as their capabilities have grown however China's leaders I think have begun to reach out beyond their borders in an attempt to reshape the world or parts of the world in ways that they believe will make it less threatening and more conducive to the long-term survival of their regime so in a way just as at the turn of the 20th century American policymakers set out as Woodrow Wilson said to make the world safe for democracy so also since the start of the 21st century there ccph counterparts have been working more openly and vigorously to make the world safe for authoritarianism or at least for the continued rule of the CCP in China and this shift towards a more assertive or outward directed approach I think began to become visible in 2008 2009 after the financial crisis it certainly has intensified markedly since the rise to power of si Jinping in 2012-2013 but it is not exclusively a function of his vision in his leadership I think it's something that goes further back like his predecessors I think she is driven by insecurity and also ambition he fears dissent social instability political unrest he and his colleagues like their predecessors I think are convinced that the United States and its Democratic allies are out to encircle his country and to undermine his regime especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis the CCP elites concluded that the United States was actually in relative decline something which had been anticipated but was perceived now to be happening more rapidly than had been hoped and that their own power was on the rise and that there for the moment had come for China to reclaim its rightful place in Asia and on the world stage and so they decided to put aside dumb Xiao Qing's famous to admonition going back to 1991 that China should hide its capabilities and buy it it's time and these phrases have a lot of meaning in the CCP system it wasn't officially removed from the language but it disappeared and seaching pink doesn't use that language and neither do his colleagues they talk now about striving for achievement but even the regime's overall long-term confidence I think is tinged with uncertainty and a sense of urgency China's rulers know that they face serious difficulties in sustaining economic growth in dealing with the needs of an aging population and a severely polluted natural environment among other problems and I think they continue to have a healthy respect for the resilience and power of the United States and of the u.s. system and those of its Democratic allies and the ability particularly of the United States to mobilize resources once it realizes that it's being challenged and one reason why I say jumping and his colleagues may be pressing so hard now is that they could perceive that there's a window of opportunity that may not stay open forever and their reasons for thinking that talked about in their deliberations about the evolving strategic environment going back to the early part of the 21st century and I'm happy to discuss the various aspects of Chinese strategy in more detail but I want to confine myself here to a few general observations technology the push to become what CCP leaders describe as a high-tech superpower is central to every aspect of their strategy it's not something that's optional it's essential it's essential as they see it to sustaining growth automation so-called fourth Industrial Revolution mastering the technologies of this new wave is essential to sustain productivity and therefore to sustain growth and in the process to maintain social stability even as China's population ages and as its previous advantages as a low-cost manual manufacturing platform begin to evaporate something which has already begun to happen so sustaining growth maintaining social control the regime has made massive investments in monitoring and controlling the internet and social media and this has been a company now by the development of ubiquitous surveillance facial recognition software the initial rollout of the so called social credit system which could conceivably give the regime the capacity to monitor the transactions conversations activities and movements of virtually every man child in china which i think is the kind of totalitarian ambition but the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century lacked the capacity to do that offsetting u.s. military advantages the u.s. is still perceived to be ahead of china across a range of technologies and military capabilities that those technologies enable the chinese strategic writers talk about the possibility of what they described as leapfrog frogging not just trailing behind but jumping ahead by developing entirely new kinds of capabilities and some seem to think that artificial intelligence will allow them to do this and fourth technology also provides a means with which to project China's influence globally Chinese companies are building large portions of IT infrastructure in many countries and that may permit them access to data that may give an edge in developing new algorithms and perhaps also enable them to conduct surveillance and perhaps even sabotage in countries that have become heavily reliant on infrastructure built by Chinese companies that's at least that concern and that seems to be the ambition regarding the means more generally Beijing is using all of the instruments of its national power to try to achieve its objectives you can argue about how well coordinated all of this is but I think I have more than one so all the elements but the blend of these elements I think is different in different parts of the world and it's useful I think to distinguish between China's own region so the 360 degrees around China both the maritime and the Continental domain and then the broader global sphere regionally in Eastern Europe on East Asia the regime appears to be trying to use its growing military capabilities in effect to push the United States back to undermine the credibility of you defense commitments and thereby to erode the foundation of its regional alliances well at the same time using the massive attractive power sort of gravitational pull of its huge and growing economy to draw others towards it so push the u.s. back pull others in and also political influence operations to try to weaken resistance on the part of local powers and also to drive wedges between some of them and also between some of them and the United States and you may be aware that there's an ongoing quite vigorous debate in controversy in Australia for example and in New Zealand as well about revelations regarding these operations so that's the immediate region globally in part because China's ability to project military power beyond its own region is still quite limited in other parts of the world it's pursuing its aims primarily through the use of non-military instruments economic statecraft so China as its economy has grown has been able to wield enormous purchasing power a huge source of demand for raw materials among other things the China's vast domestic market and the ability and willingness of the regime to hold out both the promise of access to that market or the threat of denial of access to that market gives potential diplomatic leverage and also the promise or the actuality of Chinese investment which has grown significantly in the last couple of years in particular as part of the so-called belton Road initiative so there's economic statecraft influenced operations I've mentioned to try to shape the perceptions and the policy preferences especially of elites and through them governments and also a further proof of the malign influence of post-modernism Chinese analysts smile now talk about discursive or discourse power so it's reached all the way and when they talk when they use this language they're referring to ongoing and very serious attempts to shape the terms of debate on international rules norms standards and institutions so you we can get other people to adopt our language that will adopt our concepts and they are more likely to adopt policies that we prefer so for example the idea of internet sovereignty as compared to internet freedoms of the notion that governments really have legitimate right to control the in from their own information space or the notion of the right to development which Chinese officials talked a lot about as compared to broader notion of notions of human rights the notion that economic development and the right to development that should take precedence over all of these other rights and more generally and this is something that is relatively new I think a much more open critique of what Chinese authors and analysts and policymakers now refer to as so-called universal values by which they mean the values of liberal democracy and which the CCP now denounces as not Universal but merely Western or even more narrowly American values that the United States is trying to impose on others around the world including China regarding the the ends or the goals this is not something that TCP leaders talk much about and even the analysts whose writings one can follow from the outside are cautious in discussing it but I would say and this is speculation but in what it sees as its own backyard Beijing appears to envision a new system that would extend across much of Eurasia that would be linked together by infrastructure or trade agreements and that would have China at its center and America's Democratic allies either integrated and subordinated or weakened and isolated and with the United States pushed to the margin if not out of the region altogether further afield the regime seems to be positioning itself to claim or really to reclaimed because this is something that Chinese leaders here talked a lot about a role as the supporter but also the leader and role model of a bloc of countries in the developing world a lot of what they're doing economically but also diplomatically I think a lot of the aim of this discursive power is the developing world and here Beijing may not be spreading communism as now tried to do in the 1960s but it is I think encouraging the consolidation of authoritarianism and weakening democratic institutions where they're vulnerable among other things providing assistance training and education to local elites we see a lot of this in Africa but also parts of Central Asia and now even into parts of the former Soviet empire in Eastern and Central Europe finally as regards the advanced industrial democracies I think the aim is to divide and weaken the West not actually the conquer it so it's not divide and conquer but divide and weekend and the CCP is using economic inducements and also influence operations takes advantage of differences in interest within countries we can see some of that playing out in the trade dispute now it is seeking I think to promote divisions among countries in both Europe and Asia and also seeking to drive wedges if it can between the United States and its allies at both ends of the Eurasian landmass and it's also becoming increasingly aggressive in trying to shape the discourse about China and about Chinese policy that's taking place outside of its borders including in the wealthiest and strongest democracies so threatening to impose costs on companies that run afoul of the CCP when their employees make comments about Hong Kong or cynjohn or put naps on expensive t-shirts that don't show Taiwan that's part of China or as I think VW did quote and maybe those BMW quote the Dalai Lama and their advertising or otherwise as the CCP likes to say hurt the feelings of the Chinese people regarding the future of us strategy the United States has arguably been slow to recognize these realities and to adjust its strategy accordingly and I think that's it gonna be an interesting question for historians why did it take so long for the US and other Western countries to sort of wake up to this and why did they start to do so when they did nevertheless US strategy has evolved and it's begun to change quite markedly in the last three years over the last three years or just a part of this story and in the interest of time I would just say this is a shorthand way of describing what's been happening referring back to my description of US strategy as consisting of this mix of engagement and balancing the Obama administration's pivot in 2010-2011 was basically an attempt to increase the balancing part of the u.s. strategic portfolio strengthening alliances vulturing bolstering US military forces in the region but it didn't really seek to make any serious adjustments in the engagement part of the portfolio so we're gonna continue trade and all these other things but we're gonna step up the balancing and also I think that strategy didn't abandon or alter the basic objectives of integration and the eventual transformation of China if you think about what the Trump administration is doing it's also tried to step up the balancing part and in that regard it's not that much different than what the Obama administration said it was trying to do at least so military part identifying China as a major strategic competitor which seems trivial but has major implications for the Defense Department and people in military services increasing defense spending at least for the time being talking about building up the Navy and so on on the diplomatic front the so-called free and open Indo Pacific talking about the quad again these are not radically different than the policies that were pursued by the Obama administration and the objective is to strengthen and maintain this balance even as China grows but in addition and this is the novelty of the current administration it has taken steps to constrict engagement in various ways and that's something that no previous administration has done on the economic front tariffs but also new restrictions on foreign direct investment technology exports joint ventures discussion of possible restrictions on US capital flows to China all of which are leading potentially towards something that some have described as at least a partial decoupling of the US and Chinese economies and I actually think that's underway the question is how far it'll go and how fast it'll go but also in the political and societal spheres there's been increasing attention to Chinese espionage in the United States and political influence operations something that were we not discuss certainly not high by high-level US officials in the past not exactly clear what the administration is going to do about any of these things but restrictions on the activities of visiting Chinese journalists on Chinese diplomats who want to go out and talk to people and Chinese scholars who are coming to the United States and the discussion of possible restrictions on visas for Chinese students and it's not clear how far any of this will go but again I think the way to think about it is as an effort to constrict engagement not to cut it off but to constrain it in various ways there are many questions that one could ask about the Trump administration's policies and the larger strategy of which they're presumably apart but I want to close with one in particular because it seems to me that it's kind of the unspoken question that hangs over all of this and that's what's the goal what is the aim of this new strategy if that's what it is is the United States still in the business of trying to ease China back on to the path of liberalisation or are we giving up on that and if we are what are we trying to do exactly there are a couple of answers that could be given to that question one possible approach would to define us objectives now in largely defensive terms as trying to fend off Chinese initiatives to contain the expansion of its power and influence at least to some degree and to await what George Kennan described with reference to the Soviet Union in 1946 as the quote gradual mellowing or eventual breakup he said of Soviet power this would be of CCP power so something that looks more like containment that's one possibility but there is a more forward-leaning alternative which would be to say the CCP is the root cause of our and the West's problems on with China unless and until it undergoes a fundamental transformation those problems will persist and will likely grow worse therefore to the extent feasible the United States should do what it can to least to loosen the grip and hasten the demise of the CCP that would be a much more aggressive posture on the part of the United States so to come back to the Cold War this is not an entirely new problem from perspective of American strategists I've quoted Kennan from the beginning of the Cold War let me just close by quoting I think these words were actually written by our former Harvard colleague Richard pipes in a document that formed the basis of the Reagan administration's strategy towards the Soviet Union and this is dated December 1982 and it's the introduction to a document that then lays out a a strategy for dealing with the Soviets and it says because Soviet aggressiveness has sources in the Soviet internal system an effective national strategy requires that US policies towards that country also take into account their impact on its internal development for example it's inconsistent to raise the defense budget to meet the Soviet threat and at the same time allow Western economic relations with Moscow to contribute directly to the growth of Soviet military power and it says the US must within the limits of its capabilities and it talks at great length about how limited the leverage of the United States is but it must design political economic and other measures which advance the long-term objectives of promoting one the decentralization and demilitarization of the Soviet economy to the weakening of the power and privileged position of the ruling Communist elite and three the gradual democratization of the USSR so I'm not saying this is what we're going to do or this is what we should do but I think this is similar today as it was back [Applause] there was a I don't know that it would hurt the United States I should say backing up the step the objective of the state of objective of US policy has been to encourage movement in that direction that would make China more efficient and could conceivably make it a more fearsome and powerful strategic competitor however the assumption the additional assumption in US policy was that if China went down that path and really did liberalize its economy it would have to also liberalize its political system and that if that happened the main source of friction and mistrust between the United States and China would would disappear so that was that was the theory and the policy you know up to a point was consistent with that view I do think there's a question now about if we think we're engaged in an intensifying strategic competition with China from a cold-blooded strategic perspective maybe it's not in the US interest for China to do the things that all the Western economists have been encouraging them to do in which they've been very resistant to do for various reasons because it would make them more efficient and unless it led to changes in their politics it would mean that they would have more resources with which to compete with the United States I don't hear anybody talking about that if you raise that people look at you like you're out of your mind but I think it's a logical question and I think it's right around the corner watch know this but but nevertheless I think presentation and this issue's style is sort of substances American public and MP are basically ignorant of this so you talked about ideology and you quote the long telegram and you know I'm thinking a lot of your your colleague at Princeton Stephen Kahn Canyon who said that one of the important discoveries of Soviet so V ologists at the end of the Cold War was that the Communists Stalin and on down really believed and spoke in private the Senate the same as they spoke in public they really believed in Marxist Latin ISM it seems to me that the Chinese do not believe in Marxist lanturn ism or communism I suppose it's tautology that Xi Jinping believe as to what private in public so that seems to meet a major difference and actually a major strength of China and they don't believe in an insane and ridiculous ideology so that's sort of the first the second is just if you could speak to these fears I have about US national policy on Huawei on quantum computing on R&D spending on general technological edge seems that if someone had to ask me I would say weird it's a gigantic problem we are in huge trouble at Google wouldn't work with it with the DoD on project maven and meanwhile the Chinese had spend the u.s. five or ten to these critical technologies the policies necessary to compete against China in these areas are tremendously expensive such as a nationalized semiconductor industry which we currently have almost none and so on and so forth so the way it sounds as if you know if you're right that the solutions sort of practical next steps on policy are way way beyond these trade tariffs stuff and meanwhile we've we tried on huawei just now in the last year we failed completely mainly because we can't supply 5g ourselves it's not just it was it wasn't just some kind of thumb influence persuasion failure we can't sorry if you could that makes very worried someone's fairly convinced of this rivalry is okay let me answer the first one just briefly and it's important question I whether or not the current Chinese leadership is whether their adherence to Marxism Leninism I don't know and I rather doubt I have no doubt that their Leninists in other words that they believe in the continued domination of a single political party and everything they do as I said is designed to maintain that control and they use Leninist techniques and when in this terminology they still have the vestiges of a conspiratorial Revolutionary Party now there's an overlay of Chinese thoughts and in fact now Chinese theorists are trying to sort of awkwardly blend Marxism Leninism without sort of throwing it out with portions of traditional Chinese thought that they think will be helpful but helpful in a very specific way which is to bolster the legitimacy of the regime so I think their Leninist they're not Marxist but and as you say that that has enabled them to be very flexible on certain issues of policy up to a certain point I think about the Soviet Union was that yes they really believed in this and they acted accordingly in a variety of ways which ultimately were totally self-defeating most important of which was cutting themselves from the Western economic bloc even as it got more and more wealthy they fell further and further behind so they suffered self-inflicted wounds which ultimately proved to be fatal and the Chinese leadership has done exactly the opposite which is to try to integrate as deeply as possible in the advanced industrial economies for reasons that I think are increasingly clear so I insist on the Leninism the rest is may be up for grabs so well they believe in themselves for a reason which is they think that they are the Vanguard that's lifting China up and defending China's honor and interest and is going to re-establish Chinese position as a leading regional and world power it's not nothing and if you if you take the time to read see Jing ping thoughts which I wouldn't necessarily inflict on anybody but it's it's elaborate and coherent there's a very good book I've just been reading by French journalists whose name escapes me called the mind of CJ ping in which he it's not superficial at all he looks at some of the sources and at some of the debates about various issues which he argues I think very persuasively have shaped she's thinking so this is kind of an interesting and complex guy I think he believes stuff I'm not sure if everybody in the system believes in anything much more than improving their own lot in life but that doesn't make them different than most other people as far as the technological competition first of all I would I'm not a technical expert but I would caution against simply accepting some of the casual observations that people have made about who's ahead who's behind what that even means because I've talked to people who argue all different angles of this including some people who are very knowledgeable particularly bout the artificial intelligence side of things whose point out that if when they rank the contribution of papers written on artificial intelligence according to their originality almost all of the most important ones are being done in the West the law is there's a great volume of work that's being done in China but it's not at the cutting edge whatever that means similarly you know arguments they're made about how many scientists and engineers are being produced how many patents are being obtained there's not a one-to-one correspondence between those indicators and actual technological performance it's not to say that they're meaningless or they're sort of hapless that's not the case at all and they are trying to devote enormous resources to this to this task I don't think competing with this is beyond the meanings of the United States or of the Western powers more broadly provided that there's some recognition of the need to do that and I base that in part on the history of the Cold War us spent one point two and one play 5% of GDP on research and development all kinds of programs that in our own way merged the private and the public to promote development in a variety of sectors that's difficult more difficult in the present environment partly for fiscal reasons to do that you actually have to have a budget that allows you to do that and to get the budget you actually have to have some degree of political agreement which obviously is far away also because of the diffusion of Technology and technological expertise and knowledge in the 40s and 50s the United States was really in in a class by itself and now that's still true in some areas but not so much in others so I think we're at the early stages of figuring out how to do this I don't think it requires for example the nationalized semiconductor industry but it may require changes in contracting changes in regulations regarding supply chains for procurement by US government agencies that would give incentives for companies to produce at least some things in the United States and some of that is already starting to happen not everything is of equal importance that there's a very high-end semiconductors are the ones where the US continues to have a big lead and some of that is some of those are being produced in the United States and so on as far as 5g again I'm not a technical expert but that doesn't prevent me from opining on this subject like everybody else I think what's you know it's interesting it'll be a very interesting story again for historians why it was that Western governments of course not just the United States government were so slow to recognize both a commercial challenge and a strategic problem that was coming at them as we see now very rapidly in the form of this development of this new technology or family of technologies and the fact that there was so little capacity to produce and to be a part of that competition in in the West nevertheless they have now started to recognize that I don't think the you know the whet the US government's efforts to dissuade other governments from using Huawei equipment is quite over I mean that struggle is going on in Germany and other places has it played out quite the way obviously the Trump administration hoped that it would partly for the reason you suggest that it's hard to beat something with nothing however there are other producers of relevant equipment they happen to be European Ericsson is one and I think what's coming pretty quickly is some form of cooperation between among European companies and between those companies and US counterparts and governments to create a Western alternative to what Huawei is offering and and that's that's coming down the road I think pretty fast so we're at the early stages of this but it's not like we don't have the resources or the experience or capacity to compete effectively we may have lost some of the muscle memory and the reflexes to do that but I think once there's a great recognition of the severity of we'll recover that pretty quickly Harvey then you administration policy two questions one you think it's working in second more importantly it's the president asked you for your advice as to what we should do strategically so maybe you would listen to you what you would never ask in part because I signed various letters saying that I was unfit for office so I I'm not I'm not sitting by my phone waiting for that call well is it working I guess the the prior question is what exactly it is and you know I tried to describe it it may be assigning a little bit too much to it to describe it actually as a strategy it's a set of policies that are pushing off in various directions I think there is there is a kind of a logic to it I'm not sure that it's as tightly integrated or fully thought through as I would like but let me just take the one piece of it the economic piece of it is that working I think at least as far as the immediate trade issues are concerned the answer is pretty clearly no and it seems according to reports yesterday in the Washington Post that the administration has effectively given up on the idea that it will be able to coerce try it into changing some of its industrial policies subsidies and others through the application of tariffs and that was sort of the idea at least on the part of people other than the president who was fixated on the bilateral trade deficit I think that failure was predictable I predicted it among other people it wasn't unique because we didn't have the leverage and also because those policies are so integral to the CCP system so in my view the question now becomes if you we tried to persuade in effect to persuade China to change and liberalize through sort of gentle encouragement and inducements encourage and bring it into the WTO and so on the Trump administration has been trying to coerce the interchanging with much blunter tools if both of those methods fail then the question is what comes next and I think the question really is how do you live with and deal with a very large actor that is behaving in ways that China is behaving and is determined to continue to act in those ways and I think again we're in the process of working that out but some of it has to do with taking defensive measures to protect against some of the things that China has been doing that are predatory and that's going on kind of behind the scenes and the big focus has been on tariffs and presidents meetings and so on but the other stuff that I mentioned like the tightening of restrictions on foreign direct investments or the new export control regulations that's actually much more serious some of those things are actually pushed by the Congress they've been discussed for several years and that's going forward and I don't think that's going to change the President may decide to declare victory in the tariff war and say he's gotten a great deal and China's gonna go back to buying all the soybeans they were buying before and game over but this other stuff which matters much more I think is gonna go ahead yes Oh Cold War when US and Soviet Cold War most country with excite for this situation now it all kinda seemed to be I'm willing to take sides so how do you measure and thought about it quite that way I was trying to sidestep the question of whether it was or not by saying there were similarities and differences at least for the moment what you say is true and I don't but I don't think we know quite how this is going to break or whether it's going to break in other words for now a lot of countries are pursuing a kind of dual-track policy of trying to maintain good relations with China largely for economic relief reasons and good relations through the United States largely for strategic reasons and up until very recently it wasn't the United States that was saying you know you have to choose more the Chinese implying that for example as the ambassador to Australia said last year you know you can't expect to continue to have this wonderful economic relationship with China if you continue to kind of follow the lead of the United States the Trump administration I think on some issues like by gee is now stepping in and trying to get other countries to choose sides in effect and it's a mixed bag some are for their own reasons in some part but you're right the Cold War was characterized by for at least a while by polar division in the world that's not what we see now I think for the time being Russia and China have a convergence of interests strategic interests they don't they're not divided by a common ideology as they they were during the Cold War but they're united by a common anti ideology which is their dislike and fear of liberal democracy so in that sense they have they have something in common especially since the invasion of Ukraine imposition of sanctions Russia has been pursuing yet more economic agreements and other agreements with China I don't think that's going to change anytime soon certainly not going to change what mr. Putin is in power and I suppose it's possible after he goes that there could be some shifts in the character of that regime but for now it's very much invested in taking this antagonistic posture towards the west and seeking shelter and commonality of interest with with China the weight of those two players has obviously changed a lot certainly since the Cold War when the Soviets were the dominant and the Chinese were much weaker that's been reversed some people speculate that over time the Russians will become very uncomfortable with this and might seek to turn back towards the West because they'll be fearful that they have this now very large and powerful neighbor that's encroaching on their traditional spheres of influence in Central Asia and elsewhere and that could happen but for the moment actually the two seem to be finding ways of working together and they have as I said some common interests even in those zones where their presence and influence overlaps it probably won't last forever but I think it's it's a feature for some time to come which in my view means that the notion that one heard bandied about at the start of the current administration in the u.s. that somehow we could play Russia off against China do the reverse to what Kissinger did with China against the Soviet Union I just don't think that's that's happening I don't think there is anything that we should offer the Russians that would have a major impact on their policies with regard to China maybe the current administration wants to give them the Ukraine but I don't think that's gonna happen how you evaluate the domestic political strength of the CCP in China and you know it would argue for instance that well you know you call her authoritarian but in fact all these polls show it's wildly popular in China which polls are those well yeah that's the argument is I mean obviously not just the polls but there's no sign of any significant political opposition inside China from a China he's history of China it's not system we like but they're appointed a lie is just so-called universal values they've had this that's despotism one sort but another going back you know for a long long time and if they made it work they've genius had who would have predicted China would be on the verge surpassing the u.s. at the close of World War two it's very impressive success and and from their point you're looking at the West what you see second density Klein you see ionic mass and I mean and and therefore there's just a variety of arguments of positions there so what would lead one to say on the contrary you should look at what the regime says skeptically it's just propaganda that they may be on a verge of being overthrown at some point and therefore we have to maintain our hopes in good spirits in that event well I wouldn't say they're on the verge of being overthrown I don't think that's likely at all I guess first to say that there's no doubt that the regime has been very effective in strengthening tightening its control it's expensive Norma's resources on doing that by the Chinese government's own accounting they spend more on domestic security than they spend on the People's Liberation Army they have a whole second army the People's Armed Police which is entirely inward focused and then all the costs of running this surveillance system that monitored the internet and so on so they work very hard at it but also it's not just that and this is I think what you're suggesting at least four people in the wealthier eastern coastal part of the country there have been enormous gains economic gains over the last several decades and contrary to what Western political scientists predicted where the middle the expectation was middle class has been the standard bearer of political liberalization that was true in Europe in the 19th century true in other parts of Asia in the 20th century to the contrary it looks for the time being at least as if middle class in China and they feel that it has more to lose by any change in the status quo and as long as things are going along reasonably well I'm content with that and then there's also nationalism and sort of national pride and some of that I think is intrinsic and genuine some of it is also cultivated by regime which has also expended enormous resources on a system of so-called patriotic education to teach everyone starting at a very young age that China was pressed by foreign powers and it was the Chinese Communist Party that brought China back and the continued rule of the CCP is essential to the preservation of China's greatness and so it's not like this is a bubbling cauldron of opposition on the other hand there were people who advocated political liberalisation in China certainly before Tiananmen there were even people in the political leadership after not so much but there have been intellectuals and other people who have spoken in favor of this many of whom have losing their jobs or worse and there are people outside the country who talk about how China can never truly advance until it liberalizes politically and you know there there's a strain of thought which I think is as a serious one it's in the minds of a perhaps a very small group of people in addition the regime faces major challenges and the reason they spend so much effort and energy on maintaining control is that they fear exactly that the economy the growth is slowing down it probably is even slower than the official figures suggested it is likely to grow you could go even lower so that's been the moment they've been bracing for and that is likely to be accompanied by increased discontent Chinese government used to publish figures on what they call mass incidents which were protests of I forget over 10,000 people I mean they were not small and they stopped reporting the figures in the mid-2000s when it got to be something like 70,000 mass incidents now it's a very big country and but those were not political they were about people who had lost their jobs and showed up on Monday and the factory was closed and they didn't get their wages or their land was taken over by the local government and given to some big company or they discovered that a company was polluting the water that was causing their children to get sick and so there are lots of lots of potential sources of discontent the regime is also very sensitive to allegations of corruption and that's why I think Xi Jinping has put such emphasis on anti-corruption anti-corruption campaign there's not just to go after his enemies although it was partly that but also because he believed that had it become necessary to acknowledge the existence of this problem and to be seen to be dealing with it in some way the difficulty is I think in a system like the Chinese system you can never get rid of corruption not that any system can but that it's extremely difficult in one where you don't have independent judiciary independent police investigative powers a lot of money flowing around so the problem of corruption is not solved there have been major scandals resulting from in some cases the efforts of enterprising journalists to dig into the resources the family resources of various high-ranking officials that could happen tomorrow again it did happen sort of there was kind of a near-miss for teaching pain when an investigation in Australia revealed that his cousin was a high-roller at the casinos in Australia was spending and losing millions and millions of dollars so there are things that people could be very unhappy about as long as things are going well authoritarian regimes can often keep the lid on the question is how do they fare when things start to go poorly and I think that maybe the period that we're beginning to enter into now I guess one other thing I'd mentioned sort of interesting not again kind of mass popular movement but some of the things that the regime has been doing internationally intended to promote its prestige and profile have produced criticism in China so the Belton Road scholars who we have so we'll see well partly on that issue but also just across a range of other problems or potential problems where the regime was thought by the West to have agreed or committed itself to adjusting its policies and in certain ways I think that's been growing discontent or a feeling that that has not happened the WTO was not designed to incorporate a huge really non market economy it's built for a group of market economies that basically adhered to the same rules and the question is what do you do now that you have this giant player in this system effectively gaming it and using it for its own purposes I think there are a number of potential answers to that question one which is more the mainstream answer from trade experts and lawyers and so on who were very much involved in this is you know we need to reform the WTO in various ways and that's been very difficult because it's a very big diverse organization another view which i think is perhaps held by some people in the current administration is we should sort of do away with it or ignore it and pursue our interests in bilateral negotiations and not do anything related strengthen the WTO just sort of bypass it so I'm not agreeing to nominate judges to panels that resolve disputes and so on the third possibility which i think is the more serious one and might be more effective and maybe the way that we're headed in the longer run is to have plural lateral agreements and arrangements that bind together the countries that are in fact market-based economies and that can agree on principles and rules and kind of recreate a what would be in effect that Western or liberal advanced industrial economic system and that's sort of what existed during the Cold War the International a global liberal international order or whatever people refer to it really wasn't global but there was such a system that just continued it contained the United States the Western Hemisphere the democracies in Europe democracies in Asia and those are countries which could conceivably and have talked about for example major trade free trade agreements we pulled out of the TPP the possibility of trade agreements with the EU which were under discussion a few years ago if you combined the GDP of the TPP countries the Western Hemisphere and the EU it would amount to 60 to 65% of global GDP so it's a huge source of wealth and power potentially in dealing with China if China for as long as China continues to not play by those rules the problem of course is to getting the agreement and cooperation among those countries and one of the things that the current administration has done which I think is most counterproductive and there's a long list of things but is picking fights on economic issues with our and analyze the idea of using national security provisions in our trade law to impose tariffs on imports of steel from Canada or automobile parts from Europe it's it's crazy not just on the face and on the fact but even more from the strategic point of view we should be working together with those countries to try to make a common front in dealing with China one last thing I would say is one in one of the things that's happened is that there's growing concern about these same issues in in Europe and also in Asia I think the Japanese have been worried about it for a while but countries in Europe have gotten more concerned and are saying things which are not that different than what's for example in the US Trade Representative's reports on China's adherence to its WTO commitments and I think there's a there continues to be a desire to cooperate with the US even with all the things that you want to antagonize them but we just haven't picked that up I don't think that's in the long run a very wise decision on our part so we may get a liberal order that plays by those rules and then has some different rules to interact with countries that are not truly market economies in particular China so what you cleaned out for us is sort of general CCP trajectory I think there's Chinese cartridges rests on the current administration the current teaching paint leadership you know going to the 2009-2010 period that was when he was starting to take over in terms of foreign policy so it more aggressive approach to the world is really a function of Xi Jinping and you can see this domestic you can make argument about this domestically to whom getting rid of collective leadership having him you know take away term limits and throwing the succession issue into doubt so if it's ash even cheating ping matter would it affect the your outlook on how the US ought to deal with China one and the other one one throwing their talk to the US working with partners friends and allies how do you propose do that at a time where the impression is that the United States especially under the current administration seems reckless that it seems to be lacking in commitment how you sort of get over that and answer the question of what does the US want well those are those are very good questions on the first one I think there's this really I mean there's a policy discussion to be had but there's a kind of a deeper debate I don't see it unfolding really yet but about whether what we've seen in the last five six seven years since she came to power is primarily a manifestation of his own views and preferences or whether in some sense it's an expression of sort the innermost character of the CCP regime and I think in a way that's that reminds me a little bit of the argument that the Soviet ologists used to have over whether you know Stalin was the inevitable result of Lenin so maybe eventually we'll have a debate like that and and you can't argue - either way I tend to lean towards the second position in part because as I said I think you can see the early evidence of some of these shifts and it's before she rises up in power in the economic front it also in response to the color revolutions in Europe tightening up and no doubt that he stepped on the gas and took it further but I don't think it said I don't think of it as a deviation from that trajectory but maybe an acceleration along it that's a that's an interpretation but it is an important question because if and let me say one other thing which is maybe not entirely fair I think C Jinping is a very convenient villain for a lot of people because they can say well our policies our strategy was working before and then this guy came from out of nowhere and started doing this crazy stuff so it wasn't our fault first and secondly if we just hang on once he's gone we can go back to business as usual and that assumes business as usual was actually going in a favorable direction which I don't but if you believe that then you would say we have to outweigh this guy in some way and I suppose you could say even if you believe that you could argue that it's important to make sure that his approach fails to make clear that this aggressive behavior is counterproductive to make clear that these the continuation of these status industrial policies are not going to achieve the desired objectives and then in fact the pursuit of those policies is beginning to have costs there felt in China that's actually my general approach not to be nice in the expectation that there are some nice guys hanging out wait just waiting to get into the Central Committee I don't think there are but to make clear over time that this approach is not is not going to work so even if you think it's it's him I think to me the conclusions for our policy are still similar I mean the other issue of course is because he's modified the rules we could be dealing with him for a long time to come and the question you raised about you know how you get cooperation is a fair one no I in one sense I don't have a good answer to it I try not to spend my day with my head on they keep feeling discouraged about this but I would say in that may be more serious answer is I think it's I think it's true we don't know but I don't think the pattern of our policy in the last three years is necessarily going to continue to be the pattern of our policy in fact I think in certain respects that's certainly not going to be the case I can't imagine another leader who would do things in quite the way that our present president does the bigger the deeper question is you know has the trajectory we're talking about the trajectory of China it has the trajectory of US policy shifted in a way that's going to cause the United States to start pulling back and to make it less reliable as a friend and Ally and kind of compel others to pursue more independent policies that is clearly month on the minds of people certainly in Asia but also in Europe so that you actually have serious discussions about whether Japan needs nuclear weapons whether Australia needs a nuclear weapons you wouldn't have heard that a few years ago at the same time I think in all of those places for a variety of reasons there's a real reluctance to start going down that path of greater independence in part for just the reasons that Trump complains about which is it's a pretty good deal to be protected by the United States so if we were in a happy world to get back on a somewhat more normal course in our own policy I don't think we've turned a corner which is impossible to get back from so for people who are spending their time thinking about the problem and thinking about what the strategy should be it's useful I think to try to pull back from the details of what's going on now and think of it well in the longer run what's appropriate and what is from u.s. perspective what's in the interests of the United States people may differ and from that then to think about what kind of strategy we ought to pursue I guess the last thing to say there is you know the joke about you know how does the Economist stranded on the desert island open the can assumes a can opener it solves the problem by assumption and there is a danger in these kinds of strategic discussions to say let's assume you know close allied cooperation and you know I just did it 60% of world GDP and the problem is solved well of course the problem is really getting that so you can't assume it similarly as far as the question that was discussed earlier about research and development science technology and so on it's easy enough to identify some of the policies that would make sense that doesn't mean it's easy to achieve them but if you don't have an image of what the desired course is then you're just caught up and arguing about whether in fact we're gonna sell more soybeans to China Thank You described China as a thorough carry regime resort to telecaring tendencies fits in with the broader strategy and ambitious well I'm not an expert on this although like everybody else been following the kind of flood of information that's come out about it there's been a number of good articles I can't remember maybe in you remember in the last year or so about sort of the origins of the current policies that's some one of the academic journals that looks back at who sitting pink put in charge and cynjohn and what you know what led to the changes that we see now from what I can tell it seems like it's a mix of things it's in part this continued desire to stamp out any suggestion of opposition or resistance that's framed in the CCP context as dealing with the problem of terrorism although I don't think the incidence of terrorism was actually that high there were some of it and that may have been the reason or the justification for it it may have also to do with broader strategic questions in particular that developed the belton road because the I always have trouble remembering which is the belt which is the road the belt is actually the thing that goes on land the road this is what goes on the water so the belt has to go out through western China through cynjohn into Central Asia and then down to the Middle East and across into Europe so if this area is not pacified and controlled it potentially creates a vulnerability for this big enterprise as far as how the regime has tried to deal with it here I said maybe they're not Marxist they're winning this but they seem also they have some mao in them which I think si Jinping does and this whole idea of re-education my understanding is what they've done is to imprison very large numbers of people and to subject them to bombardment of propaganda which is intended to change the way they think and break them down and then turn them loose presumably pacified and resistant to the appeal of fundamentalists it's a crazy idea and it seems to me likely to produce it big backlash ultimately I think they're actually and what they're doing there and what they may be doing as they push out inter Central Asia into the Middle East is making themselves the major target for its most terrorism in the next several decades which is certainly not what they want but it may be what they get and it's also of course creating huge problems for them in the West because this is an issue that along with Hong Kong I think it started to get attention and capture the imagination of people who may not for good reason get exercise it's about the South China Sea or made in China 2025 you know all these sort of abstract things but who can see repression and understand it when it's put in front of them and that's potentially very dangerous because it's not just in the US it's also in parts of Europe care a lot about human rights it's it's not it's not good for them as far as what can be done I think one of the things that's going to happen is that a number of countries are gonna boycott the Olympics so Olympics are supposed to be in China in 2022 I believe that's already becoming a major focal point people say really send or should we really send the themes of happy athletes the parade in Beijing when this is a regime that's running concentration camps I think in a lot of cases is good you know is that going to persuade them to change I don't know but ignoring it is not either always so far today or from what we know or and I my question is isn't it early given human nature that wants to be free not to buy and sell and produce but also to say what he or she wants and especially given that isn't China a big Yugoslavia versus suppressed for now but but probably not stamped out all together ever well I don't think the composition is you don't have it as many large really different groups so it's not like Yugoslavia in the sense that you have major proportions of the population that are there fundamentally different it's early and come back to that point yes we don't we don't know I think the CCP regime has invested a lot in creating the impression that it's continued progress is inevitable and they actually even say this now you know people should get on board and don't get left behind and they're doing that in part because they're trying to create the reality that they would like to exist and they're not confident in fact that they're going to continue to be able to do that so whether the Fisher's are ethnic they're also I mean there are also growing religious groups in China including Christians I think they're one estimate I saw was some 100 million Christians in China and the regime doesn't prohibit the practice of religion but it seeks to control it so you have both state approved churches but also secret house churches and the regime is that we fearful of that I think for two reasons one because those kind of networks human networks enable cooperation and potentially coordination across large numbers and across large areas and that's the one thing since TN and then that there surveillance and repression policy has been designed to prevent so that's one thing and that's also why they crack down so hard on the phone gone because they realized that it's relatively small and seemingly odd and harmless group could actually mobilize whatever it was ten thousand people who showed up outside the main government the compound doing exercises in the morning and the regime had no idea so it coordination religious groups can do that and the other thing of course is it potentially makes people brave and even unafraid to die and for a regime that depends on fear to maintain its control that is a truly frightening prospect so that is another factor how that's gonna play out it's too early to say energy firm was it was working for devan's out central mass why do you think you failed did you have something do with competition from Chinese producers who were accusing US state subsidies to lower their cost and where are our I think they were later better with subsidized US oil production and the Chinese don't have had little or no oil production so that they are not competing with internal studies and the other part of it question is do you how do you assess the trump presidency suppression of the appointment to u.s. US personnel to the trade tribunals because that effectively disables those tribunals and the only legal mechanism for distinguishing between trade dumping and trade subsidized trade is through those tribunals so they to be he is an enemy of the United States interests I mean that's the question is do you agree or I'm not going to take a position let me just address the subsidies question and then the tribunals I don't know the particular company you're referring to but generally in a number of industries including steel like aluminum but also solar photovoltaic cells I think wind turbines as well Chinese government gave a lot of subsidies encourage the development of a lot of companies most of which wouldn't have survived in a truly competitive environment and then consolidated them and turned them loose on the world and because they're subsidized they're able to undercut the prices of foreign competitors and drive many of them out of business and then eat up a very large market share and the concern I think is that even though this is tremendously inefficient it does work in some cases and the fear in now about some of the more advanced industries including semiconductors is that this may be for electric cars batteries for cars this may be exactly the the path that China is now going to pursue in a variety of new and emerging technologies that's what the main intent in China 2025 fuss is about because some bureaucrat somewhere thought it was a good idea in this document to say well our target is you know control 90% of the Chinese market by this state and control 50% of the global market by this date and people notice that so it's a real it's a real problem the Economist that I know attended to say well you know it's a they're wasting money and so we get to buy cheap wind turbines and maybe that's true but there probably are some industries that you don't want to give up entirely and where you don't want to be entirely dependent on industries of a regime which is fundamentally hostile to to ours on the trade tribunals as I mentioned earlier I think this reflects the view of some of the people in the Trump administration I'm not sure that the president is very familiar with the World Trade Organization but his US Trade Representative Robert like Heiser who's very intelligent man is and is very has been very skeptical and critical of the WTO I don't know that they've had a deliberate strategy to kneecap the WTO but what they've done and they have a legitimate complaint which is it takes forever you can bring these cases and they drag on for years and by the time you get a decision your companies may have been driven out of business and then you can't really get compensation for that there is a serious argument so what they've done is instead of appealing to these international rules they've relied on provisions in American law to deal with trade issues which are arguably posing a challenge or a threat to American industry some of that I think is bogus so the use of the national security provisions as I mentioned to impose restrictions on imports of steel from Canada but some of it is serious in the section 301 cases which are mostly focused on instances in which Chinese companies are thought to have stolen intellectual property or to have benefited from subsidies or other unfair trade practices they've used American domestic law as a justification for imposing the tariffs that they have so on the one hand it's not totally lawless on the other of course the trade the people who believe in maintaining the multilateral system say well if you do that everybody's going to do that and then it's you know the whole system breaks down to which the response is well that's what China is already doing how are we going to respond to that so imposing subsidies for our own in order to make our products more competitive that that would run counter to conservative ideologies right yeah that's a big problem you can do that and in some respects we do that with certain industries that are essential for national defense but you know who's gonna decide which company gets gets what it's it's a messy proposition its tariffs are inefficient too but I think subsidies for one thing subsidies involve dollars from the US Treasury that are then going to be dispersed to two companies I think there is a place for some kinds of subsidies and to help promote the development of domestic industries that are essential for strategic purposes but I wouldn't want to see the US government to get into the business of money in large quantities so do you think that the company is really extreme in the interest of the u.s. I think that that sort of the question let me say first in certain respects it's China that started this not the United States so China has for a long time imposed restrictions on access to its economy whole sectors of the economy which are claimed to be strategic or off-limits for investment by Western firms tariff and non-tariff barriers this push for indigenous innovation to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers even if they may be more efficient and cost-effective so I don't think the CCP government has ever really believed in free trade or a globalization it sort of talks that talk but it sought to establish a kind of semi permeable membrane around itself so it can send out whatever it wants and bring back what it wants but keep out things that it doesn't the US has been more or less open to products to people to capital and so part of what's happening is an adjustment in that imbalance and I think there is justification for it in certain specific domains for example I don't think it's a good idea for Chinese technology companies to build large chunks of our IT infrastructure I don't think it's a good idea to allow Chinese companies particularly state-owned enterprises to invest in US companies that have emerging technologies are important or making important innovations important for commercial and certainly for military reasons so I think there's a there's a justification for some of that the real question I think though the real question maybe it's not as important but maybe it's the most important is the is the societal aspect of things China is relatively closed again to certainly did journalists scholars some students were quite open is that a disadvantage for us I think in many respects it's it's not I don't know that it's a decisive advantage in the way that we used to think that it was that people would come here and they just love the United States and want to go back and overthrow their regimes it's not the way it's working but still we don't want to become the people we're opposing and competing against that said there are some specific areas where I think there's a reason for concern in sensitive technologies develop those sensitive technologies where the existing system for kind of screening people who are seeking to come and study or work in the United States may not be adequate there's a very good study by something called mystery Australian strategic policy institution which demonstrates for one thing that the we're just ending thank you that the People's Liberation Army has sent several thousand scientists of people affiliated with PLA institutes to work in Western research establishments that doesn't make sense it seems to me so there may be a reason to limit that I don't think there's a reason to limit Chinese students coming to study as undergraduates even as graduate students in many fields yeah so it's it's a matter of calibration and there's a danger of overreaction well this has been a performance that some you

Channel: Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard

Views: 2,706

Rating: 3.5925925 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Hl6TXctfC4o

Length: 98min 2sec (5882 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020