Beijing's Early Reactions to the Biden Administration

greetings good evening good morning for some of you welcome to asia society's online platform i'm susie jakes i'm the editor of china file which is an online magazine published by asia society's center on u.s china relations but i'm here tonight gratefully at the invitation of my colleagues at the asia society policy institute for a discussion about beijing's early reactions to the biden administration and on the outlook for the next chapter in the evolving saga of u.s china relations we're living in a moment thanks in part to the year that we've just lived through not only of strained relations between the united states and china but also of increasingly constrained conditions for the flow of information between the two countries so while in just about any context our discussants this evening would offer exceptional insight uh in the current environment when so many sources of both good information and the perspective to read it accurately have been hobbled we're especially lucky to have two of the best most dogged fastidious voracious followers of this topic to tell us what's what i'm speaking of course of asia society's president and ceo and president of the asia society policy institute prime minister kevin rudd uh who as most of you uh will already know was an accomplished uh student of chinese politics long before his tenure as a foreign minister and later prime minister of australia joining kevin is bill bishop uh founder and editor of the indispensable let me just say that one more time the indispensable newsletter cynicism which if you aren't subscribed to it already uh you very much ought to be bill consumes and digests a vast menu of chinese and english language uh news scholarships social media government documents industry reports related to china each day and publishes them in a highly readable form with brief often brilliant commentary on how to interpret them he's also an accomplished tech and media entrepreneur and he is a generous source of support and encouragement and advice to so many of us for which i and my colleagues at asia society are regularly and profoundly grateful so very glad you could join us tonight uh the timing for this talk which was scheduled several weeks ago is in one sense felicitus as the u.s secretaries of state and defense have just completed a trip to asia in part aimed at better coordinating policy with china's neighbors and u.s allies and as today against the perhaps appropriately frozen icy landscape of anchorage alaska u.s secretary of state tony blinken and national security adviser jake sullivan are meeting with uh two men who are their counterparts at least in the context of the meeting even if the roles they play in determining china's foreign policy are not exactly uh parallel to those played by blanket and sullivan uh these are chinese foreign minister wang yi and top diplomat and politburo member young jitsu so if we'd held this program a day or so later we might have had readouts of that meeting but kevin and bill will undoubtedly give you the background to analyze uh those statements with greater insight whenever they do emerge and we'll all have a chance to test out kevin and bill's predictions uh almost as soon as they finish making them so that part will be fun let me say just a word about the format this evening in a moment um kevin will deliver opening remarks uh and these are these are part of one of his regular updates on this issue uh an extensive compendium of which you can find on the asia society website under the heading avoidable war i'll then moderate a discussion between kevin and bill and then probably uh long before i've exhausted my own questions for them uh i will begin to ask questions from all of you so you can post your questions in the q a box on zoom and i think there are quite a number of you with us tonight but i will try to get to as many of them as possible as always you can find all our upcoming events and links to past events at asiasociety.org and we want to highlight our new film series asia society at the movies in which we offer screenings of feature films from all across asia and then a conversation with the filmmakers or actors or others connected to the work uh next up on april 5th is indonesia's submission for the 2021 academy awards uh in pedigore which sounds terrifying but there will be a screening uh and a conversation with the director and producer of that film to follow so i think that's all i have to say and now i will turn it over to asia society's helmsman kevin rudd well thank you very much susie and greetings to everybody who's joining us across the asia society's global network um and thank you bill bishop for being with us um bill as susie has already indicated is a much needed and necessary go-to source of analysis and information about all things concerning contemporary chinese politics and the economy and foreign policy so bill thank you for being with us and susie as the author and the pioneer and the perfecter of china filed here at the asia society thank you for your work over such a long period of time the topic that i wanted to address in these remarks this evening over the next 20 minutes or so is how the chinese are reading the these early months of the biden administration as susie has just indicated i've got my timing all wrong when we set the date we didn't know that uh the big four would be meeting in anchorage alaska and they are meeting as we speak to the best of my information and so as susie's already indicated when we get the readouts we'll be able to find out therefore how woefully inadequate my analysis have been of how the chinese have approached the bhajd administration so far or perhaps there may be an element of confirmation i'm not sure this is an important gathering of these four not least because they're highly experienced individuals and not because they also bring considerable intellectual grunt to the table from both their systems but simply because it's been in my calculation three and a half years since we've had the us secretary of state and the national security advisor together with their nearest chinese equivalents around a single table in fact we've got to go back to the trump uh state visit plus to beijing in 2017 when the team was around the table with the chinese side that as you know was the eve of the outbreak of the u.s china trade war of course there was a meeting between secretary of state pompeo and youngjae in honolulu last year not a happy one from the best reports that i have heard of it but there is a problem which arises when there is a long as it were political and strategic silence between the two capitals of the world's two largest powers it can give rise to all sorts of genuine misconceptions or there can be a simple a lack of the adequacy of conveying basic transactional information or to paraphrase winston churchill it's always better to jaw jaw than to war war there's a second reason however why this particular encounter i think is important and it's as follows that in the case of xi jinping and his senior officials the bottom line is because xi jinping has become such a powerful chinese leader because he's conducted such a series of ongoing political purges across the chinese system there is a lack of candor within the chinese system and the advice which is provided to numero uno and therefore becomes doubly important for foreign interlocutors in particular the us secretary of state and the national security adviser to be able to provide frank and clear information advice and views which then go direct and i believe in a relatively unfiltered manner straight through to the chinese leadership through translation i mean linguistic translation rather than conceptual translation so therefore it's important given the absence of what i described as a fully empowered official class in beijing for foreign interlocutors to make the most of these opportunities to convey an absolutely clear-cut message to their chinese interlocutors so in approaching this subject of how do we make an assessment of how the chinese side is reacting to the byte administration during its first two months in office uh i've sought to go through two or three different things first is looking at an overall analysis of let's call it china's emerging national security discourse within its official literature this is important and the reason it's important is because it sets the tone for the chinese internal discussion within the chinese communist party about its overall security circumstances now the second thing i want to look at is the particular foreign policy discourse commentary and statements which have been made over the last couple of months about or towards the bard administration and thirdly a quick survey of what has actually been happening on the ground and then to draw some threads together before we go to conversation and discussion on the first of these questions which is how is china viewing itself and its overall national security circumstances right now we should probably back up for a minute and reflect on where the relationship had got to by the time president biden was elected the long overhang of the trump legacy in this relationship is very much in evidence let me make two broad points about it the first is this that as far as china's perceptions of its own power and standing and prestige are concerned relative to the united states china coming out of the covert crisis coming out of its economic performance through the covet crisis is now infinitely more self-confident under xi jinping's leadership than it was even a year or two ago that's because of what the chinese leadership have observed in terms of not just america's but the collective west's by enlarged second rate third rate and in some cases disastrous response to the public health dimensions of the covert 19 crisis within their own countries but also the patchy economic policy response as well and so within china itself aided and of course abetted by china's domestic propaganda apparatus the overall year of covet has been seen as a significant enhancement of china's power relative to the united states and the prestige of its leadership relative to other leaders because of how they've emerged from the crisis the second overall hangover point i would make is this is that the number of measures taken by the trump administration against the chinese either in terms of tariff measures or in terms of technology bans or in terms of other initiatives for example in terms of visas restrictions or a change in policy on the question of taiwan in all of these areas by the time biden was elected there was an entire slew of these actions already taken or in the process of unfolding in the first two months of the bad administration if you look across the tariff measures the visa measures the technology bans questions of taiwan and other measures such as individual sanctions against individual chinese leaders for example over hong kong virtually none of these have been in any way changed removed diluted or in any way shall we say reduced where there has been one set of reviews initiated in terms of one set of technology bans one set of reviews initiated in terms of a particular set of chinese student visas and one particular trump trumpian measure on visas already announced but not implemented has been deferred in its implementation but against the overall sweep of these measures by and large the trumpian measures are still intact and in a couple of additional areas particularly technology they have actually been added to similarly on taiwan so against that background and given that neither tony blinken jake sullivan youngjae and wang yi all of whom i've known for many many years as individuals when they sit down around the table in anchorage alaska today they are not simply taking out a blank piece of paper they are dealing with not just the accumulated history of the relationship over the last half a century or more they are also looking at the particularities which have arisen in the case of the four years of the trump administration experience so where do we go to therefore in terms of uh the analysis that we might make of china's official discourse on its own national security environment some may question why we bother with an analysis of china's official discourse i simply always say to people on this question it's important to read the chinese literature for the simple reason as it sets the parameters very much for the internal debate within the party itself there are 90 million members of the chinese communist party you cannot conduct all business through the party's internal secret memoranda system there has to be a framing of the debate through the official media as well including the specialist literature which deals with areas such as strategic relations international relations and foreign policy therefore whereas we cannot form a full view from the official literature it helps guide our analysis as to where things are going so what emerges from this quick review of the national security discourse in the last several months for those of us who look at these things closely what strikes you most of all is the fact that the [Music] chinese official recourse to language such as the rise of the east and the decline of the west deng xi is now beginning to pervade the official discourse this is a euphemism not just for east and west it's a particular euphemism for china and the united states and within the overall marxist leninister framework of the way in which xi jinping analyzes the chinese communist party's current position within the country and the world this is informed by a deeply historically determinist view of china's inexorable rise under the leadership of the chinese communist party so this has become a remarkably pervasive thematic in the chinese as it were national security discourse the second element closely associated with the first is that uh the historical circumstances of the time are favoring china but the wind is behind china's backs and that nothing really apart from the chinese themselves in some of their deeper analysis can prevent china's inexorable rise there's a third element of the discourse as well which is the securitization of everything uh for example in the current 45-year plan we see new sections dedicated to security economic security this is part of a wider discourse which now points to an all-pervasive concept of security being essential for china's future political and economic development and that means that china's domestic circumstances and its external circumstances are going to have an increasingly pervasive national security prism imposed across the top the final point to emerge in the discourse which i should make reference to is the emergence now over some time but strengthening as each month passes to the concept of struggle the chinese term is and for those of us who are familiar with the way in which this term has been used uh ever since uh mao zedong's rectification movement within the chinese communist party at yanan back in 1942 through to the present when we start to hear the word dojung used either internally or externally it means that things are hardening up big time of course domestically we now have a party rectification campaign fully underway but the whole notion of belgium or struggle now being seen as essential in china's overall management of its security environment externally is something we should all focus on as well in fact the language on this has become quite explicit through a number of uh china's military representatives and what have become increasingly unguarded comments about uh how they perceive china's current relationship with the united states so in overall terms what i would say therefore as far as the general national security discourse is concerned we see a hardening and sharpening of the language increasingly the securitization of everything an underlying confidence that china's time has come and an underlying belief that the u.s and the west are now in a form of irreversible decline going to the second part of the analysis what actually do we then see in terms of china's official discourse emerging in relation to the biden administration in particular once again this is important but it's largely uh unfolded in a number of stages since the election of biden in november and through the inauguration obviously since the 2 the 20th of january suppose we could describe it as unfolding in three particular ways and all of these ways are somewhat softer and more diplomatic in tone as you would expect when measured against the hard national security policy uh discourse that i've just referred to what have we seen in these two or three stages well to begin with we had both wang yi the foreign minister and youngjae the polyphero member and former foreign minister and xi jinping's number one foreign policy advisor those who currently sit across the table from tony blinken and jake sullivan in anchorage both youngjae chu and wangee spent the better part of a month or so outlining the way forward basically went along these lines if only you crazy americans would realize how fundamentally you've misjudged china and recognize the errors in the ways of the trump administration and get back to the wonderful world of of global harmony of win-win cooperation and and discard any concept of strategic competition or adversarial behavior then we can all get back to the way things work this permeated quite a number of speeches and presentations both by young and wang in the early days needless to say in washington this fell on deaf ears what particularly i think was um ineffective on china's part was its decision on the 19th of january to impose personalized sanctions against some 28 members of the outgoing republican administration the republican 28 i shall call them for their various contributions to undermining china's national unity if this was some crude attempt to divide republicans and democrats from each other on the china question it misfired badly not only did the democrat administration attack china's decision to impose individual sanctions against republicans however much the democrats may have loathed each and every one of those individuals the bottom line is the one thing that has unified republicans and democrats in washington in recent times has been china we then looked at a second phase and that was what i would describe as again presentations from wang and yang and others about the need to begin to categorize the relationship rather than simply having america repent from its former sinful ways and come back to the path of the golden mean and eternal righteousness what do i mean by categorizing probably best put in the language of wangi who said we need to put this relationship into three sets of baskets one red lines strategic red lines which were non-negotiable referring to each country's core interests leaving to one side the do-ability of that two another area of strategic competition and three another basket which is four possibilities now of renewed cooperation between china and the united states um this was replicated both in other languages by young who referred to new and potential areas of cooperation not just climate not just pandemics global macroeconomic management and even cyber even xi jinping himself in his remarks to davos virtual davos this year said that there was nothing particularly wrong with the nature of fair and open competition but fair and open competition should be like athletes in a race rather than like people trying to slug it out to the death in a wrestling match my paraphrase of xi jinping's more elegant presentation of that concept again this is not met with enormous resonance uh so far in washington although in the elegant phrase of uh tony blinken he has said that as far as the future of the u.s china relationship is concerned uh from the perspective of the byte administration they will be competitive in all fields cooperative where they need to be and also adversarial where it's unavoidable or necessary so in other words uh this if you like broad confluence in strategic frameworks surrounding the relationship is perhaps beginning to emerge the third element in terms of the diplomatic discourse or stage in diplomatic discourse of course came with the two-way telephone conversation between president xi jinping and president biden in on the eve of chinese new year this was intelligently chosen by the obama administration using this as an opportunity to extend greetings new year's greetings for the lunar new year for the chinese people as a mark of civilization and cultural respect on the actual content of the conversation which ran for two hours of course there are different readouts both from beijing and from washington um washington's readout was president uh biden of course making it absolutely plain uh the american position on taiwan on hong kong on xinjiang china's international economic practices as well as its coercive treatment of other countries the chinese readout was a little different pointing to the fact that all these matters that the president of the united states had referred to with china's internal matters and that america should be careful what actions it took but in addition to those standard exchanges if you like between the two sides they also began to identify those areas where in fact the two countries could perhaps work together and climate of course was mentioned in both contexts this in turn in the chinese official foreign policy discourse has led to a range of commentaries appearing saying that we've now as it were turned the corner at least in part that the beginnings of the process of official dialogue the restitution of the processes of official dialogue which have been in suspension for three and a half to four years and now in prospect and in the chinese official rendition of the anchorage meeting which is occurring right now and they see this as part of the process opened up through that telephone call between the two heads of government and state let me conclude these remarks by then going to the question of not just what the chinese official literature is saying about its national security discourse in recent months not just what it's saying about its particular as it were foreign policy understanding of the biden administration in particular its interest in having um a um a restoration of high-level official dialogue between china and the united states but what has actually been happening on the ground on the part of chinese officials chinese military activity and the rest a couple of quick concluding thoughts when you look at the big questions of taiwan and the south china sea and the east china sea the chinese actions in terms of aircraft and air force sorties in the taiwan straits in the south china sea have remained as active as before indeed so too have american actions in response to those and sometimes prior to those chinese saudis occurring so in terms of the actual substance and tonality of chinese military actions over taiwan and the south china sea nothing has changed it remains as intense as it was before but so too has it been with the byte administration as well secondly of course the byte administration has made plain through public statements with the philippines and with japan that the respective bilateral defense treaties apply both in terms of any chinese attack on philippines vessels in the south china sea or for that matter any assault on japanese military units in sec senkoku darudao in the east china sea the third thing i'd point however too is what i think is a major new development in early [Music] march february march which was a decision by china to authorize its coast guard to use its weaponry in in authorized operations around china's coastal periphery of course china's coast guard units are those which are out at the forefront of china's presence in the south china sea and in the east china sea in and around san kaku and in around the eez exclusive economic zones surrounding senkoku and so this has created enormous consternation in japan it's led to a hard reaction from washington as well and this is something that is new in terms of other measures engaged in by chinese officials both military political and foreign policy of course we cannot go past what china then elected to do with the current session the national people's congress and their decision to change hong kong's electoral law you'll remember 12 months ago china shocked the world by using the national people's congress to bring in china's new national security law as a consequence of that we've had the arrest now of a large number of hong kong leading democratic figures and leaders the new electoral law uh will radically emasculate uh the limited powers which already exist for hong kong's uh legislative council so what do i take from all the above and i conclude on this overall is that what china is seeking to demonstrate to the biden administration and its response to it is one it sees history is still on china's side and that china is becoming stronger and the united states over time becoming weaker secondly that hard-line realist view of china's position in the world and bilateral united states is reinforced by the um particular actions we've seen on the ground so far both from the chinese military and foreign policy establishment where taiwan remains the crucible of most if not all of the future of the u.s china relationship three we see from the foreign policy discourse obviously an interest in china's part in reopening the lines of political and diplomatic communication so therefore my overall conclusion is for the first two months of the bard administration chinese strategic continuity it's long-term gain still being played for the 2020s all aimed at maximizing what the chinese call as their comprehensive national power in security and economic and technological terms while at the same time using its foreign policy apparatus to create new dialogue mechanisms with the united states with the objective of having as early as possible information about what the united states may be thinking of doing secondly to taking the strategic temperature down in the overall relationship for the half decade or so ahead and thirdly to also convey a sense of normality while at the same time china's core economic and military project remains well underway i'll conclude my remarks uh there susie other than to say that those who want a longer view of all that i have said there is a full text you can call it the thoughts of kevin nearly 10 000 words on this which i think has gone up on the asian society website already over to you susie and i look forward to our discussion thanks so much kevin uh and i think we in addition to everyone's ability to read your longer text i hope we'll be able to um dig into uh what you've just said uh over the next uh 40 minutes or so um the picture that you just painted uh also emerges bill in in you know your most recent couple of newsletters of the lead-up to this meeting in alaska being marked uh not not being marked by expressions of comedy on either side um so in addition to the deeper background that uh that kevin just so ably described you know even over the past uh couple of days there's been this this series of uh kind of uh exchange of irritants in the atmosphere the united states announcing uh new sanctions against chinese involved in the dismantling of civil liberties and democratic political institutions in hong kong to which kevin just referred um china's ambassador to the u.s uh tenkai uh in in what was maybe a moment of of uh trolling asking whether the united states would be a responsible stakeholder of course that's using the united states his own uh language for how china should model its behavior uh uh when uh robert zelick was a u.s trade rep during the bush administration um in a somewhat more ambiguous move beijing announced that the trials uh on charges of espionage uh against uh michael kovrig and michael spavor two canadian civilians detained for more than two years on what are widely regarded as politically motivated charges would take place on friday and mond and next monday which could be an escalation around their cases or maybe a prelude to wrapping these cases up and maybe releasing them um so there's that ambiguity and then there was this there's this uh conflict over what this meeting even was uh secretary blinken uh explicitly said the meeting was a one-off it was not part of a strategic dialogue as china would prefer and then the chinese foreign ministry immediately responded uh in concert with various state media by saying nope it's a high-level uh strategic dialogue so bill i'd like to just start uh by asking you given this highly aggregated aggravated atmosphere what is the best outcome uh that a meeting like this could produce for the us uh well thank you thanks susie and thanks uh prime minister that was uh great opening remarks and i i had the pleasure reading them before the before the uh meeting started but i highly recommend everyone go to the website and read read his long speech it's very good um you know i think when you look at um certainly what's going on on the u.s side the biden administration has been very focused on on projecting strength and not looking weak i think both for domestic reasons because they're very concerned about the perception um uh in dc on capitol hill that they somehow have gone soft on china so to speak after the four years of of trump really taking it to china which has a lot of support in the us now i think on the um in terms of towards the chinese you know they want to make clear that you know there are lots of folks on the biden team who were in the obama administration working on china policies they want to make very clear that we are not obama 2.0 and so they're trying as they're they're working through china's strategy they say as they're doing that they are trying to thread the needle to say we're not trump but we're also not obama and you know we're coming out with a set of policies that we've seen or continuity that looks more trump than certainly than obama but um i think i'm not it's not clear they are certainly are sure yet what they really want to be doing so this meeting though i think will be very useful to for both sides i mean the ideal outcome i think is not going to be there's always going to be joint statement they said there would really be to sit down and have both sides discuss what their red lines and what their bottom lines are and that's certainly what the chinese are saying and asking they're they're trying to tell the u.s these are our bottom lines these are the red lines these areas we can cooperate and in one of the main goals the chinese appear to have is to get the u.s back into this as as kevin said the strategic dialogue process which is something that makes their system very comfortable um it does not have a great uh history of outcomes on the on the relationship but it goes to this broader thing of and the prime minister referred to it which is really um the chinese side that the xi being especially you know this this east is rising west is declining which is seems like a variant of of mao zedong's old the east wind will prevail over the west wind um that sounds a little better but it's the sense and it's the term ccp uses uses quite often the system uses quite often now which is these the world is undergoing changes unseen in the century and in that concept there's risk for china as the world changes but there are also massive opportunities and around those opportunities are this china is rising and really the primary competitor the primary impediment to china's rise the u.s is declining and that view has been massively accelerated over the last year or so because of the pandemic because of political dysfunction in the us i think because the chinese system really showed that it was able to withstand the trade war i think that you know the beginning there was a lot of concerns that the the tariffs from the trump administration the trade war would really actually cause a lot of damage the system it certainly caused damage they would prefer the tariffs would go away but they were able to adjust and make it so the system could withstand it i think that actually gave them a lot of confidence and so i i see cgp really coming as at this a from a very confident perspective you know his historic marxist lineup marxist leninist historical viewpoint certainly sees that time and time and forces are on china's side but it's still too early the the us is still too powerful the relative power balance while it's adjusting in china's favor is still on the u.s side and so i you know what i'm seeing what i'm hearing from the chinese side is that they just want to stabilize lock sort of build a box around the u.s town relationship so that they can stabilize the real difficulties to buy time while they fix what they call their their shortcomings or what they say which are things like technology the biggest problem they have quite honestly is technology and the fact that they're far too reliant on u.s technology for what they call the core technology so so the outcomes for the chinese i think are we set a floor of the relationship we understand the areas where we have to work to avoid conflict and we can get back to at least some sort of a baseline where we engage in some level of um regular dialogues you know the chinese again they call it a high-level dialogue the u.s says it's not um i'm not sure you know the us i think one of the reasons us is not is because they say you know we're doing a high-level strategic dialogue with the chinese they're going to get attacked here in dc for sort of you know falling back into you know i've certainly heard people from the trump administration and the republican side say oh whatever you do don't fall into the strategic dialogue trap right and so they need to be very clear that's not what's going on here but ultimately you know for the chinese it it it there is no expectation that things are going to change materially it's how do they how do they control the risks of thing excel of the relationship accelerating out of control in very deleterious ways while they are able to um take advantage of the sort of the fundamental historical forces that they see they're on their side kevin i'd like to ask you to build on that a bit i mean i'm i'm struck by the um paradoxical metaphors used to describe washington and beijing's relations right now they're simultaneously frosty and flammable uh and you've outlined the extent to which beijing as bill just said hopes to kind of avoid the unpredictability of u.s policy toward china that was the chief characteristic of the trump administration's china policy uh by bringing the bringing the u.s back into this series of um regular diplomatic gab fest so i guess one part of my question is um would these dialogues constitute some sort of capture of the american diplomatic establishment are they really that dangerous um and of course the u.s also has an interest in not letting uh things get wildly unpredictable to the point where they spark miscalculation um particularly of the military variety i mean i was thinking back to um when i first moved out to asia in 2000 and you know what would happen today if something like the ep3 spy plane uh crisis happened in this kind of atmosphere um so kevin i wonder is there a way for the biden administration to kind of douse some of the flammability of the relationship without a thaw that neither side really seems to want yeah i'd like to build on what bill had to say before because i think he's right in his analysis the biden team um are deeply experienced those of us who know tony blinken who know jake sullivan and the teams advising them including let's remember bill burns out there now the cia these are deeply experienced individuals who understand as it were the clear distinction between china's declaratory strategy and its operational strategy or if you like china's military slash economic strategy versus its diplomatic strategy and i think it is that um delineation which is absolutely critical uh for the american mind if you like american realism is has rapidly caught up with pre-existing long-standing chinese realism which has always seen these as different domains as well second point is just to be clear in our own minds is is what chinese strategy is chinese strategy as bill just said before is to allow the natural growth of its economy through the size of its population through the expanding chinese middle class and through the maximization of its international markets and the continued success question mark of its domestic political economy to grow the economy surpass that of the united states and globally to see its influence which is already now significant expand exponentially is of course of what xi jinping has himself described as other countries succumbing to the gravitational pull of the sheer size and magnitude of the chinese economy secondly to to also grow continue to grow the chinese military into what he describes as a war fighting war-winning capability and to complete its process of reform in the date he's given uh and reorganization by 2027 what's all this mean is that china overcomes the capabilities gaps within as it were its economic strength its military capabilities and critically most critically as bill said before its technological gap in the domain of semiconductors and microchips because this is the absolute engine room of what happens the artificial intelligence revolution as it affects future economic competitiveness affects china's surveillance capabilities that affects fundamentally the ability to fight informationized warfare in the future as well so that's china's strategy it's diplomacy in the meantime is frankly in my judgment to buy time and and therefore uh to take uh the temperature of the relationship down several notches uh china is not ready in my judgment uh to run the risk of a military action over taiwan in the near term but by the time you reach decades end uh frankly that becomes the chinese calculus a more realistic proposition and in the meantime to use time to overcome the technology gap which occupies such a large part of the space in the 14-5 year plan and the associated national technology plans we've seen in recent times finally uh susie nancy a question does this provide any opportunities for the bidenistas as they approach this as well i think yes as i indicated partly in my prepared remarks the virtue of a period of what i've described elsewhere managed strategic competition between the two countries taking the strategic temperature down to avoid unnecessary unplanned crises identify your red lines around core national interest to the extent that you can prosecute effective and comprehensive strategic competition while managing areas of defined cooperation like in climate that also can mesh with america's deep national interests at this stage it could also provide america with an opportunity and a strategic window to rebuild its economy to rebuild its politics to overcome some of the frankly the deep fault lines which have emerged through the trump period in the period of covert and two as america has done so many times since the implosions of the civil war in the 1860s rebuild itself after first-class national disasters that also provides america with an opportunity i would think and finally um leaving aside what the two countries sides must now do on climate as the world's two largest emitters that speaks for itself but it's a looming national security challenge as well and that one is called uh north korea and that one is what i described as the crisis that dare not speak its name at the moment but i have this funny feeling that there's something ticking away in pyongyang at the moment which is going to radically re-alter our dialogue on what china and america do together in the year ahead and because kim jong-un ultimately is relatively uncontrollable i wonder in the context of what you just said and this is a question that both of you could answer how you view the um the accuracy of uh xi jinping's view of america um i remember kevin you and i had a conversation several years ago with a chinese scholar who had been a member of an establishment that provided foreign policy advice to china's leaders in the xi jinping era and at the time he described she is having more or less jettisoned the traditional system of information processing on world affairs in favor of a very narrow group of highly ideological uh advisors outside of the foreign ministry system and so i wonder um first of all if that's if that's still the case and um and how it impacts his understanding of the intentions of the biden administration of america's stature in the world at this time when it's been badly damaged by this variety of self-inflicted wounds with which we're all familiar um i mean it was striking to me that in your description there was this moment uh early on in the biden administration when you had diplomats uh chinese diplomats essentially saying um you know let's let's return to normal let's reset um because it doesn't seem like it would require very fancy espionage on the part of beijing to you know you could basically read a few back issues of foreign affairs to realize that the binance administration uh was not just going to be you know sort of singing kumbaya and back back to 2009. so do you view this as kind of a hail mary pass or a genuine misjudgment of the state of plane if so why why why why are they getting it wrong um that's really good this one yeah kevin you go ahead and maybe bill can okay well i'll give a short response to that because i'd really like to hear bill's views on this as well given he remains abreast of all the literature i only read part of it i think um on the core question that you asked suzy which is the accuracy of xi jinping's take on the current state of america i think that's the essence of your question have i got it right methodologically as good scholars the three of us would say how do we know but let me have it a guess which is one what i said before is we do have a problem in china in terms of the advisory network i alluded to that for my opening remarks today because xi jinping is so powerful and the official class are so disempowered as a result and fearful of providing the wrong advice or advice which is insufficiently robust in the prosecution of let's call it xi jinping's definition and timetable of the china dream and its sub-components and so therefore the response from officials most acutely in china these days is to anticipate what the leader wants and to therefore provide that advice for fear that anything of a more objective nature will not be career enhancing that's point number one point number two therefore how therefore do you convey information effectively to xi jinping about the real state of play about american power as it currently stands well part of that i think goes to the importance of these exchanges which are now occurring in anchorage because the bottom line the chinese systems like this when foreign barbarians like tony and jake even myself in an earlier capacity even now in a think tank capacity engage with our chinese friends every word that we say is transcribed it's translated and it's circulate and that is a very effective means by which to convey an analysis the chinese may disbelieve elements of the analysis but if it's internally factually substantiated then it can give senior chinese leaders pause for reflection the third point i'd make is this ultimately xi jinping's calculus of the united states will hinge on the analysis of the numbers the numbers that you'll look at in particular are these one the future of american defense outlays and where its military budget will be spent and on what second the numbers in terms of america's economic recovery and whether the underpinnings of a long-term as it were rebuild of the american economy is underway as you know susie from your own work uh mark's atlantis and their own analytical methodology go very much down to quantitative calculus hence their own uh framework of comprehensive national powers as a means by which to inform their leaders about whether china is more powerful less powerful in the united states and therefore whether china now has more freedom or even absolute freedom to move in particular areas so i think those are the two or three things which would inform xi jinping's view i worry in conclusions to the extent to which chinese leadership at present more broadly may begin to believe their own propaganda that america and the west are down for the count that is a deeply dangerous conclusion to reach because it tends to encourage more adventurous behavior than prudence in reality would otherwise suggest bill you read so widely i mean have you seen any sense of a kind of pushback against the narrative that um kevin's describing uh no i generally agree i would say um in the uh early period of the trump administration up through the beginning of the trade war um when you could have people going back and forth between beijing and shanghai and dc and so you could actually have some interesting conversations um there was absolutely no doubt that they were getting the trump administration wrong that the information flow was not working um they were either talking to the wrong people or they were um not listening to what they were being told um i think now um with the pandemic and so they're much much more limited exchanges so much fewer people with whom sort of this sort of dialogue happens on a sort of non-official way but also you know the things that that see in the media from people i talked to um that you know she really what i've been told that she really does believe in this you know the rise of the east defined the west and that it is um very dangerous for people to try and argue otherwise um inside throughout the system and we see that in you know what's popularly called wolf warriors where um you know use the chinese and various uh officials diplomats um are pushing back on criticisms about china um it's part of this broader attempt to raise what they call their share of global discourse power to sort of better tell china's story because they see um when you look at as kevin talked about comprehensive national power one bit effectively is their ability to tell china's story their share of this discourse power globally and they feel very and frankly they are very much um uh behind the the western media especially the u.s media um but so cg so wolf warrior is um really though i think is it is a reflection of um uh what is called the xi jinping thought on diplomacy which is a generally much more assertive confident approach to china's foreign relations um in every dimension and so you know and then inside china when you look at what's what's allowed to be you know the chinese internet is obviously very censored and so it's interesting you can learn a lot from what's allowed to be said um and what also is officially pushed by um various levels of the ccd propaganda system um and there's there's definitely a um very much a you know american decline america's a mess um you know america's i mean it's just it's it's a it's a very you know this happened a lot a lot over the history of the uh relationship but it's it's an intensity that i haven't seen in in a while um you know i just want to quote from one thing that it came out right before christmas it was a comment sort of a commentary on xinhua news service um that you know it was actually quite chilling it's the the title in english is worshiping in america it was the worshiping america and kneeling to america soft bone disease must be cured and it was this very um harsh basically screed telling everybody that they you know they you know basically criticizing anybody who had or tried to express sort of positive or quote soft feelings about america and it was very clear you know this isn't to the masses this is this is clearly targeted at people who have more influence in the system and around the system and it just is i think really um uh illustrative of the pressures inside the system where if if the this the person at the top has this very sort of a more harder line view towards america and and the way the system is structured where as kevin said earlier you know everything about struggle there's you know a rectification campaign in the um so the political the pulp that sort of the security services system there's no upside career or personal upside for being soft on america and so i think it is a real risk that that that the information flows skew one way and lead to potentially um significant miscalculations i mean we have that risk in america right in an open system we have that problem and so um with the nature of the change system i think the risk is is certainly um it is quite significant um and you know but at the same time this this sort of sense of pride and you know assertiveness and desire for more assertiveness it is not purely sort of party ccp propaganda and it's real china thank you a lot to be proud of i mean it's it's amazing what the country is built you look at how they've gotten through the pandemic they just celebrated you know what they called it the end of the you know the victory in the war on poverty and you know it's not perfect but objectively a lot of good was accomplished you look at um this year it's the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ccp it's you know there there's just a lot of real sort of triumphalism that's real that is also you know um enhanced through the propaganda system and so um you know this is this is not a time when you're gonna find anybody who's gonna say well wait a minute maybe we're a week or maybe these guys you know aren't declining as fast as the boss thinks they are and so that i do think adds some um some some not um trivial risk to the relationship can i add a thought or two to that term um susie if you've got a moment please yeah it's that um bill write about and i'll use the term chinese nationalism with xi jinping we have a highly effective cocktail looked at domestically the chinese political prison of a marxist leninist analytical rigour about the nature of power and threats to power both domestically and internationally [Music] albeit with the real complication that policy and analytical contestability and alternative views have now been shut down but the second turbocharging element in terms of chinese national international behaviors now is the system's active cultivation of chinese nationalism uh in recent times this is not a new phenomenon [Music] basically you could see the party moving this direction as early as the jungle in period [Music] and to some extent during the gentile period but it has gone into overdrive in the current period and as bill correctly pointed out if you were to be empirical about this and compare where china was and where it is in 1979 to where it is now on the economy alone and living standards and the war against poverty etc there has been phenomenal progress against another measure which is the degree of personal liberty and freedom well people's ability to find their own job marry who they want to at the age that they choose and kind of live where they want to live and go they want to go that's improved a huge amount in terms of their personal political liberties that's been crushed completely and so but against this matrix this is where the party is operating and one final point on nationalism i put a fair bit of treatment on this in my prepared remarks but not in what i said earlier today we need to look very very carefully at the emerging debate on xinjiang genocide and the winter olympics i said before i think the great sleeper issue in terms of u.s china relations on the question of security is north korea they're given the possibility that kim jong-un begins nuclear weapons testing again i believe another as it were challenge of of uh even greater significance is the emerging momentum to define what is occurring in xinjiang as genocide and where that will then lead to in terms of calls for an international boycott of the beijing winter olympics you don't have to be a rhodes scholar to work out that this is going to tunnel straight into chinese nationalism look at for example a minor example of how all this played out in the case of the russian winter olympics at sochi in 2013-14 the invasion of the ukraine came about a month later it's not a direct causality but it's certainly an atmospheric addition to pre-existing security policy realities therefore one of the truly dangerous questions to navigate for the year ahead for us china and more broadly for china and the world is how do we deal with xinjiang genocide and the winter olympics it's staring at everybody in the face but the debate has barely begun that was actually one of my questions kevin i wanted to hear your thoughts thoughts on this um you know president biden has said many times that he intends to have a values-led foreign policy uh how possible what what does such a what would an effective version of such a policy look like with regard to china uh at this moment given what's happening in xinjiang given what's happening in hong kong and indeed uh within china itself is there is there i've always taken the view in um foreign policy that our anchoring principles in any country's foreign policy and in particular any liberal liberal democracies foreign policy must be um anchored in three sets of documents or instruments one's the un charter the second is the universal declaration of human rights and the third is the un covenant on civil and political rights not all of which all states have signed and in china's case ratified although not ratified the third of the three that i've just referred to because it creates as it were a normative framework within which these discussions can occur that's why for example china is still a full member of the human rights council in geneva because it's the machinery established to give effect to however poorly the human rights norms which we've collectively as an international community agreed to so president biden is right at that sort of foundational level leaving quite to one side the other sentiments which were alive in the american body politic concerning human rights and human rights norms as they apply to china whether xinjiang tibet uh hong kong or prospectively on the question of taiwan the the salient point and i make this as an observation rather than as a policy recommendation is this what bill said before about the um the unleashing of xi jinping thought on diplomacy [Music] and related to that china's its warfare diplomacy is that the more you read the text and see what china is saying in doing now in the human rights council in geneva but also bilaterally with those countries who attack china and human rights is that the level of shall i say comprehensive national disdain dismissiveness and disregard which the chinese system now has for any international complaint about anything on the human rights agenda is now almost complete it is now almost written off so when the classic response by the rest of the international community is that we will advance a combined press statement about human rights abuses in x y and z a b and c uh frankly what's the most recent test case of that being it's called hong kong um and uh hong kong none of us can test the fact that it's part of china's domestic sovereignty but the human rights norms of course apply to people's domestic practices that's why they exist china in the last year has demonstrated its total complete disregard for all forms of international pressure on these questions if it had any concerns why would it have done the national security law and why would it double down with the new electoral laws and literally in the last couple of weeks i think we're into a whole new world of china's disregard for this in an earlier stage uh posthumous china understood the economic price to pay now china sees no economic price to pay and that's why we're in a whole new world i think of international pain on this question all right well let me move on so if i just add quickly um specifically the comprehensive national disdain or i would i would actually call it the comprehensive national vitriol um that's it's really been quite remarkable just over the last um few weeks the month and part of related to that though is and i think it's very specific as well to the xinjiang and then how it also relates to you know the whether or not it's a genocide and the olympics is a really um i think significantly intensified and aggressive campaign to delegitimize western media um in ways that um i don't think you know the chinese have long complained about western media but but this is i think they're really taking it to a new level and and so i think that is something that is again um as kevin said in a whole world of pain where that's uh we're just i think getting into that will depend um and i think it's gonna get significantly significantly uglier throughout the year and that's an incredibly important point um i want to shift now to kind of a different basket of issues and then it looks like we have some really excellent questions from our audience so maybe we can move through these a bit more um swiftly i want to talk about places where um where there seems to be some potential maybe for a kind of balance of competition and work together between the two countries um regional hot spots uh climate change uh and and then a question about tech and uh trade um on the first question maybe this one goes to you kevin i mean the that we're against the backdrop of this meeting that's taking place in alaska um two countries along china's border are facing uh political instability that's of concern to both the us and china uh there's been the coup in myanmar on which china's leadership has been projecting a kind of ambivalence even as citizens of the country uh many of them blame china for what's taken place uh in ways that are quite volatile and and even violent then there's afghanistan where the u.s under president trump promised the taliban it would withdraw u.s troops by may 1st we don't know yet if that's exactly going to happen according to the deadline but that's either way going to be a pretty messy situation do you see space for the united states and china to make any kind of common cause on the management of these crises or or these types of crises given the current state of the relationship um let me take a reverse order um on afghanistan no it would be my blunt response not least because um [Music] the strategic worldviews of china and the united states on afghanistan are so many worlds apart and china would not want to as it were pick up any of the fundamental security responsibilities that the united states has had given how ungovernable afghanistan has been for the last 100 years or so for all the dynamics which apply within that country [Music] so i do not see that i think china's approach to afghanistan will continue to be opportunistic which is to find whatever resource projects and other related projects are of of use to it and will seek to as it were expand its influence with the afghan government over time consistent with that but china's posture in afghanistan is largely defensive which is to prevent any spillover effects from afghanistan uh into let's call it the uh the rolling uh problems in xinjiang and elsewhere within muslim china secondly on myanmar i think it's more complex answer to your question suzy which is um along these lines there's often a temptation in the west i think to see this as american lost chinese gain as far as the military coup in myanmar is concerned i have not seen any evidence so far which proves to me or establishes to me that the chinese were had anything to do with the coup this was very much locally initiated because tatmador the burmese military did not want to lose power politically or most critically financially uh to the civilian government of ansang xi after the national league for democracy did so well in the burmese elections at the end of um at the end of 2020. and so therefore this was simply a preemptive strike about money in power a rolling shakespearean tragedy in bernie's and frankly other countries politics as well therefore what the chinese sought to do since then consistent with their policy of non-interference and internal affairs about the country other countries china will be seeking to stabilize its relationship with the burmese military it hasn't always been happy in the past we should not assume that there's now a seamless happy relationship now for the future either but certainly uh the burmese will be happy about china's overall hands-off approach uh to political developments there but here is the problem for beijing and where there may be an opportunity for u.s chinese collaboration on the burma question if tappend or the burmese military run right out of control and the hundreds of killings we've seen now turn into thousands of killings over time as the country degenerates into domestic chaos and and the military lose all control and we see large-scale carnage and and crimes against humanity china as the emerging great power i do not think will want to be in a position in the u.n security council of acting as the burmese military's permanent protector this attracts a lot of international negative karma and therefore the chinese will be i think behind the scenes uh talking to the americans and the westerns and the aseans about how we can as it were uh re-stabilize things in burma in order to not see the sort of civilian catastrophes that i've just referred to all right i'm going to begin to draw together some of the questions that we've had uh from the audience especially where they overlap with questions that i already had for you but so i wanted i think i'll direct this one initially at bill um uh on on tech and the economy there there's a debate in the made in the united states on how uh america should respond to xi jinping's push for china to become economically and technologically uh self-reliant which we saw highlighted during the recent uh npc session in beijing um in and on the general question of economic uh of china and the united states is economic interdependence in broad terms one side argues that interdependence with china is a liability in terms of national security in terms of values in terms of the vulnerability of u.s companies to ip theft etc and that to slow the effects of that interdependence as they threaten a variety of u.s interests washington ought to place greater restrictions on trade technology transfer scientific account collaboration visas etc and the opposing camp says essentially that to do so will only drive china to ramp up faster and puts us in a kind of explicit zero-sum competition that isn't in the u.s interest and only threatens to uh inflame an already too flammable dynamic between the two countries uh so i wonder where you these days come down on that debate um what kinds of restrictions you think the u.s ought to be pursuing um and which one's not so i'll sort of take up a more higher level approach i've come down in the place where i don't want to be um which is i think that um the chinese already view it as very much zero sum and in it you know the chinese have for a little change system for a long time has wanted to develop you know develop indigenous technology around things like microchip semiconductors it's very very hard they have not been particularly successful um but certainly the trump um the the the new era of jewishtown relations that we entered into um uh during the trump four years um was i think the uh sort of a massive wake-up call not just for the paranoia types in the military and security services have been who've been talking for years about the need to become self-reliant and core technologies but really made it a mass issue across all of society because um first with zte and then with huawei the vulnerabilities were shown to everybody and when you look at you know in china has had more recent programs they have the main in china 2025 program which um never went away but sort of was re-branded or talked about less because it became so controversial now when you look at the 14th five-year plan that was just approved as well as the um sort of the longer-term strategic objectives i think it's called to 2015 year to 2035 um it's very clear that the goals are to replace as much foreign technology as possible and but it goes back to i think also the earlier discussion we're having about the china's diplomatic strategy which is it's too early they're not ready yet and so they want to buy time and so then the question i think on you know for the countries and the and the corporations that have technology that china wants that is potentially sensitive is do you want to give them that time and make as much money as you can while they're using it when they're eventually going to most likely replace you or do you want to preserve your advantages now and maybe they will catch up or leap frog especially if you become sort of a whole of system approach to to innovation and science and technology development um and that's a that's a question that i think a policy maker or some of the nash security apparatus would have a very different answer to than say um somebody who's at a qualcomm or uh asml or a technology company and um but i think from this the signals coming out of china both publicly and privately we should be under no illusion that their goal is to de-westernize and especially de-americanize any bits of the um tech the sort of sophisticated technology stack that they can as fast as possible and even this week you know right after the two sessions ended um which is the most sort of authoritative important sort of theoretical journal that comes out every two weeks um the issue the lead article is a speech that gcp gave back in 2018 about the um how violent it was for china to become a scientific innovation power and it was it was soon after the first round of um sort of soon after the u.s effectively cut off zte but it was before huawei um and so i think we part they published it now to say look she's been thinking about this for a while you know he's got the vision to lead us where we need to go but it also you know the rest of the issue several articles you know the minister of science technology um heads of the two of um the academy of science and chemi engineering i mean this the system is very much focused on this now and so um the question again goes back to should we try and maximize the profits we can get now and eventually maybe it'll slow them down a little bit because they'll have the stuff they need um and there'll be a little bit less pressure on them to really try and make these break through innovations and and sort of leaps forward or given the overall state of the relationship um is it better to just sort of say okay this is this is one of those areas where we have an advantage and we need to preserve it as long as we can that's above my pay grade i don't i don't have a sort of i'm not going to make a recommendation on that i think there's there's a lot of very complicated and difficult um discussions around that and unfortunately i think part of it is i'm not sure we've had that debate enough to really get to the right answer kevin nothing's above your pay grade uh do you want to jump in with uh with some thoughts on that and maybe also touch on um how that question applies to uh scholarly and scientific exchange i'd like to comment on the fact that we three tragic so that's bill uh new susie and myself um i not only know what georgia is the party's written theoretical journal but we actually read it on a rolling basis as well that says a lot about our past times and our intellectual formation so bill thank you for giving me up up to date on my the upcoming fortnight revision of georgia seeking truth for those who don't speak chinese which is the theoretical journal of the party i've yet to be published there perhaps uh susan you'll have a pleased two quick points about what's just been said [Music] uh on the question of uh uh china having a come to mark's moment on technology on technology it really did happen in 2018 and many my own interlocutors in the chinese system these very stark terms we will not allow us to become vulnerable on semiconductors like we've always been vulnerable to the us dollar and from their perspective and these are senior folks in the system these represent two huge strategic vulnerabilities still to this day to the united states the chinese marxist leninist therefore are applying their own uh internal logic which is what would we do in these circumstances if we with america they answer uh in their own minds well we would screw china both through the use of the us dollar dollar nominated sanctions the dollar domination of international capital markets still particularly given non-convertibility with chinese yuan for reasons we're all familiar with given china's paranoia about making its currency fully tradable given the operations of hedge funds and what's happened to the asian financial crisis and all the legacy concerns it has on that similarly with technology um on the question of where the bad administration could or should land on the question of a future technology um trade uh with uh with the people's republic of china um frankly at the beginning in the end of all this is about semiconductors that's um that's the uh where the rubber really hits the road and this is a as bill has indicated a phenomenally complex debate for the administration because the technologies themselves are phenomenally complex and there's no such thing as a single microchip there are multiple variations of microchips and and therefore and if you go to the subcategories of microchips china is better in some than others and frankly is on a par with the united states in certain categories but the gap is still three to seven years in other categories which are critically relevant to the ai revolution so will the chinese domestic self-sufficiency drive in this area work the professional literature that i've read on this so far suggests the chinese will have extreme difficulty uh could commercial espionage deliberate to them um a question i'd probably better not answer in this forum um but um this is an absolute priority for them on the wider question that you pose susie about scientific and educational exchanges and where the administration is likely to go on that i would anticipate that the voices which will be at work within the byte administration will say america's overall soft power globally and in china will be enhanced by a reopening of the arteries of of student visas into into the united states from china and that the risks which uh all this presents to the american system can be handled in a much with the use of a much narrower and refined scalpel than the broader meat acts which has been applied to these exchanges by the trump administration so we will have i think restrictions obviously in particular areas of uh of uh research and development and innovation um but this will simply be an expansion of what also existed prior to 2016. those those restrictions existed then i think they're more likely to become more intense more refined more defined and more actively pursued and scrutinized by the us intelligence community rather than the broad act which says that every chinese student coming to study the united states is an agent to the ministry of state security of course president biden has long said that the united states ought to staple a visa to every uh high-level diploma that's given to a foreign student so um i just don't want to leave this conversation without uh a little bit of discussion uh about climate change um particularly uh because uh kevin you and the asian society policy institute recently published a poll that showed a majority of americans in favor of the u.s cooperating with china to address climate change uh that's at a moment where a majority of americans do not have a favorable view of china so this is a sort of interesting um an interesting poll that you did and you new former virginia congressman tom perriello who's been an innovative and effective environmental activist since we were in college if not much earlier uh wrote in slate earlier this week arguing that the u.s ought to be able to work with china on climate uh without caving or endangering other u.s interests by doing so walk us through um how you think this would work what the risks are and why you think china will play along well this one um susie i think both the american policy establishment the chinese policy establishment as well as american and chinese political leaders should be able to navigate this one as what i describe as a dedicated lane in the relationship even if the traffic remains chaotic in all the other lanes of the relationship or shall we say competitive in the other lanes of the relationship um hopefully collisions um evol avoided but to sustain my road traffic analogy dedicated climate change uh lane uh some cooperation general genera management of traffic uh competitive speeding over there on the other side of the freeway and hopefully avoiding collisions on the uh on the periphery of the roadway on climate what's it mean and i'd encourage people to follow the climate change debate to read the piece written by former congressman perriello and myself in slate it's just come out a couple of days ago in the asia society and through our policy institute for the last year or so supported by tom woodruff and our own team we've done a huge amount of work frankly anchoring a second track dialogue between china's climate change establishment and those with climate change responsibilities within the democratic party now this has been an asia society initiative and we've tried to bring as it were both sides together on this question over time and the whole objective has been that if democrats were to win the election and we didn't know at that stage whether they would and that at least conceptually um they both teams that by john kerry on the chinese side and sierra nevada on the chinese side on the american side and the chinese side would be able to begin with as it were a common framework of not just analysis but um uh a uh almost a work program of what needs to be done i think for us as an institution the asian society this has been a valuable investment of time and energy and resources i've shared this exercise myself um secondly i think uh the good thing to say is that both sides and wire and kerry respect each other professionally uh and personally that always helps when you're trying to as it were skillfully navigate these things through your own domestic systems american politics is as cavernous and as complex sometimes as the chinese political system and then thirdly on the substance of it i think where the rubber will hit the road is this what will these two thousand pound gorillas the world's two largest uh ghg emitters um do together to build global momentum and lead up to the glasgow conference of the parties which is due in the united kingdom in november 2021 this will become a question therefore of what will china and america agree to in terms of their immediate targets for the decade ahead given that both are committed to broad mints mid-century carbon neutrality when will both economies be able to peak in their carbon emissions and how they will how they will seek to go about it if china and america can get on the same page as this together with the europeans you know something we might just be able to turn this into a big change dynamic on climate and perhaps with some subsidiary benefits for the overall tonality and content for the rest of the us china relationship as well i'm low-key optimistic about this one i think um the reality the science of climate commends itself to both leaderships in washington and beijing and they know however bad the rest of the relationship gets uh climate change is already ravaging america this is already ravaging china well i'm mindful that we are almost at the end here and sadly there have been enormous number of really terrific questions from the audience i'm gonna i just spot one from our board member and my old pal from beijing fritz demopolis it's a quick one so i thought i'm just gonna ask that uh to you and then uh i will wrap it up so uh fritz just asks um uh with respect to the notion of red lines and regular diplomatic gab fests uh is it realistic or likely that redline transparency is actually achievable so maybe we can end we're kind of where we began with that question uh should we throw this to bill first and then i'll have a have a go i've been yabbering on for a bit bill what do you think um sure i'll give a quick answer but you'll answer it um you you have uh much more knowledge of it than i do um i think the chinese have actually been pretty good at telling us what the red lines and bottom lines are the team does say it almost every every time publicly and you know i i don't believe they differ from what they say privately um kevin you you could obviously correct that the us you know we don't have we don't define i don't think core interests or are consistent with chinese are um i don't think we use the red line terminology we certainly um make it sound like um things like hong kong human rights were red lines but obviously they they really haven't been and so um my sort of short answer would be the chinese side actually i think we do get to hear what they are on the u.s side i'm not sure we know and i'm not sure we've really do a good job of articulating that my view of that um very quickly and my greetings for its democracy is one that um bill is right the chinese departmental position is also their operational position on red lines um taiwan lying at the crucible of all of this two here however lies the real science um of let's call it red lines in the framework of what i continue to call a strategic framework of managed strategic competition that is within the retina it's called generically taiwan taiwan itself is not a red line what may be a series of red lines is both from beijing's and washington's perspective is what level of coercion from an american point of view would be ultimately acceptable in washington would it wish to communicate that to the chinese does it be the possibility of future cyber attacks on taiwan the possibility of future uh maritime blockades of taiwan uh other actions towards taiwan similarly in reverse from beijing's point of view uh subredlines sub i mean of subsidiary red lines concerning the level of as it were [Music] american de facto political recognition of taipei which has been unfolding in some respects under the trump administration so when we say taiwan is a red line yes i think we all agree to that but the real work and the real science lies in the sub definitions none of that can actually ever be done publicly but there is a question about the internal machinery the relationship at the highest level of political and diplomatic contact between them and that is by the two leadership elites to leave people in no uncertainty as to the likelihood of massive reaction should a particular set of subsidiary red lines be actually crossed i think there is some wisdom to in that final point is i understand the american historical position about not having red lines with the chinese i understand that in terms of the public domain no american president wants to commit themselves to acting one way or the other particular eventuality but i'm not talking about public red lines here i'm talking about those which are understood between the two systems at the highest level of politics in the absence of american red lines in the past there is a danger in the chinese system that they ultimately perceive that the united states is permanently malleable and as a consequence you wake up one morning when in fact an inferred red line from washington's perspective has been crossed on the question of taiwan we end up with a massive escalation which even the chinese are not prepared for or were not anticipating that's my concern so i'm i am up for the business of internal clarity between the two sides in non-public communications about where these thresholds lie so we have a no surprises approach thanks so much well unfortunately because i could continue talking to the two of you uh the cavs come home uh we need to wrap it up now so thank you uh so much bill for joining us um to you kevin for your incredible insights as we wrap up i just want to note that it's um just about one year exactly since we at the asia society moved to all virtual programming one year more than 300 events across our global network and we are still here in large part because of you in our global audience so if you would like to make a contribution to support all our work and these kinds of programs we would greatly appreciate it and you can do so um via the link uh secure.asiasociety.org backslash donate so good evening from all of us and uh we look forward to seeing you again soon thank you bill thank you susie and greetings to everyone on our network

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 164,526

Rating: 4.2831974 out of 5

Keywords: asia, asia society policy institute, biden, bill bishop, chinafile, joe biden and asia, joseph biden, kevin rudd, sinocism, susan jakes, the avoidable war, program, asia society new york, policy

Id: wgP2tWZdMd4

Length: 95min 46sec (5746 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021