Five Former U.S. Ambassadors to China Discuss U.S.-China Relations

you good evening my name is George Nichols and I head up government affairs for New York Life Insurance Company and I'd like to welcome you welcome you to the forum in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Nationalists normalization of us-china relations we're thrilled to have you here during this holiday season I hope you've enjoyed the food I apologize for us getting delayed in our start I'd like to get the program started right now and I'd like to introduce the president and chief executive officer of New York Life mr. Ted Mathis good evening so it's a considerable honor for New York Life to be able to partner with the National Committee on us-china relations to present you with tonight's forum I'm told this is the first time that we actually have the nation's past five ambassadors appearing together to exchange their views and some stories so I'm certainly going to be interesting for us it may be interesting for them as well our first we have five distinguished guests tonight the first up is Winston Lord who was ambassador to China from 1985 into 1989 James Lilly who served as ambassador from 1989 to 1991 Stapleton Roy who served from 1991 to 1995 James Sasser who served from 1996 to 1999 in my good friend Admiral Joe Pryor who was a member of the New York Life Board of Directors and who served from 1990 to 1999 to 2001 the the audience tonight is equally impressive I'd like to extend a special welcome from New York Life to China's UN representative ambassador Zhang I know there many people in this room today that are China observers for an extended period of time we know this is going to be a stimulating dialogue and in particular we look forward to opening up at the end of the program for some questions and answers most of you may know that New York Life is a relative newcomer to China a joined a long list of companies that are doing business in China we've been there since 2002 partnering with the higher corporation actually I just recently met with the CEO of hire group zhang room in and we're both very bullish about the future for our operation there but this evening is about really looking back and celebrating the past three decades of the nation's relationship with China I think that no one's gonna have a better view on this and the people that you're about to hear from especially on the eve of a new presidential administration it's certainly going to be fascinating to get their perspectives on economic and political issues between US and China and what we're going to see in the years ahead so it's my pleasure to turn the program over to Steve or Liz or Lin's it was the president the National Committee on us-china relations our moderator for tonight's discussion Steve welcome to New York Life thank you very much well first let me thank Ted for a New York Life our friends at New York Life for providing us this wonderful venue and yeah Admiral Peary certainly has it's important that you're on that board so we can have this it's this venue and I want to welcome all of you which is and repeat what Ted said which is this is the first time that all five former ambassadors have been together so this is a a real pressure is coming sunday is the 30th anniversary of the announcement on December 15 1978 that we were going to establish diplomatic relations with China on January 1 and then on March 1 we were going to open embassies embassies in each other's countries I think it's fair to say that this breakthrough laid the foundation for extraordinary improvements in us-china relations in fact I think it's fair to say that coupled with dung shoppings reform an opening this really laid the foundation for China's economic social and political developments over the next three decades the seeds that were planted 30 years ago flowered it's fair to say in part because the United States sent eight extraordinary Americans to China to represent our interests so it's really too terrific that we can begin the celebration of this anniversary with five of these extraordinary Americans obviously ambassador Woodcock and ambassador Hummel are no longer with us but these five have had extraordinary not only as extraordinary careers as ambassadors but have been leaders in the military in politics in non-government organizations and in business but I don't want to use all of our time to go over their BIOS which you all have now sandy ran couldn't be with us today and he tells me he will step down on on January 20th and on January 21st he's going to be replaced by someone who has very strong a very strong background in China someone whose relations with China with China's leadership are truly extraordinary in fact one who has a very close relationship with who Jintao and I'm told is going to become available on January 21st for work and George W Bush that's a joke [Laughter] drum roll so that's a joke guys so if this is on c-span this is life that was a joke yeah I was just don't you know I thanked all five of you for being with us tonight again as I said this is the perfect beginning of this celebration the National Committee is going to continue this celebration in Beijing where some of you some of the ambassador's will be joining us in early January where we continue the celebration and then in March to commemorate the opening of embassies we'll be doing a program in Washington tonight's since the ambassador's have all been introduced in the years that they served I won't repeat that tonight's format is very informal I'm gonna throw out some questions they're gonna answer they can interrupt each other they can interrupt me I can interrupt them then we'll we'll open the floor to the audience we have a microphone and because this is on c-span you will need to state your name and your affiliation and wait for the microphone and we will start in the order in which you serve so we will start with Winn Lord and the first question is really to talk about the high light and the low point of your time as ambassador now I have to say in Winston's case I know what the highlight was so I will I will put that out that is in 1988 he and I won the diplomatic doubles tournament in Beijing which was clearly the highlight of wins time in in Beijing and it certainly was of mine too I think we won of a trip to Dubrovnik which we never talked which we didn't take we donated it to the embassy so win let me turn it over to you and then we'll go to Jim Snape Jim and Joe well that was going to be my highlight Steve is so much better a tennis player than I am that when we talk about our partnership I feel it the way Albania talked about its partnership with China doing the cold which Albania said between US and China we represent one-quarter of the world's people [Laughter] so I'm the Albanian in this in this doubles team I too would like to pay tribute to our predecessors who helped pave the way also to the National Committee which has done more than any other organization of a private nature to promote good relations ever since the days of ping pong and is now flourishing under Steve's leadership but one final grace note I think it's very appropriate on this thirtieth anniversary to pay tribute to someone who literally has done more over a longer period of time to promote exchanges and friendship between the United States and China unselfish walk of this committee and I like her to stand and give her a tribute and that's Jan Baris now I'll go in staccato form on the highlights just a few specifics namely welcoming the first US Navy ships to China in 30 years explaining the Super Bowl to hundreds of millions of mystified Chinese on Chinese television George Shultz is longest and by his account best trip he ever took Secretary of State being the first Envoy to visit Tibet and hear monks in gloomy temples whispering the name of the Dalai Lama Caine Mutiny performance done in Mandarin by the Chinese people theater that had a rapturous reception produced by chalten directed by Shelton Heston and produced by my wife Betty Bob Lord so these are some of the specifics but overall the highlight and the greatest challenge was to lay a broader base for us-chinese relations beyond the glue of the Cold War namely the balancing of the Soviet Union that still was at a fever pitch that was the last few years of the Cold War we cooperated in surveillance posts along the Russian border we shared intelligence we helped to arm the resistance against the Soviets in Pakistan we sold eight hundred million dollars worth of arms to the Chinese during the late 80s but this was not going to be enough for a sustainable relationship we had to be four things not just against them and even more so when it happened which we couldn't have predicted of course at the end of the Cold War the fall of the Berlin Wall and 89 and 90 and of course gentlemen square the combination meant the anti-soviet glue was gone and greater scrutiny of China's domestic political system and so I worked very hard and I'd say the sustained highlight was broadening his base greatly expanded by my successors obviously since then but trade went way up investment military exchanges cabinet exchanges Science and Technology exchanges the Peace Corps and so that was the most satisfying finally to cut this short in terms of lowlights one started even before I got there Jesse Helms helped hump my nomination for several months meaning I couldn't get to China in time for the vice president's trip and I couldn't gets one and in time for my ailing father to see that so I've always there was a low light before I even began then a high light / low light was in the June of 1988 a year before tnmn meeting with Chinese students hundreds of them what came to be known as democracy sell-on and seeing their passion and their eagerness that was a highlight but a low-light and I could elaborate on this a few days later with don't shower playing sending me a personal warning not to meet with Chinese students and then the real low-light was the visit of the newly elected president Bush an incident too many of you familiar with where the Chinese police kept Fong leisure the dissident from attending the banquet were digging on their promise to the president and what made it worse it was a terrific summit otherwise like mrs. Lincoln and the play I guess but that torpedoed the summit instead of trying to rescue that the National Security Advisor lied to the media about the history of it instead of blaming the Chinese for if he asked Oh blame me in the embassy so that that was clearly the low light but I don't want to end on an ominous or depressing note I'm optimistic about the relationship I think you will see continuity in the new Obama administration given its pronouncements and its personnel and I think we will avoid the cycle that all of us have seen and some have experienced with great poignancy of starting out administrations on a bad note with the Chinese but finally ending up on a much better note I think this will start out on a much more positive plane win thanks Jim yeah I guess the high note was represented by Shirley Guang Minister of Finance of Taiwan attending the Asian Development Bank conference in Beijing May of 1989 and we had worked to have China join the ADB and have Taiwan stay in with a name change but I think this was symbolic of the coming together of China and Taiwan which we had started earlier with certain premises of support for Taiwan both spiritually and materialistically and then being able to carry through our obligations in Beijing as Winston mentioned the northwest sites and our military arrangements with them and this was picked up let's say in the discussions of GA TT which we had with the Chinese which always included the admission of Taiwan and China both under these similar arrangement and I think we saw Taiwanese come to the Asian Games and treated with respect and came to see me people I'd known there but I would point out to you early on that I arrived in Beijing with a certain amount of baggage I had served two and a half years in Taiwan as the American director of the American Institute and we had a so-called successful tour as I said both materially and spiritually we were gave them enough strength to open up to China in 87 and I think that was an ingredient of this although judging Ward decided he was going to do this on his own and this moved ahead and I would say this is a slow evolving arrangement that took years and years to to consummate and we can see the results of it now in the election of my NGO and the opening up and the resistance he faces we the problems never go away and I would say that it's a long-term positive effect negatively I would say that it was probably our lack of smarts in managing the media better because if they seize a certain situation where you've got high emotions such as 10 on one or other errors and they go for it and I remember talking to Chen Qi Sunday if I want to high-degree that ships coming in from the seventh fleet the blue ridge national laws that i said to chen jichen i think that if you make mistakes on this they're gonna go after your throat and they went after my throat so i mean it's it colors things it colors your diplomacy it colors your perception in the states it influences congressmen it even even influences the State Department and I don't think we were quite tuned to the power of that and what it could do to a relationship so I would say that was a low point State I've been thinking about your question Steve and from my perspective of course when Lords time in Beijing was largely a series of high points and in my case it was a series of low points I began my tour in Beijing by meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister and I persuaded him to issue a visa to congresswoman Nancy Pelosi who join a rest period managed to go down to Tiananmen Square with the television crew and unfurl a human rights banner which brought her attention presence in Beijing to the attention of China's top leaders who were not aware that she'd been given a visa and literally China's top leaders were screaming mad and of course I had created this problem I ended my time in Beijing by informing the Chinese government that the president of Taiwan whom we had assured them officially extensively would not be permitted to come to the United States that we had reversed our position in between I tried to stretch out the low points so that I I wouldn't be bored in 1992 I had the honor of informing them that we were going to sell f-16 fighter aircraft to Taiwan and the next year on instructions from Winn Lord who tried to keep me busy in Beijing I informed the Chinese that we were going to link our trade privileges with China to their human rights behavior but I offered them way out by achieving seven fundamental improvements in human rights over the course of a year which actually we made some progress on but perhaps not enough to fully remove the problem what were the high points one was it was impossible for senior American officials to visit China when I went there partly because during ambassador Lilly's very difficult period in Beijing which he handled with extraordinary skill and dignity we had had some problems with the publicity that surrounded some of the high-level visits then so it was important that we were able to get Secretary of State Baker to visit there and then we were able to get the Secretary of Commerce and later we got the Secretary of Defense and others so by the time I left Beijing we actually were in a situation where even when we had severe difficulties we were able to have senior level US officials meet with their Chinese counterparts that was important but I think my most significant accomplishment in China of course was getting China back on to the path of reform and openness while the Chinese tend to take the credit for the 14th Party Congress decision to move back strongly on to the reform and openness path since it occurred while I and was in Beijing I feel I'm justified in citing that as a high point in my time there in any event it immediately gave an enormous boost to US business and beginning in 1993 US trade with China and China's economic growth began on the strong upward path that has continued ever since and at least that occurred of my watch what my role was I will leave to history to decide so Stape we should hold you responsible for the trade deficit is that what you're telling it was very small when I was there Jim well let me just stay pro it was one of the most skillful and competent and effective diplomats that we ever had in Beijing I think he under self here and as an example of how fried he is rumor has it that when he went to the Chinese to advise them we were selling f-16s to Taiwan stapes Cape caution in these terms he said I want you to know that when and if Taiwan is Renato he reunited with the mainland you'll have some wonderful f-16 when I I was also held up when by senator Jesse Helms and the most outrageous aspect of it was that I had served 18 years with Jesse and maybe he knew me too well but in any case he held me up for three or four months along with 18 other ambassadors and by the time I arrived in China when had I mean the state had been expecting me in June and I finally got there in January the following year relations were at a pretty low AB as Stape indicated we had told the Chinese from a very very high level that we would not give the leader of the Chinese authorities in Taiwan lead on way a visa to come to the United States and we did so and the Chinese reacted very very angrily recalling their ambassador so I arrived there at a very difficult moment I would say that the high point of my service in China would be President Zhang Zi means visit to the United States his state visit I think it was 1997 if memory serves me correctly we'd gone through some very very difficult times trying to rebuild the relationship trying to get visits back and forth from a high high high level visitors and as I said the other day I wrote all my old colleagues in the Congress a letter and invited them to come to China because I thought this would narrow the distance between our two countries and would also perhaps overcome some of the biases they had well to my horror most of them came we were entertaining them constantly at one time we were entertaining Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore simultaneously so so we were busy but I remember very well we worked so hard on arranging Jon's Amin's state visit to the United States back and forth with our Chinese interlocutors working out this working out that etc etc we got to Hawaii and he spoke there at the governor's mansion the Hawaiian police didn't do their work you could hear demonstrators and bullhorns all during the dinner there the president of China was embarrassed I was embarrassed but when we got to Washington and I saw Zhang's I mean standing there on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton with the Marine Band there the full diplomatic corps drawn up there along with many of the most important members of the congressional delegation and the cabinet Steve that had to be a high point and I guess the next high point was when President Clinton had a return visit to Beijing to stand there on tenement square and see the stars and stripes snapping in the breeze and hearing the People's Liberation Army band playing the star-spangled banner next to the Chinese national anthem now that was something that I will always remember low-point well we had some low points probably the lowest was when we erroneously and mistakenly bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and tragically killed three of their diplomats Chinese government reacted very angrily the students at Beijing University were furious they marched on our embassy broke all the windows destroyed all the automobiles and this went on for three days and three nights before we finally got it got it behind us I went home and found my wife crying and I said dear what's the matter she said my feelings had been hurt by 1.3 billion so but we survived it and came out of it I think pretty well as a result of all the work that had transpired before and we left China and turned it over to my great friend Admiral prayer who who took it from there did a great job Joe Wright one of the things I've realized tonight in addition to the kinship that I have with my predecessors here as we all went through Jesse Helms Foreign Relations Committee together to get confirmed to go to China and it was always an interesting process my that particular time for me was enhanced and I'd like to pay a tribute to friend Dan Inouye who was one of my introducers and in that thing and then after he introduced me he he sat right behind me for the entire hearing as if don't don't pick on my guy here and that stem from our time and away but one of the bright spots actually if I can cheat a little bit precedes the time I got to Beijing and it's a segue from what Jim said about John Germans first visit to the US when he came through Hawaii and I remember the night at Washington house there in Honolulu and the the the drumbeat was free Tibet outside there were people were yelling that outside the the gates of the Washington house we had an outside dinner and Jong at that time leaned to Ben cayetano's wife Ben was the governor of Hawaii at that time and said didn't we all act like that when we were young and so he yeah it's a real politician here he's pretty gonna be pretty good at that but one other thing happened that has stuck with me and is instructive on that trip we had had another crisis in 96 when the mainland when China shot some missiles in the Taiwan Strait in the vicinity of Taiwan and we reacted with some ships and at that time I was in charge of the Pacific Command and when Jim was in Beijing and so we had no real way to talk to the Chinese military which we did have with all the rest of the militaries in the asia-pacific region and so with the President Clinton's engagement policy under that umbrella we started to try to figure out how to talk to the PLA and I made some visits to Beijing and and in reciprocity when President John came to to Hawaii I was a part of his host group along with Ben Cayetano but we were out on the barge looking at the Arizona Memorial and he stuck his finger in my chest and said Admiral what are you trying to do talking to the PLA and I said mr. president we're trying to build some trust between us and the PLA so that we did not miscalculate so that we don't have incidents that flare up that don't need to and we must have trust to do that he said you're right except you're starting at the wrong place he's and he made the statement before there can be trust there has to be communications then there has to be understanding and then there can be trust and so I think that's actually a pretty good pattern and his further comment was we are still working on communications and I think to some extent that's true though I think we're nibbling in the understanding area and in some places trust between our nation's now now to get back to really what Steve asked us to do the format to look at the time I was there the I didn't have a lot of low points you can see that one of the you know China has changed a lot from the 80s until I got there in 99 one of the things China has become as a half nation instead of a have-not nation and they had a lot of they brought many 200 to 400 million people out of poverty they had done a lot of things of which they should be justifiably proud but so things were going pretty well and we're trying to keep this thing together that had been building over the time that we had diplomatic relations and try to keep it going right at the end of my time in Beijing was the event which I described as a low point where we there was a collision which we could talk about a lot in the Q&A if you wanted to but I'm not going to go into that much right now but it occurred on April Fool's Day of 2001 it was a Sunday and I would describe the low point when I got the word through Michael marine who was the deputy chief of mission he called me and said on the open line we've had a collision off of Hainan Island and the Chinese plane is down our plane is safely in Hainan you know the my my mind was racing as that tried to get back to work because I was around running around town at that time and the the prospect of this collision if it were not handled well by both countries of it taking us back probably you know certainly not the Tiananmen level but back to a stage where our relationship had moved back you know several years instead of moving forward if it were not handled correctly all that was racing through my mind and I would describe that as a is probably the low point and so we got busy and worked on that fortunately I had a lot of high points and minor are not cosmyk the ones I was thinking of four high points are sort of small events one of them relates to right after the that low point there were a lot of riots or demonstrations not riots but demonstrations around Beijing and getting back and forth to the embassy would always entail going through a bunch of people in our driver was someone who mr. Chou who drove for other people as well I called him Lao he was a great great guy and his his father had been incarcerated but he had driven from one of the gang of four so driving was a habit and in this family and so but when we came back to the embassy one time there are a lot of people out I don't think there are too many there were a lot of media people but I don't think there were hostile American media there at that time but uh the we I couldn't get the door open they they were you know they were they were clustered around the car so much we couldn't get out and Lao house who did not speak English in public said stay there and so he came around and he fought his way around the car and he came up and he's a diminutive man but who always had a smile always had a cheer and this time he had a great big gash over his forehead and was had blood dripping down his face but still was smiling and said come on I'll get you through the crowd and he was a he was a not an employee of ours he was a Chinese employee who worked for our embassy and for our household but he the the fact that we had that friendship that he had he had taken that on made me feel very close to him and it's reflective of the way I think a lot of the developments between Americans and Chinese people go at the same time there are some other highlights one of them we worked hard on WTO during the time I was there then we had that finally got the WTO vote and brought China into the WTO and that was a great event to move things forward and and maybe that's responsible for the trade deficit also but I don't think so they another another event that was a highlight is my predecessors had established the pattern is when there was a US election we would go read a hall in a in a local hotel and we'd staged a mock election well we had the 2001 bush election while we were there and we were very concerned because of the time change that everything would be all over by the time that we got the by the time we got things going in Beijing and it turned out not to be that way but the Emmy but we hit you know we had hamburgers and hot dogs and stands and a lot of people coming through as an education we were trying to use as educational experience for the Chinese and for us as well it was a lot of fun but a friend of mine who had become a friend died bingo who is will be as here this week as well was the work for the the International part of the Communist Party and he had sent a group from the Communist Party school to come look at and monitor the election and so we I met them and we walked around and looked at the stands and everything and the election was in its later phases and it was right after they died think it was Florida it was withdrawn by CNN believe and they said what happened there what happened there how can they take a state back I said that's just the television you can't get and and then and then they the the thing that was the humorous part was then they got up got me off the side said come on you know who's gonna win who's who's gonna win this election we know you know and that was sort of that was a highlight as well and then another one that's a little a little different that the Chinese phrase about the clouds are high and the Emperor's far away is one that's my favorite it's like being a long way from New York or Washington and or Beijing and the the nature conservancy in the u.s. global conservation group had a joint partnership with the Yunnan Province and they had what they called at that time the Great Rivers project and they the fact that they a NGO could have a joint venture with a Province in China struck my fancy I thought this is pretty good but they had preserved an area about the size of West Virginia and trying to preserve the flora and the fauna in that area and it's it's for those of you who go to China it's easy to go to Xian Beijing and go to the plate and Shanghai go to more popular places but out there near the little town of lijiang in that area is just absolutely gorgeous it's much like the Grand Tetons in our country and it's a it's a great space to go so that that partnership which has continued was most really great there's one other one other thing if I can take just a moment of time that made me very proud was when we were working through the ep-3 Chinese f8 collision issue the the people in the Foreign Service in the embassy and I'll mention three names Jim Moriarty who is now our ambassador to Bangladesh and was ambassador to Nepal and was previously that was in the NSC and John alle we see who just left the State Department a few few days ago and Ken Jarrett who is the general counsel I mean the kind till I've gotten in business general counsel the Consul General in in Shanghai and and the the people in the embassy came together so well and worked so much as a team there's not a lot of bench strength I mean you don't have shifts like you do in the Navy to work 24 hours a day so the people in the embassy worked very hard our Chinese counterparts my go see a ting counterpart was Joe in John who's now they ambassador to the US they were working equally hard trying to trying to get it solving this problem but the embassy team just did a great job during that period and that was that was certainly a highlight for me two wonderful answers I it feels like we've taken a walk down 30 years of us-china relations and it really is a testimony to the fabulous that really is fabulous answers let's bring it forward briefly and and and it won't be george w bush but we will have a new ambassador named and who knows how long it'll take to confirm some point you know in the next few months what with all your experience he or she will be good absolutely hopefully up to the quality of the pre of all of you what piece of advice would you give the new ambassador what one piece of advice would you give the new ambassador besides keep his tennis game up by the way for me to carry i said it's the most important appointment above secretary of state and defense and everything else that this president will make i think we would all agree with that my one piece of advice is do not succumb to client itis you represent in the united states not China promote good relations but be firm when you have to as well as being positive in our engagement Jim well it seems rather presumptuous to give a man like Obama and company advice on what to do about China since the track record is not been above reproach I would say by the way I was one guy that had no problem with Jesse Helms and being confirmed my problem came from John Kerry said young man he was ten years younger than I was young man do you put democracy or security first that's quite a question yeah anyway I would say that a tour is always interesting to stress the high points and the low points as you did but it seems to me in a tour you try to change overall trends and what what do I mean by that if you get into a situation at Tiananmen where the relationship hits rock bottom you try to re-establish that relationship and there are several components we're dealing with the Chinese are tortuous and long and distorted by media coverage but you push ahead and you get that done so that when vana leader leaves you begin working on the things that are important the scientific technology agreement the managing sites agreement the education agreement the GATT WTO agreements these things you start up again resuming Fulbright Exim loans that sort of thing you do that because both sides made mutual concessions over a long period of time it took I'd say it almost a year to get to that point then you go unto the point where you try to propel yourself into the future and give the people that come down the pike from you a better situation and this involves it seems to me pushing ahead on the particular areas that you've already tried to move ahead on but then beginning with Jim Baker and others in the fall of 92 establish a new agenda for the United States China's a relationship before it had been Taiwan technology in the Soviet Union Baker came up after they'd allowed chechi Chun to see the president which was very important to him we stress Human Rights dick shift is going to go over there we stress proliferation of weapons of mass destruction reg Bartholomew is going to deal with you on this and your adherence to the missile technology technology control regime and three masts he's going to talk to you about GTO this is the new agenda that we're pushing trade proliferation and human rights that lasted about one year but for the first time I saw the Americans actually beginning to turn around the agenda for the relationship and they went along with it so I would say that working in a time frame of several years you would try to break out of the morass and then you try to push ahead with the programs you think are really worth pushing in our case it seemed rather specific that we push these things and the Chinese were agreeable to it so that's a long-winded answer saying that there is no particular advice I would give him play for the long-term get somebody over there who thinks in terms of your thinking Obama that understands the Chinese thinking and draws a synthesis as Winston says loaded in the direction of the United States because that's the country we represent state what I would normally say to somebody going to China is first be yourself don't try to simply be a reproduction of your predecessors in my case I went there with this feeling that my predecessor done superb jobs under very difficult conditions but I really believe ambassador's the most effective when they play to their own strengths and when they try to control their weaknesses and not let them dominate their behavior so that if you're good at entertaining or if you're good at policy discussions or if you're good at getting members of Congress over which ambassador Sasser was superb at in which I didn't have a very good track record on play to your strengths that's number one number two you have to retain the confidence of your government and you can only be effective in dealing with the Chinese government if they recognize that you are a reliable representative of your government's viewpoints this gets to when the Lord's point about you can't demonstrate client itis because you'll lose the confidence of your own government and that means your effectiveness with the Chinese will be limited third you must be able to demonstrate to the Chinese government and to the Chinese people that you truly believe in the importance of the relationship and that you will use your best efforts to try to solve problems and improve the relationship the Chinese need to believe and this applies to foreign ambassadors in Washington as much as it does to foreign ambassadors in Beijing the representative of your country must be somebody that the Chinese feel they can come to to get assistance in dealing with a difficult issue in the bilateral relationship otherwise they will bypass you and use other channels to your government and you will lose your effectiveness so you really need to show that you believe in what you are doing and that you want to try to get the relationship on to the right track let me give an example which was not due to my credit necessarily but I referred earlier to my first experience with Nancy Pelosi when she was in Beijing she came back to Beijing a couple of years later the Chinese let her back in she had a very successful visit she behaved with great dignity and this is an example of a I give credit to the Chinese government they had truly been angry at her first visit there but they recognized that she was an important member of Congress and that it was better to let her come back in so I think governments need to behave with the same sense of the importance of these relationships and the representatives of government need to display the same dedication and determination to try to keep the relationship on the right track Steve I don't know that I can add a lot to what's already been said except two or three things one [Laughter] well never let a former senator have the will the gentleman yield the remainder of his time but I think it's important that number one I would tell the new ambassador keep a sense of humor and don't take yourself too seriously number two I would tell him or her that you're accredited and what may very well be and probably will be if not the most important one of most important countries of the 21st century and you have an obligation to work diligently to trial to try to build a relationship that's to the mutual benefit of both countries and number three I would tell them to build trust with your interlocutors in the Chinese foreign ministry never shade the truth and never tell an untruth and if you can't disclose just be quiet and so the most important thing I think is trust and maturity and keeping a sense of humor yeah Joe well I really can't add much yeah I I think the advice is given is is extremely sound a lot of it applies to situations other than being ambassador to China the the only other IDI I would have is that the ambassador should remember that it's a team sport it is not you know hear you you're a point person there if you're you're an important person but it's a team sport there are a lot of people working on it the whole and ambassadors authority stems from a two-page letter that the president signs and it's over Commerce it's over defense it's it's over everything the executive department controls in China and that's a big team and they all need to be pulling on the same oar and be have a consistent dialogue that is consistent with what the nations message is and that's an important thing to remember as well when each of you were ambassador there wasn't this strategic economic dialogue you know we didn't have a cabinet officer with many other cabinet officers meeting with a Chinese vice premier the Obama administration is by all accounts evaluating whether and in what form the strategic economic dialogue should continue the question is from the point of view of the ambassador should it continue and if it should continue in what form and who should lead it well I think it definitely should continue or you may tweak the form but the basic principle of recognizing the mutual interdependence and the strategic significance of Chinese and American economies of getting all the ministers in the room at the same time so you don't have the stove type problem and to talk in long-term directions which will mean China looking more like us and we look at more like China about that's shorthand I won't get into details while trying to make some progress and short term issues so you have domestic support I think it's crucial but I would go beyond that it's not just in economics in terms of leading and I leave that up to Obama but I was thinking the economic it would would be the secretary of the Treasury but beyond that and Jim put his finger on it the key challenge in our relations with China is to have the strategic relationship not in terms of a military alliance but in terms of two major powers in emerging major power and an established one talking in conceptual and strategic and broad terms so we have an agenda beyond the inevitable frictions that are going to arise on human rights in Taiwan and Tibet and trade and so on and therefore not only should the economic dialogue continue we ought to continue and expand even further with the Bush administration has done well on namely the Deputy Secretary of State dialogue on regional and global issues and to the extent we can on a military level to get at each other's intentions even though it's going to be tough to carry that as far as some of the others and it's important to do this for three reasons beyond just the inherent importance of the two countries first a lot of these problems whether its global warming or whether it's terrorism or whether it's career or Iran either can't be solved it'll be much more difficult without the cooperation of our two countries secondly engaging on these issues builds up constituencies supporting the relationship on both sides of the strengthens the fabric of the overall relationship and thirdly it puts in context as I said these inevitable tensions so that our domestic public which tends to see in the media of the problems like human rights in Taiwan etc can see that there is a major positive reason to engage China on this strategic level so I'm embroidering a little bit your question but I think it applies not only to economics but to the diplomatic and the military areas as well should it be combined with the senior dial and others the die being Guan negroponte a senior dialogue Thank You secretary it gets too broad and agender if you do that no it's got to be combined in the overall relationship but that's up to the president Jim well I think that the strategic economic dialogue that was started by Paulson way back in what November oh six is probably the most significant move that's been made by this administration in terms of China policy for for two basic reasons one is the show of power in terms of six cabinet secretaries go over there and then Chinese come here with Wang XI Shan and there there is that marvelous era of face and diplomacy that starts this off but underneath that even more important to me is switching the emphasis from military strategy to economic strategy it almost foresaw the problems were running in today in a sense that Paulson who was there when it started in Wall Street he's there when it's in Washington and he's now there what is it in China and he's working with a shiny on Chinese on cooperative organizations and cooperation such as Economic Cooperation energy cooperation counter pollution counter piracy all these issues that we can work with the Chinese on but even more important than that that we work with the Chinese is the spillover this in two critical so-called flash points in Asia one is the Korean Peninsula the other taiwan china everybody talks about these as potential flashpoints and some of us have good reason to think that but in Korea I would say that your economic factor gets at the Achilles heel of North Korea you can't really fight them in terms of their military and their strategic weapons you can work it curtailing it but the real vulnerability that regime is its economic vulnerability and that is where the Chinese are putting their emphasis and where the South Koreans are putting their emphasis and you can see that the North Korean pathological concern about the intrusions from the south and from the West they're losing it and they're fighting very hard to maintain it based on insecurity because economic power is what they really can't handle in Taiwan we've had carriers we've had live-fire exercises we've had missiles fired in 95-96 the big push now is economic integration between Taiwan and China that is the most powerful force in cross-strait relations it Dwarfs the military component ok so the Chinese have a thousand missiles we sell arms to Taiwan this gets in the way but the real drive is the million Taiwanese in China the hundred billion dollars of investment Chinese information technology industry in effect Taiwan probably controls 50% of it that is the drift of the future that is happening in Guangzhou it's happening and Shenzhen is happening in Shanghai in various places they're talking about it my problem is we don't know what they're saying to each other as an old intelligence hack this burns me we don't know what they're dealing what do the Chinese demand from the Taiwanese in terms of let's say renovating the fort of Port of Leon I'm Gong what are they and what are the time when he's demand from them security guarantees for their investment five 10 years what sort of guarantees written spoken what is that what is the deal that to me is it's a gap that we don't know about and this is critical I think for warranties in the Taiwan Strait and it has an economic base state I agree completely with Jim that I think the establishment of the senior economic dialogue was not only an extremely important policy move but was extremely timely because when the economic crisis began to hit us in full force our economic financial officials not simply at the paulson level but way down in the bureaucracies had better working relationships with their Chinese counterparts than they ever had before they were in position to pick up the telephone and call their counterparts and discuss it so that as the crisis developed and clearly there was a major impact on China because it held so many dollar securities the Chinese were actually kept well informed of the moves that Paulson was taking to deal with the crisis because we had easy channels of communication we need to broaden those channels of communication much more quite frankly the US government spends much too much time on what I would call bureaucratic paperwork and not nearly enough time developing the relationships with foreign governments that you need to be able to manage crises effectively if you take Southeast Asia as an example Southeast Asia could be a Balkans region it's a hodgepodge of different religions of different ethnic groups they've been fighting for millennia with each other and yet it's been a region that has been able to manage their differences because when they formed the Association of Southeast Asian states they began a practice of frequent meetings among all of the government departments all levels so in every government in Southeast Asia people write down the director level know their counterparts in the other governments we are much deficient in this respect we don't cultivate important countries like China where it's vitally important to get the relationship right and know the people when you don't know people you can believe any devil theory about what they may be like when you know them you can discount a lot because you simply know they're not that type of person so I really do believe that this was an important step and I hope it will be kept up in whatever form in the Obama administration you see it is enhancing the relationships of the eleven hundred people in the United States embassy now oh it's it's it doesn't you know there's not a question of you know there the Chinese say well we'll just wait for the sed we don't have to talk to the Treasury rep or the commerce rep it in the embassy no it enhances it greatly and I want to pick up on a point that joke Rear Admiral prayer made one of the exciting things about being an ambassador in a post like Beijing is something you can never see in Washington which is the entire US government all the different departments of government working as a coherent team cooperating with each other to advance the US interest in Washington you tend to get bogged down in the bureaucratic infighting among departments and your embassies abroad frequently you have a unified effort in which people are all working together it's quite exciting to be an American and see that type of an operation and Joe is absolutely right the Ambassador may have the biggest office but it's the staff that is really carrying the burden of the daily business Jim Steve I think yes it should be continued and I'm going to do my best to try to persuade anybody I know on the transition team or in the Obama organization to continue it I would have this caveat on an hour it needs to be shared by someone of significant prestige and clout in the administration now Paulson is an unusual secretary of the Treasury I think we would all agree that he's probably if not in the paramount figure in the cabinet certainly one of the paramount figures so I would not say that principe de this always has to be chaired by the secretary of the Treasury in fact I would like to see it expanded we've got so many other problems that we need to deal with with China climate change pollution energy problems etc etc it goes on and on and I would like to see this dialogue that Paulson has initiated expanded almost into almost a g2 relationship and I've thought that perhaps this ought to be something that maybe the vice president should even chair because I do believe it's that important and yeah and I think our Chinese counterparts will react if we have someone of status and prestige in our administration that's actually running the show and if someone becomes chairman who's of a lesser status than I think they'll probably downgraded themselves but certainly it ought to be continued and expanded if the vice president chaired it with the Chinese upgrade up to the Premier's level well I don't know I mean that would be up to the Chinese to inside Jo I'll continue the theme of what's been said and basically see you and raise you one on this the certainly it is the the key dialogue that's going on right now but it's it's not sufficient in itself and the one of the one of the challenges is in Washington the to get the various cabinet and and departments to talk to each other well is an important thing to solve and have our own skirts clean before we start exporting this model to in talking to other people and that needs you know that always needs work it requires steady work there are other models with countries like Australia we have a thing called the Osmonds which is security oriented which is Department of State the Secretary of State the Secretary of Defense alternate with Australian but the the point that when made and others have made too is that the solutions lie actually in a broader area it needs to be a broader strategic you know comprehensive strategic dialogue not just economics but economics is a key key piece of it and how that gets orchestrated is a challenge but I think that the point that when made is that the issues that we have in the world of aids of pollution economics disease health care all the things these things are environmental issues are not going to yield to solutions without at least having China and the u.s. pulling on the same oar to try to solve these problems so something like the strategic economic dialogue is an expanded version of it as vital I think seems a consensus on that issue I had promised to open the floor to questions and even though I have another dozen questions I will live up to my word and open put up your hand wait for a microphone and please identify yourself and the affiliation this is such an intimidating panel that we've got no one here over here respect for five ambassadors I'm Elizabeth Chen from a law firm in New York and I have two questions hope you can pick up one at least the first one is that what was the culture shock you have encountered when you serve in the position as ambassador you know in China or you're staying in China I noted that at least the two of you were born in China maybe you have encountered a more or less culture shock and the second one is when it comes to the end of the term do you feel oh thank god it comes over finally oh you feel what a pity I hope I can serve for a second term that's my two questions I didn't have any culture shock I wasn't born in China but I was married to a woman born in Shanghai and she literally was my interpreter literally in many ways but certainly figuratively and we were real team so I was extremely lucky and it frankly had been in meshed in Chinese culture through her and her family so that was a tremendous asset for me the other one being timing because I got there after the early Taiwan tensions with early Reagan years saw by the 1982 communique and I left just as gentlemen was erupting leaving at 2:00 my poor successor to inherit so my timing was a very good one indeed no it was the best job I ever had I suspect yeah my colleagues have all had very distinguished assignments might agree I'll leave it up to them but I loved it there I was ready to come back for some personal reasons and I've been there for years but it was the best assignment I ever had well culture shock let's say my background is I was in CIA for a number of years and I worked against China during the Korean War and they understood that and I came and I always remember a party at the Great Wall Sheraton the correspondents gave and they had pictures of Tiananmen on the wall and they were playing the Beatles music behind it sad music and they got to the bar and they started boozing it up and the Chinese bartenders were listening and they said you know Lily's here he's going to take that guy out of here in a box and get him out or he's gonna dress him up as a woman and get him out of here funny juror two days later I get a call from the foreign ministry if you think you're going to take that man out in the Halloween party forget it and so when we had the Halloween party they had people all around us with ak-47s watching us trying to smuggle this guy out and my colleague Don Kaiser said to me you know if we have an Easter party we're gonna get him out as the Easter Bunny anyway there was a certain amount of culture separation there about what they thought what we could do what we were capable of doing and their judgment of what we were going to but in the end we understood that they would require that this man ba major leave China under legal procedures that they would control namely Passport exit permit and I remember taking to the airport and I was under instructions to stay with him and as we got to the airport and the c-141 was out here and we went into their cabin their little Hut there and they wanted to take him down this corridor and have him check out and I started going with him and they said no this is Chinese territory so you have a decision to make are they going to grab him or can you have trust in them to do this thing well I decided I wasn't gonna Ram myself through they checked him out and they sent him back we put him on the plane and he went to England it was a three-cornered shot things don't often have happy endings because he gets off the plane and the first thing he does is to badmouth President George Herbert Walker Bush which I never forgave him for I don't know why he did that after we had spent all this time to get him out sent him to England six months there it sent it off to Princeton maybe that was the price we needed pace tape sent in Princeton yeah but anyway he went to Arizona and these things have a way of right what I find is these things have long tenure working themselves out whether it's you start a low point and you end up at a reasonable point that's your objective is to move things in the right direction and there's it's punctuated by incidents such as this bar talk and with the correspondence it ends up in kind of a ridiculous confrontation the other confrontation I remember having and where there's certain cultural gap is they had a sniper on top of Jim command Y which is nine stories high and it stretches for a block and we knew from a very effective assistant military attache that they were going to fire on that complex the next morning at 10 o'clock he knew from the Chinese and we pulled everybody out and had a meeting and loaned the hall they did fire right at that building complex and one of the II's pushed our two little girls were left there push them on the ground and the bullets soared and right overhead when I was called in after this leak to the London Daily Telegraph they said don't you know there was a sniper there I pulled my military expertise and I said I was a private in the army and I understand a little but about gunfire and I know that you don't fire from this point to this point to get at this point if that firing will just parallel it come in from the other side I wouldn't be sitting here today if they were standing there there are times when you are pushed to the wall by misunderstandings of what we think that we really would accept their idea that you could close the door and beat the dog and that you could get away with this sort of thing at gentlemen why but as things moved on as we got through these difficult times it seems that towards the end again and again I saw evidence that they were really in some ways sympathetic with us you remember this horrible creature you and mu the Chinese had a statement about him I've heard about this out in Chengdu Sichuan and they had a poem based on dung this thing black cat white cat long as it catches mice good cat they had brown wood square wood as long as mates as long as it makes coffins it's good wood Raun word is UN moves name you see and they did this and when he came in and we have a meeting with Kenji and some of the good guys in the dinner party he walks in and is so the Red Sea parted nobody talked to him and very soon after that he disappeared a really obnoxious person their system took care of it Russian Russian was there early guy that began to take on the United States and begin to sow the seeds of anti-americanism and in the spirit of wide open friendship to everybody in China we invited him to a reception he came this guy that really is giving us a hard time nobody talked to it I mean it was it was a different period I think's tape and Jim SAS and others worked this thing from a different angle but in our situation we were looking for friends and it seems to me we had more friendship out there that was real certainly when I came in and the car would fly around with the American flag the students would go like this at me I never got that in Korea believe me it was this I got or variations thereof and they they were quite unfriendly and the government was quite friendly and in China would at least during the period they were quite forthcoming that always gave us okay let's move on okay I'm like Jim Dooley I'm one of the two of us up here who was actually born in China so culture shock wasn't the difficulty in going to China the problem for me has been what I would call development shock China has been developing over the last thirty years at such a pace that the country is literally different if you spend several years out of it and when you go back you are shocked to see how rapid the change has been that's the area that I have found difficult if you don't keep going back to China you really are out of touch with the place I've never lived in a country including my own where the pace of development has been so rapid as it has been in the case of China what about leaving China the answer is there are many jobs that you can be assigned to in the Foreign Service or in other places in the military where you have to work very hard but you're not you don't have a sense you're doing really important work in the case of China no matter how good or bad the relationship was you always have the sense that you were dealing with an issue to have a major relationship to u.s. national interest in national security so the answer is you basically want to serve in China as long as you can play a useful role there you don't want to just hang on but you don't want to get out of the job necessarily you want to keep doing it because it's very important work and it's a luxury to have a chance to work hard on something important well Steve I suppose the like a lot of Westerners who go to China are to other countries where the culture is so different the first shock I think is some of the food be quite frank I never really developed a taste for for fried scorpions now I had never developed a taste for sea slugs but I'm confident but I've seen my Chinese friends come to the United States and I think they have some of the same problems with scrambled eggs in the morning and that sort of thing that I had early on with Chinese food additionally getting into a crowd in Chinese area an airport terminal sometimes when just not enough space and everybody is pushing probably more than I'd experienced here in the United States and those are sort of day-to-day things that you quickly overcome but other than that I really didn't have any culture shock as to whether or not I wanted to leave I was there three and a half years I had told the Clinton administration I would go for two and every time we started to leave there would be some pressing issue that had to be dealt with and but I enjoyed my service in China immensely as a matter of fact I asked to go to China after I left the Senate the clinton called me up and he said do you want to stay in government and i said absolutely not and he said well how about an ambassadorship I said I'm not interested except maybe China and even I got a call back about two weeks later from then Vice President Gore and he said well you still interested going to China and I said yes he said well it's a done deal or is any deal is done around this damn place doctor talking about the White House so that's how I ended up in China and I thought it was the terrifically interesting and valuable and satisfying experience and at the end of three and a half years I thought I'd probably exhausted what effectiveness I had steep and so I was ready to leave but I felt like we'd done some good work there and left some good things behind us Joe well like Jim Sasser I grew up in Tennessee and I've been to three county fairs in the hog-calling contest and so I don't have any culture shocks but no seriously the a culture shock the first time you go to China particularly when you're you know exposed to the upper leadership as you sit down with a indicate our case janja men and here's the guy that's a president of a country of 1.3 billion people has a lot of moving parts a lot of lot of issues very difficult to govern very difficult to govern even under good circumstances and the there is there is a little bit of the the first time I had done it before I got to be ambassador but to go to the Great Hall of the People and go through Tiananmen Square for the first time is an awe-inspiring experience to do for for someone to do that first time the so the food issue is there Jim didn't talk about Maotai or some of the other traits that we have that that uh that help ease the culture but they the other to the other point about leaving I very much agree with state the the work there is important you every everything that you get into it's I mean you don't not every pencil you push is important but the but the work is very important its most of us like to like to do things that are that are that way it's difficult to leave anytime you go and I think there you know you get tired the circumstances Jim had that got he got written pretty hard there toward the end of it and you get you can get worn out you can get physically tired but it's a it's a it's a difficult spot to leave and probably that's true but I think it's more so as you build a relationship it's so important in our world right now and I think all of us feel that way that it's uh it's it's hard to leave okay time for another question right here we need its Mabel Chan with ABC News just reflecting on 30 years of normalization of us-china relations and also your personal experience in China what can what should China learn from the United States so what's the most important thing that China should learn from the United States and what's the most important thing that the United States should learn from China and why is it we want to just have one we'll have we'll just to get some to some more questions we'll just have one one in one answer from one ambassador from China sense of the long-term view and strategic concept and they have that in spades they've ever had it ever since I first went there in the early 70s another reason I didn't have culture shock because I've been in many trips before with next and kiss me forward and so on what China should learn from us frankly is the value of democratic system we can't impose it we shouldn't be arrogant it's got to come from within China from the bottom up and it doesn't mean you insist on multiparty democracy within a few years but you've got to have elements of the rule of law freedom of the press if you want to get at corruption if you don't want babies that died from tainted milk and therefore I do think it's in China's self-interest both for economic progress for political stability relations with us and with Taiwan to promote a freer society next question see what topping journalists thank you very much for a very illuminating discussion in the course of your a discussion there have been one or two sort of brief asides to the press in the media if I may say so not entirely flattering and I wonder if going back to the post-world War period of say 45 46 up until the present what has been the non the net contribution or non contribution of the press to understanding China on behalf of the American people I've volunteers for that one state let me take that one I think in general our press does a very good job there was a superb group of US journalists in Beijing on both of my assignments there and I thought they were really dedicated people who worked hard but in 1993 the perception of China in the United States with our Free Press was about as far off the mark as I have ever seen in nearly 45 years in the Diplomatic Service it was a situation where a Free Press because of the demand for certain types of news stories was feeding up stories that presented the negative side of China so that in 1993 after China had gone back onto the reform and openness path following Kenan month I have never encountered so much shock on the part of American visitors including China specialists including CEOs of major corporations including ordinary tourists at finding the situation in China so different from the image of China that was being pervade in the United States I would discuss this openly in my regular meetings for the American press corps and they described the factors that cause them to write the types of stories that were not giving the accurate picture to Americans their editors didn't want the types of stories that dealt with the economic progress and things like that if they wrote about the human rights problems they got page1 treatment so I have to say that these were truly good professionals but this was a situation where the way that the market for news in the United States operated we had as distorted a vision of China as when I served in the Soviet Union I saw a controlled press present of the United States and I'd live for four years in the Soviet Union seeing my country completely misrepresented to the Russian people how about today's tape today I think we're doing much better and one of the advantages of our free media is that even when we're presenting a distorted view there are always elements that are presenting a different viewpoint so that we are not limited to only one view but you do get a dominant view to give you one key example in the two years after Tiananmen you couldn't find a reference to China on US television that didn't have the picture of the students down need up to the thing now that's no more accurate or a way of presenting a news story than presenting somebody in an embarrassing situation every time you refer to his name it creates a negative image and it shouldn't have been done it was an act of non professionalism by the US media and that's the type of thing that we should try to avoid I think right now we have a much more balanced way of looking at China and therefore a much more accurate perception of the strengths and weaknesses of what's going on in China time for one last question back here I am Henry Tang the five of you are all good friends of mine I guess the one question that needs to be asked is to ask all of you to look into your crystal balls and give us your forecasts or impressions of how the shinjang and Tibetan situation my dilemma might get resolved and should it happen with or without Western and American participation any volunteers for that one I'm very pessimistic the Dalai Lama has renounced independence a good considerable political risk he continues to be vilified the dialogue has broken off the Chinese have calculated that when he dies and his Nobel laureate with his prestige is no longer on the scene they picked their own Dalai Lama this issue will disappear the answer is Chinese sovereignty but some greater autonomy for cultural and other reasons within that sovereignty but the current Chinese leadership as stiff the Dalai Lama at its own West because of violence we've seen but I'm very pessimistic and I don't see any change in that situation for the foreseeable future anyone left one last comment on Shin Jang any volunteers yes I would like to comment on the issue of should the foreigners get involved the answer is if we think that foreigners could come into the United States and take some sensitive issue here but there's race relations or whether it's something else treatment of the Indian tribes on their reservations what-have-you if we think they can come in here and be helpful in solving those problems then certainly we ought to get involved in in solving China's domestic problems but I don't think foreigners could do a good job in the United States and I think that foreigners will totally miss handle it if we try to get involved in working out the solution but the fact is China throughout its history has had difficulties in its minority areas that's what it's all about I was just watching the movie Mongol which had to do with one of the historic problems for China in dealing with its border areas and we find that that pattern hasn't ended China still has difficulties in satisfying the people who live in its minority border areas and therefore that's an issue which the Chinese government needs to pay attention to and which the minorities themself need to pay attention to in finding the right way to deal with a big powerful civilization such as China they can't escape it they have to find ways to get along with it raise this issue with the Chinese know encourage dialogue with a drama no I'm saying that we shouldn't try to get involved in trying to solve the problem that's different than encouraging dialogue what I'm saying when is is is not that different from what you're saying I'm saying that there is a problem there but it's a problem that the Chinese need to work out I think that our advice on telling them how to work it out is probably no better than the advice foreigners would give us in terms of trying to work out our domestic problems that doesn't mean we'll stop doing it but I honestly think that we're not going to be helpful in the solution unless the Chinese and the minorities themselves got serious about trying to find a better way to deal with the problems our intervention yeah make the situation worse I've often thought that simply us focusing the attention on it on Tibet or Shin Jen and us lecturing the Chinese about it or trying to persuade them one way or the other makes the situation worse it raises their hackles and their i their thought is well why are you telling us what to do in our own territory why are you telling us what to do in Tibet which your government recognized as part of China in 1915 so these I think are our I agree with the state this is something that's got to be worked out by the Chinese but I think they also need to give some more humane attention perhaps to the minorities but the minorities also need to accommodate themselves to reality come on I would like to have one other point Henry because I know this is a very serious issue as somebody who cares strongly about the us-china relationship I have to say that if the Tibetans are unhappy about the way they're being treated in China that affects our relationship in a negative way and from that standpoint I really think it's important for the Chinese government to keep working on trying to find a better way of managing a problem that they have not handled that successfully over the last 50 years during which they've been actually in control in Tibet so that this is something that does relate to our bilateral relationship but that doesn't mean that I as a specialist in the area would necessarily be able to tell them how to deal with the issue effectively but it's an issue that needs to be dealt with I think that in terms of sins young though you've got a very special problem there in terms of the weavers or if there's eight or ten million of them there and a few times that they've tried to rise up one was in April not even I was still there and was absolutely crushed brutally by the Chinese they put in six divisions and helicopters and knocked them out this doesn't ameliorate the long hatred that the weavers have for China control and weed seed it from the he's insane young that they were quite concerned about how they were handling the Weaver problem but there's two elements of that the first is that we caught we Gers in Afghanistan working with the most radical elements of the Taliban second the we Gers have we have we've gotten a mother of the Kiwi gir there she's in the States now and she's continuing to agitate the problem the Chinese find it very difficult to handle this minority because they are Tibet is an occupied area shinjang you've got this areas where the the Uighur Muslims in Kashgar in places like this have control and the Chinese are trying to dilute that over the long term by bringing in irredentism by being beginning people to take it over for the Han Chinese and the we Gers know exactly what they're doing so we are fait we've declared the we Gers a terrorist group and this then lumps them with the Taliban as mala and other US terrorist groups as something that we would work against that is it but that is a powerful movement it's it's the people that caused the uprisings it's the people that are probably a solidification of the hardcore wiegert's around this group and it spreads out I mean we'd we know all about that in insurgency warfare that you have the core and it spreads out in concentric circles just areas of support so it's it's a difficult problem and I think it's inevitable that Chinese gonna be in charge it's it's going to be a very tough problem it's going to be handled with the wiggers extremists linked to outside forces if he get to Tibet you have a different problem because we were involved in Tibet as you know we were supplying the because they were the only people we ever found that would fight the Chinese in the 50s nobody in Taiwan would fight them nobody in Korea would fight them but the Tibetans would if you gave him a flask a day of the dali lama's urine to drink they would do anything they would fight this was crushed this was this was destroyed but I remember going into them into Tibet with George Bush Senior in 1977 we were taken to the museum and here was this display of all the arms they capture from CIA the radios that said I was in CIA at the time so it was a little awkward but they had a big sign as you entered the museum with Lowell Thomas shaking hands with the representative the Dalai Lama and it says agent of fascist American imperialists cleek handing money to Dalai Lama running dog this is what it says and so when we got in Bush said what the hell did that say I said well aid would not very nice and he said ask the Chinese about this because I'm going to criticize their handling and this this this museum of course you don't criticize museums that's very unusual he did and he and the Chinese I think I know who was their interpreter I think was Youngjae sure came up to me afterwards and this is what with Thomas's book he says he was supporting the Dalai Lama in 49 I looked at it and there it is so the vice president said go elect said go see mold and find out what he says and I showed it to him he said well I gave money and I damn well do it again so yeah we did we never really pushed the problem to the give it up drop it don't pursue it the other part of the story is I believe the Lowell Thomas spent his honeymoon in Tibet with his new wife yes and there was lots of jokes about so I mean he wasn't just giving money in Tibet there were other activities that he was welcome we we we need to we need to bring this to a and he had this girl and even the Chinese and had great humor about this guy consummating his marriage 14,000 feet up and there was there was a lot of by play on this well you know sometimes sometimes these historic events don't sometimes historic events don't live up to their billing but tonight it has far exceeded its billing so I think we should thank the the reception will continue in the back there is still food and drink to be had and again we the National Committee is thrilled to be able to have hosted all five of you together for the first time thank you all you

Channel: National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

Views: 21,766

Keywords: China, ambassador to china, ambassador, U.s.-china, international relations, cross-strait, foreign policy, east asia, james lilley, winston lord, james sasser, joseph prueher, j. stapleton roy

Id: 9RHfTa2vh5A

Length: 99min 8sec (5948 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2009