Online Event: The New China Rules

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online good morning everybody welcome to virtual csis summer camp i'm seth center the director of the project on history and strategy here at csas joined by jude blanchett the freeman chair in china studies here at csis as well we're thrilled to have all of you with us normally we would give you a free coffee and orange juice to have a great discussion with us on china unfortunately today we're all on our own so i hope you have some coffee wherever you are and whatever time it is um jude and i are really thrilled to be joined by michael oslin who is the uh the treat chair in um china studies at the hoover institution um many of us have have worked with him learned from him read his scholarship read his commentary um for many years i think it's interesting that he has the treat share at hoover because for 40 years payson treat was the preeminent scholar of u.s japan relations and and misha is an honorable and the absolute right person to carry on that legacy today in a particularly important time to be studying both the bilateral relationship and also the broader implications for that relationship in the region misha of course is more than an area studies expert in u.s japan relations he is a strategist a geopolitician and someone who's really thought deeply about the relationship between power interests and ideology in both asia and really in the world and so the reason jude and i were thrilled to have him come today is to shed a little bit of of insight on how he sees trends in the asia pacific the indo-pacific emerging to more narrowly talk to us a little bit about how he sees as we've titled it and his essay titles that the china rules shaping the geopolitics of the region and then to have a discussion about how we arrived where we are today and where he thinks uh we're going and of course most importantly we're here because this discussion is in the context of misha's new book which is a terrific read for all of us it is asia's new geopolitics which puts a geopolitical lens on the challenges in the region it is really a series of insightful and thought-provoking essays on the different dynamics ranging from the us japan relationship to china's motivations to u.s strategy to looking at india's role in the region and also of course the historical lens understanding how theories of geopolitics should inform the way in which we could understand the dynamics in the region today so i think most importantly misha has a pretty pretty important thesis in the book and the and the thesis really is that the united states has lost a conscious understanding of the strategic importance of the inner seas and skies of what he calls the asian mediterranean and there are important implications both for the shortcomings in the u.s strategy up to this point thinking about the intersections of u.s strategy with changing chinese motivations and then how our allies and partners should relate to that dynamic and so we're thrilled uh misha to have you join us to talk about your insights we're thrilled to help you promote your book which by the way last time i checked there's only one copy left on amazon right now so get it while it's hot and we're looking forward to a terrific discussion today for those of you who haven't joined us at csas for one of these live events if you go to the event webpage you are able to uh ask a question and we'll do our best to incorporate that question into our discussion um try and make it interactive as possible and so with that jude you get the first interrogation question today uh terrific and thank you all for joining us thanks seth and uh good morning to everyone and michael it's great uh it's great to be having this conversation and and thank you for uh for making time um i wanted to focus on really the only area of the book i have any competence to ask questions about which is china and in particular when we were talking about doing this event and we were thinking about what's a way to thread together a discussion when the book of essays really does cover a wide range of strategically important areas and topics the essay that really stuck out to me was the new china rules essay which is on sources of chinese behavior of of course i take the subtitle there to hearken back to george cannon uh and the sources of soviet conduct and indeed we've spoken uh at length about um the contemporary framing of the rivalry between the u.s and china and does it or does it not harken back to a cold war and i have some questions later on in the discussion uh precisely on that topic but i'd like to start out by asking you about the new china rules as opposed to the china rules but you write in the book china increasingly expects the world to bend to its wishes and it has adopted a set of behaviors to ensure it gets the outcomes it wants call it the new china rules these new rules are the sources of chinese behavior and pose the greatest strategic challenge of the next generation so for those who haven't had the pleasure of reading the original essay or or haven't yet purchased the book i wonder if you could summarize for us what are what are these new rules and if you could unpack that last sentence where you say that these new chinese rules actually pose one of the greatest strategic challenges to the united states of the next generation well jude and seth first of all thank you for having me um not only uh since we're friends and and collaborators uh but to be part of of csis's continuing exploration of of the importance of of asia uh you as a the leading think tank in dc and and uh a center that all of us come to to learn from it's it's really a pleasure to be here uh with you and to take time to talk about these things that that quite frankly we talk about a lot uh and yet don't always have the time to to uh sit back and sort of put into let's say a book book form which you know hopefully gives you a little bit more time to think because events have been moving so quickly in fact the the original uh china rules essay i think came out uh in 2018 possibly 2019 i actually don't uh i don't remember um but uh if we were talking about this back then if and the book had come out i think it would have been a little bit more of a provocative uh concept in a provocative chapter than it is today we have traveled so far and as a historian i'm i'm fascinated to to already try to look retrospectively at how far we've traveled in 18 or 24 months or some will say since 2017 and and the trump administration came in in overturning or upending or at least questioning and challenging 40 years of of of u.s practice towards china in particular uh which then of course structures our alliances in the region uh our partnerships and the like um but if you if we looked at it from the other end of the telescope so to speak um it it's the question of how we've now reinterpreted china's role in the world beijing's uh desires it's its hierarchy of preferences or the policies that hits that it has uh utilized or created to achieve its national goals that's where i think the real fundamental reassessment has taken place and i think that reassessment was starting in in previous years i think it was beginning at a policy level with the obama administration it certainly picked up pace with the trump administration but it has spread into the academic and the the policy analyst world and there's there's still a debate but i think now it's not so controversial to say that beijing has a set of rules if we can call it that for how it wants nations to act and expects nations uh to act towards it so the ones that i identify in particular are ones that now uh are are of of attention on capitol hill uh that the administration has talked about and others uh starting with things like the espionage campaigns uh so you look at what the fbi has stated in the past couple of years about the level of espionage and the espionage threat that we face from china across the board and china of course i'm talking about the party i'm talking about the government uh so from beijing uh i talk as well about the influence campaigns which are are related to that um we're used to talking about um the potential problems of confucius institute certainly about uh whether chinese media outlets should uh register as foreign agents um the the aspect or or the uh phenomenon is the best way to put it of elite capture where uh beijing has uh very uh openly uh and aggressively attempted to co-opt elites uh throughout the world not just in the united states but around the world so as to be able to ensure better policy outcomes for themselves um intimidate the intimidation campaigns that then range the gamut and bleed over into economics so for example the boycott campaigns uh the um the demands on companies around the world not just american companies that they essentially order the world according to beijing's wishes so taking taiwan out of out of the um out of the the airline listings or hong kong or the like or of course making companies apologize for social media tweets that um that beijing does not agree with for example liking a tibetan independence movement or or the like and companies are are threatened with the loss of of market share so there's a whole range of actions that um individually were easy to dismiss um were also easy to dismiss from the sense of the the bigger prize is still worth it i.e access to the chinese market and and access to a working relationship with with uh chinese officials uh that would permit that um but now we've we've sort of packaged it together if if beijing package rules then we've now packaged together what those rules are in our own understanding and see that uh really at least as i look back at it no nation has ever demanded of partners be they economic or political or cultural the types of of self-censorship of fealty in certain ways if you want to put it that way of course corrections as china has and i i think of it you know originally as a japan scholar looking back at the height of japan's prowess in the 1980s uh it never demanded that americans come american companies apologize for slandering the japanese um but we've become used to it that united and zara and marriott and and mercedes-benz all apologize and say we we don't mean to offend the chinese so these are the rules and what worries me and i'll finish it up here with this answer though is that we have internalized self-censorship we've internalized subordinating many of our own interests and ways we would act with other nations in order to maintain this position in china and that the challenge is both to recognize it which now i think we have and now to ensure that we do not follow the rules simply because we feel that we're going to lose market share that the self-interest has to be expanded to understand that how we change our behavior and how we self-censor is just as important as if we meet the market expectations for sales in china the next quarter one other thing that um impressed me when i was reading the essay on the new china rules when you stitched together as you do in the essay a very comprehensive list of um all of the areas where china's been able to assert power and and in many ways increase its dominance over whether that's key areas of global infrastructure or or whether that its ability to sort of sharpen the spear and able to penetrate into into new areas that that redound to its overall comprehensive national strength one other thing that strikes me is um just how much china has been able to do to shift the geopolitical landscape across the board in a relatively short amount of time right if we're thinking back just where china was prior to the 2008 uh olympics and used that as a as a marker so just before the the global financial crisis guess a question for you is um how has it that china has been able to make such a uh demonstrated effort to shift the geopolitical landscape does that say as much about china's political system or does that say more about about the deficiencies or the distractions of the of capitalist democracies it's a great question i don't think it can be separated from the history of of the past 20 or 30 years it's fine to have a policy policies really work when the the underlying conditions uh the substructure are there to enable them to to really achieve what the goal is and i don't think that beijing would have been able to as you rightly point out shift the geopolitical playing field uh expand its influence uh and the like if it the first of all just domestically of course the the reform era had not been so successful and of course that is completely tied up with our desire and in fact our goal to bring it into the global political and economic system whether it's the wto or reaching all the way back to the u.n all of the preconditions had been had been slowly set now we interpreted those uh in in terms of our own interests that this is what we wanted uh to do with the china that was that had that had chosen post mao to re-enter the world uh that agreed to at least to some degree to enter into a a triangular cold war geopolitical relationship with the united states and the soviet union after nixon's visit to uh to china in 1972 and the normalization under carter in 1979 i don't think anyone expected it obviously to go as far as it did but at each step the logic of further incorporation certainly made sense what that meant of course was as as incorporation was successful that national uh the national position of china the development of national strength was preceding a pace so that we could look with great uh anticipation if not envy as to how successful its export industries were becoming uh the access it was giving to american companies its ability now to begin rationalizing and reshaping uh supply chains throughout the world but what we weren't looking at then was the ways in which beijing was thinking ultimately about how to how to utilize this power we saw it from one perspective a very classic liberal internationalist post-world war ii perspective and i think it's fair to say uh that uh the party saw it in in a different way not one that should have been shocking to us uh but one where step by step the rearrangement of trading relations uh productive relations political relations and ultimately even security uh the security environment was conducive to this sort of coming out of china to be a full-fledged dominant actor both in the indo-pacific region and beyond and i think we should have listened to what the party was saying particularly after xi jinping came to power um but uh if you want to look at his 2013 speeches if you want to look at document number nine on the statement of ideological conflict with uh with the west in particular the limits to any type of reform as we would have understood the next stages um all of that was very clear and i think all of that ultimately played into then the i mean use a more provocative term the weaponization of its position in the world to bring it directly to the geopolitics that that we're we're interested in um it's it's a fascinating combination of both classical mckinder uh geopolitics of trying to shape the heartland that's i think where you look at one belt one road uh and also a more spikeman nicholas spikeman or or uh sam huntington focus on the maritime and power projection region so that you have a you have a connection there between the two so that um the the strategic operating space for beijing expanded dramatically once you had national strength and national wealth develop to a point where it could be exercised or as i put it a little provocatively weaponized um and and it's a it's a type of challenge that really um i guess the last classical one without you know getting you know too much uh into the weeds probably was germany pre-world war one where it certainly had rearranged continental trading patterns expanded its influence on the continent yet at the same time both had a colonial presence and was expanding its maritime uh its maritime uh presence around the world so so it happened i think because of what had come before it would not have been able to happen if china itself had not been so successful and if we hadn't been so accommodating uh with what i think at many points was a rational calculation but one in which we didn't do due diligence along the way and certainly by the 1990s you know by the cox commission report and by other markers that should have said uh the taiwan straits crisis that this may be developing in a way that is not conducive to where we thought we would be and we need to rethink now we're in the rethink but the ground has shifted so dramatically that the rethink is much harder and the redo is much harder judy can i jump in for a second sure so so misha well i see there's there's two converging challenges here one is geopolitical and the other is ideological i think what's so interesting is the intensification of the ideological framing of the challenge particularly in the last year or two in 2017 a lot of people were fairly dismissive of the argument that there may be an ideological dimension of this challenge it was it was in many ways seen as a as a classic rising power challenge how do you see the interplay of geopolitics and ideology in the intensification of the absolutely and i i think you're you're exactly right again it was a little bit to the comment i had that we should have been reading what they were saying look i think i think uh in part answer your question and part answer a couple of jude's questions um our hangover the hangover that we had was of course the post 1989 post cold war hangover and i think it was yeah this is not the newest observation but i think it was a combination of of two different strains of thought one was frank fukuyama's end of history and the other was um from a more dc centered perspective the revolution in military affairs so we didn't really think we'd have systemic level challengers we certainly didn't think we'd have ideological challengers that was the end of history and then we thought we can act wherever we want however we want at a time of our choosing with lethality and precision uh to shape an international environment because of the revolution in military affairs which really we became very aware of in 1991 in the iraq war um so our hangover was to assume that a certain set of geopolitical geoeconomic conditions held and and in the meantime there was another arrangement another operating system that was being inserted into uh the global environment and underpinning a great deal of that as you point out was the ideology we became very uncomfortable with ideology that was the end of history effect is that we you know who could believe in communism who could believe in in uh you know a a war of civilizations you know which which has become a controversial topic lately but if you read document number nine if you read uh the the the plenum speeches if you read the party speeches of xi jinping and others let alone reading xi jinping thought on on diplomacy not not the big the big constitutional thought but the thought on diplomacy it's all in there and then i think it's translated into specific policies such as what used to be called made in china 2025 or indigenous innovation that this is a a challenge to a western presumption of how we are going to interact going forward and there is going to be more autonomy there is going to be more strategic space and freedom and that this is a model that of course should be exported should be adopted by others but also can be forced in certain ways to be adopted by others i think in some ways the the the diplomacy uh debt trap uh is is somewhat over uh overplayed i think we need to have a little better and granular assessment we all talk about haban bantota and sri lanka and others we need to understand a little bit better how that's playing out but it is clear that when you look at the what a decade ago we were calling the string of pearls was to follow uh parts of that maritime silk road there were also elements of a of a clash between two two systems that were that were developing there and so we need to get back our facility in understanding and paying attention and respecting ideological ideological visions of the world as well as ideological competitions uh and if we don't do that then i think at least we're going to misunderstand what the party is telling itself and others inside china and then not have as many tools to figure out then the ways specifically in which that animates policy and it seems to me certainly since um since the trump administration took office and since the covid crisis that that has intensified just um just an anecdote on on that point michael which i very much agree with we're we're having translated a essay by a theoretician at the communist party central school on what they call ideological work just just the party's maintenance uh of ideological control and purity within the party but within society at large and there's a a quote that i love from this this uh speech and it says if we compare state power to a table the four legs that support this table are economic power military power political power and ideological power um and one of the things that strikes me is china is or the ccp is is hyper realist when it looks at um the sources of its own power and where it sees threats uh emanating from the international environment it may be incorrect in its assessment and it may be overly paranoid about the infiltration of of foreign ideas but nonetheless i don't think there's much romantic thinking even if there is some self-delusion i don't think there's much romantic thinking within within beijing um the question i wanted to ask next is you just mentioned having a more of a granular perspective on uh you mentioned hambantota but i think more broadly a more granular perspective on how china operates in in the world um one of the things that strikes me about this current pendulum swing that i think you're right sort of prop dates prior to the trump administration but certainly wouldn't be where it is in its arc had it not been for the trump administration is we're very much focused on this the sources of chinese strength and chinese ability to emanate and demonstrate power i don't see as much granular discussion on where the shortcomings of the chinese system are and i suspect part of that is because right now the us government is trying to build the case for more aggressive action on china and so of course need to make a strong case about why the united states should uh take on costs and and and accept uh opportunity costs and trade-offs as we as we gear up for competition with china but i i wanted to ask you you've written about stagnation in in asia you're a careful analyst of of of countries around the region um where do you see the shortcomings in the chinese system um you lay out a really impressive list of strengths of china's system and i agree with almost all of them but um you know there's this the tyranny of of extrapolation into the future and i just want to know when you're looking out at where china will be in 5 10 15 years where are the where are the issues that you think will challenge china's continued rise in dominance well i think it's a very important question the first answer i would have is uh we are i would say as an old sovietologist you know starting back at the end of the cold war we are so far behind in terms of our our intellectual capital on china that again it's shocking to me uh and in part i think it's because of how we assumed that china would develop and and how beijing would would ultimately moderate or evolve its policy so that it wouldn't be any type of competition that there would be the washington consensus and so we didn't put uh and again to go back to the previous question and we didn't think there was an ideological competition and so we didn't put in we didn't put as much of our resources into building up the human capital as we did when i was a sovietologist back in the day hence you know the nickname misha if we were all studying the soviet union uh and so we're far behind not just on this question of weaknesses but on everything that we that we've been talking about and and we we we need to catch up dramatically and that takes a very a very long time i tried to do a little bit of that without flogging a previous book in the end of the asian century which actually looked only at weaknesses now the point of that one and that book was not to say there weren't strengths that you know china wasn't the second largest economy in the world but rather that we had consciously overlooked the weaknesses in in in its system as well as throughout the region so japan india korea indonesia so on and so forth um and and i think if anything when when i began that book i began the the research for it about 2011 it was completely counter-intuitive to say that china was having weaknesses because it was still at what eight or nine percent growth and by the time the book came out in 2017 you had had the stock market collapse of 2015 you had had capital flight of a trillion plus dollars all of a sudden people were starting to look at china in a slightly different way saying wow there may be there may be issues here so i think a lot of the things that i talked about back then still are the same and still hold uh the debt bomb that they're sitting on a a in opaque and unclear obviously opaque um uh underground lending system um the question of just how much uh innovation there actually is within the system i mean you have arguments from people like kai fuli and and others in the tech industry that you know this is really a now an innovative system uh but there's still questions about how much is actually innovative in fact just the other week we had several dozen chinese scientific papers pulled from science journals because of falsified certain falsified results um the latest paisa testings of student assessment uh around the world china disaggregated into three different uh test taking centers took all three top three spots whereas they had never done that before there's a lot of questions about the validity of of claims and of results that are coming out out of china um clearly uh if you look at the social sphere um what we still understand about disenchantment to put it mildly with the party questions of the party's legitimacy that is exactly what she has focused on since he came to power both in terms of the anti-corruption campaign but also in terms of controlling and limiting uh uh civil society so that the type of of sort of more raucous and open criticisms of the party and of the state that you saw in uh in in parts of the 1990s and the early 2000s don't happen again those are all weaknesses the environmental weaknesses are very clear and of course ethnic divisions uh the treatment of uyghurs the treatment of tibetans now it's not an ethnic division but the treatment of hong kong um dissatisfaction uh and gender issues as well so religious ethnic gender issues the the fissures and the fractures are there uh and we didn't want to pay attention to it because we thought that we had so much riding on china's success that uh as we now have endured a macroeconomic slowdown that certainly has brought growth in china down dramatically from where it was um questions about future stability and and even internal regime questions about opposition to xi jinping factional politics and the like there's an enormous amount of risk and stress in the system and again we haven't been very good at training our ourselves and our people to look at it from that perspective we need to do that so we're not surprised strategically um i i want to uh turn to a couple questions that we've got coming in and then i wanted to use the the remain of our time with with uh with seth uh to look forward and talk about what's next in u.s china relations uh what what either a second trump administration or a biden administration should do and then want to get you to defend yourself for uh your essay on uh reciprocity but but turning to the the questions first we've got two really good questions that i'm going to pose here um one of them is thinking through this this future scenario where we've got increased bifurcation uh or or pulls so to speak and of course what will be different if we're thinking back on a cold war framing is the level of not only economic integration between the us and china but more importantly the role of technology in any future great power competition and so the question asks if there is a digital divide between the us and china and if we see that growing we can think of who would be on quote-unquote the u.s side right we think of developed democracies we think of canada u.s japan uk question is who's going to be on china's side and the the question asker says you know aside from north korea um uh where will china be drawing support when it looks to create its own world of understanding of the role of information communication technology and digital sovereignty well you know that that is a um i find it interesting working part-time in silicon valley you know at stanford and then part-time in dc the divide here between policy makers uh who are very nuanced and trained in looking at the geopolitics and security and even economics uh and tech which seems to be a terror incognita for many in part because it's developed so rapidly and become so pervasive so rapidly uh and then on the other hand the the silicon valley folks who really don't care that much to be quite frank i think about policy and and certainly you know the national security policy and the like though i think i think they should and probably that gap is slowly beginning to to narrow but it is it is definitely there and so part of the answer is it's hard because we're not we're not as sophisticated in understanding how technology works we're using it now with zoom but none of us could look under the hood and explain how this works so the question of who's on whose side i think is maybe slightly off off the point as opposed to who uses what and how does that structure what you can or can't do um so if if uh and until recently you know it looked completely like the us was going to lose the 5g race uh that huawei would be not only dominant but would be accepted by most of our allies and we if we didn't accept huawei for 5g would be completely on the outside now that that has changed um and and it looks like there are more opportunities if the administration comes up with a very coherent policy to take advantage of of alternatives to to uh to huawei's 5g um but still china has built broadband throughout much of the developing world huawei is still dominant in the world and dominates both 5g and and quite frankly 4g and dominates handheld sets and the like so i don't think it's that people are are consciously choosing to be on china's side but they're using this technology um and and that can structure both how they use it meaning if it already isn't a an autocratic and repressive state it is it is using these technologies facial recognition technologies control of the internet to control its uh its ability to uh you know or to expand its ability to control its population or it it is wrapped up perhaps in a system where it doesn't have control always over how this information is used over which uh which uh companies or groups have access to uh to uh to the internet uh because of of preferential treatment and the like again it's something i'll be fully honest and i think we all should be in dc we really don't fully understand it we think it's like turning on a tv you flip it on and whatever channels are there but we don't look back and say fine which channels are not allowed on so the technology question is really is really central it's about the structure of the technology and in some ways not different from saying who controls the ports who controls the railroads who controls this and that because that determines your place in line it determines the costs you pay and it can determine whether your your goods and your information are safe so i think it's it's brought more broadly an issue of if we don't control this then we simply become subordinate we become consumers and consumers don't always have a say over what goods and services are offered they simply are told what their choice is let me follow up on that and then we'll flow into the next question from the audience which is a terrific one so so does technology then change the geography of the overall competition on the one hand we've been concerned for a long time about the balance of power within the indo-pacific on the other hand as we're describing the nature of this technological competition the geography shifts quite considerably to a global contest and so then the question is everyone do you agree with that and number two does that change the way we should we should think about um strategy and this flows misha from a question from one of our audience members who said that you know as you know as a historian china has been actively seeking to expand its influence latin america africa really since the 1960s so why is this geographic competition different uh and should we be more concerned now given this longer context yeah these are great these are great questions i mean directly to the to the audience question the last one uh that you asked um in part i think it's a function of scale i mean it's it's certainly fine fine in the sense that we don't get that concerned when weaker nations are are engaged around the world it can cause particular problems but but not systemic challenges it's very different when the china of 2020 and the beijing of 2020 versus the beijing of 1976 or 5 or whenever is engaged around the world i mean there is there there are tools and uh and wealth that they can use today that they couldn't use and if and if those are used in ways that we find antithetical to good governance to uh stability to international norms then we find we have a problem and clearly technology is part of that um you know the digital revolution has been so dramatic and so quick as i've said um that that we're grappling with understanding it and the fact that in in ways this does erase uh or was annihilate i think was the old term annihilate time and space effects can happen so much more quickly and can happen instantaneously anywhere that you really do have so much less time from the 19th century uh pre-telegraphs let's say when it took months for for word of an uprising to reach a capital and then months for troops to be dispatched it was a much slower uh unplaying and unfolding or playing out and unfolding of a geopolitical competition and our our global history since the mid 19th century is of the speeding up of of geopolitical uh encounter first with the telegraphs and the railroad with the steamship uh with the airplane and now with the digital so that the the decision-making window has become so much more um compressed and the scope in which actors can can act can can try to affect change is so much more dramatically opened that we are very much tested by all of this and certainly the digital revolution i guess barring something else that we don't understand is sort of the apotheosis of all of this it's sort of the hypersonics if you want to put it of of of influence uh of economics uh of politics uh and the like so if we were complacent in not understanding first of all how that would affect uh geostrategic approaches to the world and then geopolitical conditions and if we decided not really to play in that then we are are dramatically behind behind the ball and and i think that's where we find ourselves it's sort of a late developer thesis uh in ways first of all china benefits from our own uh uh advances in technology but it also benefits from being able to choose the time and place at which it can act in order to try to shift the balance within within the system whether it is through one belt one road or whether through its its 5g broadband so yes uh the speeding up has reached a point where we have very little time to not only react but to understand it in the first place and that's where we have to put our uh our um our emphasis but we're not very good at that in dc and among policymakers i think maybe the next generation will be uh the three of us are far too old maybe they'll be better at it and hopefully will it'll be a part of their thinking the same way perhaps that ideological competition was a part of the thinking of the cold war generation um speak for yourself on the age issue uh misha but um i uh i i wanted to someone has been recommending this book blitz scaling and it what you said just made me think of it it's a book about about startups but the argument is blitzscaling talks about scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water the idea being that blitz scaling is not about efficiency in the first stage it's basically about zooming past competitors controlling the competitive landscape getting to a monopolist position and then even if you've foregone efficiency you now have sort of dominant market position and you can start to set the rules and the person who recommended this said i think this is china's strategy here is is blitz scaling and and we when we look at china wag our finger and point out all the inefficiencies of you know its state capitalist model or the investments that some of its soes are making in infrastructure ports construction but thinking of it from a different paradigm that transcends our our kind of 20th century libertarian view of markets versus state it seems to me that that china is really developing a new hybrid system that will require us to create new heuristics and frameworks to think about precisely who it is as a competitor but but i also think china is is fundamentally changing or has already changed and we're catching up um how we should think about the nature of geostrategic competition that that just moves way beyond our very simplistic binaries and and black and whites uh sorry that that was a lead into my final question here as we as we look to the end of this which is um us has is moving in stages of let's say it was denialism or utopianism after after the end of the cold war there's obviously now a a real-time historical debate about engagement was it a failure to begin with were we naive you you get into this in the new china rules um we've then moved into whether it's you know beginning in the late uh the end of the obama administration but really picking up pace obviously in the trump administration of a recognition that there's there's a problem and now taking this first series of actions i think a lot of folks myself included are quite critical of what we would term as kind of lack of strategic approach here there's a lot of action but it's hard to see what this is adding up to in a crucially in a way that will alter beijing's calculations on future behavior i think being the operative term here you actually you you argue that we're beginning to see the shape of that strategy coming come into play here you frame it around this idea of reciprocity but i'd like to ask you kind of using what you're seeing as the shifting strategic landscape here in the united states could you think through where are we going in terms of u.s approach and adding a normative element of that what should we be doing and if you could because we don't know what the hell is going to happen in november you know thinking through either a second trump administration or biden administration what does the united states need to start doing to fundamentally shift the direction of the oil tanker yeah i mean we only have a few minutes i know and that's that's a huge and maybe the most important question um first i do think there is a coherent strategy that the trump administration has i think it is centered on uh a a a prudent realism uh or a tempered realism expressed through reciprocity uh just to nail it down um that doesn't mean that it is always uh it doesn't mean that it is executed uh flawlessly it doesn't always mean that it is executed equally in every uh in every phase i think in some ways um you know if we were looking and let's say it was a different administration we actually would have looked at the trade war in a different uh light and we would have said wow instead of dropping the bomb right in the beginning you know they made statements they gave space for beijing to react they then ratcheted up step by step with statements and back and forth and back and forth until we got to where we were today and i think most people would say you know that was actually very prudent the last thing you would do is slap 25 tariffs on 500 billion dollars worth of goods you know people would have said that's insane you know that is going to crater the economy and instead it took what 18 or 24 months to get to the to the point where we are today so that i think was a a uh responsibility i see the recrosty happening in two uh two different um manifestations one is structural and one is issue specific so trade would be a structural one and then the issue specific ones were things like um the the airplane ban you know uh where beijing backed off after 24 hours because they weren't letting american carriers in trump administration said fine we won't let uh we won't let chinese carriers in except one a week same as you and then then beijing backed off so i i think that if you read the national security strategy first and then you read uh the um the the most recent the uh strategic approach to the people's republic of china that it is it is clear and pompeo himself now has started using the term which was not really used openly before reciprocity he uses it regularly and i think that that is that is the shaping approach and i think that that will continue because i think if if you've looked at people on both sides of the aisle who've been worried about trade they've been worried about this these essentially unrestricted uh free trade agreements that were not fair trade as as goes back to you know bill clinton talking about fair trade as much as donald trump talking about fair trade i think these things will stay whether it's trump too or or it's biden in part because of a recognition that the ground has shifted so rapidly i mean as a historian and one who's done a lot of intellectual history work i think it's going to be fascinating to look back on us in 50 or 100 years and and it's easy to call it complacency it's easy to call it self-interest but i think it's it's deeper that there are there are mindsets that dominant hegemonic powers get uh because of their privileged position in in the international system and that those are very hard to break down and often they break down only when it's too late clearly when there's a challenger or when the system itself has has failed we're in the midst of that this is an extraordinarily psychologically unsettling moment for a nation that's for 70 years even though it went through the cold war had a very clear sense of of its economic its political its security role in the world now we're reassessing all of that i think the reciprocity approach is actually probably the most it's the most responsible approach because it doesn't go too far to one side or the other and in fact it allows beijing to determine the uh uh to determine the the pace of the relationship if there is equal access uh if there is a um a willingness to to treat each other equally which i would like to note as in in a academic way is at the core of confucianism if you look at the analytes it's actually reciprocity in other words treating others as you would like to be treated what we call the golden rule is is at the core is privileged as the highest expression of enlightened self-interest in the analytes itself it's not just what we're saying this is a centuries-old tradition um it it said we're not gonna we're not gonna needlessly capriciously punish you or or capriciously choose a challenge to you that could be very destabilizing in terms of equity markets or in terms of the south china sea rather this is is a reaction to your your actions in the world and i think it's actually very responsible um i think you'll see it continued though i think the rhetoric might change uh i think the willingness of a different administration to sort of go back to older models of of high level very flashy uh summit gatherings also might be uh something that is that is uh re-adopted or or dusted off but at the same time i i think that um the the fundamentals will probably not change uh in any significant way because it's widely shared i think across the aisles chuck schumer was cheering on the the trade war and saying don't you know don't rush into a deal and others have been cheering on the increase in freedom of navigation operations or the crackdown on on um uh on the cyber espionage i would just like to say because there was a good question about how different xi jinping is to other chinese leaders and what he's done to re revigorate um reinvigorate the party that it is interesting to question how much of today's environment would we would be in without xi jinping and important to remember that he was chosen by the party precisely to close the gap between uh the party and and state and society that had been growing uh because of uh conscious decisions uh under uh deng xiaoping and zhang zumin to create that that separate sphere that after the sars crisis of 2003 and and certain other failures that the party's legitimacy was very much at stake that she was chosen explicitly to shore up the party's legitimacy which goes back to our our uh discussion about ideology because that it was a core part of it that the anti-corruption campaign and the in the reforms that he's undertaken while we see them as sub-optimal for example in creating an a more open uh economic system were precisely designed to ensure that the party maintained a control over what was developing uh both in terms of of public opinion as well as public action um that is combined with the strength that we talked about before that developed over 30 years and a very pointed and sharp set of new policies whether one belt one road or or others or 5g in broadband around the world so that then caused this reaction on the part of the united states i think beginning back in the obama administration and continuing through the trump administration and i i would expect in the broad outlines through a biden administration so a lot of it is contingent in certain ways without having a xi jinping who may be overstepping who may be setting up greater problems coming in the future nonetheless we wouldn't be at this stage of of seeing the type of of um of challenge if not threat that we do of seeing the type of of what many people call aggression uh that we do and it's not just us it's the indians let's not forget what's going on in the himalayas it's the japanese uh with the senkaku's obviously it's the taiwanese and it's others it's not just the united states and in fact i think you're seeing a coalescing of global opinion that not only is xi jinping qualitatively different the party has now become different from what many people thought it would be and therefore chinese policy has and the we call it reciprocity i think that's a fair way to um to categorize it other states are also reassessing and recalibrating their own policies and if there is a um what i think the beijing is probably very worried about it it's the coalescing of a sort of community of interest that says we had hoped china would be one way after so many decades of engagement it's not uh we see it in hong kong we see it the vis-a-vis tibet we see it vis-a-vis xinjiang and the uyghurs and other places and therefore our policies will change that era from let's say 1972 or 1976 or 79 to 2017-ish is over we're in the foothills of the new era we don't really know what it's going to look like but we do know that the road forward is different from the one we thought we'd be on and so the uncertainty is a fundamental not fundamental part it's not a flaw of where we are it's a fundamental part of where we are we're living through an extraordinarily important but also i would say if we can step back fascinating historical period this is going to be written about for decades if not centuries about what we got right and what we got wrong how we grappled with it how beijing grappled with it were their assessments and our assessments anywhere near what the reality was that we were experiencing and therefore acting on and ultimately which we obviously don't know where did we all come out at the end of it with the type of cooperative globalized relationship that we want or a set of geopolitical geoeconomic blocks we should give ourselves cut ourselves a little bit of slack though we're in the middle of it i'm not saying don't react but i am saying we should understand just how significant this change is and therefore approach it as soberly and as seriously as possible and i think uh to end on a provocative note i think the reciprocity policy does that it doesn't mean we become like china it means that we try to ensure equality of outcome uh and equality of opportunity so to speak and access because that's where we wanted this relationship to go jude go ahead final final thoughts well i'm just going to say those i wish i'd asked that question 20 minutes ago to give you to give us more time that that was great really appreciate your thoughts and insights on on this and hope we can continue to have discussions especially at this this altitude where we can continue to think through what the united states needs to be doing at a bipartisan level to position itself to i think play a more leading role in competing with but but hopefully shaping uh the future of china's behavior uh so so thank you for for your time this morning and uh kicking over to you seth let me show you i think you've framed the analytical challenge brilliantly you've presented a strategic construct that i think had a common denominator most people could agree with i think that's the axiom of strategic consensus building um much of it is framed also in your book so please everyone who's watching take a look at uh misha's newest book misha thanks for joining us today everyone thank you for joining us as well and have a terrific terrific afternoon thanks a lot you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Length: 55min 38sec (3338 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020