The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the U.S. and Xi Jinping’s China (D.C.)

thank you so much for joining the asia society policy institute for what is truly going to be a special occasion and that is the launch of kevin rudd's new book the avoidable war the dangers of a catastrophic conflict we're so delighted to see so many friends of aspie here and so many ambassadors former officials and distinguished guests thank you for coming it has become common knowledge that the relationship between the united states and china is the most consequential one in the world today and one that is at a crossroads but what is less understood in washington and perhaps the west more broadly is what makes xi jinping tick where does he ultimately want to take china what might stand in his way what are his global ambitions what is his timeline and how does the united states fit in kevin's new book the avoidable war seeks to answer all of these questions but it does more in the words of henry kissinger kevin offers constructive steps for the two powers to stabilize their relations specifically he outlines the case for a u.s china roadmap called managed strategic competition which where both countries are able to competitively coexist but set up guard rails to avoid conflict and events over the past few weeks underscore that the stakes could not be higher particularly as china aligns itself with russia the avoidable war is the culmination of a project that kevin has been working on and thinking about for many years but before hearing from him we are fortunate to have senator mitt romney here to deliver remarks senator romney needs no introduction he's well known here in washington and outside the beltway and among his current responsibilities he is ranking member of the senate foreign relations subcommittee on east asia and one of congress's leading voices on china amidst a myriad of proposals on how to shape the u.s china relationship senator romney has called for a holistic rethink and not just a piecemeal approach he has also led calls for a diplomatic boycott of the beijing olympics and has urged u.s preparedness for chinese retaliation against u.s sanctions a matter that is becoming increasingly relevant biden administration effort efforts to cultivate multilateral multilateral cooperation in dealing with china also align with senator romney's views as australia is among the united states closest allies it is therefore particularly fitting to have senator romney offer views from washington before we hear from kevin so please join me in welcoming welcoming senator romney to the podium [Applause] thank you i should be listening to you not the other way around but i will nonetheless offer some thoughts and the good news is that the thoughts i have about china and where we are actually are pretty consistent among the two parties the uh chairman of the foreign relations committee bob menendez feels the same way as as i do and as do other members of the committee i'm sure there's some differences but there's a great deal of coming together now with regards to china i appreciate this book its optimism in its title and in the prescription which it provides and uh and look forward to it being part of the the process that we need going forward as a as a nation and as a as a civilization my first 40 years we were in a competition with the soviet union and if that was lost on anybody back then it was made clear when nikita khrushchev i think 1956 uh got 12 nato members together and said to them we will bury you and he went on to say something which is not as frequently quoted history is on our side and what he was referring to is if you look back over several thousand years of world history basically every great civilization that's come and gone was led by an authoritarian authoritarianism is the default setting of world history and when he said history is on our side it was that to which he was referring and the fact that he would bury us now we had some extraordinary advantages relative to russia one we were twice their size and number two we didn't have socialism socialism was an extraordinarily uh weak uh uh economic system to create the vitality which you need to compete and then we put in place a strategy and whether it was george kennan or d natchezon or harry truman they developed a strategy of containment or isolation of where russia was we would trade with other nations more freely we would keep the commons open for trade to be able to move through the seas and through the air and all these things combined to allow us ultimately to defeat the the soviet union now we face a very different competitor and this competitor is smarter in the way it communicates to the world unlike nikita khrushchev chef banging his uh shoe on a countertop or saying he's gonna bury us they pretend to be our best buddies and our best friends and they have a very comprehensive and effective strategy and i'll note that we don't you think about the elements of their strategy one they've described describe precisely where they want to go and when the where they want when they want to get there and so for instance they indicate that they want to be the military leader of the world by 2049 they want to also be the economic leader of the world and the geopolitical leader of the world that is their ambition then they lay out how they're going to get there and piece by piece militarily for instance they have a strategy which includes flanking western military might so more submarines more taking out capacity for our aircraft carriers uh more investment in space to knock out our communication systems uh looking at our fighter jets saying you know we're not going to worry so much about the fighter jets coming from the u.s we're going to go after the tankers that are required to get them from the us and knock them out because they're big and slow and fat and uh and so they're making a very substantial investment in their military might currently in the pacific but of course they also are establishing ports to all the cho choke points of the world this idea of control of the commons which the free world has had they're very much putting in question by establishing the ports throughout the world as they have and also uh militarizing the south china sea a second element of their uh strategy is associated with uh a form of marshall plan in the same way we invested against the soviet union to create the marshall plan and strengthen the other nations they've got their own form of marshall plan known as the belton road and it and other elements are allowing them to expand their economic vitality they have decided they want to tranquilize the people the world so instead of having us get worried as we were about the old soviet union instead they're decided to invest dramatically in putting us to sleep and making us not think about china's being a threat i mean the idea these confucius institutes i don't know how familiar you are with them at our universities where where chinese professors are teaching culture and china they spend billions upon billions of dollars to inculcate our university students with the perception that china is our friend and uh and this is something which is going on not just here in the us but around the world i was shocked that i felt one of the school districts in my state of utah gets a half a million dollars a year from china a half a million for a little school district again it's it's reaching out and and tranquilizing to a great degree the people of our country um the greatest threat to their uh their march to dominance is uh evidenced in their history which is revolution and uprising and so to deal with that they have social scoring and and uh facial recognition technology they're stamping out religion religion often has been a source of people finding their voice and finding something more important to them than their than their state and of course minorities can often be the source of uprisings and so they're eliminating the uyghurs as we know as a as a minority and then all of this is financed through an extraordinary economic uh engine uh and and it is uh it's a little like capitalism at the turn of the the century the 1900s which is the things that are illegal to do now because we made them illegal under the the sherman and a trust act they're able to do because they don't have that law we don't have it internationally so they monopolize industries they cross subsidize businesses they engage in predatory practice predatory pricing those things we can't do under the sherman edit trust act they do because they work and as a result they've established monopolies they've driven western businesses out of business they've monopolized key raw materials trying to make a battery we talk about building battery guess where all the raw materials come from now it's so they have gone at this in a very strategic sense and and against all that this very comprehensive effective strategy is america's strategy and the west strategy which we don't have we really have not developed an approach to how we're going to deal with the emergence of china that's one of the reasons why i'm so pleased to see this book and hopefully others and and why incidentally uh chairman menendez and i and others came together in the most recent national security national defense uh authorization act said let's establish a strategy for dealing with china bring in outside experts some of the governments some outside u.s non-us and come together and talk about what is the course forward for us to be able to get china to be diverted from a course of conflict to instead a course of of fair competition so it's a challenging time and uh and we face this along with what's happening in in europe right now our hearts are heavy as we think of the uh of the the many people that are suffering in ukraine but we must not also not lose focus on the greater long-term challenge to us which is the the emergence of china as the world's great uh uh great power so with that i'm going to turn to our host here today i want to say thank you to the ambassador and all the ambassadors that are here there are a number of ambassadors that are here uh and uh appreciate him writing on this topic and appreciate you being here to hear about it thank you kevin [Applause] i'm going to introduce him first thank you so much senator romney we are so grateful for you setting the table for this event it's a great kickoff for today's discussion and now i'm pleased to introduce kevin rudd one of the world's leading experts on china he has devoted much of his life to studying china's history culture politics and language he has lived in china studied as and and has been a diplomat conducted business there and has dealt with and negotiated with chinese policymakers at the highest levels as prime minister and foreign minister of australia today he serves as the president and ceo of the asia society as well as the president of the asia society policy institute and also my boss following kevin's remarks i'm looking forward to moderating a conversation with him where i get to ask the questions during which time we will wait we will welcome questions from the audience so please join me in welcoming kevin rudd to the podium thank you so much uh wendy um mitt thank you so much for being here it's really kind of you last time i looked this is a pretty busy town you've got a few priorities and uh and uh but you do me a great honor by attending the launch of this book and thank you for your extraordinary service to this country and to your friends partners and allies around the world and long may it continue the um it's so good to see others in this room today who i've known over so many years and and from all sides of the aisle i to our ambassadors who are here with us today thank you including my own ambassador arthur synodinous from australia good to have you with us arthur and to those of you who are from the press again it's a busy town and i appreciate the fact you've taken some time out today as well so here in the united states right now and right around the world we're rightly focused on the question of the ukraine and the unfolding horror that we see on the streets of kiev and the other cities of that great country my argument is pretty simple our common resolve across the democracies must be to defend freedom to defend people's right to choose the governments who lead them and to defend the rights of nation-states to live in peace and security within their nation's boundaries or as article 1 of the un charter reminds us all to be free from the scourge of war all democracies therefore should rally to the cause of providing this democratically elected government of ukraine with all the material resources it needs to defend its democracy and its country just of all of us just as all of us have a common global responsibility to share our part of the global burden in assisting the millions of ukrainian refugees now pouring out of their blood-soaked land it may therefore seem odd today to be launching a book entitled the avoidable war not between russia and ukraine even though war was entirely avoidable in that case had putin chosen diplomacy rather than the sword the avoidable war we speak of today for so many of us remains the unthinkable and that is any future war between china and the united states many of our friends in europe also thought until a month ago that another major war on the european continent was equally unthinkable but now it has come to pass we should therefore reflect soberly on the decade that lies ahead of us as we slide into a new uncomfortably binary world that is divided between china and the united states it's always problematic to reach back into the past to justify a course of action for the future history never repeats itself but as mark twain has reminded us it often rhymes as i reflect on the 20th century the world's bloodiest century if you do the math back to when we had the war to end all wars and that was the first world war there are three sets of principles which remain anchored in my mind the first is how did we all become sleepwalkers during the extraordinary events of 1914 as we all tumbled headlong into a war which nobody wanted which few expected and which monarch's prime ministers and diplomats failed to prevent some thought it was possible but none saw it as being probable until the guns of august ripped loose if you've read my compatriot christopher clarke's book the sleepwalkers how europe went to war in 1914 you two will be haunted by how quickly the unthinkable quickly becomes very thinkable indeed a second principle emerged from the horrors of the 20th century is the problem of appeasement if dictators conclude that democracies lack resolve as mit has just reminded us then the sorry history of the 1930s is that those dictators are emboldened and so hitler began the salami slicing of europe until it became all too late to prevent general conflagration there's a third principle perhaps it's this despite our near-death experience during the cold war and the cuban missile crisis of 1962 the world survived ultimately through a combination of deterrence detent and diplomacy in the case of the united states the fact that kenan's doctrine of containment finally prevailed fully 40 years after it was conceived was due to the fact that successive administrations both republican and democrat sustained it until the berlin wall came down the soviet union collapsed and eastern europe was free there are of course many other lessons from history not all geopolitical geoeconomic lessons are rich as well economic enmeshment between the nations of the world may make armed conflict less probable but certainly doesn't remove the risk altogether particularly as we reflect once again on what happened back in 1914 in what was then a highly globalized europe and a highly globalized international economy then there is our common planetary challenge of climate change this too is a matter of logic should draw us together to shut to save our shared biosphere on this paris gave us cause for hope glasgow a little less so but as we see a return to hydrocarbons in response to the any energy challenges at the moment think of what thomas paine would have called perhaps common sense common sense appears to be yielding to the imperatives of economics and geopolitics right now despite the planet so how do we draw these threads together in dealing with the challenges we all face in china's continued rise the metrics are stark indeed china is the world's most populous country the world's second largest economy the world's largest military as well as a nuclear weapons state and run by a marxist leninist party as i've said before in many gatherings if and when china becomes the world's largest economy it'll be the first time since george iii was on the throne of england that a non-democratic non-western non-english speaking country is the largest economy in the world and if people don't think changes proceed from that fact then they're smoking something china is also now actively engaged in a series of unresolved territorial disputes along the sino-indian border in the east china sea against japan and the south china sea against multiple claimant states including u.s treaty ally the philippines and of course the biggest of them all taiwan add to these geopolitical factors the ideological and ideational divides that now separate these two worlds as china seeks to replace an international rules-based order led by the united states with one of its own making and choosing one which puts china at the center and seeks to change that order's norms and rules in a manner more compatible with china's national values and interests taken together these represent a heady mix of geostrategic challenges for the three decades that lie ahead as we move towards xi jinping's 2049 deadline his target of national rejuvenation of the chinese nation by which point he plans for china to be the most powerful nation on earth let's be clear about it mit referred to it before it's there in the documents anyone who doesn't see it for the clarity with which it's ideologically intended in the chinese domestic discourse again is choosing to hold one or both hands in front of their eyes it is there hiding in plain sight so what then is to be done quoting one leninist in relation to another what then is to be done if this is indeed to be the avoidable war as the title of the book suggests it should be and how do we apply the lessons of history sleepwalking appeasement deterrence diplomacy and a common concern for the global commons to a strategic framework which might just have some chance some chance of reducing the possibilities of crisis conflict and war between these two great powers of the 21st century at present both republicans and democrats characterize the u s china relationship as one of strategic competition there may be some nuance in the description of that but that i think is its essence by contrast in china the communist party's official literature describes the period through which we are currently living as and i quote the rise of the east and the decline of the west in beijing these are euphemisms for the rise of china and the decline of the united states although i suspect the collective west's unified response to the russian invasion of ukraine including the imposition of punishing financial sanctions against moscow and something of a geopolitical reawakening in berlin may have given china some temporary pause some temporary pragmatic pause in its ideological euphoria about the inevitable decline of the west beneath the surface china also recognizes that it is in deep strategic competition with the united states even though they choose not to use that term competition with the united states for regional and global preponderance militarily economically and technologically as for xi jinping he plans to be in office until about the mid 1930s 2030s not 1930s assuming his likely reappointment at the 20th party congress this november by which point he would merely be in his mid-80s it is my judgment that xi jinping is likely to seek to use military means to recover taiwan if that cannot be done by political means and that she also wishes to see this happen within his political lifetime we should not accept the panicked assumptions of some that this will happen anytime soon in my judgment it would only happen when china believes that the balance of military power was overwhelming in overwhelmingly in china's advantage in east asia and when financially and economically it would be powerful enough that's china to withstand international financial sanctions of the type we have seen just meted out to the russian federation neither of these two conditions exist at present but china is seeking to remedy both of them that means that my judgment is more likely to be later this decade or early in the next but still on xi jinping's political watch that action against taiwan would be taken because she like vladimir putin sees himself as a man of history seeking to recover lost national territory and the sad history of our human race is that the recovery of lost national territory results in many many problematic consequences for us all if you accept the logic i've just outlined that means we've entered what i now call routinely the decade of living dangerously the decade of living dangerously from now through to the mid 2030s and the question therefore is how best to preserve the peace and defend freedom during what will be difficult and destabilizing times to do so what i argue in the pages of this book is that it must might just be possible to develop a joint strategic framework between washington beijing of what i called managed strategic competition i'm a simple australian i grew up on a farm and i have a pretty simple approach to things we had beef and dairy my father's first question to me as a kid growing up on the farm was have i made up my choice in life the decision about what i wanted to do he was sitting on a large horse and i sat sitting on a little horse and uh we were watching the cattle come in and i didn't have an idea what he meant had i made up my big my my choice for the future my decision on my future and he said well you've got two choices in life it's either beef or dairy admit that's when i discovered interest in foreign policy it was an escape from a career in future career in australian animal husbandry where i would have failed miserably but as i said i have a pretty simple farm-based approach to logic which is strategic competition can either be unmanaged that is there are no rules of the road or it can be managed in the sense that there are some basic guard rails put in place with agreement from both sides to prevent the relationship from spinning out of control by accident rather than by design this becomes even more critical when the stock of political and diplomatic capital available in the bilateral relationship has been depleted to near zero and that is the point that we have about reached now in the u.s china relationship it's pretty bare in the barrel when there is negligible trust goodwill or even open lines of political communication available the risk of radical strategic miscalculation is very large remember 1914 but there is no particular rocket science to my concept of managed strategic competition and others including david chambers with us today have been writing about this in a slightly different way for some time i've been working on this since i wrote a research paper at the harvard kennedy school with my friend and colleague graham allison back in 2014. the issue was less pressing then than it is now and i've been writing articles and delivering speeches on this concept in the years since then there are four components to manage strategic competition number one the united states and china must both develop a clear understanding of the other's irreducible strategic red lines in order to help prevent conflict through miscalculation i'm talking about private understanding not publicly public declaratory understanding each side must be persuaded to conclude that enhancing strategic predictability advantages both countries that strategic deception longer principle and chinese foreign security policy is futile and strategic surprise is just plain dangerous this will require granule granular diplomatic understandings on taiwan second the two sides would then channel the burden of strategic rivalry into a competitive race to enhance their military economic and technological capabilities properly constrained such competition aims to deter armed conflict rather than tempt either side to risk all by prosecuting what would become a dangerous and bloody war with deeply unpredictable results remember the first line of swins's art of war war is a great matter of state not to be undertaken lightly if you lose the war you lose the state this is etched deeply into the cerebral cortex of every single chinese political leader that i have ever met and military leader as well such strategic competition if managed therefore would also enable both sides to maximize their political economic and ideological appeal to the rest of the world its strategic rationale would be that the most competitive power would ultimately prevail by becoming or remaining the world's foremost power with armageddon avoided and may the best system win and i think you know which system i would back in such a race third this framework would create the political space necessary also for the two countries to continue to engage in strategic cooperation in a number of defined areas where both their global and national interests would be enhanced by such collaboration and indeed undermined by the absence of an agreed collaborative approach climate looms large on this list the world's two largest polluters the next pandemic i think would come second and then there is the tricky business of maintaining global financial stability given the challenges that now lie ahead for us all and fourth last point for this compartmentalization of the relationship to have any prospect of success it would need to be policed by a dedicated senior official on either side of the relationship on the us side that would be either the secretary of state or the national security adviser on the chinese side either the director of the foreign affairs office of the central committee or the vice chairs of the central military commission or all the above but no but quick decisions will require a dedicated group of such officials policing the relationship in order to avoid disaster of course it's important to be realistic no joint strategic framework can in itself prevent war but properly constructed and based on clarity transparency and most importantly credible deterrence it may significantly reduce the risk of it such a framework would also keep alive the possibility of political change the evolution of each side's world view or the emergence of new ways of thinking about old problems both conceptual and even technological and better managing great power relations in the complex world of the later 21st century my interest is how we navigate the dangerous decade which lies immediately ahead we can't think constructively about the long-term future if the medium-term future destroys us all most importantly it may cause both the chinese and the americans to conclude that after more than 150 years of one form or another of political engagement with each other that they are not destined for war and punching that message through to the peoples of china is no bad thing to conclude i'm sure the approach i recommend in this book will be roundly criticized both in washington and beijing as not being sufficiently sensitive to the realities of each side's core national national interests it may even be described as naive though i think if you work your way through the pages of it including its analysis of xi jinping's 10 sets of core regional and global interests it is a deeply realist analysis i'm not a member of the kumbaya school of international relations theory this is a deeply realist text it just things that thinks that blowing each other's brains out is not a good way to proceed but here's my challenge to the critics of managed strategic competition please come up with something else you want to have a war go right ahead if you want to appease go right ahead i wouldn't back that but what's the way through this which is credible realist and deterrence-based for those for example who argue for deterrence the reality is that deterrence forms a core component of the four-part structure i have just recommended for those legitimately concerned about the appearance of appeasement managed strategic competition does nothing of the sort because there is an internal clarity to the strategic red lines that have been set including on the question of taiwan and for those concerned as i am and many are about sleepwalking into war thinking that it's so unthinkable it just couldn't happen the whole point of two sets of senior officials acting as policemen of the strategic stability of the overall relationship is that it seeks to avoid by conscious design the political and diplomatic inertia followed by rapid and crazed mobilizations that we saw in the horrendous month of july 1914 when nobody was talking to anybody much and for those who legitimately believe that for the sake of the global environmental commons these two countries need to work together to save the planet managed strategic competition offers a possible vehicle for collaboration on the things that matter for the biosphere to succeed managed strategic competition would need to be embraced in beijing as well the chinese will argue that the framework i have outlined does not sufficiently accommodate their interests most particularly on taiwan but our chinese friends should reflect on the fact that crisis miscalculation conflict and war and as our russian friends have just discovered all the uncertainties that this involves that crisis miscalculation conflict and war doesn't suit china's interests either for the united states for such an approach to work it would require a level of bipartisan buy-in uh to a coherent long-term china strategy that mit referred to before transcending the normal partisan divide and the daily blood sport of domestic american politics which is an australian politician i fully identify with but america has in its history its remarkable history time and again proven that it is capable of uniting when the future of the republic itself is at stake and when the future of the republic desperately needs it and that time i believe has well and truly come on the china question i've lived and worked in america now for five of the last seven years i've had a two-year covert sojourn down under but they finally let us all out of the criminal colony and we're back at the beginning of my career i live worked and studied for some three years in hong kong taipei shanghai and beijing in beijing i worked in our embassy i know both these countries quite well and i know their civilizational traditions really well and for different reasons i admire them both quite different reasons i admire them both the time has come for statesmanship to deliver us from the peril that potentially lies ahead for us all and i hope this book and the ideas contained within it might make a small contribution to this great task thank you for being here today so kevin you um you've described your um joint framework of managed strategic competition and the bonding administration has an approach of three c's right now um competition collaboration confrontation how does the approach you're suggesting differ from the binding approach is it more because both sides would sit down on the table and work things out between them in the four categories of issues you mentioned well as i said um when the number of us been working on this over quite a number of years as i referred before to professor shambo and others himself uh we've been writing on it but as i said it's not rocket science i'm pleased that the administration has begun to elaborate this sort of framework tony blinken's description of the three c's very early in the period of this administration i think was about right what's the difference probably two-fold uh one is the urgent need to populate each of the three categories with a level of granularity that makes a real difference we can talk about the three categories as until the cows come home but the bottom line is until they are populated as i said with some granularity on the question internally of taiwan but also the east china sea and south china sea but also cyber and space then frankly it's a concept which would swing in the breeze and similarly with the other two categories that i've outlined the other difference i think wendy is this what we see evolving is a de facto mechanism for policing the relationship with the national security adviser the united states jake sullivan and youngjae on the chinese side but it needs to be taken one step further the chinese side internally is utterly bifurcated between the foreign policy and military sources of advice to the chinese president xi jinping the central military commission provided the military advice the foreign ministry and the and the foreign policy establishment have this much control over the chinese military or less than that um therefore for those reasons what's missing in the machinery uh is to pull in uh in my argument and the vice chairs of the central military commission so that there is a conjoint responsibility uh on their side if the national security adviser here can comfortably speak for all dimensions of the u.s china relationship then he or she can do that alone but if the team need to be expanded a bit and think about the secretary of state think about the secretary of defense but i probably wouldn't go beyond that despite my good friend david lipton's presence who is secretary who is counsellor i should say to the secretary of the treasury uh janet yellen back to you so to embark on on your framework it seems to me there needs to be some trust between both sides but they're in reality i think there's a real deficit in trust if any trust now how do you build trust to make your prescription work actually that's why i partly would disagree with you wendy this requires zero trust it actually is based entirely on interests and balance of power and a framework for managing that in a classical framework of old-style diplomacy as i have um uh i recall him uh former head of what we then quaintly called syncpac uh now it's indo-pacific command in the media in the medium term it was called i think pacific command but there you go in the evolution of it an admiral much decorated said to me you know kevin dealing with the chinese trust is a much overrated thing um and i therefore have taken that as kind of the late motif of where things have reached in the overall u.s china relationship and on both sides so no this is not an appeal to trust or how to construct it it's an appeal to basic elemental national security interests and how to construct an utterly pragmatic dialogue based on it to avoid accidentally blowing each other's brains out and over time hopefully as the machinery began to operate operationally to construct levels of mutual comfort not trust with each other it's still subject to let's call it strategic surprise and i understand well the importance of deception within china's classic military thinking i mean we've all read the texts i've been fargum bombs here we've when we're all at um at graduate school we all read this stuff and had to memorize it but though trust trust ain't part of the equation i agree with the admiral um maybe we can turn to the relationship between putin and she and um your book was written before the events that um we're all witnessing with horror today and in your book you mentioned that that she is publicly said that putin is his best friend and that he you know they call each other on birthdays and i don't know they've had i think 37 meetings including mostly virtual over the past few years now 38 wendy now what is um you know what does xi jinping gain from this relationship um and do you think now maybe he's reassessing the relationship that maybe the costs are getting becoming greater than the benefits he seeks to derive or is that wishful thinking largely wishful thinking i think the um i read with some trepidation this morning what i wrote at the end of last year when we had to close the text about what i'd written about china and russia and you know when you have those you know come to jesus moments when you think oh my god what have i written on this actually it holds up okay fortunately i'd spent a fair bit of time in moscow in the period since i've left political office in australia speaking to amer russian think tanks about their view of the evolving china-russia relationship so what that entrenched in my mind wendy was simply this that the baseline chinese strategic interest with russia hasn't changed it's become accentuated under xi jinping one china has enormous advantage of being able to regard this massive common land border with the russian federation as benign for most of its history it is not over the last 400 years since the czarist expansion to the east apart from that period of sino-soviet collaboration between 49 and 59 that's kind of the exception until this evolution which has occurred since 89 but most intensely in the last decade number two that means that releases china's strategic energies to be directed at its principal global and regional strategic adversary name of the united states and three that's the russian view as well in let's call it the european hemisphere as opposed to the eastern hemisphere and finally though the right the chinese would never admit it publicly they kind of like the idea that their russian friends who are always predisposed to be more out loud and proud on the question of assertive forms of foreign policy and security policy behaviour in china because china still sees itself as the global superpower of the 21st century and therefore needing to have greater greater global cred than russia the declining power the chinese still see operational utility in having the russians engaged in actions which strategically distract the united states from its principle challenge whether that's in europe as we now see with ukraine or in the middle east as we've seen most recently in syria but frankly more broadly now in the middle east as well so for those reasons what will xi jinping do about his current posture of tacit support for russia's position in ukraine i think the the likelihood of china moving any time soon to abandon putin the likelihood of that is next to nothing you have started to see some modest political and diplomatic crab walk but that's in political diplomatic language like that as opposed to anything that's more substantive if i believe xi jinping and his military advisers concluded that putin was in danger of imminently losing the field battle in ukraine and that stage has not reached yet then fasten your seat belts for a five minutes to midnight chinese diplomatic intervention to try and as it were quickly gain some credibility in the eyes of the europeans for bringing about a ceasefire under those circumstances i think that is the reality one footnote if as we see reported in the press most recently sourced i think to a series of u s intelligence briefings that russia was about to cross the tripwire in the use of chemical weapons in ukraine perish the thought other categories of weapons of mass destruction including tactical tactical nuclear weapons i believe that would then cross align deeply chinese foreign policy and national security policy establishment that they could not handle and if they got winded that was imminent if there's likely to be a single clear communication from the chinese central military commission to their russian counterparts it would be don't do that um she as many of our china analysts here will know is under some domestic political pressure because the decision to provide tacit support to putin and the content of that extraordinary document they jointly agreed on the 4th of february the joint strategic framework between russia and china he is way out ahead of his skis in terms of the rest of the chinese foreign security policy establishment so it doesn't mean that she if if putin fails in ukraine that she therefore is in terminal political trouble no but does mean that he then has a new set of strong headwinds operating against him together with others arising from the slowing economy arising from the pandemic arising from the normal neuralgia over electing a leader for life this november at the 20th party congress but this stuff could come together and create a more potent political mix of issues for him to wrestle with in the lead up to the 20th congress okay well maybe we can um tease that out a bit so the 20 the 20th party congress is around the corner about seven months away when your book was written you mentioned a number of possible headwinds facing she this year and i think at the top of the list you put the economic headwinds talking about their private sector crackdown and now we have the coveted lockdowns and the real estate problems um how um how do you see these these economic challenges now and do you think the announcements that have been made over the past week by leho to to you know to provide some stability to the financial markets and to support growth do you see that addressing some of these economic challenges that she is facing not fundamentally i think liu statement of a week or so ago and the six measures he referred to was an emergency what i describe as financial band-aid over what has been rapidly slowing growth within the chinese economy there's a big as the chinese would say dialectical debate underway in china at the moment over the future course of economic policy it's pretty fundamental actually its origins for those of us in the analytical community goes back to the 19th party congress and in the arcane world of um of of chinese dialectical studies which marxist-leninist takes seriously it was a redefinition of the central ideological priorities of the entire operation away from dung's view that the paramount importance for china lay in continued untrammeled economic development towards a much more interventionist view concerning unbalanced development but within that inequality and within that social inequality within that the problems of class which if you are a marxist leninist you take seriously xi jinping has been on that side of the argument and in a series of statements since the 19th party congress in 2017 and a series of measures whether it's a common prosperity agenda or whether it's national economic self-sufficiency or whether it's the rebirthing of state-owned enterprises or whether it's the correctives announced against the private sector including but not restricted to the tech platforms put all that together chinese private sector kind of like private sectors anyway anywhere they they're driven by animal spirits and basically this guy is trying to put the animal spirits back in a cage they don't like it so what do they do they put their cash under the mattress so you want to look at some of the big barometers as to why growth is slowing the biggest barometer is the real data on private fixed capital investment and guess what all those folks that we know in the chinese private sector are going where am i going to put my money and it's not in fresh investment and new plant and equipment in this country because i'm not sure that i no longer that i any longer have a predictable policy environment so when liu her did what he did the other day and liu herrera is on the other side of this argument in beijing was as it were trying to staunch the flow of blood which is occurring in terms of the loss of momentum behind growth but staunching is different from healing and it's different to restoring and if you're a chinese private sector entrepreneur looking at the entrails of what's happened over the last five years you would still have a problem of confidence about has this fundamentally changed or is it just tactically changing so to therefore respond to the macro question i think slowing growth through to november still represents a significant headwind in the domestic political debate remember xi jinping at the end of last year wendy said we want a stable 2022 as we all make preparations for the 20th party congress well politics is a funny old thing for those of you been in it arthur used to be in the australian senate for example and we understand just the unpredictabilities of what you've dealt up what's dealt up to you each day but if you were xi jinping in the middle of 2022 uh ukraine going bang uh pandemic jumping the border from hong kong and ripping itself across 70 chinese cities with a number of them now in lockdown covering 50 million people and you've got putin screwing up the blitzkrieg in in ukraine on the score sheet of is this looking like a stable year comrade you would say not entirely so it doesn't mean that this guy is not going to get reappointed but it makes for a much more volatile political year than perhaps many of us thought at the end of last year and where does taiwan fit in i know people some people the united states are making parallels between the ukraine and taiwan you just mentioned during your remarks that you don't think xi jinping is ready now to make a move on on taiwan maybe you can elaborate why what he's thinking and why he would wait and i'd also ask you do you think what's going on in the ukraine maybe giving him some pause or may lead him to reassess his calculation in terms of how difficult it's been for the russian army to to you know take over ukraine and also the the quick and strong unity among the west with respect to sanctions yeah i think um there are many china analysts in our gathering here today and um and i don't want to speak on behalf of of all of them because you'll all have different and nuanced views of this but my general analysis is that there's just been too many forced comparisons between ukraine and taiwan from the perspective of the chinese leadership and how they view their own strategic timetable for dealing with the taiwan question as i said my prepared remarks before my judgment at this stage is 2020s all right late 2020s into the 2030s we start to get to a very difficult time because of changing a balance of military power in the taiwan straits depending on what the taiwanese do themselves and depending what the united states does the the deterrent question there is critical and central and then secondly on the financial side i think the one telling message out of ukraine is do sanctions work in crippling an economy or do they only work partially and temporarily and the chinese will have a long analytical study of this but remember the chinese game plan would never be to put at risk their economy fundamentally by military attack on taiwan until their economy and financial system was big enough bold enough ugly enough and internationalized enough uh to not face the risk of us dollar denominated sanctions fundamentally undermining uh their growth and that means you've got to reach a stage in my judgment where they have taken a decision maybe by decades in to have opened the chinese capital account liberalized the rmb and engaged in a competition with the united states dollar because um right now they are vulnerable to a dollar denominated u.s financial system globally they are that's the truth and they know it speak to the our friends in beijing after you've had a glass or two you soon get onto the subject um which is why we all miss not being in beijing to pick up you know the granularity of the internal discussion there so for those reasons i think we're not looking at an imminent threat one caveat is taiwanese domestic politics doing something really stupid on the way through there there are presidential primaries for 2024. no one knows what's going to be thrown up by the democratic progress party domestically always worth keeping a weather eye and that's why i'm always in the business of u.s strategic ambiguity is the best way of handling the internalities of taiwanese democratic politics i think it is an enduring lesson from ukraine xi jinping will still see himself as a great man of history but i think there will be um a degree of anxiety um at the bay building in beijing the home of the the pla where i've had a few meetings over the years and the home of the central military commission where ukraine was a land-based operation like just down the road there's a stretch of water between the chinese mainland and taiwan and amphibious operations are tricky remember uh eisenhower's planning for d-day that's just across the english channel for god's sake this is big and it's open water and it's tricky so uh political timetable i think in xi jinping's mind is relatively clear given the caveats that i've just attached but the military frankly will be looking at this and studying the videos late at night for the next few years in terms of what could be coming down the track towards them we'd like to open the floor up for questions we have a microphone there if you can go up to the microphone and i can call on you maybe take a couple at a time if you can keep your question to just one question and introduce yourself and your affiliation thank you alden meyer with e3g third environmentalism brilliant uh overview we're looking of course in ukraine not just being a humanitarian crisis and a security crisis but an economic crisis energy price spikes food supply shortages food shocks on top of the debt crisis covet crisis climate crisis last time we faced this in 2008 2009 we had the g20 as a functioning space it's hard to see indonesia keeping g20 focused on what it needs to do given the split between the west and putin it's hard to imagine bush i mean biden and and vandalism and others being in a room with putin it's hard to imagine china and india allowing russia to be excluded from the g20 the way they were from the g8 is there a space where europe the u.s and china can collaborate on managing the economic crisis we're now facing outside of the formal g20 structure other multilateral spaces yeah you you're right to point to a threshold question what happens with russia and the g20 remember what happened with what was then the g8 becoming the g7 after crimea this is a threshold question the second threshold question is if russia by a majority is not invited to the next g20 summit what will then uh china do and frankly what would india then do and are you therefore looking at a terminal moment for the g20 this is really tricky if i was in government i would find it just as tricky as anybody else my overall argument is that not least for the global economy and global economic stability that you'll need to sustain the threadbare mechanisms of global governance intact and therefore i would strongly counsel that the g20 convene and that it remains as a continuing body which is functional on the question of global economic governance as churchill said on these questions always better to draw jaw than to war war uh and i tend to agree with him there's going to be enough fisticuffs in every other forum do you want to actually throw this one out the back window as well i don't think it serves anyone's interests i think the second point is in terms of the indonesians hosting my experience the g20 in the past i was around for the the birth of it as a summit mechanism is that really takes four or five governments frankly not to to gather around the host country to make it work wherever it is if that happens then it works if it doesn't then you get a bit of a rambling communique in no particular outcome so given where we are in geopolitics and geoeconomics and frankly the unresolved questions of the global pandemic because that ain't out the window yet then i would strongly encourage other governments to band around the uh our friends in jakarta to turn this into as robust to g20 summit as possible i think that's where my instincts lie other questions carolyn hi thank you thanks very much kevin caroline atkinson of the rock creek group but also aspie uh institute uh first on the g20 was i was present at the creation in uh in the 90s actually of the finance ministry uh group and then of course it went to leaders in 2008 so i was just thinking maybe one way to go forward would be to put it back to finance ministers and not have leaders but anyway that's just an idea that came to me because that might be an easier mechanism going to the economics i'm curious i'm interested that you say let's not expand it to the treasury department because the collaboration because in my experience on economic and financial matters it is actually easier to find some common ground and wouldn't that be a useful thing but maybe and this is my question to you really my second question you mentioned about the military foreign policy divide in china does that mean that how does one get around that and is there also a military foreign policy economic divide that is too complicated to try to meet on the chinese side yeah thank you for those comments in question the questions i think on the first part i'd simply say this that why i would seek to keep let's call it the policeman of the relationship to a narrow group around foreign policy and security policies is this that's the really hard stuff that's where the frankly the disagreements are ripe rife complex and deep the other and i've been in recent high-level forums between the united states and china on uh uh common financial interests all those guys talk the same dialect okay it's true they talk wall street and or they talk imf talk and you sit among them and it's a very convivial uh discussion at the end they say i wish all these political and security guys could agree like we do well you're not running the pla you're not running united states armed forces and you're not running the the state department or the chinese foreign ministry but you're dealing with the really hard in-your-face stuff which frankly can derail anything and everything so my argument in terms of keeping it narrow to let's call it people on the nasty side of the operation uh in both countries is that frankly we are now under in an uber realist moment where unless you've got those people engaging in an uber realist fashion with a couple of folk who with whom they have a professional relationship and who know that cheating doesn't work in this age of 24-hour transparent surveillance that i would keep it as tight as that in terms of the second question you ask which is the divides in china i'll be very brief on this i think the united states administration and their use of the intelligence community briefings in the last month and more now because it became before ukraine has been actually very good i'm sure people don't normally go out there and thank people for leaking intelligent secrets but i'm a responsible head of an american think tank i can now say whatever i like but frankly um not only is it i like i'm not a russia expert but not only as i think it's a useful tool in terms of shall we say common political consciousness in moscow i know for a fact it is a very useful factor in china where you have highly siloed arrangements between the military on the one hand the foreign policy establishment on the other give you the case study which is the much vexed briefings of a week or two ago about the russian request in the american response for military equipment i'm not i'm not in the intelligence community anymore i'm not in the loop and i don't want to be so therefore i can't comment on the accuracy or otherwise but what i know for a fact is it's entirely conceivable given the nature of the chinese system for the russian military command to deal directly with the central military commission completely leaving the foreign policy establishment out of the loop altogether therefore the american purpose in my judgment in a putting that out there b uh jake sutherland directly addressing this with youngjae cheer in rome and then president biden putting it on the table directly in the xi jinping conversation last week was to ensure that the entire chinese system knew that the request had been made and that was it if it was to be answered positively the consequences would flow so i think that's the best way to deal with it good how are you mate our last question kirk tom thank you and i hate to keep people but a question i really would like to ask prime minister is with respect to highest level political risk clearly that you're you you outlined a very eminent eminently sensible framework for management of u.s china relations at the highest level risk is introduced by our top leaders we have risk on the u.s side through our electoral process could you comment you can comment on that if you'd like but also you've had the opportunity to meet xi jinping and take the estimate of him what what is your level of confidence that he will be a rational actor throughout an entire decade of living dangerously that's a great question kurt which could lay me into all sorts of trouble in both countries but in for a penny and for a pound what do you think arthur the uh i think in politics diplomacy you can do what you can do okay and that is if you ultimately have irrational actors then there is a limit to what externals can do uh in dealing with that all i'm on about is maximizing the high level direct strategic and diplomatic communication between the two sides which in my judgment at present is lacking um i think the second point is this i always reflect on history if we seem to think now that there was a halcyon period in american politics and everything was fine and dandy and everyone agreed on everything oh i'm not an american but as i read my american history right from truman uh which is where kennen's uh containment doctrine came from uh and through to eisenhower and then through to uh kennedy and then through to johnson and then through to nixon and then through to the present there have been enormously contentious debates uh on most aspects of u.s foreign security policy but you know something containment survived all of that and i think through a a number of grown-ups in each room in the american political establishment holding the fabric of that the essential fabric of it together there were ebbs and flows around the margin now i'm speaking in this room with many practitioners like john miguel ponte who have seen the ugly side of this um in terms of what would happen at a particular time so therefore my argument i think is that if that could have survived and produced a successful result over that 40-year period then i argue from the premise that it should have some capacity for sustainability for the 30 years which lies ahead of us in these decades of living dangerously but then the one coming up in my judgment the most dangerous on the chinese side which i've carefully avoided in my answer to your question i think we have probably the reverse problem now with xi jinping which is isolated emperor syndrome i am deeply concerned from just my own conversations with practitioners of the extent to which genuinely synthesized fearless and frank advice about how xi jinping's doctrine is being read and seen around the world as being effectively reflected back to him i'm not sure that this is seen as a career-enhancing move uh on the part of senior chinese officials who say hey comrade she this great statement that you've put out there on common prosperity it's going really well in the economy the private sector love it that's why all of our production numbers are going up when the reverse is the case so i applying that to the the political and foreign policy realities i think there is a virtue in having this continued reality check at that level of the relationship not perfect doesn't solve everything and this to conclude on this is a text it is not an idealist text if you read this book that i've written it is deeply realist in simply saying we are where we are but if we simply say we are where we are and therefore we'll all go to hell because we can't stop crisis conflict and war i don't think that's responsible um and hence my argument for strategic guardrails to maybe see us through this ugly decade ahead i think that's an optimistic note we're concluding on um i'm sure you all agree that kevin's insights and perspectives are just invaluable as we all think about how we can navigate our relationship with china going forward we've just kind of touched the surface of this book i've read it i studied it in advance of today and i really recommend it to everyone there are copies of the book here and i would urge you all to read it thank you so much for coming and let's continue the conversation

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 152,281

Keywords: asia society policy institute, asia society washington dc, kevin rudd, mitt romney, policy, program, russia-ukraine war, the avoidable war, u.s.-china relations, wendy cutler

Id: d3Cg-8VmjQw

Length: 71min 45sec (4305 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022