Trump, China, and the Geopolitics of a Crisis

a professor of history of Princeton and a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford Stephen kotkin is one of the nation's most compelling observers of global affairs past and present dr. kotkin is now working on the third and final volume of his definitive biography of Joseph Stalin Steven thanks for making the time to join us welcome to this special work from home edition of uncommon knowledge great to be back we'll come to the coronavirus in a moment first China and what's gone wrong here's a quotation the late Hoover Fellow Harry Rowan writing in 1996 when will trying to become a democracy the answer is around the Year 2015 this prediction is based on China's impressive economic growth which in turn fits the way freedom has grown elsewhere in Asia close quote China was supposed to follow the pattern of South Korea and Taiwan you start with economic freedoms you achieve economic growth the population too begins to demand political freedoms and you end up with democracy that has not happened how come first of all god bless Henry Rowan and unfortunately he did not predict the future properly what had been better had Henry been right I'll give you two quick answers to your opening question Peter the first and important point is that it's nonsense that authoritarian regimes have some type of unwritten social contract with their population so that the population agrees to give up their freedom and the regime promises to raise standards of living the reason that's nonsense is because if the regime fails to uphold its side of the bargain for example if it fails to continue to generate economic growth the regime doesn't say oh we uphold the contract and so we're leaving power voluntarily great course not the regime instead says we're gonna use more repression and we're gonna ramp up the nationalist xenophobia or whatever tools they have in the toolkit so it's very important to understand that there is no unwritten social contract or bargain with authoritarian regime they do not leave voluntarily ever for the most fun rare exceptions the second important point in answer to your question is that the China is ruled by a communist party we forgot about this we tended to downplay the idea that it was still ruled by a communist party but we've seen how important that dimension of the question is a communism in rule is an all-or-nothing proposition you can't be half communist in other words you're either a monopoly regime or you begin to disintegrate either you're a sole party and you don't Brook any possible rival competition in the political sphere or people want different political parties and they don't need your monopoly anymore this is the prime lesson of the history of communism that the party rule is an all-or-nothing monopoly or dissolution proposition in fact the Chinese Communist Party's party spent a great deal of time studying this question and has taught all its cadre why the Soviet Union fell they study the Soviet collapse endlessly and Xi Jingping the head of the party in China speaks about this publicly so the communist party cannot allow alternatives to its power because otherwise that makes the party obsolete and begins the process of dissolution what you see however you see them indulge market economics rosy and retain centralized political power but indulge the market because they need the economic growth they need to benefit from the rising standard of living and everything else however when the market grows it becomes a threat to the Chinese Communist Party because people have their own wealth their own sources of power their own sense of Independence and they begin to talk about politics as if they have the right to do so as if it's not the Communist Party's monopoly so the party indulges it allows markets to expand and then it clamps down on the market it still wants the growth but it's afraid of the political consequences of the growth of people's independence autonomy power wealth in other words all the things that we support in our research at their institution Stephen I want to go back and and just highlight this point I can remember asking you what you you've devoted a major portion of your professional life to mastering the material in the Soviet archives and I once asked you what's the big finding when you study the Soviet archives and you immediately replied they were communists the notion that the Soviet Union by the time of Brezhnev they stopped believing it was just a great power struggle they were imperialist night and Stephen cotton said no they were communists I don't know of any honestly I don't know of anyone who believes that the Communist Party in China is serious about its communism their imperious all that we used to hear about the Soviet Union in the old days and you say oh yeah they are they are communists is that is that correct or do you want to add some nuance you want to qualify it in some ways you're right Peter the secret of the Soviet archives who set they were communists and so what does this mean it has two dimensions one dimension you could call the dogma or the ideology the other dimension is the organizational structure the Leninist part and so you can watch the dogma unravel you can watch the ideology get chipped away until everybody is a cynic rather than a partial cynic or a minority centered however the Leninist party organisation which means that there is no political system of legitimate voting where multiple parties and secret ballot elections get to pete compete with different programs there's no peacefully leaving power when the people vote you out of office instead there is a permanently endowed party rule which monopolizes not just the political sphere but the public sphere and imposes censorship on everybody else so you can watch the ideology erode and we've watched that in China but the party somehow doesn't give up its monopoly position above already it begins to substitute in the ideology Peter you begin to see the nationalist story fail some of the vacuum so that the parties ideology as it recedes there's a new ideology Chinese greatness Chinese history Chinese civilization Chinese values under party rule however once they give up the party monopoly which is what happened in the Soviet Union the whole thing unravels like the house of cards that it is however if the resolve is there with the elite and the Nationalists card that they play and using repression if all of that works they can hold on to power even with the erosion of the ideology so we're talking about an organizational phenomenon party appointments to all major positions permission of the party to invest in a large scale in something or other party directives to state-owned enterprises party directives to the private economy and forcing private entrepreneurs to join the party and be subjected to party did things more dictates of the banking system so that the banking system doesn't invest where it thinks capital can be most efficient but where it thinks it can support the rule of the party so this is what we've seen in China the entire time even as they have benefited from permitting markets to expand and the private economy to expand there has always been a limit and I never expected the party to liberalize there are some party apparatchiks who believe that liberalisation is compatible with the survival of party rule those are your Gorbachev like people right they think if you open up you allow pluralism first you are not just markets you'd allow pluralism in the economy but floral is imply that party rules survives we have no historical case where the party opened up and communist party monopoly survived this is what they've gone to school with in cheating things China and so I anticipate not an opening but a cracked-out now they still need the economic growth they still need the benefits of the market and so it's one of those yin-yang where clamped down they open up they clamp down they open up Stephens here China present day this very moment China during the corona virus crisis here's Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal on March 16th just a couple weeks ago in an ironic twist an epidemic that started in China may end by increasing Beijing's international reach the greatest impact of the pandemic will come in less developed countries aid donations plus propaganda about the supposed superiority of China's governance model will find sympathetic ears in many countries China will have opportunities to deepen security economic and political relationships with governments around the world close quote and underneath that in my to my way of reading that is the following question two extent does the Communist Party in China remain loyal to the Communist dream of it sounds crude but it is the Communist dream worldwide revolution and to what extent are they willing to supplant the strictly speaking communist aim or goal with a more limited Chinese imperial the old historical aim of local hegemony over to you again great question Peter so China is the largest economy with such an opaque political regime ever they hide their policy process they hide their motivations from their own people and from the rest of the world what we can deduce their exit their aims from their actions China's aims in order of importance to their rulers are threefold the first and most important by far is regime preservation at any cost they will stop at nothing to keep that regime involved the second goal that we can reduce deduce from their actions is the pursuit of primacy in East Asia their own region this includes the eviction of the u.s. from its military bases in the first island chain and even the weakening or dissolution of US bilateral alliances in East Asia the third aim is the build-out of a brand Eurasia folding in Russia folding in Iran and reorienting Europe away from Atlantis ISM away from the Atlantic and toward China a Eurasian reorientation including of Germany away from the Atlantic economy and the u.s. Alliance this is a breathtaking grand strategy it's not something abstract like world revolution world domination spreading Chinese civilization it's concrete domination of their region East Asia and domination of the Eurasian landmass the Chinese leaders are pursuing these aims largely without overturning the existing order they're doing it inside the current order within using trade using infrastructure using loans and aid and diplomacy as well as us mistakes this is something that we have to come to grips with as a nation we've begun to do so but there's a long way to go Stephen back for a moment to the Soviet Union I'm not I'm not sure this is a if this isn't a valid question I can count on you to let me know but it occurred to me the Soviet the famines of the 1930s the German invasion during the Second World War we haven't experienced anything like that of course thank goodness but this coronavirus locked isn't a national calamity two months ago we had the strongest economy in by some measures in several decades unemployment particularly among African American Hispanics the less-advantaged groups in this country was at the lowest levels ever recorded real income was beginning to rise and today where we've locked down the economy Goldman Sachs is predicting this quarter the economy will shrink at an annual rate of 24 percent we haven't had anything like that since the Great Depression in fact I'm not sure we had anything quite as sharp a drop is that since the Great in the Great Depression so this is in its own way a national calamity is there anything from the Soviet experience which you know so well that comes to mind lessons to learn so you're right this is very serious and moreover it's potentially very long-term now once again we're early and it's hard to make predictions there were people making predictions yesterday and last week and two weeks ago and a lot of those predictions are worth noting today so I would be cautious about predicting the future but obviously this is a very serious challenge and the challenge could get significantly worse as well as significantly better in a crisis what you discover Peter is that you need two things the first thing you need is competent and compassionate leadership competent and compassionate leadership what was interesting about the Soviet Union was that it had competence but not compassionate leadership it fought World War two for example the greatest test any society has ever faced the invasion of the Nazi land army with its allies 3.3 million men on invasion day June 22nd 1941 it faced that competent but not compassionate leadership in the sense that the Soviets did not value life they could lose a million men here and a million men there and it was just their enslaved collective farmers of which there were millions more whose lives could be wasted by the regime in pursuit of defense of the country the second thing you need besides competent and compassionate leadership it's social solidarity and trust social solidarity and Trust also is an interesting way to look at the Soviet Union in World War two because they had social solidarity but they didn't have the trust mmm the police the secret police were ubiquitous the repression there was massive terror all during the war and nonetheless the society held together so the regime did not collapse and the society did not collapse they had a version but not the version of what you need in a crisis now if you look at overall world war two or the Cold War and the struggle first against Germany and Japan and then against the Soviet Union you see that democracies are better than totalitarian regimes at mass mobilization of resources because their leadership is compassionate not just competent and because their social solidarity is based upon trust not coercion plus a sense of nationalism what tragedy and so both the UK and especially the u.s. were superior at mass mobilization during the war and during the Cold War after the hot war against its authoritarian or totalitarian adversaries whether that's Nazi Germany and Japan during the war or the Soviet Union afterwards so this is a long game Peter mm-hmm very long game and the advantages are on the side of democracies that have the compassion as well as the competence and that have the trust as well as the social solidarity however having said that you don't win just because your side has better tools potentially you win because people step up the leadership actually performs or outperforms expectation the social solidarity increases it strengthens overtime you win because you earn it not just because you're predestined with superior tools at the beginning this is the challenge for us we're not going to win this battle unless we rise to the occasion it's very very important to understand that we have the attributes that nobody else has the endowments and the attributes but we can squander them we can lose the battle because we're the people who can defeat ourselves if we have incompetent leadership if we have non compassionate leadership if we lose our social solid that let's remember Peter how did we get to the place we're in now we got to the place we're in now you could argue because of two very big trends that are reinforcing one elites were unaccountable they could do the global financial crisis or they could do monetary union in Europe and then we'd be left with the consequences and they would walk away and get promoted to yet another better job with a higher on speakers fee or a bigger book deal or whatever it might be the unaccountability of elites was something the mass is perceived across the globe in various elections in different forms in different countries including in ours that problem persists the second reason we're in the situation we're in is the fragmentation of society your strength as a society is obviously unity you want to have a sense of collective purpose you want to be Americans without hyphens you want all citizens to be equal before the law and part of the national community and part of the collective endeavor we have fragmented ourselves badly we fragmented ourselves in parts socioeconomically with the MAL distribution of opportunity I'm not speaking of equality of outcome I'm speaking of equality of opportunity right now distribution of opportunity but also we're the kind of identity politics or a tribal politics which forgets the e pluribus unum which forgets the collective Enterprise the unity of purpose the strength so this unaccountability of elites and social fragmentation has been deeply debilitating to us and those are the things that must be overcome because that's what we need that now get ourselves domestically out of this crisis but also international Steven a couple of sentences from your article last summer Foreign Affairs I'm quoting you the trumpian moment is an opportunity the best of the United States is there to be rediscovered reinvented and repositioned for the challenges the country faces if properly understood Trump could be a gift explained here it's very hard to talk about the Trump presidency these days in America as you know people are reflexively anti Trump and passionately so and then many other people are reflexively pro-trump and passionately so if you say anything about trumpet that's perceived as the least criticism 49% of the country goes crazy if you say anything about Trump that's potentially praise the other 49% of the country goes crazy so I tried in that article to talk about America rather than this 49% or that 49% and I tried to talk about the Trump presidency not as something to bash or to praise specifically but to look at where we are how we got here and where we could be going forward when we talk about the Moller report which was what that article was about we talked about Russia's interference in our elections we don't talk about our own self created problems mm-hmm don't talk about our own failings we talk about how somebody else is causing our problems somebody landed from the moon named Trump and he's not he somehow surprising everybody came out of nowhere and maybe Russia put him there or whatever the story might be so this is not a way of examination this is not a serious analysis of the trends in our country and where we are and the opportunities that are presented the Trump is a transitional figure he put his finger on the unaccountability of elites he did that very successfully during the campaign and he's a master political manipulator of the societal fragmentation that's part of the secret of his political intuition so he is in many ways showing us where we are mm-hmm and so the answer is not an antidote to him personally the answer is moving away from the shiny object moving away from the polarized forty-nine percent against 49% and reconstituting a sense of social unity reconstituting a sense of how our political system works it works from compromise the way our founders set up our political system was to make it difficult to get anything done unless people came together in the middle there's separation of powers there are all sorts of mechanisms to prevent majorities from enacting a tyranny over Bernard's cooperation coalition is required to get things done enduringly not to pass something with 50 plus 150 percent plus one vote in which the next administration overturns with their 50% plus one and so I see Trump as an invitation for all of us to get back to first principles to rediscover who we are and why we are so successful and to get that mojo back and not to fight this battle endlessly as if it's World War three as if it's the end of civilization if one side wins or the other it's not the end of civilization it's not World War three Stephen - to last left for you if I may here's the first in the winter of 1946 right at the get-go of the Cold War February 1946 you know of course what I'm about to say diplomat George Kennan sent what we now call the long telegram from Moscow to Washington 5,000 words it was a long telegram and in it Kanin outlined the policy of containment which would remain substantially the framework for American foreign policy for the next four and a half decades until the end of the Cold War why haven't we had a long telegram on China yet for that matter why have we wasted a quarter of a century supposing they were going to become more democratic when Stephen Kotkin knew from the get-go that would never happen in part Peter it's because China is not just a foe or an opponent but is also a collaborator is also a partner China's success has rebounded to America success we have been better off because of China's success it has thrown off tremendous benefits for the Chinese the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty but also all around the world and so we don't want Chinese success to stop we want to figure out a better way to manage the relationship we want to continue to benefit from the relationship but not have it be the one-sided relationship it had become partly prior to President Trump changing the national conversation about China and so the absence of the kenan is in part because fundamental nature of china is different from the soviet union having said that what similar is a potentially successful or perceived to be successful authoritarian great power that changes the game international an authoritarian power that's a basket case is not going to galvanize a whole lot of others onto its side or to imitate it or to do its will but an authoritarian power that projects its ability to lock down a country and stop the spread of the virus right to manufacture all the medical equipment that the world needs and to supply it on a voluntary philanthropic basis to countries in need that kind of power authoritarian power that's the challenge that we face now once again Chinese scientists they may be the ones that come up with the vaccine we may have a race to the moon like we had with the Soviets over the vaccine or other aspects of the pandemic I welcome that rivalry but I would prefer cooperation it could be that a race with China for the vaccine as well as Germany and Japan and other tested countries of biological science it could be that that accelerates the process of discovering the vaccine but cooperating with Chinese scientists on the vaccine would be even better potentially and so that's the proposition where is their competition and rivalry that requires a strong response from America to defend freedom and other first principles and where are the areas of cooperation that require not confrontation but in fact benefiting from the incredible dynamism of Chinese society and the human capital that they have this is the heart of conversation Peter we have had this conversation at the margins it has been occluded by our entertainer infotainment complex that we all know what it is and some of us are quite entertained by and on occasion however it could well be that now many of those recently written or written some time ago analyses of how to both compete and cooperate with China get a second look and and we figure out what we need to do the bottom line on all of this is how do we protect liberty and the rule of law at home and globally here's the last question then Stephen the Chinese vastly outnumber us their economy may very soon be bigger than ours they're spending on the military as you often point out Russia and Iran don't even come close in military spending to what the Chinese are doing and they possess a central government we would not want to live under the central government that they have but it can get certain things done and all we have is a two hundred and thirty year old Constitution how optimistic are you that's an excellent question and I'd I'd have to say that I'm a pessimist by Nature the beauty of pessimism is that a you're always right and B if by some freak of nature you're wrong it's because something good has happened however in this particular case I don't think full pessimism is called for China has a fundamental vulnerabilities and those fundamental vulnerabilities involved mostly politics we understand their banking system presents fundamental challenges we understand ecologically they face enormous challenges demographically but I want to talk in closing about the politics and why our system has strengths that we continually rediscover in the Chinese case you can imagine it as six vulnerabilities over time mm-hmm Manchuria inner mongolia shinjang and tibet are four of them those are all predominantly ethnic challenges to the Chinese and they've dealt with them first by over running the areas which Han Chinese settlement so that Manchuria is now predominantly Han Chinese and has virtually disappeared as a separate ethnic territory Inner Mongolia overrun by Chinese settlement Shin Jang where you have a large Weger population has not been all fully overrun in the same way as Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and today we have up to 2 million people in Xinjiang in re-education camps Tibet also is not as easy for chai Han Chinese settlement because of the altitude but nonetheless the challenges that they represent Shin Jang and Tibet are of a more limited quality however tragic the from a humanitarian point of view the other two pieces of the six are Taiwan and Hong Kong and they are political challenges they are an ethnic Chinese political system that's different from Communist Party rule and the strength and durability over time of Taiwan and Hong Kong are the two most important assets that we have on our site and that are the greatest vulnerabilities the Communist Chinese rule Hong Kong and Taiwan represent our kind of systems u.s. style systems where liberty and the protection of property are higher values than the preservation of a certain kind of rule of the Communist Party we have to remember this we have to remember that China has those vulnerabilities and they're right there at home China has claimed reclaimed Hong Kong from the British and they would like to reclaim I want they claim it as their territory but as we've seen they've had a very difficult time assimilating Hong Kong politically mm-hmm and this has rebounded to sentiment Taiwan as well and so let's not forget that as great as China's story has been I'm a very big admirer of the accomplishments of modern China I'm awed by the dynamism and intrapreneurial ISM of that society it's amazing what they've been able to achieve and without them we would have a lot fewer medical supplies right now in the crisis that were in at the same time they're politically vulnerable and we are potentially politically strong if we can rediscover what it is that made us the country that we are Stephen kotkin of Princeton and the Hoover Institution thank you Stephen will now will you please get away from your microphone and get back to work on the third and final volume of use of the Stalin trilogy I've done I get it I get emails every week from people when is dr. Kaka gonna finish that trilogy you know nobody wants to finish quicker than I do Peter I've been living with this monster for a long time Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and the Hoover Institution thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation Peter Robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 380,905

Rating: 4.6710811 out of 5

Keywords: Chinese leadership, China, COVID-19

Id: eVIptpWWT68

Length: 36min 46sec (2206 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020