Breaking The Engagement: How China Won & Lost America

>> Larry Diamond: Greetings everyone, and welcome to this event that we have been so much looking forward to ever since David Shambaugh spent much of an academic year with us writing much of this remarkable and important book, Breaking the Engagement, How China Won and Lost America. I'm Larry Diamond, I'm a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and I will moderate this discussion with David Shambaugh after he gives his opening remarks and with Elizabeth Economy.

 

So let me introduce them both. David Shambaugh is an internationally recognized scholar and award winning author on contemporary China and the international relations of China. I think he's authored or edited 35 books. So he's been a busy guy over the last half century or so, or I guess it's more like 40 years as a scholar formally, and this is an extremely important culmination of a lot of that career.

 

He's been both an active public intellectual and a professor and leading contributor to China studies and US China policy since he got his PhD under our mutually beloved late friend and colleague. I can say mutually for Liz and David and Gene and Andy, and in a little bit more distance and less in the realm of China Studies myself, the late great Michael Oxenberg.

 

And he then went on to become a reader in Chinese politics at the University of London School of Oriental and African American Studies, where he served as editor for five years of the leading journal in the field, China Quarterly, and then returned to his alma mater, George Washington University undergraduate alma mater, to become the Gaston Sigurd professor of Asian Studies.

 

As he explains in this fascinating autobiographical essay that opens the book, Professor Shambaugh visited China at least once a year for professional purposes for 35 years, 36 years, from 1979 to 2015. And in that year he published a little essay in the Wall Street Journal whose misleading title, as he explains, caused him to be largely banned from substantive engagement in China for nine years.

 

And during those 36 years when he was traveling to Beijing and other parts of China, he engaged party, government and military officials at multiple levels, traveled to 27 of China's 31 provinces, lectured in Chinese and English to multiple audiences, and became in China, I think, one of the best known American scholars of China and of the US China relationship.

 

During that period, he also lived off and on in China for a total of five years. Given this deep engagement with China and over the same roughly half century with the American policy establishment on China, David Shambaugh was almost uniquely positioned to write this book, Breaking the How China Won and Lost America.

 

Following David's remarks, we will hear from and have joining the conversation, our colleague at the Hoover Institution, Elizabeth Economy, who's the Hargrove Senior Fellow and co director of the Program on US China and the World here at the Hoover Institution, Elizabeth economy, from 2021 to 2023, I think most of you know, she took leave from the Hoover Institution to serve as the Senior Advisor for China at the US Secretary of Commerce.

 

Before joining Hoover, she was the CV Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of four books on China, including most recently the World According to China and the editor of two volumes. And she's now hard at work on her next book.

 

She serves on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Committee on U.S. china Relations and is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. So I'm now going to want to sit down so I can see your slideshow as well as your presence in full form.

 

David, the floor is yours. And then we'll resume in conversation. And then you all will get a chance to and if you wish, Lizzie Conomy.

>> Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much, Larry, for the very generous introduction and the opportunity to present my brand new book here at Hoover today and to thank everybody who came in person and welcome everyone who's watching online and on C Span Book TV is here today.

 

So there are multiple audiences, but thanks everybody for coming. So I am indeed delighted to be back at Hoover to have this opportunity to launch my new book today. It was exactly one year ago. I was nearing the end of the truly productive half year here as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow during sabbatical from my home institution at George Washington University.

 

And I was literally glued to my desk across the courtyard here in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, hhmb, as it's commonly known around here, finishing the last chapter in the appendix of the book. It was one year ago. Here we are, fast forward 365 days and it exists.

 

Sort of all authors kind of marvel when they receive the physical product. You know, it's hard to imagine it's gone from on screen to physical product in a year, but seems like yesterday. But that period here at Hoover was tremendously stimulating and productive period for me. And I'm deeply grateful to Hoover and to the director Condoleezza Rice for making it possible.

 

So it's great to be back. Okay. So my new book has been stimulated by two principal puzzles, one more historical, one more contemporary. First in my many years of studying and teaching the history of US China relations. And I have an annual graduate seminar just finished a few weeks ago.

 

Over the years, I've grappled with trying to understand the deep kind of underlying drivers. Of this relationship, this fluctuate relationship. This relationship has been anything but steady and consistent. It fluctuates repetitively back and forth between amity and enmity, back to amity, then to enmity, and the cycle continues seemingly endlessly in what the late and I feel great China historian Warren Cohen, who just sadly passed away three or four weeks ago and we missed, but he was a tremendous colleague.

 

He referred to this repetitive fluctuate dynamic as the love hate cycle in the US China relationship. And he traced it back many, many decades. So I'm puzzled about that phenomenon. And the first chapter of the book is called Elusive Equilib. In fact, that sort of sets out the historical puzzle what causes these two countries not just in the Communist period, but in the Republican period and the Imperial Chinese period.

 

So this is a historical trend. The second, more recent and contemporary puzzle that animates the book or stimulates me is why, after four decades of engagement, American engagement with China, in which the American and Chinese governments and societies became deeply entwined with one another and bilateral cooperation was predominantly the norm, despite occasional frictions and periodic crises, including on June 4, today is June 4, June 4, 1989.

 

But why over the past decade has the engagement given way to comprehensive competition where frictions and systemic disengagement have become the overriding character of the relationship? So that's the sort of more contemporary puzzle. How is it that China's previously positive image amongst the American public has taken a nosedive since 2012, or thereabouts, to today, whereby last year, in 2024, more than 80%, as you can see from this first slide, 80% of the American public view China unfavorably.

 

More than 80%. 83 I think, moreover, the Pew Pew Data, Pew Research center, and they found also last year that 40, 42% now of the American public view China as an enemy, 50% see it as a competitor, while only 6% see China as a partner? So the answer to these puzzles and the basic argument of my book is that over four decades, from the 1980s through the 2010s, China won over America proverbially through its generally reformist domestic policies and foreign policies which coincided with America's premises and expectations, I should say, of America's engagement strategy towards China.

 

The United States expectations of China is the independent variable in this story. China's behavior is the dependent variable. I'll say more in a moment about what these American expectations were. But in short, when China's the argument is that when China's policies and behavior conformed With American expectations, the two could cooperate and generally had non conflictual relations.

 

But when China did not conform to American expectations, frictions followed. Moreover, ironically, I found in the research did not expect to find, but I, once I began digging, I found that the deeper the engagement and the presence of each country in the other society, the other's country, the deeper the suspicions and the greater the frictions that emerge.

 

So this is counterintuitive and an irony, real irony, because engagement was premised on the liberal assumption that the deeper and broader each side's presence in and interactions with the other, the greater the cooperation and the stronger the relationship would be. So quite to the contrary, I found beginning around 2010, a wide variety of American actors began to encounter considerably increased obstacles to their work in China.

 

Non governmental organizations, journalists, U.S. companies, foundations, universities and educational exchange organizations, U.S. embassy and its consulates and many other American actors. It's never been easy for any of these actors to work in China. But there was a 2010, in retrospect was a turning point and after which all began to encounter increased impediments and obstacles to their normal work in the country.

 

So I have my theories about why 2010 was a turning point. It was more broadly, I think, in China's own internal and external trajectory. Because after that time, so I say, a variety of foreign, not just American actors began to experience increased impediments, controls and obstacles to their work, normal work.

 

I personally experienced it too. I was a senior Fulbright scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of World Economics and Politics that year, trying to research my book China Goes Global. But the Chinese Academy did very little to help facilitate that research. So it was a kind of harbinger of things to come in the academic domain.

 

So that was a turning point 2010. But then in 2012, Xi Jinping came to power. And over the last 13 years these trends and obstacles have only dramatically increased domestically and externally with what international China specialists refer to as China's quote, assertiveness and quote, wolf warrior public diplomacy.

 

Everything in China has become increasingly securitized on Chenghua, Chinese over the past decade. And this securitization has impacted a wide variety of American and other foreign actors inside of China. National security Guoja Anquan has become the number one national priority of Xi Jinping himself of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government and has overtaken development as the primary goal of the Chinese state.

 

And Xi Jinping has laid out a, what he calls the, the comprehensive concept of, of security, which has no fewer than 22 categories, including several sub elements within each category of national security. So the Chinese side has definitely securitized the US China relationship. Moreover, Beginning about a decade ago, China stepped up its own influence and interference activities in this society against the United States and in the United States and other societies, primarily in Europe, but Asia, elsewhere.

 

And these interference and influence activities began to negatively impact American society and actors and violate American laws, impacted American States, universities, civil society, media and our national security. Now I say China stepped up these interference activities because such influence interference activities have been long present as part of their united front and their intelligence espionage activities inside the United States.

 

But around in the mid 2010s, China's intelligence media and united front organs have all expanded their presence in malign influence activities inside the US and there's no better source on this than in fact the 2018 Hoover Task Force report that Larry diamond co led and Liz Economy and I were part of entitled Chinese Influence and American Interest.

 

That was, gosh, that was seven years ago. But that was really first serious investigation of this subject. Now it's considered rather commonplace, unfortunately. So the American government as a consequence has also securitized the relationship. Mutual securitization has definitely contributed to the downward trajectory of the relationship. I argue over the last 10 years both sides have done it.

 

Both sides have some responsibility. Okay, so over the past decade as a result of this, I argue, China has progressively lost America. They won it over in the previous decades through their own reformist policies which conformed with our expectations. But over the last 10 years, their policies and behavior have diverged from the American expectations.

 

So they've lost America and the actual interest of different American actors, which I collectively call the Engagement Coalition. Engagement was not just a policy, it was a broad gauged series. Broad coalition in our society and in our national government and amongst our states bought into this grand strategy of engagement.

 

There was something in it for everyone. In fact, the elasticity, you might say, of the engagement strategy was its beauty. And no foreign policy in the United States can be sustained without domestic buy in from different constituencies. So that's what sustained engagement., 4, 3, 3, 4 decades. But since over the last decade, as I say, Xi Jinping has, make no mistake, it's Xi Jinping who has broken the engagement.

 

The Chinese side has broken the engagement, this book argues. And that argument echoes Susan Shirk's own recent book, How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise. So Susan and I are analyzing the same phenomenon coming out pretty much in the same place. So the engagement strategy had run its course.

 

The engagement coalition had crumbled and has been replaced over the past decade by a new strategy of what I describe in the book as comprehensive Competition and a new counter China coalition has replaced the engagement coalition. It's a broad coalition. Many actors are part of the new coalition as they were the old one.

 

Okay, now you might ask what was the strategy and what were the policies of engagement intended to achieve in the first place? You may rightfully ask. Fair question. And the book. Well, let me just give you a quick summary of it. In my view, there are four elements that comprise the strategy and content of engagement and seven tactics.

 

Four elements and seven tactics. Very Chinese. Right, so the here we go with the four strategies. US Engagement engagement strategies sought to, in my view, modernize China economically and technologically liberalize China politically and socially. Notice I did not say democratize, I said liberalize difference. To integrate and socialize China internationally into the post World War II international liberal order.

 

And fourthly, to exchange people in multiple professions in both societies. What I call in the book engagement as process. So to repeat, to modernize, liberalize, socialize and exchange with China. Those are the four core elements, as I see it, of goals of engagement. So then what were the tactics?

 

How do you implement this strategy? Well, this slide, if you can read it briefly. First is government to government institutionalization, which you mentioned. Mike Oxenberg in your introduction. Larry. Mike was my professor. He was your friend and colleague. He was also my boss on the National Security Council 1977, 78 when I worked there and the immediate run up to normalization when we were.

 

He was the architect of president of normalization for President Carter and Dr Brzezinski in the US I would argue. Anyway, one of his strategies was what he called marrying bureaucracies together and turning the negative adversarial bureaucratic missions from the Cold War into more positive cooperative bureaucratic missions between every bureaucracy, every department and every ministry and the Chinese and the American government.

 

So that's the first tactic. Second tactic to build society to society ties at the sub national level in a variety of ways. Third, create civil society in China. Fourth, to invest in and trade with China so as to contribute to the marketization of the Chinese economy and to break down, if not dismantle the socialist planned economy.

 

Fifth tactic, to improve China's domestic governance and professional what's referred to as capacity building, organizationally, behaviorally. Sixth, building the rule of law. What rule of law? Law based on Western legal premises. And lastly, not unimportantly, educating Chinese students so that they could return to their homeland to contribute to the modernization of China and to be agents of change.

 

Liberal political and social change. Yes, we wanted to train them in whatever specialty they came here to study. But there was an assumption and a hope at least, that they would also go back. Based on modernization theory, a lot of these tactics and. The strategy itself grow out of modernization theory, that these students would be agents of change.

 

Okay, so those are the. In short, there is no classified master document in the national archives in Washington D.C. that lays out the engagement strategy. There's indeed an enormous debate about what the engagement strategy was. In chapter one of the book explores that debate. There are some people in the audience who have been participants in that debate, but so there's each administration came along, had their own internal classified documents.

 

But I think if you read them all, and I trace in the book, all these administrations through these were the core elements of the strategy and the tactics. So one can certainly question therefore if these American assumptions and goals of engagement were misplaced or not. But I do think whether they were or not, they're empirical facts and they have had much to do with how the two countries have interacted.

 

Now the critics of engagement retrospectively would argue, modernize China. Why you're creating a peer competitor. Liberalized China. Good luck. You failed or we failed because of the resilience and the strength of the Chinese Communist Party. Socialized China internationally. Partially successful, I would argue, but increasingly seen as a failure as China is acting in many more illiberal and revisionist ways.

 

And lastly, exchanges with China critics would argue hugely asymmetrical. There has been little reciprocity over the decades between the two sides. The Chinese have gained substantially more from exchanges than have Americans. So that's the kind of critical critics arguments against the engagement strategy in retrospect. Okay, so in short, what's happened here?

 

American liberalism has run into Chinese Leninism, that is, and then. And the Chinese have stubbornly resisted American attempts to change it. Now one can certainly understand why, if you look at it from the perspective of the CCP and Chinese side, because they see this strategy and these tactics as subversive to their political system and their power and their control ever since in fact 1955 and John Foster Dulles famous testimony in front of Congress about peaceful evolution.

 

Heping Yanbian at that time, Mao and the Chinese Communist said, that's what these Americans are out to do to us, peacefully evolve us. That's 1955, folks. Well, so that's been their default assumption about us ever since. And guess what? They're right, that's exactly what we've been trying to do, but not successfully.

 

Okay, so at times, you know, the Chinese, if this was their default assumption, I argue, but they, the Chinese communists sublimated their fears of peaceful evolution because they had larger benefits to be gained from the relationship. But it's always been under the surface and popping up. So they have taken, by taking advantage of America's, you know, perhaps naive largesse, China has milked engagement for its own benefit.

 

Many American constituencies all bought into the strategy. As I say, this was the beauty of the strategy. It was elastic, it gave farmers and different parts of our society a stakeholder. They became stakeholders in the coalition, so this is how China won. America and many other European, Asian and other nations have all accepted this strategic policy logic and they pursued their own versions of engagement with China.

 

Okay, so, but I think so that's a kind of summary of the core argument of the book. But to fully understand the rise and fall of the engagement strategy really requires, I believe, recognizing the long standing and deeply embedded paternalistic missionary impulse, which was actually Warren Cohen's term originally to the missionary impulse to mold and shape China that lies at the core of the American approach to China over several centuries.

 

Indeed, American attempts to shape, mold and change China far predate President Nixon's opening. They date back to the 1800s, in fact. And the first two American ambassadors to China, on the left you have Anson Burlingame, after whom Burlingame, California, just north of here, is named. In case you local residents didn't know, he was the first American ambassador, minister, they call it, to China, and subsequently J Ross Brown, who succeeded him.

 

Now, Burlingame and Brown both sought to move the Qing dynasty leaders in more modern and liberal directions. Indeed, the Qing dynasty leaders wanted to move in more modern and liberal directions. But interestingly, these two gentlemen also epitomized two alternative approaches to doing so. Burlingame advocated for what he called the cooperative policy and what might be described as patient paternalism.

 

Patient paternalism to work with Chinese reformers in a cooperative fashion. By contrast, Ambassador Brown favored a coercive policy to pressure China to undertake reforms. Burlingame indulged the Chinese, even learning the language. And the Qing court. They loved him. They liked him so much that they designated him to represent all foreign emissaries to the court at the time.

 

But by contrast, Brown was condescending. He advocated tough diplomatic pressure, moral condemnation and the threat of force. So why do I raise this? Bring these two early emissaries up? Because they're radically different approaches. One to accommodate the Chinese, the other to pressure the Chinese precisely encapsulate the twin alternative approaches that Americans have pursued vis a vis China over the subsequent 150 years.

 

Despite the very different tactical approaches, cooperative versus coercive, their strategic goals remain the same, to change China. This is in American DNA. And it constitutes a core element of the American approach to China over time and is, I think, the core tension in the relationship. So even during the pre engagement era, during the Cold War height of the Cold War, during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, there were those who advocated for relaxing containment and opening ties to China.

 

Let me digress here for a second concerning President Kennedy. Eight days prior to his tragic. Assassination on November 14, 1963, in what turned out to be his last press conference in response to a journalist's question concerning the possibility of trade with China, Kennedy suddenly declared to the assembled.

 

You can see the assembled journalists, you can read for yourselves, quote, we are not planning on trade with Red China as it was then known as in view of the policy that Red China pursues. But if the Red Chinese indicate a desire to live at peace with the United States and with other countries surrounding it, then quite obviously the United States would reappraise its policies.

 

Last sentence. We are not wedded to a policy of hostility to Red china, unquote, in 1963, ladies and gentlemen, now at the height of containment. But there is considerable evidence, which I describe in chapter three, that Kennedy was inching towards offering some kind of olive branches. Excuse me, and a possible opening to Beijing when he was tragically assassinated.

 

Most notable olive branch was a major speech that he had authorized Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hillsman to give at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The draft had been fully written and Kennedy unfortunately was assassinated. So there was a question. Does Hillsman go ahead with a speech?

 

Well, the new Johnson administration authorized that he should go ahead with the speech and he gave it. And it's well worth rereading everybody, if you're interested. Okay, so there were advocates inside the US Government at the time, but I also recount in that chapter that there were kind of activist efforts in the American Society who were agitating for, or advocate, I should say, advocating for some sort of relationship with communist China.

 

The American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers, the UN association of the United States, League of Women Voters, the American Chamber of Commerce and several notable academics, notably Robert Scalapino, John King Fairbank, Alexander Eckstein, Doak Barnett, Allen Whiting, Lucian Pai and others were all instrumental in the 60s we're talking about now here in advocating for some olive branches, some opening to China.

 

So there was grassroots mobilization and this resulted in the formation of three important non governmental bodies that were created by these individuals I just named at the time the National Committee on US China Relations, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, and the National Council on US China Trade, now called the US China Business Council.

 

These three institutions were critical in the 1970s in the lead up to normalization and then they remain critical in the post normalization period. So Nixon's President, Nixon's bold gambit to Beijing in 1971, 72 was in fact pushing on an increasingly open door in US Society Even Nixon premised his opening to China on the notion of changing China.

 

There's a quote from his article in 1967 in Foreign affairs, the world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change, unquote. That's President Nixon. So you get the through theme of this book to change China.

 

Okay, with that thematic context, let me get an eye on the clock. Let me really briefly discuss how the book unfolds. And there you can digest that. You can look at that slide while I say a few words about it. I'm not going to go into all of it, but this is the table of contents I've already essentially discussed chapters one through four.

 

The preface discusses my own personal experience of living through and participating in the engagement and the disengagement process. My own life and career has very much personified this broader country to country story that I tell in the book. There may also be some surprises for readers, like how I might have saved President Reagan's life from a possible assassination attempt during his state visit to China in 1984.

 

Let me just tease you with that. But there's a real story there, real empirical story. Chapter four of the book. Maybe an incentive to go to the back and buy a copy at the end or. But the entire second half of the book examines the period from 2017 to today.

 

First half is more historical, second half more recent, last decade. Chapter five examines the Trump first Trump and Biden administrations and how engagement turned to a policy of comprehensive disengagement and strategic competition. Chapter six looks what I call inside the Beltway at how three key governmental actors have abandoned engagement and have joined the Counter China Coalition Executive branch departments, the Congress and the National Security community, which is made up of the US Military and the intelligence and counterintelligence communities.

 

So that's chapter six, the Washington part of the story. Chapter seven is outside the Beltway, outside of Washington part of the story. Very long chapter, 20,000 word long chapter because it's a big country with a lot of actors who are involved in engagement. So I look at all these non governmental actors in the American body politic, beginning with notably with a discussion of the MAGA movement, how China is viewed by that constituency.

 

And then it proceeds through four key actors, American NGOs, American universities, American business community and American states. And I show in detail in each case how each has been negatively impacted by and alienated from China, hence losing America. So the Chinese alienated the national government Washington, and they've alienated the society outside of Washington.

 

So time doesn't suffice to go into this, these two chapters and the various actors, but I'd be happy to discuss any of them you may like in the question and answer period. Chapter 8, Quickly is about what I call the great American China policy debate of recent years, which is still ongoing.

 

It's not over. There's an earlier in chapter one I talk about the did engagement fail? Debate, which was more finite from 2017-19. But this chapter 8 is about the post 2018 to the present debate about American China policy. Where should it go? Well, needless to say, Americans are not of one view, and I try to parse the debate and the debaters by putting them into one of five schools of thought.

 

Let me briefly describe them for you. Yeah, there they are. First is the what I call the stealthy rival school. The idea for them is that China has a secret grand strategy to undermine, overtake and replace the United States as the world's principal power. For this school, all the dots of China's domestic and global power.

 

Behavior connect and they point to a regime doing its best to undermine the United States and the global liberal order. That's the first school. Second school I distinguish is what I call the Comprehensive Competition school, which is a loose coalition of those who argue that the US is locked into a series of essentially zero sum competitive relationships and different functional spheres.

 

Security, diplomacy, commerce, technology and innovation, higher education, domestic politics and ideology, global governance and other areas and that the United States should go on the offense in each of these spheres, push back against and resist China while advancing American national interests. This is the Comprehensive Competition school. Third school I identify as what I call the RE Engagement School.

 

The those who argue that the United States simply needs to get back to the old engagement strategy. They should should never have abandoned it under Trump and Biden in the first place. The old strategy still serves the US well, that China is not an adversary or even a competitor of the United States and the US needs to kind of take a deep breath, re extend the hand to Beijing and re engage with the Chinese side.

 

That's the reengagement school. Then there is a group I call the Strategic Empathy School, which is a slight variant on the RE Engagement school. But those who think that China is only reacting to assertive and aggression aggressive American actions and that the US Needs to better understand China's insecurities, not provoke them, do not demonize them, but rather be strategically empathetic.

 

So that's school number four. And then lastly there's what I call the Managed Competition School who believe and argue that competing against China and protecting American national interests must be pursued and assertively so. However, at the same time they argue that they believe that a series of guardrails, buffers, off ramps and dialogue mechanisms are necessary, some resurrected from Cold War 1.0 during the detente phase with the Soviet Union, look back in the toolbox from that period and see there are some useful guardrails, dialogue mechanisms, other things that can be reactivated, you might say, need to be constructed in order to manage the competition so that a full blown adversarial relationship or war to do not result.

 

That's the fifth school. Okay, final chapter offers my own prescriptions for the future. If I decide to put my own cards on the table and let the reader know, where does Shambaugh stand? Okay, well, I lay it out in chapter nine and for a future American China strategy and policies.

 

And I proceed from my premises that the US China relationship is in my view now characterized indefinite comprehensive competitive rivalry, which makes for a very bad acronym, ICHIR or something Indefinite comprehensive competitive rivalry, intrinsically competitive, comprehensive in scope, a classic great power rivalry and indefinite and temporal nature.

 

It will be with us folks for a very long time. So that's how I see the relationship. As such, my own preference is the United States should go on the offense in assertively competing with China in various spheres, but to manage the competition as to establish a relationship of what I call competitive coexistence.

 

I actually have intellectual property rights on that term. I used it first in an article 10 years ago. It's now kind of seeped its way into common parlance. But competitive coexistence. So my policy is assertive competition and competitive coexistence. And it has a number of elements which, you know, Larry, we can talk about this afterwards if you like.

 

Maybe we should, just for the sake of time, if people are interested for me to unpack my assertive competition competitive coexistence strategy, be happy to do so. So let me just wrap up and finish. Finally, there is an appendix in the book, really a separate chapter that flips the script, you might say, and examines how China's America Watchers subject about which I wrote my PhD dissertation back many decades ago at the University of Michigan.

 

China. So I've been watching their watchers for a long time. So, and this is what I was doing across the way last year, going trawling through, taking a detailed trawl through an unprecedented set of domestic Chinese internal publications, many of which are nebu about their understanding of the engagement policy in the first place and their own explanations to each other about why the Americans why the relationship has deteriorated and why the engagement policy has fallen apart on the American side.

 

And I found in fact that these so called America watchers or America specialists, you can watch without being a specialist. I found an abysmal and shocking intelligence failure on China's on the part of these individuals who were supposedly the best China had they totally failed to anticipate and understand the significant shifts occurring in American society, government and thinking about China during the Obama years prior to the shift in policy under Trump.

 

Okay, so it asks the basic question, this appendix has there been a who lost America debate in China? And if so, if or if not, why not? Does the Chinese side in fact believe that China bears any responsibility for the profound shift in American attitudes and policies and the disintegration of engagement?

 

Well, the short answer, in short, is a resounding no. China. These America watchers and the people who participate in this discourse in China accept zero blame for the deterioration of the relationship over the last decade, and they believe and there has been no who lost America debate. Therefore, as far as they're concerned, the deterioration of the relationship over the last eight to 10 years is 100% the fault of the American side.

 

So I think this book would it would behoove the Chinese side to read this book to better understand the profound changes in American policies and perspectives and China's own agency and role therein. But I'm hardly anticipating a Chinese translation of the book. But anyway, that's a summary of the book.

 

Hopefully it gives you incentive to perhaps order or buy a copy. Christmas is not that far away, makes a great gift for your loved ones. But first, let me please invite my great colleague and good friend, Elizabeth Economy. Liz is one of the few people, maybe three people, who've actually read the manuscript, and I welcome Liz's views about it.

 

So thank you very much for your time.

>> Larry Diamond: Well, thank you for that stirring overview of the book and the intellectual and analytical challenges you posed. And we'll turn to Elizabeth Economy now to offer some reflections. We'll have a bit of conversation. And then we'll turn to our colleagues in the audience.

 

 

>> Elizabeth Economy: Great, thanks so much, Larry and David. Thank you. Let me just begin by putting everyone's mind at ease. David has in fact written a great book. If it wasn't evident by his terrific presentation, I can assure you the book is well worth purchasing. And I do want to point out, because he just told me this yesterday, that his wife helped design this really beautiful cover, so.

 

Which I commented on. Anyway, why do I say David's written a great book? I think it's analytically rigorous. He offers a fresh perspective and a distinctive argument and it is really engagingly written. And that in this day and age is not that easy to do. We are flooded by noise and news and commentary opinion on China and on the US China competition.

 

Some of it is informed and some of it is not so informed, as David points out in a later chapter of the book. But it's easy, I think, to lose yourself in the day to day press of events and not expend the time and energy to ground yourself in real scholarship.

 

But that is what David has done and he's cut through the noise and really produced a deeply researched study that is grounded in facts and informal analysis. I think the book is both of the moment in the sense that it is relevant to policymakers and business leaders and really anybody who wants to understand where this relationship is today and how we got here.

 

And it's also a contribution, additive, truly additive, I think, to the serious literature and scholarship on China. The book is actually, I would argue, two books in one. And I think some of that came through in David's presentation. But the first book of some sense is really a very richly detailed history of the US approach to China.

 

And I think, you know, he talked about the deep roots of this sort of missionary impulse in the United States to change China and then the ongoing battle between the containment and the engagement narratives. Other books certainly have, have talked about this history, have, have done beautiful jobs.

 

Warren Cohen, John Pomfret's book, the Beautiful country in the Middle Kingdom, also a terrific book that deals with the history of this relationship. But what David does differently is really elevate, I think, and offer a lot of examples, both in terms of quotations, but also sort of historical moments that really elevate the continuities throughout history in terms of the US approach.

 

And he does that actually both on the US and the Chinese side. I think it didn't come through as clearly, maybe in the presentation that the book is more equally weighted in terms of the discussions. It's not simply the US approach, but there's a lot about how the Chinese respond at each point to what the United States is trying to do.

 

As I read the book, I had the sense of a dance, actually between the United States and China and the dance in which the United States is most often leading with China following. And at some points the two are perfectly in sync. But at other times, the United States comes on too strong and China pushes back.

 

And then the US Feels rejected. And this, in some respect, I think, describes what David calls this oscillating pattern of engagement, disillusionment, and then reengagement. Interestingly, David and I thought it was funny at the very end how you talked about the appendix and the views of Chinese scholars and how you thought that probably your book wouldn't resonate.

 

But I had a different opinion, and maybe I found the one Chinese scholar and quotation that actually, I think if you superimposed it on, your book, would fit perfectly. And that's a quotation by Wang Yisu from an interview that he did. I think it was in 2018 in the financial Times.

 

And I'm just going to read it to you and you can tell me later whether you agree or not. Here's what he says. For over 200 years, the US has never changed its strategic goal for its relationship with China. Free flow of goods and capital and free flow of information and values.

 

Chinese have always had reservations or imposed boycotts to oppose these two goals. We should criticize and have reason to criticize the US, United States. But we should realize China's own actions have changed Sino, US relations and US perceptions of China. Here he's speaking about the Xi Jinping period.

 

If we are looking for the cause, it was the change in China's policy that led to adjustments in U.S. policy. U.S. policy has changed because China changed. So I offer that up as one counterpoint, I think, to otherwise, I think a really fascinating last chapter/appendix, where you talk about Chinese views.

 

Then the second part of your book, as you described, is really just a terrific exposition of all the actors and interests and debates that are shaping U.S. policy. How the Chinese respond, and then that sort of disillusionment that follows. So that also has that element of a dance.

 

And then finally, I think what makes this book so distinctive and special is really the storytelling. And you do offer a lot of personal observations from a lifetime of engagement. In the best sense, your experiences, both in terms of how it affected you, but also your contributions to that process as a student, as a scholar and as somebody involved in the policy world.

 

And for those of you that know David, I can assure you that his tendency not to mince words is very present in this book as well. And so there are a number of parts that actually made me laugh aloud where you're sort of critical about various ideas and some think tanks and other things.

 

Anyway, it's a personal account that I think really elevates the book. I'm left, I think, with a couple of questions, and I'll just put them out there and maybe you can address them in the course of the broader conversation. I think I wonder how you see the inevitability of conflict.

 

I think one of the things that struck me initially was that this book was so much more than an effort by Graham Allison or Mearsheimer and that sort of structural realist analysis. But there is that inevitability of conflict that both of them see. And it's more than a sort of Matt Pottinger and Rush Doshi.

 

Ideological conflict makes all of this inevitable. But there are some elements of all of this in your book, and I'm wondering how do you position yourself not so much in the schools of thought that you put out there, but in terms of the literature, how do you think of this book positioned against these other kinds of arguments?

 

And then is this an opportunity now for re engagement? I know at the end you sort of said this period is going to be long. This sort of we're in for this long period of conflict and sort of, I think, basically strategic decoupling, although you don't use that term.

 

But when I look at President Trump and I think about this administration, one of the things that's clear is he does not possess this impulse to change China, neither in terms of the liberalization politically of China, nor in terms of bringing China into the system of international institutions, regimes and norms.

 

And so what does that mean for this relationship, this oscillating pattern? Is this something new? And how do you or how would you account for this? And what might this produce in terms of a difference in the US China relationship moving forward? So I'll end there. But just again, congratulations on a really, just terrific book.

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Thank you, Liz. Thank you very much.

>> Larry Diamond: Why don't you reply, and then I'd like to ask you both a question.

>> Speaker 2: Okay. So on your second question, Liz, I think that President Trump himself is an aberration from all these previous presidents who did have a transformational vision of China to some extent.

 

But the transformational vision is apparent to me in his administration, particularly Secretary of State Rubio. And he has a long track record and a distinguished one, I would argue. In fact, I would go so far as to say there was no member of Congress on either the House or the Senate who had a better, more granular understanding of China than Marco Rubio during his service.

 

He, he gets it. He's done his time. His fingernails in the garden, China, garden are dirty. He has worked hard to educate himself. And he's a hawk. Absolutely. But he has a transformation, transformative vision. He starts with the political system. But anyway, from what we can tell, and believe me, some of the tactics that he is using are inexcusable and inappropriate.

 

But, you know, I think we see snippets. The Trump administrations. I didn't really want to talk about that because I don't like to speculate about what hasn't already occurred. I'm not a pundit, I'm a scholar. Scholars look backwards in time.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Ouch. David. Okay, then.

>> Speaker 2: Forward in time.

 

But no punditry is, well, what's going to happen tomorrow on the US China relationship? Which is not what you're asking, but I think there are deeper forces than the president himself, and we saw during the first Trump administration those forces. Matt Pottinger in particular, captured China policy and drove it along with others.

 

And I give Matt great credit, in fact, for what he did. And I discuss his role extensively in the book. So it's too early to say. I think in this Trump 2.0, where they're going and you see a kind of tension, you see tensions apparent, but it's too early.

 

That's your second question. First question, had to do. Where do I locate myself?

>> Elizabeth Economy: Yeah, in the Graham Allison and Mearsheimer, Rushdoshi, Matt Potter, how do you see in terms of the inevitability of conflict? Do you feel that there's inevitable inevitability of conflict? And how would you position your book sort of in the literature?

 

What's your, what's your model? What's your frame for how you approach. This

>> Speaker 2: well, if by conflict you mean war, that's a question.

>> Elizabeth Economy: No, I don't mean war necessarily.

>> Speaker 2: Well, I would say conflict is war,

>> Elizabeth Economy: okay,

>> Speaker 2: as opposed to competition or an adversarial relationship is different.

 

So I don't see an inevitability of war. So I don't agree with Allison's book. You know, I've looked at his 14 cases carefully. This is interesting. So I don't associate with that perspective. And I don't. Over time, I have to say I have come to appreciate and associate myself with Mearsheimer more and more.

 

When he first came out with his Tragedy of Great Powers book, I was in the audience at the Wilson Center. I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. But I have to say, the more I've listened to him, and I think he was prescient and I think he's a careful scholar.

 

It's structural argument. The problems in U.S. China relations are structural. They're ideological and they're embedded culturally too. So third question is about. The third element is agency to avoid conflict. I am not a determinist. I think that this relationship and both societies have the responsibility, big responsibility, and they have the agency to pull back and to construct, as I say, various mechanisms to manage the competition.

 

So that's where I am in my five schools. I'm a member of the comprehensive competition school and the managed competition school, if you wonder. So I think that we are. There's nothing inevitable about the competition. It doesn't going to result in conflict, even over Taiwan. There are other actors besides Washington and Beijing there.

 

So I'm not a determinist. And I think with some smart people and patience, we can kind of find some more temporary equilibrium before it reverts to the mean. We'll see.

>> Larry Diamond: Okay, I'd like to ask you, David, a couple of historical questions, one personal, to which I hope you can give relatively short answers so I can pose a bigger question to both of you.

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Sure.

>> Larry Diamond: A lot of people think, and you quote our own director of the Hoover Institution as saying she thinks that our policy of engagement was not naive and not a mistake. It was worth a try. Right? It was a bet, it was a gamble, it could have gone either way.

 

And this kind of relates to the bigger question I want to ask. You know, if Chinese politics had gone a different way, the bet might have worked out better. It just didn't work out. I don't think that's Mearsheimer's view. I think his view is this was really bloody naive and wrong from the start, and we could have.

 

So is there any distance between you and Mearsheimer in that respect?

>> Speaker 2: Absolutely, yes. And I should have mentioned one other person, Aaron Friedberg. I associate myself with Friedberg's analysis, too, more than Mearsheimer. And you're quite right, Larry. So I see agency. I agree with Condi. You know, it was not.

 

This was a good strategy. It was for various reasons. And it simply didn't go the way the American side had anticipated or hoped. It's the Chinese side after Xi Jinping that broke the engagement. So that addresses the question.

>> Larry Diamond: Yeah,

>> Speaker 2: yeah, okay.

>> Larry Diamond: It does. Now, a little bit more personal question that reflects on today.

 

36 years ago in the bloody streets of Tiananmen Square was one of the, I think everyone would agree in this room, one of the most important historical events in the history of modern China and one of the saddest days, if not the saddest day of. In maybe the post cultural revolution history of.

 

Of contemporary China. By the spring of 1989, you'd spent a fair amount of time in China. You'd worked under the late, great Michael Oxenberg, who had worked under Jimmy Carter and Big Brzezinski to establish diplomatic relations with China and had his own, I'd say, very idealistic views about where this could lead.

 

Left a deep imprint on many of us. I assume, then you were probably watching this on TV while you were a graduate student at SAIS. Just reflect on that. And how it affected you personally and what you were thinking then and how you reflect back on it now.

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Well, first, I remember one year ago today, sitting in the Stouffer Auditorium with a wonderful session that you organized with Perry Link and others to commemorate this tragic event. So I was, in fact, living in London, England at the time. I was my first position at SOAS.

 

It was my second year there. And watching this on television in the UK and being on television, I had never been on television before that period, but I found myself living in TV studios for six weeks trying to interpret what was going to happen and this and that.

 

But I remember going in the June 5th to the BBC and it was very, just sadness and tragedy was my emotion, personal emotion. Did I expect that? Well, the troops had been ordered in in the previous week, so we knew, you know, that was not the first time.

 

But, you know, there's some. I was not surprised by the Leninist response of Deng Xiaoping and using force to suppress this. These demonstrations, I have to say. And I said so at the time because I think Deng saw a repeat of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards right there in the same place in Tiananmen Square, and that the regime, he saw it in regime survival terms.

 

And it was an existential, politically existential crisis for him and the Chinese Communist Party. And he did not opt for the Jiaozi approach to talk to the students, and he finally opted for the coercive approach. So, you know, what can one say? But it wasn't a great shock.

 

Many people were shocked. No, I get it. CCP had been through four decades of brutal repression of their society prior, and this wasn't the first time the PLA had killed Chinese. So, no, it was not a big surprise to me. I was in fact, anyway, that was, as I recall, how I felt.

 

And then I went. I was dispatched four, three, four weeks later by the British Academy to assess the. I was on the British Academy's exchange board with China Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. So I was sent over in three weeks to see if there was.

 

What the situation was, could there be exchanges continued. Well, Academy of Social Sciences was literally occupied by the pla and everybody was traumatized. Martial law was in place. And then my wife and I went back and lived there for the subsequent six months. So, you know, that was not a good time.

 

Very interesting, though. The British decided I came back. I said, well, look, this is not a good environment for exchanges. But they wanted to keep the Door open. Very interesting lesson I learned. The British were not as sort of punitive as Americans wanted to be. We wanted to just slap them down and shame them and castigate them as they deserved.

 

But the British and the Europeans on the continent, interestingly, I learned, because I was very involved with the Commission, European Commission and others, Europeans had a different reaction to Tiananmen, even though they had the same transformative change China approach. So it's kind of interesting for me as an American to kind of experience Tiananmen in Europe.

 

 

>> Larry Diamond: Okay, now, a major theme of your book, I think, is the interaction between the internal politics of China and the relationship between China and the United States. And on the second to the last page of your book, I'd say book proper. Before the appendix, you write that essentially engagement with a capital E is finished.

 

The strategy and policies around it, maybe some modalities will continue. And then you continue with a very interesting caveat, after. The suspicions and frictions in the relationship now run too deep and are so comprehensive that the original premises of engagement are outdated. And then there's a dash and a famous David Shambaugh italicization.

 

And it says, unless the CCP and PRC return to a more reformist and liberal mode of governance characteristic of the pre Xi era. So I'd like to ask you both to reflect first you, David, then Liz, on that interaction and what you see. You complain a lot about Wang Qi Si in particular, but also kind of the intellectual and foreign policy establishment in China now.

 

But there are a lot of Chinese we're engaging. I won't go into details. I'll just say that generally who don't share that view and do not blame the US exclusively or even primarily for the deterioration in the relationship. So think about where China is internally, but more so where it could go depending on one direction or another and how that might affect the relationship.

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Well, good question, Larry. And that's one response is the reason I use the term liberalization and distinguished, distinguished it from democratization. That was very conscious because the Americans there are those who wanted the democratization of China. I don't think that has ever been the American government's real goal.

 

Come on, let's be real about this. But liberalization, civil society, all the elements that we saw appear in the 80s and then after the tenement hiatus beginning in 1995 under Jiang Zemin, all the way through to 2010, that's when things changed. As I say, 2010, those were 14 years of creeping liberalization.

 

Still under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. So as long as the Chinese were liberalizing politically, allowing those sorts of elements of civil society, media, rule of law, then the Americans can work with that regime. An engagement with a capital E, which is with the regime, engagement with a small E.

 

You're quite right. It's between the two societies. So these aren't mutually exclusive. I'm glad you posed the question. And I just want to be clear here that we need to have small E engagement. Absolutely. And we need dialogues, we need various connectivity between our two societies. That's the best way to prevent a Graham Allison kind kind of outcome.

 

So, and many Chinese, you're also quite right that we know blame their side. They can't have an open who lost America debate because of their censored system. But I've had personal conversations with, including one year ago now in Beijing with people who blame behind closed doors, Xi Jinping for their role in the deterioration of the relationship.

 

So I don't know if that addresses your question. I'd be very interested in Liz.

>> Larry Diamond: Liz does.

>> Speaker 2: And let's see how Liz will address it.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I mean, I think I agree with David, maybe with the exception of the fact that I think there probably was more of a desire and a belief that China could become a democracy than maybe you give it credit for, I think that modernization theory element of it.

 

What we saw ultimately what happened with South Korea, what happened with Taiwan. I think there was a sense that why not China? There were discussions about not necessarily China enveloping Hong Kong, but maybe Hong Kong would become the model for China. That was a while ago, of course.

 

I think if you look back to that 2008, 2009, even 2010 period, you saw in China an incredibly vibrant civil society, right? An Internet that was alive with protests. You had entrepreneurs and human rights lawyers and scholars meeting in these salons to talk about the future of democracy in China.

 

You had, you know, a big entrepreneur taking a group of other entrepreneurs to Taiwan to show them what a Chinese democracy could look like. I think there was a lot of. And you had, what was it? The count, I think in 2010 was 180,000 protests in China around issues like the environment and pensions and other things.

 

And so to my mind, let me just point out too, you had individuals beginning to run that were not affiliated with the party running for election. Right, and so at the local level. And now, of course, they ran into some trouble sometimes. But nonetheless, I think overall, directionally, I think there was a sense of hope, one might say, that China was on this trajectory.

 

And for me, it didn't really end until Xi Jinping. And I know you dated to 2010. I think I can still look back and see a lot of dynamism in China's political, you know, in its polity, even at that point. But for me, it was really Xi Jinping and then the crackdown on, you know, from the minute he took power, on the newspapers, changing the editorials, so there was no mention of the future of political reform.

 

So, you know, in any case, I. So I'm always of a mind, even today that, you know, it's really difficult, you know this, I know this, journalists know this, that we don't have the eyes in China that we used to. We don't have the access we used to.

 

It's much harder to see the kind of dissent you don't have. 180,000 protests on the street, 50,000 people marching for the environment. You don't have that now in the same way, but those differences of opinion still exist. Right, and so just because what we have access to seems so much more constrained and limited, and it doesn't mean that there aren't as many opinions, different opinions inside China as there are in the United States.

 

And I think some of the small scale research that people like Jennifer Pan does here, like on urban middle class Chinese suggests that there is still a desire within the middle class of China for. And maybe this is the liberalization as opposed to democracy, but the liberalization of the political system.

 

They want the rule of law, they want the ability to assemble, they want free speech. So all of those things come through in some of these surveys, however limited they are. So I think, for sure, it's important to continue to try to engage. It is incredibly difficult, and we can't do it in the way that we used to.

 

We simply can't. You know, the law in 2017 on management of foreign NGOs, literally, you know, cut the number of NGOs, foreign NGOs working in China from over 7,000 to under 500. So there's just not that opportunity to engage in the same way and not the opportunity for business, to do business in China in the same way.

 

But again, it doesn't mean that we can't, and we shouldn't remain open to it, and we shouldn't foster cooperation and collaboration wherever we can.

>> Speaker 2: One small addendum, if I could, Larry. Students or scholars of Chinese politics are familiar with what's known as the Fung Shou cycle, Fung shou Jyoti.

 

Fang is for open, shou is for close, and Chinese, this is coined by former UCLA professor Richard Baum, and if I'm not mistaken, and argues that Chinese politics has since done. Has oscillated back and forth between fong and show, usually and it's Warren Cohen who actually counted this, if I recall correctly, seven years of fun.

 

Then there's a kind of catharsis pullback for usually one to two years of show, followed by six or seven more years of fong, then one or two of show. And this has been a repetitive process since the 1980s. So unfortunately, right now we are in year 13 of show.

 

China's overdue for a lot of fun and there are a lot of people inside the party, not just in the civil society, who, so if Xi Jinping slips in the bathtub or whatever disappears from the scene tomorrow, I will wager that the party will snap back to Fang.

 

 

>> Larry Diamond: Interesting, any questions from our audience, Peter? We'll start with Peter Michelson.

>> Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you. Earlier, you mentioned Secretary Rubio and his deep understanding, I think, of the US China relationship. But you were also referred to tactically, you had some issues with his approach, does that include, for example, student visas of Chinese students in the United States?

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Yes, I think that is very mistaken, very inappropriate. Mistaken. And

>> Larry Diamond: that is the banner cancellation on the visas?

>> Speaker 2: Well, both. I mean it's unclear what his policy on the visas exactly is. He's we're gonna aggressively enforce. What does that mean, first of all. But no, I believe in the our American open door policy in educational exchanges.

 

That's one of our greatest soft power assets as a society. We have the wherewithal to monitor espionage in our society and on our campuses. So you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater with that sort of ban, knee jerk, it's just really unproductive and silly. I oppose that.

 

 

>> Larry Diamond: Next.

>> Speaker 5: Thank you, David. I look forward to reading the book. Point I wanna make the beginning. I absolutely agree that the downturn, the difficulties arise from Chinese decisions and actions, I would date it slightly earlier than 2010, but from a Chinese perspective it was beginning to look a lot like 1988, 89, 2009.

 

And part of that was the black hand of the United States intervening and exploiting vulnerabilities inherent in connections which come about because of engagement. Where I'd like a little more comment and maybe differ is the elaborateness of the engagement strategy and its tactics and so forth. As you laid having been one of the people in the room going back to 74.

 

We thought about this not as a special way of dealing with China. This was the way we deal with countries and big objectives, US Security, commercial opportunity and open China to the corrosive and positive effects of interacting with American society. It's the missionary zeal kind of writ large.

 

And the policy was one basically of opening China after we had dealt with. This is the peak of the Cold War. Soviet power at its apex didn't do so bad in terms of dealing with the American security dimension to it. Until that time, China had been completely closed to commerce.

 

It was open. US Government didn't do much except remove containment like restriction. But it said go ahead. The same for civil society in there. And Oxenberg's build as many ties contexts as possible as a way of buttressing the relationship so they wouldn't all go bad at the same time.

 

And that was a very persuasive argument to us. It scared the bejesus out of the Chinese as one of the ones doing talking with them. What we thought strengthened the relationship, what we thought stabilized the relationship, they saw as building in levers for the United States to bring about.

 

Absolutely agree with you. This peaceful transformation thing that, that they have, along with the inevitability of conflict that really does drive and the unleashing of the American private sector basically to do its thing. That's the implementation strategy of engagement. So a lot of the other things are post hoc.

 

How do we explain these things that come out? They must have had a purpose. Making money, establishing contacts, working together with 1/7 of mankind to tackle a lot of problems. That was the driver. How do you explain it afterwards? How do you raise funding to do it? You're going to do all these nice things.

 

The final comment, and it's picked up on Liz, the Taiwan example, South Korea example, important to remember they had not happened yet. When engagement, what became known as engagement, was hammered out. We just had Kwangju. The Taiwan had suspended the elections. It's a decade later. So getting the chronology right here.

 

When talking about. I know you have it right, but when talking about what was known, what were the priorities of the objectives. And this was fundamentally a Cold War strategy in my view.

>> Larry Diamond: We're running, running out of time.

>> Speaker 5: And the point you both made is we can't go back to policies developed for a different time.

 

When the world is different, China is different, we're different. But thanks for working the issue in. This book.

>> Larry Diamond: And any reaction?

>> Speaker 2: Not really. I thank you, Tom, for the observations. Was it John Maynard Keynes who said when the Facts change. I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

 

Well, some people in this country, the RE Engagement School, I call them, who haven't changed their minds even though the facts have changed. But I agree with you tomorrow about the chronology and so on. So, yes, very helpful

>> Larry Diamond: in the back.

>> Speaker 6: Hi, Oriana, Moscow, Stanford how's it going?

 

I have a question about kind of a counterfactual for you. You started your presentation. I read the sections of the book in which you talked about the independent dependent variables being US Expectations, then Chinese behavior. I don't have the quote in front of me the way Liz had it from Wang Jisi, but there was this quote from Yen Xue Tong who said the problem was US expectations.

 

We could converge our expectations in Chinese behavior if we had accepted very early on that competition was the natural state of our relationship. So I guess what I'm asking you is if you had the typology and your variable varied and it wasn't only US Expectation of liberalization, but is a strategic way forward a sort of US Acceptance of could we do it in a different way, that strategic competition, if we had accepted that earlier on we could actually have a more peaceful relationship.

 

And along those lines, I was very surprised. In your appendix you talked about how no Chinese think it's their fault. And I completely agree with you on that. But if the argument of the book is that we could only get along if they met our expectations of how they were going to be, which they were never going to be that way, aren't the Chinese right for thinking that there was nothing they could do to win America?

 

 

>> Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Orianna. Yes, I think in large part they are right because our expectations have been relatively constant. And again, when they were in a reformist liberalizing periods and trajectory, they converged with our expectations. Our expectations have been pretty constant. They're the ones who fluctuated in their policies from Fong to show.

 

So, you know, maybe if you're asking should the Americans have had those expectations in the first place? That's a, that's a separate question that I tried to address. Some would say those are naive, you know, you know, it's hubristic American, you know, intoxication with itself. I mean, there are validation critiques of the American expectations, but I take those as an empirical fact.

 

The expectations across governments, and I show from one in eight administrations how presidents and they all have it. So the argument that Ian Johnston and others have made that engagement was not a continuity or was not a continuous policy. Sorry, Engagement to change China was not a continuous policy.

 

Wrong. He didn't dig deep enough.

>> Elizabeth Economy: David, can I just say, I think the expectations remain constant, but I think, as your book shows, there is an oscillation between the containment and the engagement parts of this. Right, and those two different policy approaches could yield different policy results coming out of China, right?

 

So, I mean, even though the expectations remain constant, when we change the way that we try to realize our objectives, that can elicit different responses from China. To Orianna's point, I think we do things differently at different points in time. And the question then becomes, is the Chinese response different as well to those different, you know, policies to realize our objectives?

 

 

>> Speaker 2: That's where J Ross Brown and Burlingame come.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Right.

>> Speaker 2: You know, coercive policies are not going to produce cooperation from the Chinese side yet when we have more cooperative policies, they see it as subversive, too. So we Americans can't win.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay.

>> Speaker 2: Right.

>> Larry Diamond: So maybe we can.

 

I'm sorry, we need to close. So I want to give David the last word and offer my own opinion in the process of doing so.

>> Speaker 2: Please.

>> Larry Diamond: I think. I think it's not difficult to argue that modernization theory as applied to China was pretty well correct, which is why you saw the explosion of civil society, the growth of more liberal aspirations, the possibilities for change, and then this turning point moment where Xi Jinping came in and said, either I'm going to crack down, or, you know, thinking about your 2015 article, maybe this explains their explosive reaction to the title, the Coming Crack up of the ccp or however it was phrased by the Wall Street Journal.

 

So I want to pose this challenge by linking today's remarkable event on your book with yesterday's remarkable event on Joseph Turigian's new book, the Party's Interest come first, the life of Xi Zhongshun, father of Xi Jinping. And Joseph referred there to some concern of Xi the father, which maybe ran through the Party, moreover, that you cannot lose the younger generation, okay?

 

And so it's very clear now that one of the things that Xi Jinping has embarked upon, maybe with the fingers in the dike to hold back modernization theory, is a propaganda and mobilization campaign for the younger generation. So if, you know, competitive coexistence, which many people here, including me, would be more likely to term strategic competition, is not to kind of become a fait accompli of a path, you know, more in the direction of the worst case scenario.

 

What can we do to engage and kind of, in a way, reclaim the imagination of young Chinese?

>> Speaker 2: Interesting. Great question. We can, as I say, throw the baby out with the bathwater and ban young Chinese from coming to our society. And their side needs to permit, and our side needs to permit American students to go to China.

 

But your question, how do we. I think that's exactly what Xi Jinping has been doing. And it comes out of the reasons that Joseph elaborated yesterday in his book and lessons he learned in his life and dong was worried about in the 80s. It's the young generation who are susceptible to liberalization and are to be watched and brainwashed.

 

And so this, you know, this is a. It's kind of a subversive. He has subversive elements within his own society in generational terms, he thinks. And going back to 28, 9, 10, he probably saw all these things taking place in society, the, the demonstrations every year, a lot of things spinning out of control.

 

And at the end of the day or in the morning, he wakes up and he thinks about the Sulian Bun Kuen, the Soviet collapse. This is just ever present in his mind. And he's trying to prevent the collapse or the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party. So he's using a certain tact.

 

But so was Deng, so was Jiang Zemin, so was Hu Jintao. But they were using different tactics to save the party. And far be it for me to tell them what tactics are better or worse. But anyway, here we are where we are. But we have to figure.

 

I'll just finish on this note. I tell my students, US China relationship as bad as it gets, like a bad marriage where divorce is not an option. We have to figure out a way to coexist because war over Taiwan to begin with, if not more broadly in the Indo Pacific theater is a possibility and would be absolutely catastrophic.

 

So we've got to figure out a way that various mechanisms to remain, I'm not going to say engaged because I don't like that to talk hotlines this, that and the other thing. But, you know, we cannot just decouple and cut off. This is not in our national interest and it's not feasible either.

 

 

>> Larry Diamond: Okay. Well, please join me first in thanking Elizabeth Economy and most of all, David Shambaugh.