 Good afternoon and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz. I'm our Senior Vice President for External Relations here and I am absolutely thrilled and honored to be hosting this book event for one of my favorite reporters in town, Jeff Dyer. Jeff, as you know, is a senior foreign affairs reporter for the Financial Times, which, you know, I don't know about you all, but every day I've got three newspapers on my desk. One of them is the Financial Times and that's what I start with. Second is the New York Times. The third is the Wall Street Journal and I read the post online, but if you really want to know what's going on in the world, you need to read the Financial Times and if you really want to know what's going on in foreign policy in Washington, you need to read Jeff Dyer. This is a fantastic book and I hope all of you will buy several copies after the event. Jeff will be happy to sign them. We're right here and now we can sign it. If you buy more than one book, we can push Jeff to the best seller list on the New York Times, so just think about that. They're great gifts. Chris Johnson is our Chairman, Freeman Chair in China Studies. Chris is one of the great experts in the world on China and you know, I know this because he gets to brief a guy named Henry Kissinger every once in a while. In addition, Chris has really led us into a whole new territory of China Studies and we're really grateful for that. We're grateful for you being here. This event will also be posted on our website after the fact. If you'd like to refer back to it, the video will be up and again, thanks for coming to CSIS and with that, I'm going to give it to my colleague Chris Johnson who's going to begin the discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you Andrew. Appreciate it. And thank you all for coming. It's fantastic to be here. We're really excited to have the opportunity to host Jeff and have him kind of give us some insight on his book and what he's thinking. Ask him a few questions then obviously we want to hear from the audience as well and have a good dialogue with you guys. Let's get the boring bio stuff out of the way. Jeff's worked for the Financial Times for over a decade in China, Brazil, the UK and now the US. He was the FT's Bureau Chief in Beijing from 2008 to 2011, following three years working for the paper in Shanghai. He has also been the paper's Brazil Bureau Chief and covered the healthcare industry where he wrote extensively about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Asia. He recently took up a position in the DC Bureau writing about American foreign policy, studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University and at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna and Washington DC where he was supported by a Fulbright award. Jeff is also a great personal friend of mine. I deal with him on a regular basis. I find him to be one of the best journalists here in town or anywhere else to be dealing with. Let me just say a few quick words and then Jeff's going to provide us some overview about the book, The Contest of the Century, available as Andrew said outside. You know, I love this book as sort of a corollary or the second half to a book that his colleague Richard McGregor wrote a couple years ago called The Party, which looked at the internal side of the Chinese sort of system and reminded us all that in the same way that Bill Clinton once said it's the economy stupid, in China it's the party stupid. And I think we're seeing this very, very clearly under Xi Jinping and the rest of the new Chinese leadership. And I think what Jeff has tried to do with the book is provide us with a similar look at the sort of foreign policy strategy from the Chinese point of view and also what this means for the Sino-U.S. relationship. And I particularly value the book because it is both written in a very approachable, almost breezy journalistic style, but also has really deep substantive content and research. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Jeff. He's going to give some opening remarks. I'll ask him a few questions and then we'll throw it open to you and the audience to continue the discussion. Jeff, please. Well, Chris, thank you very much and thank you very much, Andrew, for that embarrassing introduction. I really appreciate it and thank you very much for CSAS for having me here today. It's both funny and a little bit intimidating to be here today. The funny part is that when I first started to think about this book and I was put in touch with a very good agent, and I was trying to ask her, you know, I have these ideas but I want to pitch them in a way that will be accessible to a general readership. The Financial Times is a slightly exclusive product with a slightly elite readership and you actually want to sell some books when you write a book. So I asked her for her advice and she was a very experienced agent. She'd run a big agency in New York so she knows the U.S. market and she runs this agency in the U.K. as well. And the one that she said to me the following, she said, when you sit down to write this book there's one piece of advice that I really want you to follow. Whatever you do, you're not writing for one of those bloody Washington thinking. So here I am. Intimidating because it's a golden rule of journalism that you should never appear on a stage or in front of an audience of people who know a lot more about the subject matter than you do. So I'm breaking all the rules here but I'm going to plunge in. I'm just going to briefly outline for 10 minutes or so. A couple of the main points in the book. Probably not things that are hugely surprising to a Washington audience but I think they're still very important points. The first one is that one of the things I've tried to do in the book is get over the sense of the way and I think that China has changed quite profoundly in the last five years or so. The way that China thinks about its role in the world has started to change. This transition that I've described that China has made from this country that was keeping its head down and concentrating just on growing its economy to a country that now wants to actually start throwing its weight around, influence events, shaping events, behaving much more like a great power. It's obviously it's not a transition that happens overnight. These pressures and ambitions and ideas have been present in China for a long time but I think there are important reasons as to why they've really started to come to a head I would say from the 2008-2009 period. I think the financial crisis was a hugely important event in China not just for economic reasons but for broader psychological reasons almost. It had a very strong psychological impact on the way China thinks about itself. This idea that the U.S. is in decline became very prominent. It was very strong in 2009-2010 but it's still to some extent a strong idea amongst the Chinese elite and this brought forward this whole idea that now is our time we need to start standing up for ourselves. In a sense, there had always been an argument within China about what we will do the day we become powerful. The Chinese hawks, if you like, suggested that we will eventually have to challenge the U.S., we'll have to stand up to the U.S., we'll have to push back in all sorts of ways against the U.S. and the more dovish people in China said the best way for us to pursue our interest is to integrate within the global economies, to play by the rules that the U.S. has established for the global system. This argument was always happening but what the financial crisis did is it brought it very much to the forefront and made it about the now and the present not some theoretical discussion about the future and that doesn't mean to say that the hawks if you like have won but it does mean that something that's very much going on the here and now at the top levels of power in China and the second part of that is pressure from below within the system particularly in the form of this very visceral nationalism that you sometimes see in China. It's been a whole series of the last decade of these spurts of emotional anger if you like, of this very kind of visceral internet-based nationalism incredibly anti-Japanese but also in lots of ways very skeptical about the U.S. and that has in its own way if it hasn't necessarily forced the government to take certain positions it's made it much harder for them to back down in certain situations much harder for them to compromise to get another factor that's just pushing the country to have a slightly more ambitious a more aggressive almost foreign policy and the same time I think you've also seen what I describe as something of a fracturing of power. It's very much not the same as a liberalization but what it means is that power has dispersed in some ways from the very top leaders throughout the kind of top levels of the system so you've had big state-owned companies for instance have been the prime drivers behind China's engagement with Sudan which has become a very difficult controversial issue or a local government in Yunnan has been one of the main drivers behind China's investments and engagement in Myanmar which has become another very controversial issue and then you have the military itself which I mean it's desperately hard to actually define where what the role of the military is and how it relates to the party and I could probably Chris could probably talk about it with you all night but there have been these few glimpses we've had in the few years of a military that's getting more restive more assertive and wants to wants to have more of its say it's had this huge increase in its budget in the last two decades and so it's entirely natural the military would want to use some of those resources it would want to actually be able to mobilize some of that power that's accumulated to try and shape events and it's an interesting thing that's very much happened since I've finished the book is of course that Xi Jinping is trying to reverse a lot of that fracturing of power he's trying to sort of reassert himself as not quite a strong man but it's very much as the decisive leader at the top of the system who's pulling back in some of that power that's dispersed and down the ranks and that's going to be one of the fascinating things to watch over the next few years is whether he's actually able to do that or not but a subset of that is his relationship with the military it's not a tall clear but will be one of the key questions I think whether Xi Jinping is the guy who controls the military or whether he channels some of the military's instincts and that's still I think very much an open question and so the way I would frame it is it's often asked particularly in Washington is China revisionist power or is it a status quo power and clearly there are elements of both here but I think the better way to understand it is that China's behaving now like a great power this is what big important countries do when they become powerful they try and shape events so there are no own interests there might be things that China is doing that people might be disturbed about or worried about but that we shouldn't be surprised that China is beginning to behave this way this is an entirely natural thing for a big important country to do it's what history has shown us lots of other countries do when they accumulate the kind of resources and power and economic interests that China has so that's the the first argument the second one I tried to put forward is that China will actually struggle in lots of ways to push back against the US even in the ways that it's trying to have my rather vanglorious subtitles how American go when but what I mean by that is it's going to be very tricky in lots of ways for China to really dethrone the kind of central role that the US has in the international system and just to give you a few examples of what I mean by that in soft power China has invested huge amounts of money in the last few years in soft power it's almost like an obsession in the Chinese system they've really embraced the idea much more than almost any other country in the world but they're constantly undermined by the way that China itself treats its own more awkward citizens the sort of artists and film directors and activists and the kind of people who'd be precisely the sorts of members of society who might be able to generate soft power to change the way people think about China are often people who find themselves absolutely against the sharp end of the way the system works so it's it's kind of undermined itself in that way and economic issues and one of the most important ones is the way that China is trying to change the status of its currency trying to develop the currency into being a potential challenger to the dollar to being an international reserve currency which has economic benefits for Chinese companies but also there's a strong political agenda as well to solely chip it away at the role that the US dollar has enjoyed but that's also going to be incredibly hard for China to really mobilize that because to do so it's going to have to introduce root and branch reforms of the way the economy works and especially the way the financial system works and especially the way the Communist Party controls the financial system so that's another one that's going to be very hard but the biggest one that and there's one that's you know obviously drawn the most attention in Washington is the way that China's military buildup is now starting to affect the balance of power and politics within the region and all those obscure disputes about uninhabited islands that we're constantly hearing about and you know clearly China does have a much more muscular military clearly the long-term trends some of the long-term trends are very much in its favor but even then I still think that there are powerful advantages that the US still has that will again make it very hard for China really to to restore that kind of central role in Asian affairs that historically is enjoyed and the biggest one of one of those is that most of other Asian countries still want the kind of Asia that the US wants the US is very much pushing against an open door in Asia if this was just about the US against China the US would clearly lose in the sense that it's 8,000 miles away but there is a very favorable potential balance of power pushing the US's direction because most countries still want an Asia that's based upon trade across the Pacific they want freedom of navigation they want a system where countries are not bullied and pushed around every time they have a dispute to the powerful country like China so that gives the US a very strong opportunity over the next couple of decades to to construct alliances and build and existing alliances and construct partnerships that will instill those kinds of rules and allow it to insulate the region for maybe some of the more potentially destructive aspects of what a powerful China could potentially entail and that really goes to the sort of underlying truth about the central role the US has enjoyed in the in the world affairs since the end of the Second World War it's not just about the power of the US military it's about the fact that so many other countries buy into these underlying ideas that they believe that the US led order actually benefits them that's why it's so resilient it's not just about those 11 aircraft carriers and then finally you know I don't want to sound too pollyannish so I'll just throw out a few of the kind of major problems that clearly the US is facing and then maybe these are some of the things we can we can talk about the obvious one is the US is finding very hard to respond to this idea of Chinese salami slicing the idea of this is very incremental slow patient ways in which China is gradually exerting some greater control over the seas around it we've seen but the classic case being the way that China was able to take control of the Scarborough shawl from the Philippines two years ago now clearly people who are very worried about it they haven't really found a response but I would suggest it's slightly less of a really kind of fundamental problem and maybe some people suggest for the simple reason that it seems to be a very effective Chinese strategy against a country like the Philippines that really doesn't have the resources and muscle to push back against China but it's much less effective against Japan or even Vietnam that does have some of those resources so in order for China to push those countries around it's going to have to take much more aggressive offensive steps that will get that will be much more damaging to its reputation and damaging to its broader interests so I think that the salami slicing it's a genuine issue for the Philippines but it's slightly less of a of a winning strategy for China when it comes to some of these other countries the other one other big issue the US is clearly facing is just this whole idea of focus the underlying idea of the the pivot was really about staying power it's about the US trying to impress upon the region that we're not going anywhere we see our long-term future is absolutely rooted in Asia and we are here to stay and that was a very effective powerful idea in 2011-2012 but then already we've seen in 2013 just how easy it is for the US to get distracted my job is to write about US foreign policy there was a moment last year when I almost changed my business card to Middle East correspondent because that is just the nature of the nature of Washington as you come as you find out when you come here it's about time it's about agenda it's about the urgent pushing out the important and already there is this feeling that even though the administration absolutely denies it there's a profound sense within Asia that the US has already got distracted it's all too focused in the Middle East and it's kind of taken its eye off the ball in Asia and so there's lots of Chinese to say quite convincingly you can't maybe rely on these people they have too many they're involved in too many other issues and you think they're going to be there to back you up but actually their focus has already drifted elsewhere and then the final issue is just going to be very hard for the US to articulate is an economic strategy that really links the US into Asia in the long term we've seen that you know very practically with TPP in the way that in the last couple of weeks Congress has suggested it's not going to do very much on TPP and just as an aside I mean I've been doing a couple of radio events connected to my book a astonishing number of calls about TPP and a couple of those events almost half the calls about TPP even in the last couple of months it feels as if TPP has has really come to life as a political issue and it almost feels if the administration has maybe lost the debate already even before it's really had a chance to articulate it so when you know when Harry Reid comes out and says we're not going to touch fast-track status for trade negotiations he knows what he's talking about he's obviously seen that felt that as well he's sensed the way that it's become a kind of hot button issue and almost all the calls are deeply against it but it's not just about TPP it's about a broader sense about the US seeing its economic features intimately linked to Asia's future and if you're thinking about a strategy to revive manufacturing and double exports and boost middle class salaries that clearly has to involve Asia in a fundamental way because that's where the fastest growing big markets are going to be but that's very hard for a US politician for an US administration to articulate at the moment because there's so much broad pessimism about globalization about trade deals and the sense that the US has been at the losing end of some of these deals in the past but that ultimately has to be the root of what a US strategy is going to be in Asia because it can't just be about security it can't just be about having some aircraft carriers that come in when there's a crisis it has to also be about the US being economically relevant to Asia's future and Asia being relevant to America's but that's going to be very hard to do so i'm going to leave it there and then we'll open up to questions. Sure plenty of food for thought there just for those of you who are standing there are a few empty seats up front if you'd like to come up and sit down feel free to do so this is a great opportunity to as the think tanker to be questioning the journalists so very much enjoying that opportunity one of your kind of key assertions i think in the book is that struck me was the difference in political strategy between a rising china right and a china that has effectively risen or is well on its way to to rising can you kind of elaborate on that a little bit for the audience and kind of tell us what you think the core differences are and then you know what it all means based. I mean the strategy that it was adopting say a decade ago. Right so the kind of biden hide shifting to you know something else. Well from particularly from the period of 97 to about 2008 China had an incredibly effective strategy especially in Asia sometimes you know framed in the terms of the dung shopping same as advice about a nourishing obscurity and biting your time but sometimes also described as the charm offensive and the basic idea was that China wanted to present a very very unthreatening image to its neighbors to say you have nothing to fear by our rise all we want is to develop our economy all we want is the mutual prosperity and you shouldn't be alarmed by us that worked like a charm in lots of many ways it was very effective after the Asia crisis when there was a huge amount of resentment towards the US but it also worked effectively throughout the next decade and you could sense particularly in the middle of the 2000s there was a moment where it was genuinely possible to speculate about the US being pushed out of Asia all across the region you could see political wobbling about the alliances that various countries had with the US and South Korea and Japan and the Philippines even somewhere like Australia which has been the rock solid US ally but the problem that China's had is with this that's new if you like more ambitious assertive aggressive strategy since 2008 that really now has two different approaches that are contradicting each other it still believes in this idea of the charm offensive that it wants to link economically with its neighbors and be an engine of prosperity for the region it still sees that as a fundamental part of its its strategy and its game plan for Asia but at the same time it has this more ambitious military strategy where it's trying to push its weight around in some of these territorial disputes build a military that slowly and surely pushes the US further out into the Pacific and those two strategies are very contradictory because the harder that China pushes on these territorial issues the harder that China maybe pushes against the US the more it alarms its neighbors and pushes them into the arms of the US and undermines that whole charm offensive approach about creating good will through economic links yeah and kind of on that note I mean you also sort of suggest in the book that the US must periodically push back when China sort of tests US global preeminence in terms of the international system you know and so on and you know you talked about this a little bit in your opening remarks the challenges the US faces in trying to to get that right one are there kind of specific areas that you see is the most likely realms where the US may have to do some of this more assertive messaging and then two you are the foreign affairs correspondent here how do you think the administration is doing on this task both from your perspective here sitting in Washington and then just kind of what you pick up how the region is reacting I think on some of these issues you know the US doesn't actually to push back it just needs to hold its nerve in a sense there is no special reason to be worried about the Chinese soft power offensive I don't think it's going to be very effective and I don't think that the the renminbi is going to dramatically undermine the US dollar unless of course you have a sort of default on the debt so that would be a basic recommendation would be not to not to do that but obviously the clear yeah not to self but obviously that you know that the the clear and very difficult one is on these military issues is on the whole salami slicing it's on this Chinese push to slowly and incrementally gain greater control and dominance over some of these maritime areas and clearly that's a very very difficult one for administration to thread it needs to be firm and firm enough to to push back against some of these Chinese ambitions but not so firm that it will rattle some of its allies and friends in the region and not so firm that it will you know dramatically stimulate some of the hawks in China and set off a kind of Cold War arms race type dynamic and clearly the administration you know hasn't quite found the way to do that so we saw with the the aid is situation the end of last year you know they came on very firmly at first with you know sending a couple of B-52s through the area through the region but then the message Golg are very muddled when they said to civilian airlines that actually you know Europe you should abide by these rules and so it gave this very confused message both of the Chinese and both some of their allies in the region and it's entirely possible that people in China think that they want a tactical victory that they advance their claim a little bit and they saw done some descent between the US and Japan so I mean there's no magic formula here but it is just a sort of a generalized issue that the US has to be find a way of being firm but not too assertive or too aggressive and the way it pushes back. Yeah I agree and then also you kind of talk in the book about this tension for China between balancing its more activist position in the international rule setting game and in the international system against the risk of irritating you know traditional friends partners and others in the region to me I kind of see the regional situation with regard to the maritime situation as sort of very much a microcosm of that if you will they're in this unique position of trying to I think very genuinely improve relations with the regional neighbors at the same time they're very forthrightly pushing and defending the sovereignty issue and so do you see that as kind of a test case if you will for the bigger the bigger problem that they'll face ultimately globally and if so or even if not how do you think they're doing and managing them. Oh absolutely this is a test case and I think a lot the whole world not just in Asia is watching the way that China is behaving it's it's it's the first case if you like of how this powerful almost super part China will behave how it will regard its responsibilities in the world and I think what you're seeing in the last maybe six months to a year is what China trying to adopt a slightly more sophisticated version of this so the northeast Asia they're pushing back very hard against Japan but they're trying to get on very well with South Korea and they're being helped by the intense friction there is between Japan and South Korea which is one of the underlying trends which is working very much in China's favor and then in Southeast Asia they're pushing back pretty hard against the Philippines but trying very hard to patch things up to some extent the Vietnam and and broadly with Malaysia and Indonesia which they are doing quite well so it's definitely they've tried to adopt it like a more nuanced strategy try and have you know elements of both it's more assertive China but also of the charm offensive China but ultimately it's a little bit self-defeating because even the countries that are on the end of the charm offensive at the moment can see that these other countries are being pushed around and so they you know will think to themselves you know that might be Japan today but that could be me tomorrow if I'm not careful so ultimately doesn't really seem like a long-term winning strategy to kind of win the confidence of those countries that you can't this is one where you just really can't have it both ways right you mentioned the the kind of role the global financial crisis in in stimulating you know a lot of this to what degree do you also I think you mentioned this in the book you know the 2009 the drawing of the nine dash line effectively ripping the mask off if you will of some of their intentions I mean in my own assessment that has kind of created that latent hesitancy to buy into the charm offensive in the way that they did in the late 90s period how big of a role do you see that playing and and is it something that the you know Chinese talk a lot about moving ahead on the code of conduct but you know as you look at it and you talk to regional players the situation on the water you know doesn't necessarily comport with that so how do you see that I'm well well clearly country like Vietnam is as glad to try and reduce some of the tensions and they don't want to be at always at loggerheads with China but I think you know they they clearly see that China hasn't been you know very very you know forefront and trying to push with a code of conduct and generally in trying to establish you know underlying ground rules for how some of these disputes might be solved and they see the way that China is being much more aggressive with the Philippines um so you know clearly trying to be more sophisticated now having some success I would say with you know Indonesia and Malaysia the underlying dynamics still seems to be one where China is storing up lots of potential problems for the future it's going to be very hard even if it was successful in undermining the support that the US enjoys in the region it's going to be very hard to be an effective leader if you like of Asia when it's created so much animosity and so many so much resentment amongst some of these other countries which might simply be waiting around for for China to you know to fall on his face in some way to get their own payback you know these are deep-seated historical remnants on both sides and so there is no there is no victory in these things there's only can only be a sort of you know guarded draw no that makes sense one of the challenges I mean I face it every day and writing on the subject in such a dynamic period you mentioned Xi Jinping in the way that he's kind of come to the forefront and and you know actually opens the road to the next installment of your books something for you to think about but you know as you know my own position is somewhat bullish on you know how quickly he would kind of put himself in a solid position in the leadership and some so on I have to say that something that has surprised me a little bit is his ability you know I think most of us figured that given the challenges and given where they were going with the reform process and so on they would be very internally focused but he has managed to to run a fairly adroit foreign policy strategy so far and especially this clear theme that that the kind of Biden-hide you know approach while not officially dead you know certainly is changing and I think the best way to describe it is sort of you know we're still biding our time but we're not going to hide our strength anymore right and how do you see that how much of it do you think is personal to Xi and you know how does that affect the U.S. relationship and and so on I mean clearly he's he's he's personally made a great effort to try and restore some stability in U.S. general relations he he wanted to dial down some of the temperature the way that you know some of the tensions that had developed with the U.S. even while he's being much tougher with Japan but I think that from a foreign policy point of view I think the interesting thing about Xi is the following he has this very ambitious economic reform agenda that's politically treacherous right the way in which he's going to be able to push these reforms is by taking power and money and future income away from some very powerful actors within the Chinese Communist Party especially big state-owned companies the temptation for him you know given that that's going to require a huge amount of political capital the temptation for him will be to play tough on some of these foreign policy issues especially with Japan or that's the real kind of riskier if things start to look very difficult on his domestic agenda and the chances of him ramping up the tensions and some of these territorial disputes start to increase so I think that's even though he seems very much in control much more control than one could imagine him being especially at the last few years of the Huawei area where it really did feel as if the central leadership was really losing some of its purchase very dramatically but there's still you know he still has to play this domestic political game and so that the tendency the temptation play tough with some of the neighbors will be very strong yeah I mean I think it strikes me that's one of the risks in the reform program both domestically and in some of the reforms defense structural reform in particular that lend themselves to foreign security challenges is the desire or the seeming need because they are so hard and because the vested interest problem is so important to create a sense of crisis or urgency you know which then I think runs the risk of tipping over into a real problem and it might actually be part of his worldview I mean he's a reformist authoritarian nationalist will seem to be to be the three ways I describe an odd mix of characteristics not entirely uncommon and global affairs are tall and so but there is that strong nationalist core in his thinking in his world view yeah and which he you know we're quite comfortable playing up at certain times yeah I agree okay well let's throw it open to the audience for some questions and as usual per CSIS practice if you would identify yourself and please do ask a question don't engage in a soliloquy right here up front we'll start here good afternoon I'm a student here at Johns Hopkins size so I'm happy to CSISers and somebody who happened to spend some time in China before coming to the US since I've arrived here something which has European also I should say so since I've arrived here something which has surprised me is a little bit this will or this wish from the US to engage on a bilateral basis with China to open avenues of cooperation conversation on a one-to-one basis and then on the other end the China pushing back this this this wish from the US saying that the G20 or the UN are actually the the right places to have this kind of engagement so my question is what do you think might explain the Chinese attitude in this case is it a tactical thing or is it let's say a genuine agenda they have so I think there are two different stages to this I think during the financial crisis there were some people not within the administration but in Washington who started articulating this idea of a G2 the idea that the US and China would collaborate together to solve these big grinding global problems first the crisis but then the environment and all sorts of other issues and China very clearly said we are not interested in that and there's definitely a strain in Chinese thinking that sees that as a trap it sees that essentially being suckered into playing along with America's rules it reduces its freedom for action it involves all sorts of responsibilities that China thinks it shouldn't necessarily be be burdened with at this stage in its development so the G2 idea never got anywhere but what we've seen more recently is this idea of a new type of great power relations as the phrase that's usually bandied around which has come from the Chinese side but which has been embraced rhetorically by the Obama administration as well now it's it's rhetoric and it's jargon and maybe we shouldn't read too much into it but there is a real risk with the US embracing this is that it seems to be seems to a lot of people in the region as if it's ceding to Chinese ideas that it's making it seem as if the US is saying well we will allow you to become kind of much more important leadership role in Asia and we will take a much much much more of a backseat role they've allowed the China to frame the way this issue is described in certain ways now they have a good reason for that and the way the US the reason the US has embraced this concept is because it very much wants to try and find a way to unpick the sense of inevitability that the US and China will end up in conflict and that's the underlying idea but you have to be very careful with it because it can it can give the impression to lots of other people in Asia that actually you're taking more of a backseat that you're leading from behind that you're disengaging all the kind of conversation on yours about the US in the Middle East this phrase is a way where those kinds of ideas can be injected into the debate in Asia so it has to be handled very delicately up here in the front again sorry yes that's right did you see the Nicholas Christoff oh sorry you grind staff did you see the Nicholas Christoff article about China at once a short sharp war with Japan over the seikaku to your island um it is and it's a phrase from a American senior american intelligence officer with a pacific fleet and what he is alleging he's saying is that one of the big military exercises last year that the chinese conducted was really a way of preparing of training for an invasion of the seikaku's and some of those other islands now that sounds very dramatic but it maybe shouldn't be too much of a surprise and one way to think about it would be that the chinese have been training to invade Taiwan for 20 years right but they haven't actually done it so we need to be very careful and distinguishing between a training exercise that dovetails with some of their broader objectives and that the dispute they're involved in at the moment that's very different from an actual plan to actually conduct it so he said that in a way that's very attractive to newspapers i suspect we will probably be writing a story about it as well but you know i wouldn't want to you know we have to be very careful and say that doesn't mean to say that the chinese are going to plant a flag on the seikaku islands tomorrow and that's a that's very much in all the case thank you i'm andre so and i'm the chief representative in vietnam for the interstate traveler company in detroit and one of president obama's presidential partners so my question is um do you believe that that in order to you know stimulate beijing to become more pragmatic and opt for peaceful coexistence within for example compliance with the law of the sea of 1982 the united nations do you believe that the president i are president president obama should take a somewhat harder line with china and um you know send stronger signals that while we want a good relationship we're just not going to tolerate going into the exclusive economic zones of the philippines and vietnam and others and if so if you do believe he should take a harder 90 of any specific recommendations as to the kinds of adjustments policy wise he could make um i don't want to use a very hard or line but i would say they do sometimes need to be firmer in the way they respond um and i you know very much want to draw that distinction from you know it can't be too aggressive or too offensive and it has to be responding to things that do appear to be legitimately provocative um the things that the us could do be more sort of freedom of navigation operations and some of these seas more things that play into this idea that there are common goods that the us is defending that it's not actually getting involved in territorial disputes but it's it's defending underlying sense of rules and of common goods that that the us is backing um so that would be the kind of broad comment but it does have to be you know very sensitive in the way it does that and you know vietnam is one of those countries that demonstrates that i mean they have an incredibly complicated complex delicate relationship with china it's both full of historical animosity and tension but it's also quite close cooperation in lots of ways as well and so the us can potentially have a closer relationship with a country like vietnam as one way of you know generating a sense of deterrence against china but it can push too far because that would be an incredibly provocative thing towards china david uh david lynch with bloomberg jeff has china's increasing uh assertiveness in the maritime sector had any visible economic consequences so far has it affected pardon me trade and investment flows the activities of japanese multinationals philippine companies etc and to whatever extent it has do you expect a greater impact going forward i was absolutely when it comes to japan there has been a discernible impact already i don't have the figures up to my head but you can see a very strong shift of japanese companies looking you know for other markets looking for other places particularly in southeast asia to invest rather than china and that is an incredibly dynamic and strong relationship the one between china and japan uh there's something like trade of about 350 billion dollars per year there's one of the biggest trading relationships in the world so that already is a you know a very important impact but beyond that for other countries there hasn't really been too discernible an impact yet and you're still seeing you know very strong you know chinese investments and financing to countries in southeast asia and other parts of the region uh so you're still seeing china expanding if you like its economic influence in most other countries but the exception being japan where there's already a big dip up around here you have a question bill tucker i've done a lot of work on china and i'd like for you to comment on china's one-chaw policy i've seen many instances a set of parents two set of grandparents over a child in a department store for the child to have it a fit because they can't get what they want so they're they're raising a bunch of spoiled brats in the country and how's that going to affect the country and in its progress um well as a parent of a single child family unique position to comment on this um i mean there's a couple of couple of things first of all is that the one-chaw policy for many if not most chinese is no longer a reality and hasn't been for a long time ethnic groups rural areas lots of different people in cities have for some time been able to have at least two kids and there have been relaxations more recently um indeed some some of the criticisms that people would make of the one-chaw policy is that uh prosperity and development would have achieved the same demographic results without the very harsh uh mean brutal way that the one-chaw policy was imposed i mean it's just a sort of natural order of things that as countries and people become wealthier and more secure they have fewer children and that has happened in china even amongst the people who are allowed to have more than one child but in terms of your question about you know spoiled kids i mean that is that does capture a certain amount of reality about you know the way the chinese families are maybe we compared to other countries but then the flip side of that is an incredibly ambitious you know really sort of dynamic young kids who who have all this attention are you know they are their whole family's attention is focused on them and so they're absolutely desperate to get ahead and get an education come to the states to get an education so the flip side of it is this really sort of almost overwhelming sense of ambition that you get when you meet young chinese people which is almost one of the one of the most striking things about living in the country is this sense of possibilities and of opportunities that this this generation of young chinese often feel about their lives in the back there in zemperoni with ardy german public television um you said in your opening remarks that china has changed in the last couple of years is you know behaving like a great power is trying to assert itself and i was wondering how much that is a government issue stands and how much the chinese people are backing that because it seems to me that as soon as they you just said you know they try to have an education and so as soon as they can if they have the means they try to flee the country they come to the u.s the immigration of chinese to this country has increased immensely over the past years and so in back to the title of your book how much is that really a contest then of the century between china and the u.s if china is somewhat corroding from inside unless that's the wrong perception i have that's a very interesting question i wouldn't necessarily interpret the huge numbers of chinese who come here to get an education as a sense that china is corroding um or to be or to say that it's a contrast with this idea of a more ambitious strident foreign policy and you often oftentimes you find that some of the young chinese who come here to get educated often end up being some of the more nationalistic people that you come across uh some of that internet nationalism that you there's very strident strong in china often comes from the some of these kids who've been educated overseas in a returned home it becomes part of the sense of identity they develop while they're overseas they become oftentimes you find them becoming more patriotic and more and more generally it seems to me that this is the fact that so many chinese kids are so ambitious that they want to come here and be educated is a very good thing for china because a huge resource of people that you are seeing more and more of them going back because there are good opportunities in china they've learned all sorts of skills that they might love learning the chinese education system here so they're you know they're a real potential asset and strength for china they're not necessarily as you're suggesting is that a sign that china is eroding but there definitely is that that aspect to the chinese elite as well i mean you're seeing huge numbers of rich people trying to get passports foreign passports trying to have their kids have foreign passports or apartments overseas and that just tells you i think something more about insecurity about the political system the sense that you know they do think things have gone very well their lives have got a lot better but there is this fear that you know potentially the system could turn against them if they you know they made their own friends or their own business deal and so they want an insurance policy so that does tell you something that behind the this very confident self-assured china that we sometimes see there is actually quite a deep sense of insecurity both at the government level and amongst you know even very successful people as well in the back there Wang Genghua from chinese embassy and about the us a pivot strategy and do you think in the recent years there's some disputes arise in asia pacific including the maritime disputes do you think to some extent the us pivot strategy help encourage some regional countries to take a harder line on the maritime disputes to china and do you think because i know us public always are critical of the administration's policy but on pivot policy strategy do you think us need to reconsider some elements in it and to to make it a better one and the second question is even us pivot to asia pacific in the recent years but still i think us china relations keep stable and the mutual dialogue and mutual exchange between different levels are there keeping the momentum so what would you assess the future effect of the pivot strategy to the bilateral relations between us and china thank you very much two very interesting questions i think you've definitely pinpointed one of the the real risks with a very with a the us strategy in asia is that by trying to up its game by trying to say that we are going to be a long-term presence there that it does encourage some of its allies to be overly ambitious overly aggressive and you could make a case of that has been the case with the philippines for instance i think the japan situation is a lot more complicated but definitely i think you could say that some of the things that the philippines has done have been overly bold because they think that the us is going to have their back and then they've been very disappointed to find out that us didn't necessarily have their back and going long term that's definitely one of the underlying risks for the us is that it gets sucked into other people's conflicts rather than being the being the sort of backstop to those countries from being pushed around by china your second question about us china relations there's clearly a huge kind of bureaucratic effort on both countries to to find ways to have a more stable relationship that s and ed brings together hundreds of officials and seem to get together to talk and there are the numbers of connections are very strong but it does feel like it's on a slightly thin fabric there's what the us if that if that kind of relationship is going to develop in a more coherent way there needs to be common projects things that the us and china are doing together that the governments feel they get benefit from and that they can tell both of their societies that they get benefit from and the obvious one that people in this country have been excited about is is cooperation on environmental issues perhaps some shale gas that would be a very interesting one to watch in the next few years but i think you do need to see some success stories some real kind of policy achievements uh to butchers that relationship otherwise there are lots of political pressures in both countries that could pull it apart relatively quickly in the center here my name is a kunio kikuchi and i'm with uh washington research and analysis uh going back to your title about contest i think the biggest contest might be that of between us and china might be that of the form of government it seems that if us today has a kind of government that is the ultimate form multi-party democratic and uh decision-making system that is open to the public uh then the government form of china single-party communist uh was very opaque uh decision-making and if you see the photos of the once in a few year central party meeting it's mostly men and also senior people a lot of them i think that form of government may not be sustainable and i was wondering when and how china might change its government into a multi-party system the way they have already in hong kong or let's say in taiwan and of course japan and korea thank you oh well there's an easy question softball there yeah um so i'd say i half agree and half disagree with you um in terms of what i describe as the contest one of the striking things to me is how much of it is not as ideological as we often assume if china was a democracy it would be doing a lot of the things that it's doing at the moment maybe doing more doing anyway maybe even more it might be even more nationalistic in lots of ways but the underlying motivations for china to do these things are much more rooted in the fact that it is now this great power that wants to shape the world to its interest and and less about its own particular form of government however i think you've you have hit a very important point which is that in the long run i think you know one of the underlying advantages the u.s has is in 20 years time we all know how the american president will be elected in 20 years time we can have no idea about how power will be transferred in china in 20 years time and one of the things we can say that is we don't really know why and how Xi Jinping was chosen two years ago but here's another man who's the second most powerful leader in the world and we knew five years beforehand that he would be chinese president but we don't still actually know why again chris could talk to you all day about some of the the guesses that we have and educated guesses they would be but we don't really know the political coalitions that were made that decision we don't even know who made that decision was it the the nine people then on the standing committee was it the central committee was it the polar bureau so there's huge core issues about how political power is exercised and transferred in china that we we still don't know a lot about and which will become even harder going forward so you know that that very much so is one of the kind of big weaknesses if you like that china faces in the sense of this being a long-term contest for relevance and viability right here hi samjin came visiting fellow of csis china has hosted six party talks to manage the denuclearization of north korea and korean peninsula recently but the relation between china and north korea has been estranged especially the since the execution of jang sung taek by north korean leader kim jeong so what do you think about the prospect of china's policy against north korea and the cooperation or policy with the us clearly there are things happening in in chinese policy towards north korea and this was was apparent even before jang sung taek was was executed but even more so since then because he was as you mentioned he was wasn't just the sort of you know force behind the throne but he was considered to be the conduit for for beijing with with new leader with this new regime in north korea but i might still suspect that the bottom line for china is what it has been for the last couple of decades and which has guided their policy which is they they still see north korea as this buffer state they don't want the regime to collapse they don't want implosion north korea they don't want a hasty unification that would potentially bring us forces up to the chinese border or in some you know chaotic situation chinese and us forces maybe coming together in some way so i think still think that their bottom line is still ultimately they want to maintain as long as they can the viability of the regime even though they're incredibly uncomfortable and incredibly put out at some of the recent term of events in north korea woman over here in the corner just wait for the microphone please i'm susan weld at georgetown law center and this is what i wonder i remember when jung bijan had his harmonious rise theory and they were i believe a number of people in the military who were not pleased with that kind of rise do we are we seeing a unified sort of rejection of the jung bijan attitude and foreign policy or is it something different so where described it is to go back this idea that actually in some ways china has two different strategies it has this get-on with the neighbors economic integration strategy which is the formalization of jung bijan you know peaceful rise peaceful development and then this different more military strategy about strategic space about getting control over maritime areas about pushing the u.s. back and so you haven't seen the end of it but it is as i say there are two contradictory strategies and the fact that the military one is so much more prominent now is undermining the foundations of that one but it's still very much part of how chinese government would describe its strategy of how they would like to think about the world but they're they're they're trying to have it both ways in a sense and then they're not able to in the back there uh nicholas weinstein red cross volunteer i was uh wondering about your uh your thoughts on the charm offensive with the economy versus the military aggression or yeah anyway um i was wondering is this somewhat of a carrot and stick method so the uh they use the economy to charm people and then the military to uh get more of their way or is and is it the case that uh as the carrot grows the stick will get bigger as well i'm sorry i missed that last last just the last part of your question will it be the case that as the carrot or the economy grows that the stick will also get bigger well definitely that is that is part of the dynamic i mean china is trying to expand its influence by integrating these countries in more closely with its economy it's trying to become the central reference point for economic interactions in the region and that will continue on and will become as long as the economy keeps growing at a relatively high rate that will become more and more powerful as time goes on um but your second question about whether or not they're going to you have a bigger stick or not i mean that's a much harder question to to answer as i suspect it might depend to some extent on the political temperature of what's happening in beijing i mean if the economy were to slow or if the reform process were to get tied up and Xi Jinping was to find himself in a very tricky domestic situation then you might see them having using a bigger stick in some of these disputes to be a temptation to do that but i don't think there's a sign necessarily that they have a deliberate strategy at the moment to to get tougher i think what they're trying to do is a slightly more focused thing where they're being more pushing back against japan but being nice to south korea pushing back in the philippines but trying to get on with vietnam and indonesia and malaysia and some of these other countries that seems to be the the way they're thinking about things at the moment okay i think we have time for one more question it's julien li from csis uh i bought your book thank you very much very key question uh what's the biggest business opportunity and the biggest risk in the ten year between china and uh united states thank you biggest opportunity and risk um i think actually one of the real really interesting and not very commented on issues is the potential for chinese investment in this country um and i think it's very important for the us for two reasons one because the us needs the money um not to be too blunt on it but the second is it seems to make very good interesting politics for the us one of the the great problems the us has had is trying to have leverage within the chinese system uh us has all these interest groups that can be addressed directly but the the commerce party seems outside to be this kind of unified coherent whole and it's very hard to to get constituencies of support within the system the way to do that would be to have very big important powerful chinese companies operating freely within this country and i'm thinking not just about private businesses but big state-owned companies um if you think about you know the us relations with china the the biggest lobby that beijing has had within the us system has always been multinational companies that's slightly gone down a little bit in recent years because the the chinese authorities have had a kind of tougher relationship with multinationals but it still very much holds true they have been off to mean the people who've come in and tried to push whatever administration it is to take slightly softer line with china and the us wants to have leverage in within the chinese system that's one way to kind of get hold of it to get a little break to build up a constituent of support amongst particularly amongst big so e bosses that can give you some sort of influence over the system and just one example of that would be iran sanctions policy uh china has generally cooperated quite effectively with the us over the iran sanctions one of the reasons maybe for that is actually a couple of big oil companies yeah by large a couple of big oil companies are operating here and so it does mean that they're exposed to legal risk and that they're susceptible to american political pressure in ways they wouldn't necessarily have been before okay well jeff uh obviously we continue this all day thanks so much for coming by and i do encourage people to buy the book and please interact with jeff while he's here for a few more minutes please join me in thanking jeff for his presentation thank you very much turn this off yeah