 of the Sours China Institute. Before I start with the webinar and introduce the speaker, let me remind you that this webinar is being recorded and it will be made available after the event. For this evening's webinar, I'm delighted to present to you one of the world's best political scientists working on China. And he is, of course, Professor Andrew Nathan. And he is going to speak to us on the subject of Biden's China policy, All Mind in New Bottles, question mark. Andy is the class of 1999 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where he had also served as the director of the Brethren East Asian Institute and as chair of the Political Science Department. And for those of you who know Professor Nathan's work, you would know that he's not only a very distinguished academic, but also somebody who act on his belief in human rights. And he has served on the board of the human rights in China, or he is still a member of the board of the human rights in China. And he had previously served on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and also for Freedom House. As a scholar, I think Andrew has worked on China's politics going all the way back to the earlier part of the 20th century to very contemporary and on China's foreign policy. He's also known for his work on political participation and political culture in Asia and the international human rights regime. He has published very widely. It will take me perhaps the full duration of this webinar if I'm going to read out every single item he has published. So I would not do that. I will simply highlight that he's the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of at least 14 books that I know of. Those that I think are particularly interesting for mentioning for this evening is his book on Chinese democracy in 1985, the Tiananmen papers, China's search for security, will China democratized? And most recently his co-edited book on China's inference and the center periphery Tuck of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific. With that, let me hand over to you, Professor Nation. Thank you, Steve, very much for that introduction. Well, the question mark after my title, Biden's China policy, old wine and new bottles, question mark is because the Biden policy resembles the Trump policy in certain ways. And there's a lot of talk in the media and elsewhere that Biden hasn't changed the policy but my view is that the policy is fundamentally different and I wanna explain why and then talk about what it is and what the critiques are of it and whether I think it's going to perhaps succeed and why. So that's the general outline of my talk. The Trump administration made a decisive change in American China policy early in its period in office when it declared the relationship to be that of what they call the strategic competition. Ever since Nixon up until Obama, the United States of course, as everybody who's listening is well aware was pursuing an engagement policy with China with various ups and downs such as the sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen incident. But the idea of the, it's actually debatable as to what the engagement policy really aimed at because some people now say it failed because China did not become a democracy. But I think that the engagement policy really among the strategists who ran the policy inside the government, not the rhetoric but the real policy was not to democratize China but it was to make China into a friendly country to the United States into a so-called responsible stakeholder that would be satisfied with the international system in which the United States was the dominant power. And in that sense, it did fail because China has never really been satisfied with its security position in the American dominated world. Steve referred to one of the books that I co-authored called China's Search for Security. And my co-author Andrew Scobell and I argued that China was not a satisfied power from a security point of view. It had a lot of threats that it faced including internal threats from its own middle class that was undergoing very rapid change in ideological disorientation. And from the peripheral peoples, the Muslim populations in Xinjiang predominantly in Xinjiang and the Tibetans and other minority peoples, the separation of Taiwan, unfriendly, almost all unfriendly or dubious neighbors around it, Japan, India, Vietnam and all the others, even Russia really in a long historical trajectory has never really been trustful of China even though their relations today are quite close. And growing dependency upon an international economy that it didn't have secure access to because the United States and its allies controlled the sea lanes. And as China was importing more and more oil and raw materials and relying more and more on foreign markets, that was a vulnerability as well. So China was really not satisfied in every place that it looked, all of its security problems that saw the United States as a troublemaker, as a chief threat, even in China's internal political issues, the Chinese leadership perceived the United States I think excessively so, but perceived the United States as meddling, trying to destabilize, trying to change the minds of the Chinese people so that they wouldn't be loyal to the regime. And American politicians and NGOs and universities, one could say really did try to do that but I don't think their impact perhaps was as much of an existential threat to the CCP as the leadership believed. And they saw the United States Alliance system surrounding China and they saw the United States Navy dominating the seas and they saw the U.S. economic preferences dominating the global economy in terms of the rules of the economy and the United States and its allies having a lock on existing oil supplies and so forth. So the Chinese government was never terribly satisfied with that situation. But as you all know under Deng Xiaoping and his two successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the Chinese strategy was to, you know, to take it easy to hide one's light and buy one's time to appear cooperative and to be cooperative in order to build up Chinese power and that changed as the Chinese economy grew very fast in the 1990s and the beginning of this century and as China invested more in its military power and in its foreign economic relations and it made a decisive change with Xi Jinping who I think inherited the leadership of China at a time when China had the resources to sort of take a bolder stance I think a lot of foreign policy analysts believe that China's more assertive behavior under Xi Jinping is something about Xi Jinping's personality or his ideology and I think Xi Jinping is a tough guy but I think that what really happened was that the time was ripe, the time was perceived by the Chinese leadership to be right for China to begin to rectify. It's strategic vulnerabilities, partly because China had become wealthy enough to do so and its military had become high tech enough to do so and partly because the Chinese perceived the United States entering a period of weakness, perhaps surprisingly early. So, and I think that was a correct, actually a correct, actually a correct assessment by Chinese strategist, the United States already under Obama confronted a, you know, financial crisis which meant a great deal to the Chinese leaders they really changed their minds about the United States. Obama displayed a lack of interest in international wars he didn't follow up on his red line with Syria and I was an Obama supporter, I understand why he did that but I think from Beijing's point of view it just showed that the United States doesn't have the guts to fight and they assessed Obama himself as a weak leader which is not my view but I think that China assessed it in that way and the United States under Obama became very polarized and racism has a lot to do with that but so does the impact of globalization on the United States. So all in all, I think Xi Jinping and his colleagues felt that the power balance had shifted even earlier than Chinese strategist intended and the time was ripe for China to behave in a more assertive manner in the South China Sea with respect to pressure on Taiwan to launch the Belt and Road Initiative to so-called tell China's story well to fight back against critics of China by denouncing them very directly and so forth. So China changed its image, its foreign policy profile in a rather dramatic way under Xi and the Americans noticed this actually even before Xi Jinping came to office the Americans were beginning to notice what we called the rise of China. So even under Obama you had the so-called pivot to Asia which didn't amount to much and the Chinese assessed it and saw that it didn't amount to much and so I think that was another element that fed into Xi Jinping's more assertive policy. So against that background it was really the Trump administration that sort of really drew the line between the two eras. You know, nothing in history sort of, well at least rarely changes overnight, right? There's always some background to it and I've described the background but it was during the Trump administration that we really shifted to a policy of well what we call strategic competition which I think is a very accurate word for it which has a lot of overtones of real hostility to China. And Trump then took a number of measures besides this designation of China as a strategic competitor the most sort of market thing that Trump did was the tariffs on China, the trade war which Trump said is a good thing and easy to win but also Pompeo, the secretary of state originated this thing called the Quad a cooperative endeavor between the United States, India, Japan and Australia which is not an alliance and its military implications were not clear at the beginning but it was a symbolic at least kind of form of cooperation saying that these are four countries that are uneasy with Chinese behavior the Trump administration stepped up its naval patrols in the South China Sea to enforce what the United States calls freedom of navigation and in gay played around I should put it with probably upgrades in the protocol status of Taiwan again to send a signal to Beijing and Biden has in fact continued all of those things including not changing, not dropping the tariffs even though they are paid by the American consumer and are damaging to the American economy and actually building up the efforts of the Quad making it more manifestly military it's still not an alliance of course but there's military exercises in this famous August agreement of selling a U.S. slash U.K. built nuclear powered series of submarines to Australia having Australia actually manufacture it in some way it's not clear how with U.S. and U.K. technology so and even enhancing the protocol status of Taiwan and you all know that Biden recently on a TV show asserted that the United States would defend Taiwan although the White House then walked it back and said there wasn't any change in American Taiwan strategy but it is Biden was correct to say that although the U.S. has no military alliance with Taiwan it has a political commitment that has come to be understood as a commitment to defend Taiwan in case of an unprovoked attack so I think that's probably what he meant when he gave a sort of forward answer for five word answer saying yes we have that commitment so it looks like Biden has just gone along with Trump's policy but I wanna explore the differences with Biden and there's really one key difference which is that while Trump's policy was called strategic competition it actually was not strategic competition because it was neither competition nor strategic so I'm gonna have a little part of a few minutes here where I'm going to analyze what really went on in the Trump China policy and why I think it wasn't strategic competition so first of all Trump himself was only concerned with the trade deficit we all know that Trump is not a strategic thinker he doesn't think synthetically or long-term and he is not really interested in foreign policy except in so far as it affects his reputation in the domestic political arena so that he can be popular and win reelection so Trump felt that the trade deficit was the main thing that interested him and that interested his electoral base and in terms of other issues of which there are many in the US-China relationship Taiwan and human rights and the so-called level playing field of trade and all the complexities of that and tech competition and climate change and so forth Trump had no patience for any of those issues so there was no strategy with Trump and there was also no discipline in his administration because he wasn't in charge of China policy in the sense that I'm just describing it now that he didn't have a strategy and because he wasn't in charge nobody else was in charge but he didn't have the discipline to keep a close eye on all of the other people in his administration who were involved in one way or another with China so different people went off in different directions. So for example, his trade advisor Peter Navarro had articulated very clearly before he came into the administration that he thought the United States should have zero trade, zero investment zero economic zero tech relationship with China complete decoupling of the two economies and he pursued that in the administration did his best to encourage measures that would move in that direction while the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer a professional trade attorney much more realistic I would say from my point of view was pursuing actually changes in the China market that would open it up to various kinds of Chinese trade manufacturing and service industries so which would be not decoupling but if it were successful it would be the opposite. Secretary of State Pompeo and Vice President Pence are two politicians with important bases in the evangelical Christian community in the United States and both of them with a strong interest in running for future office. So they seized upon the China threat in a way that made sense to that audience and classified China as a threat an existential threat to Western civilization understood as Christian values, Christian Western values and rode very heavily on the issue of religious freedom among other things. Pence gave a speech at the Hudson Institute which is a conservative think tank in Washington where he hammered very heavily on China's violation of religious freedom. The evangelical Christian community in the United States is concerned number one about the freedom of Christians around the world but that extends to religious freedom as a principle and so China obviously is a pretty good target on that issue because they do violate religious freedom especially of Muslims and their system of religion which allows five state dominated religions but bans the so-called house churches is not consistent with the American and I would say even with the international human rights understanding of what religious freedom is. Our FBI director Christopher Ray was concerned about Chinese espionage especially intellectual property rights which is an issue for sure. And there was also in the White House something that people called the Wall Street faction people like Secretary of Treasury Mnuchin, Trump's son-in-law Kushner, the one time economic advisor who served only for a year plus Gary Cohn who came from Wall Street and felt that China was a great place for the finance industry to make money so they wanted to move in that direction. So the Trump administration was all over the map not strategic and the things that Trump did to damage the American economy and the American political system and America's relationship with its allies and so forth all those things were the opposite of competitive. So there was neither strategy nor competition. The Biden administration's China policy whether it succeeds or fails is at least consistent with the concept of strategic competition. First of all because it seeks to be competitive now this is not an easy thing for the United States but Biden understands and has articulated very clearly that if we're going to continue to have American success in the world and not be dominated by China, whatever that means and that's a big ambiguity because I don't think we're gonna seriously live in a world where China controls the whole world but there is a competition about who's gonna have more power and more privilege and whose tech will dominate and whose currency will dominate and whose military will dominate and whose sense of the so-called rule-based international order will be the most influential. So Biden has articulated that if the United States is gonna preserve its role as the biggest of the great powers in the world that has to do better at home. It's kind of like how the United States responded when the Soviet Union back in the day launched the Sputnik Earth satellite and that was what we called then the Sputnik moment and it led President Kennedy to sort of enter the space race and sort of energized American competitiveness and Biden has said that if something to the effect that if China's not gonna eat our lunch, we have to, as he says, build back better. So he's using China, first of all kind of opportunistically to sell his plants, which as you all know have not yet passed the US Congress. This is part of the problem with America competing is that we have this political system that's very divided and even intentionally ties itself up in knots by having two houses of Congress in the electoral college and the separation of powers in the federal system and so on. So the US is a very difficult system to mobilize but Biden is trying to do so and he's presenting it as competition. And I think that's not just rhetoric. So it is rhetoric and I hope that it succeeds in creating some consensus among the American political class and voters for the United States to get its act together but it's more than rhetoric. It really is a strategy and it's a reasonable strategy, I think. The key competition area I think in this whole competition and it's an old system competition of infrastructure, of educational system of innovation and so forth but I think of all of these domains that are incredibly important, the most important one in the long run for which country will dominate the, to use the slogan dominate the 21st century would be the high tech area where the United States for quite a long time has really dominated in innovation. Innovation now in the area of computer chips, 5G network equipment and whatever will come after that artificial intelligence, biotech, nanotech, new energy, tech, new vehicles and so forth, all of that stuff is so important and Biden is trying to put money into this which means a little bit that the United States is moving further in a direction in which it's been moving for a long time of somewhat more of a government managed economy, industrial policy type of economy. We, the United States says, oh no, we're a free market. The government doesn't pick winners and losers but China and before that, Japan, South Korea and others have been very successful in picking winners and losers and in this 21st century economic competition the United States I think is being kind of forced to move to some extent in that direction, not 100% but Biden wants to invest in some of these areas and also more generally in science and technology and higher education. The second thing that Biden is doing that Trump didn't do or that Trump did the opposite of is to try to work with allies and partners. So as you all know, Trump offended our NATO partners offended the EU, offended Japan although Abe was very flexible and tried to nonetheless maintain a good relationship with Trump. And Biden understands that our allies are a tremendous asset in the competition with China which of course has no allies except North Korea and it has one very important strategic partner which is Russia, but the United States has a widespread alliance system with I think around 60 formal allies and quite a few really important partners like India, Vietnam and however, and the value of the allies is that to the extent that they can be brought to cooperate they send a signal to China that makes it harder for China to cooperate with that vast range of countries to a certain extent and should incentive I'm not talking about a sort of world war which I don't think is gonna happen where all of the 60 allies join in with the American military to attack or to defend against China but I'm saying that China will find the big actors in the international system insisting on certain common principles. So for example, China's behavior in the South China Sea will meet with more or less disapproval or resistance. So the UK and France for example have deployed some ships in the South China Sea to show their support for the US principle of freedom of navigation operations. However, working with allies is no easy thing. And so I think some people criticize the Biden administration saying you you're not doing a good job of it. And the big example of that is the recent mess up with France over the Alkus deal where Biden had to go and apologize to Macron. I think it was the day before yesterday and say we didn't handle that very well. The thing about alliances is that even close allies never have identical interests. You think about the United States alliance with Japan which is a very close one. But when it comes to say the defense of Taiwan Japan is closer to China has much more exposure and vulnerability to China militarily and also even economically as well as having a completely different way of presenting itself in its foreign policy because of its World War II record Japan is inherently very cautious about how it positions itself as an international actor. So it's not easy. It's never been easy for the United States and Japan to agree on what Japan would do that Japan doesn't wanna do as much as the United States would like it to do in case of a Taiwan scenario. And this has been an issue of negotiation for 30 or 40 years and Japan keeps moving a little bit closer to what the US would like. Another very, very close ally of the United States of course is the United Kingdom. And there was quite a gap between the US and British position on China under during the golden era under your previous prime minister's name. I'm just blocking but you know where Britain was totally emphasizing the commercial relationship now under Boris Johnson Britain has shifted a lot and has banned Huawei 5G equipment and prior to Johnson put a stop to the Chinese project of the nuclear power station and has sent I think one ship maybe I'm undercounting the number to the South China Sea but the UK has no defense commitment to Taiwan at all understandably. And has long not messed into that issue because of its interest in Hong Kong and of course the Hong Kong events in Hong Kong have helped to pivot the UK to a much closer position to that of the United States with respect to China. So my point is if you go down the list of allies whether it's the other NATO allies Germany is another very important example it has no military posture in Asia. It places great emphasis on its trade and manufacturing and tech relationships with China. If you go down the list, the allies it's not easy to work with allies they are gonna never I think which is always a strong word to use in these contexts because never say never but I think it's probably safe to say that the allies will never just hop to and join onto American policy 100% there's always a negotiation and a compromise in the relationship the cooperation is part way. It's even more so with the Southeast Asian partners of the United States allies and partners like the Philippines as a treaty ally but under Duterte has not wanted to be very close to the United States Vietnam has to really balance most of the ASEAN powers wanna balance India never wants to be to sacrifice its so-called strategic autonomy. So the ally portfolio is extraordinarily valuable but it is no easy thing. The third feature of the Biden administration's China policy that's very, very different from the Trump policy is to greatly enhance the human rights element of that policy in the case of the Trump administration some members of his administration Pompeo and Pence emphasized as I said before religious freedom but there was no consistent or across the board emphasis on human rights in general Trump even at one point spoke in favor of Xi Jinping's policy in Xinjiang. And other than using human rights to sort of bash or demonize I would say China the Trump administration as far as I know really ignored it the range of human rights issues that are there in China and pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council where there's a lot of important work on the international human rights regime is carried out. Why the Biden administration has emphasized human rights I think we have to give credit first of all simply to their conviction that human rights is an important value that they as individuals share and that they believe the United States needs to stand for and perhaps they also think of human rights as part of the long-term strategy for making the world a better place to live in which is what the human rights regime was from its initiation in 1945 with the United Nations was in a vision of a sort of a better more peaceful world. I think they share that view that these are important norms even though and I'll hasten to add because I'm sure many of you are thinking this even though the United States itself has frequently violated these norms and has this notorious double standard about human rights, but I think the people in the Biden administration feel that it is and most Democrat administrations have felt this way too that this is something they believe in. But secondly, it's also very useful for explaining China policy to the American people. The series of presidents have found it useful. In the United States, there's always the strain of isolationism that why are we even bothering? China is very far away, Asia is far away and it's all too expensive and troublesome. But I think if one explains to the American people that there are severe human rights issues happening in a certain place, it's one of the ways that it's not a magic bullet or whatever you call it, panacea for getting public support for foreign policy but it is an important theme in American domestic discourse about foreign policy. Third, it's something that most of our allies really agree with us on. Germany to take an example that I mentioned before under Merkel at least has really, she's often pursued a quiet so-called quiet human rights policy, but she, for example, got Liu Xiaobo's widow Liu Xia out of China by working patiently and insistently with the Chinese government. I mean, I think that the Germans and because of their history as well as their positioning in the world, they, this is the thing they share and that's true I think of course with Britain, with France, with Italy, with the other NATO allies with EU countries, with the EU itself which has an explicit formal foreign human rights plank in its foreign policy and in its China policy, Japan. So it's a support structure for our alliances and it is also a weak point in Chinese, the Chinese effort to gain influence in the world, not in every country. There are a lot of countries that don't where public opinion or elite opinion doesn't care that much about Chinese human rights behavior but I think that you've seen the polling from the Pew polls and other polls that Chinese image popularity has been declining in the world and this is one of the reasons that there are other reasons too, wolf warrior diplomacy and kerf luffels over the belt and road investments and failure to make good on investment promises in the port of Piraeus and things like that have an effect but I think the human rights image is one of them. A fourth element of the Biden China policy which is different, is related, somewhat related to the Trump policy but different as what I'll call partial decoupling. So the Biden administration does not seek a black and white or complete ban on trade and investment with China. I think it understands or takes the view and I agree with this view that the trade and investment with China is too vast and valuable to both sides but here speaking of American interests to be interrupted unless there's some kind of disaster and it would exact a huge cost if that relationship were to be fundamentally interrupted but decoupling is necessary in certain areas to a partial degree. So the most important one which I've mentioned already is the high tech of the 21st century where we have to compete and protect our advantage by being tougher about leakage of high tech information and of course the two countries are engaged in a very serious espionage competition about which I don't have any concrete information but we know that's going on. And so things like 5G which create vulnerability for espionage that has to be decoupled and areas where somebody's gonna win and make a huge amount of money and somebody's gonna come in second like clean energy is an area where we really can't share with China in the tech and there are also these strategic supply chains some of which are quite simple pharma PPE and so forth where we need self-sufficiency from China. So there's gonna be a part I predict and I think their policy is for a partial decoupling but not to fundamentally interrupt their relationship. The final area of the Biden policy that's different from Trump is to try very, very hard to find certain key areas of cooperation with China and one of them is climate change and you've seen John Kerry the president's whatever it's called special ambassador for climate issues meeting a number of times with relevant Chinese officials to seek cooperation and the other. And I think my own view on that is relatively optimistic in the sense that even if China doesn't wanna sign some cooperation agreement on the dotted line if we do what we need to do and that's as again you know, up in the air still with the Congress not yet decided on these two bills but if the United States does what it needs to do China will probably do what it needs to do as fast as it possibly can, you know this is it is working very hard on that but it's not easy for an economy like China to be quickly, quickly turned around on a dime. The other important one is global public health and that's proving to be extraordinarily difficult to find cooperation with but the Biden administration wants to and wants to cooperate as well with other areas where this is possible including North Korea, Iran the Biden administration would be willing to cooperate with China's Belt and Road Initiative and global infrastructure construction if the two sides can find a basis to be cooperative about it fisheries management, ocean pollution, things like that so Trump did nothing, none of Trump's nobody in Trump's administration did anything on that line and the Biden administration wants to and is working particularly on the climate issue. The most difficult area in the relationship I think is this one that has always been the most difficult area in the relationship which is Taiwan and people are worried and there's a big debate in the United States as you know about whether Xi Jinping is getting ready to attack Taiwan within the next as the saying is the next six years that was what the outgoing commander of the US Indo-Pacific command predicted in congressional testimony a couple months ago. People wonder sometimes why the two countries can't just settle, I mean, you know kind of tolerate each other on the Taiwan issue. Why must the United States mess in this issue when the United States is 10,000 miles away and so forth? And the answer to that is sort of historical that the United States has found itself and of course I won't go through the whole history but finds itself with a very heavy political commitment to what we call the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue which really means the separation of Taiwan from mainland Chinese control into the indefinite future not a declaration of independence but a frustration of the Chinese goal to get control over Taiwan. The United States is politically committed to that so heavily that if it abandoned that commitment I believe that our whole alliance system would just fall apart. You know, none of our allies completely no ally completely trusts any other ally ever in history but particularly American allies in Asia have always had a lot of doubts but so far they have say Japan has continued to commit itself to the American alliance but if the United States walked away from Taiwan either before a war broke out or during a war I think the Japanese would really have to rethink and South Korea would rethink and Australia would rethink and Japan and South Korea would probably go nuclear and the NATO allies would take another look. So the United States and that I'm just mentioning the most sort of geo-strategic reason for the United States commitment to Taiwan but there's also an important economic relationship Taiwan's production of high-end computer chips and the fact that it's a flourishing democracy is also very important. And in the case of China it's unsustainable from a security position to have this independent island 90 or nautical miles off of its coast that is beholden to China's main threat the United States and China needs to control Taiwan for that strategic reason as well as for its own ideological nationalistic historical and so forth reasons and from a legal point of view China has a very robust claim to Taiwan nobody says Taiwan is anything other than part of China even Taiwan doesn't say that. So I see this as a kind of unresolvable issue that's going to go on and on and on and on for a long time I don't see how we get to an end to it in any I mean I don't see the way out so I don't know when something may happen. This leads to a debate about whether the United States should declare once and for all that it will defend Taiwan the so-called end of strategic ambiguity but the Biden administration doesn't wanna do that even though Biden made this sort of careless statement on television that's not what he meant it doesn't wanna do that because talk is cheap and what the United States really needs to do is to have a credible military deterrent to China as while at the same time reassuring China that the US is not maneuvering to make the situation worse i.e. to have Taiwan declare independence. Okay, I'm coming to the end of my remarks but will the Biden strategy work? I am optimistic of course I'm distressed by the gridlock in Congress which could really make trouble for the Biden strategy but if that gets resolved I'm optimistic critics on the right such as Pompeo and Pence and others believe that the United States needs to really really pitch itself hard against China and Pence's Pompeo rather called for the Chinese people to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party the right wing in the American politics thinks we have to sort of crush China that's crazy talk that it's not feasible to do so. Critics on the left say we should accept China's legitimate security interests in Asia we should stop constraining them we should reach some kind of a condominium a G2 we should back off maybe we should abandon Taiwan so the Chinese won't be so angry at us and so forth I think that won't work and I've already explained I think my reasons for that and it's just not international you never settle an issue by backing off that just makes the other side push harder. I am hopeful that we won't have a third world war between China and the United States or and that the two sides can continue to compete there's no way out of that but can continue to have a very intense competition which is tough I'm not minimizing it but without a global crisis or the end of Western civilization or the end of Chinese civilization for a number of reasons first of all China doesn't actually has not launched an ideological this is a very debatable point but I'll put my position on the table China doesn't have an ambition to spread Xi Jinping thought for the new on socialism for the new era or whatever their ideology is to the rest of the world unlike the Soviet Union they don't have an ideological program for the whole rest of the world they just want the world to respect China and stop dissing China. Secondly, they're not trying to overthrow the so-called the liberal international order they want more influence in it they wanna change the emphases reduce the human rights part of it keep the human rights part but reduce the sharpness of its edge against China and its friendly countries have more voice in the trade rules and so on but they actually like the sort of UN based system which is based on the principle of sovereignty and in a way they're quite conservative so they're not a revolutionary power in that sense nor do I see them as an expansionist power in the sense that they do have some territorial disputes with India, with Vietnam and other South China Sea countries and a claim to Taiwan but those are old claims with historical roots I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong but they have a case for them but they're not then saying now we're gonna go after once we eat that up we're gonna invade Vietnam, invade the Soviet far east invade North Korea that of course that would be crazy for them to try to do that so I don't see them as expansionist the way that say Hitler was and the final reason why I'm optimistic actually is a word of praise if you will for Xi Jinping and my last point in this talk because I know I'm out of time which is to say that Xi Jinping is smart he is not the kind of a person to launch a crazy war or he has made mistakes I think Wolf Warrior diplomacy is a mistake I think the Belt and Road Initiative has proven much more difficult to sort of make a success financial or strategic success than perhaps than the Chinese hope but you look at Xi Jinping's behavior in the South China Sea for example where he found the moment and he pacified Obama saying we're not gonna militarize these islands and he only built up islands that China already possessed he didn't attack anybody else's islands he didn't give any country a causes belly for what he did and he moved the so-called salami slicing tactics that Stalin made famous Xi Jinping has practiced sort of moving out decisively and effectively but in a way that didn't encounter effective opposition I think that's quite characteristic of his style same thing with the Belt and Road Initiative which is a big challenge to the United States and to the sort of old European powers of their influence in South America and Africa and the Middle East and so forth in Eastern Central Europe it's a challenge but it's not the kind of challenge that can create a crisis so I think as long as somebody Xi Jinping or somebody like him is managing Chinese foreign policy it's they're not crazy people and if the United States can itself elect people who are not crazy people which of course is a big gamble then I'm hopeful that leaders on both sides can manage the strategic competition in a way that won't be fatal to all of us and with that I conclude and I look forward to discussion and comments corrections. Well, thank you very much Andrew, professor Nathen for this to the force of a presentation. I am not going to say too much about how wonderful it is I will start off with a question but before I do that let me remind everyone that if you would like to raise a question or make a comment please use the Q&A box when you do so it will be very helpful to me if you could say who you are with information to identify yourself but if you would like to stay anonymous just say so in your question and I will respect that and will not read out your identification it will simply be helpful for me in picking questions to put to the speaker. The question I want to put to you Andrew is the point you make about the engagement with allies that the Biden administration has done which I agree with you the administration is doing which the Trump administration was not doing but in terms of the effectiveness of it this is where I wanted to discuss with you is it the American approach that is being effective has America been able to persuade is European allies and others to work with the Biden or are they turning away from China because of the effectiveness of China's wolf warrior diplomacy and one would perhaps go even as far as to say that if China does not have a foreign ministry in the last two years China will have more friends in the world and it would have been much more difficult for America is to get various countries including established democracies to turn against China in the way that we have seen with your Pew Center survey data what's your response to that? Yes, I agree that a lot of the changed like for example with the UK and everybody on this call knows more than I do about the UK so please correct me on this I think that Chinese behavior had a lot to do with it I know that the Trump administration lobbied the UK very hard not to use Huawei 5G and I'm not sure what exactly caused the change in UK policy in that respect I think it was I'm guessing it was actually sharing of intelligence information that persuaded UK officials that the Huawei really was a big risk for espionage but I don't know but the behavior of the Chinese ambassador in London I know has been very offensive to the UK public and to the government so I agree with you that these behaviors by the wolf warriors have really helped the Biden administration and if one then tries to look at the other side and say how effective has the Biden administration been with the allies? I can only off the top of my head point to two examples of successes so far one is the Alkis deal and the other one was the statement the joint statement with Japan in which the word Taiwan appeared for the first time but other examples if they exist that is to say specifically vis-à-vis China let's say if I think about US-German relations around the China issue I cannot report any payoff right now well the EU's failure to ratify the investment agreement could be another one but that's really I think more attributable to Chinese behavior as you pointed out to their sanctioning of the number of EU individuals and institutions rather than to work by the United States so yeah these two things come together it's hard to say which has a greater percentage of impact on shifts in European policy you're on mute. Thank you Andrew. Yeah. The first question I would like to put to you comes from Jim Harkness I'll read that out a bit long. You have made a convincing case that in some areas the Biden administration is acting more strategically while continuing Trump's policies but in at least two areas the Department of Justice China initiative and sanctions on imports Biden is maintaining Trump's policies that I would submit are actively harmful to the United States economy our values and the bilateral relationship do you have a view on why this is and do you see any prospect for the situation changing? Thank you. Well on the tariffs I think the problem is that the Biden administration doesn't believe in these tariffs doesn't believe that they're useful as a tool against China doesn't believe that they're doing anything good for the American economy but in the current political environment if they were to well even as a negotiating tactic you don't give something up for nothing I mean even though they inherited these tariffs they need some China to do something including presumably to make good on China's commitment under the so-called what was it called interim trade agreement I forget the name of it that the Trump administration reached with China for China to purchase The first phase agreement Yeah what was it called? The first phase agreement First phase agreement you know China hasn't made good on that agreement so just you know you inherit a bargaining position and you don't just give it up for nothing but I think even more importantly is that the political consequences in the United States of abandoning the tariffs for nothing would be devastating in an environment where you know the public is so divided and the Trump faction is so vociferous and you know it would just create a firestorm of criticism of Biden is surrendering and also politically it would be dangerous to give it up without an excuse as it were for doing so The DOJ China initiative I don't know how it has weather and then if so how it's been changed in its application under the Biden administration so I think that the Chinese theft of crucial intellectual property is a real thing and that the United States has to protect itself from it some of this Chinese acquisition of American intellectual property and European intellectual property is legal they read journals they invest in companies they invite, they hire people they hire people who got PhDs in the United States and Europe and so and those things are legal and then there's the illegal part which is partly hacking on the internet and partly all other kinds of spying and the US has to protect itself against the illegal part of that and probably should protect itself better even against the legal part of it in legal ways What was bad about the DOJ China initiative under Trump in my opinion was it's sort of racial profiling of Chinese persons but has the DOJ been able to adjust that which is not easy because China itself as you know Xi Jinping puts out that any ethnic Chinese anywhere around the world shares the Chinese blood and should be loyal to the nation and the party and calls upon Chinese persons whatever they're citizenship to contribute to the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation and so forth so this is unfortunately a fact that there are persons of Chinese ethnicity they aren't the only ones but they're I'm guessing a greater percentage of the persons who were doing espionage work for China or of Chinese ethnicity but that doesn't make it okay for the DOJ to target innocent persons who happen to be Chinese but what do you do about that? I have no information so I don't know whether the Biden people have I hope that they have, you know that they're doing a better job than was done under the Trump administration The next question I picked follows ups on this and it comes from a colleague, Kevin Latham, at Sowast it's a rather long question what do you think about the recent efforts to increase Chinese soft power internationally ranging from the influence in overseas Chinese communities to mobilization of or through Chinese students overseas which of the following three positions would you agree with if any? Number one, China is always trying hard but not really succeeding Number two, trying harder than ever and succeeding to some degree with overseas Chinese communities and students but not influencing foreign powers or number three, having greater influence with developing countries and economies but not in western countries I mean, do you or is it that the fear of Chinese soft power something that is conjured up by hostile foreign journalists and what does the Biden administration think about it? So what does Chinese soft power consist in? So I would say there may be just off because this is a very stimulating question and I haven't thought about it systematically before but let me say for now maybe Chinese soft power consists of three themes three main themes one is the soft power that says the Chinese be proud to be Chinese the Chinese have stood up nationalism and ethnic identity second one would be China's a benevolent power with a win-win relationship to other countries you know, we can help you we respect you and we can help you and we're not imperialists and the third one would be the Chinese political model political administrative economic social model is better than the bankrupt Western model. So if one thinks about these three themes and then answers Kevin's question in terms of the impact of it I think that the that well, as you know China has achieved control over most Chinese language media in the rest of the world. I participated in a project at the Hoover institution called China's Influence and American Interests which is available on the Hoover website for free and it has a chapter on Chinese language media in the United States and it points out that there's hardly any of them anymore that aren't controlled by China. So I think for the and this is a global phenomenon and I think also we could put in the Chinese students and scholars association and universities and so on that when it comes to reaching out to Chinese speaking populations around the world and saying, you know China's really stood up in the world and is doing great. I think that's very effective. On the win-win theme, I think with where China has a lot of trade and a lot of investment and belt and road initiative projects and so forth whether it's in Africa, whether it's in Argentina whether it's in Greece or Laos or so that in most of these countries there are two sides. The side that is dealing with China the government that's in power that signed the deal the enterprise that is, you know working with China and so forth is very convinced that this is a good deal and there's always an opposition faction that says, oh, you're corrupt and you're violating the environment and things like that. So I think it's quite mixed currently. And then in terms of the China model is a good model this is kind of the flip side of Steve's question before I think that a lot of people now think the Chinese model is better than the American model and this is just as China has damaged its own image through willful or your diplomacy the United States is the one that's done the most to promote the Chinese model by doing such a horrible job at home. Democracies looking very bad nowadays in the world at least, you know, I think American and probably UK democracy look pretty bad, Germany looks not too bad. And so I think a lot of serious people including Chinese people, including third world people including Americans and Europeans are thinking hey, maybe authoritarianism is not such a bad thing they can build railways really fast. Next questions comes from Sir Andrew Burns who had extensive experience in Hong Kong. His question is that it is striking that in all your talk, in your talk you have make no mention of Hong Kong. Does Hong Kong's future no longer matter in this context or is it now the relevance to the United States? I think there's a lot of, I'm a little bit biased or down in the looking at this from, I've been pretty involved with the Hong Kong, you know, diaspora movement in the United States and participated in a number of, you know, webinars and so forth about Hong Kong. So in my circle, there's a great deal of attention to the Hong Kong and Xinjiang issues. Now maybe from a broader national view, the Xinjiang issue has gotten more attention than the Hong Kong issue. The US Congress has, I'm not quite up to date but they've adopted, I think passed a law for easing the access to a green card for people who flee from Hong Kong and there are a number of measures under consideration or which have been adopted in Washington to support people who flee from Hong Kong. So no, I think I just mentioned it once in passing but it's just because of the constraint of time that I didn't talk more about it. I think it is very important in the US image of the strategic competition and why, you know, there's a lot at stake that China's the type of political system that we need to compete with and resist. But as Sir Andrew would know better than I do, there is actually nothing we can do about it. We have no governmental leverage. It would be significant if the US and global finance community were to move out of Hong Kong. From what I can see so far, they haven't made that move. They have accepted the assurance of the Hong Kong government that this has nothing to do with them. And absent that type of reaction from the finance community, there's not a hell of a lot that anybody outside of China is gonna be able to do to reverse the national security law and the vicious way that it's being implemented. We can't do anything for the many people who've been imprisoned, the way they're being mistreated in prison, kept there without trial, without bail, isolated. So it is important. Okay, next question I picked comes from Graham Hutchings at the Oxford China Center. Your subject is changes in US policy towards China. Can you say a bit more about the potential changes in Chinese policy towards the United States? Under Xi Jinping or perhaps if he is going to be around for a while, given that he's going to be around for a while and therefore what would be the potential changes in Chinese policy towards the US? I think what you see is what you get with Xi Jinping. I don't expect a change. I think that the Chinese leadership, whether it's Xi Jinping or others, are not surprised at US hostility. I think they are realists. They felt that this situation was inevitable when China became strong and tried to take its rightful place in the world, the United States as the incumbent power would resist. That China has to keep on asserting its interests. So you're gonna have the rhetoric of the win-win and you're gonna have the building up of the Chinese military. So they're very smart about investing in asymmetric military capabilities that have, I would say, have checkmated the long, the inherited American military strategy around Taiwan. So we now have to adjust. They're gonna keep on building up their international influence, but I don't expect any change. I'm not one of the ones who thinks that Xi Jinping is gonna launch an attack on Taiwan by some deadline. Yeah, so I don't see the need for a change on their part. I think in response to the bad publicity that they've gotten from Wolf Warrior and from certain BRI projects and so forth, China may adjust in a way that we like, actually, and become, you know, try to soften their image because they are capable of adaptation when they get a bad result. The next question that comes from a PhD student at SOAS, Malika Robinson. To what extent does the national identity dynamic within China and the United States contribute to the US-China tension, particularly over the trade war? The issues Malika has in mind include telling China's story well and also the foreign policy for the middle class. Obviously one for China, the other for the US. Yeah, hi Malika, nice to hear from you. I think that one of the things that the United States policy makers don't understand is the, so the United States policy makers tend to view the Chinese middle class as natural allies of the United States. And that includes the students and the intellectuals and the entrepreneurs and the people who come here as tourists and the people who come here as students and so on. They think we tend to think they should be friendly to us. What I think we don't understand is the pride of Chinese people in their Chinese identity and that when the United States positions itself as sort of saying that China's a barbarian, atheist civilization that's out to ruin the world and burning too much coal and shameful and all the things that are said about China in the United States that many Chinese people feel that their identity as Chinese persons is being offended by that. They may be critical of some of the things of their own regime, but they still wanna be respected as a great country and a great civilization and so on. I think there is that. And then I think in the United States that there are some, the United States is a country with very deep racial, I wanna say racism such a vague term, but sort of gut belief and race differences and race hierarchy and so forth is very deeply built in not that we're the only country like that into our political culture. And I think there's a well, there's a very explicit white supremacy movement, but I think even broader than that is this assumption of Western advance progressive advanced country, most civilized country, city on a hill and so forth kind of a thing that makes a lot of Americans kind of inherently antagonistic to an upstart country of another race as it were. So I think I agree with Melika that these identity attitudes as she calls it which is probably a polite term for kind of racialized identity attitudes are very important in the dynamic at the public opinion level. But what I hope for is that at the leadership level and I think that's true in both the Xi and Biden administrations that you're talking about sophisticated realist politicians and international realist geopolitical realism is a pretty pitiless discipline but at least it's got strong elements of instrumental rationality. So that's where I hope that these prejudices won't carry us away into a unnecessary degree of conflict. Okay, we still got quite a few questions. I'd like you to pick the next one from Grace Goud which is a bit of a critical question. You said China doesn't intend to upset the liberal world order. She said it is not so. China has every intention to be master of the world, to be master of the world as they say in the international now. And this is evidenced by Xi Jinping's rhetoric and public sentiment in China so it likes to know what is the basis of your conclusion that China is not trying to replace the United States as the world leader. Right, okay. So I think I would like to divide that question into two parts. One about the liberal international order and the other one about replacing the United States as the world leader. So what is the liberal international order? It is, for example, the United Nations Security Council that is supposed to, you know, that armed interventions in the internal affairs of countries are only legal if the Security Council authorizes them. You know, a world trading order with the maximum amount of freedom of trade. You know, international airlines, international shipping, insurance, banking, international, you know, and all this stuff is the liberal international order that I have in mind. And I think that China basically likes that order but they were not satisfied with their, and so they've put their people into leading positions in the World Bank, into the IMF, into the Interpol, into the World Health Organization. You know, so in other words, that existing set of institutions, many of the UN institutions and the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, China has no fundamental alternative to those things except that it has set up a number of its own institutions that do kind of the same thing like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. That they participate actively in the UN human rights institutions and they try to weaken, as I said, the impact of those institutions on China itself but they like to use them to criticize countries that they wanna criticize. So that's what I meant by not wanting to overthrow. So they don't wanna dissolve the UN or to return to autarchy or protectionism. I mean, in a certain sense, the US under Trump was more antagonistic to the liberal international order than China has been in the post-Mao period. And of course, the Soviet Union had its kind of own international order and didn't participate much in the Western one China wants to participate in the one global one. Now, in terms of replacing the United States as the dominant power, my understanding is that China knows that there is not gonna be, that when the US was the so-called sole superpower in the world, after the collapse of the Soviet Union for 20 years, maybe from 1991 to like 2001, that's not gonna happen again. There's not gonna be any sole superpower. The United States may be messed up, as it appears to be, but it's not gonna disappear. It may become the number two economy if China becomes number one, but the United States will still be a big economy with a big military and a lot of allies. The EU is not gonna disappear. Russia is not gonna, Japan's not gonna disappear. India is not gonna disappear. So there's really not gonna be another sole superpower. It's not gonna be the US and it's not gonna be China. I think that is the Chinese assessment about the future shape of world power. Okay. We've got actually about six or so really good questions, but I'll pick once on the tech side which comes from Duncan Hewitt, a research associate sourced. Given what you said about the tech, how far do you think the US should restrict market access to Chinese tech firms like Huawei, China Telecom or even TikTok? So market, so my understanding of this is, is very amateur, but I think that number one issue is not about market access, but it's about commanding proprietary technology that's going to become the global standard going forward in any of these areas. But with respect specifically to market access for Huawei, I think it's number one, it is about espionage. I think that that, again, I lack the technical expertise, but I find it entirely credible that if you build a Huawei infrastructure, you're giving them, giving the Chinese security agencies a key to all of your information. And it's also of course about we are behind in developing the 5G or the 6G technology, but in the meantime, we don't want Huawei to sort of lock it all down. So that would be the reason for denying market access to Huawei. China Telecom, I don't know exactly what technology they sell. So I can't comment on their market access and TikTok is a whole nother issue. I think it's not, as far as I understand it, it's not about high tech. It is about collecting information about our citizens and feeding it into their artificial intelligence databases and things of that kind. And I don't think that TikTok collects any information that actually has intelligence use in terms of politics and technology and military and stuff like that. But I don't even use Facebook and I'm the last human being in the world who doesn't use it so much. And I certainly don't use TikTok because that's as I understand it is for teenagers. That's what I heard, I don't know. Okay, probably the last questions and it comes from Lithuania from Constantinus, Andrew Yalkes. Right. Is there any willingness by the current administration to tackle China's real or alleged maligned influence in those domains that form an important part of American soft power globally? For example, Hollywood or NB8? If yes, then how could it be done in practice considering that these are businesses? Exactly, yes, Constantinus. Thank you for that question. The way the American system works, as you said, these are private enterprises, Hollywood and the NBA and academia and publishing and so on. And journalism are private enterprises or operations and it's hard for the government to intervene. And I'm not aware of any effort to do so. Sometimes these, I'm not saying these specific ones but sometimes groups that are subjected to Chinese pressure, especially businesses that are subjected to Chinese pressure will go crying to the administration and say, do something to protect us but don't use my name. And then the government officials will tell them, what can we do? What do you expect us to do to protect you? You have to stand up and protect yourself and refuse to bow to Chinese pressure. There's been a lot of discussion of this in the China policy community about what can we do and what has often been proposed say is that, say think tanks get together and have a code of conduct or universities get together and have a code of conduct so that we present a common front to the Chinese because the Chinese like to isolate a particular target a particular basketball team, particular sports league a particular hotel or airline company, isolate them. And if there was a code of conduct that where the whole community of that type of organization stood behind some principles that would help but those codes of conduct have not yet come into existence as far as I know. So this is a real tough policy problem to which no solution has yet been found. Well, thank you very much, Andrew, Professor Nathan for sharing your very insightful thoughts with us. I'm afraid that we still have quite a number of very, very good questions that I have not been able to put to you. They will be shared with you after the event but I'm afraid that we have reached the limits of our time. So let me just thank all of you who have taken part ask questions and also listened to Professor Nathan's talk and about for Professor Nathan for his fantastic webinar. Thank you and goodbye. Thank you.