 trick is China's grand strategy under Xi, reassurance, reformed, and resistance. Now, some of you will know that Professor Goldstein is a very distinguished scholar on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He is the current David Naught professor of global politics and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's also, I think he was the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and also at the moment, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute based in Philadelphia. He's published a lot of extremely high quality academic analysis on China in some of the best journals and is also very well known for the free books he has published or with Stanford University Press. The first of the three was from Ben Macdon's to balance of power politics, structural constraints, and politics of China from 1949 to 1978. After that, he published The Terrence and Security in the 21st Century, China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution. And more recently, he published Rising to the Challenge, China's Grand Strategy, and International Security. And with that, I will hand over to you, Avery, for your speech. OK, thanks, Steve, and thanks for inviting me to share my thoughts with the attendees today. I'm going to have a timer going here, and I'm going to make sure that I don't go past 45 minutes. But the topic I'm talking about is a rather large topic. It's about China's grand strategy under Xi Jinping. I'm going to try to touch lightly on all of the key points and try to do this in a fashion that I hope will set the stage for a good Q&A session afterwards. So most broadly, what I want to do today is look at this question of China's grand strategy under Xi Jinping. And part of the motivation for my beginning work on this part of my projects that I'm involved in, and that ultimately resulted in an article that was just recently published, is that analysts seem to have concluded by 2016 or 2017 that under Xi Jinping, China had adopted an approach that was fundamentally different from that of its predecessors in terms of China's approach to the world. Now, I'm not going to say that these analysts are wrong. My argument is rather that that view is misleading because it's oversimplified. And that misleading conventional wisdom is what I would label it entails two points. The first, that Xi Jinping had broken with China's broadly cooperative approach to foreign policy that had been in place for most of the quarter centuries since the end of the Cold War is the first point. The second point of this conventional wisdom was that Xi Jinping had ushered in an era in which an aggressive China would play a disruptive role that raises the risk of sharp confrontations and perhaps international conflict. Now, as I said, this is more oversimplified and misleading for that reason than for being wrong. What I want to suggest instead is that Xi's approach to international relations, his grand strategy for China, is distinctive. It is different. But it's not a fundamental departure from the approaches of his predecessors in the post-Cold War years. But I'm also going to emphasize that this approach, the way it's been implemented under Xi Jinping, is unfortunately revealing a lot of problems. And just how difficult it's going to be for China if it follows the approach that he's taking to avoid provoking a rather dangerous international reaction. Let me provide some context for what I want to talk about today by saying that my view of this question of grand strategy is maybe itself distinctive. But my argument is very broadly that since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, that China really has only had two grand strategies, though it has had more than one version or interpretation of each of these two broad grand strategies. That during the decades of the Cold War, roughly from 1949 to 1989, that China embraced various grand strategies of survival. And that in the post-Cold War world, since 1992, up through the present, China has embraced various grand strategies of rejuvenation. I guess I ought to begin by saying what I mean by this term grand strategy. And as I said, I'm moving beyond narrow military questions. And for me, grand strategy refers to the broad vision that sets the top foreign policy priorities based on a country's understanding of its capabilities and the international setting in which it has to operate. And to the vision that informs foreign policy choices across a broad variety of topic issue areas, dimensions, how we want to put it. The fact that you call grand strategy grand suggests that it draws together military, economic and diplomatic resources. The fact that it's a strategy means that not only must the state consider its own capabilities, the policy tools that it's disposal and figure out how they can advance the country's interests, but leaders who are formulating a strategy or trying to practice one have to anticipate how others are going to react or respond. That strategy is the realm of interdependent choice. And in fact, this is part of where C's strategy runs into some problems. But let me turn back to China and away from this general topic of grand strategy and say a few things about, very briefly, about China's grand strategies of survival during the Cold War. It'll make a nice contrast with the current approach. Most of those four decades of the Cold War, China, at least the regime, believed that it faced a clear challenge that would shape its grand strategy. And that was that it faced serious external military threats, first from the United States and later from the Soviet Union. Facing these kinds of existential threats, the leaders of the CCP regime in China felt tightly constrained to focus on a strategy that would ensure their survival. And during those decades, China was relatively poor, militarily weak compared to the superpowers that pose these military threats. And so as a consequence, China's only recourse was to turn to one superpower partner as a counterbalance to the threat from the other one that it believed it faced. And so in succession, in these grand strategies of survival, China embraced these approaches to trying to cope with the dangers it faced to its own survival. That's why these are grand strategies of survival. The first one, most familiar, certainly familiar to most people probably watching the seminar was Mao's so-called lean-to-one-side approach to the Sino-Soviet Alliance and military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union to ensure the regime's security in the face of what was seen as the United States hostility as a superpower, the threat posed by American economic isolation of China that China had no recourse other than to turn to the Soviets as a counterbalance. So the first grand strategy of survival was the Sino-Soviet Alliance. By the late 1960s, early 1970s, China still faces a threat to its survival, but it now perceives that that threat from a superpower is from the Soviet superpower. And so, although it wasn't quite put in these terms, China is going to embrace grand strategies of survival that lean to the other side. And while Mao was still alive, this alignment with the United States, not a formal alliance, but an entente with the United States was focused on military security concerns. That in leaning to the American side, Mao's approach was to focus narrowly on military and security issues to ensure the regime's security in the face of an existential military threat from the Soviet Union. After Mao dies and when Deng Xiaoping and the reformers come into power in the late 1970s, China continues with a grand strategy of survival that leans to the American side and carries forward the military engagement or alignment with the United States that Mao had initiated in the face of Soviet military threat, but also under Deng Xiaoping added to this grand strategy of leaning towards the American side, an economic alignment opening up of the country because the regime under Deng Xiaoping and the reformers leadership believe that in addition to the external military threat they faced, they faced a serious domestic danger to the regime's future as a consequence of its failure to improve the standard of living of the Chinese people, but also as its failure to build an economic foundation that would make the country strong enough to deal with external threats on its own. So you have this continuity over four decades of grand strategies of survival but different approaches to implementing it. But as we all know, by the end of the 1980s the Cold War is ending and after 1989 and into the early 1990s the Soviet threat that had been driving China's grand strategy of survival over the last two decades of the Cold War, that threat had evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, but before China was going to adjust to the changing international context as I think everybody here knows, domestic political upheavals, demonstrations, protests in 1989 in the spring of 1989 pose an immediate domestic challenge to the regime's survival. And so the focus was mostly internal for a couple of years, even as the Cold War was ending. And it wasn't until the CCP had restored its grip on power that it would look outward again and try to figure out how to make its way in the world. And it's going to reemerge on a world stage that is fundamentally transformed by the end of the Cold War. I guess the good news was China really no longer faced a serious foreign military threat to the regime's survival. And on top of that, the regime by the early 1990s was already beginning to as a consequence of the fruits of the reform program in China was beginning to deploy both conventional and nuclear forces that would enable it to cope with any real external military threat to the regime's survival on its own. Mainly by dissuading others, even a superpower from challenging China's vital interests because of the consequences of punishment that would entail either relying on China's conventional forces within the East Asian region or on China's finally viable nuclear deterrent that was deployed by the 1990s. So the regime's no longer going to have to be obsessed with the challenges of survival. So after 1991, instead China's leaders shift their grand strategic priorities, shift their grand strategic focus, no longer to survival of the regime but to the longstanding goals of Chinese nationalists since the late 19th century. And that goal really is to restore China to its rightful place as they see it as one of the world's most advanced countries and a great power on the world stage. And what I'm going to argue is the regime was turning to grand strategies that we now call, that has been made up the terms of popularized by Xi Jinping, but he certainly didn't invent the term three strategies of rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. These three grand strategies of rejuvenation, three approaches to this goal, they share the common goal but they've differed in the way it's been pursued. Initially in the early to mid 1990s while Deng Xiaoping was still wielding power within China, China's grand strategy, the immediate aftermath of the Cold War was summed up by Deng's call for the country to exercise caution, restraint, maintain a low profile in the essence of this relatively passive approach to its foreign policy designed to rejuvenate China and elevate its position in the world was captured in a famous four characters, Taoguang Yang Huai'er hide capabilities and buy our time. And the logic of this approach was rooted in the belief among Chinese leaders in the early 1990s that others would accommodate China's rise that they would not oppose China's integration into the international economic order and would permit China to become both wealthier and more powerful. Why would they expect that others would be so accommodating from today's perspective that sometimes seems surprising that this was permitted or was tolerated. I don't think everybody had to give them permission. And the answer, if you were sitting in Beijing was pretty obvious because from their perspective everybody understood that China was far too far behind in the early 1990s economically and militarily for it to pose much of a challenge let alone a threat to any major powers interest in the world. This rather optimistic view was not unreasonable based on the facts. In the early 1990s, China had what was at best a second rate military. Some put it on a par with Saddam Hussein's military on the eve of the first Persian Gulf War by the United States. And a third rate economy, so it was roughly 6 to 7% the size of the American economy. In other words, the US economy was 15 times larger than China's economy in 1992. So why would anybody care if China was trying starting to make strides on this path to reemerging as a great power? That was the perception in Beijing but within just a few years, really within three years of following this approach China's economic growth was beginning to catch the world's attention. On perhaps even more importantly, China was flexing its military muscles to the extent it had these military muscles in the region, in the South China Sea but probably most importantly in the Taiwan Strait in 1995-96. And this began to raise concerns among China's neighbors and more importantly in the United States about the implications of China's rise if they continue. The United States and regional neighbors responded the United States and its allies in the region began to reorient or recraft Cold War military alliances from their old mission, which had been to deal with the threat from the now to funk Soviet Union to alliances that tacitly prepared for the potential threat from a rising China. And from Beijing's perspective, this was alarming, I mean, a seriously bad news. A spike in external threats to China spearheaded by the United States might compel China to return to a grand strategy to prioritize the immediate military security threats rather than focusing on the effort to transform China into one of the world's leading economic and military powers, which would be a long-term project. Put bluntly, by 1996, Deng Xiaoping's low-profile stealthy rise approach was no longer working. Others were already anticipating and worrying about continued increases in China's capabilities. And so China's leaders began to modify their approach to the grand strategy of rejuvenation, began to fashion policies that reflected this new approach to the grand strategy as Jiang Zemin took over for Deng Xiaoping as leader of China, an approach that would continue into the first term under even Jiang's successor, Hu Jintao. In other words, this is a approach to the grand strategy of rejuvenation that will be in place from roughly 1996 until roughly the summer of 2008 when the summer Olympics are held in Beijing. This was a new approach to the grand strategy. It was rooted in the view that even though China might not yet be very wealthy or very strong, it was both wealthy enough and strong enough to alarm others. And that China therefore needed to adopt policies and take actions that would establish a track record and build confidence in Beijing's assertion that a more capable China would be a responsible and constructive member of the international community. This was a more proactive approach to reassure others. It would highlight the benefits for other states if they embraced rather than attempted to block China's rise, which is what China's leaders feared the American-led efforts in the region were about to do. What kinds of benefits, what kinds of mutual benefits would be gained here, gains from trade and investment available to China's economic partners, the stabilizing role that China could play when the international economy encountered problems like the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s and the global financial crisis or economic recession in 2007, 2008, the useful role that China could play in helping others to address prominent international concerns about nuclear proliferation, terrorism, environmental questions and public health and China's willingness within the region to participate and in fact foster and strengthen multilateral cooperation with its ASEAN or Southeast Asian neighbors. So the upshot of this turn in the grand strategy for juvenation under Jiang Zemin and into the beginnings of Hu Jintao's terms was that China's leaders were integrating with and adapting to the existing international order. That was the message being sent out. No challenge, no threat here. This was expected to enable China, China's leadership's perspective to seize what they expected would be a several decades long period of strategic opportunity to make the, to focus on making the country richer and stronger without stoking the fears that triggered resistance and pushback of the sort that seemed imminent in 1995, 96. The takeaway here, the bottom line in terms of how well this approach worked is it worked rather well. In fact, by the early 21st century, some analysts in Asia and certainly some in Washington, DC were worried that China's approach was proving so successful, this attempt at reassurance and indicating that China was pursuing a peaceful rise, that China might supplant the United States as the central player in the region, whereas it was sometimes put in Washington, DC, China was eating our lunch. But then for reasons that are still debated and I won't linger on in this talk today, we can deal with it in Q and A if people want to, for whatever reasons after the summer of 2008, Beijing seemed to deviate from this rather successful strategic blueprint. And for a few years, they kind of stumble about and I would refer to this period from 2009 roughly until Xi Jinping comes into power as a period of strategic stumble, period when the outside world began to discern that there was a change in China's behavior. The argument was China has become more assertive in economic, diplomatic and military affairs. The upshot of all this perceived assertiveness from the outside world was the effort most importantly undertaken in the Obama administration to rebalance the US strategic focus away from the Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia to dealing with China's role in the Asia Pacific region, the so-called pivot by the United States, which China from China's perspective was perceived as another attempt to contain or block China's rise. There's good news and mostly bad news here for China as this happens, the good news was probably 21st century and certainly by the second decade of the 21st century, the China's military capabilities which are already improving in the 1990s, nuclear and conventional capabilities. Big China with deterrence that buffered any security risks to regime survival that they might face as a consequence of this strategic stumble. China was strong enough at this point to cope with military threats to regime survival. If that's a good news though, it's mostly bad news. The bad news was that the regimes, the purpose of the regime's foreign policies, the goal for the regime and its grand strategy was after all rejuvenation, not just survival. That's the benchmark is the approach that China is taking enabling it to achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. That's the benchmark of success that the regime set for itself as early as the beginning of the post-Cold War era. And for that, the regime is going to have to develop a new approach because things were looking pretty bad in terms of the international context for China in the early 20 teens, the second decade of the 21st century. So the new approach that's going to be embraced and new approach to rejuvenation that's going to be unfolded under the leadership of Xi Jinping is going to have some distinctive characteristics. So now let me turn directly to the elements of Xi Jinping's approach to rejuvenation, his grand strategy of rejuvenation. And it rests on the following assessment by the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping after 2012. The assessment was there was no way to simply go back to Deng Xiaoping's low-profile approach of hiding capabilities and biding time. And China was already strong enough and wealthy enough that other countries are going to pay close attention. There was no more hiding and biding possible. But also that China couldn't simply revert to the approach that had been quite successful under Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, the peaceful rise approach of reassuring others because events between 2009 and 2012 had made it much more difficult to convince others that China's intentions were benign and that it could be counted on to adhere to a foreign policy of cooperation as it grew wealthier and more powerful. Or put most simply, there was no way Xi Jinping could turn back the clock. Instead, Xi Jinping is going to try to craft or come up with his own approach to pursuing rejuvenation for China. And my argument is that as it said in the title of the talk, this is distinguished by the combination of three efforts, reassurance, reform and resistance. So first, China under Xi Jinping still tries to reassure other countries. When it's possible, it seeks to nurture their confidence that even as China becomes more powerful, that it won't pose a threat to others and to try to convince them that China's rise still presents opportunities for mutual benefit. But reassurance won't suffice and it's less frequently going to be possible. So there's more to his approach to rejuvenation than that. The second element here is under Xi Jinping, an attempt of a richer and more powerful China to promote reform of the international system, just reforms within China. That China emphasizes, first of all, that it is not out to overthrow the existing global order because China as well as others have benefited from it. But instead, the leadership under Xi Jinping has insisted it's trying to modify international institutions so that they better reflect the current realities and the new challenges of a world that's quite different from the one that prevailed when these institutions were established under the leadership of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. In other words, the message that's being sent by this reform strand of Xi Jinping's grand strategy is that China is not simply a status quo power that's adapting to the existing order, but it's also not a revisionist power that seeks to overthrow that order because that order has served China's interests, but instead that China is a reformist power, one that recognizes there are changes necessary on the one hand in order to ensure that this global order from which China benefits doesn't collapse, but also to ensure that China's interests are accommodated. The third element in this grand strategy of rejuvenation under Xi Jinping is that China is going to rely on its increased power and wealth to more resolutely resist challenges to the country's core interests as the CCP, Chinese Communist Party, has defined them. This reflects a distinctive concern in Beijing, the nature of Chinese politics is such that the leadership there believes that it needs to demonstrate to the Chinese people and if not to the Chinese people, certain leaders have to demonstrate this to the relevant party elites that the current leaders are up to the challenge of ensuring that the country is treated as a respected great power in the international system. And for the Communist Party, this is actually quite a dicey proposition. It's essential for them to do this for domestic political reasons, but it poses certain problems for China's foreign policy because the efforts to resolutely resist challenges to China's core interests inherently, as we'll see, are going to risk aggravating international concerns about the potential threat from arising China, in which case, Beijing's attempt to reassure others that it's not going to disrupt the system, it's claims that it only wants to reform the international order, it risks making those claims ring hollow. Otherwise, I guess you could say it's kind of an internal contradiction among the elements of this approach. So each of these three elements of Xi Jinping's approach to rejuvenation, reassurance, reform and resistance have been reflected in what China's been doing since 2012, 2013. Let me just lightly touch on some of the evidence, more of it is spun out in the journal article itself. So let me begin with reassurance. So what do I mean by that? First months that Xi Jinping was in office and certainly within the first year, he undertakes, he coordinates a diplomatic offensive by China to try to diffuse the fears of great power conflict and regional conflict that had become quite serious in the last years under Hu Jintao. Perhaps the highlight of this was Xi Jinping's efforts and when he met with President Obama at Sunnylands for this side trip when he was abroad. In June 2013, he meets President Obama and the effort at Sunnylands was really designed to try to reassure the United States and tried to get the United States to accept that the United States and China could find a way to forge a so-called new type, great power relationship that would enable their two countries to avoid falling into what would eventually become famously known as the Thucydides trap. In other words, reassure the United States about China's intentions and the viability of working out some sort of modus vivendi. So that was the first year in office. In addition, during that first year, in October 2013, Xi actually solidified his grip on power in the spring of 2013. In October 2013, Xi launched an initiative that would result in the founding of an institution known as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or AIIB, when that was announced and when that was being promoted, the Chinese were careful to emphasize that the AIIB would not challenge but rather supplement and cooperate with existing multilateral development institutions like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, sending these reassuring signals. Again, we could talk about that more in the Q&A. The third manifestation or bit of evidence here had to do with a shift in China's approach to the question of climate change, that the Paris Climate Accords and under Xi's leadership, Beijing embraced the position on climate change that was clearly designed to bolster the perception of China as a more responsible actor, willing to cooperate with others, most importantly, the United States, but also to take a leadership position in the developing world, as China views itself, to address the problem of global governance when it comes to the environment and climate change. This was a major shift from the position that had been staked out under Hu Jintao's leadership in 2009. I guess it wasn't Copenhagen and marked a contrast that was meant to look more reassuring. All right, enough on reassurance. Now, turn to the other second element, the reformist impulse. Here, we're really talking about something that advisors to Xi Jinping referred to as globalization 2.0. Globalization needed to be reformed in some ways and a new version come up with. This was being discussed and was articulated within China, but the outside world really pays attention beginning in January, 2017, when Xi Jinping became the first top leader from China to attend the World Economic Forum at Davos. Where he delivers a speech that emphasizes China's, first of all, support for the fundamentals of an open international economic order, a speech in which he notes that globalization had benefited China and others, but globalization was already resulting in various problems that required reforms if this open international economic order was to be preserved and the main focus being on institutions like the WTO. The effectiveness of Xi's speech at the time was magnified by the events that had immediately preceded it. You had, I can tell most people in this audience, you had the Brexit vote, you had the election of Donald Trump in the United States and there were growing doubts at the time in January, 2017 about the durability of Western support for global economic cooperation. That there might in fact be a fundamental pushback against globalization, and of course this is all pre-COVID-19 pandemic. But China was taking out the position as the champion of saving an open international economic order, a reformed one that would deal with some of the existing problems that were triggering things like the Brexit vote, resistance in the United States to free trade, et cetera. Another element of China's reform push under Xi Jinping is in the realm of cyber governance, global governance on cyber issues. This is an area where the institutions were not yet well formed, but clearly most of the way in which the cyber realm was being organized reflected initially America's domination of this area in international affairs. And China under Xi Jinping was gonna play to the argument that China wanted to see these institutions modified, clarified, but certainly reformed in ways that would serve China's interests. And in doing this China, some people now view this as China's efforts to kind of stake out an authoritarian alternative to the global governance of cyber issues, sharing interests with countries like Russia and some other authoritarian regimes around the world. But at the time that China's beginning this push, there was sympathy for the argument that this was an ungoverned realm that required reform, partly as a consequence of the revelations from Edward Snowden, but also because of growing concerns about questions of privacy and security in places like the EU. So this is an area where China believed it could, in fact, be an advocate of reform that might be welcome. But the third and most significant area that the element of reform in Xi Jinping's grand strategy of rejuvenation has been his, what was first announced or translated as One Belt One Road, but is now known as the Belt and Road Initiative. This is distinctive and it is not like the AIIB. The Belt and Road Initiative was a unilateral Chinese undertaking, not a multilateral institution that China was forming. The AIIB, by contrast to the BRI, emphasized that China was gonna follow the best practices established by other development funds. The BRI, China emphasized, was not necessarily going to embrace the rules of conditionality for assistance in development projects that other multilateral institutions had embraced by the end of the 20th century, safeguards against corruption, respect for labor rights, consideration of environmental consequences in the recipient countries. Instead, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative was going to focus narrowly on economic ends that were not being met by existing development efforts. It would serve China's interests, but also would serve the economic interests in parts of the world that were not being well-served by existing investment alternatives. And for those of you, I'm not gonna go into the BRI very much. She was an attempt to build communications and transportation networks that would knit together economic activity across a wide region, beginning in Southeast Asia and Central Asia, but eventually extending to Africa, Europe, and in fact almost all corners of the world. So that's the reformist strand of this grand strategy. The third bucket, and the one that's most problematic was Xi Jinping's determination to more resolutely resist challenges to what the CCP sees as China's core interests. Now, the first thing to say here is I'm not trying to imply that the predecessors to Xi Jinping did not resist challenges to China's core interests. They were all prepared to defend China's vital interests where they were challenged, especially in the Taiwan Strait, but also in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. The difference is under Xi Jinping, China has been much less dependent, more proactive in staking out its positions, resolutely resisting challenges to these interests and deploying the capabilities that they claim are necessary to defend them. What kind of evidence do I have or do I look at that convinces me that Xi Jinping's approach is different in this regard? The first thing has been his approach to military modernization, military modernization that really kicked off in the 1980s, even before the end of the Cold War. But under Xi Jinping, there's been a shift, not just sustaining the program of military modernization. It's been accelerated and its focus has changed. In fact, there's five distinctive aspects to it. I'm looking at the time here and seeing I got a little bit of time, so I'll just mention them. Of course, part of this is increasing and sustaining and it's a growing investment because China's economy is growing, but the percent of the national budget is not necessarily growing. It's going to the military, but increased and continuing investment in more and more sophisticated military equipment, but also more and more realistic training for China's military. Perhaps another important signal here, a second area of military modernization was that China reorganized the way its military is commanded from seven geographically defined territories within China to five theater commands, which are defined by the most likely threats to core interests that China faces in maritime East Asia. The third thing was the increased prominence accorded China's Navy and the military leadership because again, focusing on the role that the Navy was going to play in defending China's core interests in maritime Asia. The fourth thing was the elevation of China's, the what had been the second artillery branch of the military elevated to its own role and as a separate military service, the PLA rocket forces, this reflected the importance attached to China's ballistic missiles, both conventional and nuclear for ensuring China's vital interests when facing the United States in East Asia. And fifth and maybe a little bit too nerdy for people here, the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping established a separate military branch, the PLA Strategic Support Force, which is mainly for coping with new challenges to China's interests in domains that reflected new technologies, especially the military applications of electronic space and cyber capabilities. So first element here, the new wrinkle under Xi is this dedicated effort to improve modernized update and reorient China's military modernization. The second aspect is something I think we're all familiar with by now and that has an increased focus on China's sovereignty claims and maritime rights in the Asia Pacific, the source of friction for which the military modernization is supposed to be the solution. Bold initiatives under Xi Jinping to bolster China's sovereignty claims and maritime rights in the East and South China seas. This begins in November, 2013, when China announces the air defense identification zone it was setting up over the East China Sea, including areas that are in dispute with Japan. After that, again, people are familiar with this, China's efforts to build up artificial islands and top reefs and low tide elevations in the South China Sea and then fortify them and in advance, rejecting international arbitral panel set up under the UN Convention and Law of the Sea to try to resolve China's disputes with the Philippines in the region. China's staking out a pretty bold and hard line position in doing what it claims is defending its vital interests or core interests there. Third element of the resistance that was not as important in the beginning of Xi's first term in leadership but certainly has become more significant recently since 2016 has to do with cross straight relations. That Beijing seeing the leadership under Maying Zhou waning in 2015 and then in 2016 with the election of Tsai Ing-wen, Beijing's state had a very hard line position, essentially laying down the terms under which warm relations across the strait with Taiwan could continue. It would acquire Tsai Ing-wen endorsing the Communist Party's version of the 1992 consensus on the one China principle. And when it was clear that Tsai Ing-wen was not going to talk about this the way that the leaders in the mainland wanted, China began to rely on its economic leverage and diplomatic clout to further constrain Taiwan's international space, something that the Chinese leadership views as resisting a trend on Taiwan towards drift, if you will, towards greater independence that China views as a threat to its vital interest in reunification. Fourth, and I'll just quickly mention this so I don't run out of time, developments on the Korean Peninsula. In particular, the decision by the South Korean government that it would host the US missile defense system, the FAD system drew a really outsized response from Beijing that this threatened China's vital interests because the radar associated with this missile defense system would not just be useful for coping with North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, but might in fact jeopardize China's nuclear deterrent that it sees as a vital for ensuring its ability to deter the United States from really jeopardizing China's, the Chinese regime. China's pushback on this entailed resorting to economic sanctions in addition to overt rhetoric, but China tacitly imposed economic sanctions on South Korean businesses. And this really is just one example of the way in which China has begun to use its economic cloud as a tool to resolutely resist what it sees as infringements on China's core interests since Xi Jinping's come into office, in particular using economic tools against Australia, New Zealand, Canada, as well as Taiwan. So those are the elements of the grand strategy. I wanna move to the conclusion here by asking the question. So basically how's it going? Has this been successful? Has this been a catastrophic failure? Not a catastrophic failure, but I think it's fair to say just a few years into this implementation of Xi Jinping's grand strategy of rejuvenation, that there's some very important reasons to doubt its feasibility and the prospects for success. I think part of, you can get at this by thinking about both the style, the rhetoric that Xi Jinping has invoked in announcing and pursuing China's foreign policies, but also the substance of China's foreign policy under Xi Jinping that has been creating problems for China. So first let me start up a little bit about the rhetoric. And here the point is that words matter. In fact, you know, actions are gonna matter. I'm gonna talk about actions, but words do matter. When Xi Jinping first started talking about China's rejuvenation in 2012, I think it was at the time he visited the historic exhibit at the Chinese National History Museum and just after he became chairman of the party in the fall of 2012, he started talking about the China dream, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. At first it looked like, you know, little more than standard Chinese party rhetoric. Maybe it was a way to try to mobilize the party and people behind his new leadership, but over time as he repeated this idea of rejuvenation and as he spun it out, as he explained it, the rhetoric grew increasingly ambitious and specific in its stated aims, more grandiose in its style. So that by 2017, at the time of the 19th party Congress when Xi Jinping was gonna serve, begin his second term as general secretary of the party, his speech at that party Congress pretty clearly stated what rejuvenation meant. In the speech he pointed out that that was China's goal to basically modernize the entire country and its military by 2035 and realize the dream of rejuvenation by 2050 with a Chinese economy and a Chinese military that would be among the world's leaders. The fact that this kind of rhetoric, in fact increases the difficulty, increases the benchmark, the standard, the challenges facing Xi Jinping and China to demonstrate that its grand strategy is succeeding. First of all, it raises domestic political expectations when Xi Jinping says these things, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party after he says this now own a definition of and a timetable for rejuvenation from which it will be difficult to back away. Equally and arguably, in fact, more important, some in China but more importantly outside of China heard Xi's openly declared ambitions as revealing China's intention to challenge American leadership in the Asia Pacific and perhaps beyond. That Xi's openly announced goals meant that economic and technological concerns that were already brewing around the world, especially in the United States are now married to concerns about China's growing military power, concerns that accelerated a shift in the West, particularly the United States and its views of China. That even though it's not true in Xi's speech, in Xi's speech he did not lay out this idea of taking the world over from the United States, didn't lay out an explicitly revisionist goal of challenging American power, but the shift in tone as he described this determination to catch up to the United States, fed a narrative in the United States that China's ambitions were far greater than it had been previously realized. This fed a new consensus in Washington that China might pose an alarming, fundamental challenge to American global interests and trigger to call for the United States to more openly confront China to prevent it from supplanting the United States as the leading power in the international system. I'm not gonna go into this, and it's a separate talk on US-China relations, but I'm focused on this question of grand strategy today. So part of the problem here is the boastful rhetoric of Xi Jinping, but it's not just the words. Words matter, but actions matter too. Arguably, actions are more important. And some of the China's international behavior under Xi's leadership following this grand strategy of rejuvenation has deepened the difficulties that Xi's strategy faces. And the problem is reflected in the two elements of this grand strategy that really distinguish it from his media predecessors who did rely on reassurance, but not reform or resistance. On reform, China's attempts to reform the international order have mostly fallen flat. In fact, it's not just that Beijing didn't convince the world through its speeches that it didn't pose a challenge to the United States, but in fact, China's actions through its most important element of this reforms initiative that they undertook, the Belt and Road Initiative, immediately and increasingly came under fire. It was judged as something that was negatively affecting other countries' interests globally and not making a constructive, reformist contribution to global development. In fact, as I'm sure many are familiar, this was not, the Belt and Road Initiative was not welcomed as a contribution to lagging efforts of global development. Instead, it was seen as a narrowly self-interested program to benefit China economically, increase China's leverage over recipients, and gain a geopolitical advantage over the United States and others. Quickly it gets labeled by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who's actually drawing on a term from an Indian analyst named Brahmachalini, referred to it as debt-trap diplomacy, to try to entice participants to take on these debts for unrealistic projects that would enable China to extract concessions and have leverage over them in ways that would compromise their sovereignty. We can talk about the debate about the Belt and Road Initiative and whether those charges are justified or not. The bottom line here is the evidence is pretty thin on the idea that this really is debt-trap diplomacy, but it was difficult for China to counter the charges because one of the characteristics of the Belt and Road Initiative, as a unilateral initiative, was that it was done very opaquely. The contracts that were negotiated were not at all transparent, and therefore it fed suspicion that China in fact was enticing countries to take on debt they could not afford and cutting corrupt deals with dictators around the world. I'll skip over some of this because I can see the time's waning before I hit my 45-minute end here. On the resistance element of this grand strategy of rejuvenation, and this is gonna be tough even with the most prudent management of efforts to resist what the Communist Party sees as challenges to China's core interests. It was gonna be difficult to resist what they see as challenges without making others nervous. Many of you perhaps study international relations, you're familiar with the security dilemma, and whatever China was going to do in terms of trying to defend its own interests could be viewed by others as attempts by China to do more than simply defend those interests, that others in fact have viewed China's efforts that it sees as defending its vital interests as really revealing evidence of China's more aggressive intentions, whether you're talking about the behavior in the South China Sea, or it's increasing coercive capabilities with respect to Taiwan. So let me wrap up because I can see I have run out of time and try to emphasize this point that the style and implementation of Xi Jinping's distinctive approach to the grand strategy of rejuvenation has been aggravating international concerns about China's rise, concerns that had initially developed in the mid 1990s and led China to adjust its foreign policy under Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. Today, you again see this resurgence of concern about the meaning of China's rise, but what we haven't seen is an attempt by the leadership under Xi Jinping and Steve and I were talking about this before we went live to try to adjust China's approach in ways that might seem less challenging to the global order. Instead, the reaction to Xi Jinping's approach has been one of a growing wave of pushback against China, growing concern about China's international role. And under Xi Jinping, it doesn't seem as though there's much adjustment in the cards. And the most important part of this is probably the fact that the United States has fundamentally altered its approach to China in ways that it's not likely to reverse regardless of the outcome of the American presidential election next month. So you would think that given past experience, maybe China's leaders will eventually come around to the idea that they can adjust and modify their approach taken to the outside world to make the environment more favorable to China's rise. But as I said, we see no indication that that is happening in Beijing, no attempt to devise a new blueprint for rejuvenation that would better serve China's interests. And I think the argument that I would make here is that Xi Jinping and those around him who are still in office may simply be too closely and too publicly identified with the current approach they've been taking to change course. And if that's true, that's bad news for China making the kind of adjustments that may be necessary if they're gonna head off a less forgiving international environment for China's rise. That's bad news because as many of you know, the last party Congress, who was announced that they would end term limits for the president. And that means that China could wind up struggling with these challenges that Xi's approach to the grand strategy of rejuvenation has been creating for the foreseeable future, at least until a successor to Xi Jinping comes into office. And that could be years and years away. So I'll stop there, I ran over a little bit and I'll certainly take any questions to clarify or perhaps respond to some criticisms that you have. Thanks again. You're muted, Steve. You're muted. Yes, sorry, I was unable to unmute myself. Adri, it was as usual, I've expected a fantastic talk to the force, very, very thoughtful and nuanced. Before I start the Q and A, just let me remind people attending this seminar that if you are using the Zoom platform, you can ask the questions on using the Q and A function. If you are using the Facebook streaming, you will have your questions being pushed to me by our administrator, Aki. It will be very helpful if you could in your question box identify who you are so that I got a sense of who you are. But if you would prefer your name not to be mentioned, just say so, the anonymity will be respected. Before I open it to the everybody and try to fit in as many questions as I can and hopefully all of them, let me start off by asking you a question, Avery. And when I do so, I will also pack in some comments that was made to you by one of the anonymous attendees. The question I want to put to you is that you provide this fantastic overview from Dong Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Sorry, you start off by providing this view that Dong Xiaoping provided of the Taoguang Yangui, the hiding capabilities and biting full-time. And you end with Xi Jinping asserting China's place in the world in a much more proactive way. If we look at the language of the Taoguang Yangui, it was never meant as a policy or as a grand strategy to guide China forever. It was always meant to guide China for a period of time until the time when China is ready. So on that assumption, at some point, one of Dong Xiaoping's assessors will make that call and judge that China's moment is nigh. It wasn't Zhang Jimin, it wasn't Hu Jintao, it turned out to be Xi Jinping after, as you explained, the Olympics and the global financial crisis, which gave China very good reasons to believe that the context has changed. China is genuinely rising and the once upon a time invincible Democratic West was in serious decline, couldn't manage its economy. All the hubris of the post-Covid-19 era is over. And so it happened, was that going to be something that we should fund it in any way surprising? Now, having said that, let me also bring in the comments that was made by the anonymous attendee because he will take exactly the opposite view. He or she takes the view that Taoguang Yangui doesn't actually means China was hiding capability and biting full-time. It is just an attitude that people should be modest on their own capabilities and not be aggressive towards other people around China. Where do we stand on that, sir? Well, I think it was more than just an attitude of modesty. I think it was a strategic purpose involved, which was the recognition that, I mean, when Deng Xiaoping was articulating this, he was also acknowledging the reality. And he saw this as a very practical way for China to try to focus its attention on its main goal at the time, which was getting the Chinese economy to take off, which would ultimately take a while, but eventually would supply the necessary foundation for military modernization that we see today. So I don't think it was, I wouldn't want to minimize it. It sounds like the anonymous question is trying to minimize the significance of it, especially because we know, and I think this gets at the opening remarks you made, Steve, because we know at the turn of the century, really the early 2000s, already within China, you were seeing a debate amongst Chinese scholars who are counterparts who talk about China's foreign policy about whether Taoguang Yangui was still appropriate, given China's increasing capabilities, even before the financial crisis. And I think some Chinese, the view was, well, that served its purpose at the time, but now that China's capabilities have become greater, China can't reach for the stars yet, but it can certainly do more. And I can't remember the exact translation of the phrase, but the idea here is that we should try to do something more active, not just hold back and be modest. So I think that that was already being debated in the early 2000s. And for me, it's not so much, I want to get involved in those internal debates, although we do know that there was a meeting cited in the article, I don't have the date in front of me now, I think it was in 2017 or 18, where Xi Jinping explicitly says the period of hiding and biting is over. He's settling that academic debate about how relevant is Taekwondo in today's world for China. But I do think, for me, the most important thing is that each of these approaches, to keep their eye on the ball, the ball is China's rejuvenation. Now, I thought you were gonna go in a different direction in challenging me and say, well, wait a second, didn't Mao Zedong also want to see China's rejuvenation and for China to become rich and powerful in his own sense of rich and powerful? And the answer is yes, but the international context at the time was such that they couldn't afford to focus on the questions of becoming rich and powerful because every time they took their eye off the ball of this challenge of ensuring regime survival, they faced dire challenges that they had to somehow cope with, whether it was American challenge or the Soviet challenge. I mean, Mao did at times try to say, I'm gonna pursue this dream I've got for making China an advanced and powerful country and they turned into catastrophes. So that was always there. I mean, it's part of the nationalist strand in modern Chinese history that has as its legacy, all Chinese nationalists, including those who become members of the Communist Party, that to rejuvenate China, it's not a matter of China really rising, it's a matter of China coming back to its rightful position. So I think that was there from the beginning under Xi Jinping. And I think that you're right, it was always seen as time limited. I also, because it was 2005 with a book I wrote about China's grand strategy in the era of peaceful rise, I said in that book that that was time limited, that it was pretty clear that when they talked about a period of strategic opportunity, that implies there's gonna be an end date, right? This is the period of strategic opportunity, take advantage of it because when it's over, then we'll be in a position to do something more. And I think what's happened, I think de facto what happened under Hu Jintao towards the end when they really didn't have a coherent approach to this, but certainly under Xi Jinping is, as you said, the argument has prevailed within China that that period of strategic opportunity enabled China to become rich enough and powerful enough that it really can do more than just adapt to the international order dominated by the United States. Thank you, Avery. We have plenty of questions and I do mean really plenty of them. So it will keep me short. Thank you. Thank you. Let me start with questions from William Knight. He wanted to ask you about the AIIB and what the creation of a Chinese-led AIIB have occurred because China could see that with the ADB effectively being led by Japan, it would be really helpful for China to have its own alternative operations in the same matter. I think that might have been part of the motivation. Of course, that doesn't tell us why they would set up the AIIB the way they did, which does not even clearly determine that China's role will be as great in the future as it is today. So yes, undoubtedly China wanted to show that it could do just like the other countries that have set up development banks, not just Japan's leadership in Asia, but similar institutions in Europe and elsewhere. I think they did want to demonstrate we can do this now too. We're in the club with the big boys. But for me, the key was the way in which they crafted the rules and regulations. Some of you who studied the AIIB probably know that Jin Li Qin, who is the first president, who is the first president, when they drafted the rules for the AIIB, they tapped individuals from the West, most importantly Natalie Liechtenstein, I think, who had worked at the World Bank. They essentially were mimicking the existing international institutions. And simply saying, part of what China's going to do is lead institutions that fit within the existing order, even a setting aside questions of reforming that order. Okay, let me try to combine two questions to use together. They're not exactly the same questions, but they're kind of related. The first one is from Ray Hong Song. And the question is about, is there any feasible way for the Chinese government to protect its core interest without challenging the global order or being seen as challenging the global order on the one hand? And then a question from the other side, which is that from William Knight, is not China pushing its grand strategy simultaneously on too many different fronts? Great questions. I could be flip and say the answer to the first question is yes, of course. Well, first, let me deal with the second question. Yes, China is clearly one of the, I gotta be careful here. What I've heard from people when I could travel to China before the pandemic is there's plenty of people in China who think precisely this, that it has been too much all at once. The Belt and Road Initiative and everything else, that China is striking out in too many different directions that one runs the second question, definitely yes. On the first point, would there be ways for China to defend its core interests without seeming so aggressive and assertive and without frightening others to put it bluntly? And I think the answer there is yes, there are ways. I don't believe that China's leadership is prepared to embrace them. But for those of you who study questions of international conflict and international disputes, one of the arguments that's often made is in order to mitigate the security dilemma, the fear that others have that your efforts to defend your interests really are going to jeopardize my interests. Now, one of the remedies for that is what's called sending costly signals. And I've often made the argument in China when I've given this talk or versions of it to Chinese audiences, when the issue of territorial maritime disputes comes up, I've argued that China is a big and powerful country as Yang Jieqiu pointed out in Hanoi in July 2010. But yeah, China's a big and powerful country. And what that means is China has the opportunity to make concessions to its neighbors that don't in any way really jeopardize China's vital security interests, to send a costly signal. It's costly to China to do this because it's paying a price in terms of its previous claims to these territories and maritime areas and also the way it's positioned itself in front of the Chinese people. That sends a costly signal that they're doing something difficult and they're doing it in order to demonstrate that in fact they really don't want to jeopardize other's interests. So there are ways to do this. But as I said, I have little confidence that the current Chinese leadership is very interested in doing it. Right, again, I'm combining two questions together. The first one is asked by Mark Simpsons. What indications could we look for that the Communist Party is not as united behind Xi Jinping as the media portrays? And could the situation be Xinjiang? If the world opposition governs further negative responses with that undermines Xi Jinping? And then there's a question also from JS which is that how do you see the Xinjiang situation to fit into Xi Jinping's grand strategy? How do you see this panning out? Is there an end game? Would still, is approval by the rest of the world change anything? No, so far disapproval from the rest of the world has certainly not changed anything. Now you can argue that doing things like banning the purchase of goods from factories that are produced with labor in Xinjiang, that maybe that will have some effect. I'm not so sure because I think if you ask how this fits into Xi Jinping's grand strategy, I think clearly, and I didn't talk much about the domestic political order in China, but clearly an overriding concern for any regime is regime survival. And for reasons that are distinctive to the Chinese Communist Party and their understanding of the national interest, their view is that these rest of political regions that are populated by ethnic minorities, Xinjiang, Tibet, and now more recently Inner Mongolia, that these are places where China cannot be tolerant of anything that might evolve into a challenge to the country's territorial integrity. I direct people's attention to somebody who's thought a lot more about this to an essay in international security by Sheena Greitens, that highlights the ways in which this program in Xinjiang, the concentration camps, and all the other policies really takes off when the regime is afraid that domestic turmoil in Xinjiang and resistance to Han domination there is being married to foreign forces, the international global Islamic movements of various sorts. And they just don't wanna let that happen. And they decide to embrace these policies that are beyond heavy hand that I think we all understand that these are violations of human rights, whether or not it amounts to cultural genocide as a conceptual debate we get into. But these are clearly what I would characterize as crimes against humanity of one sort or another. And it is eliciting a very negative reaction. And you see what China is doing in response. It's not changing its approach in Xinjiang at all as far as we can tell. Sometimes they're trying to say, well, we're winding it down. And then evidence appears that not winding it down from satellite reconnaissance photos, et cetera. And instead what you have are competing letters being filed at the United Nations, China tries to line up countries that are willing to support its endorse its approach to handling what it sees as separatism and terrorism in Xinjiang while the United States and other Western countries are lining up on the other side. So I don't see any indication that there's modification taking place under Xi Jinping. As far as you began by saying, is there any way we know whether there's internal disagreement with or resistance to Xi Jinping's approach? We don't really know. Although again, most of us who've traveled to China to talk to people that have contact with the Chinese elite seem to, there seems to be pretty good evidence. There's a lot of people who think this is a foolish way to go. And that I suppose it's possible as resistance, but Xi Jinping has proven to be a fairly effective autocratic trying to squash any opposition internally, partly through the anti-corruption drive that he championed. So unfortunately, given the nature of the kind of regime that China is, we probably won't know whether there's resistance until it manifests itself in a serious challenge to seize leadership if it emerges. I think it's more likely that once Xi leaves office, if he leaves office voluntarily, or if nature takes its course, that at that point there might be a reassessment of China's direction. There are two other questions I want you to take which are related to what you have been saying, April, about Xinjiang. One question is from Andrew Halper. And the question is really asking you to comment about the potential adverse effect on China's international ambitions, particularly from the countries in the Muslim world. And the other question is about how China's passive engagement affect China's positions in say the Middle East. Will China's assertive approach have a negative impact there? Take the second question. First, I think China's assertiveness or its more forward-leaning policies have less, fewer negative consequences so far in the Middle East because that's not an area where China is directly engaged in either territorial or maritime disputes with other countries. And it's an area where they're not directly bumping up against American interests. But that first question about the Islamic world, is China's approach to Xinjiang going to complicate things like the Belt and Road Initiative which involves a lot of Islamic majority countries around the world. And the answer is surprisingly so far not so much. And in fact, people have noticed the reluctance of Islamic nations to join in the course of criticism. Many of them, there are exceptions. Criticism of China, initially Turkey took a pretty forward-leaning approach to criticizing the policies being undertaken by Xi Jinping, but even Turkey's tacked back now and is more reluctant to criticize China on this. Some people point to the idea that this is really a reflection of China's economic leverage and these countries don't wanna alienate China as an economic partner. Some people point to the idea that China has successfully convinced, especially conservative authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world, that they are dealing with extremist Islamic forces within China just as these Islamic governments are dealing with extremist Islamic forces within their borders. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not an expert on China's relations with the Islamic world, but it is noteworthy that even this most recent round of statements at the UN, the letter, the 22 countries criticizing China on Xinjiang and then 72 countries or whatever it was lining up endorsing China and supporting it, that you look at the lists of countries and lots of Islamic majority countries have at least officially on the record supported and not criticized China's approach in Xinjiang. Doesn't mean it's gonna last forever. I think it will depend over time whether there's domestic political pressures in some of these other countries for their governments to stand up to China on this issue. Okay, we still have plenty more questions, even more than when we started. Again, I'm going to bring two questions together. The first one is from Jonathan Fenby, which is to ask you about how important is Xi Jinping's brand of rejuvenation for the Communist Party's domestic authority. And compliment to that is a question from Bernd Berger, which is to ask you about how would you factor on regime security in 2020 since the external rhetoric is disability against the one party system? And what impact do inner party conflicts have on attempts to adopt this strategy towards a less aggressive looking approach? So on the first question, can you tell me that first question again? I'm not sure, the question part, I got the setup. Well, the first question is about how does Xi Jinping's brand of rejuvenation figure in domestic politics? So I guess I kind of glossed over that fairly quickly, but I do think the fact that he has now staked the party's reputation in delivering the goods on this idea that they are gonna transform China into a major world power, a major technological power, economic power, military power by the middle of the 21st century, that's the standard now. And failure on that score is gonna would make I think a significant difference towards the perception of whether or not the regime's been successful. One of the strengths of the regime is that since the crackdown in Tiananmen Square 1989, the relative economic and development success within China has played into strengthening perceptions of the regime on the part of the Chinese people so that they haven't faced a legitimacy crisis. And I think the regime is well aware that failure to continue providing for improvement in the standard of living of the Chinese people, something that Xi Jinping explicitly talks about, not just incomes, but quality of life, failure to be able to stand up for what they have claimed are China's interests on the world stage, run some risk of undermining regime's legitimacy if they fall short. Frankly, I think it was a foolish, the best way to do that kind of thing is to talk about periods or many decades in the future and not set timelines. I think setting the timelines may turn out to be a fatal mistake because what I didn't talk about and I realize, you don't want me to take up too much time here, but one of the consequences of China's more forward leaning approach and the alarm bells it's set off abroad is that we now see the reaction, especially in the United States, pushing towards some kind of economic decoupling and technological decoupling. If that takes place, the prospects for China to continue making the strides it's made over the past couple of decades diminish. It is possible that China will find itself with a set of partners for trade and investment and exchange, academic and other kinds of exchanges that are less attractive than the countries from which it's forcibly decoupled as a consequence of China's approach. And that would rebound to undermine the party's legitimacy if the consequences that, in fact, they're not achieving the goals that they've set for themselves. Okay, again, I bring you two questions. One is from Finnate from one of our civil servants in this country. And the question is, which country is more likely to trigger the chiselous trap and commit a clear act of war? Do you think that at all likely? And related to that is a question about the election, the presidential elections. And that is a question from Lisa. Do you see the result of the US elections affecting Xi Jinping's strategy and will it influence China's approach to Taiwan and particularly in terms of the risk of invading Taiwan? That's why I'm bringing them together to you. These are huge question. So let me deal with the second question first and I'm probably gonna ask you to remind me on that first question. So the elections in the United States, they will have some consequences for US China policy and probably for China's policy towards the United States. That I think regardless of who wins the election and if you believe the polls, it looks more likely that Joe Biden will win in November. I think there's going to be an incentive both in the United States and in China to at least make an effort. They won't say it explicitly to reset relations, at least try to see if there's a path forward that is less confrontational than the relationship has become over the past year. I think it's unlikely to happen for a couple of reasons, mostly on the American side and on the American side, the problem there is even if Joe Biden and his team wanted to do that, they're gonna be pretty tightly constrained by the domestic political reset that's already taken place in terms of opinions of China and they're gonna be constrained by Congress as well as public opinion and the analyst community not to go back to a less confrontational approach. I think that's really going to limit what they can do because in the United States, as much as you and I care about US-China relations and all of that, that's not gonna be the main focus during the first year or two of a Biden administration. The focus will be reviving the economy and controlling the pandemic, obviously related. And in pursuing that agenda, the new administration cannot afford to alienate Congress. They need to build support and coalitions in Congress to get their agenda through. So they're not gonna try to cause problems by coming up with a China policy that is gonna be heavily criticized. On the Chinese side, I think we've already seen indications that they're kind of, pardon the phrase here, biding their time until the outcome of the November election in the hope that if they keep their powder dry a little bit over the next few months, maybe the new administration or a second term of a Trump administration would at least explore the idea of reducing the pressure on China that the US has exerted over the past year or so. The first question about is there gonna be a war? I guess that was the bottom line of that question about the Thucydides trap and which side would be more likely to start the war? Well, there's good news here for me anyway. And the good news is that I don't think either side is intentionally going to want to walk into a direct military conflict with one with each other. And I think mainly because both sides fully understand that they're nuclear weapons states and you can begin the war the way you want but you can never be sure where the war is gonna finish and both sides recognize the dangers of escalation. I think the bigger risk of conflict between China and the United States right now is the possibility of a tense confrontation, perhaps a crisis triggered by an incident either in the South China Sea, East China Sea or more recently it seems most likely in the Taiwan Strait in which both sides, the US and China and I'll set aside Taiwan for the moment here don't feel like they can climb down from their positions and as tensions ratchet up you run the risk of an unintended initially unintended military escalation. And while I think it's unlikely that both sides would under those circumstances keep climbing up the ladder of escalation there's always the risk that could happen. That's again, it's a good news, bad news thing. The knowledge that that escalation would take place provides strong incentives for whoever is leader in the United States and in China to be cautious. But the fact that escalation is possible means you can never be sure of the outcome. So I don't think that the city's trap is really the concern. I don't think the US is going to go to war to keep China from rising. I don't think China is going to go to war to grab the power of the United States is denying it. I think the real risks of military conflict are more local consequence of these local confrontations that could spill over into military force. Got a question from one of our students. Where does Japan fit into China's grand strategy? And this is a question from Matt Kennedy. Yeah, China kind of has, I want to say they flip flop on this, but they have kind of ambivalence about Japan's role. For many decades, China welcomed the US-Japan alliance as a way of reining in the possibility that Japan would go off on its own and pursue its interests in ways that are threatening the China's interest in the region. I think over the past couple of decades, China's become more wary of the US-Japan alliance and really doesn't have a good idea of how to respond to Japan. Every once in a while, try to improve relations with Japan when relations with the United States are most tense. We've seen that over the past year or two between Xi Jinping and Abe in Japan, but there are limits to this because in fact, certainly on the Japanese side, public opinion and political elite opinion towards China is very negative. It's grown much more negative over the past two decades, largely as a consequence of the territorial maritime disputes with China. And I think the Japanese connection to the Taiwan issue and the eyes of the Chinese leadership on the mainland means that relations with Japan, there's a limit to how warm they're going to get. I think Japan's view, to get back to the question itself of what role Japan plays in China's grand strategy, I think for the Chinese, the role for Japan is, the Chinese view is to minimize the possibility of Japan being the tail that wags the dog in China's larger plans or in US-China relations. Right. I want you to move to two questions, but I will ask them in sequence one at a time. They're not directly linked, but they're interesting contrasts. The first one I want to ask you is from Francesca. Would you say that the CCP's current grand strategy is to wait for the Western world to adjust to China's rise? And China can afford to wait, relying on its material capabilities. And she's thinking of, say, Italy signing the memorandum of referendum, joining the BLI, she's thinking in terms of the international leaders, the hearings that Xi Jinping is more trustworthy than home. Should China simply wait it out? Or is it going to? Can it do that? Well, I think if China were wise, it would have decided to be more patient, to be less forward-leaning. That's not the decision that they have made since 2012. Could China afford to do this? Yes, I think especially because one of the things that I didn't talk about here, but one always has to remember, there's nothing inevitable about the growth of China's economy, the technological improvement, leading sectors of the Chinese economy, or the modernization of China's military, or even the continuation of a one-party regime, as we know it, under the Communist Party's leadership. Things happen, things change. And it's possible that just by being more patient doesn't mean inevitably China would rise and be able to assume its role internationally that it deserves. Perhaps that's part of the impatience on the part of the Chinese leadership, feeling that now is their moment to make their move over the next couple of decades. In terms of perceptions, how does this play into the perceptions of China from other parts of the world? Well, the reference here was to the pew poles of public opinion towards the United States and President Trump and China and Xi Jinping. And in fact, if you look at those two rounds of Poland made at the same time, but they were released roughly a month apart, I think, one of the striking features of those poles is the perceptions of the United States and the perception of Donald Trump, the perception of China and the perception of Xi Jinping have both turned much more negative over the past year or so. So it's not clear to me that China is necessarily benefiting from the negative views of the United States under President Trump's leadership, that in fact, even in Italy, which as the questioner points out, signed a memorandum of understanding on the BRI with China, you look at those poles and there's been a sharp turn according to the results of those poles in Italy, in their perceptions of China and related issues such as the leadership or the role of Xi Jinping. Also it's role in fighting the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. So, yes, my guess is patients would have been the wiser course, but it's not the course China has chosen. Thank you. This next question comes from a completely opposite perspective. This is a question from Christopher Sharpe. And the question is about whether China's current proactive strategy in promoting Chinese power in the South China Sea, in creating a blue water navy, in spreading influence through the Bell and Roll Initiative, et cetera, in fact, indicate a recognition that Chinese power has reached its apex and is going to be in decline. And therefore Xi Jinping must maximize the chance it has now thinking in terms of the changes in demographics and increasing costs for China for generating growth in terms of the economic competition that China is facing and all the other problems that it is facing. What do you stand on that? It's a great question. Said it was from somebody named Sharpe. So it says, sharp insights there. It's definitely possible. I mean, that's kind of the counter to the other kinds of arguments we've been making, which is that Xi's approach reflects Chinese confidence about its inevitable rise and the role to which it's entitled. Instead, the argument there is that what we're seeing is an expression of concern about the future, sense of insecurity in China that it can't continue to rise and to be in a better position in the future than it is today. So, as it's sometimes put strike while the iron's hot and see what you can get. Perhaps, I mean, I had no way of answering that other than sit down with Xi Jinping and find out what he's really up to. But I would say that some of the analysis we've seen in China over the past six months or so, including a famous study that was undertaken by the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations, an internal study about the strategic situation, does suggest some concern that China's facing a more, it's going to face a more challenging world in coming decades than it has in recent decades. And that does reflect the kind of pessimism about the future. We all know about the demographic problems. I think they can be overstated in terms of their consequences for China's rise. Nevertheless, there are lots of, and I'm sure when Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning as confident as he may appear in his public statements and speeches, my guess is the first thing that crosses his mind is what am I going to do in conquering the world today? It's what kind of problems am I facing at home? I mean, there's just so many challenges within China that one could argue that somebody brought up before China tried to do too much internationally. You can make the argument, it's not only doing too much at once internationally, but given the array of problems China faces domestically, ranging from, as you said, demographics, but the environment, rebooting the economy under a different kind of development strategy that's not so dependent on international trade, other things, that in fact, the big challenges are at home. So maybe in fact, you can make the argument that some of what China is trying to do is to lock in gains now while they can before they begin to face greater challenges in the future. I just have no way of knowing. Well, thank you very much, Avery, Professor Goldstein. I do have to apologize to many of you who have put questions in the Q&A box or through the Aki in the chat box. I think I've only managed to get just a bit over half of the questions that were being put to you, Avery. Sorry about that. But it's been a really fantastic, very, very fruitful and thought provoking conversations that you have with people from SOAS and beyond. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Great pleasure. Goodbye.