 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's one o'clock. This is Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel and our guest today, Denny Roy from the East West Center. And our topic with Denny Roy is can human rights, whoops, wrong, wrong case. We're going to talk about connecting the dots on China and U.S. policy. And where is it going? And what are the factors involved? Hi, Denny. Nice to have you on the show. It's nice to be here. So let's talk about the status of U.S.-China relations. I'm going to tell you before we begin that back in the early 2000s, you could go to China and feel good. You could say, well, it's not a completely perfect relationship, but we can live with this, and it's going good places, and it's fun to be there and everybody's so friendly. And the government is getting more enlightened all the time. And a lot of Americans did that, but somewhere along the line it changed what happened. I'd say the single biggest factor in the decline in U.S.-China relations is the international structure. What I mean by that is until recently, the United States was strong, China was weak, and both sides understood that this was the reality they had to work with. And it set the parameters for the relationship. It was relatively stable. It was also awkward, because the Chinese, of course, are very proud of their 5,000-year history. Certainly, if you were to make a list of the most admirable and respectable civilizations in world history, China would be one of the finalists. It's easy for Chinese to think that their country is the natural leader of Asia. It has been through most of those centuries until this recent down period, which the Chinese called the Century of Humiliation from 1842 to 1949. China was clearly the preeminent civilization in Asia. During this period, recently it has been forced to tolerate American preeminence in the region, which American preeminence came on the scene just during this period of Chinese weakness, which the Chinese see as a temporary and unfortunate and anomaly. The Chinese have understood that in the post-war period, and particularly the post-Cold War period, that they were in a rebuilding phase. Here we get to Deng Xiaoping's advice. Deng, who died in 1997, advised that Chinese foreign policy ought to consist of China laying low, not taking a leadership position in international politics, not putting itself forward and remaining calm and in the face of perceived slights and trying to get along with the United States. Was that a good policy? Would you agree with him if you were there with him now? I think Deng's policies, both inside the country and in China's external relations, have been fantastically successful. But now we get to the structural change, where China is now much stronger relative to the United States, has largely closed that gap with the United States, which changes the outlook of both countries. Previously, it was fairly easy for China to tolerate their agenda not being fully realized in the region because they understood that China was too weak to challenge the United States, at least for the time being. The United States was relatively patient with China in its project to socialize China. That is, get China used to the idea of being supportive of the international system as sponsored by the United States. It was to be persuaded that China could be secure and prosperous within this US-led system. But the Americans in seeing that China was stalling on this or that issue could afford to think we've got lots of time before China gets powerful and therefore it's not threatening that China isn't doing everything we want right now. But now bring in the structural change and the Chinese think now that that period of rebuilding that Deng Xiaoping talked about is over now. So Deng is out and now we switch to Xi Jinping's foreign policy, which involves asserting regional leadership by China, which involves imposing Chinese preferences on the region, winning those controversies that the Chinese usually had to swallow their pride to put up with American preferences. In particular, we see the Chinese going after their irredentism agenda, which means reclaiming territory that you think rightfully belongs to yourself. So it is a large swath of the region from South China Sea to Taiwan to the East China Sea, even the LOC border with India. We see the Chinese now more insistent on the Chinese side getting its way as opposed to the other side. China is less tolerant of the US agenda. And on the US side, Americans are no longer as patient with waiting for the Chinese to catch up to accepting American leadership and China living with within the American sponsored system. Americans have concluded that it's time to declare that the socialization project has failed. We need to move on to something else. There was kind of an expectation on the American side that as China became more economically developed and more wealthy, that its politics would become more liberal, both inside China and in China's foreign policy would be more cooperative. It would come to accept the American agenda. The Chinese would think like the Americans that we have these common interests in supporting this American sponsored international system. But what Americans have seen under Xi Jinping is that although wealthier, China is now less liberal, both in domestic policy and in foreign policy. It could have been the other way though, couldn't it? I mean it could have been they would have had a more enlightened view of things and they wouldn't need to assert themselves so much. It could have been that they saw themselves as co-partners in the liberal world order. Is that possible? Sure. International politics is all about human decisions and governments deciding usually based on their domestic politics or their view of history to tread a certain path and China could have chosen a different path. But it's not surprising that China has taken the approach it has under Xi Jinping if you think about the broader sweep of Chinese history and the sense of grievance from the century of shame. But let me mention a couple other factors in addition to the change of the international structure that are sort of honorable mention. The first is President Trump's focus on trade imbalances is being very important. This goes back to even long prior to him being president. This has been a consistent theme for him as identifying cases of where he thinks a US trade relationship with some other countries unfair to the United States and focusing on rectifying it. His feeling in this regard seems to be distinct from, separate from the issue of China growing more powerful overall. What I mean by that is even countries that don't necessarily pose a military threat to the United States but that have a trade surplus with the United States have come in for criticism from President Trump, even allies such as Japan and South Korea. So the fact that China has the largest bilateral trade surplus with the United States made it a target I think for this pre-existing inclination on the part of President Trump and American presidents being very strong in the making of foreign policy this this color is the whole approach of this administration. And then a second factor is of course domestic politics. So in the United States of course we have the presidential election coming up and we see the Republican party in general and President Trump in particular taking a very tough line on China as part of the presidential campaign and the election campaigns of other Republicans who are running for office. But in China also about the same time there will be the fifth plenum which puts some pressure on Xi Jinping also to not only answer what the United States is doing but also to show that that he is fulfilling expectations of being a tough foreign policy president for his potential challengers inside of China. So we have this combination of the domestic politics in both places driving the relationship further downward. It comes to me to ask you know there are people who say that a few months ago China would have liked to seen Trump win in this election coming November but more recently those same people are saying no that's not true. In fact the Chinese don't like his unpredictability and they would rather see somebody more predictable that they can engage with on foreign policy issues. What have you heard about that? Yes this is hard to measure objectively because you can't do the kinds of public opinion surveys in China that we might be able to do in other places but my sense was that in 2016 most Chinese who thought about international affairs preferred Donald Trump to be president over Hillary Clinton. The expectation being that Trump might drive a hard economic bargain but but the Chinese could handle that. They could understand that and they could they're confident that they could make a deal and alleviate American pressure that way whereas if Hillary Clinton had become president she would have had a lot more interest in the geostrategic threat that China opposed to the United States which been a lot more difficult for China to deal with. Meanwhile what about the tariffs? Have the tariffs done anybody any good? They certainly haven't improved our relationship with China but have they done any good indirectly? Have they done any good for this country? I like the idea that President Trump challenged China in an area that really got China's attention but he's got a lot of criticism for using that particular tool to try to rectify the problems in the U.S.-China economic relationship. A lot of folks would argue that the problem isn't necessarily or the the most pressing problem shouldn't bring a focus on the balance of trade between China and the United States. The more pressing problem would be structural impediments to fair trade between the United States and China. The tendency of the Chinese to treat American companies systematically differently and more restrictively than say Chinese companies would have in the United States and that maybe the emphasis should have been on bringing about those hard structural changes on the part of China rather than simply the Chinese buying more American stuff. Is that doable as a matter of foreign policy? When you go to China and say look you're not treating us fairly, you've got all these restraints, you're taking our intellectual property or you're taking advantage of us as Trump says once in a while, I mean would they have, could they have, could they now agree to that or is it built into their what do you call it business culture, political culture? Never to agree with that. Always to try to keep the upper hand on business treatment of American companies. I think it would have been difficult for the United States to to get 100% of what it might be asking in that regard requiring the Chinese Communist Party to really change the way it does business and change fundamentally the relationship between the party and the economic system in China. Nevertheless pushing the Chinese in that area and maybe using trade as one of the levers of pressure might have gotten us some progress in that direction and we should recognize also that there are some Chinese elites who actually welcomed the idea of the Americans using a kind of what the Japanese would call a gaiatsu, you know outside pressure, bringing about changes that would be very painful for the Chinese to make but then a long run would make China better and more competitive. Gee, that seems appealing. You know the other thing is from what you've said I maybe this is oversimplifying it but it seems that the Chinese have been stuck in the century of shame and they're still stuck in there. They don't, they have not recognized their power. They have great power but they're still in shame. The US after the war had great power but possibly they overestimated power as a matter of foreign policy in China, in the South China Sea and all that in Asia Pacific and maybe Trump doesn't fully see that the US has declined in its influence in the area. You know the pivot was abandoned or lost strength somehow and so you have one party believes that it is a shame that should and should react and should take steps that are aggressive and another party that feels that it's more strong than it really is and is not taking the steps to engage. I know it sounds oversimplified but is there anything in there as far as you're concerned? Yeah I think Americans air where in as much as we overemphasize our influence in Asia but our policies should be based on on a winning over third parties in the region. Well it, soft power means something very specific to me. I think that that's part of it but it's also something I wouldn't describe the soft power but making a strategic argument that it is in the interest of these third party countries in Asia to support with the United States this current liberal international order that they are better off backing up the United States and sponsoring that that model than they would be in becoming subject to whatever the Chinese would replace that order with. Yeah so if your isolationist and you don't seek support of other third parties then you lose influence and I would like your thoughts about our state of influence now if you would. Not only with China but with with all of Asia Pacific and Indo-Pacific are we are we losing influence have we lost influence why? Well let's look at the indications first. China is almost everyone's number one trade partner so this gives the Chinese leverage because the the the Chinese can link the trade relationship with their political agenda and they're not at all shy about doing that. If you talk to folks from Southeast Asia particularly elites you know whether politicians in private or journalists or scholars and Southeast Asia I think is you know one of the key battlegrounds where both United States and China are competing for influence. You talk to these folks generally they will say China is more influential now than the United States. China is visible the money is there Chinese officials come to the region. If you you look at China's success in gaining influential positions in international organizations such as United Nations you see a steady improvement a steady increase and China's leverage over those kind of levers. In fact just recently the Chinese got one of their officials on on the law of the sea court you know which in my mind is a travesty given the way that Chinese reacted to the 2016 South China Sea decision and if you want a sort of a microcosm of this effect you can look at the Philippines under President Duterte. Here's a here's a US treaty government whose president has been at best very ambivalent about whether he wants to cooperate with the United States to protect Philippine interests against China or accommodate China and cut out the United States altogether. So maybe we could talk about some of the causes of this what is widely seen as a decline of US influence in the region. Yes please. And I would say that the the main one is simply the rise of China particularly the China's economic development which which again makes China so economically important to almost every country in the region and this is not a failure on the part of the United States it's simply China having a very fast economic growth rate you know so tripled out of the United States if not more over the last couple of decades so that China's got itself in this position of having leverage with other countries. But having said that there are some failings on on the part of the United States I would say the United States deciding to back out of the trans-specific partnership you know what was a big one and symbolic regardless of how the the TPP itself would have changed the trade relationships between the participants it was the the optics of the United States abdicating the position of being a leader in the pushing of international trade toward toward a lessening of barriers to toward new frontiers that would make it more attractive for more countries to participate. United States is kind of notorious for not sending high-ranking US officials to important meetings in in Asia particularly southeast Asia or sending lower ranking delegations than everyone else is sending. It's notorious for for being somewhat deaf to the concern of other countries in the region that is say U.S. officials come to a country in Asia and and emphasize that we Americans are very concerned with this particular issue and we want to know what your country is doing to satisfy us on this issue as opposed to asking what is of greatest concern to you and how can we together work to to accomplish this goal. This is not meant as a partisan criticism but if your your your bumper sticker approach to foreign policy is America first this is just just factually it's going to have an alienating effect to some degree on other potential partners in the region. Tellingly the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in Europe a few days ago and among the many things he said in between threatening other countries with economic punishment if they didn't follow the Chinese agenda. He also said we will never say China first. Obviously playing directly on this idea that of course every country looks out for number one but there are differences in how you can approach this problem and in a different way to approach it would be to argue that we see our two countries as partners and there are things that we can work with with you on together that are of equal benefit to both of us. Well it seems like they you know they have an initiative going and trying to look good trying to look good at the United Nations trying to look good and they're even when they really don't deserve to look good they're trying to look good and in the process we don't look so good and so I think this is going to continue at least for a while don't you? Well the Chinese are trying very hard to look good as we are they have their counterpart organizations and efforts to what we do. One sort of advantage the United States has here is that the Chinese tend to often do things that undercut their efforts to make themselves look better but we cannot cannot count on them always doing that for us. Well that takes us to some of the you know high high profile aggressive moves that China has done and I I guess I think first of Hong Kong but I also think of Xinjiang and the and the Uyghurs and some of the other moves they've made including the way they've handled you know people who visit the country many things they have done that are not really reflective of a respect for human rights and so why why do they do these things it just strikes me that is this part of Xi Jinping's larger vision or is this just a way to a way for him to feel good because it to the world doesn't look so good. Well I'll go back first to something I referred to earlier Deng Xiaoping's advice that China should see itself in a rebuilding period and should go out of its way not to antagonize foreign countries particularly important countries like the United States keep a low profile and so on. Deng's advice implicitly was always to be temporary that is the implication was there will come a point where China is past the rebuilding period and is strong enough that then it can begin to more forcefully impose its its will and its agenda on the international community. Deng was simply saying wait until China is strong enough to do this well it appears that that under Xi Jinping Beijing has made the decision that that the time has come that China can begin to act more forcefully in imposing its agenda on the rest of the region. Why now I think three things first of all China is relatively strong it is as I mentioned that it had been continually cutting the gap between itself and the United States over the last couple of decades and now reaches a point where it's certainly not as strong as the United States either economically or militarily but but it's getting close to to the level of a sort of a peer competitor as the US government would say. Secondly the the Chinese perceive the United States as waning as declining particularly after the the 2008 financial crisis you know that the Chinese are very eager to see even from from a communist ideology that the strongest capitalist power reach reach a point where where it sort of cripples itself and and makes way for the strongest socialist power. So the Chinese are are constantly watching for signs of American weakness and that was in the Chinese mind that was a big one. And third the the Chinese seem to think that they have enough economic penetration in in Asia with with most of the countries in Asia that that gives the Chinese enough leverage that they they they have the luxury of now worrying less about other countries fear in China which which I think was a big check on Chinese foreign policy until recently. So China worrying less about being loved but and more about being respected and using that economic leverage to ensure that other countries don't have a choice but to conform to China use preferences. So just to continue you mentioned that there are several instances where China seems to be acting aggressively and and often you can you can point to a list of perhaps five or six things you mentioned some of them that that in the year 2020 alone where you see China seemingly having decided that that we're gonna we're going to push harder on on every front is if Xi Jinping is given the order full speed ahead on all fronts. I think the the reality however is a little more complicated than that. If if you you look at this list of items you might have you would I think find that each of them has its own drivers and its own schedule so that the totality is not necessarily reflective of a decision by the Chinese to to stop worrying about about China's prestige in the world and simply rushed to to winning on the battleground and in all these areas of strategic competition with with other countries. So if you take them one by one Hong Kong for example some years ago you know there was an instance of people power in Hong Kong where huge numbers of people came out of the street and protested a proposed law that was the anti suggestion law and then last year the same thing happened with regard to the proposed national security law. So Hong Kong for many years has presented the Chinese leadership with this problem of of number one they think of Hong Kong as having been brainwashed and needing to have their brains reoriented because Hong Kong has been you know outside of the grasp of the Communist Party for so long and secondly this problem of people power which both of these instances you'll seem to suggest that that the Hong Kong government was limited in what it could do by by this outboring of of public sentiment and and public mobilization you know which was horrifying to the Chinese Communist Party you know when they saw something like that with with the following gong they took harsh action to make sure that would never happen again so so for several years Beijing has felt that it needed to take the kind of action that it ends up taking in 2020 it's not something that's just happened this year. In the east China Sea you know where where China has territorial conflict conflicting claims with Japan this really goes back to year 2010 when the Japanese government took government ownership over the Senkaku Islands which previously had been officially owned by Japanese private citizens. So from that time forward the Chinese consider that a Japanese attempt to solidify their control of the islands you know making Chinese claims farther and farther from realization so since that time they've been they've been sort of periodically steadily pulsing the flooding the Senkaku Island region with Chinese ships and aircraft so what's happening there is a continuation of something for many years ago. The South China Sea I think that the the the key event in recent Chinese policy is the decision by Xi Jinping to build those artificial islands so-called islands and put military bases on that that was a decision to take a more assertive Chinese posture and based on I think the Chinese sense that China could put more ships in the area than any of the other claimants and it was time to condition the rest of the world to think of the South China Sea as Chinese territorial waters. The border clashes with Iran is sorry with India is another item on the list. This again is several years in making you know the recent clash that we had in in the Gawan River Valley this year. The Chinese for many years have been building infrastructure to support China's ability to defend disputed parts of the border that the Chinese claim and in more recently the Chinese have seen the Indians doing the same thing so the rise in recent tensions which resulted in that incident earlier this year was a culmination of these two several year long trends bumping into each other. A final thing we're not having the list is is what's been happening with Taiwan. We've seen a steady increase in Chinese military pressure and you know hostile signals aggressive signals to Taiwan that that we see you going down the path of of independence and and we want to warn you that as you continue to take steps down this path we we are more prepared to launch a military effort to to reincorporate Taiwan into the People's Republic of China and into China under the People's Republic of China which they've never been of course. This goes back to President Tsai Ing-wen who the Chinese consider a separatist of pro-independence politicians per election in 2016 and then with her reelection in 2020 it was incumbent upon Xi Jinping to take further and maybe maybe stronger gestures and signals toward Taiwan to match what what Chinese elites saw as the the losing of ground with President Tsai knowing when having won two consecutive presidential elections in Taiwan. Well we only have a little little time left and I did want to get to the question of COVID. How has COVID affected all of this? The Chinese even now are there what I read this morning is that they are physically forcing people to take medicine. I don't know if that's a vaccine medicine or a therapeutic but they're pretty tough on that and I think they they they see that they've lost some face over it. Trump has insulted them many times and has claimed that they're responsible for the pandemic. How does that affect the relationship between the two countries? How does that affect China's image of the world? Yeah I think there are two major effects. The first is China's international reputation. So of course one could argue that that some aspects of the way that China undertook to control the outbreak were effective and maybe admirable but generally speaking countries like ours are are disturbed by you know some of the measures that a authoritarian government might take in a situation like that. I mean you have to quickly add that United States has not done a very good job but generally speaking the Chinese approach to both the pandemic and their messaging as a result of the pandemic has lost China prestige in a lot of important areas of the world not necessarily the entire world but certainly the United States, Europe and some of the important countries in Asia. The second major aspect of the fallout for China is an acceleration of decoupling that is making China and other countries less economic economically dependent on each other. This was not a new issue. There was a lot of talk prior to the pandemic in countries including the United States about the vulnerability that we put ourselves in by being too heavily reliant on China for the supply of vital supplies. During the pandemic we saw that amongst being a world leader in the supply of lots of other things including our country China had was the main manufacturer worldwide of things like medicines and masks so that when there is a crunch where we desperately need some important supply we left ourselves vulnerable by being so heavily dependent on China and then you added that some of the signals out of China particularly by the Chinese media that perhaps China should take advantage of its control over some of these supplies to try to coax more compliant political behavior out of certain other countries so the Chinese sort of reinforced our fears about being overly reliant on China so as a result there's an accelerated movement to reduce the dependence of many countries on Chinese supplies. It's certainly in areas of vital supply certainly medical supplies but going even beyond this it's given more impetus to the idea that there are sensitive sectors that go beyond the medical where countries need to produce more for themselves or diversify their supplies away from China to to other countries that perhaps they trust more. Danny one last question before we're done is about the election coming soon and you know there certainly Trump has been attacking China in various ways. Biden has not been all that kind to China in his public statements and I wonder what you think China would want in terms of a result of that election and I also wonder it's a little compound but I also wonder what you think the proper policy of the winner of that election should adopt in order to improve our position our influence our relationship with China. I think if you asked the Chinese which of the two they would support I think there isn't as clear an answer as there would have been in the previous election. With Donald Trump what the Chinese get that they would approve of is is Trump himself seems to be although very interested in trade not so interested in geo strategy. I think a lot of his advisors are Trump himself not so interested in geo strategy and not so interested in human rights so less likely to beat up on China over human rights than perhaps a lot of other people in that position might be and because Trump is so interested in trade he is he is liable to in some cases trade off geo strategy in order to get a favorable trade agreement with China. With candidate Biden on the other hand you see a lot of interest expressed in repairing U.S. alliances. Now from the Chinese point of view I think it's a it's a big plus that President Trump has in some cases damaged U.S. relationships with U.S. allies. That's great for China in making United States a less effective international leader a less appealing international leader and in creating doubts among U.S. allies in Asia as to U.S. reliability and and whether the United States is willing to support them for the long haul. So Biden would likely based on what he's emphasizing put more emphasis on repairing those relationships probably less emphasis on making the alliances financially solvent for the United States the way President Trump has by just more likely to take the more traditional American approach that United States sees value in these alliances and therefore is willing to to pay a certain financial cost because of the the more intangible benefit we think we get from that. Biden is also more interested in human rights issues. One of the senior campaign officials recently referred to the Uyghur genocide in China very strong language. So so on the one hand the Chinese would with with Trump they would get less predictability and and maybe less emphasis on geo strategy and ideology with Biden perhaps less emphasis on a trade war but maybe a stronger commitment to U.S. alliances therefore bolstering U.S. leadership in the region. So so it doesn't look great for for from the Chinese point of view to think about what the package of either candidate would offer them. The Chinese government nevertheless seems to have taken a pretty strong position opposing President Trump but I but I think Chinese elites generally would have a more mixed view. Well which which one of them do you think would come up with a policy that would best serve American interests right now. I think the repair of U.S. alliances the recommitment to U.S. alliances is a really pressing need so so to get to your question of what I would recommend for U.S. foreign policy. I'm happy to see the candidate Biden is emphasizing that need that would be at the top of my list. Secondly lots of analysts talk about this and I agree the United States would would serve its foreign policy best by rebuilding a home that is doing the things we need to make ourselves a fundamentally strong country areas that we have under our own control you know domestically and that if we are best selves at home that that makes us a stronger country internationally and and foreign policy issues will largely take care of themselves. Third I think an American policy of limiting to some extent our cooperation with China in certain targeted sectors in certain second sensitive areas is very advisable. Kennedy Trump has talked about dramatically decoupling the United States from China. I think probably something in the middle where we don't over enthusiastically throw out all cooperation with China including on issues where we have a common interest where where cooperation with China is actually good for us but we do need to be strong and smart about targeted decoupling it might be called and finally I think United States government could do a better job and needs to do a better job in defining a kind of a China that United States could live with a Chinese foreign policy that the United States can live with going beyond simply what the Trump administration has emphasized in rallying the other countries in the region against China. Well thank you Danny. Danny Roy East West Center it's wonderful to talk to you and have your view on all these things it's an education. We really appreciate you're coming you're coming down to Think Tech. We hope we can talk to you again soon. Thank you. Nice talking with you.