Beijing wants freedom of action, not a new world order
“I think broadly, there's a pretty consistent desire for, under the sovereignty rubric, freedom of action and freedom from coercion. So they invest a lot in doing things that prevent them from being coerced basically by the United States, and they've got increasingly effective at that. What they want to be able to do is act freely in their own interests wherever they need to. That is very different, I think, as both Jessica and Dan suggested, from an ambition to create a whole new structure that they then have to bear the costs of supervising.”
PLA could intervene in Iran but won't shoulder that burden
“So to start on that point, of course, they could, right? There's been a PLA Navy Task Group operating in the Gulf of Aden or a series of task groups for 18 years now. They've shown the capability to operate naval assets wherever they want to. If they chose they wanted to join such a thing, they could. I don't believe that that would be the choice that will be made in Beijing. I don't believe that they want to shoulder that burden should that come along. Yes, Iran is an important partner to China, but so is UAE and so is Saudi Arabia. And they've been very careful to spread out their level of risk in different ways.”
A grand bargain on Taiwan is unlikely — there's no Kissinger
“My thought is here because President Trump is so distracted. He has so many things to take care of. And I think his instinct, sometimes he has some instinct thoughts about certain things in our bilateral relations, which is very good. But he does not have people to implement. So just like President Nixon has Dr. Kissinger. But I haven't seen here who is the Dr. Kissinger for President Trump. So if you need to have some grand bargain, you have to have people on the table to discuss.”
US chip export controls leak through massive gray markets
“There are definitely some requirements for domestic companies to buy domestic chips in order to keep the domestic industry going. And there is an active gray or black market in these chips, which evade the export controls and the Chinese import controls all together. And this is kind of tacitly agreed to by pretty much all of the parties in the transaction. So it's kind of a messy compromise, and I think that's going to characterize a lot of the technology debate in China in the years ahead.”
“If I can just ask you on freedom from coercion, I mean, last year when China said to the US, you're putting all these tariffs on us, we are going to introduce a fairly draconian export control regime for rare earths. As someone told me recently, Deng Xiaoping first talked about rare earths in 1964, which I thought was stunning. I think they felt that they had sufficient, not only physical control over the rare earth supply chain, but also legal control through the export control regime that they had developed to put that on the table. And my assessment is that in Beijing, they now think that they have gotten to a point of you could call a strategic stalemate with the United States.”
China pursues 'China-first' agenda, not global hegemony
“I'd say that what China wants in the world is sort of defined by a sort of a set of minimal objectives, sovereignty, security, and development. But what that means in the context of a shifting global order isn't exactly clear. They certainly want to feel safe and secure and prosperous in a world that the United States has long dominated. If anything, I think that Chinese leadership and experts that I've spoken with have a far greater sense of the domestic constraints that have in fact inhibited America's global leadership. And China's not eager to kind of repeat those mistakes of being an overextended global superpower while not attending to some of the more pressing challenges at home.”
Don't project American power concepts onto Chinese ambitions
“But I think that the projection thing is that what I detect in DC is a tendency to think that the Chinese must have the same concept of international power that the United States has. So if they are challenging the US in certain ways, what that must mean is that they are trying to replace the US system with their own system. And I just think that that's wrong. What they have is more narrowly defined objectives of freedom. And if you burden yourself with alliances, for example, or the cost of underwriting formal systems, that actually is a limitation on your sovereignty and freedom.”
Trump-Xi summit will likely be 'thin on substance'
“Well, there will be some nice pictures, you know, and some handshakes. I think that the pomp and the circumstance is like at a minimum, I think, for both these leaders. Reportedly, there's less preparation for some of these kinds of kind of substantive details. I certainly think I agree that on the Chinese side, there's actually a pretty dim assessment of just how much can be done with an administration that is so mercurial and that might not be, you know, might not stick to its own positions from a given week to the next.”
American China expertise is collapsing at a critical moment
“I mean, I think the latent interest is there, but I think in terms of numbers, we are certainly down, and I don't think it helps that sort of the kind of funding for the study of Chinese language at traditional centers of excellence throughout the United States has been way cut. And to add it to that is the concern that if you go to China, what kinds of positions in the United States government could you get in the future? And apparently, I hear it so bad that even in the embassy in Beijing, they don't have enough kind of qualified Americans with the language expertise to staff this kind of a visit. So we're in dire straits here, right?”
