The Rise and Fall of US-China Engagement with David Shambaugh | China Considered | Hoover Institution - China Considered

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>> Elizabeth Economy (00:08):
Welcome to China Considered, a podcast that brings fresh
insight and informed discussion to one ofthe most consequential issues of our time,
how China's changing andchanging the world.
I'm Liz Economy Hargrove, Senior Fellowand Co-Director of the program on the U.S.,
China and the World at the HooverInstitution at Stanford University.
Today I am delighted to welcome my goodfriend, Professor David Shambaugh.

(00:30):
David is the Gaston Seeger professorof Asian Studies, Political Science and
International affairs atGeorge Washington University.
He's also the award-winning author oreditor of 35 books,
including his most recent bookthat we'll be discussing today,
Breaking the How China Won andLost America.
David, welcome.

>> David Shambaugh (00:52):
Hi Liz, good to see you.
Be with you.

So you've been studying China since the 1970s when you
were a college student.
That's really before I think Chinabecame such a hot topic in international
relations or such an important partof the US Foreign policy discourse.
What drew you to study China at that time?

Well, I was an undergraduate at that
time at the University ofNew Mexico in Albuquerque, and
I had a little bit of previousexposure to China, you might say,
in that my older brother had beenin the American army in Taiwan and
I spent a summer with him, gosh,
the summer of 1960 in the middlethe height of the Taiwan Straits crisis.

(01:40):
So I had a kind of subliminal memoryof Taiwan anyway in Hong Kong,
although obviously neverbeen to the mainland.
But I found myself as an undergraduateat University of New Mexico and
I took a course calledthe Chinese Revolution and
Maoist Thought,taught by a fiery Marxist professor.
And I took a history class from a culturalhistorian on modern Chinese history.

(02:04):
So between those two,I was sort of intrigued.
And then I took a gap year betweensophomore and junior year,
went around the world all the way.
And when I got to Hong Kong, in fact,
I met a British person who had justcome out of so called Red China.
Turns out she'd only been upto the Guangzhou Trade Fair.
But that intrigued me.

(02:25):
So I took the train up the nextday to the border to Lo Wu and
looked at all this, you know,
miles of barbed wire fencing to keep themainlanders from escaping to Hong Kong.
And I it kind of puzzled me what is goingon on the other side of these fences.
Turns out that's where Shenzhen is today.
Then it was just rice paddy.

(02:45):
So once I returned to New Mexico,I decided I really wanted to study China.
And that's not the place to study China.
Latin America, yes.
China, no.
So I transferred to George WashingtonUniversity and completed My undergraduate
and East Asian Studies there,that was the origins of my interest.

Stay with your brother and then a later trip.
And so just out of curiosity, when youwere at the University of New Mexico and
you took that college classby the fiery Marxist,
were you at all persuaded bythe Marxist sort of thinking?
Did it sound attractiveat all at the time?

Absolutely.
I think I might have even consideredmyself a Marxist at that point in time.
I was very inclined towards [COUGH]Maoist thought and Marxist socialism.
And this fiery Marxist professorwho'd done his own PhD at Berkeley,
he tried to simulate the CulturalRevolution, or part of it in our class.
We had small group criticism sessions.

(03:43):
And so, yeah, I was taken bythe whole Maoist experiment.
And then I got to gw, which was just theopposite end of the intellectual spectrum.
This was the Institute of Sino SovietStudies, which is very Cold War ish.
And I studied under some verysignificant professors, Franz Michael,
Gaston Seeger, Harold Hinton,William Johnson.

(04:05):
But these were individuals who were tothe far right on the China political
spectrum in the United States.
So I went from far left to far right.
It was rather jarring experience,but that's how I got started.

And then you ended up at Michigan, kind of in the middle,
maybe, right?

Well, interestingly, I actually between George Washington and
Michigan.
I first worked for about two anda half years in the government,
first in the State Department forabout one year.
And then I met Michael Oxenberg and he wasin the National Security Council then,
in charge of obviously China,but also Indochina,
which is how I met him because I wasthe Indochina desk officer in the Bureau

(04:45):
of Intelligence andResearch at INR in the State Department.
And he asked me and shocked me and said,
how would you like to come over tothe White House and be my assistant?
And I almost dropped my coffee atthe time and said, well, yes, of course.
Long story short,I went over to the NSC 1977, 78,
and worked forMike on a variety of issues.

(05:07):
Many China related inthe lead up to normalization.
It turned out a lot ofthe pieces of the moment.

Yeah, this is kind of only second to, you know, 1972.
This is really, you know,the pivotal moment in the relationship.
And you were there for that,working on this issue.
Wow.>> David Shambaugh: Yeah,
a lot of export control work andclaims assets and what to do about Taiwan.
We were drafting what turned outto be the Taiwan Relations Act.

(05:34):
We did a lot of, you know, sort of build.
Building block, foundational thingsthat would have to be put in place come
normalization of relations in 1979.
And I stayed there right until January 79.
I met.
I was on the South Lawn ofthe White House when Deng Xiaoping came.
I met Deng three times on that visit.
And then I returned to graduate school.
I went to Johns Hopkins SAIS fortwo years for

(05:56):
an MA while Oxenberg wasstill in government, waiting.
He then asked me if I wanted to goout to Michigan to be his student.
I said, well, yes, but know he said,I'm not going to be back for two years.
So, long story short, I went to Seisswhere one of my immediate classmates and
good friends was Nicholas Burns, the mostrecent American ambassador to China.
So we, Nick and I have been friends forthat many years.

(06:19):
But then I went to Ann Arbor andstarted my PhD under Alan Whiting and
Mike Oxenberg andothers at the University of Michigan.
Wow.
So, you know,I think it's one of the things.
And I wanna talk about your mostrecent book, which is so terrific.
I think it's one of the things thatcomes through in the book is that
you've actually lived history.

(06:40):
You know, you've lived the historyof the US China relationship,
both as a preeminent scholar, but also,you know, in the policy space and
through your sort of think tank work.
In addition,you've worn many different hats and
I think you brought them all to bear ina really fascinating way in this book.
So let's talk about the booka little bit first.

(07:02):
Why did you decide to write it?
I know there must have been somethingthat you impelled you written 35 books,
written or edited, I guess, 35 books.
And I'm sure with each one there wassomething that drove you, a question or
an issue, something that's made you sitdown and say, I've got to get this out.

Well, I have been teaching us China relations for
more than 30 years.
I have an annual graduateseminar on the subject.
And I've been puzzling every year inthat seminar with what are the sources,
the drivers of this relationship and
the sources of the fluctuationin the relationship.
This has been anything buta smooth, constant relationship.

(07:45):
It's just oscillated wildlyfrom amity to enmity,
back to amity to enmity,what the late great China historian
Warren Cohen called the love hatecycle in U.S China relations.
So that puzzled me.
That was sort of a bigger.
Question.And
I've wanted to sort of explorehistorically in the first half of
the book, which we can get into isthe historical part of the book.

(08:07):
Then the other puzzle that I've grappledwith is more recent and contemporary.
Why, after four decades of engagement andentwining of the two societies and
governments over the last decade, whyhas it unraveled to the point of today?
So those were the two kind of motivatingquestions that animated me to try and

(08:28):
tackle this during my sabbatical year.

So let me ask how you understand engagement because,
you know, different, different scholarshave different understandings of
what the United States has meant whenit's talked about engagement over,
you know, the course of the decadesthat we've sort of had this approach or
policy or people may say it's a strategy.

(08:52):
And did you see it change interms of the definition and
the understanding across administrations?

Well, it has evolved.
But I would say, and I argue in the book,that it's had some core elements
across what, eight administrations,from Carter through Obama.
And there is no, Liz, there's nokind of secret master document in
the American National Archivesin Washington.

(09:18):
This is, this was the engagement policy.
But if you look across thosemany administrations, there are,
I think, four core elements.
And just very quickly they werethere was strategy of engagement,
then there were tactics toimplement the strategy.
The strategy itself had,I argue, four elements.
First, to help China modernizeeconomically and technologically.

(09:41):
Second, to liberalize China politically.
Third, to socialize China intothe international liberal order,
to integrate China, which was outsidethe institutional order, as you know.
You've written enormous amount about that.
You wrote a book with Michael Luxembourgcalled China Joins the World about that

(10:01):
very process.
Anyway, that was the third element.
And the fourth element I call engagementas process, where the two sides,
governments and elements of societywould exchange with each other.
That's how most people think aboutengagement, simple exchanges.
Well, yes, that was a,I would argue, a tactic, but

(10:22):
the tactic was to supportthe first three goals.
There were other tactics, too.
You know, marrying the two nationalgovernments bureaucratically together,
trying to foster civil society in China,trade and investment with China,
trying to help China build the rule of lawaccording to sort of Western legal norms,

(10:43):
educating Chinese students in theUnited States in a variety of fields so
that they would go back andhelp modernize their country, but
also liberalize their country.
So I'd say that was the these werethe that was a strategy and some of
the tactics that the US has been pursuing,really, for 40 years, until 2017.

Okay. But let me just push you a little bit.
I mean, was.
Was modernizing China the objective in andof itself or.
Or the process the objective?
Or what did the United Stateshave in its mind?
If you were to look back across, you know,what various secretaries of Spanish
state or even presidents talked about,when they talked about what it was that

(11:26):
we were trying to achieve, I think yousort of came out there toward the end.
There was an element ofliberalizing the country.
Right.Liberalizing economically and
politically, right?
And having China,as I think you're suggesting,
become what Bob Zelick talked about,right?
A responsible stakeholder inthe international system.

(11:46):
Some people say it was never the USintent to have China transform or
to move toward democracy.
Are you in that camp, ordo you think there was that element of it?

Well, I very carefully use the word liberalize rather than
democratize.
That's very intentional because I don'tthink any serious American has ever
thought that the Chinese Communist Partywas going to democratize, as we know,
democracy.
But the reason the first half ofthe book is historical is because I
wanted to dig back into previousadministrations, not just to Carter,

(12:22):
but I go back all the way to Truman,Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
and to see what the antecedents were forthe engagement strategy.
And I have unearthed, I think, and
dug out each of those presidentsall the way through to Obama,
what they had to say engagement was forto those three elements.

(12:43):
Integrate China into the internationalorder, liberalize it politically, and
help contribute to its modernization.
That, now it goes backto the 19th century.
That's not a recent goalof the United States.
It goes back to the Qing dynasty, andall the way through the Republican era,
the United States has been trying tocontribute to China's modernization.
And then when Oxenberg,he's explicit about it,

(13:07):
as was Carter and particularly Reagan.
And I find quotationsin various speeches and
documents from every administration from.
From Carter, Reagan,the two Bush administrations,
the two Clinton administrations,and the Obama administration,
which very specifically explicitly talkabout liberalization, modernization,

(13:30):
socialization, andthe international integration dimension.
So it's not just.
That's my hypothesis, but
I find empirical data points acrossmany administrations to support it.

And do you have a sense for, if you were to look back across
the AID administrations that sort ofconsciously had this as a strategy,
you know, is there one that stands outto you as being particularly successful?
Do you see a period in which the UnitedStates was, you know, really made a lot of
progress with China, recognizing,of course, that it takes two to dance.

(14:06):
Right.And it's not all about what
the United States is doing.
It has to have a receptive Chinaon the other side of things.
But is there a period that you wouldconsider to be sort of the golden era of
engagement?

Yes. I would identify the Reagan.
Ironically, the Reagan administration.
I say ironically because,as we know, Reagan,
when he became president,was a stark anti communist.
He campaigned on overturning thenormalization of relations with China and
restoring diplomaticrelations with Taiwan.
But after one year in office,he was in office from 81 to 89.

(14:45):
That those eight years were the,you know, sort of heyday,
you might say, golden era of engagement.
And the Reagan administrationactually completed what the Carter
administration had envisioned,I would argue the institutionalized
the relationship at the governmental andthe societal levels.
And so all the pieces of engagement wereput in place during those eight years,

(15:09):
I think that was the sort of golden era,you might say.

I remember reading a quotation at one point by Reagan where he
said we should simply give our technologyto the Chinese to help them develop.
Sometimes it makes me laugh.
And I think, can you imagine anypresident today saying something,
you know, along those lines?
I don't think so.
So talk a little bit about the level ofChinese receptivity to engagement and,

(15:39):
you know, how did China actuallyleverage US Interest in those
sort of elements that you discussed,the modernization and
the integration and the liberalization?
How did they react?
How did they use it?
You know, did they, you know,face problems because of it?
Did it challenge them?

(16:00):
in ways.
What was the sort ofthe response on the other side?

Well, the, the Chinese, you know, grand strategy,
if you will, after dung, from dungonwards, it goes all the way back to
the Qing dynasty again has to bewealthy and powerful modernization.
So to the extent that any foreign country,including the United States,
could contribute to China's economic andtechnological modernization,

(16:25):
they would take it.
This is the, you might say the kind ofthe genius of the Chinese communists.
And they're very eclectic and takingbits and pieces from different systems.
But for the United States,they saw, you know,
the most modern country in the world,which they wanted to emulate in many ways.

(16:45):
And so it was pushed for the Chinese,pushing on an open door.
The Americans were offering them all ofthese opportunities, sending millions,
hundreds of thousands,millions of students to our country for
professional training,foreign direct investment.
The United States has been, I thinkover time, the number one foreign direct
investor, about $100 billion a yearuntil last two or three years, trade,

(17:10):
science and technological cooperation.
But it also afforded opportunities forso, you know, shall we say,
more nefarious elementsof China's modernization.
Intellectual property threat theft,forced technology transfer, espionage and,

(17:30):
and theft of military technology,some very advanced military technologies,
you know, nuclear warheads, high endfighter planes, et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, engagement offeredthe Chinese an incredible
opportunity at technological,economic modernization.

Does it seem surprising at all?
I mean, if you look back and
you think here the United States waswith this policy of engagement and, and
you know, sending our companies out,welcoming Chinese students here to,
to train and to learn that Chinawould steal military technology?
I mean, was there an element of thatwhere we were still militarily,

(18:13):
where we didn't trust each other, where wewere security competitors even as we were,
you know, economically, our traderelationship was, you know, booming,
you know, during, you know, the past,you know, four decades, again,
up until recently, I mean, does itseem a little, you know, anomalous?

It does.
And again, in the early in the 1980s,prior to the Tiananmen massacre,
part of our America's efforts to modernizeChina included military modernization.
We were exporting various weapons systems,not just technologies to China.
The embargo on COCOM had been relaxed andthen came Tiananmen.

(18:58):
And from then on, the militarycomponent of America's assistance
to the Chinese modernization was hivedoff, you would say, to this day.
But other areas continue to pace.
After about 1995, there was a sortof five year hiatus after Tiananmen,
but the military side was frozen andhas been to this day.

(19:22):
But The US has been more than,
I don't want to givethe United States credit for this.
In a sense, China's modernized theirown country, let's be clear about that.
And the Europeans and the Japanese andthe South Koreans and
many other countries have beeninvolved in this process.
In fact, engagement wasn'tjust an American concept,
it was adapted by many other Western andAsian.

(19:45):
Asian countries,>> Elizabeth Economy: of course.
And I was just thinking about thatseparation you mentioned that the military
security element was hived off,but with, you know,
current, with, you know, Xi Jinping'spolicy of the military civil fusion.
Right.They have found a way to utilize
technology and technology that'stransferred for commercial purposes.

(20:06):
Right.For continuing their, you know,
advancement ofthe People's Liberation army as well.
That's right.
If one studies, you know, military modern.

You have done, I mean, you're also, let's face it,
you're also one of the original expertson the People's Liberation Army.
When did you publishthat book that you wrote?
It was,>> David Shambaugh: gosh, that was called
years ago.
Right?>> David Shambaugh: Modernizing China's
Military.
It was in about 2000.
It's after I returned from England to,to the US around 2000, 2001.

(20:38):
So I spent 20 years of mylife studying the PLA and
in those years it was very interesting.
There was no, what,
no spin on from the civilian technologicalsector to the Chinese military sector.
Whereas in many other countries,the United States and others,
that's very common.
Technologies developed inthe civilian sector are adopted,

(20:59):
adapted for military ends.
So that was one of the reasons China,the pla had such a hard time modernizing.
There was no spin off andthere was very little spin on and
there was no very little spinoff from the military sector.
In fact, China's military industrialcomplex was very backward in those years.
So, but, so
they've only fixed that really in the lastdecade and now we see the results.

(21:23):
They basically have a self reliant,independent military industrial base.
They don't even rely on the Russiansthat much as they used to.
And they're becoming a significantsupplier to other countries in
certain weapon systems.
Yeah. And
they're out there training,doing military training with,
you know, officers from, you know,many emerging and middle income economies.

(21:47):
And in some respects, you know,emulating what the United States has done,
established their firstmilitary logistics base.
Right.In Djibouti.
And yeah, there's, they're,they're on, I think on the cusp,
I think they've transformed the militaryalready in terms of the technology.
I think they're on the cusp of reallybecoming a global military player as well
in, in ways that are pretty fundamentallydifferent from what was before.

(22:12):
Because I'm pretty sure, correct me ifI'm wrong, that up until about 2010,
2011, it was PLA doctrine that theywould never have overseas bases.
Wasn't that sort of the, the rule thatthey were never going to be hegemonic,
you know,the way that the United States was?

That's right,
I think it was Chairman Mao who saidhad something called the three nos.
No overseas military bases,no debt, international debt.
That's one lesson he learnedfrom the Sino Soviet split.
And I forget his third.
No, but they now have.
Well, they have one military base,of course, but

(22:54):
I would still note that you're right.
They are beginning to train and have,you know, African, Middle Eastern,
some Asian militaries, but they are not inthe league of the United States at all.
What's known as security assistance.
There's weapons sales.
Yes, they're selling weapons,but actually training personnel.

(23:16):
They don't do that much of it.
They have an annual course at theNational Defense University in Beijing.
But compared to whatthe United States does worldwide,
they've got a very long way to go.

Yeah, no, I do remember reading something about PLA
officers actually in the Philippinesduring the Duterte period where some
of the Philippine military officials weretalking about the contrast between the,
you know, sort of professionalism andhow advanced the US military was
compared to the way thatthe Chinese were trying to train.

(23:50):
And anyway, it was just an interesting,interesting difference.
So to your point that they're notquite in the same league yet.
But, you know,
I think if we've seen anything comingout China over the past decade and.
And bit it's that you blink, andthey've kind of changed the landscape and
are right there with us, challenging us,and competing with us in new ways.

(24:12):
So let me go now to the.
I want to talk aboutthe book in some more depth.
And, you know,the subtitle of your book, which I love,
is How China Won and Lost America.
So talk to us about whatthat actually means.
It's clever.
I think it plays against the,you know, trope from the 1950s and
60s about howthe United States lost China.

(24:34):
Right.
And so now you've kind offlipped that on its head.
So what does it mean?
How did you end up with this?

Well, I first have to credit you, Liz,
with encouraging>> Elizabeth Economy: that.
Of course.
I had come up with that as a potential subtitle.
And then for a period of time,I was thinking about discarding it.
You encouraged me to keep it.

Yes, I do.

That was the lost part.
But what I then began to realizeis if you lose something,
you have to have wonit in the first place.
So I realized that the argumentof the book really is that during
the reform period, from Deng Xiaopingonwards, China won America
proverbially over differentconstituencies within the United States.

(25:19):
The U.S. government, the businesscommunity, the academic community,
you know, farmers, various elements ofwhat I call the Engagement Coalition,
they all found a place in Engagement forthemselves.
The elasticity, you might say,of Engagement was its beauty.
It had a place formany American actors, and

(25:42):
they all went into China physically andotherwise.
So it was in those decades in the 80s andthe 90s, despite Tiananmen,
into the 2000s, where China sortof won over these constituencies.
That was the winning part.
But in the last decade, I argue,or more than last decade, in fact,

(26:03):
beginning around 2010 or so,each of these constituencies and
their own constituents in their own ways,
encountered difficulties with theirChinese counterparts in China.
The business community,the academic community,
US government as NGOs in particular,which you've written a lot about,

(26:26):
all began to run up againstdifferent obstacles.
And Chinese just began to make it verydifficult for different American and
Western, including West Europeanactors to operate in China.
And one by one, I argue in the book,these constituents peeled away or
peeled out of the coalition, andthe coalition essentially crumbled.

(26:49):
And then Donald Trumpcame to power in 2017.
He just accelerated the crumbling,the atrophy,
if you will, during his four years.
So that's when Engagement died, andthat's when China lost America.
Beginning in 2017, I would argue,right on through the Biden administration.
And it's still, we can talk about this.
It's a little unclear the second Trumpadministration exactly where they're going

(27:12):
with China policy, but engagement.
Humpty Dumpty is not going to beput back together again in my view.

Yeah, so let me ask you, do you think that the Chinese, and so
you date this a little bit before.
I tend to, in the sense that I tend tolook at Xi Jinping as the sort of the,
mostly the inflection point forwhen policy really changed.
But let's take your 2010 moment.
Do you think it was a conscious strategyof the Chinese leadership at the time to,

(27:42):
you know, sort of make it more difficultfor US Business to do business,
to make it more difficult forUS and other multinational.
I should say it's not just the U.S.as you mentioned earlier.
It's multinationals writ large.
It's NGOs, you know, international nongovernmental organizations writ large that
found it more difficult to do businessin China, particularly after 2017.

(28:05):
Do you think that therewas a strategy here or
was it just one off policiesthat accumulated over time and
made China that much less attractive andfrankly less interested
in engaging with the United States andthe west more broadly?
And do you think that therewas debate around this?

(28:27):
People were saying this is a mistake,I see what's happening.
People like us in China, you know, werethey writing things like we're making,
you know, a big mistake here by, you know,
this set of policies orthat set of policies?

Excellent question.
And just coincidentally, I was, we,we all date the, these policies,
these more repressive restrictive policiesof the Chinese side to the Xi Jinping era,
which began in 2012.
We're now in year, what, 13, 14 of that.
But I date them to 2010, 29, 10.

(29:04):
And just coincidentally,I was living in China that year.
I was a senior Fulbright Scholarat the Academy of Social Sciences.
Not my first time at Cass,actually my sixth time.
I was, I've been a resident fellow in, in,in different institutes, six different
institutes, but I was in the Institute ofWorld Economics and Politics that year.
And so I personally kind ofexperienced it in the academic realm.

(29:28):
I mean, they did not do muchto help my research, quite.
In fact,they went out of their way to impede it.
And I wasn't the only foreigner inAmerican that was experiencing that in
the scholarly domain.
But I interact with a number of for nos.
Good friend of mine was the head ofthe Ford foundation at the time.
They were feeling it.
Other nos were feeling it.
The American business community wasbeginning to feel increased obstacles and

(29:51):
pressures.
So it was really that the fall,fall of 09.10,
which we now look back on, we callthat China's Year of Assertiveness.
China went out and started to pickfights with all of its neighbors, Japan,
India, the Philippines, Australia.
And so, you know, each of those,I don't think, to answer your question,

(30:11):
there was some conscious strategy.
The Chinese leadership didn'tget together in Jongnan High and
say, okay, let's go out andalienate all of our neighbors and
while we're at, let's go to Copenhagen andalienate the European Union and
the United States of the climateChange conference too.
No, I don't think it coordinated,but these, these independent dots,
you know, created a pattern that yearwhich we in the Chinese foreign policy

(30:33):
world refer to as China's Yearof Assertiveness.
It comes in the back end of the, of thefinancial crisis, global financial crisis,
and the Chinese and the Olympic Games,where I was actually with my son.
So they got through the Olympics, theywere feeling really good about themselves.
In the global financial crisis, they werefeeling even better about themselves.
Really hubristic, you know,so they decided for

(30:55):
whatever reasons to undertakeall these activities.
But it added up to a qualitative shift.
And it was two years,
it was last two years of Hu Jintao'sreign just before Xi came to power.
And then she just doubleddown from then 2012 on.

Yeah, I mean, I see.
I definitely take your point onthe sort of external assertiveness.
And I remember learning that Xi Jinpingwas in fact the head of the small
group that was dealing withthe South China Sea within the Chinese
leadership in that 2010,2011 period when you did start to see so
much more assertiveness coming out of,of China.

(31:35):
So in my mind, I thought,well, there you go.
Wherever his hand goes,
you're gonna see more challengingbehavior coming out of China.
But I also remember in 2010 that,you know,
there were 180,000 protests inthe country that were documented.
And it was still a time where the Internetwas quite vibrant and interesting.

(32:00):
And so, maybe both thingswere true at the same time.
You know, a little bit of still opennesson the domestic front, but again,
increasing assertiveness andchallenging behavior on the global stage.
Okay, so that's how China lost America.

(32:22):
Do you sense, you know, now in terms of,you said, Xi Jinping has doubled down.
We've seen it a couple of differentpoints where there he seems to be,
or the Chinese leadership seems to bereaching back out to the United States or
reaching back out toEurope to try to engage.
To say, we're open forbusiness, come back,

(32:45):
what do you think is the reality of that?
Are you seeing the kinds of changeson the ground that would, you know,
give life to that kind of rhetoric?
Do you think it is just rhetoric?
What, what do you think is the calculus?
You know, as we've seen China,you know, not that long ago, frankly,
even when I was just inthe administration working for

(33:07):
Secretary Raimondo, they were reallytrying to get US business back in China.
Do you think that there'sa rethink underway in Beijing?

That's a good question,
I don't really see a lot of evidence forit, it's more rhetoric.
There has been a rhetorical outreach,you might say.
You know, they say they're reformingthis regulation and that law, and
they're open foreducational exchanges, this and that.
But actually, if you look at,at it on the ground In China,
foreign NGOs have no greateropportunities than they've had.

(33:41):
Foreign companies are still runningup against even greater impediments.
The US Government and consulates, theycan't even schedule a meeting with Chinese
counterparts or very great difficulty,you know, just having normal interactions.
Scholars, scholarly exchange.
We have only 800Americanstudents in China today.

(34:04):
Used to be 20,000.
So you can just go throughsector by sector by sector.
The Chinese are not, in fact,welcoming rhetorically.
They say they are, but their words and
their deeds are not congruentwith one another, in my view.

I think maybe that Xi Jinping thinks things are working
reasonably well the way they are.
Right.That he doesn't need actually to change
Chinese behavior because actuallyhis model, or the model of,
of the current Chinese leadership is doingexactly what it needs to do right now.

(34:44):
So I don't know, do you agree.
With that, or, or>> David Shambaugh: I think that there is.
That's a.It's a good hypothesis, and I think
there's a lot of truth in it that he'sbelieves that his Various policies and
strategies are working.
The global Circulation strategy,the Indigenous Innovation strategy,
the counter Peaceful Evolution strategy,and his diplomatic strategies with

(35:08):
different parts of the world,with Southeast Asia, with Latin America.
We'll see shortly when the Chinese and
the EU have their summit later thismonth about that piece of the world.
But I think Xi, I think you're right, Ithink Xi Jinping believes it ain't broke,
don't fix it.

(35:29):
Their strategy is working.
I think from his andthe regime's perspective.
Yeah, and to the EU summit.
I'm sure you've seen that thatdoes not look to be set for
a resounding success at this point.
I was just reading that the Chineseeither are planning to or
have already canceled the second day.

(35:49):
And the Europeans have been quitecritical of China in the run up.
So now it's down to a one day summit andthey apparently canceled
the economic discussions that weresupposed to take place in advance.
So, so I, I guess, you know,that's not looking like it's going to,
to lead to a big shift, positiveshift in the China EU relationship.

(36:15):
So one of the things that I reallyenjoyed about your book was your
discussion of the state of US scholarshipor, or on China or China analysis.
Why don't you, if you can just sharea little bit of your thoughts on
the strengths and weaknesses ofthe academic and think tank world and

(36:38):
government world andhow it's analyzing and understanding and
trying to understand China, what,what's working and what's not working.

Well, thank you for, for asking.
I, ever since I wrote my doctoraldissertation at the University of Michigan
on China's America Watchers 40 years ago,I've been a watcher of watchers.
Not just Chinese watchers, but foreign,
foreign China studies andRussian Studies and other.
I've just been interested in how fieldsin international subfields within

(37:13):
international relations sort of evolve.
So I've been a watcher of watchers fora long time and I decided to include this
chap in the book calledthe Great American China Policy Debate,
which is still ongoing.
It's been ongoing really since about 2016.
17.

(37:35):
There was a previous debate which Idescribe in an earlier chapter on
the Did Engagement Fail Debate.
That was a more finite debatethat ran about two years.
It was kicked off by an articleby Eli Ratner and Kirk Campbell.
But then after that debate there has beena much longer running one on what should
American China policy be.
So I, I, I look at the, those who'vecontributed to that debate and

(38:01):
I put them into fivedifferent schools of thought.
And these are mainly individualswho turns out are in think tanks.
The American academic community,it has to be said,
are not really participantsin this debate.
The American I've written aboutthis elsewhere, you know,
American Sinology orAmerican China Studies I should say,

(38:25):
has become so granular andit's not very policy oriented.
So save a few individuals,
the academy is not really a participantin the national debate on China policy.
It's largely driven bypeople in think tanks or
other private sectors, organizations.

(38:46):
Anyway, I put these authors andI only look at published materials.
That's the empirical basis,not op EDS so much, but you know,
substantive articles and books.
And I place them into one of five schools.
Just quickly let me take them off for,for you and those who are listening.
The first school I call the stealthy,stealthy rival school.

(39:10):
This is a group of individuals whobelieve that China has a kind of secret
grand strategy to undermine, overtake and
repl the United States asthe world's principal power.
And for this school, all the dots ofChina's behavior internationally and
domestically connect.
And there is this sort of grand,grand plan towards that end.

(39:32):
Then I have a second school.
Let's see, I call the comprehensivecompetition school in which
I would place myself, and the term definesitself, that the United States and
China are in competition acrossa variety of functional domains.
Economic, technological,political, ideological,

(39:56):
global governance,higher education, software.
Power, you name it, the two are competing.
And competition is different thanan adversarial relationship.
We're not yet fully into an adversarialrelationship in these domains, but
competitions just as it is in sports,you know, each side is trying to gain

(40:16):
advantage vis a vis the other, and eachside is playing defense against the other.
And it's kind of a continual process,a soccer match with no end and
no overtime, there is no winner.
This is a perpetual process.
I describe in the book.
I call it our relationship is now oneof indefinite comprehensive competitive
rivalry.

(40:37):
It's gonna go on indefinitely.
It's a classic great power rivalry.
It's competitive across allthese functional domains
comprehensively and so on.
So that's the second school.
Then thirdly, I find those I callthe Re Engagers, the RE Engagement School.
And not surprisingly, theseare individuals who are big particip,
major participants in the EngagementSchool previously, and they have

(41:00):
devoted their careers, many of them in theUS Government and the State Department and
the private sector, mainly inthe business community, to engagement.
And they believe that it'sthe United States that has actually broken
the engagement since Trump and
that the United States shouldsimply get back to engagement.
They argue that China is not a competitor,not an adversary of the United States,

(41:24):
and the US Just needs tokind of take a deep breath,
re extend the hand to Beijing andreengage.
So that's a group ofindividuals that I discern.
And then last two, quickly, next schoolI call the Strategic Empathy School,
which is somewhat relatedto the Re Engagers.
This is a group of individuals who arguethat China is reacting defensively

(41:48):
to American aggression and assertivenessand as America is the, you know,
aggressive party here, and that China isnaturally trying to defend itself and
that therefore the strategicempathizers argue America
needs to understand China's insecurities,not provoke them,

(42:09):
not demonize China, and to be morestrategically empathetic with China.
So it's viewing the relationshipthrough China's eyes.
That's the fourth school and last schoolI call the Managed Competition school,
which is very characteristicof the Biden administration,
even though I'm the first one.

That was, in fact,
what the Biden administrationcalled its approach.
I think that that term was actually usedby maybe Tony Blinken, but go ahead.

Yep, no, but
I have intellectual property rightsover that term, I first used it.

Let him know.

17, you can let Blinken and Sullivan know.
I don't care who.
But no, I.
The point is thatcompetition is a reality.
It's an indefinite reality.
It has to be pursued andassertively so by the United States.
But competition is notan adversarial relationship and
we don't want it to become such.
Hence it has to be managed throughdialogues and other confidence building

(43:05):
measures and even some of the tools takenfrom the first Cold War toolbox during
the Daytone period betweenthe United States and the Soviet Union.
So the managed competition school,which I also put myself in, so I'm in
comprehensive competition and management>> Elizabeth Economy: too, because I.
Was going to say, you know, do you not seeyourself in that, in that bucket as well?
So okay, you can in twodifferent schools of thought.

(43:27):
Okay, good to know.
That's how I the American debate.

So okay, given sort of those five schools then, you know,
there's been a critique madeby a number of our colleagues,
mostly in the sort of academic world,not in the think tank world,
that there's groupthink in Washington andthat it's very difficult if you're,
if you fall into the strategic empathygroup or the re engagement group.

(44:00):
It's near impossible to have your voiceheard because there is such group think.
Do you subscribe to that notion?
Do you think that there'sno space that there's
a kind of one narrative that'saccepted in Washington?

Well, I would say that there is a predominant narrative in
Washington, but I would say there'sa predominant narrative across the land.
It is not just inside the beltway,it's outside the beltway.
You know,
there's a reason that 83% of Americanshave an unfavorable view of China.
42% identify China as an enemy,52% identify China as a competitor,

(44:36):
while only 6% see it as a partner.
So I would say this is a, there is a,
I would argue there's a nationalconsensus about China and
it is about the competitive, you know,so it's not just an inside the beltway.
So there are those who argue forreengagement, strategic empathy.
They are in my view the outliers.
They are the 6%.

(44:57):
Their voice is valid voice.
Everybody has a valid voice.
But they are such a minoritycompared to the broad,
I would say consensus acrossthe country of not just experts and
foreign policy people, butAmericans on, on China as a,
as a serious competitorthat has to be dealt with.

(45:18):
So you know, I commend,I'm not going to name any names,
those who have tried to find theirvoice within this dominant hedge.
You might call it a hegemonic discourse.
Yes, there is a hegemonic discourse inthe United States, around China as a.

Yeah.

So the strategic empathizers and the re engagers are having
a hard time getting their, their,their voices heard because there's not
a whole lot of evidence to supporttheir positions in my view.

Yeah, that's probably what I would,
I would argue as, as well.
So let me just come back for a secondbecause you put yourself in the two
buckets of comprehensive competition andmanaged competition.
I mean is there a different outcome for
the comprehensive competition bucketother than managing that competition?
You said there is no winning.

(46:06):
So do you end up anyway if youbelieve in comprehensive competition,
do you end up anywayhaving to manage that or
is there something differentthat can come out of it?

Well, if it's not managed it then it becomes
a fully adversarial,much more zero sum dynamic.
I've thought a lot about this,about competition.
I've done a lot of reading intothe literature of competition
in different fields.
But competition is justthat the way I think of it.

(46:36):
It's just that it's not fixed,it's fluid, it's dynamic.
Each side.
As I say, I sports, I love sports, but I,
I see a lot of analogy between teams,right?
They one's on offense,the other's on defense.
You have to, if best defense isa proactive defense, you try and
control the pace of play on offense.
So the meta sports metaphor may bestretched, but there is no winning.

(47:01):
As I say, there's no overtime.
And this is an indefinite state.
And we, we, Americans and others, Europehave, and the Chinese for that matter,
have to learn to live with this asthe new normal and keep it bounded.
That's where the management comes in.
Because if we fail at the managementthen we really have a cold war.
I don't think we're in a Cold War 2.0.

(47:23):
There are some elements, butwe're not quite there yet.
But competition can indeed bleedinto a fully adversarial cold war.
And cold wars don't always stay cold.

Now I know you mentioned, and you have mentioned
that you don't certainlylike prognostication, but
maybe just a quick assessment thenof whether or not the two sides
right now are managing the competitionwell in your estimation and
if not, what would you say would beneeded to get the relationship back?

(48:01):
In a sort of on a more constructive path.

You know, very fair question.
We're in a kind of strange hiatus atthe moment, I would say in the first six
months of the Trump administration,because the administration has yet
to unveil and roll out their Chinastrategy other than their tariff strategy.
This has become a singledimensional relationship.
Save a few other data points.

(48:25):
Yes, Secretary of Defense Hexath andeven Secretary of State Rubio have made
some hawkish statements that,that suggest where, that the relationship
is kind of a continuation of Trump 1.0,but it's an odd hiatus period.
So I'm not going to say that they'redoing things right or wrong yet.
There aren't, they're not managing.
There's no management at the moment.

(48:48):
The Rubio hasn't even met Wang Yi once,Heth hasn't met his counterpart.
The bureaucratic institutionalizationdimension that I don't know,
I guess says except forthe trade talks in London and
Zurich where Secretary of Commerce andtreasury met their counterparts,
there's no high level institutionalizedinteraction at the societal level.

(49:12):
At the military level, you know,there are a few things going on, but
this is a very odd, odd kind of period.
It makes me a little nervous.
We need to, the Trump administrationneeds to figure out their strategy,
unveil it, which as soon as the tariffissue is put behind them, so to speak,
whatever they, they think is,is acceptable, then they will move on and,

(49:34):
and unveil a much more systematic policy.
And that's a question wherethe management piece of that comes in.
We'll have to wait and see.

So you're expecting that they will unveil a more
comprehensive, more strategic policy?

Absolutely.
And there are alreadysome indicators of it.
And, you know,
the press guidance has been given tothe spokespersons of the White House,
National Security Council, State andDefense Departments, et cetera.
Some of the things Rubio has said,some of the things Heath have said,
there are the components ofa more systematic strategy there.

(50:10):
Trump himself is the wild card.
It's, you know, and we can talk aboutthat, but I think we're, we're not,
they haven't unveiled their, their policy.
But, you know, I think they're trying toshift various assets to the Indo Pacific.
China is there, you know, kind ofthe pacing threat, as Hexeth has said,
the Secretary of Defense.

(50:30):
This is the driver of the Trumpadministration's international diplomacy,
international security,commercial policy, et cetera.
So they just haven't articulated it yet.
But I think that's where they're headed.

Yeah. They haven't articulated and
it's not clear to me they're putting inplace the right building blocks with our
allies and partners.
If, in fact that is goingto be the strategy for
what we're looking at islargely return to Trump 1 and
in many respects the Bidenadministration policy as well, you know,
what they're doing on the trade front andthe talk about increasing defense

(51:08):
spending and the threat threats don'tseem to be particularly conducive to,
to sort of strengthening our ourrelations with our allies and partners.
Although I do agree with you, I think,
that both Secretary of Defense Hexath andSecretary of State Rubio and
former National Security Advisor Waltzhad as their inclinations to do that.

(51:30):
I think they're all more traditionalRepublican internationalists.
But I also agree with youthat Trump is the wild card.
President Trump is the wildcard in all of this.
So let me ask you one moresort of bigger question, and
that is if you are sitting in China andyou have, as you've noted, spent a lot

(51:51):
of time in China, a lot of time inthe Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and
certainly meeting with universityprofessors, I'm sure in Beijing and
Shanghai and Guangzhou and elsewhere,if they were to read your book, and
I'm sure it probably has already beentranslated informally into Chinese,

(52:11):
I have no doubt at this point there's somebootleg copy because I'm pretty sure,
you know, the Beijing Foreign LanguagePress is not going to be translating
it anytime soon, you know, into, intoChinese, I guess they wouldn't translate.
But Beijing Press, nobody's translating itinto, into Chinese out of mainland China.

(52:33):
What do you think they would say?
Would they say, I, I see this,I, I largely agree with it.
It makes sense to me.
Or do you think they would havesome pretty pointed critiques?

I wish I knew.
It's interesting you ask because I havean appendix in the book which is really
a separate standalone chapter thatexplores China's America watchers,
analyses of what engagement was and
then what has happened tothe disengagement period since 2017.

(53:03):
And I dig into a lot of internalChinese language materials,
many of them restricted material,so called Nebu material.

But you must have gathered before, well,
before you started writing this book then,right.

I've been gathering them for the last three or four years.
But and I've had some excellent researchassistants I have to give credit,
who also helped me.
But anyway,I thought it would be interesting for
readers because the book is reallyabout America's China policy.
This book is about the Americanside of the relationship, but
I thought for readers,they would like to ask, no,

(53:39):
what you've just asked,what do the Chinese think?
So that's why I added this appendix.
And I find in the writings of the socalled America specialists
that they take no, no acknowledgement,no blame whatsoever for
China's role in the deterioration ofthe relationship over the last decade.

(54:02):
It is, as far as they're concerned,100% the fault of the Americans.
I found, I think one scholar fromthe Chinese Foreign Affairs University,
very perceptive individual whoacknowledged that China has had a role
in the deterioration of the relationship.
Some agency on China's part.

(54:23):
But this is really stunning.
This is, I argue in the book,a major intelligence failure on China,
China's part.
These so called America specialists, whichagain I wrote about in my dissertation
40 years ago, they didn't understandthe United States very well then and
I hate to say they still don't orthey can't acknowledge it.
They're on.

(54:43):
They live in a highly censored system.
So to be sure, all the data I had,but NEBU materials are more,
more honest, you might say.
And, but even in the NABOO materials,there's no acknowledgment of China's
agency andthe deterioration of the relationship.
It's all the American side.
So you know, if they're not reflective,they're not self critical and

(55:03):
they can't accept anyblame on China's side.
That's a problem in the relationship.

Yeah, that is,
that is a problem becauseit does take two to tango.
And if we ever are going to movethe relationship, you know,
to get it more back on track andin a positive direction,
it's going to take somegive on both sides and, and
some I think nuanced understanding, whichyou know, and it's funny frankly if you
stop to think because I know you've heard,you know, as I have throughout the years,

(55:32):
many, many times that you know,while China understands the United States,
United States does notunderstand China nearly as well.
But I think what you're suggestingis maybe that's not actually so
accurate a statement.
Okay.
I always end with a couple of really quickrapid fire questions, so five of them.

(55:56):
First, what's your favorite China book orarticle that you would like to.
Recommend that people read,>> David Shambaugh: gosh.
Well, everythingElizabeth Economy has written.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, good answer.
But let's, let's be real.
Go ahead.

Well, my favorite book, in all honesty,
my favorite China book is by Lucian PI.
It's called the Mandarin and the Cadre,it was published back around 1990.
Sorry, around 96, 97 or soby the University of Michigan center for
Chinese Studies,University of Michigan Press.
Mandarin and the Cadre.

(56:32):
It is the most singular,single most insightful book.
It's about Chinese political culture,what makes China tick,
why do they behave the way they behave.
And it is worth all of our rereading.

Right, I agree with you on that one.
I think he was fascinating,fascinating read.
What do you think we need to know asa collective, either as scholars and
think tank analysts orbroader American public?
What do we need to know moreabout China that we don't know?
What's missing, you know,that we can't quite seem to get?

Well, we don't acknowledge the diversity of,
of China enough in our analyses.
There is a kind of natural tendencyto speak about a unitary China,
which is one of my critiques of AmericanChina scholarship is that there's,
you know, it's a bit of a contradiction.

(57:30):
We know a lot about a little,you might say we know more and
more about less and less.
There are specialists on every little,you know, small area of Chinese economy,
society, technology,religion, so and so forth.
But it's putting the pieces ofthe puzzle together that I think is
the real problem in our analyses of China.

(57:54):
What are we missing?
Of course, this is a Leninist.
This is a closed, highly opaque Leniniststate that prizes secrecy and discipline.
It's very hard to penetrate the socalled black box.
That's intentional on their part, and
Xi Jinping has made iteven harder to penetrate.
So there's a lot of questions, butI think our analytical community does

(58:15):
pretty well with the data andthe available ability that we have.
We just don't have access to the countryin the way we used to before, and
that that's a problem.
This is again, not accidental.
Xi Jinping and his regime have not.
They don't want foreign China specialistssnooping around in their country.
This is all part of their fear of peacefulevolution or whatever, their xenophobia.

(58:39):
So it's very hard to get on the groundgranular data, much more difficult.

Now than, you know, ever, ever before.
Has there ever been a time whenyou've just gotten China wrong again?
Knowing that you don't like toprognosticate, but written an article,
you know, or uttered a phrase andthen later you look back and
like, my God, boy, did I get that wrong.
Or maybe not.

Sure. There have been many times in my writings
and career where I didn't get it right.
I mean, the phrase that I did notwasn't mine was the headline of that
Wall Street Journal article, the ComingChinese, Coming Chinese Crackup.
But I think the analysis of that article,I don't disown that.
I think it was accurate.

(59:25):
It was the incendiary titleWall Street Journal put on it.

That does not count.
Somebody else put the title on.
That's not, that's not an admission of,of, of wrongdoing.
I, I'll, I'll tell you mine, which wasI wrote a piece in Foreign affairs
that that sort of argued that Huintawas going to be a political reformer.
Right on his role at the party school,things that he'd said, written, etc.

(59:48):
That was that.
I wrote that article.
And that certainly didnot prove to be true.
So>> David Shambaugh: my own self critique
was precisely about the end ofthe hu Jintao Era, 2009-10,
precisely the fourth plenum of the 16thParty Congress in October of that year,
which is a very progressive document.
And I said to myself,I was living in Beijing, I thought, great,

(01:00:09):
they're going to continuewith these reforms.
And then within a matter of months,it just came crashing down and closed up.
So I was wrong then.
Okay, all right, there you go.
That counts.
So both of us got something about huge,how wrong if you were advising
the Trump administration,take you back to your Washington days.

(01:00:30):
What one thing would you say?
You, you need to do this.
You should be doing this now andyou're not.

>> David Shambaugh (01:00:37):
I think they need to take a page out of the first Trump
administration andparticularly what Matt Pottinger did,
who I have great respect for.
Matt Pottinger reorganized the American
bureaucracy around a newcompetitive China strategy.
He turned what Oxenberg had done 40years previous to make cooperation

(01:00:59):
the leitmotif of our institutionalrelations with the Chinese government.
He turned it around into a competitiveset of bureaucratic missions.
Okay, so this government, the current one,doesn't seem to know where it's going.
They have no, no strategy or strategists.
They have no Pottingers.

(01:01:19):
Maybe I'm exaggerating Matt's own role,but
they need individuals who understandthe American government and
can marry a China strategyto a bureaucratic strategy.

>> Elizabeth Economy (01:01:35):
Interesting, interesting point.
Okay, last question.
President Trump always seems to want tomeet with Xi Jinping, always looking for
that meeting, has already made a statementthat he's going to be going there,
Xi Jinping is going to be coming here.
What are the odds that we endup with some new Nixon Mao

(01:01:55):
breakthrough momentwith these two leaders?

Goodness.
Well, I think actually the possibilitiesof a head of state meeting between
Presidents Trump and Xi is highly likelyand maybe sooner rather than later.
But that does not mean, in my view,
that there will be a complete reset ofthe relationship, nor should there be.

(01:02:22):
But the reset would require the,the Republican Congress,
the American people,the people in his administration, Rubio,
Hexa, all the others, they are allwedded to a competition strategy.
So you're not gonna get some Kumbayabetween the two countries of

(01:02:43):
Nixon Mao reset.
If these two leaders meet andthe Chinese side are girded for
a long term competitive relationshipwith the United States too,
they're not going to resettheir own domestic bureaucracy.
So, yeah, we may have the pomp andcircumstance honor guards.
One president goes,you know, to Beijing or
the other comes to the White House,or both.

(01:03:03):
But I don't think that's going toreset the intrinsic relationship.
There are structural factors thatare driving this into a long term,
comprehensive competition.

Okay, well, David, on that note, let me thank you for
just a terrific conversation,wide ranging, so informed.
There is a reason that you are one of thedeans of the China field, I have to say,
and I'm going to end with this.
I asked ChatGPT, I just couldn't resist.
I've never done this before, ButI asked ChatGPT to name the top five China

(01:03:37):
scholars who, you know,offer foreign policy and domestic policy.
I did it like four times in a row,
and your name came up numberone every single time.
So a privilege to have you on the podcast.
Thank you again.

Well, that's why they call it artificial intelligence.
Thank you.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
And this podcast series, ChinaConversation that you've initiated is
a wonderful contribution toour national public discourse.

So thanks for that, David, okay?

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Rise and Fall of US-China Engagement with David Shambaugh | China Considered | Hoover Institution