This is Democracy – Episode 94: U.S.-China Relations

Announcer: This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week, we are talking to one of the foremost experts on China and East Asia and the United States, Sheena Chestnut Greitens. She’ll be joining the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin here in August of 2020, we’re very excited. Sheena’s a very busy person. She’s also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she frequently writes and presents research. She is an affiliate with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and she’s a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security. Before joining us in Austin, Sheena was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri. Her work focuses on American national security, East Asia, authoritarian politics, foreign policy, questions about surveillance and surveillance technology, which we’ll talk about. Her special emphasis is of course on China and the Korean Peninsula. Sheena, thank you for joining us today.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be on with you.

Jeremi Suri: Our pleasure. Before we turn to Sheena, of course we have Zachary scene-setting poem. What’s the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: A Superpower Scorned.

Jeremi Suri: Okay. Let’s hear about A Superpower Scorned.

Zachary Suri: It was the afterthought of the war, the millions used for bayonet practice, and the screaming babies dying in Nanjing. It was the after thought of the reconstruction, the large neighbor to Japan stumbling over its own tail. The war that we lost and was never resolved, the beginning of today. It was the after thought of the Cold War, the third wheel super power on the Security Council that professed conformism and mass revolution, threat only to its portion of the globe. It was the after thought of the Asian economic revolution, as Japan built the Toyotas that invaded suburban driveways. It was the seat of the superpower of future domination, germinating in oblivion. Then suddenly, it was the center. Presidents railed against the economic threat. Jobs disappeared across the Pacific, and wealth suddenly condensed over China, and now, everything bears it seal. Even the French ceramic coasters have its signature. The American flag in my bedroom has it stitched into its stars and stripes. China was the afterthought that became the looming shadow, and how, with its billions of people, how with its mountains and rivers and valleys, how with its deepwater dominant ports, how did we not see this coming? Love hath no fury like a superpower scorned.

Jeremi Suri: What’s your poem about, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about how underestimated China really was in the international stage, until it seems, suddenly, it became this global superpower that really loomed large over American policy discussions of the past two decades.

Jeremi Suri: Sheena, is that accurate? Did the United States and other countries underrate China as a strategic competitor for too long?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: But I think that the view of China has always been a country that has a tremendous amount of potential. There’s the quote from Napoleon that when China wakes, she will shake the world. But there was also this sense for a long time, China was a country, As Zachary’s poem mentioned, it was a country that was devastated, not just by war with Japan, but by its own civil conflict which stretched really from the late ’20s all the way through 1949 in the CCP’s rise to power, and the country, to a certain extent, either turned inward or at least away from the United States and Western Europe, toward the Soviet Union, toward the International Communist Movement. So certainly, there’s a sense that China’s engagement with the world as we’ve observed it in the last few years is both a pattern that has been in the awakening since the 1970s with the launch of China’s reform and opening policy, but also that really under Xi Jinping that we are seeing a new approach both to domestic politics and to foreign policy under Xi Jinping’s leadership.

Jeremi Suri: So when I was writing a book about Henry Kissinger years ago, he viewed the opening to China as the pinnacle of his career in many respects, and the pinnacle of American foreign policy. But it seems to me that your work shows so well how much more complicated Chinese-American relations have become since the early 1970s. What’s made it so much more complex? How have we gone from this moment of euphoria in 1972 when Nixon and Kissinger visit Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai? How have we gone from that moment to where we are today?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, when you think about the motivation and the conditions that made the opening to China possible, that was historic. I describe it when I teach my undergraduate class on Chinese politics and foreign policy, a moment when the tectonic plates of world politics shifted in the sense of China’s realigning itself from the Soviet Union, which it had split from toward the United States. So when you think about that, the security arguments at the time were really in favor of China cooperating with, and even to some extent, aligning with the United States as a way of balancing and creating some protection against the Soviet Union, which it was worried about the Brezhnev Doctrine, it was worried about Czechoslovakia, about the Lin Biao incident, which Mao saw not only as a threat to China, but a direct personal threat to his leadership. Although there was mistrust over Vietnam and Taiwan in particular, there was also a sense that there were compelling security reasons for the United States and China to cooperate, and that they had a real overriding shared interest in balancing against Soviet power. As we think about what’s changed since that moment with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and this incredible rise in inch of China itself, which really has occurred since Nixon’s visit. Nixon visited in February of 1972. Mao died, Nixon left office, the normalization process was completed at the end of that decade. We sometimes forget how long that process took.

Jeremi Suri: That’s right

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: But even if you think about normalization occurred within about a year of Deng Xiaoping launching the policy that became known as reform and opening, China’s reopening to the outside world, and re-engaging in a very different way with the world at large. So China itself was in a very different place and because of that, I think it’s inevitable that US-China relations would be at a very different place. So now what we’re seeing, I think there’s always been this mix of cooperation and competition in the US-China relationship, but the security rationale that bound the two countries together when they normalized relations no longer is there, and in its place has come a set of security issues to the fore where the potential for cooperation or the shared mutual interest is simply not as clear. So the security realm, I think has become more conflictual, and the emphasis on competition has has become a bigger and bigger part of the US-China relationship in the last, really, I think gradually over the course of the time since reform and opening. But again, I also do think that there was the ascendance to the leadership, to the top of the Chinese political system of Xi Jinping in 2012, is also an inflection point that has taken us a little bit of time to recognize in terms of what it means for China’s internal politics and also for the way that China approaches the world. I see some fairly major changes that have emerged under Xi Jinping.

Jeremi Suri: How would we think about those changes in comparison to the figure that many of us as historians focus on, which is Mao Zedong? Is Xi Jinping creating another emperorship for himself? Or how do we understand his presidency for life, as I understand he’s made it into?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, one of the striking things is it was the elimination of term limits in the Chinese political system, and that surprised outside observers in part because when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, there was this sense that China had actually moved away from the personalist leadership that we associate with Mao and had moved. It hadn’t ever quite explicitly repudiated the cult of personality in the same way that the Soviet Union did when it did destalinization. But that China had moved from the personalist, individualist model that Mao represented to a much more collective leadership, represented by the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the 7-9 men who have been at the apex of China’s political system. So if you think about Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, the figures who have headed China since Deng Xiaoping, there was more of an emphasis on collective leadership, and what we’ve seen is that Xi Jinping re-centralized power and to an extent depersonalized it, to the point where there’s Xi Jinping thought, there’s an app that lets you study Xi Jinping thought.

Jeremi Suri: Oh my Gosh.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: You don’t go a page or a day without seeing Xi Jinping on not one, but multiple headlines in the People’s Daily or other state media outlets. So the amount that Xi Jinping has become both a symbolic and an actual political, personalist leader, what we would call personalist in political science, meaning that power really is concentrated in an individual rather than in an institution like the party or the military, is really a reversal of what we thought we were seeing in post-Mao China. Along with that, we’ve seen pretty massive changes to both domestic politics and foreign policy. So the area I work a lot on, as you mentioned in your introduction, is about domestic security and surveillance. Xi Jinping has essentially completely overhauled the internal security, the police, the coercive apparatus. He has drafted about a dozen new laws. He has replaced the personnel leadership of half a dozen institutions, the courts, the police, the state security ministry, the armed police, the military. He has restructured the military, he’s reorganized the paramilitary, People’s Armed Police. There’s just this whole incredible raft of changes that he’s made that have cumulatively completely overhauled the security infrastructure that keeps the party in power in China, what they would call political or regime security. Then at the same time, there have also been big changes to, China’s role in the world and China’s approach to foreign policy. So we see that, for example, the reclamation of islands in the South China Sea, literally creating islands where rocks or low tide formations were all that existed before, and then putting runways capable of receiving significantly sized military aircraft on them. So they were literally islands and territories that didn’t exist when Xi Jinping came to power that now exist in the South China Sea. We have the Belt and Road Initiative, we have a very, very different pattern of China pursuing leadership positions in international organizations, which, again, is a change because China participated in international organizations much more actively, starting in the ’80s and ’90s. But to see China now occupy the leadership role in four of 15 UN specialized agencies is a very, very different environment for a global governance than we’ve seen before. I think both Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy have really changed pretty tremendously, even in the last eight or nine years under Xi Jinping’s leadership.

Jeremi Suri: That’s an incredible encapsulation of so much. Before we turn to the discussion of domestic surveillance, which is one of the areas you’ve done groundbreaking work on, Zachary has a question for you.

Zachary Suri: I was wondering why we haven’t seen the same democratic backlash within China to this growth and authoritarianism. Is it because the Chinese people have chosen economic prosperity over political freedom?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: That’s a great question, and it would be fantastic if we could do surveys without restriction in China and count on the reliability of the answers that we get. It’s really hard to gauge what the distribution of preferences is in China, what citizens actually think, and then I’ll get to your question about backlash and some of the other factors that I think help shape public opinion in China. But first of all, I think we have to be careful when we look at survey results or see interviews with people, because we know, and this is actually something that we learned from people who worked on Eastern Europe and life under Communism there, is that there’s this phenomenon called preference falsification, where people will outwardly behave as if they agree with the regime, even if their private beliefs are different, because being the only dissenter can be quite lonely, and in many cases, just physically dangerous when you live in a dictatorship. So what happens is that there’s this cumulative effect where everyone looks around and all of the citizens are pretending and acting as if they agree with what the regime is doing. A great many of them might, in private, disagree, but there’s no way to know that because everyone falsifies their external behavior out of a natural human desire for self-protection and to protect your loved ones. That’s also why we get these really unexpected cascades because once one person, think about what happened in Tunisia during the Arab Spring, one person breaks the mold, someone else who actually secretly agrees with them says, oh, well, they did it, I could do that too. You can very quickly get these cascades where suddenly, it feels less risky and more morally or socially appropriate to express your true feelings, your true preferences. That phenomenon has been used to explain why we saw in places like East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe under communism, this really quick switch from a seemingly stable regime to one that, overnight, all of a sudden, wasn’t. So that’s a note of caution. I just think we need to be a little bit careful about how much we can actually know about what people think in any non-democracy and that includes China. But second, the other thing that China did, especially after Tiananmen Square, was that the party decided that they had not done enough patriotic education, and so there’s been some great entire books written on this campaign, to educate Chinese citizens about this. One of the key concepts that’s used in this curriculum is called The Century of Humiliation. So it begins with the Opium Wars and exploitation by the British, and it goes through a long list of foreign predations, exploitation, victimization, and abuse of the Chinese people,  until they’re finally liberated from foreign imperialism and foreign predation by, of course, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. So the way this history is taught now in a curriculum that goes from the time you’re pretty young in China, all the way through the college entrance exams, really fosters a very strong sense of nationalism and suspicion of the intention of foreign powers. As well as this story, this narrative that only the Chinese Communist Party was capable of freeing China from being exploited by much of the rest of the world. So I think that nationalism is a really powerful factor. Today is the anniversary of a nationalist movement in China, the May Fourth Movement. So I think it’s also just a good reminder that patriotism and nationalism exist in non-democracies too, and where a regime can convince people that they’re patriotically authentic. Then they can often direct citizens’ anger and blame outward rather than toward a desire for internal accountability. I think sometimes we see that happening in China.

Jeremi Suri: Sure, and it wouldn’t be unique to China either. Just as a way of background for our listeners, the May Fourth Movement, of course, was part of a movement against foreign imperialism at the end of World War I in China, and as you pointed out so well, it had been co-opted in many ways by the current Chinese leadership. I want to turn Sheena to the topic of domestic surveillance, which you’ve written so much about. One of the points you’ve made in some of your recent work is how the Chinese have not only developed an incredibly sophisticated, vibrant surveillance system within their country, but also how they started exporting it to the world. Could you say more about that and what your particular concerns are about that for the future of democracy in other countries?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah, sure. So I would highly recommend, there are few documentaries or short news clips out there about the growth of the Chinese surveillance state inside China itself. In one of them, there’s a BBC reporter who goes and has his picture taken at a police station in China, and then he gets in a taxi and gets out and starts walking toward the train station and by the time he gets to the train station, the police have picked him up on a video monitor at the entrance and are able to intercept him. It takes them about seven minutes to do so based on facial recognition, video cameras and the very high-tech command center that exists in that particular city. That approach has now been scaled up and used across China. So what’s really interesting about this is that, a lot of the initial reporting about this framed it as something that really just had the implications inside China, and that is absolutely no longer true because these technologies are being exported and employed widely around the world. So thanks for mentioning the paper, it just came out with the Brookings Institution. It talks about the fact that I had a research team working to try to locate as many of the countries where China has exported this technology to as possible. We found that there are over 80 countries right now that we can find. We know we’re missing at least a few where China has helped to set up what we call a surveillance and policing platform. What’s significant about the platforms is they’re not just selling cameras. It’s not just one specific type of hardware, they can collect some super fancy kind of data. What’s actually really important about these platforms is their ability to take multiple types of data. So they might use a driver’s license database and the welfare information in China, and then use information about your job, your party membership, where your parents work, and then the license plate on your car. So when, for example, your license plate or your image is captured, that can be matched to your national ID number or the information about your car, which then is matched to your ID number and all of these other information is instantly layered over it. So you have a very, very complete file on somebody, their relationships, their employment, their engagement with the state, their history of protesting or petitioning, or other forms of contentious politics, and to the power to pull all of that information together really quickly for surveillance and policing purposes, is really powerful. I think sometimes we tend to focus on the super fancy heat sensing or infrared glasses or facial recognition enabled sunglasses, which is one of the crazier inventions I’ve seen, but unless you can actually match that with all this other information, it’s not that useful. So it’s actually this capability to do data integration that is so interesting and that’s what we found is showing up in at least about 80 other countries around the world.

Zachary Suri: In recent years too, we’ve seen a lot of backlash from American companies and their employees against cooperation with the Chinese surveillance state. Has that had an impact and has it been effective?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Yeah. So one of the reasons there’s been push-back is that some of those technology companies have, for example, been implicated in human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where China’s weaker Muslim population has been subject to draconian limits on movement and in some cases, forced internment and re-education into political indoctrination camps. So there’s been legislation in the United States and some real push-back on companies whose supply chains rely on China or potentially on forced labor. There’s actually a bill in front of the US Congress related to forced labor in Xinjiang now. I haven’t checked in the last day or two to see where it’s at, but I know that that bill has been proposed. But one of the interesting things about this technology in terms of thinking about potential global backlash, is it is actually showing up in both democracies and non-democracies. So this is not just that China is exporting to other authoritarian political systems and helping solidify dictatorship. Some of these tools are being used in places like Germany or Malta, or places that are US treaty allies like the Philippines. That raises a lot of different concerns. One is about data privacy and whether Chinese companies have backdoor ways of accessing the consumer data that the technology generates. There’s questions about if China becomes the market dominant force, what effect will that have on strategic competition between US and China? Then there’s also concern that this surveillance technologies could, and Zach, I think this is where your question was going, that these technologies could really damage the quality of democracy and limit human rights and civil liberties in recipient countries. So even if it goes to a country that’s a democracy, the subsequent effect could be really corrosive on that democracy. So I think that part of what this points to, is the US has a tendency sometimes to approach this stuff as this is all about China and China’s the one exporting this and here are the issues and the risks we see with China and getting this technology from China. The paper actually urges people to stop and say, “Okay, well, if we’re thinking about potential backlash or we’re worried about the bad effects or the negative effects of adopting this technology, maybe we need to ask the people who are adopting it what problems they’re trying to solve.” In many cases, these are local mayors or the provincial governors who are concerned about crime, public safety, investment, and job creation, who are trying to reduce violent crime, and they’re convinced that this looks like a decent solution. So I think it’s important to think about the demand side and for the US to have conversations that aren’t just focused on China, but are also really focused on what are the problems in recipient countries that make them willing to consider or even want to consider adopting this technology in the first place. Because it may have really negative effect, we don’t know yet. It’s new.

Jeremi Suri: It’s a powerful insight to think in terms of not just the Chinese exporting, but the import motivations that various groups have for using this technology. Before we turn to where American policy might go and thinking about these issues, we have to ask about North Korea. Obviously, in the news recently quite a lot with the question about the health of Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea. To what extent do you see China having a very strong influence over the future of North Korea? Or to what extent is North Korea somewhat independent from Chinese influence?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So I think that’s a great question. One of the things that I think this recent episode where Kim Jong-un went out of sight for 15, 20 days, and then reappeared, was actually to point out a really urgent need, not just for the US to think through, okay, what happens if he’s not healthy? But also for the US to maintain and have conversations with as many countries in the region as possible to try to make sure we understand what these potential scenarios are for if Kim Jong-un actually does pass away. He’s not in good health, that’s been pretty clear for a while. So even though he’s okay right now, there’s still a pretty clear need to think about what would the US policy be if something happened. One of the interesting things about North Korea is that, around the same time Xi Jinping came to power in China, who was a leader who wanted to do things differently than his immediate predecessors; Kim Jong-un came to power in North Korea. He came into power in early 2012, having been the designated successor for about two years. So one of the only times that we’ve seen a second hereditary succession. We’ve had maybe 30-ish hereditary successions in dictatorships, they’re actually pretty hard to do, and no country other than North Korea that I can think of has pulled that off twice in a row. So Kim Jong-un is also not cut from the same mold as his father. He styles himself much more like his grandfather, he’s outgoing, he will speak in public, which his father never did. But what’s interesting about that is unlike Xi Jinping, who actually appears to have really changed policy, the change with Kim Jong-un seems to be more stylistic. There just seems to be a lot more continuity, there’s no sign that North Korea has abandoned or modified its desire to have a nuclear weapons arsenal, or the capability to hit the United States with it, which it’s now accomplished with a lot of its recent missile testing. By recent, I mean in the last decade not in the last year or two. So in terms of foreign policy, there’s actually much more continuity on the North Korean side than I think we’ve seen with China, although the China-North Korea relationship doesn’t seem to have changed very much. That’s been a relationship for a long time where North Korea relies on China, but doesn’t want to rely on it too much. I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the things Kim Jong-un did was remove the person who had the best relationship with China, his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, who he purged and then executed. I think it’s going to be really important for the United States and China to try to have constructive conversations about what might happen on the Korean Peninsula, but there’s a lot of mistrust, that’s an area where the interests and what each side would prioritize or want don’t overlap very well. It’s been very, very difficult to get candid conversation going between the United States and China. The results is that right now, there’s a lot of concern about what wouldn’t happen in a scenario where it’s not clear what’s going on in North Korea if the US and/or China had to try to step in to fill a power vacuum. Would they be able to talk to each other, coordinate, and avoid a clash that might just come out of a straightforward miscommunication? It’s not clear right now that there’s a procedure or a way in place to avoid that scenario even though it would clearly be sub-optimal for both sides, but it’s really hard to talk about. So that’s what I think where things are. That’s not an optimistic answer. I’m sorry.

Jeremi Suri: Not at all, but very helpful. You’ve really laid out the strategic landscape for us both with regard to Chinese policy in South China Sea with Chinese policy with regard to surveillance technologies and with regard to North Korea. We always like to close, Sheena, with a discussion of where we go from here. Where should we go in terms of policy making, and what should citizens be looking for and arguing for? We are going to have an election in November, and at some point, there will be some discussion of foreign policy in China. What should citizens be looking for? What should they be lobbying and arguing for?

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Gosh, I think that’s a great question and it is difficult to answer concisely. I will do my best in part because this is such a complex and multifaceted relationship. These are the two biggest economic and military powers in the world, and their interaction encompasses literally every issue you can think of on the planet. Most of us probably would not have had public health at the top of our list of issues in the US-China relationship agenda, and yet all of a sudden, our lives are being overturned or massively impacted by the public health relationship between the two countries right now. That’s just an example of how complex and how seemingly minor issues in the US-China relationship or at least issues that aren’t high-profile, can suddenly exert a huge effect on the lives of average Chinese people and average American citizens. I think as we think about American policy, listening to what are the two candidates assumptions about the relationship with China, about the nature of the Chinese political system, and about what America should be trying to do with China; what are the objectives and what’s the plan? I was listening this morning to some remarks by the Deputy National Security Adviser, Matt Pottinger, where he talked about the current US approach to China. I would commend those remarks they are very, very interesting and fairly has focused on ideological competition. The question is, where does that leave the prospects for cooperation? He still sees a fair amount of room for cooperation as I interpreted his remarks. But we’re going to be offered at some point, I think an alternative vision of what that relationship does and should look like, and it’ll be important to think about what the actual points of difference are. Sometimes in campaigns that can be tough to tell. There’s also a real incentive for American politicians usually in an electoral campaign season to talk tough on China, thinking about what the effects of those policies would be if they were actually carried out. I guess the last thing, if I can throw one thing in there on surveillance technology. I think this public health crisis has the potential to really revise how both democracies and non-democracies think about the use of surveillance technology. Test and trace does require some intrusion into citizens traditional conceptions of data privacy, at least as we think about it here in the United States. Right now China has done a lot more in, for example, the UN or other standard setting bodies to propose a set of standards for surveillance technology and related telecommunications or other technologies that are used for surveillance. One of my recommendations I think is that, the US needs and should have a much more comprehensive strategy for what kind of standards it wants in the world that can accomplish some of our goals in, for example, public health, but that remain compatible with American values and interests like civil liberties, democracy, and human freedom. I think for me that’s it because it’s the area I work on, that’s an area where I’d like to see more proactive US leadership because right now, I think China is pushing ahead and we risk having China fill that gap if the US doesn’t pursue that comprehensive strategy soon. Otherwise, man, it’s such a huge complex relationship. I could talk for a few more minutes on the economy but I’ll stop there.

Jeremi Suri: No, you’ve given us a lot to think about with regard to strategic relations and security issues. Zachary, for young people like yourself looking at these issues, do these security issues resonate with you? Is it possible to find space to think about them in the context of, obviously, the pandemic and other issues, and also do these issues help you get beyond the sometimes, a narrow stereotypes, sometimes racist stereotypes that people use toward China and the United States?

Zachary Suri: I definitely think they do. I think that this new generation of leaders that’s coming up in the United States is really much more aware of China as a world power and a major US policy issue than past generations. In a way, I think China will be like the Soviet Union in Russia were to an earlier generation in the 1980s in terms of, we’re going to have to study China much more in depth and think about the policy in a much more complex way than the simple extremes that we see often in the political sphere.

Jeremi Suri: Well, and I think what I’m very excited about is that we have scholars and political activists like Sheena, who understand these issues and can educate us. Sheena, thank you for sharing your insights and helping us to at least begin to understand some of these complex issues, all of which deserve individual podcasts unto themselves. You really were brilliant in bringing these issues out for us. Thank you, Sheena.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about these things today.

Jeremi Suri: Well, and thank you, Zachary, for your poem. I should also mention that we’ve done this-

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: For your questions, those were great. Thank you.

Jeremi Suri: Yes, he always asks the best questions. I should mention also that we’ve done this podcast in partnership with the Horns of a Dilemma, which is another wonderful podcast put out by the Texas National Security Network, and the Clemens Center, and War on the Rocks, and the Strauss Center all of which are partners here at the University of Texas. Thank you, everyone for joining us for this week of This is Democracy.

Announcer 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

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