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Chas W. Freeman Jr. is one of the world’s foremost authorities on China, and served for years as one of America’s top diplomats. He was President Richard Nixon’s principal interpreter on his historic 1972 trip to China. Freeman went on to be the charge d’affaires at the newly opened U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he frequently interacted with Chinese leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. He later served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Freeman is now a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and is chairman of Projects International, a business development company in Washington, D.C. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: As President Nixon’s translator on his first trip to China and then Charge d’Affaires at the newly opened embassy in Beijing, you’ve seen the whole arc of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. Since your trip in 1972, is this the lowest point in U.S.-China relations?

A: Yes. In many respects, we’re back to levels of mutual antipathy not seen since the period immediately after the Korean War. We don’t have military conflicts actively occurring as we did then with the so-called ‘offshore island crises’ over the various island groups off China’s mainland, including Kinmen and Matsu, which respectively blockaded Xiamen and Fuzhou harbors. But we are engaged in military maneuvers against each other in the South China Sea. We are vigilant because of the dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku (or Diaoyu) Islands. And, of course, the Taiwan issue has reemerged as a central irritant in the relationship. 

Many are beginning to view U.S.-China relations as a new cold war. Is that a useful analogy?

Not really. There is no ideological competition. Internationally, China is not attempting to export its system, which frankly, it has great trouble even defining for its own people. We [the U.S.] remain armed evangelists; we like to export our ideology. In a sense, we believe that we are threatened if any area of the planet does not accept our ideology. It’s a sort of absolutist approach to moral standards that has deep roots in American culture. The Cold War was, in no small measure, about ideological struggle. Both sides were messianic. That’s not the case now. 

Second, the geopolitics of this antagonism are very different. We’re not talking about a divided Europe, with the danger perceived by both sides that one or the other would surge into the territory it controlled. Now, what we’re talking about is an American policy of confronting China on its own borders, its maritime borders, and taking sides against China in every border dispute that it has with its neighbors. Finally, we are engaged in continued intervention in what remains of the Chinese Civil War [the dispute over Taiwan]. This has very little to do with the combined ideological and geopolitical struggle that the Cold War consisted of. 

The final distinction is that Deng Xiaoping made a deliberate decision 40-some years ago to bring China into the American-led world order, and China is now fully integrated. It’s a major factor in global industrial production and trade, even finance. The Soviet Union was deliberately self-isolating. It wanted to practice autarky rather than interdependence with other countries. And therefore, [the U.S.] could practice containment and hope the defects of the Soviet system would eventually bring it down. But no one expects the defects of the Chinese system to bring it down. In fact, China in many respects is a very successful case of economic modernization.

Do you think the U.S. should develop a more coherent policy of containment, as that seems to be the path we are on?

If that’s the path we’re on, we’re on the wrong path. China is fully integrated into the global economy. It is almost everybody’s largest trading partner. Trying to contain China, we’re more likely to end up containing ourselves. We need to wake up and realize that the monopolies on wealth and power that we once had are no longer there. It’s not just because of China; it’s because many countries have risen from poverty, from destitution, and from the damage they suffered in World War II and are formidable competitors of ours, even if they may not be in the military sense. Where we clearly are unmatched is in military spending and military prowess. We’ve had a lot of practice. We’ve been invading and occupying countries and trying to overthrow regimes for a long time. Others have not engaged in that, and they’re probably not as good at it as we are.

Do you think the U.S. should step back from the Western Pacific and the conflicts on China’s borders?

The U.S. needs to recognize that the countries in East Asia — which were prostrate, destitute, and devastated after World War II, creating a vacuum that the U.S. felt obliged to fill — are now prosperous, wealthy, and strong societies. Japan has one of the most formidable military establishments on the planet. It also has the third largest GDP in the world and is a major trading country with great influence beyond its borders. Vietnam has shown that it cannot be conquered by anybody and stands its ground against the Chinese, as it did against us in an earlier period. Indonesia is reasserting itself as a great power in the region. And India, although it lags behind China in many respects, is fully capable of defending itself and pursuing its own interests. 

The proper U.S. response would be to reduce our forward military deployments in favor of encouraging countries in the region to take greater responsibility for their own defense. Not to leave the area, but to recognize that most of the challenges [East Asia] faces are really not military-focused. They are economic, and perhaps cultural, and they cannot be addressed successfully with increased defense spending or deployments. 

Does that mean stepping back from the military relationship with Taiwan as well?

I think so. The question we need to ask ourselves is: would we be better off if there was a political understanding between Taiwan and the rest of China about the relationship between the two? The answer is yes. We are engaged in supporting a rump state created by the Chinese Civil War, which is a very attractive, ideologically compatible society [with the U.S.]. It’s probably the most admirable society that has ever existed on Chinese soil. But it is on Chinese soil. 

And here we are contesting that relationship [between Taiwan and mainland China] when our opponent has nuclear weapons. The dangers that would ensue from any outbreak of conflict are enormous. We’re engaged in a futile effort to maintain a military balance that is now turned against us and could turn even more against us in future. If there were ever a case where we should be encouraging a political, diplomatic, or negotiated solution, this is it. Instead we are backtracking on our earlier interest in a peaceful settlement and entrenching ourselves on the military side. It’s very dangerous. 

I worry about us. I’m not very concerned about the Chinese; they can take care of themselves. But the U.S. is not behaving wisely in the region.

Why should the U.S. accept Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is a part of the People’s Republic?  

The Chinese Civil War did not come to a conclusion, because on June 27, 1950, the U.S. interposed the Seventh Fleet between the contending Chinese forces. So, the Chinese Civil War was suspended; it has not ended. From a legal point of view, most of the world explicitly recognizes that Taiwan is part of China and that the sole legal government of China is in Beijing, not Taipei, as we insisted for 23 years at the U.N. and elsewhere. I played a part in that. We defended the thesis that the only legal government of China was the Republic of China [Taiwan], its capital was Taipei, and it was not a government in exile because Taiwan was part of China. That was essentially reaffirmed in the normalization agreements with China with a hedge or two. But we stopped, in a legal sense, from disputing that Taiwan is part of China. 

Our position from June 27, 1950, has been that we would like to see this resolved peacefully, rather than through the use of force. We oppose unilateral change imposed by either side; that’s our official position. In recent years, we have begun to drift more and more into open support of self-determination for Taiwan because it evolved into a democratic society. When I first lived there, it was totalitarian under Chiang Kai-shek, but it has become a robust democracy with a great deal of respect for civil and human rights. And it is from that perspective ideologically admirable. 

This is a classic contest between ideology and interest, between the value of the word of the U.S., which affirmed that Taiwan was part of China on several occasions, and our ideological druthers. This is not a problem to be approached lightly. We are in fact, contesting the borders and the territorial integrity of a nuclear power. We never did that with the Soviet Union. The risks of a conflict over Taiwan escalating out of control are very great. This needs to be approached with respect for the political achievements of people in Taiwan, but with due regard for American interests, which must come first. And those interests dictate peace, stability, and no war with China. The price of that interest is deference to Beijing on the issue. We have had diplomatic relations with Beijing since January 1, 1979, and have managed those in a way that actually facilitated the emergence of democracy in Taiwan where there was none. And we have not in any respect harmed Taiwan, except in terms of its obsession with face. 

Are you worried that we might be heading towards armed conflict with China? 

Yes. We are in the process of violating, directly or indirectly, almost every assurance we’ve given the Chinese on the question of Taiwan: the Shanghai Communiqué in 1972, the normalization communiqué of 1979, the arms sales agreement of 1982. We are not in compliance with any of our assurances anymore, and the Chinese in response have begun to build a military capacity to devastate Taiwan. We no longer have the ability to block that but are talking and passing legislation as though we did. We are essentially leading with our chins, and we are dependent on the self-restraint of Beijing, rather than our own restraint, to keep the peace in the Taiwan Strait.

What would it take to de-escalate tensions between China and the U.S. and move forward as partners?

At this point, I don’t anticipate that happening. We’re locked in a long-term, several decades pattern of mutual hostility. The U.S. has assaulted basic Chinese interests on multiple levels: objecting to China’s domestic policy on a wide range of issues, arguing, in effect, for regime change in Beijing, because we don’t consider the Chinese Communist Party to be legitimate, even though it seems the Chinese people don’t share our opinion. The legitimacy of government derives from that of the governed, not foreigners. We have sought in some ways to beat China back into underdevelopment. We object to its progress. We are trying to cut it off from foreign markets, whether in our opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative or through the attacks on Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese technology companies.

We’ve been running around the world bad mouthing China, sometimes for good reasons, but more often than not for reasons that don’t withstand scrutiny. Debt-trap diplomacy [the idea that China loans poor countries money for projects that they can’t pay back, thus giving China leverage] is a splendid example of that: it doesn’t exist and hasn’t since William Howard Taft practiced it under the rubric of dollar diplomacy a century ago. We’ve been very much on the offensive against the Chinese, and we’ve finally evoked a counteroffensive on their part. 

What about Xi Jinping? Does he or China more broadly bear any responsibility for this deterioration in relations?

Of course. No major problem between two parties is exclusively attributable to one or the other. In diplomacy, it’s not at all useful to try to assign blame. Getting into a blame game just ensures that you can’t address the issues that caused the problem. On the Chinese side, there were a number of very serious errors of judgment. [They didn’t] pay attention to political trends in the U.S., or to objections to the sometimes uncontrolled theft of intellectual property rights by Chinese companies, many of them private. 

What’s your assessment of China’s shift under Xi Jinping?

I’m not sure how great it really is or how lasting. He is a very clever politician and a vicious bureaucratic and political infighter, and he has managed to concentrate an unconscionable amount of power in his hands. That’s dangerous because if you are responsible for everything, you are accountable for everything, and lots of things are not going right. Chinese intellectuals in particular find his style of rule objectionable and say so. What he has gained in political power, in military, the security apparatus, and the like, he’s lost in terms of popular support. Will this last? I doubt it. China already has the world’s largest middle class. People who are in the middle class have certain characteristics: they’re attached to their property, they like their leisure, they like to go on vacation, they value education for their kids. All of these things have been jeopardized by some of Xi Jinping’s policies, plus the coronavirus pandemic. Chinese students who once sought education in the U.S. are now being diverted elsewhere because of the bad U.S.-China relationship. And many people attribute that, in part, to Xi Jinping and his policies.

How well has China handled the coronavirus crisis?

It got off to a bungled start for the same reason the U.S. has continued to bungle it — namely, politicians got in the way of scientists and medical personnel and went into political denial mode. In China’s case, this lasted a couple of weeks in one locality, Wuhan, and then was followed by really decisive, draconian action to control the virus, which has worked. There are still outbreaks going on from time to time, but essentially China has shown it can control the virus. Its performance is pretty good. The U.S., meanwhile, has emerged as the major reservoir of contagion in the world. Europeans are not going to open up travel from the U.S. to Europe, they say, because we are such a sinkhole of infection. It has been politically convenient here and elsewhere to blame China for the bungled initial response without addressing the fact that the bungling has been reversed, except for here, where it is still continuing. 

So, China’s response: pretty good. When all this is over, which it will be, there should be a major investigation of everything that went right and wrong in dealing with this virus. That will include China, and I don’t think we’re going to come off very well in that investigation. China will be shown to have made mistakes. We will be shown to have been utterly incompetent.

If Trump wins reelection in November, what do you think will happen with China?

Mr. Trump doesn’t have a clear vision of U.S. global interests or foreign policy — or indeed much knowledge of foreign geography or affairs — but he has surrounded himself with people who have very strong convictions. Peter Navarro [Trump’s senior adviser on trade and manufacturing policy] wrote a book, Death by China, which made it very clear that he is fanatically anti-Chinese. Trump also repudiates all of economics since David Ricardo demonstrated comparative advantage [in 1817]. He’s very protectionist. He and others in the administration are mercantilist and want government-controlled trade rather than free trade. We now have a trade deal with China in which the government is attempting to dictate purchases and sales without regard to market forces. 

So, what would happen if Trump wins? Our deterioration in the global economy would continue. China, in the end, won’t be threatened fundamentally by our decision to wall ourselves off from the world. We are the ones who will suffer from that. The Chinese will take care of themselves. They have a very well-established record over the past 40 years of examining foreign best practices and adapting them to their own purposes in China. They haven’t stopped doing that, and they won’t. I wish my own country, the U.S., which was once the supreme practitioner of such adoption of foreign best practices, would return to that rather than indulging in smug, complacent, self-satisfied stagnation, which is what we are now doing.

And if Joe Biden wins the presidential election? What should he do?

There is now a national consensus in the U.S., which is embraced by the many neo-conservatives that are lining up for jobs in the Biden administration, that would perpetuate our heavily militarized foreign policy, would not emphasize diplomacy, is fundamentally opposed to China, and is happy to engage in adversarial antagonism with it. If Mr. Biden is elected, he will inherit a U.S. government that is measurably less competent than the one Trump inherited. The Department of State, the U.S. Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and others have all been subject to purges, to assaults in the press, and to denigration that destroys morale. Many of the best people have left. The expertise that was once valued is not valued in this administration. Whether it’s scientific expertise or foreign affairs expertise, the President prefers to consult his gut rather than listen to expert opinion. All of that has done huge damage. And that’s not going to be undone in four years by Mr. Biden or anybody else.

So where should a Biden administration start? Should he reinstate and continue Obama’s policies?

Obama’s policies weren’t too bad. The main problem was the over-militarization of the approach when the issues are primarily economic. The Obama administration came up with theTrans-Pacific Partnership, but rather belatedly after first announcing the so-called Pivot or Rebalance to Asia, which was entirely military. It seemed TPP was almost an afterthought.

I read the text of [the TPP] and wasn’t terribly impressed. It wouldn’t do much to create jobs or expand the economy in the U.S. It was mainly an effort to establish political and economic influence in East Asia that would be a buttress against Chinese influence. The Trump administration, with the applause of the Democratic Party, trashed that agreement almost instantly. I don’t think it will be resurrected. There is a good chance now that China will join it, but we will not. So, the Obama administration’s legacy was one of at least polite dialogue with China, but not really an effective response to China’s rise in influence and the decline of American power in the region.

If we are going to pursue an anti-China policy, which I take it we are, we should try to restore alliances and partnerships internationally. Many of the relationships we call alliances are one-sided: we have offered to protect a foreign country that doesn’t have any obligation to do the same for us. On the one occasion when such an offer was made by our foreign partners, after 9/11 when NATO’s Article Five [which calls for collective action against an armed attack against a member state] was invoked, we pretty much brushed it aside. 

Our expectation is that we provide defense services and others follow us. But the questioning in the Trump administration of whether we remain committed to providing defense services has led to a collapse in followership. People no longer snap to attention when the U.S. speaks. Before, you could concert a multinational united front to deal with some of the challenges to global order that China represents. To get back to that, you would have to restore the partnerships that the U.S. has been engaged in vandalizing over the past three and a half years.

Going back to 1989, it seems that was the last time U.S.-China relations were really in disastrous shape. What do you think of the U.S. response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

It was an absolute disaster for the course of reform and democratization in China, but perhaps its biggest victim was Hong Kong, whose moment of democratization was blighted by the confrontations in Beijing and Chengdu and other places. Did we handle it correctly? Yes and no.

The George H. W. Bush administration hesitated to cut off relations with China for a very simple reason, which was not known to the public: mainly that the U.S. depended on listening posts in China to counter the Soviet Union. We had a robust military relationship with the People’’s Liberation Army. And we had cooperation on Afghanistan with the Chinese. This is why [then-national security advisor Brent] Scowcroft and [then-Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence] Eagleburger were sent quietly to Beijing to reaffirm a partnership the public was not aware of. That wasn’t enough for the Congress. Much of what the Congress did in terms of sanctions in particular was directly counterproductive. For example, banning assistance to China meant that when the Chinese asked, as they did, for assistance in modernizing their legal system, judiciary, and investigative apparatus, Europe responded but we did not. The approach we ended up with, the product more of the legislative than the executive branch, was ineffectual. We did the equivalent of standing on the other side of the ocean and hurling invectives at the Chinese. There was no effort to engage them or persuade them that what they were doing was wrong, which it was. A great deal of that responsibility belongs to the ideological establishment in the Congress.

Which administrations have dealt with China the most successfully, and which were the least successful?

The Nixon administration, although truncated by President Nixon’s character flaws and misbehavior domestically, was brilliant in its handling of the opening to China. The Ford administration lacked the clout to follow through and was unable to execute the promises that Nixon had made to normalize with China. The Carter administration had considerable success. It drafted the Taiwan Relations Act, which is now seen as a Congressional rebellion against executive authority, but it was actually introduced by the administration in order to preserve the substance of unofficial ties with Taiwan, which it has done very effectively for more than 40 years. 

Ronald Reagan, after a very bad start, made his peace with Deng Xiaoping. Tension in the Taiwan area in particular went down radically after the agreement to restrict arms sales to Taiwan, which left Taiwan with an incentive to pursue a political dialogue across the [Taiwan] Strait and left Beijing with an incentive to reduce tension so that the arms sales would continue to decline. The George H. W. Bush administration, desperate for reelection, basically repudiated the Reagan policy with major arms sales to Taiwan that broke American commitments and devalued our word. The Clinton administration went off on a tangent by trying to use trade to produce political change in China. It’s something that almost never works, economic sanctions do not overthrow constitutional orders anywhere, and they failed here. Clinton to his credit, acknowledged that failure and moved on. The relationship with China under him proceeded, and China was fully integrated into the global trading system when it joined the World Trade Organization, which has had a great deal to do with the global prosperity that ensued. 

The George W. Bush administration came in with a very negative attitude toward China and was diverted from pursuing a vindictive policy only by 9/11, which replaced China as the major enemy with Muslim extremists and terrorists and diverted the U.S. for a long time. The Obama administration did fine. It didn’t do anything terribly exciting or innovative, although towards the end it began rhetorically to beef up American military capabilities in the region, but it never found funding for that. It was more talk than action. The Trump administration has been a catastrophic one, not just on this issue, but many others.

You mentioned the U.S. views the Belt and Road Initiative as a threat. Do you think that that is a mistake?

The Belt and Road Initiative is an exercise in geo-economics, and it has major geopolitical implications. Essentially, the Chinese are offering to connect the Eurasian landmass as well as East Africa and the Indian Ocean Basin by building ports, airfields, pipelines, roads, railroads, telecommunication links, fiber optic cable connections, and the like. Everything from Lisbon [Portugal] to the Bering Strait [Russia/Alaska], everything from Gdansk [Poland] to Colombo [Sri Lanka]. Connectivity is an economic basis that can be used by anybody. If there is a port built, there’s nothing to stop the U.S., Japan, or anyone else from using it. The U.S. concern is that China’s willingness to invest in the development of other countries, to establish free trade agreements and agreements for the customs-free transit of goods, streamlining transit and transportation links, would give China political influence at our expense. 

But, on the other hand, I don’t see much evidence that we’re trying to build our own influence. We don’t have any money invested in connectivity. We’ve come up with a $60 billion putative public-private partnership [the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation], but this is essentially unfunded. Nothing is happening because we are not into infrastructure construction at home, much less abroad, and we are not able to provide foreign assistance when we can’t even pass a budget that pays for domestic government operations. 

Essentially, we are forfeiting influence, and the Chinese are gaining influence. They’re doing it by making real investments. We’re not. The U.S. has had enormous soft power — a term I don’t like because it implies that power is somehow unusual if it’s not military — and the ability to inspire other countries. We have professed and, to a great extent in various periods in our history, have actually striven to reach aspirations that are higher than those of other countries. We’ve tried to be better, morally and otherwise. It’s not there anymore. What the world sees when it looks at us is a country that is mean spirited, that does not support the development of other countries or their interests, and that at home is mired in endemic racism, subject to police and vigilante violence, has occasional gun massacres, is unable to pass a budget, and has a political system that is visibly venal. I don’t know of any country that laments the fact they don’t have their Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump. 

But some of China’s diplomats have been criticized recently for turning into “wolf warriors,” aggressive and nationalistic provocateurs. What’s your take on that?

There’s always a problem in diplomacy. Your objective is to persuade your foreign [counterpart] that it would be in his or her interest to do what you want him or her to do — that your position, which he or she may reflexively reject, is in fact one that would serve his or her interests, or those of his or her country. But everybody’s always looking over their shoulder at the unseen audience back home. 

[Former Secretary of State] Dean Acheson once said something like, “everybody’s a hero in their own memorandum of conversation.” And I even saw this when I saw Xi Jinping interact with Joe Biden [in 2012] at a lunch on the eighth floor of the Department of State, which is the ceremonial dining and meeting area. Mr. Biden was condescending and insulting. Lots of remarks about the inferiority of the Chinese system and ideological cheap shots. This is unfortunately an American senatorial tradition: we think insulting foreigners is a freebie, and it plays well at home, so we do it. We don’t consider the fact that the foreigners also have feelings and are prone to develop resentments when they’re insulted.

Biden did not get a rise out of Xi Jinping, who just stood there smiling, I suppose like Winnie the Pooh, whom he is compared with. He did not react, and I thought that was pretty impressive. He had nothing to gain by getting into a squabble publicly, and he didn’t.

But in regards to the so-called “wolf warriors,” I do think the Chinese have snapped and gone totally to posturing for a domestic audience, belittling foreigners, insulting them, behaving imperiously, attempting to bully their interlocutors. It looks great back home. But it’s totally counterproductive and any professional diplomat would know that. We are witnessing a partial nervous breakdown on the part of the Chinese foreign policy establishment, because given all the pressures that have been put on China, the Foreign Ministry has been largely marginalized and accused of being weak and toadying to foreigners. This is not new; Joe McCarthy made the same charges against the Department of State. There’s always a tone of that here. In order to cure that politically, the Chinese are being obnoxious to foreigners. That’s very injurious to them, and they should knock it off. But I don’t see any signs so far that they’re going to.

What’s your view on the U.S. decision to expel Chinese journalists and China’s decision to do the same to Americans?

You should never get into a pissing match with a skunk. If you try to outdo the Chinese in curtailing press freedom, you’re going to lose, big time. Instead of trying to curtail press freedom for them, we should be trying to expand it for ourselves. What we did is give the security services in China the perfect excuse they’ve been waiting for to chuck out some very good reporters. 

We have an open society, and you don’t need to be here to learn a lot about us. That is not true of China. You have to be there. It was not until 1979 that we were able to get an agreement to station American reporters in China. Now, of course, that is breaking down. More ominously, there are signs that the Chinese may extend their ban on American journalists to Hong Kong.

One driver of U.S.-China tensions is that the U.S. has placed some of China’s leading tech companies on the Entity List for being complicit in human rights violations in Xinjiang. Is this the right approach?

I think it’s not targeted at Xinjiang. It’s targeted at crippling those companies and Chinese technological advance, and it’s part of a broader assault on scientific and technological exchange. It is said that the White House is contemplating an outright ban on STEM students in the U.S. Nothing could be more foolish or devastating to American innovation. If you go to a computer science course at any major American university, you’ll find that at least half the students are foreigners. Many of them are Chinese — they’re the largest contingent of foreign students in the United States with some 350,000 or so studying here. If you go to an artificial intelligence lab, [foreigners make up] two-thirds. 

Every year, Chinese universities graduate millions of  STEM workers. The U.S. graduates about 650,000 annually, and about a quarter of the graduates are foreigners. China now has a STEM workforce that is one-fourth of the world’s — that is eight times larger than ours already — and the gap is growing. What we are doing is cutting ourselves off from the largest pool of scientific and technological talent on the planet. And doing so on the basis of a misunderstanding of what technology is and how it advances. It advances through collaboration, much of it international. It does not advance by shutting the door and locking yourself in a closet, which is what we’re trying to do. This is going to hurt the United States vastly more than it hurts China. I don’t worry about the Chinese; they’ll take care of themselves. I worry about the damage that we’re doing to ourselves by picking fights that we can’t win. I’m all for picking fights we can win.

If the human rights violations in Xinjiang are being just used as an excuse to sanction tech firms, what should the U.S. approach be? 

I think we should condemn it, because it’s inconsistent with the liberal values we espouse. But if we take punitive measures, we turn what should be a struggle over ideology into a struggle between geopolitical interest and we entrench China in its misbehavior. This is not a peculiarly Sino-American issue. For decades, Europeans and newly independent African countries protested segregation in the U.S. Eventually, a combination of domestic pressure by the victims of segregation and foreign opinion, which we had to cultivate in the Cold War, led to the success of the Civil Rights movement and the end of formal, legal segregation, but it didn’t solve racism as an issue, unfortunately. So, the question is, in a case like this: who are those who can help? Can you, by building a broad international coalition that demonstrates disapproval of what’s happening, touch the conscience of the perpetrators? I don’t think sanctions on individual officials from China does either of these things. 

What do you think of the national security law for Hong Kong? What should the U.S. policy be towards Hong Kong now?

The question is how the national security law is implemented. It’s not unreasonable for the Chinese to object to protesters, including rioters, who are not defending two systems, but are against one country. They’re burning the Chinese flag, [attacking] Chinese officials, trashing Chinese-affiliated companies. These actions are not defending Hong Kong’s uniqueness; they are attacking Hong Kong’s association with the rest of China.

If you do some of the things that the protesters in Hong Kong did — not even speaking of arson and attempted murder, which occurred during the during the unrest  — anywhere else in the world, you would very quickly be brought up short. We’re in the awkward position of having condemned police activities on the street in Hong Kong that were far milder than what we’ve seen in our own country in response to the murder of George Floyd. 

We should be vigilant. There is an interest in defending freedoms in Hong Kong. It’s an interest that we have in Hong Kong as an economic center; it’s an interest we should have in Hong Kong as a model for a future, more liberal China. It’s worth preserving. The rule of law that has been working in Hong Kong effectively will, as has been the case in the past, infiltrate the Chinese system. When Hong Kong reverted to China, in many respects, China became more like Hong Kong rather than the opposite. We have an interest there. That interest needs to be defended with a sabre, not a blowtorch.

How well did Beijing handle the situation in Hong Kong?

In the case of Hong Kong, the Chinese exercised forbearance and left things to the local leadership in Hong Kong for far too long. There are some exceptions. China has engaged in extraordinary rendition, the practice they pioneered with a bookseller or two, which intimidated people in Hong Kong in ways that are clearly inconsistent with the spirit of the “one country, two systems” arrangement. But the source of the problem in Hong Kong has not been Chinese interference in local government, rather the opposite. [Beijing] said at the outset: “港人治港” — that Hong Kong people should govern Hong Kong. But it turns out that oligarchs govern Hong Kong — a group of very wealthy, privileged people, most of them involved in real estate, who have done very little to provide housing or other public benefits for the people of Hong Kong. Instead, the people of Hong Kong have watched as well-educated people from the mainland come in and take the jobs they otherwise would have had and buy the expensive real estate that the oligarchs are building while they are left to live in coat closets. The resentment is huge, and entirely justified. And it’s focused on the relationship with China. 

Several things need to happen. Carrie Lam, the current chief executive of Hong Kong, needs to go. There needs to be a government in Hong Kong that is committed to broadening public participation in the development of policy. That government needs to focus on the well-being of the people of Hong Kong, rather than defer to real estate speculators — some of whom are my friends. They represent an interested class of rulers who have proven to be injurious. All of this needs to change. 

In the security area, the role of the Mainland ends up being pretty crucial. If they start interfering with freedom of information, then Hong Kong will die. What makes Hong Kong viable is the fact that you can use Google and you don’t have to use Baidu. Even though Chinese history is littered with the corpses of geese that lay golden eggs, people in Beijing don’t want to kill this particular one. They will be careful. We need to focus on practical things rather than ideological presuppositions that may prove to be wrong. 

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