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J. Stapleton Roy was a career American diplomat, who served with distinction in the foreign service and at overseas embassies in Asia. He was stationed in Moscow in the 1960s, later in Taipei, and helped set up the American Embassy in Beijing, in the run up to the U.S. and Beijing agreeing in 1979 to formal diplomatic relations. He also served as the nation’s top envoy in Singapore (1984-86), Beijing (1991-95) and Indonesia (1996-99). Ambassador Roy later joined Kissinger Associates, the firm run by Henry A. Kissinger, and served as the founding director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Roy was born in Nanjing, China in the 1930s, the son of American educational missionaries and studied at Princeton and the National War College.¹Roy’s older brother, David Tod Roy, was an American sinologist and Chinese literature scholar. He died in 2016. What follows is a lightly edited Q&A.

Q: Ambassador Roy, earlier this month, The Wire looked at Kissinger’s secret visit to China, and Nixon’s opening to China. Where were you at the time of the 1971 Kissinger visit?

A: I had been assigned to Moscow, after taking advanced Russian language training at the U.S. Army Advanced Russian School in Garmisch, Germany, in the spring of 1969. This was nearly two and a half years before Dr. Kissinger showed up in Beijing. I began in Moscow as an administrative officer, before moving up to the political section in 1970. I was the political officer covering Soviet relations with Asia when Dr. Kissinger showed up in Beijing in July 1971.

In a sense, it was President Nixon’s genius that recognized that you couldn’t offer half a loaf in order to achieve a breakthrough with China. If he had proposed to send his Secretary of State or his Vice President, it wouldn’t have worked. In a way, Mao Zedong had a more challenging problem because he was still treating the United States as one of China’s principal ideological opponents, so explaining the breakthrough [with the U.S.] to the Chinese people was not going to be easy. Both sides faced a problem in that respect. It was only the extreme daring of President Nixon and his willingness to take the political risk of going to Beijing in order to get a breakthrough with China that produced what was needed. 

Looking back, it is remarkable that there was the Vietnam War, and also the possibility of war breaking out between China and the Soviet Union…

It was clear that the purpose of the breakthrough was to turn China to our side in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but Beijing would be a limited ally in the absence of diplomatic relations. Moreover, cooperation with China was going to be a concern in the sense that a breakthrough by the United States might induce the Soviet Union to do something. Still, we have to remember that China had begun testing nuclear weapons in 1964, so China already had a nuclear capability. In a way, that served as a deterrent to Soviet action, a minimal deterrent, but a deterrent nevertheless.

You were working in Moscow in 1971. Were there any indications inside the State Department that such a mission was underway?

No. The State Department had not been part of this process, except indirectly. Winston Lord [Kissinger’s aide who traveled with him to Beijing in July 1971 on the secret mission] was an exception. He didn’t come from the State Department, but Al Jenkins [who worked in the State Department] was among [Kissinger’s] top Chinese advisors. But as an institution, the State Department was kept totally in the dark. What happened was this, however: We had a world in which all of our hundreds of embassies abroad didn’t have a clue regarding what was going on. And so, clearly, Washington had to provide guidance to our embassies and consulates as to what was happening and what the ground rules were for dealing with Chinese counterparts. What I found in Moscow was that our ground rules mirrored the Chinese ground rules. We were to have no contact whatsoever with the other side. But after the Kissinger visit, and after the announcement that President Nixon would be going to Beijing, the ground rules changed and I was permitted to have conversations with Chinese diplomats at diplomatic receptions [in Moscow]. I couldn’t invite them to my home; I couldn’t go that far; but I was no longer frozen out from talking to them. Their ground rules changed in a comparable way. After the announcement of the Nixon visit, I was able to have conversations with Chinese diplomats at receptions [in Moscow].

Let’s step back for a moment. You were actually born in China, and grew up partly in Nanjing, right? The late Jim Thomson (James C. Thomson Jr.), who I studied with, also grew up partly in Nanjing, as the son of American missionaries. He later studied at Yale and Harvard, with the scholar John King Fairbank, before taking a job in the Kennedy White House and entering academia. Did you know him in China? 

Yes, Jim and I began taking Chinese lessons together there [in Nanjing] in 1948, and then he had to leave at the end of the summer to go back to Yale. His parents, like my parents, were educational missionaries. They were associated with what was called the University of Nanking, not to be confused with Nanjing University. The Chinese name was Jinling Daxue. Jinling is an old name for Nanjing. My father was a professor at the University of Nanking, and Jim’s father also had a position at the university.

And I recall hearing from Professor Thomson that the novelist Pearl Buck, the author of The Good Earth, was a family friend and neighbor…

My parents knew Pearl Buck from their earlier assignment in Nanjing during the 1930s. But [when I was growing up] she had already left China. She had been married to J. Lossing Buck, who was a professor of agricultural economics [in Nanjing]. In 1949-1950, when the communists took over and we were being home schooled in Nanjing, he taught one of my high school courses in his residence.

So in 1949, when the communists took control, you were about 14 years old? Did you spend much of your childhood in China?

I was born in 1935. In 1936, my parents went back to the United States for a two year furlough, during which my father got his M.A. at Princeton in 1938. Then we went back to China, but the university had pulled back to Chengdu, in Sichuan [Province], because the Japanese had occupied Nanjing. So I spent the period from 1938 to 1945, seven years during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, living in Chengdu. When the war in Europe ended in 1945, we went back to the United States for three years of furlough. We returned to China again in the fall of 1948, after my father got his PhD at Princeton. We were in China from 1948 to 1950. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the climate became very hostile to Americans. My parents immediately sent my brother and me back to the United States so that our education wouldn’t be interrupted. They stayed on [in China], which turned out to be a mistake. They ended up with a big public trial and were expelled from China in the spring of 1951.

So you left China in 1950…

I left in July 1950. The Korean War broke out on June 25th. Within two weeks, my brother and I were on the train to Hong Kong to go back to the United States. I was 15.

So even after the communist takeover, your parents felt it was still safe to stay in China?

We didn’t know what to expect. We’d been in China throughout World War II, so we were used to, shall we say, disruptive conditions in China. The U.S. Embassy remained in Nanjing until the fall of 1949 but it left before the establishment of the People’s Republic. At the time, the conditions in Nanjing were relatively calm. The key change that occurred was that Nanjing had been the capital of China under the Nationalists. And when the People’s Republic of China was set up, the capital shifted to Beijing. That meant that the embassies in Nanjing had to move to the new capital. Their governments had to make the decision. This affected our lives significantly, because virtually all of the foreign embassies moved to Beijing. And that meant that the number of foreigners — Americans and non-Americans — went down to near nothing.

If you left in 1950, how much interaction did you have with China between 1950 and the 1970s? Did you return at all during that period, when the country was largely closed off to Americans?

I had no direct interaction [with mainland China] for decades. I went to Taiwan in 1958, for advanced Chinese language training. I had joined the State Department in 1956 and had a very brief assignment in Hong Kong and a two year assignment at the American Embassy in Taipei, Taiwan. So I was working on China-related issues as a very junior officer, but there was no access to Communist China itself. So from 1950 until 1976, I had no direct contact with China. 

At the time of the Nixon visit to China [in February 1972], I was still working on Soviet affairs. In 1974, after working for two years as the deputy director of the Soviet desk in the State Department, I spent a year at the National War College, graduating in the summer of 1975. I then became deputy director of the China desk in the State Department. That ended my long period of focusing on the Soviet Union, rather than on China. 

In April 1976, I had my first opportunity to go to China. As an outcome of the Nixon visit, we had agreed that one or at most two congressional delegations could visit China every year. I went with three delegations in a row, in April of ‘76, April of ’77, and April of ‘78 as the State Department’s escort officer because I was fluent in Chinese. Then, in June 1978, I was assigned to our liaison office in Beijing as the deputy chief. The head of the liaison office was Leonard Woodcock, formerly head of the United Auto Workers, who was a remarkably skilled negotiator. He and I were the only people in the liaison office who were part of the ultra secret normalization negotiations.

Why were they “ultra secret normalization negotiations”? 

Because we still had formal diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan. Nixon went to China in ‘72, and for six years we were blocked from any further advance in our dealings with China by the fact that we didn’t yet have an agreement on how to handle Taiwan. When Jimmy Carter became the president, he was offered various options [on how to deal with China], and he accepted the option of going for broke and trying to get full diplomatic relations.

I knew that throughout the ‘70s, the U.S. and China were on the road to normalization, but I didn’t think that it was such a challenging task, following Nixon’s trip. Can you explain?

Nixon’s visit was in February of 1972. Both the Chinese and President Nixon hoped to complete the normalization process by the end of Nixon’s second term. But in 1974, he ran into difficulties over Watergate, and in August of 1974, he had to step down from the presidency. The Chinese were upset because that threw a question mark over whether or not we would be able to complete the normalization process. Gerald Ford, you may recall, made a visit to China while president. But he had decided that he needed to get re-elected before taking on the enormous political risks of striking a final deal with China. So that put things off.

When President Carter came in, there was a dispute between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who wanted to give priority to trying to get a Strategic Arms Limitation [Talks] agreement with the Soviet Union, and Zbigniew Brzeziński, who wanted to give priority to getting diplomatic relations with China. Vance won that one, but we mishandled the initial negotiations with the Soviet Union and reached an impasse. At that point, President Carter authorized Brzezinski to go ahead with the China initiative, which was driven from the White House not from the State Department. Secretary Rogers was kept informed of what was going on, but the decisions were all made in the White House.

What were the biggest hurdles to getting a deal done?

The Chinese had three conditions for normalization: breaking diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan (in other words, transferring diplomatic recognition to Beijing as the sole legal government of China); ending our security treaty with Taiwan (we had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan); and removing all of our military forces from Taiwan. We had tried everything we could under three presidents and two secretaries of state to see if we could retain some sort of residual official relationship with Taiwan, but it became clear that the Chinese were rock solid on that issue. They wouldn’t budge. So Carter made the decision that we would meet those three conditions. But we were not prepared to leave Taiwan unable to defend itself. Therefore, we insisted on continuing arm sales to Taiwan. 

We briefed the top leadership in Congress on this position before we began the negotiations, including the top Republicans and top Democrats, and we indicated what our bottom line was going to be. And the response we got back was, “You’re doing the right thing,” and “We’re going to criticize you when you do it.” That’s why the secrecy was so vitally important. If it had leaked that we were engaging in these discussions, then members of Congress, believing that we were doing the right thing, would nevertheless have essentially denounced the negotiations.

I have been told that Paul Kreisberg helped formulate America’s policy towards Taiwan, dealing with the delicate “One China” policy…

Actually, the One China policy was a Chinese policy. It came from the civil war in China, where you had two alternative governments: the Communist government, whose headquarters had been in Yan’an during World War Two, and the Nationalist government, whose capital was in Nanjing. Each side was fighting to be the sole, legal government of China. Chiang Kai-Shek was just as strong about the One China policy as Mao Zedong. Both of them claimed Taiwan as part of China. 

When the military situation in the civil war turned against the nationalists, which occurred just as my family was returning to China in 1948, the Nationalist remnants of the government and the military forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949, while continuing to maintain the position that they were the government of all of China. They took with them to Taiwan the executive, legislative, and judicial organs of the Nationalist government. 

As things settled down, there was a problem in Taiwan: you couldn’t have national elections to restore the legitimacy of the legislature, which was the congressional body, because you couldn’t hold elections in the other provinces. However, you could and did have provincial elections in Taiwan, for the provincial government, but power was in the hands of the central government. You did have a governor of Taiwan, and a Taiwan legislature that was elected through a quasi- democratic process (the KMT was not prepared to permit a non-KMT party to gain control). So even after we broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the legitimacy of the central government in Taiwan still rested on its claim to be the government of all of China. So the One China concept was vital to the KMT in Taiwan. The PRC, for its own reasons, also claimed to be the government of all of China, and that included Taiwan. That’s where the One China policy came from. 

What has changed is that Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-Shek, became the president of Taiwan after his father died. As president of the Republic of China, he began the process of opening up the political system and permitting the Taiwanese to gain control of political power. Prior to that, the political power in Taiwan had rested in the hands of the mainland carpetbaggers, who had retreated to Taiwan and controlled the national government.

By the 1990s, Taiwan was able to hold democratic elections for the national government. That meant that the legitimacy of the central government claiming to be the government of all of China no longer rested on that claim to “One China” but rested on democratic elections. This removed the necessity of adhering to a “One China” policy in Taiwan. That has been the root of the gradual drift on Taiwan away from the “One China” policy.

Was there any other way to deal with this issue? 

I think history has answered that question for you. What do I mean by that? No government has been successful before or after our normalization with Beijing in 1979 in getting terms that are different from the terms that we got. The only difference is that we were successful in continuing arms sales to Taiwan. Despite the fact that we couldn’t resolve that issue (there was no agreement to disagree; there was disagreement), but the Chinese side decided to go ahead and establish diplomatic relations with us anyway. In that sense, we got better terms than anybody else. But if you don’t look at the historical factors, you could make a case that we were snookered by the Chinese, except your problem is that no other country was able to do better.

How well has engagement worked? Or should we say, how well did it work before Trump entered the White House?

This is a big question, and parts of it are philosophical. By that I mean, what is the purpose of foreign affairs? Is our purpose to remake other countries in our image? And what is the test for the success of our policy? Is it whether or not we can force them or induce them to have democratic governance? The answer is, that’s a false way of thinking about foreign policy. The purpose of foreign policy is to influence other countries around the world to act in ways that are compatible with United States interests. And if that includes decisions by them to liberalize their governance structures, then it’s compatible with U.S. policy. 

It is presumptuous of us to think that we have the tools to force China to do things that are embedded at the heart of its own problems of domestic governance.

Now if you say, “Well, that’s the wrong approach…” then my answer is: Why is it that in our own backyard, dealing with small countries like Haiti and Central American countries, we have governments that in many ways are less effective than the government of China? If we can’t induce these countries to have democratic systems, then why do you think we are capable of persuading the Chinese to do things our way? 

Another way of thinking about the issue is this: when people say we should be forcing the Chinese to deal better with the Uyghurs, and we should be forcing the Chinese to treat the people of Hong Kong better, the question is: what should the Chinese be doing to force us to address our own racial problems better? What should the Chinese do to force us to have honest elections? Most Americans would say that’s a silly question because it’s clearly not within the capability of China to know how to run the United States. And I would apply that same type of reasoning to China. It is presumptuous of us to think that we have the tools to force China to do things that are embedded at the heart of its own problems of domestic governance. They have problems in Xinjiang. If you asked me, I would say that they are mishandling them in an egregious fashion. 

The fact of the matter is, there’s nothing effective that we can do about it. There are ineffective things that we can do about it. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re making it impossible for a lot of our industrial interests to function properly because cotton has a tendency to have Xinjiang sourced cotton in it. And all the lines of supply get mixed in with Xinjiang cotton. So our economic interests are facing massive problems because Congress has decided that we should sanction any use of cotton that is produced in Xinjiang. It may make us feel virtuous, but in terms of affecting the outcome in China, I would say it’s not effective, and the pressures for change will come from our own business community not from Chinese pressure on us.

It’s interesting that you raise the philosophical or political underpinning of U.S. policy. Was U.S. policy towards China ever aimed at coaxing the nation into becoming a democracy? Was that ever an explicit goal of American policy? And did that play any role in the U.S. fervently supporting China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001?

No, and I say this with considerable confidence. That was never a factor in U.S. government policy. The only role it played was that in order to gain support for Chinese entry into the World Trade Organization, President Clinton used language suggesting that their entry into the World Trade Organization might help to move it in the direction of other modern countries. I can guarantee you that the internal papers in the Clinton administration never used that argument. Incidentally, in your question, you say that we fervently supported it; we did not fervently support it. We did everything possible to keep China out of the World Trade Organization, until the late Clinton administration. When I was ambassador, for example, we made an egregious mistake in 1994, when the Chinese said that they wanted to join the World Trade Organization. Everybody else did the smart thing. The Europeans, for example, all said, “Well, here’s what you have to do.” And the American said, “Forget it. You can’t qualify this year.” This meant we had no negotiating leverage. 

We had corrected that by the second term of the Clinton administration. And that’s when serious negotiations took place. The reason was that China’s economy was growing rapidly and American investment was pouring into China, and we were encountering all sorts of obstacles in China. If China had to adopt the international ground rules that were incorporated in the World Trade Organization rules, [American firms] would have better economic opportunities in the China market. That’s where the pressure came from for China to join the World Trade Organization. Was it the right thing to do? The answer is, of course, it was. You can’t call a World Trade Organization a World Trade Organization if one of the major economies of the world is excluded from membership. And there was a belief in China (not just outside of China) that membership in the World Trade Organization would assist in the process it was on of strengthening market factors as the determinants of prices and the allocation of the raw materials. 

This is related to this question of changing governance in China. In the early 2000s, lots of people — including a billion Chinese — were stunned at how rapidly China was recovering from the horrible economic impact of the Cultural Revolution. The mood leading up to Tiananmen Square in 1989 in China was that there was no limit to the changes that might take place in China, politically and economically, if China continued on this course. Now, who were the Americans to say, “Hey, guys, it’ll never happen!” That would have made no sense. But there was never a belief in the United States, among what I would call knowledgeable government officials, that we somehow could produce that outcome, or even belief that that outcome was possible by the Chinese themselves. But as long as there were encouraging signals, then obviously, we didn’t want to do things to pull the rug out from under the reforming forces in China.

Things went too far. And they came to a head with the death of the Party’s General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, in the spring of 1989. And you began to have demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in favor of the reforms that young people in China associated with Hu Yaobang. And we China specialists were baffled. Why is the government permitting these demonstrators to remain in Tiananmen Square when previously China had never permitted demonstrations in China to get out of control. Demonstrations were not uncommon but on this scale in the center of the capital of China, with the president of Russia due to come — Gorbachev was coming at the end of May. I would meet with other Chinese specialists, and we couldn’t understand why action hadn’t been taken.

What was missing in our knowledge? We didn’t know that there was a fundamental dispute at the top level of the Chinese Communist Party over whether they should use force to remove the demonstrators. And you ended up with a dispute between Zhao Ziyang, who was the party general secretary, and the premier, Li Peng. And Deng Xiaoping ended up backing Li Peng. And that’s when the crackdown occurred. That altered the whole outlook, because from 1989 until 1992, China didn’t pursue reform and opening policies. 

But in 1992, the conservative forces in China who had been opposed to market reforms were purged and didn’t gain a foothold at the 14th Party Congress in the fall of 1992. The Party Congress strongly endorsed the reform and opening up policy. And that’s when China began to grow like gangbusters. Over the next few years they introduced significant political reforms: Jiang Zemin came up with this idea of the “Three Represents,” which is that the Communist Party didn’t represent the proletariat; it represented the advanced productive forces — these are entrepreneurs, or what we would call capitalists; it represented the advanced cultural forces — this included major artistic figures, the performing arts and philosophers, etc.; and the Party represented all of the Chinese people. In a sense, a key tenet of Marxism was thrown out the window. 

Jiang Zemin’s successor was Hu Jintao, and he came up with the concept that the goal of communism in China was to produce a “harmonious society.” Well, if you read The Communist Manifesto, the way to get a communist society is through class struggle, not by promoting a harmonious society. So two key ingredients of Marxism were changed during the period after Tiananmen. They abandoned the class structure of the Communist Party. And they abandoned the concept of class struggle.

There was some optimism, both during the 1980s and in the 1990s, after the 14th Party Congress, that China was moving in a direction that would make it more like the successful countries of the West. But that optimism was on the part of Chinese, not on the part of U.S. government officials. I was ambassador in China from 1991 to 1995, and I never saw the slightest possibility that China was going to move away from iron control by the Chinese Communist Party. 

What we didn’t anticipate was that China’s membership in the World Trade Organization would accomplish what our business community wanted it to accomplish. What I mean is that conditions for foreign investment, direct investment in China and trade conditions improved. But it also produced two backlashes in China. What do businesses do when they’re threatened by foreign competition? Look at U.S. industry. When Japanese autos were threatening Detroit, Detroit wanted to raise tariffs and keep Japanese autos out. To deal with that, Japan had to move production facilities to the United States in order to get around an economic backlash, featuring economic nationalism. So to be patriotic, I came back and bought an Oldsmobile. It turned out that it was made in Canada. When I switched to a Honda, it was made in Ohio. This was confusing. 

One backlash [to China’s entry into the WTO] was that Chinese economic nationalism became stronger and opposed foreign entry into the Chinese market. The second backlash was an ideological one. There were some who said that introducing market forces into the Chinese economy was an abandonment of socialism and, therefore, China was becoming a non-socialist country. These forces were already evident in 2007, at the 17th Party Congress. And they became even stronger at the 18th Party Congress, which is when Xi Jinping became the top Communist Party figure in China. 

In Xi Jinping’s first substantive Central Committee meeting after the 18th Party Congress in 2012, the Third Plenum in the fall of 2013, he issued a work report saying that the market would be the determining factor in China’s setting of prices and in allocating resources. But curiously, he also provided for other reforms. The other reforms went ahead. And the economic reforms went nowhere. Two years later, there was a national commentary carried in the central government’s media all over the country, talking about the ferocious opposition to the economic reform policies that had been approved at the third plenum. Clearly there was pushback in China against the very economic policies that Xi Jinping had himself endorsed. 

…There is also a well ingrained theme in American foreign policy, which is to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And it would take a monster to destroy the current system in China and subsidize some American version of democratization.

That reflected what I would call the ideological backlash caused by the movement away from a tightly controlled communist economic system. Instead, emphasis went back to state owned enterprises. The private sector in China, which had been the principal driver behind China’s rapid economic growth rate, was starved for capital because they couldn’t get loans from the state-controlled banks.

What should U.S. policy be towards Beijing with regards to human rights, a free press or democracy? Are you arguing that it’s not effective to pressure Beijing, or that U.S. policy should not support or punish nations with regards to how they deal with the issue of democratic elections and human rights?

I would put it this way. If you can straighten out Cuba and straighten out Haiti, which are right next door to us — they are not far away, they don’t have 1.4 billion people whose minds must be changed — then, once you do that, let’s use that model of success and apply it to China. But I would say that the American Dream is more accurately stated by John Quincy Adams, when he was Secretary of State. In a famous statement, he said, “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions and her prayers. But we go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. We are the well-wishers to the freedom and independence of all. We are the champions and vindicators only of our own.” But there is also a well ingrained theme in American foreign policy, which is to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And it would take a monster to destroy the current system in China and subsidize some American version of democratization.

Certainly, the tide has changed in U.S.-China relations in recent years, and the two countries seem at loggerheads. What happened? What led us here?

It’s a combination of two factors. One is a loss of self-confidence on the part of the United States. We are substituting bluster for what used to be confidence that we knew what the right thing was, and we were capable of doing it. We were bursting with that attitude when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. And so, during the 1990s, we gloried in being the world’s sole superpower. Now, what does American political theory tell you? It’s in George Washington’s farewell speech. Power corrupts. And it has to be checked and balanced or it will be abused. Well, that applies to the international situation as much as it does to the domestic situation. The Soviet Union had been the check and balance on how we could use our power in the world, and it no longer exists. There was a way to substitute for that in a way that wouldn’t simply throw away American interests. And that would have been to strengthen the international global system, and to ensure that there were rules that we were prepared to play by, and to put ourselves under that type of discipline. 

If we’d done that, we wouldn’t have gone into the war in Iraq. We would still have been able to intervene in Afghanistan to oust the supporters of the terrorism that had been directed against us on 9/11, but we wouldn’t have hunkered down and pursued nation building in Afghanistan for 20 years. But we didn’t do that. It still baffles me why there is such unwillingness on the part of the United States to recognize that if power corrupts, you don’t want a sole superpower. You need checks and balances in the international system as much as you do in the domestic political framework. 

So then, all of a sudden, 9/11 occurred, and we got bogged down in our war in Iraq. And just when the war in Iraq had turned out to be a disaster, we have the global financial crisis with us as the principal perpetrators. All of a sudden, China catches up with us much faster than we thought it would. And we discovered that there was a fundamental flaw in our economic system that we didn’t know how to deal with. And now people say we have this glorious economy that is expanding, but they forget to mention that’s on the back of trillions of dollars in debt. We had $3 trillion in budget deficits during the last year of the Trump administration. That’s not a healthy economy. It’s an economy being pumped up by deficits; and the debt will be inherited by our children and grandchildren. We know that, but we don’t like to talk about it. 

So one of the problems we’re facing is a loss of self-confidence. And that has been exacerbated by the divisions in our society that have become much more acute over the last 25 years, dating back to when Newt Gingrich was emerging in Congress. That’s when the polarization process became evident. It was already underway, but he recognized the process and he exploited it. And Donald Trump did the same thing. He exploited the ideological divide in the United States successfully. This undermines our ability to compete effectively with China. 

The second problem is that China has defined its national goals in ways that are guaranteed to be unacceptable to the United States. Xi [Jinping] talks about becoming a world class military power. He wants to complete China’s military modernization by 2035, and to have a world class military by 2049, which is the 100^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. He talks about building up a Navy that can match U.S. naval power. And he’s developed missile forces that threaten our ability to operate in the western Pacific. And he set goals for being a leading power in key areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and other areas where the United States has historically had the edge. And now, he’s talking about challenging us head on. This is defining China’s goals in ways that are guaranteed to make Americans feel that China is seeking a deathblow to our role in the world. 

In my judgement, this is a serious error on the part of the Chinese. It was the error that Germany made before World War I — aspiring to have a Navy that was the equivalent of the British at a time when the British were dependent on their Navy in order to protect their global Empire. The Germans had overseas colonies, but they played a much smaller role in terms of Germany’s prosperity than for Britain. This was a life and death issue. And so between 1890 and 1910, Germany and the United Kingdom went from being friends to enemies. 

What I fear is the loss of self-confidence by the United States in our ability to manage our own affairs, combined with a China that is defining its interests in ways that confront us in core areas where we have enjoyed the advantage. This has made Americans see China as a threat. And this has caused a bipartisan reaction in the United States [reenforcing the idea] that strategic rivalry with China is necessary down the road.

Given what we have been hearing about the hostilities on both sides, what should we be doing? Should American companies be prepared to leave to reduce their footprint in China? Should we be worried about what China is doing in the South China Sea or Hong Kong or Xinjiang? Where do we go from here?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that if we look at the problems facing China and the ones facing the United States, we are much better off. China faces problems that are, in some ways, unmanageable. 

However, China is taking a long range view. For example, they’re talking about where they’re going to be in 2050. But nobody in the United States talks about that. The Chinese do. They set goals for 2049. We’re always thinking of change in China as occurring within a timeframe that is too short. You can easily prove that grass doesn’t grow. You can sit down and watch grass and see very clearly that it’s not growing. But if you wait a week, you see a significant change in your lawn. 

When we think about changes in China, we need a longer term perspective. China is going to run out of water. It already has an egregious water shortage. The glaciers in the Himalayas are being eroded by global warming. And global warming is not only going to raise sea levels in ways that are going to cause lots of problems for us; worst of all, the glaciers in the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia. The Yellow River already has a severe water shortage. The Yangtze River could end up with an increasing inability to meet the needs of the country. This is already a major issue in terms of the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, which is vitally important to Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. And all the water in the Mekong comes from China. If they dam up the river and divert the resources there, then you have a gigantic impact on Southeast Asian economies. 

Also, China has a shrinking population. That means that their workforce is going to decrease. Now we have a perverted view of the implications of a shrinking workforce. Because our social security retirement system is based on current workers only paying a portion of the cost of their retirement, with the main burden being borne by the current working generations. That means that if you have a shrinking workforce, you have a crisis coming in your retirement programs. But if, as in Singapore, which docks 25 percent of your wages for retirement programs, a shrinking population doesn’t matter because everybody’s responsible for the savings necessary to ensure their own retirement. China faces that type of problem. 

Also, China doesn’t have any natural friends [in other nations]. It wants to become a global naval power. But it doesn’t control the straits in Southeast Asia that are necessary to pass through in order to get from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean and beyond. This is a problem that Germany and the Soviet Union have never been able to solve, which is the restrictive access they have to the open oceans. China also has a population imbalance in terms of the sex ratio. They have too many men and not enough women. With those types of problems, even smart policies won’t do. 

The problems the United States faces can be addressed over time, if we have the leadership, and if we’re able to understand what needs to be done, and have the political base to get it done. I would take our problems over China’s problems. 

An additional problem in China, which is fundamental, is that China has shown it doesn’t know how to rule people who have not been raised under the mainland type of domestic disciplines imposed by the Communist Party. They can’t rule Hong Kong because the mainland system requires suppression of freedom of expression. And it turned out that Hong Kong lacked the self-discipline not to violate the rules that Beijing feels are vital to maintaining political stability in the mainland, and so they cracked down. They don’t know how to rule Tibet. They don’t know how to rule Xinjiang because they have minorities with big populations in those areas. And when they go abroad, they don’t know how to manage foreign workforces, which is why when they pour investments into Africa, they bring in Chinese workers and that creates local problems. Instead of creating jobs for the local economies, Chinese workers are coming in and taking the jobs. 

So China has a lot of problems. And over time, that’s going to be a problem for the leaders in China. Now they have an additional problem. They can’t produce competent successors [to Xi Jinping]. That’s one of the reasons why Xi Jinping is probably going to be able to get an additional term or several terms at the Party Congress in 2022. 

The senior cadres in the Chinese Communist Party like the system of having regular turnover in top leaders produced by enforcing age limits. That has been the case for the last 25 years. And Xi Jinping is going to violate those rules. And one of the reasons he’s going to be able to get away with that is because China is not generating leaders who are seen as capable successors. Now part of that may be deliberate, namely, not permitting capable people to prove themselves. But on the other hand, China will have the traditional problems of gerontocracy if they start doing away with age limits, because people don’t like to give up their power and privileges. And in China, that’s the case in spades. If you have power, you have privileges in China.

Is it surprising to you that Beijing is holding up some ideas that seem rooted in the Cultural Revolution, some sort of return to a supreme leader with nationalist themes?

No, I don’t think about it that way. People here are very free with criticism of China. And much of it is, in my judgment, fully justified. But China has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It has created a gigantic, new middle class. The middle class travels abroad; it’s aware of conditions outside China; it can make comparisons between the way China does things and the way they are done abroad. And that creates domestic political pressures in China for modernization of their governance, along with modernization of their economy, their society and their military. But China is refusing to modernize its political system, and is succeeding in its other areas of modernization. And that becomes a gigantic contradiction inside China, which is one reason why they have to control speech and not let people talk about alternatives. Because their stability rests on not permitting free discussion. That’s a problem we don’t have to deal with. And it’s a gigantic problem. 

There’s no question that China is on the minds of many in Washington. What would be your advice to policy makers, law makers, and American businessmen who have significant interests or investments in China?

I would ask: what do we want from the China relationship? Does our analysis suggest that competition with China should be the driver of our bilateral relationship? Or should we decide that a cooperative relationship with China, which will always involve major elements of competition, is the balance most likely to avoid conflict and to advance American interests? 

We are not defining what we want. If we are saying that in our relationship with China, the driver is going to be competition/rivalry, there’s a problem. What’s the lesson of the Cold War? It’s that rivalry always has a major military component. That means you’re going to have an endless arms race with China. One of the reasons East Asia has prospered over the last half century is precisely because they didn’t have to divert resources to an arms race, but could devote them to economic development. And more than any other region of the world, the resources in East Asia, including China, have been devoted to economic growth, rather than to building up arms. China has had such spectacular economic growth that it has been able to support rising military budgets equivalent to the rate of their economic growth. And that has enabled them to modernize their military very rapidly. I feel that what is missing is a sense from the United States that we can convey to the Chinese people that we want more than rivalry from the bilateral relationship.

The problems the United States faces can be addressed over time, if we have the leadership, and if we’re able to understand what needs to be done, and have the political base to get it done. I would take our problems over China’s problems. 

Now, let’s say I’m wrong. The problem is this. We would not have been able to set up NATO in 1948 if all of the European countries had had more trade with the Soviet Union than they had with the United States. All of our friends and allies in the western Pacific and East Asia have more trade with China than they have with us. And that means they don’t want to be forced to choose between China and the United States. Japan is in the middle of that problem because we want them to choose. And we have more leverage over Japan than over any other Asian country. Japan is conflicted on that subject. If we get them into a war with China over Taiwan, for example, they can’t afford to be passive on that question. We have bases in Japan. They would end up being the targets of Chinese missiles. 

So we’re not formulating our foreign policy in terms of understanding the interests of the key countries we have to work with in order to effectively compete with China. We’re looking at it from the narrow standpoint of our interests and trying to impose on the countries we need as friends and allies our concept of how to deal with China. That’s a recipe for a failed policy. Success lies in finding the best way to link your interests with the common interests that we have with other countries, and in East Asia that means we can’t be seen simply as being competitive with China. We need something more.

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