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Andrew J. Nathan is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an authority on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He is also chair of the steering committee of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. Nathan’s books include Peking Politics, 1918-1923; The Tiananmen Papers, co-edited with Perry Link; China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, co-authored with Bruce Gilley and China’s Search for Security, co-authored with Andrew Scobell. Nathan has a B.A. in history, an M.A. in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He has taught at Columbia University since 1971.

Q: In his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the scholar John Mearsheimer painted a dark portrait of the U.S. rivalry with China, suggesting that China has significant advantages and aims that could push the two nations toward war. You have, more than once, taken issue with such talk. Many agree that the situation looks increasingly dire. How do you see it?

A: There’s no doubt the rise of China presents a great challenge to American interests. But it’s important to get the China challenge — or the China threat — sized correctly; to focus on the real parts of the threat. And yet there’s a discourse about how China wants to rule the world or how China will replace the United States as the global superpower, or how China wants to remake the liberal international order. And that discourse is usually not very specific about what exactly that would mean. And in not being specific, it arouses all kinds of vague nightmare fears – fears that are counterproductive. A lot of politicians have an interest in arousing these fears, because they want to show themselves to be strong patriots who are defending the United States against some existential threat. 

Several years ago, in The New Yorker, Evan Osnos quoted a speech given by Newt Gingrich saying the rise of China presents the greatest threat to the United States; greater even than Stalin and Hitler. And if you’re talking about Stalin and Hitler, you really are talking about an existential threat to the western way of life. I think that’s wrong. The rise of China does present a significant threat to American preeminence in Asia; and to the security of northeast and southeast Asia. But China doesn’t, in my view, present the larger threat scenario that Mearsheimer wrote about in his article. Another example is a very well-researched, but I think overly scary book recently published by Rush Doshi [The Long Game], which I reviewed in Foreign Affairs. He is now working at the National Security Council, which doesn’t mean that he’s running American China policy, but he is in the policy circle. He describes Chinese strategic ambitions that are global, and that really threaten the western way of life. 

So there are no existential threats, or a kind of war over whether an authoritarian system or a democratic system will prevail, in your view. So what is the real China threat, or perhaps better said, “challenge”?

Of course, there is a real China threat to Taiwan; and that threat is incredibly important, because the fall of Taiwan to China and the failure of the United States to effectively defend what we call “the status quo”— which is Taiwan being separate from China — would bring into question our alliances with Japan and South Korea, and require those countries to probably go nuclear; it would also likely make European allies lose confidence in the United States. Taiwan is very important to the United States. I understand that Taiwan is incredibly important to China too. So I’m not blaming them for wanting to control it. But this is politics, and it happens to be important to both sides.

Taiwan is, of course, no small matter. But it doesn’t mean China has an ambition to overthrow democracy in the United States, or to overthrow democracy anywhere that democracy functions. It doesn’t mean China has an alternative vision for the world order. This is an area where there’s a lot of debate, because it depends on what you mean by the world order. If you think the world order is one in which every country always votes in the UN Security Council with the United States and every country that the United States accused of violating someone’s rights immediately falls down on its knees and says, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake,” that world order doesn’t actually exist. The world order that does exist is one in which China fights for its influence in the WHO and in the UN Human Rights Council and other international institutions and the United States and other countries fight for their influence in the same places. 

Another interpretation of the world order is it’s unipolar. The United States is the sole superpower and so any change to that picture is a revolution. I agree, a change in the balance of power is a big deal. But that doesn’t mean it’s the replacement of one unipolar system with another unipolar system. The system is at the present time and for the foreseeable future multipolar. 

Taiwan is, of course, no small matter. But it doesn’t mean China has an ambition to overthrow democracy in the United States, or to overthrow democracy anywhere that democracy functions. It doesn’t mean China has an alternative vision for the world order. 

And in my assessment, China understands that. Chinese strategists understand very well that China’s power potential is limited by all kinds of circumstances. This goes back to a book I co-authored with Andrew Scobell in 2012, called China’s Search for Security. The title of the book describes my basic view, which is that if you were the ruler of China, you’d have many headaches about security, internal borders, economic security, and so forth. It’s far from striding the globe as a colossus. China is a country with a lot of security problems. They’re trying to solve them. And getting hold of Taiwan is one thing they need to do, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it.

Some analysts believe an invasion of Taiwan is imminent, that it could happen this year or next year. Is that even conceivable? 

The good news, from my point of view, is that Xi Jinping is not dumb. In fact, he’s very smart. And an example is the way that he has expanded China’s position in the South China Sea without triggering a war. It’s the salami slicing technique. It’s avoiding the creation of a casus belli, and expanding one’s position step by step. That’s because he doesn’t want a war. I’m not a military expert, but you try to scope out the military strategies on the Chinese side and on the American side. The American strategy to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan relies on aircraft carriers and huge air bases in the region, by which I include Guam. And those assets, the aircraft carriers, and the bases, are now exposed to Chinese missile attacks and submarine attacks. They’re at risk. So it’s a dangerous situation. But my guess is that if there really were such a war, the Chinese would not win it. And my guess is that they understand that, or they understand at least that there’s such a risk.

Couldn’t the calculation be that if they moved with force now, that the Biden administration would choose not to defend the island and trigger a wider war? 

Possibly. But I think Xi Jinping is going to do it when he’s got a much higher confidence in winning than he has now. In my assessment, the chief priority of Beijing is to deter a Taiwanese declaration of independence; to keep the principle of “one China” alive until such time as they think the United States’ decline is further advanced. They believe the future will be better than the present in terms of the balance of military power and will, and that at that point they should be able to win peacefully by bringing pressure on Taiwan and on the United States so that the Taiwanese get the picture and surrender. The Chinese strategists assess that as long as they can keep Taiwan from going independent, eventually the apple will fall from the tree into their hands.

Let’s talk about Hong Kong. There were demonstrations, street battles, and then a crackdown and a new National Security Law that has effectively neutered free speech and press freedoms and reshaped Hong Kong’s political dynamics. Can you put the situation in perspective?

The Chinese authorities were, from their point of view, very patient. They thought, first of all, that the benefits of being part of China would win the hearts and minds of the Hong Kong people. And because they are historical materialists — they’re Marxists — they don’t understand the value of identity to other people, even though identity is so important to them. The idea of a separate Hong Kong identity is one of the things none of us expected, because originally there was no such thing. Hong Kong was, as the saying went, “borrowed place, borrowed time.” So it was surprising that as China became wealthier, instead of the Hong Kong people falling in love with China, they became alienated from China, and the younger people, especially, developed this very anti-China Hong Kong identity. 

That was a surprise. But then they thought, “We can count on the Hong Kong elite, and the Hong Kong government, the chief executive, and the business class to be in control of Hong Kong.” Under “One country, Two systems,” Hong Kong patriots would rule Hong Kong. But the incompetence of the successive chief executives of Hong Kong to manage Hong Kong was a surprise to Beijing. So finally, after several cycles of increasingly large demonstrations, Beijing gave up hope that the Hong Kong authorities could handle the situation. They would have to do it. Beijing then faced choices about how to do this, one of which would have been sending in troops. And instead of that — and I’ll say again, they’re smart — instead of that, they used the law. But they did it with a very Chinese communist law, which is a law that bears the fuzziest resemblance to anything that we think of in the West as law. It’s very general, very abstract, very imprecise; it’s arbitrary. It is a remarkable construction, like a wedding cake, with layer after layer of repressive features, ultimately allowing Beijing to control everything, as if they still don’t trust the Hong Kong authorities.

Can you explain how they did that?

Well, first of all, we’re going to give the Hong Kong authorities this National Security Law. And after that, we’re going to write the law in such a way that you could put anybody in prison that you feel like putting in prison. But then we don’t trust you, so we’re going to give you a mainland advisor who’s part of your National Security Committee. And since we’re not sure that’s going to work, we will give ourselves the right to extradite people from Hong Kong. If you can’t try them, we’ll try them ourselves. And so once they decided to go in with a law, they built a law that’s a kind of Rube Goldberg construction with so many levers and so many mechanical hands; it says, “If one thing doesn’t work, another thing will work.” They sent a message to the Hong Kong authorities who are doing the job now. They [Beijing appointed officials] don’t have to extradite anybody. The Hong Kong authorities are leaping to it and arresting everybody, no matter how little they did.

OK, that other hot spot: Xinjiang. That is even more fraught, and complex and contentious because it has been the most notable human rights crisis, if you will. Is it as horrendous as it seems, or could we be misjudging the situation, or failing to get the facts of what’s really going on there?

The Xinjiang situation has a lot of the same earmarks that we were just discussing, which is that Beijing policymakers do not understand why the minority populations, whether it’s Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongols, etc., don’t love being citizens of a China that is wealthy, rising, and is investing a lot of money in those regions. China’s been shipping money into Xinjiang and into Tibet, and felt like, “You people should be grateful.” But instead of that, there’s this superstitious thing in the superstructure that Marxists think doesn’t amount to much, which is that religion and identity have proven themselves to be very important values to people. So the Uyghurs have been disaffected. I’m no expert on Xinjiang or on the Uyghurs. But things I’ve read say that Uyghur Islam is traditionally moderate; it’s a moderate form of Sunni Islam. And there were few [violent or terrorist] incidents. These were the kinds of incidents that in other countries, in the United States or France, Germany, India and so forth, the same level or worse incidents take place. But they really spooked the Chinese government, because they think the rest of the world is out to get them and are manipulating these internal problems to try to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. 

I’m a human rights activist, so I’m totally against what they’re doing in Xinjiang, and yet I think the motive of calling it a genocide was political.

So they decided that they need to solve the problem once and for all. That seems to be the assertive Xi Jinping way of doing things, although not, in my view, with Taiwan, as I said. And the way to do this is basically to culturally assimilate these populations by reducing instruction in their native language and reducing what Beijing views as strange and threatening religious practices and clothing and things like that. And to assimilate them culturally, and to do so with great efficiency, the same kind of efficiency that they use with COVID outbreaks; which is to say they use all of these power levers to make it happen in two generations. So they’re working on the parents and the children. The parents have to be re-trained and persuaded in a coercive manner that, “You’re lucky to be part of the PRC,” while the children are taken and put in schools and taught in Chinese to love the motherland, that is, the PRC. 

This has been called a form of genocide. Is that term appropriate? Is there evidence of genocide?

There’s a debate that I take seriously about whether that’s genocide, because the Genocide Convention is open to interpretation. It’s not genocide if you understand the Genocide Convention in a certain way. The Genocide Convention calls for “an intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” a racial or ethnic group. That’s because the Genocide Convention was written right after World War II, with the Holocaust in mind. It seems to say that genocide is when there is an intent to basically eliminate the entire DNA of a certain population. And that’s not, in my reading, the intent of the Chinese government. But it is the intent of the Chinese government to assimilate them in such a way that although they would still look like Uyghur people — so their DNA would still be there — their language and religion and cultural attributes would be reduced to this kind of museum of happy minorities, dancing in special costumes. At that point they wouldn’t be culturally that much different from Hakka, or Shanghai people or Fujian people, because even among the Han, people are culturally and genetically somewhat diverse.

So under one interpretation of genocide, it isn’t, and under another interpretation of genocide, it is. In the past, the UN has pretty much used the more conservative, traditional, physical definition of genocide. And the designation by Mike Pompeo of this as a genocide is what the Biden administration has inherited and politically can’t afford to change. This is an example of what I was talking about before, about the politicization of “the China threat.” I’m a human rights activist, so I’m totally against what they’re doing in Xinjiang, and yet I think the motive of calling it a genocide was political. Pompeo is an evangelical who has sought to motivate the Christian base by placing emphasis as Secretary of State on religious rights as the core of human rights. He has a whole agenda there. And this fits into it.

This is interesting, coming from someone who has long focused on human rights, and published The Tiananmen Papers. It sounds like you’re saying the tide has swung too far against Beijing. But what, if anything, do you think the U.S. needs to do in light of Beijing’s increasingly hardline policies?

There’s a lot we need to do. We need to reconfigure our defense posture around Taiwan, so that the vulnerabilities I mentioned before are reduced, so that we have a credible deterrent against Chinese military action so they don’t attack. We need to protect effectively against Chinese espionage. We need to stop voluntarily transferring key technologies to them. We have to work for domination in the so-called 21st century economy. We need to work with the allies to constrain China’s influence. And we need to compete better in the UN agencies and in the developing world and offer something real to compete with the Belt and Road Initiative. I do believe in this concept, which the Trump administration introduced, called strategic competition.

And we need to keep hammering China about human rights, not because this is going to make the Chinese government wake up and realize that they are ashamed of what they did, but because I believe in this sort of FDR-Eleanor Roosevelt, macro strategic vision of a world in which there are human rights and international laws; and I believe this would be a better world for the United States and other countries than a world in which human rights violations are not denounced. These values are still worth articulating, even though the United States famously has a double standard. We ourselves have not ratified the women’s rights and children’s rights and disability rights conventions. Even so, human rights are an important set of norms that we cannot just let go. When there are such conspicuous violations of those norms, we have to call them out. There are people in China who are sacrificing a lot to hold out hope that China will eventually become a rule of law society, and they deserve our support. But we need to avoid demonizing our own ethnic Chinese population, including citizens as well as visitors and others. 

Is there anything that worries you about this new “strategic competition,” and even hostility?

One thing that worries me is that the rhetoric of senators and other political entrepreneurs might force the administration to do things about Taiwan that would endanger rather than help protect Taiwan, such as the abandonment of “strategic ambiguity.” I think the “status quo in the Taiwan Strait” is a valuable thing that we should preserve. I’m also afraid of the hyper-politicization of China as a demon in American discourse strengthening fascism in the United States.

How important is human rights in U.S. policy towards China, and should that have any influence on American companies doing business in China?

I think the business and human rights field is very important. And corporations have to really be pushed and forced and embarrassed and exposed to do the right thing, because they quite naturally have an interest in making money. And China is a place where you can make money, and where relationships count and where records are kept. China takes names, as the saying goes. So they know if you’re a friend or not a friend, and they have 1,001 ways of making life easier or harder for anybody who’s doing business there. My attitude is a little more pessimistic or guarded in the sense that I don’t see the magic bullet that the U.S. government has, other than calling out the Chinese government for these things, which it does and must do.

Should American policy on human rights intersect at all with how American companies do business in China? Should there be any linkages there? In other words, should the U.S. government put restrictions on U.S. businesses operating in China on human rights grounds?

Are you asking, should the U.S. government pressure businesses? Well, that is an intricate question, because it’s a case by case thing. Maybe sometimes, yes. But I wouldn’t want the U.S. government to forbid Tesla from opening a factory in Xinjiang. I would rather have the human rights movement do that. I guess I’m sufficiently middle-of-the-road to say that I don’t want the U.S. government telling private corporations where they can open factories.

So at one time weren’t these issues, in a sense, linked to U.S. trade with China, and then delinked during the Clinton administration? Was it good or bad that these things were linked?

It’s not about good and bad. When [Winston] Lord was the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, he was the designer of this policy to pressure China around Most Favored Nation trading privileges. And unfortunately it was a failed policy. So it was inevitable that the policy would be abandoned. It’s regrettable that the use of MFN to pressure China failed. But it’s a fact. And to follow a failed policy with doubling down so that it would fail even more, it seems to me, is unthinkable.

The issue today is different. We have certain economic sanctions on China and we need more with respect to things like Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision. Yes, those sanctions need to be there. That is a national security issue. It’s about espionage. It’s about intellectual property theft, and about the vulnerability of digital infrastructure. There’s a wonderful new book by Jonathan Hillman called The Digital Silk Road, in which Hillman says that if our whole digital infrastructure is built in China, they can turn off the water, the power, the airplanes, the banks. My retirement assets could disappear! They’re all digital. There’s no actual money. And our Zoom call could end. So we can’t let that happen; that is a government obligation for national security. But then if you’re saying that this shirt that I’m wearing couldn’t be imported from China, I mean, that is going to be very difficult to implement. I’m not sure that it’s beneficial.

You might not have alternatives for your shirt…

That’s true. The trade war that Trump put in is a complete failure. Our two economies are quite interdependent in ways that perhaps nobody fully understands. [Former Trump aide Peter] Navarro said let’s cut off all trade and investment relations with China. I don’t think that’s possible or a good thing; and I don’t know that it would make human rights any better. 

Can I ask you to briefly step back to examine the aims of engagement and the roots of the tensions we see today? 

When American presidents, from Nixon through Obama, gave public speeches and commencement addresses, like George H. W. Bush at Yale, their speechwriters invariably had them say words to the effect that when we engage with China, the Chinese will love our way of life, and they’ll become like us. But the real engagers, the strategists inside the U.S. government, people like Jeff Bader on Obama’s National Security Council, never thought that was the idea; that was not really Nixon or Kissinger’s idea or that of any of the professional strategists. It seems to me the professionals’ idea was to use China to check the Soviet Union and later, to maintain the status quo in Asia, for decades of peace. They were going to prevent Japan from going nuclear, provide stability to the southeast Asian nations, and allow the regional economy time to grow. It was a very pragmatic, realpolitik thing. And in that sense, engagement paid tremendous dividends. But nothing in international relations is permanent. There’s no such thing as permanent stability in international relations. So there was a downside, which was the rise of China.

And the Chinese, in my opinion, utilized the rise of China in a way that was very understandable, which was to improve their security situation, inevitably by means that are adverse to the interests of the United States. For a long time, the U.S. basically had a stranglehold around the neck of China because our military is located all around China and has been dominant in the region. This is not a situation you would expect China to accept forever. I remember when Donald Rumsfeld went to the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore in 2005, he challenged the Chinese defense minister in his speech, saying, “Why is China’s defense expenditure growing? … No nation threatens China.” The Chinese defense minister must have thought, “What? I’ve got no enemies? Why are you surrounding me with all of these troops? Why are you flying your EP-3 spy planes 12 nautical miles off my coastline every day and constantly mapping the floor of the South China Sea?” So the idea that China can be comfortable with American military dominance in the western Pacific, but the United States security is threatened if China expands its military posture in the western Pacific 10,000 miles away from the coast of the United States, is illogical. China was not comfortable. It seems to me that what happened was very natural. But the engagement policy bought us something like 40 years. I remember that as having been a pretty good time in Asian security.

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