It's not possible to assess the external dynamics of contemporary China unless one fully understands the internal situation of the country argues Professor Susan Shirk
On Monday, April 26th, the Ash Center hosted the annual S.T. Lee Lecture on Military History, Strategy, and Policymaking titled “China Inside Out: A Conversation with Professor Susan Shirk.” Professor Shirk, who serves as Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego argued that it is not possible to assess the external dynamics of contemporary China unless one fully understands the internal situation of the country. Tony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, moderated the conversation.
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Presenter: You're listening to AshCast, the podcast of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Fred Logevall: Well, hello everyone. And thank you so much for joining us this evening or afternoon or morning, depending I suppose on your location, I'm delighted that you are with us. My name is Fred Logevall, and I'm on the faculty here at Harvard Kennedy School, I'm the Lawrence Belfort Professor of International Affairs. I'm also a member of the history department in Harvard College. And I'm honored to have this opportunity to welcome all of you. Just a few announcements before we begin. First the Ash Center would like to acknowledge the land on which Harvard sits as the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people and a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations. We also wanna acknowledge the co-sponsors for today's talk, along with the Ash Center, today's event is being co-hosted I guess you'd say by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, here at HKS. And just a few words now from me about the lecture, and then of course I wanna introduce our speaker and our moderator. The S. T. Lee lecture focuses on military history and how it might shape global approaches to policymaking. The lecture also reflects Lee Seng Tee's dedication to providing a platform for scholars and policymakers to address critical international issues. Lee Seng Tee is recognized internationally, globally as a successful business executive, a philanthropist as a patron of the arts. And we're grateful for the support the distinguished lecturer this year, the S. T. Lee lecture is being given by our guests this evening, Susan shirk, who is a research professor and chair of the 21st century China Center at the University of California at San Diego. She is one of the most influential experts working on US/China relations and Chinese politics. Her book, professor Shirk's book, "China: Fragile Superpower", helped frame the policy debate on China in the US and other countries. Not a bad thing to have one's book framed the debate on any topic, but especially one I think that is of such international consequence. Her current project is "Overreach: How China's Domestic Politics Derailed its Peaceful Rise". And her articles have appeared in the leading academic publications, far too numerous to list in the fields of political science, international relations, China studies. And as you can imagine therefore, her views on a range of issues pertaining to Chinese politics are highly sought. Our moderator is my good colleague, Tony Saich who is the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and is the Daewoo professor International Affairs here at HKS, at the Harvard Kennedy School. Tony has published widely on the politics and history of contemporary China, currently, he's examining various things, he's got a project looking at survey data on citizen satisfaction in China. He's also exploring recent developments of, the recent development of philanthropy and its social consequences. Tony's exciting new book about which we spoke a few minutes ago before we came on with you, on the history of the CCP which is titled "Rebel to Ruler, One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party" is forthcoming in just a few months, timed perfectly with the 100th anniversary of the party's founding. It's coming out I believe with Harvard UP or with Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. And so with that, it's my pleasure to turn things over to professor Saich.
Tony Saich: Thanks so much Fred for that introduction. And also I'm so excited that we've got Susan Shirk with us to discuss some of these issues this evening. Now most of the attention in the policy-making circles in the US of course, is focused on China's economic rise, its global impact through its trade, through its investments with a particular focus on the Belt and Road Initiative. And Washington seems fixated on the question of, how should that rise be dealt with? And we seem to have come to bipartisan agreement that China is now seen as the major strategic competitor to the US position globally and in terms of international institutions. And indeed even presents a military threat and challenge to that preeminence, perhaps even offering an alternative model for the economy and the politics. And so we see a lot of writing about, how do we compete? Where should we conflict and where can we possibly cooperate? But I think what a lot of that thinking is missing is really what is happening within China and how will those developments within China impact on it's global approach. And that's why we're so lucky to have Susan with us this evening, because this is something she's thought about deeply, she's written about quite extensively, how the framing of these issues and questions in China and the dynamics of Chinese politics affects its outbound activities. So we're coming up to two big anniversaries, we build the 100th anniversary of the founding of the communist party coming up shortly, but perhaps even more importantly in 2022, we have the 20th Party Congress, 20th Party Congress is of course being an important on congress of one things back to the Soviet Union. And on that, looking at it from outside, it looks as though Xi Jinping couldn't be in a better position. At the last party congress, he seemed to have strengthened his control within the party. There didn't seem to be any successor insight, and in fact, that's something that professor Shirk talked about in 2020. So perhaps we would just start with, what do you see and what do you might expect as we move towards that 20th party Congress next year? Is Xi Jinping a secure and as strong a leader as he looks?
Susan Shirk: Well, thank you very much, Tony, for that question, I'll come back to it in a second, but first I wanna say that I'm so pleased and honored to have been asked to give the S. T. Lee lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School, Ash center, and I wanna thank you very much for the honor. It's a great pleasure to be with you and to be introduced by my former UC colleague, Fred Logevall as well. So your question about the 20th Party Congress. Just a year ago, or at least at the start of the COVID outbreak in China, there was a tremendous upsurge of anger and resentment being expressed toward Xi Jinping and toward the Chinese Communist Party, because of the suppression of information, the censorship, the security forces had prevented people in Wuhan and Hubei Province from getting the information they needed to stay safe. And so at the start of the outbreak, there was a kind of online Tianamen mass incident you might say, which spread beyond Hubei Province to the whole country. Quite surprisingly, there was actually very little censorship in those early days, so everyone could see that their friends and neighbors and fellow students shared their outrage, as well as presumably their fear about the epidemic itself. And so it really looked like things were pretty dicey for Xi Jinping. He disappeared for a period of time, they delegated the job of leading the COVID Task Force if you will, leading small group to Li Keqiang, the premier, Xi Jinping was not front and center. And there was even a lot of speculation that other members of the party elite who already had a lot of reasons not to be that thrilled with Xi Jinping to feel quite dissatisfied with him. Now we're also very dissatisfied at the way he was leading the response to COVID. But, and anyway, there are a lot of details, strange things went on, he gave a speech and sort of appeared to say, well, I actually defensively was actually really in charge, even though nobody had seen him, it was published later the account of that speech. So there was a lot of us wondering whether or not this crisis was really a challenge to Xi Jinping and perhaps even to party rule itself. Because I'm sure that you've heard from your Chinese friends and colleagues just as I have had, they've said, well, Xi Jinping is in pretty solid shape, it's gonna take a huge crisis. Something has to happen, some crisis to really create a threat to his continued rule. Well, talk about a crisis, this was a tremendous crisis. But then once Xi came out and seemed to take over, they controlled the spread of the virus using all the capabilities of this strength in the party because of course Xi has worked very hard to strengthen the party and to have its organizations go into society, every aspect of society, every residential area, every work unit, whatever. And so they use this ranks and party to control people's movements, they forcibly quarantined people who tested positive and they managed to get control over the spread of the virus in a very remarkable way, using also surveillance technologies, really all the tools, you might say, all the tools of the Chinese Communist Party led police state. Worked very well to keep people safe. So in the end, people in China ended up being very satisfied with the job that Xi Jinping did and with the role of the party. And so ironically, it might be argued that COVID has smooth Xi Jinping's path to the third term that he expects to get at the 20th Party Congress, because this third term is definitely controversial in China. There's evidence from surveys and that the ordinary urban public as well as the elite is not very enthusiastic about throwing over, abolishing the practice of having regular peaceful turnover of power at the top after two five-year terms. And this was not easily achieved by the Chinese Communist Party, it was the first and only large communist country to have achieved a peaceful protocols of peaceful turnover. And so it's, the third term is definitely a controversial issue.
Tony Saich: Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a number of interesting things amid made switch you said there. I mean, in some ways COVID was almost like a rerun on a much larger scale of what we saw with SARS in 2002, 2003.
Susan Shirk: Yeah.
Tony Saich: Where the same things happened, basically there was a cover-up at the lower level, cover-up as it went up the system and it was only once sort of social media really ran out of control that the leadership had to admit that something was going on. But then we see how that system kicks in in the way you're talking about maybe strengthening Xi Jinping's position by saying, well, all the success of this is of course, because of the party. And I thought it was fascinating this time in COVID was it kept stressing that those doctors and nurses were party members. So again, reinforcing this message, it's the party that's doing it to for you.
Susan Shirk: Yeah, and if I may just throw in a point about the party as that, the heroism of party members because they really did go to the front line, they were mobilized to do a lot of the power and medical work and the social support work. And so as a result, one of my Chinese political science colleagues has studied applications to the party, applications to the party actually went up. Because the respect for being a party member went up and they're viewed as heroes.
Tony Saich: That's fascinating. Two other things occurred to me what you were talking about there, one is, you talked about there's enough to be dissatisfied with Xi Jinping, and perhaps in a moment you could expand a little bit more on what might those people have been dissatisfied about with Xi Jinping. But the other related question is, is this issue of succession. You mentioned sort of peaceful transitions, I mean, there's only been really one in history of the Chinese Communist Party, and I would say that wasn't with Xi Jinping, it was really with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao. And of course, Xi Jinping, his ascendance to power was, had as a prelude, the whole issues around, Bo Xilai, a potential rival and the whole unraveling of the, what was seen as the model in Chongqing. But do you think that, I mean, I'm sure from Xi Piping's perspective, him having a third term is giving stability. I wonder though, is that true or is it really creating instability by essentially pushing a problematic succession further down the line?
Susan Shirk: Well, you know, one of the greatest risks to the stability of communist party rule or any authoritarian rule is preventing who's at the top and open splits in the leadership. And I would argue that actually the turnover from Jaing to Wu and then Wu to Xi, that's two actually because Xi was even chosen in a straw poll. You know, they started it twice, they've had straw polls before the central committee takes its formal vote to help shape the slate of nominees. It's all secret, it's not a real election in some sense but it's kind of a popularity contest. And Xi apparently did quite well in that and that's why he's the leader of China but he now has decided that all voting, all elections are bad. And so in before the 19th Party Congress, there was no straw poll to select the standing committee, the politburo the politburo, and instead they had this interview method where he just interviewed a lot of people and then trust me, you know, I did it right. So it's, I think the institutional protocols, practices, precedents have definitely been destroyed by Xi Jinping. And I think that's very dangerous, I think it does make a power struggle more likely.
A really destructive power struggle more likely. There's no sign of a rival to Xi Jinping now who has stepped out of the woodwork and because it's too dangerous to do that, and also he's been pretty effective at trying to wipe out rivals through the anti-corruption campaign. But at some point there will, a power struggle is much more likely because of scrapping the term limits for the top leadership position.
Tony Saich: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that turnaround with Xi Jinping because a couple of, two or three party congresses before that he actually turned out bottom in an opinion poll.
Susan Shirk: That's right, that's right.
Tony Saich: Becoming an alternate for the central committee. So he'd done something obviously to turn things around. I mean, I'm also interested by what you say because if I was someone in the politburo at the moment looking sort about, what are my chances of getting up there?
Susan Shirk: Yeah.
Tony Saich: And it looks pretty much as though Xi Jinping wants to stay 2035 with these plans he's putting forward, whether that's directly in control or whether it's a Deng Xiaoping, behind-the-scenes issue. I would be pretty frustrated that basically, you're telling me my upward mobility there is gone. So perhaps, maybe turning a little bit, you did mention people being dissatisfied with Xi Jinping, I know elsewhere you've talked about mistakes that you think he's made.
Susan Shirk: Hmm-mm.
Tony Saich: If you'd like to elaborate just a little bit more on that for us.
Susan Shirk: Well, I think as you just said, the dissatisfaction comes from the fact that your career is no longer predictable and safe, for one thing, Xi may come in, it's not just that your chances of promotion have been reduced, let's say you're really an ambitious politician and of the suitable age, and you've gotten up to central committee and even or politburo level, you see that he's basically stopped all career mobility for someone like you and even worse, he could come at you any moment accusing you of corruption or some other crime because he feels that you are a threat to him. You know, the pressure to demonstrate loyalty in the Xi Jinping system is tremendous. Everybody has to be outside, they have to show their loyalty. And this creates a kind of bandwagon effect, everybody has to try to read the cues on what does Xi Jinping actually want? What's he about to tell us the policy will be and they try to get there earlier. I argue that this contributes to overreach. Because of this pressure of loyalty and the bandwagon effect. And, so the other politicians don't like this, I mean, they don't feel safe. Their whole career and their family's welfare could be wiped out in one stroke by Xi Jinping and for quite a few politicians that actually has happened.
Tony Saich: Yeah, certainly. I mean, certainly the overreach goes well beyond that, doesn't it? I mean, both externally and internally, the concentration of power with Xi.
Susan Shirk: Well, yes, and then the whole question of the information. So in this type of highly centralized system and because of the pressure to prove your loyalty, nobody really wants to tell Xi Jinping what is the potential or actual downside to decisions he's making. So he lives in an echo chamber of praise and loyalty. So he's not, I think he may not be getting accurate information, for example, now, is he getting good information about the backlash to China's recent actions internationally? The Wolf Warrior diplomacy over vaccines, the the punishing of Australia for asking for international investigation of the origins of COVID the, Xin Xhong, Hong Kong, the extreme kind of Beijing's takeover of Hong Kong essentially. Is Xi getting accurate information about the price that China is paying in terms of its foreign relations and its international image as a responsible rising power? You know, I'm not sure.
Tony Saich: Yeah, of course we've had our own experience of that with the recent president in the US who may not have been entirely well-informed about global perceptions and others.
Susan Shirk: Right, and a lot of pressure to prove loyalty. I mean, there were many times over the last four or five years in which I was horrified to see the American political system resembling the Chinese political system.
Tony Saich: Yeah.
Susan Shirk: In that respect. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just in the last week, we've seen countries representing about 50% of global GDP, all taking actions that can be considered negative to China, Australia dropping the Belt and Road initiative, the US of course signing on for this new strategic competition report, Japan saying it's going to cooperate on 6G development, German IT law, which is effectively going to cut out Huawei from development there. So, you're right, I mean, this big backlash is taking place, and one does wonder if that information is getting through to Xi Jinping. Yeah, so the centralization of power quite predictably leads to this kind of echo chamber effect, which is really quite dangerous. And it's something that we should be factoring in when we think about how to deal with China now.
Yeah, and I think this, some of the important work you've done before I think has highlighted what previously been, has been the adaptability and flexibility.
Tony Saich: Of the Chinese system. You know, we were conditioned to think Leninist systems really aren't flexible. And yet under Jiang Zeming and Deng Xiaoping, we had the situation where a lot of local flexibility was allowed, a lot of adaptability was allowed, private sector was allowed to experiment more and I think many of us felt that, that rather than state intervention was what was driving China forward in creating that more vibrant environment. So is that a danger you now see with this centralization of authority under Xi Jinping?
Susan Shirk: Well, yes, there's this kind of uniformity, everybody is supposed to follow the center's directive and the core leader and protecting the core leader is the key mission for every subordinate official. You know, it really is, it's kind of Stalinist actually. And even though Xi is very different than Mao Zedong, it has some similarities in terms of the extreme centralization of power and the necessity of demonstrating loyalty and this kind of a uniformity that we had under Mao as well.
Tony Saich: Yeah, I mean, as you suggested, it certainly is a pushback from where the Chinese elite leadership seemed to be going which was more collective based, which was in a sense kind of dividing the spoils between different groups within the elite, and much of that now seems to be undermined.
Susan Shirk: Yeah, so the project I'm doing now does look at the Hu Jintao era, as well as the Xi Jinping era. And the Hu Jintao era of collective leadership was admirable in many ways and one of the ways is that power was shared. Patronage was shared, unfortunately corruption was shared as well. But, so people thought that Hu Jintao was a weak leader. There was a lot of criticism by intellectuals, other urban middle-class people of Hu Jintao, especially because of the corruption. But this collective leadership was a kind of oligarchic power-sharing system. And the overreaching that started in the mind 2000s, I mean, one of the strange paradoxes of the history of domestic politics and foreign policy and China over the last few decades is that there was a major inflection point around 2007, eight, nine, and it didn't happen because of Xi Jinping. So we can't blame all the overreaching or the problems on Xi Jinping. This started under Hu Jintao.
And, why was that? Well, of course, part of it was global financial crisis which led to a call for a more robust Chinese role in the world from the public and from the elite, but even before then what happened is you had in this oligarchy, you had a lot of different interest groups, bureaucratic interest groups, economic interest groups, kind of going their own way. And in order to maintain cohesion within the oligarchy, they made decisions by a kind of log rolling, which means that every one of the barons, so every one of the politburo, your members or standing committee members, he had, there was a division of responsibility and he ruled his domain without any question from the other oligarchs or from Hu Jintao for that matter. So each one of these sectors or functions was being ruled quite independently. And there was absolutely no checks. And a lot of what they did, say for example in the South China sea, you had all of these different maritime interest groups as well as the PLA Navy, that saw that they could get more resources, bigger budgets, more bureaucratic heft by saying that they were going out to defend China's maritime and territorial claims in the Spratlys and the parasails and the whole South China Sea. So that was how, because when the South China Sea, more assertive behavior on China's part began around 2007. At that time, there wasn't a lot of pressure from popular nationalism over the South China Sea issue. The public was much more concerned about Japan or Taiwan than they were.
About the South China Sea. But these interest groups ended up pumping up more of the nationalist attention, the attention and the emotion from the public over these issues. So the collective leadership had its own problems, overreach, corruption, and as a result at the 18th Party Congress when Xi Jinping comes into office in 2012, you look at the work report that Hu Jintao gave which is kind of the transition and a kind of elite consensus, and they're calling for stronger leadership.
So there was dissatisfaction with the collective leadership, call for stronger leadership but people were not reckoning that they were gonna get anything like Xi Jinping.
Tony Saich: No, I think we all know that that may have been true but nobody expected it to be quite as tough as it was. And in some ways I think they felt safe with Xi Jinping, in some ways, not exactly the lowest common denominator in terms of its strength, but he thought he could appeal to various different groups within the party.
Even though pretty soon came apart. You know, and if I was Xi Jinping taking power in that situation, if I looked around, it looked a mess he felt that, yeah, this is weak, it's not really hard decision-making, we've got the corruption, we've got society running its own way, we've got local governments not obeying. So I'm gonna pull this together. I wanna open it up to the questions in a moment, you actually answered one of them which was about the South China Sea, but I want to ask you an almost impossible question. If we don't have Xi Jinping, would it change? Because in terms of what you're talking about, there was an underlying sense of this is moving out of control, we want a strong leadership. So without Xi, would we get much of a different approach? Would we go back to that collective leadership that you talked about operating before?
Susan Shirk: I think it would be very different. Hu Jintao also was kind of experimenting with intro party democracy.
There were a lot of members of the elite and intellectuals who thought that if you make the party leader actually accountable to the party elite broadly defined, which really means the central committee, the several hundred people in the central committee. And of course, according to party rules, the central committee does elect the top leadership. So of course they've never rejected the nominations from above in the China case ever but it did happen in the Soviet Union.
Several times in the Khrushchev era and it's happened in Vietnam. So I think a more institutionalized collective leadership with a leader with a little more oomph than Hu Jintao had, who gradually takes steps to strengthen China's institutional arrangements, including the legal system which frankly has kind of gone backward. I mean, there have been, during the 1990s, there was quite a bit of progress to strengthening the courts and the professionalization of judges and things like that. Things have slowed down or gone backwards. Similarly with market reforms themselves, pretty much stalled out and we have this more status system. You know, Xi Jinping appears to be ideologically committed to state-owned enterprises, not because they're actually good for the Chinese economy, but he sees them as the base of communist party rule. But, if we had another leader, they might gradually strengthen the private sector, really treat the private sector fairly for a change and reduce the role of the state sector. I mean, there's so many different options that they would exercise a stronger leader but one who is really accountable to the central committee, might exercise greater restraint.
In foreign policy and make wiser decisions. But on the other hand, let's face it, Chinese nationalism and anti-foreign nationalism has really gotten very strong now. So one danger is.
That any leader will be tempted to play to that nationalist sentiment.
Tony Saich: Yeah, I think that's very true, and that relates to some of the questions we've had which I wanna come back to in a moment. I thought you said about the state-owned enterprises was interesting because I think it, I wonder whether it's just Xi Jinping or whether it reflects really what is a very powerful block within China, because in November 2013, the Central Plenum Resolution, did talk about more influence being given to market forces.
And the premier certainly spoke up on behalf of market forces, but I do think we miss something in it, I think we tend to wanna look for what we want to see. And so I think we also just shot to this sort of comments about the markets on and so forth. But actually, in the documents, there is still strong sentiments towards the position of the state on enterprises within the economy. And certainly, as you said, what we've seen under Xi Jinping, not only domestically, but globally, really relying on state-owned enterprises to push forward the kinds of policies that he wants to see. So there are none.
Susan Shirk: Kind of like the party's bank, you know, I mean, you can.Yeah. He can direct the state-owned enterprises to put resources behind all of his pet projects.
Tony Saich: And they can pay for the Winter Olympics as well. Apart from anything else. I do wanna give a chance to some of the questions that have been popping up, some are externally related, but there was one also related to a very important question about domestic developments. And that was the changing demographics in China and the person questioned what is the impact of that, and most importantly what would the impact possibly have been, spending be for an aging population?
Susan Shirk: Hmm, well, I think people are really quite concerned about that, international business as well as Chinese policymakers because the ratio of the working-age, what we call the dependency ratio increases, right? So. We have a smaller proportion of the population of working age. One consequence of that is that wages do go up, there are actually shortages of labor and the countryside is, the labor, maybe surplus labor or whatever, that's probably not the right term but has pretty much left the countryside already. And then especially with one child families, people have to take care of the elderly population, the state social security and pensions, not adequate, health care, it's a huge burden to the government. And of course one solution to that, I mean, other countries like Japan or Korea are experiencing the same thing actually in a more acute form. And they face a lot of tough decisions about for example, allowing foreign labor to commend immigration. So I think the demographic problems are really very acute in China, they're definitely coming down the road.
Tony Saich: Yeah, I mean, a number of the factors which really have contributed to China's extraordinary growth are fading away. And the the demographics is clearly one of them which has turned more negative from the positive phase it was in.
Susan Shirk: Right, and on the consumption side of course it's, older people don't consume as much as younger people do.
Tony Saich: Yeah, that's true.
Susan Shirk: So and China needs to make this shift to more consumption-led growth away from investment-led growth.
Tony Saich: True. Another question which we had relates, again relating to external issues is the question of Taiwan, and why does it seem to be that under Xi Jinping this has become such a much more pressing issue than it had been perhaps previously?
Susan Shirk: Well, one reason is because many people in China were justifying the idea of a third term or longer as this is how much time it's going to take Xi Jinping to reunify Taiwan. And so they kind of project this thinking onto Xi Jinping that he must be planning.
Something really big to bring Taiwan back into the PRC during his legacy because, I mean, during his administration, because of course that would be such a great accomplishment for any Chinese leader to achieve that. And just China's military buildup of course gives it greater capabilities, the military balance across the Taiwan Strait has changed. And I think in the United States, there's also a lot of discussion about would the United States really come and defend Taiwan or not? I mean, I think they would, and I think the people in Beijing believe that yes, America would. I hope they believe that but there's a lot of discussion about do we need to strengthen deterrence in some way? And how do we do that? Do we do it by hardening our commitment to Taiwan militarily? Or do we do it by elevating our treatment of Taiwan diplomatically? So there's a lot of debate. I think much of it is a kind of American debate which isn't necessarily connected to a big increase in the risk of Xi Jinping actually attacking Taiwan. My own view is that there's a much greater risk of Beijing using economic coercion against Taiwan which is what it's been doing with a lot of other countries. Then there is the risk of an actual military attack on Taiwan.
Tony Saich: I mean, that would seem to make a lot of sense to me. I mean, the mainland can keep turning the screws on Taiwan, making it squeal more and more. Because clearly, it's rhetoric of win-win, come in with us and we'll all be better off hasn't worked. It didn't work in Hong Kong, and what has been happening in Hong Kong of course is gonna make it even more difficult for people in Taiwan to really buy into that. I wanna just turn back again to a domestic issue before coming back to the international again, and that is inevitably the question of Xinjiang came up in the Q&A and in the sense of what is the rationale procedure in being with that and what are the objectives short and longterm if you have any thoughts on that?
Susan Shirk: He just wants to get rid of what to him is a problem. But the way of doing it is creating a much bigger problem. And there's just no sign of any sensible internal debate over the best approach to the Xinjian issue inside China. And that's very disheartening. So there's, it seems that that people have bought in to the idea that Xinjiang represents a serious terrorist threat, that these, the people living in Xinjiang are of course hostile to Beijing. Well, if they weren't before, they certainly are now.
Given the reeducation camps and the extreme approach to try to basically brainwash the people of Xinjiang to support the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, one of the most horrifying things to me is that it appears that Xi Jinping still believes in this Maoist idea that he can use reeducation to wash people's brains and to make them loyal to him and to the Chinese Communist Party. So it's not just the reeducation camps, it's sending people into families to have heart-to-heart talks, talk to them, these are all methods of trying to bring about ideological support for the regime that were tried in the Mao era, tragically failed.
So, and of course it's just so extreme that, but it's very, very difficult to see how the United States even in conjunction with other countries and really pressure Xi and party leaders to reverse this because, and it looks like they have the Chinese public behind them.
Tony Saich: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it does raise a broader question about what can Washington do to change internal behaviors in China? And I think we have to be honest and recognize it's pretty limited in that sense about what one can do. I think that what is happening in Xinjiang now in a way recognizes the failure of the idea that somehow you can develop these problems away, that if you put more and more money into a place, it's gonna be better and everybody's gonna join in in celebration of the communist party. And it ignores questions about of identity, of culture and alternatives in that. But coming to, obviously, there's a number of questions related to the US, one of your former students from 15 years ago, Alice Chang has a question about whether you see potentially any role for the private sector in the US in terms of engaging China and building a more effective competitive partnership between the US and China?
Susan Shirk: Well, I do certainly believe that civil society's ties with China are so important as well as business ties. One thing that worries me about US policy now is that we may see a kind of split between international business and other groups in the United States because international business, the interest in investing in China and doing business in China is kind of inelastic. You see this from Taiwan businessmen, you see it from American businessmen. I mean, people there's, it's such a huge domestic market and it's still the consumer market especially, is still growing pretty dramatically. So people really wanna get in there and do business and make money. That's understandable.
But meanwhile, there are a lot of other groups that find so many features of China today so reprehensible and we're busy sanctioning one thing or another, and it really, it creates for a potential schism like that, but I'm a big believer in people to people diplomacy, obviously education, students, civil society groups. Of course the Chinese have made it more difficult going right back to the NGO law of a few years ago. But my view is we just keep at it, we persist, and do what we can to maintain these ties between the two societies.
Tony Saich: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, think this question is schism between business sectors and Washington is important. And I think in some ways you can see China has been quite smart in kind of dangling fruits in front of Wall Street.
While this has been going on. And so, for example at a time when Jack Ma was making criticism of some of the regulatory practices in China, in the same panels, you had people from investment US and other investment communities praising China for what it was doing.
Susan Shirk: Yeah, I'm sure you, like, I have been to some of these big events in China with a lot of international business people. And it really is like little Lord McCartney coming in, banging his head on the floor.
Tony Saich: Yeah. We're getting near the time, but there was many other questions, including the question of inequality, what that impact on the legitimacy of the party, but inevitably maybe we can round off with that. Just some of your reflections on where you think we are with US/China relations and any possible suggestions you might have for developing policy over the near to medium term which has come up in different ways in a number of the questions in the Q&A area.
Susan Shirk: Well, my own view is that the Trump administration approach, kind of sledgehammer approach of confronting China across the board, as far as I can tell, actually accomplished nothing. I don't see any respect in which China's behavior has been influenced positively by US actions. And when the Biden folks were campaigning, what they said they would do is to come in, identify priority issues of dispute with China, and ones where they thought that maybe negotiation, smart use of carrots and sticks and communicating with them, talking clearly about what we'd like to see them do might actually succeed. And there are issues like Xinjiang and Hong Kong, it's hard for me to see any negotiation being successful on those issues. But there are a lot of other issues related to the structural problems in the Chinese economy, the way they manage their economy, which results in unfair treatment of our firms and lack of market access, conformity to international norms on how they manage their economy, et cetera. As well as things like journalists, visas, student visas, other civil society issues where I think we might be able to make some progress. So I'd say identify the priority issues, try to negotiate on them and to negotiate successfully, we also have to demonstrate that we have some goodwill here. That if China were to actually moderate its behavior internationally or domestically or whatever we're talking about, that there would, that we would recognize it, and we would reciprocate in some ways. So, if you frame everything as it's all about competition, strategic competition and you have a heavy hand on the sanction side but very little expression of goodwill, including so far as far as I can tell, none of the unwise actions of the Trump administration have been lifted or reversed. They're all still there. So in my view, we need to get a little bit of positive momentum going at the same time as we reverse this misperception that the US is on the decline. And the Biden administration has been great on that. Getting back with our allies joining international organizations again and investing in ourselves. First of all addressing COVID, infrastructure investment, the large recovery bill, all of these things are very important, but at the same time, I think we could it's time to start actually trying to resolve some of our differences with China through negotiation.
Tony Saich: Yeah, I mean, certainly the maintenance of sanctions saying it gives some kinds of leverage seems somewhat crazy given that there's no real evidence has ever been produced that China has suffered from that. And yet we know there has been adverse consequences for the US, so.
Tony Saich: Seems keeping something like that on is really only damaging the US own interests. So, I'm very sorry, I mean, I could keep talking about this whole night but we are out of time and I know people do suffer from Zoom fatigue but this has been a wonderful conversation, Susan, I wanna thank you so much for agreeing to take on this S. T. Lee lecture, especially in this sort of virtual form. And I think it's been an extraordinarily informative discussion, and I truly hope that in the not too distant future, maybe we will be able to have you up here in person. So thank you again, Susan, and I wanna thank everybody who put this event together, so thanks.
Susan Shirk: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation and great questions as well. Thank you.
Tony Saich: Thank you.
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Presenter: You've been listening to AshCast, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation's podcast. If you'd like to learn more, please visit ash.harvard.edu or follow the Ash Center on social media @harvardash.
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