Isaac Stone Fish & Stephen Orlins on How the US Should Respond

Episode originally aired October 30, 2019

Isaac Stone Fish is the founder and CEO of Strategy Risks. He is also a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

October 30, 2019

ISAAC STONE FISH: Today, the Communist Party is ruling China, and the Communist Party is not a fair, accurate, or ethical reflection of the Chinese people.

***

MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today, we're discussing everything under the sun within the U.S.-China relationship: the protests engulfing Hong Kong, the trade war underway, and how the U.S. should respond to China's rising geopolitical influence and its human right violations. Most importantly, we'll be discussing what politicians and American voters should pay attention to in the days and months ahead.

To help us make sense of all of this, we are talking to two experts on China with fairly different views on these issues. The first is Isaac Stone Fish, a journalist and contributing columnist for “Global Opinions” at The Washington Post. Isaac has been critical of China and has called for a more aggressive response to the Chinese Communist Party.

HANNAH: So let's talk for a minute about the protests in Hong Kong.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You've advocated for America calling out the abuses of the People's Republic of China against the protesters there. But what does calling out China mean?

FISH: I think it's specifically calling out Beijing and the party and arms of the party or people acting in concert and affiliation in the party as opposed to calling out China. And I think for the city didn't—

HANNAH: Is that like an all-caps tweet? Is that a press release? A press release from the State Department?

FISH: Only all-caps tweets.

HANNAH: No, seriously. Like, what is it? What does a calling out look like?

FISH: There are different responsibilities for people in the State Department and for journalists and people in think tanks and professors. For the State Department—I can’t believe I’m saying this right now—when it comes to the situation right now in Hong Kong, I think they're doing a pretty good job of showing support, of making it clear their sympathies lie with the protesters without allowing them to be too closely linked, so that Beijing can easily say, “Look at the CIA, American Black Hand that's guiding the protesters.”

HANNAH: Will Beijing ultimately give Hongkongers more autonomy?

FISH: Gosh, the million dollar question there.

HANNAH: And how long will it take? What's the kind of timetable here?

FISH: On the one hand, Beijing has promised Hong Kong one country, two systems, and Hong Kong is so much more free than probably any other part of China. It's so hard to know, and Beijing has a reputation as a polity that does not yield. But there certainly are plenty of examples in modern Chinese history where the party has backed down in the face of sustained opposition. So it is certainly possible in a couple of months, if this does not end in bloodshed or martial law, that we do see Hongkongers with more freedoms, either along the margins or in general.

HANNAH: How can the United States show support for vulnerable populations in China, including people in Hong Kong, the Uigher Muslim community, without getting entangled in a foreign military adventure with a rising military power?

FISH: The situation in Xinjiang in northwest China, where there are roughly one million Muslims in concentration camps, is just an absolute crime against humanity. It's really hard to call it anything else.

Interlude featuring archival audio

FISH: I think the question is both what the U.S. government can do and what U.S. individuals who are concerned about issues of global human rights, about the way Muslims should be treated, can do. I think the first thing both for the government and for civil society and individuals is to not self-censor and to not be afraid of speaking out and condemning what Beijing is doing.

One of the things I mentioned in an article I wrote in The Nation with Daniel Bessner, a history professor, is the need for there to be images of the atrocities of these camps. The photos that came out in 2004 of Abu Ghraib really helped crystallize the pushback against the American invasion of Iraq. From what we know, there are far worse things happening in China, and these images should come out.

HANNAH: But would you consider your outlook on China a bit more hawkish? And if so, what tempers that hawkishness?

FISH: Certainly one of the things that tempers that hawkishness is to not have anything to do at all with Bannon or any of the people who combine tougher policies against Beijing with policies that denigrate Chinese or Muslims or any ethnicity.

HANNAH: Let's switch gears and talk about the trade war.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Donald Trump has escalated economic pressure on China, and China is responding in kind. And it seems like this has less to do with helping American consumers and businesses than it is about hurting China. Would you agree?

FISH: Like you said, that trade war does seem less designed and less well-thought-out, by far, than it actually should be. I think what we had was that Trump had an idea in the right direction and then executed it in a very Trumpian way, and that's partially why we're in the mess we're in now. What I would like to see—and what a lot of people would like to see—is similar ideas executed far more carefully, far more thoughtfully, by someone who's far more able to think and act strategically.

HANNAH: What do you think the biggest misconception is that Americans have about China?

FISH: A particular one that frustrates me is this idea that Chinese think in decades or in centuries, and it's an Orientalist thought that there is a great heaving, planning central bureaucracy where scheming Chinese sit and put together how the world is going to look in the next ten, twenty, one-hundred years. Anyone who's lived in China knows that is very much not the reality. It’s really a system of negotiations and compromises and much more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of place than it appears from the outside.

HANNAH: But it is still an ancient culture. In the United States, we trace our founders back 250 years. But in China, they have a longer, almost interminable history. Or are you saying that I am “orientalizing?”

FISH: The Egyptians have an interminable history. The Syrians, the Jews…

HANNAH: But continuity is characteristic of Chinese—

FISH: Egypt has been a lot more continuous of a republic than China has been. I think we can look at the dislocations in 1911, 1949. It was a failed state in the ‘20s and ‘30s. There was an emperor before that. I think a lot of these other polities have had more consistent identities over the centuries. Another one of these chestnuts is, “The Communist Party lifted hundreds of people out of poverty,” the implication being this is why we should revere them. No one seems to add in that sentence, “The Communist Party in 1949, in 1976, when it made sure Chinese people were more deeply mired in poverty than they were before.”

HANNAH: Right. The Cultural Revolution is responsible for at least two million deaths.

FISH: It's certainly in the millions. There are no good statistics, in part because of what the party does about history. During the Great Leap Forward in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, there were tens of millions of deaths. And that doesn't seem to get tallied in these normal, “The party lifted hundreds of thousands people out of poverty,” statements.

HANNAH: But there certainly are differences between Maoist China and Deng Xiaoping's China, or Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. What do you think is the most remarkable reform in China in the past sixty or seventy years?

FISH: There was so much emphasis on learning this idea of reform, and that is sort of the framework in which we're supposed to think of China's evolution. So, I will answer the questions so I'm not evading any questions.

You certainly can give a lot of credit for the privatization of property and the breakup of the communes and the returning to Chinese people the ability to travel overseas. It's certainly helpful, but I think what I would love to see in the years going forward—one of the positive things about the Trump Presidency, a man who, for the record, I think is absolutely despicable in a lot of ways—

HANNAH: You’re a real outlier there in the foreign policy community. It’s a bold position.

FISH: I know. Very unique. I don't want to self-censor myself on that unique position. But, I will say he has allowed for the flowering of a lot of different ways of looking at China. I think as we move forward, it'll be great to see histories and studies that don't place this dichotomy of reform or closing as the way to look at China's economic history.

HANNAH: Of course, there's no independent internal polling inside China like there is within the United States. But are you suggesting the Chinese Communist Party lacks popular support? Are you saying the current regime is illegitimate, not just by Western standards, but by universal ones?

FISH: It's certainly illegitimate by Western standards. As for Chinese standards, the short answer is, who knows? As you rightly pointed out, there is nothing resembling even an awful poll on what kind of support the party faces, and you get very different answers sometimes from the same people, depending on how public the conversation is. As Chinese interlocutors love to remind Americans, China has 5,000 years of history. The party has ruled for about one-and-a-half percent of those, and it's really not fair to the Chinese people to lump them in with some of the atrocities that the Communist Party has committed and continues to commit.

HANNAH: Tell me if you think this sounds Orientalist: The United States has used its superpower status and its geopolitical and economic influence to try to remake the world along democratic lines in its image. We assume China is going to do the same thing as it continues its ascent. But doesn't that disregard the part of Chinese culture that suggests hegemony is antithetical to Marxism?

FISH: That's not Chinese culture; that's Communist Party culture. And I think you asked originally if I thought this was Orientalist. I don't. I think the “-ism” or the “-ist” that comes out of this is a race-based nationalism that we see among some of the party elite and is worryingly similar to the fascism we saw in World War Two Japan. It's often used to try to argue the negative. Xi Jinping said a few years ago that invading other countries is not in Chinese blood—which is a silly statement to think about Chinese blood and how that plays in—but every culture in the history of civilization has fought other cultures. That's not a controversial statement, and China under the party is no exception. My quibble—or I'd say it's larger than a quibble—my issue here is there is nothing wrong with an ascendant China trying to push the world to further serve its interests like America did or like the United Kingdom did. The problem is unfortunately, today, the Communist Party is ruling China, and the Communist Party is not a fair, accurate, or ethical reflection of the Chinese people. And I really feel that a China under the party serving as a global hegemon, or serving as the world's most powerful country, would be far more damaging to interests of people around the world than the very imperfect American hegemonic period was.

HANNAH: Our next guest is Stephen Orlins, a lawyer, a diplomat, and a businessman with a long history inside of China. He was a member of the State Department legal team that helped establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in the 1970s.

Stephen was also the president of Lehman Brothers Asia and the chairman of the board of one of Taiwan's largest cable television and high-speed internet providers. Today, he's the president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. So while Isaac's opinion pieces in The Washington Post can be rather hawkish toward China, Stephen’s organization seeks a greater understanding between our two countries. So let's dive right in.

The United States has invested heavily in the liberalization of China over the past thirty, forty years. Now we seem to be fearful of an enriched China, of a China that's more economically powerful than it was, when in some ways, we aided them in getting to the place where they are today.

STEPHEN ORLINS: Yes, we're unnecessarily fearful, in my view. Within the Beltway, people who haven't lived in China, people who haven't dealt with the Chinese the way I have over forty-two years, kind of need an enemy. There is a requirement, weirdly, in the United States, partly generated by the military industrial complex, partly generated by Chinese policies. I always joke with the Chinese, “Who is the biggest enemy of China?” The answer is China. They are their own worst enemy in many, many ways. But we have an exaggerated fear of China—an exaggerated fear of China's economic prowess and an exaggerated fear of China wanting to be a hegemon in Asia. In fact, we talk about China being a hegemon in the world.

We just hosted the state councilor and foreign minister of China, who says, “We ain't interested in it.” I studied Chinese history when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and I've spent my life looking at Chinese history. China is not an expansionist power. It's not in its DNA, and the reason for that is today it has 1.4 billion people. The problems the Chinese leadership needs to deal with are within China. I always joke, talking with a national security adviser of China—he used to say, “You have to think about China in these terms. President Obama was president. President Obama gets up, and the national security adviser briefs him about Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Venezuela, you name it. The problems are all outside of America. The president of China gets up, and he gets briefed on Xinjiang, Sichuan, Guangzhou, Tibet.” The problems are internal, and those problems are so severe that every Chinese leader I have met with over these forty-two years talks about, “How do we maintain stability in China?” To the extent that there are foreign policy problems that wash back into China—they're concerned. The idea of them being a hegemon—they don't want it. They're not interested in taking on those responsibilities.

HANNAH: I've heard the Chinese foreign minister say that hegemony is antithetical to socialism, to communism, when its sought empire wasn't in the Western Hemisphere, necessarily. So you do take that at face value, and if you think there's some credibility there, what is America's fear being driven by? Are we just projecting? Do we think just because we want to make the world in our image that China must as well?

ORLINS: For many years, we haven't had an economic competitor, and America has not been good at dealing with its own problems. We used to have a joke, which was, “Don't blame you. Don't blame me. Blame that guy around the tree.” We have not reinvested in our infrastructure. We have not dealt with the inequalities in our society. We have not dealt with social programs. We have not dealt with climate change. We have not dealt with all of these things. Instead of dealing with these, which we should be doing, we're sitting there, and we're worrying about an enemy that doesn't exist. It doesn’t exist.

HANNAH: Do you think this is people within the Beltway sort of manufacturing an enemy to distract us from our problems?

ORLINS: No, the people who feel China is an enemy are good Americans. These are not people who are looking to harm the United States. It's people who, based on Chinese government policies, some of which are terribly damaging, have reached conclusions which I disagree with. The question you have to ask is does it rise to a strategic threat to the United States? And I think the answer is no.

HANNAH: Even though the national security community has branded them or labeled them a strategic competitor, I've heard you say that you consider them an economic and diplomatic competitor, but not a strategic threat. What does that mean?

ORLINS: There are three levels of competition. When I was a student of international relations - the lowest level is economic. We compete with the Brits, the Canadians, and the Mexicans on economic things. It's fine. Our companies compete. Some of our multinational companies may be making decisions which advantage our economic competitors. We live with it. That's what America is all about, and that's fine. The next level up is diplomatic competition. Diplomatic competition is: we've got different foreign policy goals from another country, and we will compete with them diplomatically, compete with them at the UN, compete with them with foreign aid, and compete with them in a whole number of areas. We sometimes compete with the Brits. We don't agree. The French didn't agree with our invasion of Iraq. There are a lot of areas. The Indians don't agree with us all the time. The Vietnamese, that we're now growing closer to, certainly disagree with us quite often.

And that's the next level. And it's okay. It's acceptable to be diplomatic competitors. But when you’re strategic competitors—when you're saying the fundamental interests of China and the United States are adverse—I disagree with that, because it's misstating what Chinese policy is. And worse than that, it's leading to the expenditures of funds which starve the areas in the United States that need the money. So our defense budget is now about 750 billion dollars. Really?

HANNAH: China's is less than half that.

ORLINS: No, it's like a quarter of that—a little more than a quarter, closer to a third today—but it's increasing, too. By the way, this strategic competition damages the United States. It also damages China. It creates a reallocation of funds. I take the subway to work every day in New York. It's horrendous, and it's horrendous because we haven't spent the money. I always say it's the poor people of the United States—it's the working poor—that pay the price for the misallocation of funds occurring in the federal government today. President Eisenhower said it perfectly, and I love the quote: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” And that's what's going on today. Our social programs, our education—instead of entering into the diplomatic and economic competition by rebuilding our infrastructure, by focusing on R&D, and by focusing on education, we're spending incredible amounts of money on defense. When you buy a defense service or defense equipment, it has no ripple effect in your economy, as opposed to when you invest in the subways, when you invest in bridges, when you invest in tunnels, when you invest in education, you have this great ripple effect in the society. And we're starving these things.

HANNAH: Stephen, what do you see as the danger of this label “strategic competitor?” Do we run the risk of talking ourselves into a military conflict?

ORLINS: I think what it does—by branding China the way our national security strategy did in December of 2017 as a revisionist power and a strategic competitor—is it ignored the nuance that exists in China today, and it strengthened those who oppose the United States, people in the PLA who think a strategic competition with the United States is a good thing.

Now, why did they think it's a good thing, you should ask? Well, because it strengthens their budget. If the United States is saying, “We're a strategic competitor. We need more ships. We need more planes. We need more ABMs. We need more this. We need more troops. We need this, that, and the other.” What we did is we strengthened the anti-American, anti-reform part of the Chinese government. It also has the danger that because we have now characterized China as a strategic competitor and a revisionist power, every single policy we talk to the Chinese about, they say, “It's not about the policy. It's about containing us. It's about the strategic competition.” Chinese policy in Xinjiang is unacceptable. But because we're a strategic competitor, when we sit there and talk to them, they're just looking for a way to keep us down and to have more terrorism in China as opposed to if we say, “We're partners. You're my partner. What you're doing and Xianjing is really unacceptable,” and you're able to talk to them better. Same is true of Hong Kong when you talk to them about what they're doing in Hong Kong. What is the Chinese narrative today on Hong Kong? It's that the black hand of the United States is behind these protests.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You think that by passing certain things like the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in Congress is only giving fuel to that fire?

ORLINS: Well, it does two things. One is that it gives fuel to those who argue that it's the black hand of the United States behind it.

Worse than that is—let's say they decide under this act that Hong Kong's freedoms are no longer sufficient, and we cannot justify keeping Hong Kong’s separate customs status. Right now, it is a separate customs territory from China.

HANNAH: According to the US.

ORLINS: Yes. If that happens, Hong Kong is dead.

HANNAH: Despite their differences, there was one topic upon which both Isaac and Steve agree, and that's the need to engage with ordinary Chinese people. For Steve, this is illustrated in the case of a Chinese student he knew who came to study in the U.S.

ORLINS: I always think of him. He's a good friend of mine, a fellow by the name of Ming Xia. He was a refugee. He was at Guangzhou Science and Technology University and decided he wanted to leave China in 1982 and come to the United States. He was granted a visa and then studied at USC. He ultimately got a Masters and PhD in engineering.

He invented the biometric fingerprint machine, which is now used by Homeland Security and by embassies all over the world. Its biggest customer is the U.S. government, and now foreign governments, to the extent that we’re allowed to sell them.

I think about him, and I think of our policies today. The same kid is in Guangzhou studying at the Guangzhou Science and Technology University, and he applies for a visa to the United States. And he's denied because that's where our policies are moving. So we never get that machine. We never get the contribution that Ming Xia made to the United States, and America is worse off for it.

HANNAH: It's a sentiment Isaac agrees with.

FISH: I think it's very important for people who are watching this issue to go to Hong Kong or read or research and come up with their own truth about what is happening. I think so much in the States, we either allow Beijing to drive the narrative, or we allow people who are affiliated with Beijing to drive the narrative.

I'm also very aware that people can take some of the ideas I have and say, “Because of this, we want fewer Chinese studying in America, fewer professors here, fewer Chinese businessmen here.” I actually think it should be the opposite. One of the things that should be part of a general strategy against the party is attracting some of China's best and brightest and letting them stay for as long as they want. And at the same time, I really do feel like the more Americans spend time in China, the better understanding we'll have of a really fascinating, really important place.

HANNAH: I want to give a big thank you to both of our guests today, Isaac Stone Fish and Stephen Orlins. I’m Mark Hannah of the Eurasia Group Foundation, and this has been another episode of None of the Above. If you want to listen more, you can find us at noneoftheabovepodcast.org, or iTunes, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Catch you next time.

(END.)

More Episodes