Ryan Hass and Susan Thornton on the Dangers of Decoupling from China

Susan Thornton served in the United States Department of State for nearly thirty years, focusing on East and Central Asia issues. Currently, Susan is Senior Fellow at the Yale Paul Tsai China Center. You can follow Susan on Twitter at @suea_thornton.

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

Show notes:

Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence (Ryan Hass, 2021)
Xi Jinping's address on the CCP's 100th anniversary (Xi Jinping, 2021)

Archival audio:

China's Communist Party warns the West of 'bloodshed' (Sky News, July 1, 2021)
China uses Communist Party's centenary for a show of strength and defiance | DW News (DW News, July 1, 2021)
China President issues warning on Communist Party’s centenary | 9 News Australia (9 News Australia, July 1, 2021)
Xi vows China will 'never be bullied again' as CCP marks 100th anniversary (Arirang News, July 2, 2021)
Chinese President Xi Jinping marks 100th anniversary of CCP (CNBC Television, July 1, 2021)
Biden Orders Supply Chain Review to End U.S. Reliance on China (Bloomberg Quicktake: Now, February 24, 2021)
US-China decoupling will impact regional ties in the Asia-Pacific: IISS report (CNA, June 8, 2021)
How the Chinese Communist Party's relationship with business has evolved - BBC News (BBC News, June 28, 2021)
China accuses US of sending 'wrong signals' as Biden's unofficial delegation arrives in Taiwan (CNA, April 14, 2021)
China Diplomat Warns Biden to Tread Carefully on Taiwan (Bloomberg Politics, March 7, 2021)
Blinken: U.S. Has 'A Serious Commitment To Taiwan Being Able To Defend Itself' | Meet The Press (NBC News, April 11, 2021)

Transcript:

August 3, 2021

RYAN HASS: The reality is it's going to be really hard for one country to thrive while the other suffers. Both of our destinies are a bit linked to each other, given the depth of interdependence that exists.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah.

In June, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

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HANNAH: China's leader, Xi Jinping, laid out his country's goals for the next 100 years, including aspirations for global leadership.

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HANNAH: The speech got a lot of attention because Xi's tone was much more assertive, insisting China would reject any foreign interference in its affairs. Though he didn't mention the United States specifically, the implication was clear. As the world's newest superpower, China aims to forge its own path independent of America's wishes.

HASS: The portion of his speech that attracted the most attention was the reference to how any adversary that challenges China will have its head split open on an iron wall of 1.4 billion people. It was a pretty rough-sounding statement to an American here.

HANNAH: That's Ryan Hass. Ryan is the Michael H. Armacost Chair in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident fellow at the Pol-Sci China Center at Yale Law School.

HASS: What I think is often overlooked is that's a phrase that goes back to the 1950s that has been used periodically at key junctures to talk about developments inside China as well. We Americans—we’re separated by an ocean. We can't travel to China right now. It's a little bit easier to be susceptible to simple caricatures of another country. And I think both countries suffer a little bit from this. From the U.S. perspective, I think there is an unfortunate bias sometimes to treat China as if it were this monolithic entity where 1.4 billion people are marching in lockstep toward a pre-set goal on the horizon, and Xi Jinping is that the head of the pack directing every step.

For those of us who have lived in China, we recognize how messy, complicated, chaotic, and contested of an environment China actually is. And so, I think those of us who've had that tactile experience, breathing that air and dealing with some of the inconveniences of living in China, recognize that China's recent history has had a lot of zigs and zags. And it shouldn't be treated as a foregone conclusion that everything is going to work out just perfectly according to plan.

HANNAH: What does this all mean for the United States? How Americans respond to events like Xi's speech is important to understand because it directly shapes how we confront and respond to the reality of an increasingly powerful and influential China. It directly informs the framework through which U.S.-China policy is conceived—great power competition.

HASS: The idea of competitive interdependence is intended to be a modest departure from great power competition. Great power competition is the idea that the United States and China are locked into this struggle with each other, and we are fiercely competing, even though no one would really tell you what we're competing over—but we're competing nevertheless.

HANNAH: In his latest book, Stronger, which we'll be discussing today, Ryan proposes a new path forward, one which directly challenges the notion that China and the U.S. are inevitable competitors and adversaries, one which works toward coexistence rather than dominance. This is the idea of competitive interdependence.

HASS: What I'm trying to put forward with the concept of competitive interdependence is the idea that, yes, we are competing fiercely with China to see which country’s governance system is best capable of delivering results for its people and for the world. But at the same time, we have to recognize we are interdependent with each other, and that interdependence should bound, to a certain degree, the manner in which the competition expresses itself.

HANNAH: Interesting. So, Ryan, how have we seen that play out at all—competing while recognizing we have these shared interests?

HASS: If you think back to the meeting that took place between American and Chinese senior officials in Anchorage in April, both sides had very sharp words for each other in front of the cameras when the media was present. It was not lost on anyone who was watching the events. It was a very tense, competitive environment. And yet when the cameras left, both sides sat in a windowless room with each other for over eight hours, talking about every problem they both confronted in the world at the same time. And I don't think they did it because they particularly liked each other's company or thought the ambiance in the windowless room was really attractive. I think they did it because they both recognized that both sides confront similar problems, and we're both going to be better positioned to manage those problems if we can have some type of understanding about how we're going to do so than not.

Yes, there is competition, but there is also another dimension to the relationship. The reason why I think it matters is that if we only look at the relationship in terms of competition, we are going to find ourselves traveling around the world trying to confront, challenge, and push back on every Chinese action everywhere, irrespective of whether or not it implicates our vital interests, and we're going to foreclose opportunities to work together on common challenges.

HANNAH: So, your argument is that because the United States and China have shared interests, the United States should be more willing to cooperate with China. In your book, you talk not only about shared interests, but also about how dependent the two countries actually are on one another.

HASS: The United States and China are about the two most interdependent countries you can think of in the international system right now. On a scientific level, it's a more fertile U.S.-China scientific collaborative relationship than any other relationship that exists in the world today between two countries. Our two countries trade immensely with each other—over $600 billion a year. Investment stock in both countries is very significant. During the period before COVID-19, there were roughly 400,000 Chinese students studying in the United States. There's a dense web of relationships that exist on both sides of the Pacific. There are roughly five million ethnic Chinese people that live inside the United States.

HANNAH: But many smart and influential people in both the United States and China are calling for decoupling—a separation of the complex economic, technological, and cultural ties that currently connect us.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Why are we hearing these calls for separation? And is that a possible path forward if we are so interconnected?

HASS: Some people think the solution to our problems is to decouple or to try to disentangle or separate the United States from China so that we have more space to throw punches, basically, and we don't find ourselves locked in this bear hug with each other. But the reality is it's going to be really hard for one country to thrive while the other suffers. Both of our destinies are a bit linked to each other, given the depth of interdependence that exists.

HANNAH: Let's take a giant step back for a minute. Why are we finding ourselves in this situation today, where conflict between the United States and China feels almost inevitable, like it's kind of second nature?

SUSAN THORNTON: The idea that China represents a whole of society threat to the United States really emerged, I think, under the Trump Administration, certainly in the Obama Administration, which I also served.

HANNAH: That’s Susan Thornton. Susan's a retired senior U.S. diplomat, having worked at the State Department in Eurasia and East Asia for nearly thirty years. Now Susan is a senior fellow and research scholar, also at the Pol-Sci China Center at Yale Law. She joins us from Maine.

THORNTON: The idea was that China is getting stronger, but we are more worried about a China that is fraught or by chaos or unsuccessful than we are about a China that was successful. And I think that reflected a continuing U.S. confidence in its own abilities to compete and to lead on the world stage. I think that confidence was gravely undermined during the Trump Administration, and to some extent in the Trump Administration itself, they were not very interested in that kind of competition or leadership. They were more looking for hooks to hold onto in order to push the Trump domestic “America first” agenda.

HANNAH: Susan suggests America is feeling the pressure of a changing geopolitical system, one in which the United States was long the sole superpower.

THORNTON: I think we cannot really get at this question of what has happened in U.S.-China relations and how it is that we or at least Washington—but I think now we—have come to see China as such an all-encompassing, all-society threat. You can't look at that without going back to the whole issue of structural imbalance, power imbalances, and changes coming in the international system.

China, of course, is a rising power. That has been discussed by many, many, many people in the policy community and elsewhere. The U.S., whether it's in decline or not—I tend to say not, but it is in relative decline in the international system. And this is basically an inevitability. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was almost fifty percent of global GDP, and it was not destined to stay in that position for very long. As we've pursued and pushed this globalization, which was about basically sharing prosperity with the rest of the world, other countries are coming up. And it's not just China. China is a dramatic example of a country that's grown rapidly and done very well economically in the last twenty to thirty years, but there are a lot of other countries that figure into that equation. Therefore, the relative power of the U.S. in the system is going down. It's just a mathematical reality. And so, that's part of what we are currently grappling with. The U.S. hasn't really had to feel or realize that until, I think, the post-great financial crisis. And now in the post-Afghanistan and Iraq period, we are coming to realize that this period of unipolarity where the U.S. was the top dog after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this era of being able to sort of do whatever we want because we're, without question, the preeminent power in the world, is going to come to an end or is coming to an end. And we haven't really figured out what our role is in the world and how we're going to grapple with that and whether we're OK with other countries having much say in how affairs are governed in the world. I think that's a very basic underlying factor.

HANNAH: Susan, you served in both the Obama and Trump Administrations, and you retired from the State Department in 2018. Was that because you were pessimistic about where relations were going? You're now quite vocal about what you believe needs to happen and why you believe cooperation and de-escalation of these tensions between the two countries is so important. Could you speak on these beliefs, these misgivings, while you were in government?

THORNTON: The things I speak out about now that I wouldn't be able to speak out about when I was in government are my misgivings over the U.S. creating, I think, in many ways, an exaggerated threat about China in order to serve its own domestic political purposes. And that's very much what I see happening. I think it's a mistake, because I think China is not the across-the-board, Manichean kind of threat that is being posited in Washington. And I think by painting them as such, we are pushing them in a direction that is going to be very inimical to our own interests and probably the interests of those of our partners. You see this in many respects already with the kind of responses the Chinese have shown with respect to Taiwan in recent years in response to U.S. changes in policy with respect to Taiwan, et cetera.

Interlude featuring archival audio

THORNTON: By pushing and provoking and having this kind of across-the-board confrontation, as we did, frankly, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, you're seeing manifest many of the things I think we are claiming we want to prevent.

HANNAH: Ryan, you also worked in government and served in the Obama Administration. What are your reflections? What has changed over the past few years?

HASS: During the Obama Administration, there was a real effort to move forward the rebalance to Asia on a systemic level—to do it diplomatically, militarily, economically, and in terms of our people-to-people exchange, across the board, because there was an early recognition that Asia would be the most dynamic region of the world. It would have the greatest impact upon America's security and prosperity going forward, and so, we wanted to invest greater resources and focus on that region. The military component of the rebalance was the easiest to affect because the military is exceptional at making plans and carrying them out.

We thought we were making progress on the trade component. We finished negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we ran into political headwinds at home. And I think, with the benefit of hindsight, it probably would have been wise of us to try to push to close that deal sooner and work it through our political system well before the 2016 elections. But it didn't happen that way, and it's unfortunate because I think the United States finds itself on the outside looking in as the Asia region continues to integrate on its own without us.

So, those are a few of the reflections from that experience. But look, I think the United States has changed. China has changed. The world has changed. If the same people were put back into the same positions now that they were in four or five years ago, the approaches they would advocate would certainly be different, because I'm not aware of anyone from that era who is advocating for a return to the playbook that was put in place in that era. Everyone recognizes the situation is different.

If I could just add, Mark, a lot of attention and focus is placed upon what the United States has done in the past four or five years in the context of U.S.-China relationship, and it's often under-appreciated how much China has changed in the past four or five years. Four years ago, Xi Jinping had term limits. Now he doesn't. Four or five years ago, Hong Kong had a high degree of autonomy. Now it doesn't. Four or five years ago, Taiwan was under considerably less stress than it is now. No blood had been spilled at the Sino-Indian border for over forty years. There were not reeducation camps in Xinjiang. There was not the same level of high-level surveillance and mass censorship that exists today inside China. So, yes, the United States has changed during that period. But a big part of the change in the relationship, I would argue, emanates from the behavior in China.

HANNAH: So, Ryan, China is obviously moving ahead on its own. But let's talk for a minute about the problem of allies. The United States is feverishly trying to convince our allies around the world to stand with us and to defend our interests against those of China, and traditional allies like Germany, for example, are pushing back. They have their own trade and economic interests with China. Does that worry you at all as they continue to expand—as China continues to expand?

HASS: Well, the risk is that we will expose the limits of our leverage and reveal a certain degree of impotence for dealing with the challenges—the very real challenges—that China poses to us. If we insist that other countries become perfectly aligned with us in a bloc against China, I don't think we're going to find many takers. I think we would undermine our own competitiveness and our own position in the international system if we were going to do that.

From my perspective, we are in a challenge or a competition with China to see who can develop more high quality friendships with major powers around the world, and the United States starts this competition with some inherent advantages. We have the largest constellation of allies that has ever been assembled in the history of humankind. We have a political system that prizes—when it works best—compromise and forging partnerships on common challenges. We have a tradition of building mutually beneficial partnerships with other countries. Nine of the world's ten largest economies in the world are democracies, and perhaps most importantly, outside of Russia, every other major power shares our interests in encouraging China to curb bullying behavior and contribute more to addressing global challenges. So, I guess what I'm trying to argue is there's a pretty strong foundation to build on, and we can afford to build piece by piece rather than insisting that everyone else accept our architectural design for the house before it begins to be built.

HANNAH: Then what's next? If the era of competitiveness has led Xi to simply push back harder, what should the strategy be? In the book you wrote, Stronger, you spend a lot of time discussing policies much closer to home. You write that the goal of U.S. policy in Asia should be to, quote, “channel China's rise in the direction of being ambitious without growing aggressive toward either the United States or its security partners.” And also by concentrating on its own progress, the United States should aim to outpace China in economic innovation and outshine it in delivering better governance to its people. Why is it important, then, for the United States to be looking inward at the same time as it's looking outward toward China?

HASS: A part of what I'm trying to argue in my book is that the United States can be no stronger in the world than it is at home and that the United States has considerable work to do at home in renewing itself. I talk about the need to find ways to get past the era of hyper-partisanship we find ourselves in to rebuild our schools, to restore R&D funding, and to reaffirm America's openness to the outside world so we can continue to attract the best ideas and brightest minds to want to be with us. I think both President Biden and Secretary Blinken would agree that domestic renewal is both the most consequential and the most challenging aspect of the book for them. I don't think they would have particular heartburn about many of the recommendations I provide on how to deal with the China challenge. I worked closely with many of the figures that are populating key positions and in the Administration now. When we were all together in the Obama Administration, I suspect my thinking was influenced by those experiences. But just to be clear, I wrote the book in 2019/early 2020 before it was clear who was going to be the Democratic nominee and certainly who was going to become the next president. So, that's sort of what I was trying to get at. China poses major challenges to the United States, but unless we address our own shortcomings, China's challenges to us will end up paling in comparison.

HANNAH: Susan argues something quite similar, that looking at all of America's own political issues through the prism of China is misguided and can actually be counterproductive.

THORNTON: Now, with the Biden Administration coming off of the Trump Administration, what we see is this sort of reflection of all the problems of the United States being centered on something China has done. And I think if you're a reasonable human being, you look at that, and, probably, at the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that a lot of the problems in the United States are things that have been longstanding and are self-made and may have been exacerbated in some respects by things China has done. And some of the things China has done are not in the spirit of fair play or not in the spirit of following the rules. But at the end of the day, we can't really chalk up all our problems and insecurities we're feeling right now to China, and I think that's where we've kind of gone off track.

I also think if we look at every problem we're trying to solve through the prism of China, we will not come up with the right solutions. That's what I'm most concerned about. In the U.S. system now, there are a lot of structural obstacles to reforming and to making ourselves more competitive and to fixing a lot of the issues we have in society, whether it be with respect to our education system, our health system, immigration, all of these things. We can't directly grapple with these, and so, using China as a foil for all that is wrong with U.S. institutions, society, competitiveness, and economics, et cetera, has been something Washington has found useful and is using quite extensively, I think, in the last five years.

HANNAH: In his book, Ryan writes, “Exaggerating China's strengths creates anxiety. Anxiety generates insecurity, and insecurity leads to overreaction. And overreaction produces bad decisions which undermine America's own competitiveness. Our relationship with China is unavoidably complex and without clear precedent. We are not simply rivals as we were with the Soviets, not simply partners as we are with our European allies. Instead, we are forced to chart a new and more nuanced path in the relationship. But one thing seems clear: the relationship is not a zero sum game. There is no one side winning over the other. Rather, we must find a way to grow together.”

HASS: I think the United States and China each have their own reasons, independent of how they feel about each other, to find a way to make the relationship work. The reality is if the United States and China find themselves in conflict with each other in the future, they can right off both of their national ambitions and goals, because a war with each other would be a war that would be unwinnable, that would cause immense devastation to both, and that would basically set back and turn off any national ambitions either country had. So, it's not really a question of whether we particularly like each other. It's a question of what is in each side's interest in order to find ways to move forward.

As I look back on the U.S.-China relationship, I come to a few conclusions, one of which is that the relationship works best when both sides have a certain degree of confidence and comfort in their own future. When one side feels insecure or threatened, the relationship usually has a degree of turbulence. Another conclusion I draw as I look at the relationship is that it's really hard to find solutions to problems people in both of our countries face when we are working at cross purposes with each other, whether it's on climate change or pandemic issues. I'm not Pollyanna-ish. I think the relationship will be inherently competitive for as far out as I can see, but when we can only view the relationship through a competitive lens, I think we miss things. And we miss opportunities in ways that are harmful to people in both of our countries at the same time.

HANNAH: Thank you so much to both of our guests, Ryan Hass and Susan Thornton, for joining us.

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thank you to our producer, Caroline Gray, and our associate producer and editor, Luke Taylor. Music and mixing was done by Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s research assistants are Lucas Robinson and Alec Evans. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and catch you next time.

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