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I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
It’s part of the great narrative of American politics that Donald Trump took on China. He said China was “raping” us, they were cheating American businesses, are taking our jobs, screwing us over in deals. And one thing here, with Trump, he didn’t just talk. He actually took action.
He began a trade war. He blocked the Chinese company, Huawei. He moved towards forcing the sale of TikTok. And just fundamentally, he treated China as a threat, as a quasi enemy, not really as a partner.
And then, in 2020, whatever he says, he lost. And Joe Biden, with his more measured rhetoric, and his continuity with the Obama team, he took the White House. But he didn’t go back to the old consensus on China. He didn’t roll back Donald Trump’s policies. He went way further. He’s more measured in how he talks about China than Trump was. But the places where he isn’t, they’re more consequential — like in his repeated declarations about how far America will go in supporting Taiwan, declarations his own administration has repeatedly, now, walked back.
And it’s not just Biden. Washington, as a whole, is increasingly hawkish on China. Bills like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, they’re often framed as opposition to China. If you want to get something done in Washington today that is bipartisan, you frame it as competition with China.
Nancy Pelosi, she visited Taiwan, against the pleas of much of Washington’s foreign-policy community. There’s this dynamic, in Washington right now, where there is a lot of consensus around China, but always in the direction of getting more hawkish, more confrontational, with Beijing.
And that is not in any way to say there aren’t real reasons for that, or that Beijing doesn’t hold some responsibility for that. But it is a dynamic that needs to be named and looked at and thought about.
Jessica Chen Weiss has been trying to do that. She’s a political scientist and a China scholar at Cornell University. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as senior adviser in the Biden State Department. And she emerged from that experience really worried about what she calls, the China trap, this dynamic the U.S. and China are in that could become, maybe has become, a process of mutual escalation that is not going to be easy to break, and could make conflict a lot more likely than it needs to be.
As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Jessica Chen Weiss, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.
So I want to begin with a moment I found really remarkable. So back in May, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still fresh. It’s in full swing. Putin is global enemy number one. And Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, gives this major speech at George Washington. And he says in it, quote, “Even as President Putin’s war continues, we will remain focused on the most serious, long-term challenge to the international order. And that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China.” You worked in Biden’s State Department for a while on U.S.-China issues. When Blinken frames China as the central threat to the international order, even at a time when Russia is invading Ukraine, what does he mean?
Wow, that takes me back because I was actually in the State Department when that speech came out. And you know what it basically means is that China is increasingly influential in the international system. And it’s run by a government that has very different values from ours.
And it is — unlike Russia, which it poses an acute military threat, it’s invaded its neighbor, China has, I think, in the eyes of the administration, a much longer game. It is interested in reshaping the rules, the norms, the principles of that order to better suit and provide space for China’s authoritarian system in the international order, which has long-privileged democracies.
I think the cynical take that you’ll hear from critics inside America and outside is that we are not worried about the international order. We are worried about our own leadership or pre-eminence of it. What do you think we’re worried about?
I have to say that those cynics are probably not far off the mark. I think that it’s not a pretty fact. And I wish it were otherwise. But if you fast-forward several months, to Jake Sullivan’s speech on the eve of the rollout of the U.S. semiconductor restrictions, he talked about maintaining not a relative, but an absolute lead over China, and as large as possible of a lead.
And so I think that even though we don’t talk about it a lot, ultimately, this is about American primacy or pre-eminence, where we got used to being the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at the end of the Cold War. And I think that we’ve — are still coming to grips with the fact that, even though I think we still remain head and shoulders above many others, increasingly, the world is becoming more and more populated by other major powers, with significant influence that they would like to throw around.
And so when they talk about the rules-based international order, I think that it reflects the nostalgia for what was, and doesn’t really reflect the fact that we have, I think, really done as much as China, to undermine it in recent years, particularly under the Trump administration, with the withdrawal from certain U.N. bodies, the Paris Agreement, et cetera.
And so although this administration is back, and very much wants to be seen as a champion of the rules-based international order, as Secretary Blinken loves to call it, nonetheless, even in recent weeks, we’ve repudiated the ruling of the World Trade Organization against the Trump-era steel tariffs, and aren’t doing a whole lot — although I think there is, I think, a desire — to revitalize and modernize that international order.
I think that the scale of the investment and really the political will to do so, I think has really foundered on the shoals of political partisanship at home, and the fact that we are no longer as committed to leading internationally as we once were.
I think it’s always hard to talk in terms of the rules-based order because, as you’re gesturing towards, America often violates the rules of it. And so you can get really caught in charges of hypocrisy. But I think if you back out, what is being said here is that we are a liberal democracy. And you want the global superpower to be a liberal democracy. And China is an increasingly authoritarian and surveillance-oriented and worrying state.
So to quote Secretary Blinken, he says, in that same speech, “Under President Xi, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad. We see that in how Beijing has perfected mass surveillance within China and exported that technology to more than 80 countries, how it’s advancing unlawful Maritime claims in the South China Sea, undermining peace and security, freedom of navigation and commerce, how it’s circumventing or breaking trade rules, harming workers and companies,” and so on.
And the argument being made here is that China has become a kind of state, that it would be frightening to have them wielding too much power, that there has been a change. It’s been a change in a marked period of time, particularly under Xi. And that is why America has had to move into a more competitive or confrontational or concerned posture. Do you buy that?
There’s no question that China has become both of those things, more repressive at home and aggressive in the tactics that it’s using abroad. I think the question is, where is this leading? Where are the increasingly confrontational or competitive actions on both sides? This tit-for-tat spiral that we’re in, where is that headed?
And in my view, it’s likely to lead to a growing risk of an avoidable crisis, likely over Taiwan. And it’s likely to put increasing strain, if not paralysis, in that international system, and on the various institutions that once worked to find common solutions or regulate disputes.
And so increasingly, we’re seeing efforts to block and check — counter — China’s initiatives, which there’s a role for that. But the question is, are they in service of something that we want, that we want to create or we want to fashion? That ultimately acknowledges the reality that China is not really going anywhere. It’s going to remain influential, to a greater or lesser degree.
And so simply blocking Chinese influence can’t really be the solution. It means that we have trouble prioritizing. It means that we are often overly reactive. And it means that we aren’t really driving toward a specific destination of a positive-sum inclusive vision of the future for ourselves at home, but also in the world. What do we want it to look like in three, five, or 10 years — I’m not sure we have yet figured out what that is.
I want to talk about some of those recent policies. But I want to work our way up to them. Tell me how you would characterize the orientation towards China over the past three presidents. What did Obama do differently than what was being done before him? What did, then, Trump do differently than Obama? And what has Biden, then, done differently than Trump?
So Obama came into office, really, with the global financial crisis, roiling global markets and our own domestic economy. And it was at that time that we — first, we looked to China a little bit, to help stabilize the international system, which it did. But it also, I think, on the Chinese side, also dislodged any notion that the United States was the teacher and China the student.
And we saw, from 2008 into 2012, a Chinese Communist Party that was, even under Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, increasingly concerned and, frankly, more willing to crack down upon domestic dissent and expressions of sympathy or interest in liberal ideas that they saw as, really, imported from the outside.
And so as, I think, the Obama administration registered China’s growing — what was then often termed “assertiveness,” oftentimes in reaction to something else that took place, whether it was an incident in the East China Sea with Japan, or in the South China Sea with the Philippines, China began acting more assertively, sending ships into disputed waters regularly. And then, toward the end of the Obama administration, doing this massive reclamation in the South China Sea, and setting up militarized outposts there.
And so the Obama administration really moved, I think, more toward emphasizing deterrence, and in the so-called pivot or rebalance to Asia. But the Trump administration really took that to a whole other level. Trump’s assessment of China was that it was out to “rape” the United States, and especially after the Covid pandemic broke out, really pointed the finger at China and began to accuse China of really seeking to undermine — dominate the world and undermine democracy.
And we saw, really, the escalation of a number of punitive actions that hadn’t been taken before. First, there was the trade war, which, to some extent, settled out with a phase one trade deal, a negotiated arrangement.
But that really then, collapsed, I think, under the pressure of the pandemic, and the increasing willingness of the Trump administration to allow more hawkish voices, particularly Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and others, to really go after the Chinese Communist Party with a variety of different punitive actions — sanctions, bans. And from there, that was really, I would say, what the Biden administration inherited when it entered office.
And I would say that many people expected the Biden administration to lift some of the more unreasonable or even irrational pieces of what the Trump administration had implemented — in particular, these tariffs that were hurting many American businesses and consumers.
But I think there was a combination of political concern that doing so would be seen as too soft on China. It would make it harder to get key nominees through Congress, would give Republicans an opening to attack the administration. And there was also, I would say, a fair amount of continuity in the underlying diagnosis, that China was now the greatest strategic challenge to the United States, and our policy needed to change to reflect that.
And I think there was in, for example, in key senior officials, the belief that the policies of the past had failed. And this is — in the words of Kurt Campbell, the era of engagement was over, and that we needed something different.
And so there was, I think, a shared assessment that really meant that the Biden administration started out with a pretty tough set of policies that had been inherited from the Trump administration, and which ultimately, didn’t really change to much extent.
And then we’ve only seen, in months since, I think, the accumulation of additional efforts to do various things. I would say that there has been — they’ve been very careful to say that we are not in a Cold War, we do not seek a Cold War, we do not seek decoupling, but nonetheless are taking very systematic, tough actions, to try to protect many of the national security interests that were seen as key vulnerabilities.
And so now, here we are today with, I would say, a growing interest in at least conducting normal, diplomatic engagements with China. But I think that fundamentally, the focus on competition, I think, remains predominant, although I think the administration has been clear that we would like to cooperate with China in areas is that are in our mutual interest, ranging from climate change to infectious disease to counternarcotics.
But that cooperation, I think, in this approach, is something that’s nice to have, but not necessarily a defining feature of the strategy, which really rests on these three pillars that Secretary Blinken laid out — invest at home, align with our allies and partners, and then compete with China.
And you’ll notice that cooperation isn’t really prominent there. It’s a second — I would say almost a second-tier priority.
I think there was a view, when Biden came in — I don’t love the terms harder and softer — but that he would be a break away from Trump’s more punitive policies and rhetoric towards China, back towards something else — more engagement, more cooperation focused. I’d say that didn’t happen. I think it’s quite fair to say, his policies took what Trump did and then built on them, quite dramatically. And rhetorically, he’s not — he doesn’t say things like China’s out to “rape” us, the way Donald Trump did. But in some ways, he and his administration, in part because, I think the view is you can actually listen to what they’re saying, they say things that are more profound within the context of the relationship.
He’s made a number of comments that go far beyond what has been our more ambiguous statements on Taiwan. You have things like the Blinken speech. It’s not gentle rhetoric, by any means.
And it all comes down, I guess, to this word I hear from them all the time, when I ask them about it, which is competition. And I want to ask you about it because I think there can be two ways of understanding competition. One is that we want to make sure we can win a race. We think China has built up an amazing manufacturing capability, and we want to reinvest in domestic manufacturing.
And then there’s another thing that I think is hiding in that word sometimes, which is, it’s not winning the race; it’s making it so the other guy can’t win the race. It’s impeding or handicapping or sabotaging.
And the semiconductor rules seem like a big break point here. Can you talk a bit about what those are, and what they implied and the way that our view of China, of what we should be doing towards China, changed?
That’s a great question. And I would say, first of all, you’re right that there’s two ways to compete if you’re running a race. You could run faster or you could slow your opponent down. And I think that the semiconductor restrictions, almost explicitly in how Jake Sullivan described it, reflected a shift in understanding of the administration, that it was no longer enough simply to run faster and stay a couple of generations ahead.
We now needed to do everything we could to hold China back to a level that was to maximize our lead in doing so, and that over time, that wouldn’t necessarily be adjusted as technology progressed but would be fixed in place.
And so you might say, that’s a bet about the nature of these foundational technologies and their military applications, which has a little bit of a futuristic, sci-fi bend. But people, I think, say that, well, these chips are being used in China’s hypersonic missiles. And so it’s totally sensible that we should not be selling these chips to them.
But there are different ways to not sell advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. One is to say, you can’t sell to these entities which are known to be associated with the People’s Liberation or the Chinese military. That was the older-style, the end-user based export control system.
And this one, however, is much more sweeping. Firms need to apply for licenses to export either these advanced-node chips to China, or to export the equipment necessary to make them, and that it’s also extraterritorial. And this applies to firms anywhere in the world that use U.S. technology to do so.
And so there’s a unilateralism to these semiconductor restrictions, so far at least, that is a little bit at odds with the ostensible, multilateral emphasis of the Biden administration. I say so far, at least, because I think the administration is now very much engaged in the process of trying to get allies and partners on board, particularly Japan and the Netherlands, which are leaders in this area, to go along with, and adopt similar kinds of export controls.
But until that happens, effectively, the United States is coercing others around the world to not sell this kind of technology to China.
I want to hold on this policy for a second because to zoom out, the reason this particular policy got a lot of attention, in my view, is that it was a little bit of a crossing of a bridge. And maybe I’ll quote Clete Willems, who worked on international economic policy towards China under Trump, on this. He said to Politico, that the Biden “administration views Chinese Indigenous innovation as a per se national security threat ...
and that is a big leap from where we’ve ever been before.”
And you can take that too far. They don’t view it that way on everything. But Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, has said that they don’t just see it this way on semiconductors. They see it this way on renewable-energy technology. They see it this way on biotechnology.
And it’s true that all of these things have, or can have, either a national-security dimension — chips go in a missile — or they can become something where other countries have a dependency on Chinese production, and so China has coercive capabilities in the way that maybe Russia did with natural gas towards Europe.
But we’re really, then, saying that very, very important technologies are just intrinsically national security threats. And we are — I don’t really know how to think about this. We are really just saying, we are going to try to slow China’s technological advancement, as a country, because we think it is unsafe for us in the world if they pass us or match us in next-generation technological capabilities.
And that’s a really — I’m not saying that there’s no rationale for it. It’s just a very profound stance to take towards another country that you also are intertwined with and need to cooperate with and are not at war with.
I think you’ve put your finger on it. It is a really big shift in the way that we have regarded and treated China. And even though you might say that there are, of course, some technologies that should not be sold or transferred to China, when you start talking about green technology and biotech, we then have to wonder, OK, if you’re going to slow China down, how much are you also slowing ourselves down? And how much are you then making it harder for the world to solve the kinds of pressing challenges — climate change, cancer — that might be discovered in China? If they were discovered in China or made affordable in China, wouldn’t that be a good thing for the world?
And I would say that we’ll have to see. But I think the signs are that this is how the Biden administration sees these technologies. And even though that doesn’t extend to China’s ability to produce teddy bears or underwear, that’s still a lot of technologies that don’t have clear military purposes.
And so I’m concerned. I’m concerned about the direction of travel here. Even though, rhetorically, we reject decoupling, between the administration’s statements about future technologies that could be —
Could you say what decoupling is?
Yeah, so decoupling is basically the idea that we won’t trade with each other, that we will separate ourselves economically, financially. And I would say that most people regard — and I think I would also say that’s impossible. We are among each other’s largest trading partners.
And so it’s right to say this is not decoupling. But it is certainly moving us in that direction. And there’s a question, at what point does movement to disentangle and erect barriers between ourselves, to what extent does that have really negative repercussions for our ability to decarbonize, to solve many common challenges in health and other areas?
How does a policy like this look to China? What is it, both in terms of their direct response to the policy, and in terms of what they understand our view towards them and our relationship to them is?
These export controls, I think, served as yet another data point for Chinese analysts to say, look, the United States is out to contain China’s rise. And it will stop at very little to do so. I think that they got the message when the Trump administration used similar measures against Huawei. And it was then that they really started to stockpile and invest very heavily in making their firms effectively independent, not reliant so much on external inputs.
But Huawei’s still struggling. And so these export controls are hurting Chinese firms. But the question is, will they succeed? And the Chinese response has been, they won’t — that one of the unfortunate consequences of unilateral export controls of this nature is that they give firms around the world a huge incentive to de-Americanize their technologies so that they can continue to sell to Chinese firms.
And so experts in this area — one put the impact of these restrictions that maybe it would slow China down for a couple of years, but that they would nonetheless ultimately manage to surmount this through even greater domestic investments in R&D and in their own Indigenous innovation.
And so I think another question with these export controls is, will they even be effective? So what benefit have we gotten, at what cost?
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You wrote in a piece for Foreign Affairs that quote, “Overreacting, by framing competition with China in civilizational or ideological terms, risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington fear it already is.”
And I was thinking about that because as I’ve been doing more reporting around this question, and something I’ll hear from administration officials, is, look, China gets up in the morning, and they want to become the world’s leading superpower. And they think we stand in their way. I’m paraphrasing here.
And then basically, the next sentence is something like, and we take them seriously on that. And we are completely determined to stand in their way.
And there’s this funny way in which, to the point of your quote, it certainly seems like we might be making the other side’s fears about us truer than they would otherwise be, which then makes it more reasonable to act in these ways, which then makes the fears even truer.
I just worry about — I wonder about a cycle of turning ourselves into antagonists and how inevitable or necessary that really is.
That’s exactly the dynamic that I see taking place. And I think some would say, well, of course. There’s nothing to do about that. They couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. That’s their ambition.
And I see it a little bit differently. And in fact, many in the U.S. intelligence community don’t conclude that China is bent on global domination. So if you look at the 2022 threat assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it talks about China’s desire to become the preeminent regional power and a major global power. That’s “a,” not “the,” major global power.
And so I think that there is, unfortunately, kind of an artificial, I think, sense of certainty about China’s ultimate ambitions, because if you believe they are fixed and unchanging, then there’s no downside risk to just standing in their way because they’ve already priced that in.
But if you think, as I and many others do, that very little in Chinese politics is fixed in that system. It is one that has evolved. It has reinvented itself. It uses ideology and rhetoric, often very instrumentally. It embraced and co-opted capitalists, and then rewrote its ideology to gloss over the fact that it was doing so — that there’s a lot more domestic contestation, if you will, over what China wants. They’re not sure, exactly, what kind of international order they want. They’re not sure what costs they’re willing to pay in order to be a leader.
There have been, I think, a lot of domestic concerns about China’s overseas spending at a time when there’s still intense poverty, rampant inequality, high levels of youth unemployment, for China to be spending that overseas and rather than on bettering the lives of China’s own people. It means that there’s these unresolved debates within China over what China wants.
Now, certainly, the Chinese Communist Party wants security, and feels, I think, mortally threatened by the more intrusive, liberal — the universalism of liberal values. And so they do want to reshape the international order to privilege the state over the political rights of individuals. But that’s different from saying they need to or want to upend the international order, necessarily, replace the United States as the sole global superpower.
You were in the administration for a while on these issues. And I think it’s fair to say you’re more on the dovish side of these questions. My instincts tend to put me there.
But the people we’re talking about — Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and so on — they’re not people who hate peace or are unaware of these dynamics in which more hostile policy towards China is going to make China more hostile towards us. And as China continues to rise in power, there’s going to be more hostility between the two countries, and that’s a dangerous thing.
So they clearly believe this to be truly important. And you’ll hear them say things like, this is a defining decade. This is a decade in which the terms of our relationship and competition with each other will be profoundly set. So what is it that you would hear, inside or outside, as the counterargument to this?
Their kind of argument would be that we tried. The Obama administration tried very hard to engage China, to bring it into the international system. And look what happened. They militarized the South China Sea. They stole our intellectual property. And really, there’s no good-faith effort on their side. So even if we wanted to, they’re bent on taking advantage of the kind of privileges that have been afforded to them, and the access that they have had.
And I would say that there’s bad faith and a lot of mistrust, or I would say mutual suspicions, on both sides, and that even though that history can’t be redone, nonetheless, the bet all along, I think, was that having China on the inside of these institutions was better than having China on the outside of them. And that even though China is no longer liberalizing, we still have to figure out how to live with one another.
And so the alternative, which is to simply continue this tit-for-tat struggle with one another, is really leading in a direction that will ultimately be at enormous cost to not only our economic interests, but also our values, as we basically make common cause with whoever around the world that might stand with us against China.
What do we actually want? Because there is a realism here, in all these speeches. People understand, they say they know. China is powerful. It is large. It is becoming more so. And so there’s no real world here, where China is not, as it already is to some degree, a central superpower.
It’s not 100 percent clear to me, then, what the stated endgame is. Do you feel like you have a better sense of that?
Not only do I not have a better sense of it, but I think that there’s real resistance to even defining it. Because history, of course, doesn’t end. And it’s difficult to look five, 10 years down the pike, when I think many people are, today, motivated by the sense — this urgent need to counter whatever it is that pops up on the radar, that China is doing here, there, or the other place.
And so I think that it’s difficult. I think there’s a recognition that unbounded competition, without guardrails, as the administration likes to put it, that’s not a good place to be. So we have the rhetoric of, we need to manage this competition responsibly.
But what does that mean and where is it going? I don’t think that there’s a clear vision, unfortunately. And it’s really not on one administration, I think, to put that forward. This has to be something that is more broadly bought into because given the nature of American politics, I think that there’s an unfortunate tendency to not want to stick out one’s neck when more measured, pragmatic policy is just going to invite an investigation, which we may well see, as the House stands up it’s its new select committee on China.
To draw out another political or geopolitical argument that I think has become influential, one thing you’ll hear is that there is an ineluctable tension between a world safe for liberal democracies and a world safe for authoritarian or autocratic regimes, and that there’s no real plausible coexistence there because the two are just always in conflict.
The very things that a liberal democracy is doing and supporting and pushing are a threat to the stability of autocratic regimes, the freedom of speech, the lack of domestic surveillance, political rights, political liberalization and vice versa.
And so the reason we have such an interest, here, in China’s rise, or in curbing it, is because we are trying to make the world safe for ourselves and for political systems like ours, and that if China becomes powerful enough, they’ll use economic coercion, video surveillance and so on, not because, necessarily, they’re expansionistic, but because they are just trying to protect themselves from the threat of liberalism. How do you take that argument?
So I’m very much of the view that a world safe for democracy could also be a world safe for autocracy, so long as it’s one that reinforces the sovereignty norms at the heart of the U.N. Charter, which is noninterference in others’ affairs.
Now, what does that mean in practice? I think it basically means that both the United States and China would have to curb some of the extraterritorial infringements that we’re seeing today, whether that’s Chinese influence efforts abroad, and supporting candidates or intimidating dissent, or it might mean reining in the scope of American sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials for things that they have done inside their borders, for example.
I think that the question here is, will defining this competition as one between systems alleviate or make that competition more intense. And here, I think there’s a concern that if China concludes that the United States is indeed unwilling to coexist with China, so long as it remains authoritarian, that it will only take more and more aggressive actions to delegitimize and potentially destabilize democracy.
Now, I’m not a Russia expert. But my understanding, from talking to colleagues who are, is that the Russian interference efforts were, at least in Moscow, conceived of as retaliation for U.S. efforts to support democracy in Russia and its near abroad.
And so I worry that we are at the beginning stages of an escalating ideological competition, where the United States and China no longer remain chiefly interested in defending our respective systems but are, in fact, as the United States and Soviet Union were during the Cold War, engaged in going around the world, meddling in various places to put our thumb on the ledger in order to counter the perceived influence of our geopolitical rival.
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One of the scenarios that emerges, when people are afraid of this, is Taiwan. And you hear, again, different incarnations of this scenario. One is that China gets stronger and decides it’s time to take Taiwan by force. Another is that China is getting weaker and worries that the window is closing to take Taiwan.
But there’s a real fear that what happened with Russia and Ukraine will happen with China and Taiwan. And America’s become more committed. And things Joe Biden says — we say our policy hasn’t changed, but he’s been much more explicit about our intention to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion effort. How do you think about the flash point of Taiwan?
So I would say that there are a lot of pressures on the status quo, which has really served all parties, Beijing, Taiwan and the United States, pretty well for decades. But it is under, I would say, unprecedented pressure.
And the status quo, really, is that Taiwan is a self-governing democracy. But it doesn’t enjoy formal, legal, international recognition. And one of the sources of pressure on this are, I think, to some extent, it is China’s growing military capabilities, which make it a little bit less credible that the United States would be able to hold off China if it were to decide to invade.
That said, it would still be extremely costly, very difficult, for the Chinese military to take the island easily, just given geography. It’s a very tough target. And I would say that other changes, I think equally significant, are, first, Taiwan’s democratization and evolution, over generations, of a more independent, so-called naturally independent Taiwanese political identity that wants very little to do with mainland China.
And the experience of watching the crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic freedoms have really made the so-called one country, two systems model that China has offered, as the way that Taiwan would be governed after unification, really a nonstarter among the Taiwan public, as well as Taiwan’s political leaders.
And so what we have now, I would say, is a very eroding status quo, which for the U.S. part, I think, has also become a little bit hard to explain, especially as the desire to stand up to China, I think, takes hold. And in particular, Taiwan is this —
there’s a moral piece here that Taiwan is a vibrant democracy worth defending.
But that ultimately has the effect of destabilizing this equilibrium that has held for so many years because part of what has made this work for so long was that leaders in Beijing could continue to tell themselves that there is a prospect for peaceful unification, and that the United States would not necessarily stand in the way of that.
But increasingly, as you have the United States doing things with Taiwan that look like, to Beijing, a restoration of the defensive alliance, a formal relationship that the United States once had with Taiwan, before the switch in diplomatic recognition at the end of the 1970s, that secular improvement in U.S.-Taiwan relations looks, in Beijing, like a steady march toward Taiwan’s permanent separation or even, eventually, formal independence.
And I would say that you have, even in the United States, former officials — you have Secretary Mike Pompeo even calling for Taiwan to be recognized by the United States as an independent and sovereign country.
And so politics here, I think the more public attention we have to this issue, it’s become increasingly difficult to pursue and uphold this very — really ambiguous status for Taiwan that has maintained and been the secret to peace and stability for all these decades.
10 or 15 years ago, it was very clear what we were doing and what we hoped would happen. So we were bringing China into the global economic and political system. And we were hoping they would liberalize, hoping that either the Chinese Communist Party would become some kind of more democratic institution, or other things would arise.
But there’s a view that if you get China richer and more integrated, that there would be an inevitable demand for an opening up. And so you’d have a country more on the path to being some kind of more liberal, more democratic state.
I think some of the turn, as we’ve discussed, is almost like a spurned-lover dynamic in Washington, which is not meant to dismiss it, but a real that proved truly wrong. If anything discredited neoliberalism and a whole era of policy making, it was that, and a feeling that maybe this was not good, frankly, for the American economy either, that we lost a lot of manufacturing towns and opened up space for populist authoritarians like Trump.
And so in that space, there’s not really a lot of vision right now of what we should want. If you were writing out that vision, what should it be? If you take China’s form a little bit for granted, the Chinese Communist Party and so on, what is it that we should want and be striving for?
So that’s a great question. And I think that we have to start here, at home, with a more realistic assessment of what it is that we can do in the world, and who it is that we want to be at home, and what will enable us to be as competitive, if you will, going into the future, regardless of what shape that international order looks like.
And so in particular here, I think that there’s a lot of good words, something that — for the free and open, secure and sustainable, inclusive. Right? There are all these words. They’re great ones. But what does that mean in practice?
Right now, I fear that the kinds of policies that we are adopting to ostensibly protect what we make and innovate here at home are actually smothering innovation and discouraging international investment and talent from coming and remaining here in the United States.
A recent survey by the Asian American Scholar Forum found that 60 percent of Chinese-born scientists who are working in the United States, including naturalized citizens and permanent residents, are considering leaving the United States to work elsewhere, in maybe Europe or Canada, because of this combination of xenophobia, anti-Asian attacks, but also policy efforts to protect research security.
And it’s not just Asian American scientists. It’s also international scientists generally, who in a survey by American Physical Society, found similarly shockingly-high levels. 40 percent felt that the United States was no longer a welcoming environment for science and innovation.
And so to me, we have to start with, who do we want to be at home. And then how can we be true to our principles? When we talk about freedom from coercion, how do we really, truly, work with our allies and partners, rather than twisting their arms, whether it’s on export controls or when we think about, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act and the buy American requirements. We are introducing these frictions that I think makes it difficult to lead inclusively with as broad a coalition as possible.
I think we should also stop drawing artificial barriers between autocracies and democracies, recognizing that we, ourselves, are going through a moment here at home. Of course, the Biden administration acknowledges this. But nonetheless, by still describing it as that kind of a world, where you have one system pitted against another, you make it harder to work with countries of all stripes on common challenges, including improvements in domestic governance and responsibility.
And so I think that what our vision ought to be is one where the United States still engages with the world, knowing that what happens overseas doesn’t stay overseas, that we can’t simply wall ourselves off, and that actually, being much more principled about how it is that we work with the world, that that has been the hallmark of American competitiveness, these principles, legal framework, a consistent framework, rather than a society where the taint of something Chinese is enough to decide that we want nothing to do with it.
So with Virginia Governor Youngkin pulling out of consideration for the Ford battery plant because there was a Chinese investor involved, that kind of knee-jerk reactiveness, I think, is the antithesis of the forward-looking, really pragmatic, results-based policy making that I’d like to see us able to recapture.
And so on other issues, I think there’s — human rights, for example. I think that’s an issue where we want to be leading. It’s, of course, difficult to be leading when we have committed such atrocities ourselves. But nonetheless, I think that there’s a way to do so, just recognizing that our ability to transform other societies and to nudge, by hook or by crook, other governments in this direction, is rather limited.
And so we need to, I think, prioritize more — how do we use our resources in a way to support, not only democracy here at home, but those who already committed to democracy abroad, without, at the same time, really feeding the insecurities of authoritarian governments elsewhere. Because as I think we discussed earlier, there’s a concern that the more pressure we place on authoritarian governments elsewhere, the more they will, in turn, try to undermine our democratic freedoms. And that’s the spiral that I think is most important that we arrest, alongside, of course, the potential conflict over Taiwan.
I think that’s a good place to end. So as always, our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
The first is a book by my colleague and co-author, Jeremy Wallace, about China. It’s called “Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology and Authoritarianism in China.”
And it really is about the sources of domestic contestation and evolution of what the Chinese Communist Party has been, how a revolutionary communist party came to embrace G.D.P. statistics as its measure of legitimacy, and how once those numbers didn’t quite add up, how, under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has embraced a neo-political turn to legitimize their continued rule.
The second book I’d recommend is a work of fiction by Celeste Ng. It’s called, “Our Missing Hearts.” And it’s really a cautionary tale about many of the, I think, unfortunately, real dynamics that we’re already seeing and a combination of concerns about the protection of American culture and traditions and what is being taught in schools, along with the dose of suspicion of anything of Asian or Chinese origin, and family-separation policies, which are unfortunately part of our history and our present.
And so this is really a cautionary tale about what our society could become if we let this instinct to counter or protect ourselves against anything that might smack of having Chinese influence dialed up to 100, what that could do to us and our democracy.
And finally, the last book I’ll recommend is a book by my very good friend, Valarie Kaur, called “See No Stranger.” And if one of the challenges that we have here is overcoming the very deep divisions here in our society, to figure out what is that affirmative vision, that future that we want to create, her book, I think, provides a road map to looking beyond the many things that divide us, to thinking about what unites us, and taking in, always, at the forefront, our collective humanity, not just here at home, but what that could look like, and envisioning what could coexistence look like.
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Jessica Chen Weiss, thank you very much.
Thanks so much. It’s been great to be here.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing and original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Carole Sabouraud and Kristina Samulewski.
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