Another China Is Possible

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rana, thank you for joining me, and for the wonderful essay you wrote for our May/June issue, “The Once and Future China.”

RANA MITTER

Many thanks indeed, Dan. It’s a huge pleasure to be here on the podcast, and always a huge pleasure to be able to engage with that amazing readership that Foreign Affairs always has.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, it’s our pleasure as well. Let’s talk a bit about that essay. You’re a historian, of course, but one thing that is so striking in your writing is your fairly unique ability to show how memories of the past and changing narratives of the past shape the present, and also how an understanding of that past should shape our thinking about the future—that’s not to say predictive, but to understand the forces that will define it, and to understand really the range of possibilities in that future is typically wider than we think in the present. So I want to go back and look at how we thought about China for the couple of decades in which, I think, both of us came of professional age, at least, and started paying attention to these issues.

At that time, most Western policymakers and analysts, at least as the trope now holds, but also many people in China, I think, expected that the indefinite continuation of the liberalization, of reform and opening, that characterized the 1990s and 2000s in China would continue. And the simplistic version of that is that we expected China, nudged along by diplomatic and economic engagement with the United States and the West more generally, would become more and more like us, and that that would really mitigate the sense of threat or danger from a powerful China. How, as you look back, do you see those supposed delusions of that period? And are there lessons in the mistake to the extent that you agree it was in fact a mistake?

RANA MITTER

Dan, such an interesting question with a lot of complexity. If you had to choose a shorthand these days, a lot of people would say, “Well, look, 20, 25 years ago we thought China was going to liberalize. It didn’t liberalize, and therefore, in a sense, we’d been cheated out of what we should have expected as an almost inevitable global outcome.” I want to point to one specific thing where that analysis may have gone wrong for those who perhaps weren’t looking as closely as they might’ve done. So let’s go back all that way back to the 1990s. At that point, China was struggling, I would say, back into the international community. We have to remember that 1989, the killings in Tiananmen Square, 4th of June, 1989; that was still very much in popular consciousness in the wider world. And in a sense, much of the early-to-mid-1990s was China trying to get back in the international community and move past what was still regarded as a bloodstain, really, on China’s international reputation.

So a few things happened during those years to bring China back to the center of international society, you might say. One that we’ve forgotten now, but mid 1990s—1995—was the UN International Women’s Conference. I think that was the first big international event that was held in the mid 1990s. Also, China, of course, famously won the right to the 2008 Olympics. That was a little later, in 2001. But through much the late 1990s also, the moves to get China into the World Trade Organization. Those were happening as well. So there were moves in that direction. That’s largely about what the outside world, particularly the United States, was thinking of doing. But let’s look at one particular argument that was happening inside China itself. And I would say that if you had to look at the Chinese elite, and the way in which they looked to role model countries, places that they really wanted to learn from, it wasn’t even then so much the United States. Of course the United States was there as a trading partner. There was even a sense that with some issues like privatization of many of the state-owned enterprises that the United States could provide useful input.

But actually it was Singapore that a lot of those people looked to as a place that, on the one hand, yes, had learned to open up to the international market economy, and of course, was freer and more open than it had been in a previous period, perhaps in the 1960s or 1970s, but where there was also still quite a strong strand of people essentially taking top-down governance—if you want to be a little bit pointy, you could call it an authoritarian streak; there are some people in Singapore who wouldn’t disagree with that even then, or now. And I think it was indicative that that interest in Singapore, as opposed to the United States, from China’s elite really gave the direction of travel.

Whether or not China was going to become a fully liberalized state was not really so much the agenda, more the question of how far it would be able to balance the continued rule of one major party that would stay in charge while allowing space for civil society to emerge. And I think that a lot of people in western Europe and North America fail to appreciate why that difference actually turned China onto a rather different pathway. And I think looking on from that point is really where we should be looking today to understand if we look at the question of what changed rather than what went wrong, where that change came from. In other words, how to create perhaps a state that was authoritarian, but might’ve had more space for free discussion than has been the case, certainly in the last few years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you look at the change in the debate in the United States and western Europe, so much came with the early years of Xi Jinping, in the sense that he had really changed the direction of China that had been on one path, both in its domestic policy and its foreign policy, and that this brash, strongman leader comes in 2012 and suddenly changes everything. Obviously, I’m overstating that purposely, but to what extent do you see Xi Jinping as a meaningful turning point? Or is that a fixation of the West that misses deeper forces and in some ways is an overcorrection of the mistakes of those earlier years in our own debate about China?

RANA MITTER

So Dan, I’d say that the rise of Xi Jinping is both important in its own right, just as the rise of Donald Trump obviously is in the United States, but it’d be wrong to ignore the underlying factors. Let’s just deal with the reasons why we should take Xi Jinping seriously. He’s not just a phenomenon that comes from a wider context. He’s actually someone who essentially, like a lot of the strongman-type leaders who’ve emerged in the last few years, helped to craft his own path to the top. It’s worth noting that, in one sense, his pathway is something that has become typical of the bigger story that we hear in China now. In a sense, he came of age in some of the go-go, economically strong provinces of China, Zhejiang in particular, where he was able to put together what in retrospect looks like the kind of recipe that China is now, I think, really pushing harder in terms of its future economic development. In other words, the idea that yes, you get foreign direct investment, but you use it to develop a very strong indigenous production capacity. It’s not so much just about opening up to the outside world. It’s more about making sure that you actually build self-sufficiency on your own terms. And actually again, not so different from an awful lot of what we hear now in the United States from Donald Trump and those around him.

But having said that, I think that there is a reason that it became more plausible, more of a narrative that makes sense, for Xi Jinping to rise to the top. And that did happen before he actually came to office. The big event, I think, is 2008, and the global financial crisis. When we look around what’s happening at that point, we actually see that many of the significant Chinese leaders at the time made it very clear that they regarded the near collapse of the Washington consensus, the Western-driven economic system as something that vindicated China.

There’s a famous quote, or at least a quote that’s been attributed to the then Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, saying to Hank Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, formerly of Goldman Sachs, very well-known figure in China, even today, and saying to him words to the effect of, “Hank, you used to be our teacher, but what is it we have to learn from you now?” And if you look at the path that China took at that stage, it was, of course, one in which essentially the creation of huge amounts of capital, huge amounts of investment, which essentially led to what people now tend to point to when they look at China today: the skyscrapers, the high-speed rail, the highways all over the place. I’m thinking, actually, of an article Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times just a few weeks ago, in which he visited China quite recently and said words to the effect of, “If you want to find a futuristic country, it’s not necessarily the United States; it’s now China.” Well, all of that emerges really, I think, in the pushing of so much investment into infrastructure after 2008.

But it also did something politically, I think, at that time. It made China more confident of its own pathway, the idea that essentially it could draw on its own resources when it came to scientific and technological development. And of course while in the Western world it’s often stated with understandable anger that key intellectual property, technology, IP, and so forth is being either taken or stolen by China to use, it’s often underestimated how much China’s technological development actually emerged from that period in the early 2010s, during the financial crisis and aftermath, when something like 2.4 percent of China’s GDP was being put, year-on-year, into R & D, into training STEMs—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—graduates, who in sheer quantity would then people the research institutes, universities, and private companies that underpin that technological change. Or, of course, in developing China’s internal single market. The phenomenon you see now, when you go to China, of essentially getting out your smartphone and everything you do is paid for on there is the production of an electronic virtual single market that really takes off in those years of the 2008, 2010s period.

Now your question was about Xi Jinping, but I would say that the Xi Jinping that we see today couldn’t really exist in that form without that underpinning of a society which has moved essentially online, whose purchasing, of course, underpins the consumer boom that was running in China for much of the period until COVID, when the West was having to go into austerity. But at the same time also providing the data, the surveillance capacity that actually blurs that line between civilian, government, military, that Xi Jinping’s China has been able to turn into a highly efficient surveillance society.

So Xi Jinping and his personality and his desire essentially to create what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people,” of course without that, without the shift from a more collective leadership that you had and his predecessors, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, to something much more personalistic, you wouldn’t have the flavor of leadership you have now, but the technology, the economics, the geopolitics underpins it too.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the last, I’d say, ten years, the narrative in the U.S. policy discussion has shifted almost 180 degrees, and we now look at Xi Jinping and project forward to a China that is implacably bent on displacing the United States and taking Taiwan and dominating the South China Sea and remaking the global economy and everything else. As you’ve watched that shift happen, what do you think is right in that change narrative, and where do you think it has overcorrected or gone wrong?

RANA MITTER

Well, the first thing I’d say briefly, Dan, before answering your question properly, is that the article, which you very kindly mentioned, in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, starts with a cautionary tale, which is pointing out that in the last 100, 120 years, the one thing that will almost get you to a wrong prediction is to take any set point in China’s past or present, and just extrapolate in the straight line ten or 20 years out for where you are now, because China has an infinite capacity to surprise you in terms of where it goes next.

But that having been said, I think it’s fair to say there are certain things we can see now that look as if they are continuing trends. First of all, it’s clearly the case that China under Xi Jinping is becoming more ambitious and more confident about its capacity to be a changemaker in its own right. In other words, although there’s clearly a large extent to which it regards the United States, evidently as its only peer competitor, and competition with the United States in a wider sense as something that still very much motivates the Chinese elite, trying to reshape the wider Chinese world, and certainly Asia more broadly speaking, which it regards very much as its core, and in its own terms, rightful sphere of influence, that’s something that China today, and certainly in the last five to ten years, has become much more confident and straightforward about saying that it essentially wants to reshape.

So what would that mean in practice? Well, first of all, let’s take Taiwan head-on, because that is, I think, one of the questions that is not only most current, but also one of the ones where there’s the most ambiguity and speculation. Most analysts, including in Taiwan itself, think that the prospect of an all-out military invasion as a fulfillment of Xi Jinping’s desire for unification is still not the most likely immediate outcome, the reasons being, in the end, around it being a very, very high-risk venture, though not impossible by any means. I think that if the United States continues to maintain a firm position, a quite traditional position, that the maintenance, at the very least, of the status quo of Taiwan, its autonomy, very different from its independence—it’s important to differentiate those two terms—to maintain that separation from the mainland with American support, then I think that the status quo is likely to continue for quite some time to come because essentially the danger to China of provoking a war with the United States or some kind of conflict, I think, would regard it as a risk too far, even though China would clearly find that an extremely anger-provoking situation, and would no doubt ramp up the rhetoric about how the eventual reunification of Taiwan has to be considered the end point.

I will note that actually within the last few days, at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was there making a pretty unequivocal, very clear, in some ways quite traditional, statement of U.S. commitment to supporting the defense of Taiwan. But supposing that were to change, if there were a wider perception in Taiwan society that actually the American assurance—they use that word because, unlike with Japan, it’s not a guarantee; clearly there’s no formalized statement that the United States would come to Taiwan’s aid—that could rattle minds, that could make people much less certain about what the outcome might be. Now that is certainly something that would suit the overall aims of China at the moment, since clearly it is the case that, in a broad sense, unifying Taiwan is one of the list of goals that, certainly before 2049, which would be the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, would be a key goal.

But it has to be weighed up in the context of the other things that are happening at the moment, in particular, the fact that the Chinese economy remains sluggish, and that while nobody has a magic bullet, or an obvious way simply to switch the economic growth on again, the engendering of a major, or even a minor, conflict around Taiwan, or any of the other parts of Asia that has China at the heart of it, is I think a pretty sure recipe, actually, for economic turmoil and a downturn, a further downturn, for the Chinese economy. So I think there’s a question of salience: Which of these goals is likely to be more important for consolidating the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party, which they’re very, very keen to maintain as long as possible? And does pushing on Taiwan really help that goal at the moment? At the moment, I don’t think it’s absolutely obvious that it does.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You beat me to referencing the wonderful essay in our current issue, when you made that point that projecting forward 20 years has never been a reliable way to understand China’s future. One of the key arguments of that essay is that “another China remains possible"—I think I’m quoting you directly there—that you can imagine a course in which China tacks in a different direction once again and becomes a slightly more moderate version of itself. That’s not to say a complete transformation. What would that more moderate course look like? What would the signs be that we’re getting there? And where would that leave us as we approach 2049?

RANA MITTER

One of the things that might be possible with a China that essentially keeps the same system, which I think it is likely to do for quite some time to come, but which moderates its behavior is its sense of comfort in the world. One of the things that I think has led China to feel that it’s had to reach for a really quite sharply authoritarian turn, even in its own context, in the last five to ten years is the feeling of the outside world being essentially a place which isn’t friendly to China’s interest. Now, that may be a misleading feeling, but China’s long history of being invaded and occupied for much of the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries still sit as a sort of collective historical consciousness on the minds of elite policymakers. But it is the case, and this is not necessarily a course for rejoicing for liberals around the world, but it is the case that so far the tenor of the world in general has moved towards a relatively more authoritarian and communitarian feel in terms of politics around the world. It’s true in much of western Europe, it’s true in the United States, it’s true in India, it’s true in other places, which remain electoral democracies, but where it’s fair to say that a more populist, less pluralist view of politics is more widespread, along, as it happens, with a much stronger feeling around the world—and this is certainly true in the United States—that maybe interference in the politics of other countries actually shouldn’t be a key goal of a liberal world which is becoming less liberal.

I think, if that trend continues—and in the hours that I’m speaking to you, we’ve just heard results from Poland that Poland has, by a small margin, elected again a president who comes from the more national conservative strand, as opposed to liberal strand of political thinking. So in the case of China, I suspect the sense that there is a world emerging that is more suited to China’s account of itself in the world, which is that what really matters is a kind of economic well-being; that doesn’t really pay that much attention to individual civil liberties; that’s very much about collective good over individual good; and where essentially the relationship between major powers should be somewhat economic and relatively transactional, even though there’s this sort of wider collective good of humankind that is painted as a sort of overall message behind it.

So I think that that sort of trend of world politics is something that China will find quite amenable. But I do say in the essay that you’ve mentioned, actually, there’s another issue that I think is likely to be more controversial around the world, and where I think China will be looking to push its advantage quite hard. Because it’s one thing to say that we live in a transactional world; we keep hearing it, and it’s almost become a cliché in recent weeks and months. But actually, I think China wants more than that. China wants to portray itself as a moral actor in the world without embracing liberal values. And I think that the way that it’s going to do it is through a story about energy. It looks at the abandonment by the United States, in its current administration, of the idea that green energy is a global public good. The Biden administration did put that forward very strongly. The current administration was elected, clearly, on the basis that actually they wanted to push back very strongly against that global narrative. But China hasn’t abandoned it at all. In economic terms, it already has, as I think is well known, a really strong dominance, if not necessarily a monopoly, on solar, wind, and indeed actually also in some aspects of nuclear technology, which is the other element of non-fossil fuel technology that looks likely to have grown in the next few years. And I think we can already see, and we might see more of, a story that China tells, particularly in the global South, about how it’s the green energy superpower, and that this is a moral good, as well as an economic good.

Now, you and I can pick a lot of holes in this argument, not least the fact that China is putting out huge amounts of carbon and fossil fuel–derived gases into the atmosphere, along with India, the EU, and the United States, to be fair. But the point here is not about the facts and figures; it’s about the narrative. And I think that that’s something that China will use as a way of portraying itself as a moral actor in the world. That will then, I think, combine in terms of that sense of what kind of state China’s going to be, with where I think it has a chance of ending up, with a version of what we did see in the 1990s: a state that’s firmly under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, still firmly authoritarian, locking up lawyers, political prisoners, all that sort of thing, that’s still all going to be there. But with more space for a civil society that allows some space for discussion on issues that are not directly about the rule of the Communist Party itself.

I think that might happen for a couple of reasons. One is that, as I say, China may feel more comfortable in the world that’s emerging. But also, there’ll be a new leadership cadre coming to power: the people known as the qiling hou, baling hou, jiuling hou, the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s kids. Xi Jinping is the last top leader who will have come of age during the Cultural Revolution, for him, a very traumatic Cultural Revolution, in which he was sent into exile in the Chinese countryside for many years, and took a long time to get back to Beijing and to anything that even looked vaguely like power. But although he may go on with extra term limits, the other leadership will be retiring in their 60s and 70s, almost certainly in the way that has happened in previous generations. And the people coming up through the system are people who grew up in that period in the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States, and the Western world may not have been best friends with China, but were seen as the occasion for opportunity. There was relative openness. Students were going in both directions, and they will I think, be shaped by those memories, not to turn China into an alternative version of America, which I don’t think will happen—I don’t think many Chinese actually want that to happen—but rather to understand that a more open society, as opposed to one that is fully open and liberal, will have benefits for China in the 2020s and 2030s to come.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Your point about this more illiberal world being more congenial, more friendlier, towards China is quite fascinating. I was in the audience when Pete Hegseth was speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue last week, and he, on the one hand, was very vociferous in denouncing Communist China and its activities in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, but he did also say quite forcefully that the United States was not there to lecture Asian countries about their own domestic systems. And you can imagine kinds of accommodation that would be harder under previous administrations than might be under this one.

But I want to press you on one point because I think if you go back to earlier periods in Chinese history, to the first half of the twentieth century, a period that I’ve written about and you’ve written about, there was more speculation about a form of democracy emerging in China, kind of a democracy with Chinese characteristics. Why is that so far-fetched? Why do you not see any prospect of a real democratic emerging? I know that sounds fantastical, but there was a tradition of this thinking in China in earlier eras.

RANA MITTER

Absolutely, and I don’t think it’s impossible at all. But I think the form of democracy is likely to be something that doesn’t look anything like the form that has emerged in much of western Europe and, of course, in the United States over the centuries. So I do think history is useful here. And I find myself in a small group of, what you might call “constitutional nerds,” who look back at an event that’s not well-remembered outside China: the discussions in 1946 and 1947, in the last days of the old nationalist (or Kuomintang) regime of Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese mainland. The Chinese Civil War, as many of your listeners will know, essentially consumed China pretty much in flames. And at the end of that war in 1949, the nationalists fled to Taiwan, never to return, and the Communists took over the mainland. That meant that the discussions over a Chinese constitution at that time in 1946 and 1947 were perhaps eclipsed obviously by the events of the war. But they were absolutely fascinating because they involved really deep and very serious discussions over months and months about what it would mean to take China from essentially a pretty authoritarian dictatorship, which the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek really was, to something that would not be an American-style multiparty democracy immediately, but would incorporate elements of multiparty democracy while also allowing a leading party, a vanguard party, as they might have said at that time, to maintain overall control in various ways. And essentially even the way that they did it was to arrange the national assembly in such a way that there would always be other parties elected, but they would not be allowed to actually dominate the assembly. Then there were questions about whether the president should have certain types of veto power, and how that would work with the legislature.

An adapted version of that system actually works in Taiwan today, which of course was completely democratized since the 1980s and 1990s, but drew on that 1946 constitution.

Now at that time, lots of China’s political thinkers, including some who are red in the mainland today, like the philosopher Liang Shu-ming, who is often nicknamed “China’s last Confucian”—a book by the historian Guy Alitto used that title about him. That makes him sound a bit like an old fashioned guy with a long beard and a robe. But in fact, he was in many ways a very modern thinker. Liang Shu-ming believed that China would have to adapt to the modern world, but he was very adamant that it must have a system that didn’t just draw from the outside world, but drew on China’s indigenous traditions. And he saw a combination of that type of drawing on Confucian thinking along with the systems that might emerge from understanding how democratic authorities work also as potentially very productive.

Because for a very long time we, in the liberal world—I’m using the word advisedly here—tended to think that either countries would be full scale, multiparty democracies, free press, free media, all of that, or they were dictatorships, and that in between wasn’t really a plausible alternative. I think in this world where, as we were saying, we now see that there are illiberal alternatives between pure liberal democracy—not very many of those left perhaps—and the world of pure authoritarianism, that perhaps that space would emerge in that context for a wider and more open discussion. So I think that those sorts of discussions are visible in China. And indeed you could see them even ten or 12 years ago, when people discussed constitutionalism, how places like Singapore that I’d mentioned before, which we’ve just come back from, of course might be used as role models for that intermediate process, those discussions are not happening openly in China now, as far as one can tell. The political atmosphere is essentially too topped out at the moment for that to be the case. But my sense is that, in an ironic, paradoxical way, the turn towards a more illiberal world might make China more comfortable in following those discussions.

I’ve got an essay coming out in volume that will be out actually, free, open-access, edited by Hal Brands, a historian and analyst who we both know very well, on U.S.-China relations. And the term that I’ve put forward in terms of the future of U.S.-China relations, at least the next few years, is what I’ve called “competitive anti-liberalism.” Because essentially, one of the ways in which I think that geopolitics is going to develop in the next few years, is the way in which the United States, as an electoral democracy, but one that’s chosen actually not to promote liberal values, and actually in some ways to actually say that liberal values are the problem, up against the clearly authoritarian Chinese Communist Party, which has, for very obvious internal reasons, really pushed back against liberalism for years and years, if not decades and decades, is a very interesting competition. Previously to this, we’ve always had an ostensibly liberal hegemon in the world that actually has chosen, whether it’s Republican or Democratic administrations, to push the idea that some broadly pluralist idea was the right way for societies to go. And I think in a way that the current administration wouldn’t push back from, those are not the ways in which the current administration is choosing to define itself in terms of America and the world.

And I think the competition between two anti-liberal hegemons, one democratic and one authoritarian, is something that we have not seen for a very long time. So that competitive anti-liberalism is something that I think is going to be the framework within which China and the United States will compete for quite some time to come. And it may be the things like constitutional discussions within China might yet reflect that idea of changing government but not necessarily in a liberal direction, in fact, in some ways an actively anti-liberal direction.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a fascinating way of thinking of the dynamic between the United States and China. Let me stick with that theme for a moment. You say very clearly in the recent essay that external factors will be secondary in shaping change within China, even though we can be sure that change will come. When you look at U.S. policy options going forward, what beyond the changes we’ve seen under Trump already would facilitate positive change in China and what would inhibit it? To the extent that those external factors do play into it, what’s likely to push it in the wrong or right direction from a U.S. perspective?

RANA MITTER

I continue to think that a China that feels that it’s not under threat is more likely to undergo significant internal political change. And there again, I’d refer to things like the new generation coming up through the leadership, which is likely to have, at least in its younger days, to have had a closer relationship with the Western world, and feel at least a little more inclined to engage with them. I think that there are some red lines on that, and I think that any kind of aggressive move against Taiwan would certainly be bad for the United States, but it would also be bad for China, in fact, in terms of its overall outcomes, and I think it wouldn’t work out well. But if we can maintain a situation, and it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of the great powers of the world to maintain essentially a status quo in East Asia at the moment, around the South China Sea, Taiwan, but also acknowledging that China continuing to develop its middle class, to continue to provide some economic stability for its huge population is internally a legitimate goal, and one that it’s entitled to seek to undertake.

That strikes me as being the light clearest good outcome for the United States and the Western world. Why? Because that China is a China that will essentially still be a country with which significant amounts of international trade can be done. That trade will not be in high quality electronics, of course, it’s not going to be in terms of highly national security sensitive areas, but it will still be a large part of the immense global trade of which the United States and China still provide two of the major actors. I think it’s also likely to provide necessary and useful competition in the energy sector. We are now in a world where the global South is beginning to really make its presence felt. It’s made it clear that its challenge to both the United States and China is to try and solve one of the biggest and most fundamental problems of the 2020s and 2030s, which is, how can the emergent middle class of those global South countries, and sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America thrive, grow, undertake the life choices that the rest of us have been able to make in the global North, but do so in a way that involves abundant energy that does not contribute to further global planetary decline?

Because so many of those countries are the ones that are on the front line of climate change and issues that surround that, it is clear that regardless of what the United and China think about this, they’re going to be challenged repeatedly. And actually, we know that in those sorts of areas, competition tends to be good. Competition in terms of trying to get the most nuclear weapons, or to get into an arms race isn’t always a particularly happy outcome. In terms of trying to provide a global public good, which is absolutely essential, both for global economic stability and prosperity, but also to make sure that we end up with a planet that’s still inhabitable, that will be a challenge that I think that both United States and China will still have thrown at them by the wider global community. And that’s where I see an awful lot of the competition actually emerging in the next ten, 15, 20 years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So much of the debate about China policy in the United States really boils down to arguments about what China’s ambitions are: whether it really has a desire to transform the global order in its own image. But if I’m reading you correctly, China doesn’t have a grand plan. It hasn’t answered that question for itself, and that in some ways will depend on the global environment and the United States. Is that the right way of thinking of this?

RANA MITTER

I think the image that I’d use, Dan, is to think of China as having a series of concentric circles of intent which are quite intense and very visible close to home, and which are still very much there, but which become less visible as you project outwards. So in terms of the immediate area around China itself, particularly the maritime space, I think it’s fair to say that China has both defensive and offensive intents, defensive in the sense that it perceives itself, understandably, as a country that both from land and sea has been attacked on many occasions in the last 200 years or so. I think it feels that broadly its land borders, with a partial, but only partial exception of India, are pretty well sorted out through treaties, and of course the agreement that Russia, which keeps the biggest land border essentially under control—one of the reasons, by the way, why I think that any attempts to try and detach Russia from China are not likely to lead with very productive outcomes.

In terms of the maritime space, I think that given a choice, China would certainly want itself, Beijing, to be the only security provider in the region. And that’s one of the reasons that pretty much every other actor, with a couple of smaller exceptions in the region, actually is very keen for U.S. power to remain. And I suspect it was a sigh of relief when you were in the room, when Secretary Hegseth was speaking, in terms of the position towards Asia and their allies not being the same as it appears to be now towards the Europeans. And yet beyond that, you can see that the influence that China has in terms of trade and economic acts is genuinely global. But in terms of security presence in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, it will be there. You’ll see things like the Djibouti base, and there may be other places in southeast Asia and Latin America where there’ll be a greater security presence from China, a military presence— we should be frank about it—but not, I think, at the size and presence that you’ll get in Asia. I think that China is more interested in what happens close to home.

The exceptions—and they’re important—will be in two areas. One is in technology. China’s greatest international influence already is in the path dependency it has created essentially through a combination of subsidized production at home and commercial assertiveness, in terms of 5G, internet of things, and the technology that’s coming next. The number of places that use Chinese systems, parts, and also essentially will probably be tied to those for years and decades to come is very considerable already. That’s probably a better source of influence for China than any traditional old-fashioned empire, which I don’t think it has much of an interest in putting into place.

The other area is international institutions. And again, this is one of the areas where I think the United States needs to be cautious about abandoning the still very strong presence that it has at the United Nations and many of the other international institutions, where it’s still tremendously important as a player. Because China is clearly there as an alternative leader in many of those cases: the United Nations, by some counts, depending how you are counting, China could be regarded as the second biggest payer of dues into that institution after the United States. And pulling out tends to leave not a vacuum, but instead a space in which China essentially argues that it’s perfectly legitimate for China to fill the space if the United States doesn’t actually want to be there.

So I think that the growth of Chinese global influence is real, but the mixture of areas where it manifests itself is not as immediately obvious as it might’ve been in the classic days of great-power empires. Not absent in that sense, as I’ve said. We can mention naval bases and so forth and other expansion, but broadly speaking, the commercial and technological and energy-driven global expansion is really, I think, where China sees its greatest advantage lie.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You also make the point in several of your essays, and also in your fantastic book about China’s experience in World War II, that China very much thinks of itself as one of the founding powers of the existing order, that World War II is still very central to its own national mythology; that it was one of the, I think, the very first signatory to the treaty establishing the United Nations; that it does see itself as having shaped that in certain ways, which we don’t usually think of it that way in Western discussions of it.

RANA MITTER

That’s absolutely right, Dan. I would say that one of the things that’s most remarkable on that front is seeing, over the last few years, key Chinese leadership figures, Xi Jinping himself, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and various others going to major international gatherings—the Munich Security Conference would be a good example of that—and wagging the finger at the audience and saying, “You should remember that not only was China one of the first signatories to the United Nations charter in San Francisco in 1945; it was the first signatory,” which actually is technically true because of a desire to acknowledge China’s contribution as a wartime ally against Japan. But the reason this is worth noting is that, for most of the periods, certainly, of Chairman Mao being in power and the People’s Republic being the ruling authority in China, that first of all China, of course, was excluded from the UN. The Eisenhower and following administrations did not choose to bring China back into the UN system, and it wasn’t until 1971, in fact, that they regained the China seat at the UN.

But also during that time, Mao’s China regarded the UN as the feudal, backward, bourgeois organization that had no real relevance for China that sought instead to portray itself as a revolutionary actor in the Third World. So essentially the turnaround has been quite significant from the 1980s and 1990s up to the present day. Essentially, these days—and it’s worth noting in this 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and China will be noting that quite extensively in August and September this year, which, of course, coincides with 80 years since V-J Day, the victory over Japan—they will note China’s presence in the UN as part of the legacy that China won through its sacrifices of more than 10 million dead and 100 million refugees they sacrificed during World War II. But they won’t of course mention, other than very much in passing, that it was the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek that actually signed that charter in San Francisco. That’s the other reason that it wasn’t possible to actually mention that particular event until recently.

Now the Chinese argument essentially is that it’s all China, basically. China then and China now have a continuity in terms of that presence at the UN. And, adapting the title of Dean Acheson’s famous memoir Present at the Creation, China’s argument today is that it was present at the creation of the United Nations, it was at Bretton Woods, it was at all these elements that made up the post-1945 world order. And the implication is that if the United States no longer wants to maintain that structure that emerged in 1945, then it falls to China instead to be the “true inheritor” of that legacy from 1945. It would be deeply ironic if a formerly revolutionary Maoist state ended up being, in its own eyes, the gatekeeper or the pillar of that particular community. But that may be in 2025 what we’re moving to if we move inexorably in the direction of travel that we seem to see in geopolitics at the moment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I do sense, though, a degree of skepticism with Trump the second time around that China will be able to really take up that space in a persuasive way. You see them giving speeches at international conferences and elsewhere about China being the responsible power and the one that’s going to uphold the international order. But as you’ve noted, the Chinese economic model does not look as good as it used to be. There’s growing awareness of surveillance and repression at home, I think more appreciation of some of the activities of China in Asia and growing skepticism of its role, certainly, in its near-abroad. So I wonder whether we’ll be able to take up that opportunity even if the United States is leaving the field in some ways.

RANA MITTER

I think that the rhetoric far outruns the capacity, Dan. You’re absolutely right on that. And I would say that beyond that, there’s a couple of things that come to mind. One is that, as I mentioned before and will say again, if you look at countries in China’s backyard, in Asia, with a very small number of exceptions—maybe Cambodia, maybe Laos—but pretty much every other actor in the region. When asked quietly or even explicitly whether they would want U.S. power to be withdrawn from the region, give an absolute unequivocal, “No.” It’s not that they either can or would want China to withdraw from the region; it’s impossible that’ll be the case. It’s the biggest power in the region by anyone’s account, and it’s a major trading partner for every single one of them. But they’re very aware that if U.S. power was no longer there to essentially keep the status quo, then China would become the dominant security power in the region. And I don’t think there’s a single actor I can think of—Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore—that would actually want that to be the case.

They certainly don’t want a conflict. They certainly don’t want a war. But I think they also don’t want Asia to essentially be a place where China is the only security provider. So that is already the first undermining of a rhetoric that actually doesn’t match up to the reality, as well. There’s also a realization that, as is the case with any major economic power, if there is one market, in this case China, that does provide the primary set of supply chains or market for your exports, that makes you vulnerable as well, because China, of course, is very inclined to rewrite trade according to its own rules. The Trump administration has made a very strong point of this, but it’s not the first U.S. administration. All of its predecessors have also pointed out that China claims that it’s a developing country in economic terms when it’s convenient to do so, and claims to be a market economy at other times when it’s also convenient to do so.

You might argue that great powers tend to rewrite the rules. The United States can often do the same thing as well, but that makes it more difficult to portray yourself, in China’s case, as an honest broker to smaller countries. So all of that is true, but I think it’s worth noting something that I think is beginning to change, and that’s true both at the country level and at the level of populations within those countries. I don’t think China’s favorability rating overall is turning into a desire for other countries to become like China, in the way that, to some extent, rock and roll and Coca-Cola and blue jeans and all of that in the Cold War made America somewhere to aspire to. I don’t think China has quite that capacity.

But if you talk to Indian business elites—again, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and also one where the Trump administration, I think, is very keen to build up a close relationship. Talk to them about what they really think about China. And of course, they’re scared of China in some ways, they’re worried about China’s military intentions, but they also admire China. They look at China’s capacity, and say, “Look, they’ve got the same population size as India, and look at how fast the economy’s grown. Look at their tech capability.” Indian tech entrepreneurs will say this more quietly, but it’s true: actually, without China’s supply chains, even now, India’s capacity to innovate in technology is not going to go all that far. All those Apple iPhones that are going to be made in India for shipping to the United States, most of the parts are still actually assembled in China. Final assembly is in India.

And one of the elements—I said that the element of populations and how they react. I think one of the trends that’s beginning to emerge and I think will become a subject of more examination in the next few years, is the way in which actually soft power—and I use the term carefully because my former colleague and friend, Professor Joe Nye, who passed away just a few weeks ago, Joe Nye thought up the term “soft power, which I think is pretty much mother’s milk to everyone who’s a Foreign Affairs listener or reader. It was generally premised, not necessarily explicitly, but generally premised on the idea that it was broadly liberal and perhaps even somewhat counter-cultural values that could help create the idea that a society was lively: rock and roll, Elvis, whatever it might be. I don’t think we should underestimate how much, again, in a changing world where certain types of authoritarian values are becoming quite trendy, quite cool—just look on social media—that China’s proposition, which is about a technologically enabled, glamorous anti-liberalism, actually has a lot more pickup, particularly in parts of the global South, where liberal democratic norms are not necessarily very widely felt in many parts of the region. That side of China’s offer may have more attraction, and soft power, to use Joe Nye’s term, in the decade to come than it would’ve done in the past year. This is not to say there are not lots of people around the world who don’t embrace liberal values to the full, and who have no interest in essentially taking up that sort of authoritarian element. But at the same time, I think we are no longer in a world where we can assume that authoritarianism and soft power are incompatible with each other.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I should note that we are this week releasing an essay that Joe Nye co-authored just before he died, which we are very honored to have in our next issue, the last major thing he wrote after contributing a number of essays to Foreign Affairs over the years. Sticking with Trump: before we close, how do you read China’s reaction to Trump so far? Especially in the trade war, which has consumed a lot of the attention in the U.S.-China relationship for the last several weeks, China is, of course, projecting assurance and toughness and ability to withstand difficulty, that there’s a tradition of struggle and hardship in the Chinese population, that they do not see among us Americans. But you can also see certain ways in which they seem to be protesting too much, that there’s a degree of bluster that’s concealing some anxiety. But as you read this dynamic, how do you see it?

RANA MITTER

I would say that there are two threads of the many which I’d flag up at this point. And they sound slightly contradictory, but actually I think they both speak to the wider issue of how China, as a whole, has reacted, both times round, to the Trump presidency. So number one is, as you’d expect, that in the last few weeks there’s been lots of anger about the tariffs, about the unpredictability. And a lot of that, as you say in a sense, is more significantly hypocritical on the grounds that China is quite happy to ratchet tariffs and non-tariff barriers up and down when it pleases them. Just ask the Australians, who spent several years under unofficial semi-sanctions because of comments that the then prime minister had made about COVID that the government didn’t like. But the way in which much of the protest is put, actually, is often, “Well, this is what the Americans do.” In other words, the differentiation that much the rest of the world sees, that Trump is somehow different from previous U.S. administrations, actually isn’t felt as strongly by many of the commenters in China, who just say that we always knew that Obama, Biden, Trump, whoever it is, the Americans are out to get us, and this is just part of the same process.

So that, in a sense, is almost “same old, same old.” But there’s another element that’s always been there, and it was very visible—and time moves so fast—but let’s say January, February this year, before the main tariffs started to kick in, which was actually a kind of admiration for Trump. Bearing in mind that a figure who basically speaks extremely robustly and frankly; just says what he thinks about anything; big property developer, of course a species that’s very well known in China; and someone who is not particularly sensitive to liberal values, this is very problematic to many people in the United States and the West. But in China it’s very much part of the normal back-and-forth of international discussions. Because I think at some level there’s a feeling that actually Western leaders who just speak out plainly and don’t hide behind what many Chinese regard as a sort of carapace of difference between liberal societies and illiberal societies actually goes down quite well.

There’s also worth noting that very early on, one of the Chinese social media commentators just said that he was looking forward to a good show for the next four years. And since we know that amongst the many things that President Trump is very keen to try and stress, which is the idea that performance is a very important part of politics, I would say there’s an awful lot of people in China who agree with him, and are watching right now and rather appreciating that performance.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Mao talked about liking rightists better than leftists, I believe, in his early interactions with the United States, so I suppose that still holds true to some degree. I should also mention the other issue that has been taking up a lot of the oxygen in the U.S.-China relationship the last few days at least, which is the pledge from the administration, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to go after Chinese students in the United States. You’re sitting at Harvard University, which has been at the receiving end of plenty of attacks from the administration, and you’ve had, I imagine, hundreds of Chinese students over the years in your teaching career. How do you imagine that that would change the dynamic of the U.S.-China relationship and our ability to really understand China, and China’s to understand about us if that does in fact happen?

RANA MITTER

So as I’ve read the statement that’s been made from the State Department in the name of Secretary Rubio, it talks about essentially aggressively revoking visas from Chinese students. And then it qualifies that by saying, “who are working in sensitive areas, or who are committing other violations,” which are defined broadly and not necessarily in detail. There’s an extent to which you have to ask if actually this is an entirely different policy. Because certainly it was the case up to now that Chinese students who work in highly sensitive areas of science were already likely to be denied the chance to study in the United States. And that has been changing already. That was continuous, I think, between the first Trump and Biden administration, as well. And beyond that, it seems to me left quite purposely vague about what that wider revocation might refer to, so perhaps meant as a warning, rather than necessarily in terms of specifics.

My sense overall is that the United States—the Western world in general—is going to have to get to know an awful lot more about China in the next few years. If you regard it as a peer competitor, a peer adversary, whatever term you want to use, you need to know about the other side. And in recent years, partly because of COVID, but the number of American students going to China to study has gone from tens of thousands to a few hundreds. That is a very, very shallow base on which to base the depth of knowledge that you need for understanding a society that is going to be central to international policy, foreign policy, and geopolitics for years and certainly, I think, decades to come. So stepping back and thinking actually how that knowledge is to be obtained, how to actually get the depth of understanding that many Chinese students, to this day, have of the United States and the Western world, that is, I think, a really key task for a government, an administration, but also a society which can’t just hope that China is going to disappear and go away. It’s too big. It’s too important. And knowing about it, and knowing about it in depth and in detail is going to be central to whatever government and whatever society we have in the United States for years to come.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a wonderful note to end on. And people can start by going and reading your fantastic essay in the current issue, “The Once and Future China.” Rana, thank you so much for that piece and for joining me today.

RANA MITTER

A privilege and honor, Dan. Look forward to speaking to you again soon, I hope.