In the Room With Xi Jinping

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Nick, thank you so much for joining me for a second time. We’re talking just a few days before you leave your post in Beijing, almost three years since arriving, and come back home.

NICHOLAS BURNS

Dan, thank you very much. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. There’s a lot to talk about.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to start with perhaps a somewhat personal question. Over the past few years, you’ve almost surely spent more time in the room with Xi Jinping than any other American, I would venture to say. You’ve been there for meetings with President Biden and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and others. How has that time sitting right across the table from Xi, and those repeated discussions, changed your understanding of him? What’s your sense of what drives him, what worries him, how he sees the world, especially the things that those of us who are watching from a distance may miss?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, obviously, Xi Jinping is a supremely powerful leader of China. I think you have to go back to Mao to find a Chinese leader with so much power in the system. And he’s been in office now for quite a long time—over 12 years. So obviously, he’s very experienced. He’s put in place Chinese foreign and defense policy that’s very ambitious and very aggressive, and that’s what we have to react to. China is seeking to become the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific. There’s no question about that. China, led by President Xi and his relationship with North Korea, with Iran and Russia, has formed a authoritarian group that is contesting a lot of what we put in place after the Second World War to keep Europe and the world peaceful and to establish liberal values—liberal, in the small “L” of the word, values—democratic values, values of human rights, of state sovereignty, that you can’t cross someone else’s border and invade it just because you want to do that. That’s what Putin has done in Ukraine.

So he’s a very self-assured, I think, self-confident leader in the way he interacts with others around the world. He is very well informed, obviously, and China has followed a foreign defense policy that’s highly strategic. I’ll give you one example. Foreign Minister Wang Yi just left Beijing yesterday on a trip to four countries in Africa. This is the 35th consecutive year that the Chinese foreign minister has begun the year with a trip to Africa. Now that’s strategic focus. It’s the kind of thing that’s very difficult to do in any democratic society, when you have alternance of power between different leaders and different political parties. But it’s that kind of continuity that the Chinese rely upon to expand their influence in the world.

Obviously, Dan, and I’ll just finish on this: we have a very competitive, challenging, and often very contentious relationship. Sometimes, in diplomatic terms, it’s done in a way that I think both countries understand, but we have enormous differences between us, and I think that’s at the heart of all of our interactions with the Chinese.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You know, there’s this debate, as you’re obviously aware, in government circles and in places like Foreign Affairs and books, about whether Xi Jinping is an ideologue or a pragmatist. How do you see that question, having spent time in all of these discussions with him?

NICHOLAS BURNS

I think what has characterized his term of office is a belief in the Communist Party, and to make the Communist Party the supreme repository of power in the Chinese system. So there is a government of China, as you know; there is a state council, for instance. But in many ways, the party has risen above state authorities, and is the supreme place of ideological, economic, political, regulatory power in the Chinese system. That’s what’s changed. What’s also changed, of course, is the concept that Deng Xiaoping brought in after the excesses of Mao, that there should be a group that leads China, and of course, Xi Jinping is singular in his power. So it’s very apparent that the party controls everything. And you see that in the provinces, and I’ve been to 23 of the 31 provinces of China, and just over the last several months, have met with a large number of party secretaries. These are the Communist Party secretaries who run each of the provinces, much like our governors, but they take central direction from the party in Beijing. And so I think this is a unique time in modern Chinese history, where some of the dictums of Deng Xiaoping have really been put aside for power centralized in one person.

The other thing you see here is that studying party texts, studying Leninism, studying Marx and Engels, is something that now every Chinese official is required to do. And it’s quite striking to meet Chinese officials who will tell you, you know, “I’ve been for the last five or six days at the Central Party School in Beijing. I had to go back for study.” Now, that doesn’t happen in most societies, but it happens here. So I think what’s really been pronounced here, especially in my time here, is the rise of the party and the rise of this singular rule of a leader.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The last time you were on this podcast a little over two years ago, you talked about the Chinese view, fairly deeply held, that the United States is in decline, and that the West more generally is in decline. I think you said the party leaders think of us as a nation that is weakening. Your sense, of course, was that it was wrong, and that much of what the Biden administration was doing was intent on proving that was wrong. Yet the rhetoric, at least, that you hear from Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders hasn’t changed all that much; it’s still versions of “the West is declining and the East is rising,” or whatever the formulation of the year is. To what extent is that their genuine view, or do they have a sort of different net assessment of U.S. and Chinese power, from what you can tell?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, you know, they said that the East is rising and the West is falling. Chinese leaders said that with a great deal of self confidence, and I think they were convinced that this was their time to lead in the world, along with Russia and other authoritarian countries. I wonder if, in their heart of hearts, that’s what they still believe. Because certainly, if you look at what President Biden has been able to do, and we’ve worked very hard on this, we have strengthened our strategic position in the world, and specifically in the Indo-Pacific, vis-à-vis China. We’re stronger now, and it’s because of our alliances. They’re the force multiplier in American foreign policy. We cannot forsake our alliances. But the United States–Japan strategic military partnership is stronger than it was four years ago. The Philippines has flipped from President Duterte to President Marcos, has opened up nine of its bases to the American military, is acting strategically with the United States. Of course, you know about Australia. You know about the rise of AUKUS. You know about the rise of the Quad. In fact, I’ll be in a Quad meeting tomorrow with my Indian and Japanese and Australian ambassadorial counterparts here. We work very closely together. And so I think, in a sense, we’ve upped our game. It’s very difficult for the Chinese to argue that they’re the strongest military power in the Indo-Pacific when you have these democratic powers working together.

And it also is a function, Dan, of the fact that China’s faced a considerable number of domestic problems, particularly with the economy: the lack of consumption, the fact that the property crisis has not really been overcome, the youth unemployment, the fall in foreign direct investment. There were two quarters in 2024 when there was negative FDI here: more money leaving, foreign money leaving investments in China than coming in. All this has, I think, shaken the leadership here. They’re very focused on this issue, and consider the enormous strengths of the American economy. Consider the power of our tech companies in AI, and that’s given us a lead in AI, and may we keep that lead. And so some Chinese officials still say the East is rising and the West is falling. I don’t think there's conviction there, and it’s certainly not supported by the facts. So, as this administration comes to an end, I think we can say with great confidence we have strengthened the American position in a long-running competition for power. And for me, I knew that was my central job when I came out here. But as I prepare to leave next week and resign my ambassadorship, I’m confident that the United States has competed effectively in the military realm that we’ve talked about, certainly in technology.

And it’s been very interesting, Dan, to see that, as I assess the relationship, technology has taken center stage. It’s the heart of the relationship. Now it’s about who is going to be the first mover, both in commercial and technological terms, but also in military terms, on artificial intelligence, on quantum computing, on biotechnology, and a number of other areas. And there the enormous power of the American research universities and our tech companies, and the confluence between them, and federal funding has put us in a very advantageous position, and so we’ve pressed that advantage.

And obviously, we’re also looking at the issues that really separate us from China, and that is our belief in human freedom and our belief in human rights. And that is a powerful argument for what we’ve been trying to do with the Japanese, and what even the Europeans, who are acting strategically now on China, have been able to do: to separate ourselves from their view of the future, that it should be authoritarian led in the world, and our view, that it should be in one of freedom and one of democracy.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to pick up on a lot of those dimensions of the competition and of the relationship that have consumed you for the last few years. But just to linger on the economy for a moment, it’s been kind of striking to watch this debate from the United States, where lots of Western observers, whether policymakers or economists or investors or others, have watched the performance of the Chinese economy since the end of “zero COVID” and insisted that at some point, leadership would really have to change course in a dramatic way and resort to reform and stimulus measures and be more friendly to FDI and to foreign business. That does not seem to be the view of Xi Jinping or other Chinese leaders. They seem quite committed to their course. What is their view, their understanding of the Chinese economy, and what is the disconnect between the kinds of advice that Americans might give and what they see as the necessary course?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, there’s certainly been a reluctance here on the part of the leadership to engage in the type of major stimulus action that, say, President Biden did in 2021 that helped to bring us out of the very difficult position that he inherited when he came into office, and very different than what President Bush and President Obama did to respond to the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and 2010. They’ve not made that commitment.

Now they have loosened, as they say, moderately their monetary policy. A big problem here is the indebtedness of the provincial governments, and they’ve put, now, a considerable amount of funds aside to try to deal with that. But at the heart of it, they appear to be in a deflationary situation. The Chinese people are sitting on their money because of the property crisis. The property is where a lot of Chinese had their wealth, in apartments. And as the bottom has fallen out and the value of those apartments have plummeted, and there are something like 70 or 80 million empty apartments now in China because they overbuilt, that’s the core of the crisis.

And so they’ve put their attentions elsewhere. What they say they're doing is to engage in high-value manufacturing, and so they’ve doubled down on productions of electric vehicles, lithium batteries, solar panels, robotics, steel, and they’re producing two to three times domestic demand in many of those areas. And what they’re doing is they're exporting the excess at artificially low prices, and they’re dumping it, in classical economic terms, in countries around the world.

So you know what we’ve done: President Biden raised our tariffs on EVs to 100 percent, on semiconductors to 50 percent, on lithium batteries to 25%. But it's not just the United States. Who else has placed tariffs on China because of this massive export of the excess manufacturing capacity here? Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the European Union. So there’s been a reaction from all over the world to China dumping its problems on the rest of the world with a design to kill the manufacturing capacity of many of our countries.

Secretary Janet Yellen just had a conversation the other night with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who is a very powerful economic official here, and she has raised this issue in a really vigorous way. I was with her when she visited here in China back in April. We had 11 hours of conversations. She focused on this. She warned them not to try to do this, or there will be consequences. And now the Chinese are feeling the consequences. So they put all this effort into manufacturing as a way to resolve their problems. What it does is it ticks up your GDP growth rate because they want to hit five percent to show that they’re healthy. But it’s not dealing with the major problem that Chinese people are not spending, consumption is down, and there is a deflationary aspect to all of this. So I think that is the heart of the issue for the Chinese: Will they now engage in very dramatic ways to try to meet this crisis? And there’s no sign yet that they're going to take that major type of relief effort.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was struck when I was last in Beijing, when I saw you there a little over a year and a half ago, at how much pessimism there was among students at elite universities—and this was obviously a very impressionistic sense from my brief visit there—but the difficulty that elite students had finding jobs, the extent of unemployment, the desire of people to stay in school longer. China Hands occasionally point out that that’s a rather distressing signal for Chinese dynasties historically. And we’ve also seen this series of what are called “revenge on society” attacks, which also suggest a level of social discontent that may not be readily apparent to outside observers. Is there ferment and dissension under the surface that is hard for us to see from the outside? I mean, what is your sense of the degree of political stability in an authoritarian system that is very opaque to the rest of us?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, Dan, it’s obviously a central question, and you're right to ask it. Even with my years here in China, I'm humble. I think all of us should be a little bit humble in trying to understand the direction of 1.4 billion people. Obviously, one of the problems here is youth unemployment. It was so high a year ago that they actually changed the way they measure it in order to reduce what they say the youth unemployment figure is. But that’s a major problem of highly educated young people who come back to China from the United States or Europe or Australia, or from the great universities here, with MBAs and PhDs and can’t find a job. That’s a big problem. We’ve seen that in our visa lines. In 2023 we issued 104,000 new student visas to Chinese students this year, in 2024, just under that. We now have 277,000 Chinese students in the United States. That’s the largest undergraduate population of any foreign country in the United States. So you can see students are looking to education as a way to try to delay the difficult prospect of finding a job. That is an issue here.

At the same time, the Chinese economy has stumbled, and so that’s a major problem, I think, for young people as they look at their future here. But I have to say, to be fair and be a little bit balanced and a little bit humble about this, every Chinese young person can look at their grandmother and grandfather and see that they, the younger people, are living better than their grandfather and grandmother, and that’s absolutely true in economic terms. They can also see a country here that has succeeded in so many ways: the infrastructure of this country, the cities that have been rebuilt here, that are much easier and more pleasant places to live if you're Chinese.

There’s a great deal of nationalism here, and so the pride that the Chinese feel in their space program, in their level of economic development, in the influence that China has in places like Africa and South America, where they are now the leading economic partner of most of those countries. So, I think you have to balance this. And I’m trying to speak objectively here, just as I observe this country, there’s a great deal of pride in China, and we experience it sometimes in a great deal of anti-Americanism if you look at the massive number of people, millions of people on these online debates, and there’s a great deal a sense of pride in China. So we who are interacting with this country—and I’ve been very critical of the Chinese government here on a number of issues—have to understand that the Chinese people are also cheering on their government as they take on some of these, we think, very unfortunate and objectionable policies overseas.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’d be really curious to hear how you've thought about your role as a kind of public critic of some of these Chinese actions. And you occasionally hear some of the more traditional China Hands complaining, respectfully, that an ambassador should be much more restrained and leave that kind of criticism to the press secretary at the White House. You've obviously done this quite self-consciously. You’re one of the most skilled and experienced diplomats in the United States. How did you think about that tension? Why did you make the decision to be outspoken in the way you have?

NICHOLAS BURNS

I’d say two things. First of all, one of my major jobs here is obviously to interact with the government of China, and there have been times when I haven’t said much, over weeks, and the first time, my first period when I was here, months, because you understand you have to build relationships, you have to try to work out difficult issues behind the scenes. You can’t just argue in public about issues and get very far. And we’ve been very disciplined about that. We were able to achieve the liberation of four Americans from prison here in China, some of them held for a very long time, David Lin for 17 years. We did all that through quiet diplomacy, so I’ve obviously done a lot of that here.

But there are other times when it’s incumbent upon the American ambassador here to speak out on human rights violations, for instance, or on the fact that Chinese companies are supplying major technical support to the Russian war machine, the Russian defense industrial base. There are times when you have to apply that public pressure and speak out. And so in my dealings with the government of China, I’ve been very conscious of that balance, that sometimes you’ve got to work behind the scenes and be disciplined about not speaking in public, and sometimes it’s absolutely necessary to say and declare what the United States believes.

The other thing I’d say is that one is an ambassador to a government, but also to a country. And so in addition to spending a lot of time, sometimes at very late hours, in terminally long debates about Taiwan and other issues with Chinese officials, I’ve tried to spend a lot of time with my terrific team of diplomats here, and getting out and meeting provincial governors and mayors and heads of nonprofits and business people and the Chinese people. It’s interesting. When you leave Beijing, very few people ask you about Taiwan. They want to know: Are you really open to giving visas to Chinese students to study at University of Texas or UCLA? They want to know about investment. They want to talk about the Second World War, because they relate to the United States, and we’re just commemorating the 80th anniversary, starting now, of the end of that war in 1945, and it’s a big issue that the Chinese people take pride in, that we fought with them in that war. So you’ve got to do both as an ambassador. You’re ambassador to the people of China and also to the government of China. And they’re two very different things. I have been very critical at times of the government of China, but always try to engage the people of China. And I do think, Dan, this is a national security issue for the United States. It’s not just a nice thing to do to connect our two societies; it’s a necessary thing to do.

We once had 15,000 American students here. That was ten years ago, and because of COVID and the Chinese policy of zero-COVID, with its quarantines and embargoes, we went down to 350 American students two years ago. We’ve actually counted. Our public affairs team went to every university and said, “How many American students do you have?” We think it’s 1,105, so modest progress from a low base, but the two societies need to be connected. I think we found in the old Cold War—and I’m old enough to remember that old Cold War and to have worked in it as a younger diplomat—when you separate and decouple two societies, it doesn’t help in our ability to understand what motivates the other country, the history and culture of that country.

And the last thing I’d say on this is, we have so few American students here now. I am blessed by an embassy filled with American diplomats who speak Mandarin fluently, who’ve been here two or three times. I worry about my successor ten or 15 years from now, who will not have this kind of bench. So again, sometimes people say, “Well, that's just a nice thing to do.” It’s not a nice thing to do to keep our societies connected in a very difficult relationship. It’s a necessary thing to do so that we can be effective in the way that we deal with this country.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve talked about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in the United States as a positive thing in most ways. My guess is that most members of the next administration will not, at least at first, see it that way, that they will see it through the lens of security threats of various kinds. How would you advise them to think through that question? What’s your case for seeing it the way you see it?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, I have a very clear view of this, as does our administration. By the way, the president and Secretary Blinken and others, we follow an executive order that President Trump put into place in 2020, which essentially says, if a Chinese student is seeking to study, let’s just say for obvious purposes, nuclear weapons design at Carnegie Mellon, that student’s not going to get the visa. If a Chinese student at the graduate level is going to be in a STEM field that could help the PLA or the Chinese intelligence services, we’re going to turn down those students. And we do that. So we are very mindful of trying to separate out Chinese students who are going to the United States for positive reasons, and who will not present, when they come back to China, some kind of security threat to our country.

But on the other hand, those 277,000 Chinese students in the United States, they will come back to China with an understanding of our democratic society. They’re going to see their peer American students being able to exercise freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, that you can go out on strike and you can demonstrate because you’re passionate about an issue, as long as you do that peacefully. That doesn’t happen here in China. So in that sense, you’re exposing millions of Chinese students over a 30- or 40-year period to the best aspects of our democracy.

And the second reason why we need students in the United States: a lot of them end up working for American companies. They work in research labs. They work particularly in the tech field. And I very much believe in the H-1B visa program. I’m on that side of the debate, that we ought to be recruiting the smartest Indian and Brazilian and South African and Chinese students, as long as they’re not a security threat—and you screen people—because that will empower us in our competition with China on the tech front, which is the heart of the competition. And it’s been good to see other voices like Condoleezza Rice argue in Foreign Affairs just a couple of months ago that she thinks that we need to continue to welcome Chinese students on our campuses. I very much agree with her.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I imagine, when you’re outside of Beijing and not being asked about Taiwan, you’re mostly relieved to not be having that conversation. But since you are in Beijing, I’m going to ask you about Taiwan. This has been one of the most complicated parts of your job. I imagine, for the last few years, there have been lots of different comments from members of the administration, and lots of debate in public about what exactly Chinese leadership’s intentions are vis-à-vis Taiwan, what they’re thinking about unification, how they see the direction of politics in Taiwan. As you sit there and wrap up your time in Beijing, what is your assessment of their current thinking around Taiwan? How do they assess their chances, the timeline and how has that changed over the last few years?

NICHOLAS BURNS

There’s no question the Chinese leadership has been very clear about this. They intend to bring Taiwan, they would say, back into the People’s Republic of China. Of course, the Chinese government has not ruled, from the mainland, Taiwan since 1895, but there’s no question that's the strategic ambition of China. They make that clear every single day, publicly and privately to us. We’ve been very consistent with the One China policy, the American government, since 1979, when President Jimmy Carter normalized relations with China. And we’ve been very consistent in speaking up and arguing with the Chinese government here in Beijing that they’re making a mistake to be so belligerent, and they’re making a mistake to try to intimidate Taiwan itself. And so we’re exercising our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act, which is the law of the land in the United States, to provide defensive military technology to Taiwan. We’ve done that in a very vigorous way. We also stand up for the principle that this cross-strait difference of long standing has to be resolved peacefully. And we challenge China to do that, that it must be a peaceful resolution of this dispute. And we think that it would be a better step by the government in China to talk to the Taiwan authorities, talk to President Lai, and they’ve refused to do that.

I also think this is another way we’ve strengthened the American position in the Indo-Pacific. You see that Japan has been much more outspoken, much more vigorous on this question of Taiwan than they had before. The Philippines, in the same way. And it’s also interesting to see the number of members of the European Parliaments, and the Bundestag, the French National Assembly, flying into Taipei to show political support, humanitarian support for the Taiwan authorities. So we’ve obviously got to build up our capacity to deal with any kind of eventuality there. And we, of course, do that, but we, I think, are in a strong position in arguing to the rest of the world that all of us should insist that this problem be resolved peacefully. And China’s refused to do that. They reserve the right to use force.

And Secretary Blinken has been warning publicly for the last two years, if the Taiwan Strait were over closed, think of the enormous negative consequences for the global economy, because half the container traffic in the world, in a monthly basis, flows through the Taiwan Strait, given the strength of the economies here in North Asia. So I think we've been consistent. It’s hard to find an issue where the United States, over 45, 46 years, has been, from every administration to the next, both parties, remarkably consistent. So we’ve stayed with American policy because it has worked, and we hope it will in the future.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Is your level of concern about a crisis in the Taiwan Strait higher or lower than it was as you depart than it was when you arrived a few years ago?

NICHOLAS BURNS

I would just say this. I admire Admiral Sam Paparo, who is the head of our Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu. He’s our senior military official in the Indo-Pacific, and he and I work closely together, and he said in his confirmation hearings, to a question like that, he said, “Look, we have to be prepared every day, and we can’t think about timelines five years from now, or 1ten or 15 years from now.” And I think that’s a good way for our military to think about the problem, and certainly for those of us in the diplomatic corps to think about this problem. We have to be ready every day, so we’re on it. We have vigorous discussions with the Chinese leadership routinely about Taiwan. They understand our position, and we’ve mobilized other countries, from the European Union countries, the NATO countries, but particularly the countries in East Asia, to say to the Chinese, “You've got to act in a way that's going to be constructive here.” And that gets to what we were talking about: a peaceful resolution of dispute, diplomatic dialogue with the Taiwan authorities, etc.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In some ways it seems harder, again, observing it from afar, to imagine how we avoid a crisis in the South China Sea, given developments there around the Second Thomas Shoal, and just watching Chinese activities there over the last few years. What will it take to avoid that kind of crisis? And again, where’s your level of anxiety as you prepared to depart?

NICHOLAS BURNS

It takes strength and consistency and clarity, and I think we’ve been all of those things. And the objectionable way that the PLA Navy and the government of China have treated the Philippines, for instance, at Second Thomas Shoal and two other parts of the South China Sea. And China has this extravagant legal claim that it asserts against five other claimants, to the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, indeed also to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, where it contests Japanese administrative control of the Senkakus. And nobody supports China around the world. Their legal claim is not valid under the Law of the Sea Conference of 1972, which is the international law of land. And so we need to be clear, and we have been clear, that we are a treaty ally of the Philippines, and under Article Four of the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Philippines, we have an obligation to defend the Philippines. And the President and Secretary Austin and Secretary Blinken and myself here, in conversations with the Chinese, have been very consistent in telling them there is a line not to cross here.

And this gets back to allies. I started as a practicing diplomat 45 years ago—I’m that old—as a 24-year-old intern in the State Department, and I’m about to resign from the State Department. The fundamental lesson I have learned about American power and the world is we are powerful, but in large part, especially in this part of the world, as a function of our alliance relationships, that they multiply our power, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, our treaty allies here. They expand the power of the United States. And a lot of people want to measure, as you know, Dan, the competition between the United States and China: who’s stronger in terms of nuclear weapons and naval power and air power and the economy. It’s a false way of measuring power. You’ve got to measure China versus the United States and Japan and South Korea, et cetera, and the Philippines and Australia and Thailand. And if we’re interested in outcompeting the Chinese, and we have to be as Americans, staying close to our allies, not forsaking our allies, not trying to criticize the allies publicly, or humiliate them publicly, or contest their own borders and their own national sovereignty publicly—I think this is a big issue in American foreign policy.

I’ve been so proud to work for President Biden, who has strengthened our alliances from day one in his administration. And if you want a strong America, you have to have strong alliances in the modern world. That’s true of NATO. I was an ambassador there on 9/11. I saw how Canada— by the way, a country that’s been in the news this week—was the first country to assert that we ought to invoke Article Five of the NATO Treaty to defend the United States. And all these countries—Canada, Denmark—have been with us time and again in the wars that we’ve had to fight in the struggle for power we’ve had with Putin and Europe, but also with the Chinese leadership here in the Indo-Pacific. So that’s my fundamental, walking-away lesson learned. Don’t forsake your allies. Keep them close. Honor them and support them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One dimension of the South China Sea and Taiwan issue I just want to get your thoughts on, because it’s been so perplexing to observers from outside China, is what exactly is going on in the PLA, in the People’s Liberation Army, and what the dynamic between President Xi and PLA leadership has been. There has been this series of purges and leadership changes. Do you have any understanding of that that you can share?

NICHOLAS BURNS

There’s been a fair amount of turbulence. You’ve seen it. It’s been quite public. President Xi instituted an anti-corruption campaign shortly after he took power in late 2012. A lot of people thought back then—that was a long time ago—that it might be just short-lived, but it’s actually been an on-running anti-corruption campaign that hasn’t stopped. And it has focused on technology figures and business figures and political figures, party figures, but also on the military. And that has continued just over the last couple of weeks, where a very senior military officer has been brought up on charges. So it’s often hard to know exactly what that means in terms of capability and strategy. But it’s not a positive sign if you're trying to have a united military that’s focused on these strategic challenges. So we watch it very carefully, obviously, and try to understand it as best we can.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

To go back to the U.S.-China relationship. The view you hear from both Chinese government spokespeople, but also from fairly sophisticated Chinese academics and analysts who have been invested in the U.S.-China relationship for a long time, is this view that there is now a bipartisan commitment to something very like containment in the U.S. foreign policy system. I think that’s been a surprise, or was a surprise, early on that Biden, in many ways, continued some of the tougher aspects of the Trump policy. When you hear your Chinese counterparts talking about containment, what is the argument you have with them? Do you seek to convince them that’s not the case? Is there evidence that it’s wrong? Or do you think that does, in fact, get at some elements of our policy?

NICHOLAS BURNS

We have not used that word, “containment,” the Kennan word from the Long Telegram and the Foreign Affairs article in 1947, but what we do tell the Chinese leadership is, “Look, you have been unnecessarily aggressive in contesting American power and the power of our allies all across the world.” In the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, in the Taiwan Strait, the support that Chinese companies, obviously with the support of the government here in Beijing, the enormous support they’ve given to Russia to rage this brutal war in Ukraine. The fact that China is embarked on this extraordinary build up of the People’s Liberation Army that they’re building up—and look at our unclassified Pentagon report of the last couple of weeks on the Chinese military—they’re building up their nuclear weapons force at an unprecedented level, and they refuse any kind of transparency about it. It's the first time in the nuclear age since the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that a major nuclear weapons power refuses to talk to any country about what it’s doing.

And there’s another issue I should talk about: the cyber aggression against the United States and its allies that director Wray and others have talked about publicly. So the message to the Chinese leadership is, “You're contesting our power and our interests on so many different fronts; you have to expect a pushback.” And I think that is what has united leaders of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in both houses of Congress, because I speak to members of Congress all the time when I’m back in Washington about this, and that has also motivated the Biden administration to be very competitive with the Chinese. And so I think of it as competitions in four spheres: the military competition in the Indo-Pacific, where we have to hold our ground and avoid a situation where the PLA overtakes the American military in power, and we’re going to accomplish that.

Second: to compete on the technology front, which is the new battlefield and which is at the heart of this competition, and we have been all in on that competition. Third is to demand that China play by the rules in trade and investment, which it’s not doing. We have more than 10,000 American companies in China, and yet they don’t operate on a level playing field. And I spent a lot of time, and Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Yellen have, in trying to back up American business. And the fourth arena of competition is human rights, where we have to stand up for human rights, in Xinjiang, of the Uyghur people, who’ve been jailed by the millions. We have to stand up for what’s happening in Tibet and Hong Kong on the lack of religious freedom. So if you think of the competitive aspect of this, I do think we have unity in the United States, that we have to wage this competition.

At the same time that we compete, and I spend most of my time on the competitive end, by the way, we do have to engage the Chinese on issues where we have our national interest that’s at stake, and where we can work with them. So on climate change, we have to work with China. They’re the leading carbon emitter. On fentanyl, a majority of the precursor chemicals that make up the synthetic opioid fentanyl, come from China. We’ve been working vigorously with them, pushing them to do more to limit the flow of those precursor chemicals to the drug cartels. On military-to-military cooperation, you don’t want to have a situation where our senior military officers are not talking because you want to drive down the probability of any kind of misunderstanding or conflict in the South and East China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait.

And we have a situation now, because President Biden and President Xi agreed we would do this, where Admiral Paparo has met twice over recent months with the Southern Theater commander of the PLA; we got the four Americans released through quiet diplomacy. So there are times when you have to engage and there are times when you have to compete. I would say that 80 percent of what I have done here, the time I’ve spent, is on the competitive side, but that 20 percent in the engagement side is very important. And I think that it would be a mistake if we said we’re never going to work with China on any issue, because that would just be self-defeating for the United States in the areas that I’ve talked about.

And the final point is this: we have to live in peace with China. We don’t want a war, and the Chinese don’t want a war, and we shouldn’t stumble into one. So there has to be a sufficient amount of engagement of cabinet-level communications to make sure that we’re being clear with each other and intentional, and that we’re letting each other know about what we're doing in the world and how we’re opposing each other. And I think we’ve succeeded in the last 18 months in building those cabinet channels, the most important of which is President Biden and President Xi, and they’ve met three times in long meetings. I’ve been at each of those. Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan with Wang Yi, Janet Yellen and Gina Raimondo with their counterparts. I have served that purpose at my level here. And so you don’t want a situation where the two countries aren’t talking. So there are some voices back home that say, “Shut down the relationship. Decouple. No more students, no more tourists.” That's a recipe for failure. China’s strong. China is global, and so we have to interact, but from a position of strength. And I think we’ve done that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me ask about one more competitive dimension of the relationship before getting to some of your parting thoughts. I think it would have been a surprise when you were arriving a few years ago to know just how deep the Russia-China relationship would become over a few years, and you and others in the administration have spent a lot of time trying to persuade the Chinese that it’s not on their interest, the kind of support they’ve lent to the war in Ukraine. The Russian war in Ukraine is not in their interest. That has not worked. Why have they not taken that advice? Why have they not been persuaded by that? And how do you assess the state and longevity of the Sino-Russian relationship at this point? You, of course, worked on Soviet affairs and Russian affairs in the Cold War and post–cold war. So you know the other side of this relationship quite well, as well.

NICHOLAS BURNS

The relationship between China and Russia is quite strong. It’s as strong as it’s been probably since the 1950s, when Mao was quite attached to his relationship with Stalin and Khrushchev. And I think it’s centered in the personal relationship between President Putin and President Xi. They’ve met more than 50 times. They both declared this is the most important relationship that they have. You see it on the ground. The Chinese say they’re neutral. They claim they’re neutral in Russia’s war on Ukraine. They’re not neutral. They’re giving very valuable support to the Russian leadership. And so I think we’re going to have to assume that for the foreseeable future, we’re dealing with two countries that see a coincidence of their national interest in this relationship. And it’s broader than that. Bob Gates wrote, in Foreign Affairs, in an article that I have reread three or four times a year and a half ago, that it’s not just Russia and China, it’s Iran and North Korea, in an unholy alliance, and so we’ve got to confront that and deal with that from a position of strength, which we’ve tried to do.

It’s interesting, Dan, but over the long term, will this be an alliance that stays together like NATO has for 75 years? I think that’s an open question, if you look to the 2030s and 2040s, when there’s generational and leadership change, just by dint of chronology. There are still some academics here in China, and I’ve talked to them, who complain about the unequal treaties between the Romanovs and the Qing empire. The Chinese remember that. Or the division of Mongolia in the 1920s. They’re few and far between, but they’re there. So I think what distinguishes our brand of diplomacy, which is based on being aligned with and allied with democratic countries, is you get NATO for 75 years. You get, for 75 years, our treaty alliances with the Philippines and Japan and South Korea. I don’t know whether this Russia relationship is long lasting. It’s so much based on personality, as opposed to values and national interest. But in the short term, this is a very difficult proposition for the United States, and we’ve been very focused on it.

China has not used its influence to dissuade the Iranians, for instance, from falling off their support for the Houthi rebels who have shut down commercial traffic in the Red Sea. China has been on the sidelines on Lebanon and in Gaza. They’ve complained. They’ve castigated the United States, but it was the United States that produced the cease-fire with our Arab partners in Lebanon, the United States and the Arab world and Israel working on the prospective cease-fire in Gaza. China is not acting like a great power. It scores political points, but it rarely rolls up its sleeves and spends political capital the way that a normal great power would do. So I think they’ve been exposed, in a sense, and their relationship with Iran and Russia has had unintended consequences.

The Europeans tell the Chinese that Chinese backing of Russia is an existential issue, because peace in Europe, the indivisibility of Europe, is an existential issue for the Europeans, and has been for centuries. And it’s come at great cost to the Chinese. There’s great, great distrust in Europe of China because of what’s happened in Ukraine. And we have told the Chinese, by the way, that what’s happened in Ukraine is an existential issue for the United States. We are on the continent, and NATO, as an actor in the defense of Europe, and the Chinese, I think, did not see, when they enunciated that no-limits partnership on February 4, 2022 between Putin and Xi Jinping, that the reaction from the United States, from Canada, and from Europe would be so severe. It’s cost them in their relationships with all of us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So in a couple of weeks, you will be getting, I hope, so much deserved rest, and President Trump will be back in office. As you’ve watched the Chinese hash out their own policy for Trump 2, what does that debate look like, and how do you think they will react to the next Trump administration?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Of course, we’re following that debate. You talked to a lot of Chinese. I talked to a lot of Chinese about it. You read what they’re saying in their press. I think there are a couple schools of thought. One school of thought here is that this might be advantageous, this change, for the Chinese—that they’ve dealt with President Trump before. Another school of thought is that it’s going to weaken China. So we’ll just have to see how it plays out. I have not commented about what President Trump might do—I don’t think it’s proper for me to do that. We need to give him time to come into power and form his government and put his people in place. I don’t want to be unfair to them. I should tell you that I have never met Senator David Perdue, who is President Trump’s nominee to replace me as ambassador to China. But when I heard about his appointment, I reached out to him, and I said publicly on social media that I wish him well, that I’m going to give him every support that I can, because his success will be the success of our country.

And this gets back to one of the things you asked me about, and you’re right to do it. We do have a rough bipartisan consensus about what we should be doing to China, and I don’t want to see that broken, so I will do everything I can to help Senator Perdue when he becomes, Senate willing, Ambassador Perdue because, obviously there are differences for sure between the Biden administration and the future Trump administration, but there are a lot of issues where we would obviously want the United States to go forward on a unified basis. And so I wish him well in all of this.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Is there anything you would tell him about what you’ve learned in your time in Beijing, that you wish you’d known when you started, about the relationship and how it works?

NICHOLAS BURNS

Well, I’ll probably leave that to my private conversation with him, but I would say this, Dan. I came to this job three years ago. I was confirmed a little over three years ago with a very tough- minded view of China. All of us have lived through what happened when China went into the South and East China Seas in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and built up those illegal bases and claimed land that wasn’t theirs, etc. And all of us lived through the China shock, where we lost a significant number of American manufacturing jobs. So I was prepared to be hard-edged, but I leave China focused on the competition. China is out to overtake us in total power in the Indo-Pacific, and we cannot let that happen. And we’ve talked in this interview about all the different elements of that competition. But I would also say to my successors and other people who are interested in this issue, we’re going to focus on competition, and we have to, but we have to also reserve some room for engaging China on issues, and we’ve covered them: fentanyl, military-to-military, climate change, where it’s in our interest to cooperate with them.

And we need a stable relationship with China. The two times when I felt the relationship was veering out of control were the months following the visit of Speaker Pelosi, which we supported, to Taiwan, August 2022, where the Chinese shut down eight avenues of communication with us on very important issues. And then the balloon crisis of early February 2023, that strange balloon that floated across our territory for five days. And in an Orwellian twist, when President Biden shot down the balloon, as he rightfully should have, the Chinese then blamed the United States for the balloon. They then shut down communication again, and I thought that was a dangerous period. If two supremely powerful countries are not talking in any meaningful way, nothing good comes from that.

So I think what needs to temper some of the discussion in the United States is, yes, we should be competitive, and we certainly have been, but you also have to engage, and you have to keep the lines open, because we are powerful countries, and you don’t want that power to be uncontrolled. And you want us to have the ability to respond to an accident if two ships collide, or if two planes collide, and those things have happened, and you want adults, senior military officers and diplomats, to be able to defuse that crisis. And we’re going to compete with China, but again, we have to live with China—in peace. And so that’s where diplomacy comes in, and that’s why it’s not a 50/50 balance. I think it’s an 80/20 balance of 80 percent competition, 20 percent engagement. But there has to be that balance, and I think that is drawing on the lessons of the old Cold War. Eisenhower was not afraid to talk to Khrushchev. Ronald Reagan was not afraid to talk to Mikhail Gorbachev. And in doing so, that actually helped us to be successful in the old Cold War. These are very different situations, because China is so much more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was. But I think there are some lessons from the old Cold War, which I remember from my time as a young diplomat, that we can take advantage of.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, Nick, thank you for doing this in your final days as ambassador. Thank you for all you’ve done these last few years. We’ll look forward to doing this again, I hope, when you’re back stateside and have had some time to rest, and I’m sure there’s much for you to write in Foreign Affairs as well.

NICHOLAS BURNS

Thank you, Dan. It’s always a pleasure. And thank you very much for this interview. Thanks a lot.