约翰.桑顿 中国是精英治国 美国是富豪统治
Distinguished Lecture: Navigating the Future of US-China Relations
Texas Science 2023年5月18日
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgUX82Vh_8I&t=1541s
On Friday, April 28, 2023, John Thornton, Director of the Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing and former President of Goldman Sachs, lead a conversation about Navigating the Future of US-China Relations in the Amir and Zaib Husain Auditorium on the campus of ?@UTAustin?.
Moderator: JR DeShazo, Dean, ?The LBJSchool? of Public Affairs, UT Austin
Hosts:
David Vanden Bout, Dean, College of Natural Sciences, UT Austin
Don Fussell, Chair, Department of ?@UTCompSci?, UT Austin
Amir Husain (B.S. ’98 UT Austin), Founder & CEO, ?@Avathon?
Zaib Husain (B.B.A. ’99 UT Austin), Founder, Makerarm
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约翰.桑顿说中国是精英治国:说要做某事,十有八九会去做。而美国是富豪统治,行为相反。
黑白碎片 2025年9月19日
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exz45TP2oIY
在这一段访谈中,高盛原总裁兼首席运营官司约翰.桑顿谈到他对中国的体制以及中国式现代化的理解,强调了中美关系的重要性,呼吁美国要加强对中国的了解和认真对待,以及他个人与中国政商高层打交道数十年的心得和体会。
Hi folks thank you so much for joining us today uh Zaib and I Dean Vanden Bout uh and of course chairman Fussell are all thrilled to have you here we have a very very special session by a very special person uh Mr John Thornton uh I have known John now for many years and in his many many qualities one of the things that I can tell you is that his incisiveness about issues of global
import are simply that skill is simply unmatched I've never found anyone who I have run across
anywhere in the world that is able to take complex Global topics and cut straight to the heart of the
matter and in this day and age where the biggest challenge that we have ahead of ourselves is how
two powerful Nations the United States and China coexist in a dynamic changing world the attendant
questions are what will U.S China relations be and while there will be some tension and while there
will hopefully be some room for cooperation how can this relationship be handled in the best way
possible to yield the most positive outcome not just for China not just for the United States but
for Humanity and I think there's no better person than Mr John Thornton to address these questions
today so with that let me invite Dean de chazo and Mr John Thornton to please join us here [Applause]
well good afternoon everyone I'm J.R DeShazo I'm the dean of the LBJ School of public affairs and
it's my great pleasure to to welcome you to today's event and to moderate this important
conversation on probably the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world that between
the U.S and China and uh we have as Amir just mentioned a very distinguished and
deeply knowledgeable thought leader with lots of experience on both sides of the
Pacific on this issue of John Thornton John is the executive chairman of the Barrick Gold
the world's largest gold mining company and was recently appointed professor and director of the
Global Leadership program at qingwa University and the school of economics in management
he retired in 2003 as the the president of golden Goldman Sachs and has since served as trustee and
board members on dozens and dozens of boards including the Council on Foreign Relations the
Asia the the American Asian society and many others John holds degrees from Harvard JD from
Oxford and a masters of management from Yale so please join me in welcoming John with us today
so the format is John's going to give a few opening remarks I will ask hopefully some
insightful questions and then we'll open it up to you towards the the latter half of the conversation John the floor is your wife well first of all thank you for having me here
particularly to Amir and zave um so this topic as we all know is so complicated
and or toxic and or hyperbolic and or all kinds of negative emotions that my real goal today is to
conduct this conversation in such a way as to uh Inspire or catalyze greater curiosity on the part
of every one of you about this topic and I say that because uh I've recently been re-reading
two books my first degree was in history so I'm kind of a history buff rereading two books one
was one is Barbara tuckman's guns of August of course you won the won the Pulitzer 1962
and the other was Richard hofstetter's the paranoid Style in American politics the first
book talking's first book of course is how we got ourselves into World War One rather by accident
unfortunately the second book Hofstadter's book is even in some ways more relevant hofstetter's book
he was inspired to write the book because of the emergence of Joe McCarthy and he wanted to
understand how is it possible that Joe McCarthy could have Arisen in this country and so he went
back through history and came all the way to the present and he basically concluded I'm simplifying but bear with me here he basically concluded there's kind of a paranoid Gene
in our culture that surfaces every so often typically in conditions in which ordinary
people have got difficult lives and a populist leader comes along and inflames their fears and
their passions and their and their insecurities by reference to some external malevolent Force
called communism or terrorism or Chinese and we're living through one of those periods right now
and what hofstetter basically says is this is just part of Who We Are and it kind of Ebbs and flows every so often it surfaces and then it disappears but when it surfaces
it hangs around for a while it's a decade or two this is not something that disappears quickly
and what's amazing is that this pattern continues to exist I mean it just drives me nuts but anyway so so hofstetter would say that when when it occurs first of all it's going to last for
a while second of all people who know better typically do one of two things
they go to ground and disappear and say nothing which is not very helpful or worse they get to the front of the queue and they lead the parade
and again we're seeing a lot of that right now that's why I I start off by saying
I have this kind of naive hope that that common sensical ordinary intelligent Americans
can analyze things themselves and come to more balanced conclusions than what's going on in
our country right now on this topic you know it wasn't very long ago essentially
the consensus is all around this side of the ship now sunlight's over on the other side of the ship and you know you get a little bit of vertigo watching this happen
so that's the first thing I want to say the second thing I want to say is uh I've kind
of been trying my mind how do I discuss this topic in a way that gets oxygen into the room
and people will actually listen and so I started to say to myself well maybe I should talk about
the world in the future because people are less emotional about that it's further more distance
they'll be more balanced but near enough that it's real so I started as Fashion on the year 2050.
and I said to myself okay what would the world be like in 2050 well the best estimates are they'll be something like 10 billion people
and today there are approximately 8 billion so we have an incremental 2 billion people
and those people are going to come primarily from nine countries and those countries are India Nigeria Pakistan Ethiopia Uganda
Tanzania Democratic Republic of the Congo Indonesia the United States
so essentially we're going to add two billion poor people primarily in Africa and Central Asia
and at the same time the concentration of wealth will get worse so for example the U.S and China today are something like 42 percent of global GDP
in the year 2050 no one really knows of course but it's going to be somewhere between 50 and 60 percent so two countries will have 50 or 60 percent of the world's wealth
and there'll be two billion more poor people now we already know what it looks like when you have that kind of uh inequality both within countries and across countries
just about everything you can think about is not good migration disease terrorism climate change Etc so I look at that and I say to myself
if we had any kind of as it were strategic planning going on for the world
raise your hand if you think it's a good idea that in that world I just described
that the world's pick your number most powerful wealthiest 10 countries
five countries or how about the two countries who thinks it's a good idea that in that world those two countries should spend most of their time
fighting with each other I mean it can't make any sense at all and so I look at that world and
I say to myself wait a minute right now the way I feel about it it's like we're heading over a cliff
we're persuading ourselves and it's kind of it's kind of like a escalating negative game
both sides are persuading themselves but the other ones nefarious malevolent and
it's getting worse and worse and it can't make any sense and so then I scratch mine and say
well now how are we going to get ourselves out of this trap out of this trap and it's not obvious particularly when you have regard to what I said a minute ago about hofstetter
because our own country domestically is going to be in my opinion politically ill for a while
so with that if I can call it that reality that makes the the task that much more difficult
so there are only two things I'm kind of I'm hoping will exist one is that
other countries will in fact increasingly over time more forcefully say to the United States
and China I'm sorry it's simply not acceptable for the two of you not to have a constructive
relationship the world cannot exist if that's the case and you got to stop it
um and you see some of that happening right now one of the things that kind of interests me is I don't want to take a tangent but I'll just quickly go through this if you
look at the um the Russian Ukrainian War and if you were following just the English language
media English language communication channels which dominate the world's communication channels
you could be forgiven for thinking that the sanctions on Russia are basically a good idea and are essentially working and most people see it that way until you get into the fine prints
and you realize that of the 54 African countries the number supporting the sanctions is zero of the
32 Latin American countries the number supporting the sanctions is zero
of the 22 Middle Eastern countries the number of supporting the sanctions is zero
the 48 Asian countries numbers supporting the sanctions are three South Korea Japan Singapore
16 Pacific island countries two Australia New Zealand so I just named you 175 countries
five of us are supporting the sanctions so the sanctions are essentially an American Western European and a few American Allies in essentially an Asian australasia now the relevance of that is
that it does show you a certain kind of fissure that exists that you don't hear a lot about uh
and the positive side of which maybe this is the question may be that all those other countries over time will say to both the United States and China as I
said earlier it's just not acceptable for you all not to have a decent relationship
and and China by the way is already the largest trading partner with 140 of those countries
uh and China I was just in China earlier this week listening to a uh there's a new sort of
well a more more prominent form of a term of art the Chinese are using called Chinese modernization
and they're determined to illustrates for the world that modernization and westernization are not synonymous
and the modernization can take different forms in different countries and I was listening to the
foreign minister lay all this out and among the other things he cited was in no particular order
uh China's contributed more to Global growth in the last decade than all G7 countries put together
1.4 billion people in China are more than all the developer world put together uh uh they're they're the leading Trader with 140 countries the trade between China and asean
this is amazing the trade between China and asean is bigger than the trade between the United States
and EU so when you start going down through these things you realize there's a certain reality here
that sooner or later the Americans are gonna have to accept and my own opinion is the sooner that
gets understood and accepted the better and that the relationship has got to get better because if it doesn't get better than everything I was saying about 2050 let alone 2070 or 2100
it's just going off a cliff I'm going to stop there great all right so there's so much that
to dig in there and and I think um I I want to come back to China's relationship with other
countries because I think that's been pivotal and it sets the stage for many topics that we need to to talk about but but I want to start back in 2012 when Xi Jinping came to power
and I this is a Premiere that that you have watched and studied and know help us understand
who he is and as a leader what he wants okay so this can make me very unpopular so Xi Jinping
and this goes back to what I was saying earlier I want you to keep your minds open for a second and try to Imagine This and and some of you may know this um so XI jinping's father was
the youngest vice Premier in China in 1959 when he was 46 years old and Xi Jinping was six years old
1962 XI jinping's father was purged by Mao so Xi Jinping between age six and nine his
father's right in the center of the power structure and suddenly he's out altogether
four years later 1966 is the cultural revolution Xi Jinping is 13 years old the father and the mother sent to prison
two years later Xi Jinping at age 15. is sent to the countryside sent down youth so he lives in the
countryside from age 15 to age 22. so for those seven years those seven extremely formative years
he's living the dirt dirt poor existence of the Chinese farmer
with both parents in prison older half-sister commits suicide
so their children paying as a in this teenage college Years by the way of course not being educated there's no school in his own University and you know where's the future
during that period he applies 15 times to be in the Communist Party he gets turned down 15 times
eventually of course Mao dies El pain comes back into Power done shopping
brings the father out from prison pink is now free to go to university and start his life
the father meanwhile dun Xiaoping makes him the governor of Guangdong Province Guangdong
Province is the province right across from Hong Kong and XI jinping's father is the individual
who goes to done Xiaoping and says we should make this a special economic zone
and experiment with market economics so his father is the individual who goes done
shopping and stuff that's the kind of the the first Spark of the reform and opening period
uh later on when Don Xiaoping essentially removes Julio Bang from Power then Tiananmen
Square happens XI jinping's father is the only one of that generation who tells dung he's wrong
and he gets banished again so
I want you to think about the sort of the strength of character of somebody who goes
through what I just described and comes out the other side of it pretty much intact stays in the system Rises up to the position he's in I have four children the youngest of whom is a
sophomore in the University this past semester he had a course on the cultural revolution
and the final paper was write a paper on what you think the impact was on the sent down youth of the
cultural revolution and so my son interviewed six or seven sent down youth half of whom were living
in this country and half of whom are living in China and of course in his paper he basically says look you can't you can't generalize for 17 million people on the basis of talking to seven but this
is what these seven people told me and then he says you know it's interesting to speculate what was the impact of the on the sent down youth of those sent down youth who stayed in the system
and got to the top of the system like Xi Jinping and my son says the following things in his
paper which I agree with he says the first thing is if you're Xi Jinping when he says
our single highest priority is to improve the lives of the ordinary people
when he says that this is a deeply felt personal emotional comment this is not a conceptual comment
and this is not you know any of the U.S leaders in my lifetime none of them live like that life
and so when they talk about improving the lives of ordinary Americans this is an intellectual concept they believe it to more or less extent for Xi Jinping this is a highly personal comment
that's number one the second one is if you live through the Insanity of the cultural revolution
and you're a leader of China priority one through five or one through ten
is social and political stability so those two things to me are the most defining
characteristics of this person the third one being cheating Pink's desire for China as a country to
re-establish itself remembering that in 18 of the last 20 centuries China was the world's most was
the world's largest economy it's only the last two centuries 19th and 20th where it wasn't so
so in the Chinese mind the re-establishment the norm they're not they're not sort of uh in
Graham Allison's or Graham Graham Allison's phase coming into a pre-existing system of setting it
so one of the things then that I think it would be helpful for us to understand is what are the
policies that he's implemented and why and I I you mentioned the number of countries that have
remained neutral uh with respect to the Russian invasion of Ukraine um one can't but wonder how
much the one belt one road initiatives which supported the trade both within Asia and China's
connection to Natural Resources and the rest of the world economy through this initiative have
played a role in that outcome can you can you talk about what you see as the importance of of what
that initiative looks okay one built one rose is a perfect example of something and I didn't
know this until I was told this by John Kerry so John Kerry told me that in I think was 2013
he was the senior American at one of these International meetings that Obama could not
attend for one reason or another and so he was the person who took the meeting with children pink
Xi Jinping in that meeting said to John Kerry by the way let me tell you about something I'm thinking about and he laid out the one belt one road
and Carrie said to him oh that's very interesting why don't we do this together and Xi Jinping says that's a great idea let's do this together
I mean Kerry came back to Washington and he said before I get off the plane the treasury Mandarin said cut his legs off and there was no chance it was going to happen so it never got to Obama's
desk that's kind of a strategic question but I tell you that story because if you were reading
the if you were reading today the characterization of one belt one road you would think this was some kind of malevolent tactic to get control of the world on the part of the Chinese which it is not
it is it is exactly what it's said what do you thought they say it is which is to which is to uh
extend a model of development into as many countries as it wanted who desperately needed and
when I talked earlier about Chinese modernization that I that I attended this last Monday so Chinese
modernization I won't go into all the details but there basically are five central characteristics characteristics of it one of which is a peaceful world second one of which is common prosperity
third one of which is harmony between man and nature so the foreign minister wants this whole
thing and then there were five of us asked to comment on it and I said in my comments I said listen those of us who have ever run anything though plans are one thing execution is another
executions the whole thing so my piece my advice to you the Chinese would be if you're going to
hold yourself out as believing in these things I mean who's against any of these things who's against World Peace who's against Harmony between man and nature who's against common Prosperity
nobody 10 out of 10 people there's nobody in this room who's going to be against any of these things
so that's not the issue the issue is are you actually going to do what you say you do
and if you don't you're going to suffer the same uh the same negative blowback that countries like
the United States get when they were seen as being hypocritical so that's Point number one point number two which is extremely important and a point I want to make to all of you
which I made to the Chinese Stone blue in the face very unsuccessfully which is when I first
started spending a lot of time in China wasn't them well I was chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia in the mid 90s into 2000. at a point in time when the Chinese system was just starting to open up
and they were just starting to put state-owned Enterprises into Western markets
and zuraji was the premier Vice Premier then premier and he was a very unusual person and
he really cared about getting this right and I happened to be there when I was very senior so I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to give him advice
in a way they'll probably never occur again because the Chinese were so needed with the advice but one thing that struck me about them was the Chinese leadership on almost every topic
not every topic but almost every topic was systematically open in the following sense
they started with the premise there's somebody in the world who knows this topic better than we do
let's get that somebody to Beijing let's drain his brain let's study what he had to say see if
it applies to us refine and customize for our circumstance and then execute
and they did this time after time after time which is why you always back in those days you would have seen both John zimin and zoranji routinely meeting with Western CEOs Western
superb academics Nobel Prize winners and so forth Western head of ngos they met with them routinely
one-on-one because they knew they were getting very high quality information coming in from people who didn't work for them and good information was coming back the other
way that that's that started to stop a few years ago that's another topic but my point
is systematically open except I said to them listen one thing one topic you missed which is
the English language dominates the world's communication channels
and you recognize that you literally don't participate in them at all
so the Chinese story as it were is told by people who are not Chinese and guess what they don't know
the story as well they don't tell it as well and so it's entirely absent and until you start to
get into those channels you're going to be a big big disadvantage so when you talk about Chinese modernization going back to that if you believe it number one you've got to deliver on it number
two you've got to communicate it in such a way that the external World particularly the English language World takes it in and believes it and right now you're failing miserably on
that count and until that gets corrected it's never going to solve that problem
so one of the things I think most Americans were taught when they learned about China
was that it is a communist originally Marxist form of government and Society
uh but one of the things that we we many of us have missed is how not just embracing of
markets China has been but how dominant China has become at capitalism in in its own flavor of
capitalism in terms of state-owned Enterprises and allowing for other kinds of free market operations
and the one belt one road initiative is in many ways an expression of that
um the the incredible trade integration and Market integration with the US is another
expression of that can you talk about how that transformation has happened and how we missed
it and what it means for for China in particular well let me say a couple of things first of all
I just want to read you one quick thing this by the way another one of my pet peeves is that um
last November I was having breakfast in New York with a very senior Chinese official just one-on-one with a note taker and in the first five minutes the official said to me
it's so frustrating to us that senior Americans never read anything that we
put out instead what they do is they they listen to so-called experts Western experts
who interpret our documents for these let's say the senior people in this country
and he gave a specific example he said for example Kevin Rudd who his is him talking
Kevin Rudd who I know very well he's a good guy in those twine quite well again Cameron's got a
whole theory about what we're doing now and a lot of people listen to them he said the problem is
Kevin Wright's wrong and I don't know how to correct that and and when he said that
I said I recognize exactly what you're saying it relates to what I was just saying a minute ago but in addition to which here I've got a book for example written by a
senior Chinese comparing the Warring States period in China with with the ancient Greece
so a frustration of mine is as much as I know or don't know about China and I know that uh you know an outsider to our culture can never be an Insider so most
of you ever hope to be is kind of a synthetic Insider by building relationships with people
um but one thing I know after all these years is that as much as I think I know in something
if I don't test it with a close Chinese friend I'm going to be off sometimes a little bit sometimes a
lot and so I tried as much as I can to read things that the Chinese themselves actually write and by
the way this is an aside with destruction of the Chinese government when they say they're going
to do something chances are very high they're going to do it and in contrast for example to the
you know our state of the union which is basically a speech about about the future and about hope
the Chinese have the thing they call the it's called the the the the the equivalent in China
is the Chinese work report which tells you exactly what they actually did for
real and what they're going to do for real it's a completely different document all right now I just
want to read you one thing here though because I sort of captures I think a very good sentiment
bear with me here one second ah okay here we are the the power configuration in the current world
should not be defined as competition between China and the United States for hegemony rather
we witness a shift from the situation in which a single civilization dominated the globe to Common
prosperity of diverse civilizations what China has inaugurated is not a Chinese Century But A Century
of diverse civilizations a new era in which there will no longer be a single civilizational hegemon
and that's exactly the way they're trying to see it as opposed to you know Joe Biden says this is the this is the century of democracies versus autocracies
some of the some of the funnier more clever Chinese would say no no it's the plutocracy versus the meritocracy uh which gets to the Chinese Communist Party the Chinese Communist
Party the best way to think about that is the Chinese Communist party is essentially the meritocratic elite in the same way if you look back through Chinese history
there was an emperor and then there was the kind of the Mandarin class running the country that's
essential what you have at the moment and you don't get into the Chinese Communist party if you're not very able you don't get the qingwai university if you're not for able you know
10 million kids a year take the take the national examinations to go to a university
the top three thousand of those but at Qing University three thousand get admitted and three thousand go and so and and Qing University accounts for 50 of the leadership of the country
so so that the examination-based culture which has existed for 2000 years still exists and
essentially that's what drives the the input into all these institutions and so to put it
in in the vernacular if you get to the top of the Chinese system there's no chance you're not
very smart and very able and the only institution in this country which is to me is at all like it
and when I tell them this it drives me crazy the only institution in this country that's all like the Chinese Communist party is the US Military which is to say that if you and I were 18 years
old and went to West Point together we went in the military and we stayed in the military one day we're four-star generals we've known each other for you know whatever it is 40 years and we're
sitting around the same table that's the Chinese system and so they know each other intimately
they've had real jobs they failed or they succeeded if they succeeded they want to have they
fail they failed and like all big organizations there of course there's plenty of rough Justice in infighting all the rest of it that goes on in every corporation in the United States
anywhere else but that's basically the system so I think the word communist kind of gets into the
gets in gets into the mental way of Americans understanding what you're dealing with it's not
a communist system period which doesn't mean they don't have when they talk about common prosperity for example you might say that's the equivalent of trying to fix incoming inequality
that we would talk about but the other day another Chinese were saying to me the capitalist system
is essentially a divide and conquer system the Chinese modernization is a unifying system
and so they're the so Xi Jinping to go back to him he is determined although they haven't figured out how to do this yet the common Prosperity is for Real they're proud of the fact they've lifted
800 million people out of poverty because that's the most ever in history by a long long way
they're proud of that and they think those people ought to continue to advance and that's this
you know this big big differences between the wealthy and the poor it's just it's too much
and that's why you seem sort of cracking down now on some of that so on the one hand I mean
the portrait that you paint is is one of of Xi Jinping and the Chinese government making
successful strategic investments in Market development internally and externally in terms
of improving relations with other countries supply chain robustness hardening resiliency
and and America responding poorly to being beat out in these marketplaces and and whether it's a
trade War intellectual property threats because we're worried we might fall further behind in certain ways um and to cover that up or maybe not even to focus on that there's the framing of the
autocracy versus democracy and that's there's the moral play that we should be focusing on
but if a lot of Americans would focus on well we feel threatened because of China's policy towards
Taiwan or towards North Korea or now towards Russia and potential Partnerships there how does
your your narrative around common Prosperity fit into that foreign policy story admitting that I've
just picked three countries out of probably 120 with whom it has positive trading relationships
right well obviously all these topics are very complicated but um and what's so hard to know is
when these when the two biggest countries the two most powerful countries start getting antagonistic towards one another you know what's causing what right and it's it may not even be a useful
exercise to try to figure out what caused what um but you're but you inspire me one other point
I wanted to make which is this I had thought incorrectly that when Biden became president
we would have for the first time in history and ask that we never had before which was an incoming
president who already had a good relationship with the existing Chinese president so when Xi
Jinping was vice president and Joe Biden was vice president the two of them spent about 10 days
in China together and 10 days in the United States together that's a long time for two
people without seniority so in by making president he had a pre-existing in fact I would say those
two have spent more time together than any two American Chinese Presidents in history so I thought incorrectly the Biden being a good politician would realize his first
phone call would be to Xi Jinping and say looking forward to working with you we can do this that the other thing together blah blah blah he did exactly the opposite they literally
decided no no what we have to do is we have to talk to everybody else in the world first particularly the allies get us all together coherently and then talk to the Chinese
so about nine months elapsed before Biden and Xi Jinping ever spoke so then I started thinking okay now Biden says routinely as all American presidents have recently
the U.S China relationship is the most important relationship of the 21st Century
of course I agree with that and so then if you kind of conceptualize the president United States it's sort of the CEO of the country
and the CEO of the country just said okay the most important relationships you are trying
now if you were running a company and you had your key people around the table let's say your
cabinet as it were and that was your directive you would think that everybody everybody was senior
ought to be all over that topic right so now I've often done this sort of thought
exercise in my head if you went around the cabinet table you said to each Cabinet member
tell me the name of your Chinese counterpart I'll bet you 90 of them couldn't tell you let alone if you were to say on a scale of one to ten
grade your relationship with your counterpart the answer to that would be zero
so there's a there's a fundamental disconnect here which I to me it it's sort of it's almost uh
political malpractice by the way I say the same thing about the Chinese this is not this goes both
ways I'm picking out our own country because it's more polite to talk about your own country uh it
goes both ways I mean it's completely intolerable obviously we all know just through this is like
human relations 101 right if you if you want to build a relationship with someone that's why you got to talk to them and want to build any kind of trust or even even diminish fear
the better you know him or her the better or even if you're wanting to make a judgment and what do I
think about person a b or c isn't it a good idea to like spend a lot of time with them him or her
they're doing none of that so let me ask about that though I I mean I think again
many of us might think that domestic politics determines and shapes a country's foreign policy
um and and I happen to think that that's probably true in the U.S as well why you told the story
about Kerry and Obama and how Kerry was invited to join the one belt one road initiative I never
heard that story before yeah um we'd be in a very different position today goes on to say you know
in life you have these missed opportunities the single biggest missed opportunity in my life politically I mean it certainly has completely reshaped the International
Development world the World Bank the IMF are now second fiddles really to to that effort
but let's try and understand how the US got where it is today going back to Obama
um Trump Biden why haven't we been able to do better what let's diagnose the problem what
what's what's keeping us from communicating more or whatever it is we should be doing at this point
it's a very good question you know I I scratch my head because the consensus on China has become so
overwhelming that if you say anything even close to being constructed you're sort of viewed with
with a kind of Suspicion that's how bad it's gone so I don't know trying to deconstruct exactly how
we got here is hard obviously when Trump became president and let me just say Trump to me is going
back to what I was saying about Hofstra Trump is both symptom and cause so if Trump didn't
exist the underlying politics are still there he happened to capitalize on them rather well
the Trump story I know fairly well because I was in the early days I was quite involved with it um
and you remember in the beginning of the Trump period the the fear then was that trade was going to be a real problem and I was asked by the White House to help lighthizer
on the US China trade stuff because his counterpart was was a person called Vice Premier League who I knew very well and so I met with lighthizer and I said to him Bob
oh by the way I didn't know him at all and he had a reputation for being a real Hawk so I said Bob there's only one model of U.S China relationships that I know works
and I will call it the Kissinger Joe and lime model and that's this the respective
presidents appoints somebody who's very senior who's very trusted and the two presidents say
to the two people metaphorically get in a room and don't come out until you've got a solution
and this is exactly what kissing Joe and Joe and I did and so I said to Bob Bob that's the only model
that works that you absolutely have to follow that model and what you have to do you can't delegate this you have to build a relationship of trust with NoHo I've known lujo for 20 years he's a good
guy he did his Masters at the Kennedy School he speaks good English he's old elegant elegant man
um and a very bright man and I'm telling you whatever the result would otherwise be is going to be better if you do it the way I've just described and lighthizer
two is credited exactly that and the irony is four years later the trade channel was still wide open
so during the covert period for example uh when the White House was telling American manufacturers of medical supplies you know we need
all your stuff fast and a lot of these American Metal companies were Manufacturing in China
and because the Chinese covert thing happened earlier the Chinese government had done the same thing they said to Johnson and Johnson no no you can't export staying here in China
so the American companies drive and tell the White House we're happy to comply but a lot of ourselves with China we can't get it out and so they came to lighthizer and to me to say can
you talk to the Chinese and get them to let the stuff out we went through the trade Channel and
I said they had a conference call with um five CEOs of American Medical companies I said you're
going to think this is crazy but I'm telling you this is the way to get it done I need to know the name of the specific plant and the plant manager and his WeChat number
you give me that and I'll get it unlocked that's exactly what happened but the reason I tell you the story is because notwithstanding
all of the Harem thing and all of the storm and drunk that channel was actually very effective but
what then happened was Trump not having the discipline to kind of follow through on his his original his original engagement with Xi Jinping which by the way was very positive
uh and Trump kind of you know he he sort of uh engendered and and was not all bothered by a
kind of a world of chaos so he suddenly started sharing these speeches from Pompeo Navarro Pence
you're this person that person one was more hawkish than the next and so this started going getting worse and worse and worse and then I think the domestic Politics the way that played out was
I think the Democrats decided that the the very voters who Trump managed to pull away from Hillary
Clinton who simplistically were essentially middle class or working class Midwestern mostly white
mostly male voters that those voters Biden was able to bring back and those voters were
on the very negative end of the China issue and therefore we the Democrats cannot afford to let
the Republicans get to the right of us on China therefore both the Republicans and Democrats are
kind of fighting it out who's more hawkish on China and once that starts going then you know
genders all kinds of behavior which I'm sure you've all experienced you've seen you know at the very negative end you've seen a lot of a lot of uh sort of Despicable behavior on the part of
the government towards Chinese Americans Chinese Nationals particularly in academic institutions
um on the one hand at the other end of the spectrum you've seen people inspired to write in research and some of the stuff's quite good whether it's talkers or not lockers right
all right I want to invite the audience to participate now through q a so if you'd like to ask a question and I ask that you make it a question raise your
hand please identify yourself and um and state your question we'll
yeah we'll go I guess the microphones over here we'll go here first and then we'll come down
all right thank you for coming here and speaking with us today um I have a question you mentioned the two systems westernization and globalization and I I'd like to
hear how that differs from the Chinese perspective how they view these two systems differently and
and how come in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan that seemed from an American's perspective seemed to be westernizing and how that conflicts with the Chinese idea of of oh sorry uh was
it modernization modernization forgive me so yes that's my question yeah well first of all
as I started say before the Chinese definition of what they're calling Chinese modernization
has five central elements to it I named three of them before and they're all very sort of
high level macro I would call them aspirational or inspirational and I also said what I said earlier
which is okay if you say that you believe in these things then you're going to be able to explain
how does the Ukraine war fit into this emphasis on World Peace how does the behavior in Hong Kong
or the behavior in syndrome province or the behavior vis-a-vis Taiwan how do those fit
into these things and um since they're just sort of rolling this out now my assumption is although
I haven't heard the answers that you want to hear I want to hear them too I haven't I haven't heard those circles being squared yet but clearly they have to do that and I think that uh you may
have seen when if you're following what's being said by the Chinese with respect to the Ukraine
you can see that they're sort of starting to roll some of this out they're saying essentially we're neutral we're for peace and we want peace to happen as soon as it can happen
and what the time has to be right and the warring parties have got to be willing to
be interested in having peace but when that occurs we're happy to be as helpful as we can be so
it remains to be seen what comes to this you know I think that I uh a foreign policy
realist would look at this and say this is all naive nonsense um you know Global Powers behave
a certain way period end of story and they have for thousands of years nothing's going to change
it's tempting to think you'd like to think that the mankind can kind of evolve and then maybe just
maybe get to a point where they the most powerful countries in the world actually at least aspire
to have a peaceful world and they work hard to maintain that now who knows what that can
ever come about but certainly the Chinese Chinese make the case and I think with some justification if you look through thousands of years of History it's been a pretty um
it's been a pretty well sort of want to self-contained civilizational relatively peaceful
civilization if you were to one another one of the other parallel games I play in my own head is
if you compare the last 50 years just to pick to pick something and you were to go year by year
1973 74 75 Etc right to 2023 and you ask yourself one question was this country at War yes or no
you ask the question about the United States it's close times it's not 50 out of 50. it's close
you're asking about China I think it's one out of 50. 1979 in Vietnam so that may be a little bit
too clever but I think that it's not irrelevant and so now um on Hong Kong in particular well
let me say one more thing I'm getting I'm falling prey to my own criticism which is I
try to stay away from hyperbole but you get going you get to um you know I would say to the Chinese
the way you should have managed Hong Kong which you didn't you should have managed it in such a
way as to be reassuring to Taiwan that should have been your criteria what actually happened
was they managed Hong Kong in the early period rather rather well but after the early period the
managed terrible and and it came out as bad as it did and of course all it did was make the Taiwan
issue significantly worse so there's no Monopoly on on mistakes by any country so let's try and get
a couple more questions in before we run out of time um why don't you had your hand up go ahead
um one thing that I found particularly interesting was this remark you made about how China is basically completely absent from English communication channels why
do you think that is like what is missing there because my my impression is like if they wanted to they could break through like they could get the people what's missing there
really you know it's complicated because I had this conversation many many times with senior Chinese as recently as December with the with the most senior foreign policy person
um there are a couple of things first of all there's English language facility that's the most basic thing and at the very very senior levels is spotty that's one thing and the second thing is
on a kind of personal level I guess a sort of asymmetric risk meaning not only you've
got to be able to participate but you've got to be facile with the kind of the kind of uh
culture that exists among the English language media so if you're if you're
there let's say in freeze Zakaria show you better be ready for serious questions
and You Gotta Be You know you've got to be able to handle that that's the second thing that can be trained the third thing is though if you make a mistake
you know in the Chinese system it's a classic um under promise over deliver system
and for the standpoint of any individual making a courageous decision it's got asymmetric risk
if you're right you're not going to get a whole lot of credit if you're wrong
because it could be over for you so I think that's another issue and and then I think that the for
all the things I've said that are positive I don't think the Chinese have yet completely internalized
um how powerful that world is and what it does to them not to be in it even though I've it seems to
be obvious but you know when you're when you're in and when you're in an internal system like that
you know people we've all seen that we've seen that in companies we've seen in it just gets insular it's very interesting it's it's interesting to me though it's odd
but let's get uh one more one more question right back here
John thank you so much for what you have done for the Chinese people um as ethnic Chinese I love my
Heritage however there's one thing that I beg to defer is that I think the Chinese economic miracle
is the hard work of the Chinese people and the generosity of the United States and the rest
of the world in spite of the Chinese Communist party so um and I think that uh right now the two
parties that are antagonistic against each other are the United States and the Chinese Communist
party not against the Chinese people so my curiosity is that um given that the CCP controls
all mediums Chinese people are not allowed to see any news anything outside of you know China
whatever that's being you know broadcast by the party what are the three key things that you and
all of us could do to help the Chinese people to gain the understanding of the world and I think
that's the key to world peace and if we get their mind share Chinese people will be on our side
I am very sure about that thank you so much okay a couple things first of all
I you know I've been teaching at qingwai now for 20 years so I deal with and know a lot of young Chinese from that and from other words
and then of course I'm dealing in a sense with self-select I'm dealing with the most educated people but at least among that group I don't know a single one of them who doesn't know what's going
on in the outside world now we're sending your comments about Chinese um uh control of media
100 of them are connected 100 of the time just like you and I are to the to the world's media
because that's my first comment my second comment is I know that this this line of
you know it's it's the United States versus the Chinese Communist party not the Chinese people it it um this has been a sort of a way of looking at the world that's been
perpetrated recently by a lot of the particularly Republican leaders and it sounds good but in fact
inside the Chinese system as I said earlier even to this in fact even to this day
I remember when I was teaching my very first year I asked my students what do you want to
do when you finish and of course if you had you asked that question 10 years earlier
100 of them would have said I want to be in the government when you asked it when I was teaching this goes back 20 years ago even then 20 years ago the government was well down the list so
number one from memory this I'm going to remember number one was the PHD in a western Institution
number two was uh uh a PhD in a Chinese Institution number three was work for a western
company and get trained four was work for a joint venture company controlled by the Western company
five was five was
maybe the no work for a highly successful Chinese private sector company
like Alibaba or whatever six was work for the government and seven was worked for Chinese
State on Enterprise so even 20 years ago the government was well down the list however because of the sheer numbers the quality of the people going into the government is still very
very very high so I think it's a little bit of a sleight of hand to say you have the Chinese
Communist party on one hand and the people on the other hand um the third thing I would say is
which I'm sure obvious to you the Chinese know a lot more about us than vice versa
now there's a lot of reasons for that including the fact that we're an open Society but another reason is because they've been studying us for the last four decades at least and
we have not been doing the reverse and if you were to if you were to take any kind of any kind of uh
um activity like let's say I don't know numbers of Chinese students studying
in the United States number of Americans studying in China you know it's ten to one
um so and even I would say even among the elite here their knowledge of China is very very thin
and it's not true in the reverse isn't to say that Chinese can't learn a lot more they can learn a lot more but but their knowledge is much higher than ours so um
so I guess my answer to your question is I'm a big believer in um what both sides call People to People exchanges
by which I mean a whole raft of activities but what it basically means in its Essence is
Chinese people spending time here and vice versa I'd like to see a lot more going the other way
um I think that's the most powerful way to make a difference over time and I think it does make a difference we know that from our own personal experience and as
to what it does to the Chinese system over time I mean I guess I'll finish with that to the extent that any external people or even internal people
could have an impact on the Chinese system and the evolution of the Chinese politics and all that for sure you'll have more influence you've got the relationship and you built the trust
I once had a uh in 2007 Xi Jinping for a short period of time was party Secretary of Shanghai
and at that point in time I've known him for about 10 years and he asked me to do a project for him which was how to ensure Shanghai remains or becomes and remains a Global Financial Center
and so I want a way to do this project and I came back have dinner with them to report and
it just happened to coincide with I was writing a very short article for foreign affairs magazine
it was maybe 20 pages long it took me 14 months to write it because I wanted to be sure it was
accurate and so there were there were four of us for dinner Xi Jinping myself the head of
Finance in Shanghai who had not met Xi Jinping who was a mentee of mine and then a friend a
close friend of mine was also close to XI Japan so I happened featuring I happen to arrive first
and he says to me so what have you been doing recently as well I've been writing this article on the political evolution of China that's very interesting he asked me a question I answered and
I'm thinking he's just being courteous we sit down he keeps asking questions for four hours all we
discussed was what I thought I was learning about the political evolution of China we never touched
the topic of Shanghai as a Global Financial Center and their two friends didn't say a single word
the reason I mentioned that story is because because I have a quite a good understanding
in that one area of how he thinks but the reason I mentioned is not that I
mentioned it because I give you an example of something I did in that I did and failed in that discussion which was I tried to say to him with respect to the rule of law
I said it seems to me as a matter of common sense when you think it through that maybe with the exception of a small number of categories the rule of law is overwhelmingly in the interest of
the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party because it's a kind of a it's an area for redress
and that's good because the Chinese Communist Party tends to be very responsive anyway I I tried that line of argument didn't get anywhere
now but as I mentioned of those because I genuinely believe and it's been my experience and
overwhelmingly for years and years that if you're going to have any kind of influence on the thinking of senior Chinese for sure you've got to have their trust or you're
not going to have a real conversation anyone you have the real conversation you know nine times out of ten you're not going to make any progress but one time out of ten you will
all right with that um I'd like to thank you all for being here I'm going to ask my my friend and colleague
um David Van about the dean of the Natural Sciences to say just a few closing remarks okay
um just quickly wanted to thank zave and Amir Hussein uh particularly for introducing us to John
and John uh thanks for coming and visiting us here on the 40 acres it's been really
inspirational and you know as I think about one of the best things that can happen at a university is an event like this which really Sparks your curiosity to learn more and I think
you've really done that today I'm pretty sure if you'd asked us all what the most important relationship was in the world today we would have said U.S China and if you'd asked
us what we know about it we might have come up a little short so I think we uh I think we have a a lot of learning to continue to do and thanks for uh again sparking
our curiosity to do that and I have a small Memento to commemorate your visit and talk so
and um with that I will invite everybody out to our reception I'm outside