Distinguished Lecture: Navigating the Future of US-China Relations

hi folks thank you so much for joining us today  uh Zaib and I Dean Vanden Bout uh and of course uh 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 prob

ably 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 eco

nomics 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 insightfu

l 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  t

hat 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 releva

nt 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 diffic

ult 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 n

ot 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 s

ay 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 o

f 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 mea

n 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 simpl

y 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 ch

annels 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  sa

nctions 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 countrie

s 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  s

tructure 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 chil

dren 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 Prov

ince 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 onl

y  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  thin

k 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  cheat

ing 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 t

he 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 y

ou 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 blow

back 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 the

y 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 leadersh

ip 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 J

ohn 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 topi

c 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 bel

ieve  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 th

e 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 ha

s 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 the

y 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 ex

actly 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 wa

s 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  a

ccounts 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 y

ou 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 beca

use 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 ex

ternally 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 t

he 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 r

elationship  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 re

alize 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  wo

uld 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 abo

ut 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 w

here 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 tryin

g 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 trad

e 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 go

od 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 n

eed 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 the

m 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 nex

t 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 U

kraine 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 cas

e 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 a

sk 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 man

aged 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 Chi

nese 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  langua

ge 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 Commu

nist  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 u

nderstanding 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 perpet

rated 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 w

orked 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 rea

sons 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 h

e 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 Ch

inese  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