In this episode, I sat down with Aaron L Friedberg, he is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Over the past two decades he has written numerous books and articles warning of the dangers of an intensifying economic, military, and ideological rivalry between China and the West, including :
His latest book is titled Getting China Wrong and some of topics in the episode we discussed includes:
The Book and Audiobook: Getting China Wrong is out now.
You can also Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronFriedberg
As of now, my podcast is biweekly and prior to an episode I’ll let you know what book/audiobook I’ll be listening to before the next show so we can delve into it together!
Please don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you’re in the loop whenever a new episode comes out… and also connect with me on Instagram or email so we can keep the conversation going and share with each other fascinating content.
www.instagram.com/SoundsAboutPod
I am now on goodreads!
www.goodreads.com/SoundsAboutPod
Are you an author that will like to be on the next episode of the podcast?
Listeners: Did I cover a book you read or listened to? Did I discuss the things which also stuck out to you? Or did I miss it out?..... get in touch, and let me know what your experience was or to give me audiobook recommendations: soundsaboutpod@gmail.com
In this episode, I sat down with Aaron L Friedberg, he is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Over the past two decades he has written numerous books and articles warning of the dangers of an intensifying economic, military, and ideological rivalry between China and the West, including :
His latest book is titled Getting China Wrong and some of topics in the episode we discussed includes:
The Book and Audiobook: Getting China Wrong is out now.
You can also Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronFriedberg
As of now, my podcast is biweekly and prior to an episode I’ll let you know what book/audiobook I’ll be listening to before the next show so we can delve into it together!
Please don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you’re in the loop whenever a new episode comes out… and also connect with me on Instagram or email so we can keep the conversation going and share with each other fascinating content.
www.instagram.com/SoundsAboutPod
I am now on goodreads!
www.goodreads.com/SoundsAboutPod
Are you an author that will like to be on the next episode of the podcast?
Listeners: Did I cover a book you read or listened to? Did I discuss the things which also stuck out to you? Or did I miss it out?..... get in touch, and let me know what your experience was or to give me audiobook recommendations: soundsaboutpod@gmail.com
ng (00:02.208)
Aaron, once again, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
aaron_friedberg (00:06.09)
Thank you for having me.
ng (00:08.664)
So the first thing I wanted to run by you is that as well as this book, you are also the author of Contest for Supremacy, China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. When we're in the book, you argue that America's leaders are failing to act fast enough to counter China's growing strength.
If you don't mind me asking, when did China-Renix engagement, geopolitics and economics become a topic that was of interest for yourself?
aaron_friedberg (00:39.522)
I think I began to get interested in Asia and China in particular.
going back to the 1990s. So I'm by training a political scientist interested in international relations. At the end of the Cold War, it seemed that peace was breaking out all over, particularly in Europe, but it seemed to me that that was not likely to be the case in Asia for various reasons. So I started focusing on Asia. I would say by the end of the 1990s, a good deal of my work was especially focused on the relationship between the US and China.
at that point as an emerging rivalry between the two countries.
ng (01:22.876)
And with the demise of the Soviet Union, I'd say it was clear that the US and its allies, for lack of better term, had won. And the US was in a powerful position where it could lead the world. Was the US naive when it thought that it could promote the idea of free community of market democracies to China?
aaron_friedberg (01:46.55)
I don't know if it was naive, but its policies, and not just the policies of the United States, but of other Western democracies too, were based on a set of assumptions and theories about...
political development about the way in which economic growth would promote political liberalization, a belief that there really was only one successful model to follow at the end of the Cold War, and that was towards liberal democracy and the expectation that China would eventually follow that model too. Now those theories and those expectations turned out to be mistaken. I don't know that they were naive, but they were wrong as it turns out.
ng (02:28.344)
And listen to the audiobook, I was trying to pinpoint when was it that China was given the confidence to grow as a competitor of the US rather than a partner. When would you say that is? Or could you put it down to a specific occasion or is it literally a chain of events rather?
aaron_friedberg (02:49.81)
Well, it's a very good question. I think it is a chain of events, but let me start by saying that from the perspective of China's leaders, so going back, really going back to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, but even with the beginning of the so-called period of reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, and even after the end of the Cold War, China's leaders,
believed themselves to be engaged in a struggle with the United States and with the West. But they didn't think they were strong enough at that point, really, to push back in any substantial way. In fact, to the contrary, they thought they needed to do what Deng advised in 1991, which was to hide their capabilities by their time, use engagement with the United States and the West to grow stronger.
and eventually begin to assert themselves more fully. If you look at the history of the last 20 years or so, I think there is a change that takes place in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. So 2008, 2009, I think that's when you begin to see much more obvious assertive behavior on the part of China. And it starts first with
increased contention over these claims, maritime disputes in the South China Sea. But this really takes off under Xi Jinping. When Xi Jinping comes to power at the end of 2012, that's when we see this real intensification. But it began earlier.
ng (04:27.717)
Oh, would you say that the, when Bill Clinton decided that the MFN renewal no longer had to be linked to human rights. And then, I think by the end of that decade, Congress established permanent
trade and relations with Beijing as well. Did that possibly give them the confidence to further expand beyond what anyone could imagine?
aaron_friedberg (05:05.302)
Well, I think in both instances, I mean, so the first is after Bill Clinton is elected and comes into office 1993, he had campaigned criticizing the George H.W. Bush administration for, as he claimed being soft on.
ng (05:12.685)
Hmm.
aaron_friedberg (05:22.506)
China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. And so Clinton's position was, we're going to be tough. And the initial way that he sought to do that was to use the annual renewal of China's most favorite nation status. So giving it the same low tariffs that all other trading partners of the United States had, that that renewal would depend on an assessment by the United States of its performance on human rights. But that
decision got reversed very quickly within a year, that idea had been abandoned. And it's the result I think in large part of considerable amount of pressure from the American business community, arguing for greater engagement, greater openness and making the case that in fact, openness and engagement will promote liberalization better than trying to hold a stick over China's head. And then as you mentioned at the end of the decade,
making that permanent as a step that allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization. I don't know that those two decisions had an immediate and dramatic impact on the thinking of China's leaders about how to behave externally, about whether they could afford to be more aggressive. But I do think it convinced them that they...
would have access to on an assured basis, to US markets access to the Western trading system that would enable them to grow even more rapidly. And I think they learned also from the experience of the early 1990s that the West and the United States, as they saw it, really didn't have the stomach to impose painful economic measures on China, if that meant accepting costs themselves.
And I think ever since, they've been, it's not that they don't worry about economic sanctions and they talk about them, but I think they're skeptical that liberal democracies will be able to stick with.
aaron_friedberg (07:30.998)
painful measures that would hurt China, but would also hurt them. And that's one of the reasons I think why they're watching what happens with Russia and Ukraine. They're not convinced yet that Western societies are willing, for example, to go through a very cold winter without enough energy. So that was an important lesson of the early 90s. I think it did give them confidence, but it didn't lead to an immediate change in their behavior because they needed to keep growing.
ng (07:59.992)
Thanks, Aaron. Why did the USA's policy of engagement fail to meet its objectives? Or would you say that's a harsh assessment?
aaron_friedberg (08:12.23)
No, I don't think it is. And that's really the argument of my book, that by any reasonable definition, this strategy failed. And I argue that.
the architects of engagement had really three expectations. One was that China would become, as they said, a responsible stakeholder in the existing international order. So it becomes sort of a status quo power. Two, that China's economy would liberalize as it's integrated into the global economic system, starting in the 90s, accelerating after its entry into the World Trade Organization. It started down a path that will inevitably lead
to liberalization. So the role of the market will grow, the role of the state will wither, and China economically will come to resemble other advanced industrial countries. And third and last, they did expect and certainly said that engagement would eventually promote China's political liberalization, put it on a path towards democracy. And so those were the stated goals of the policy. And by any measure, none of those objectives has been achieved. China's not as
to add a scroll power.
It's a revisionist power that wants to change important features of the existing international order. It hasn't moved towards more market based economic practices. It's in fact gone in the other direction and it's in many ways more reliant on sort of status, mercantilist economic policies. And it certainly hasn't become more democratic. To the contrary, it's more repressive now than at any time since the Cultural Revolution. So I would say by any measure, the policy failed.
ng (09:53.8)
I remember in the book when you mentioned that a statement that Nixon had made about saying that he didn't want to change China and was more focused on how they engaged with the outside world rather than how they behaved internally. When you consider the practices of the CCP, was this an oversight?
aaron_friedberg (10:16.33)
Well, Nixon was saying very bluntly, and of course he was saying it in private to Mao. He wasn't saying it publicly. Something that so-called realists still argue and believe, namely,
ng (10:22.241)
Yeah.
aaron_friedberg (10:29.602)
We don't have the power to change China system. We need to deal with it as it is. And therefore we can't concern ourselves too much with how the regime treats its own people. We may dislike it, we may criticize it, but we can't change it. But that was in the context of the Cold War. And what Nixon and Kissinger were trying to do was to draw China out of its isolation, draw China towards the United States and cooperate in counterbalancing
then in the 70s and 80s, the rapidly growing power of the Soviet Union. So it was purely a geopolitical calculation. I talk in the book about engagement 1.0 and engagement 2.0, and engagement 1.0 goes from the early 70s to the early 90s. And during that period,
I think the sole goal of US policy was to build up China's strength economically, technologically, militarily for strategic reasons because of the belief that the Soviets were a greater threat. And it made sense at the time, but perhaps people didn't look ahead very far as to what might happen if the Soviet Union ever went away and China had become stronger but hadn't changed internally.
ng (11:50.28)
I suppose you can understand that at the time considering the size of the population, you know, I could understand why the US thought that having China as an ally would be of benefit to itself. But they, you know, they couldn't have foreseen that what would transpire over the next proceeding decades, isn't it?
aaron_friedberg (12:14.662)
No, and really when you look back, I talk a little bit about this in the book, there were not very many people who kind of looked ahead and began to think about where China might be going and in particular what might happen if it really did succeed in taking off economically.
there's very little forward thought about that. And I guess as people begin to think about it, their concerns are alleviated by this new set of beliefs that engagement is going to change China. So yes, China is growing. Yes, eventually it's going to get strong. But by the time it does that, it will have been transformed in all these nice ways and it won't be a threat. I'd say the other thing.
certainly through the 70s and 80s into the 1990s, the belief was, and it was not wrong at the time, that China just lagged so far behind in technology in particular, military technology, but also the development of commercial industries that.
it would never catch up or yes, it would advance, but the West, the United States would keep moving forward and would stay ahead. So there really wasn't anything to worry about in any of those domains. And what's happened, I think, is that China has developed and advanced more rapidly, perhaps, than some people thought. It's closed that gap. And as it's closed the gap,
ng (13:25.514)
Hmm.
aaron_friedberg (13:39.938)
People in the US and elsewhere in the West have come to see it more and more as a challenger and even as a potential threat. But it took a while for that really to sink in.
ng (13:50.168)
Thanks, Siren. You mention in the book that under Xi Jinping, the CCP's consistent strategic objective has been to preserve its own rule, whilst enhancing the power of the Chinese nation. What actions would you say he took in order to achieve this?
aaron_friedberg (14:10.166)
Well, first I should say that these two objectives that I think are critically important for Xi were the same objectives that his predecessors had. I think all Chinese Communist Party leaders, again, since Mao, have had the goal first of maintaining the exclusive grip on political power of the CCP.
and two of building up China's power so that it could once again become one of, if not the preponderant great powers in the world. So they've all wanted to do those things. They've used somewhat different means, but they've had consistent objectives. On the first, so keeping control, Xi has obviously emphasized repression.
Again, he's not unique in that, but the degree and the manner in which the CCP regime has repressed its population under Xi is different than what we saw before. In one sense, it's more sophisticated technologically tracking the movements and transactions of Xi.
millions of Chinese citizens. In other ways, it's very crude in sort of 20th century. So putting a million or more ethnic Uighurs from the Western part of China into concentration camps. So it's brutally repressive and Xi will not tolerate any dissent even of the mildest sort from professors or retired party officials. There is nothing, he will not accept any of that.
As far as making, well, first I should add to that, it's not just repression. He's also ratcheted up something which again, was there before, but he's now made nationalism into a central feature of the party's.
aaron_friedberg (16:10.418)
ideological program and the idea of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and achieving the China dream. Those things have always been there, but they were for a time secondary to the goals of building communism or socialism with Chinese characteristics. Now building socialism is a means to an end and the end is advancing the power of the Chinese nation. Now as to how he's
aaron_friedberg (16:40.372)
say the one feature of his policies that's really crucial is the push for rapid technological advancement. I think...
she and those around him see attaining this kind of rapid technological advance as the potential solution to all of their problems, a way of sustaining economic growth by increasing the productivity of workers, even as the number of workers declines, a way of ensuring the party's grip over the population through the use of artificial intelligence, big data, again,
population a way of matching and maybe surpassing American military power. So they've, he's focused a great deal of effort on achieving technological breakthroughs. Again, it's not unique to him, but the degree to which
the party state is now pouring money into that is unlike anything that we've seen in the recent past. One other way in which they've tried to do that, and again, this is not something that she invented, is through the theft of intellectual property from the West. So one way of closing the gap is by getting your hands on something and then copying it, imitating it. And the regime has supported a
aaron_friedberg (18:05.392)
the reasons why you now begin to get more resistance to China's economic policies and more suspicion of China's intentions, again, not just in the US, but also in Europe and in Japan and Korea. It's this very aggressive pursuit of technology that has others worried.
ng (18:26.948)
And what actions have America and its let's say global partners have been trying to make in order to neutralize this?
aaron_friedberg (18:38.258)
The response has been somewhat belated and it's not at this point all that well coordinated, although it's starting to become more so. On the one hand, the United States, and at least some of its.
partners, particularly in Asia, its treaty allies, and also Taiwan have responded to China's military buildup by trying to enhance their own military capabilities. And also by trying to promote cooperation, even if it's not an alliance cooperation, for example, in the so-called Quad, among Japan, Australia, India, and the United States, it's not an anti-China alliance, but it's cooperation with an eye towards maintaining
or the Indo-Pacific region. So it's partly trying to maintain a balance of power. It's partly trying to counter China's economic policies. And that's really, I think, where the biggest changes have started to occur, but are not yet complete. So imposing stricter monitoring of attempts by Chinese companies to buy up American companies.
out of concern that they'll extract their technology. Again, that's something that's happening in Europe too, imposing export controls so that American companies are not allowed to sell certain types of advanced technologies to China. So trying to counter the efforts that China is making to accelerate its own economic growth, its technological development at the expense of the United States and other advanced countries.
So there's that. Also although again this is kind of nascent.
aaron_friedberg (20:27.29)
identifying China as a rival, as a challenger, and talking about it as such. That was not something that we saw very much of for the 20 years or so after the end of the Cold War. There was a tendency to kind of downplay those differences, not to want to make too much of a big deal about the differences in their regime and ours. Criticism, yes, of human rights policy, but always the
going to get better. That's really evaporated. And so you have, for example, the European Union in 2019 issuing a white paper in which it describes China as a systemic challenge, not just an economic challenge, but presumably a challenge to Western liberal democratic ideals and institutions. That's new. And again, that's a reaction to
ng (21:18.531)
Mm.
aaron_friedberg (21:25.994)
recognition that China in fact is not changing in the ways that people in the West had expected, has gone in a very different direction and is now very actively trying to do things that make people in the West feel threatened.
ng (21:41.608)
One of my questions, Aaron, was that when you consider the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre in 1989 and the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in China, whether the US and its global partners are showing a level of complacency. But I kind of feel as though you've answered that already in terms of how the actions that they're taking in order to kind of neutralize China. Because I think...
The way they're acting is in response to that as well as other things as well, isn't it?
aaron_friedberg (22:15.554)
It is, but it's not nearly as much as I think it should be. So there's a fair bit of hypocrisy. So we're going to criticize China for its for what it did in Hong Kong, for example, crushing the last hope of some kind of democratic governance in Hong Kong over the last seven, eight years, a lot of protests, a lot of unhappiness expressed by Western governments, but really not much more than that. And similarly with Xinjiang,
ng (22:19.832)
should be.
aaron_friedberg (22:45.248)
the governments weren't really doing very much to respond to what many have now referred to as a as a form of genocide that's taking place in Western China. Again, that has started to change. So in the US, there's legislation that's been passed to bar the export of goods from China that can be shown to have been manufactured with forced labor. And this is true of apparently of
garments that are made out of cotton, it may be true of other kind of manufactured products. That's going to have a real impact, but for the most part, most companies that are engaged in business with China and most governments, even now,
still are treating China more as if it's a normal trading partner than as they would a country, another country, perhaps it wasn't as big and potentially as important economically that they were accusing of committing genocide.
ng (23:50.264)
I think that China now have Western organisations and companies in an interesting position. I'm talking about sports organisations, such as the NBA doing the best it can to ensure the relationship with China is still intact whenever one of its players says something which can jeopardise it, or even Hollywood films changing the ending of their blockbuster movies that they release so they can kind of appease China in a way,
such a key market. And I remember John Cena, the wrestler and actor, he made a video making a groveling apology in Chinese after referring to Taiwan as a country. Is it possible to get China right again? Or has America and its global partners gotten it too wrong for too long?
aaron_friedberg (24:32.971)
Yes.
aaron_friedberg (24:42.55)
Well, first on this point about the way in which China tries to exert leverage, you're right.
The reason that they feel able to do this and the reason that they have been able to do it to some degree is because of the importance of their market or the perceived importance of their market. So the NBA wants its games to be on television on Chinese networks because China is a big place and people love basketball and the NBA makes a lot of money from it. So if somebody in the NBA speaks up about Hong Kong or some other issue and the government of China threatens to
the NBA off, there's a tendency to want to quiet things down. I'd forgotten about John Cena. Thank you for reminding me of that. That was a pretty sad spectacle, but you can understand from the point of view of his bank account why he might behave in that way. However, and this gets to the second part of your question, I think here, as in other ways, China has overreached. And one of
aaron_friedberg (25:50.964)
towards China across the democratic world, in Europe, in North America, and in Asia over the last several years, is it's in part because of the way China has been trying to throw its weight around and trying to reach into other countries to silence criticism of its policies. That is one of the things that's causing kind of a backlash and resistance. We saw that in Australia very, very dramatically.
Is it too late? No, it's not too late. The advanced industrial democracies collectively have enormous resources that they can bring to bear and China can't match those resources, even as much as it's grown and as wealthy as it's become and as strong as it is in certain ways.
But the democracies have to cooperate with one another in order to effectively use those resources and use their advantages. And China's strategy depends in part on preventing them from cooperating or driving wedges between them. And that was successful up to a point, but again, I think there's beginning to be a change. And interestingly, one of the things that's accelerating this change in the last several months is not something that China has done directly.
but Russia is doing in Ukraine. So Russian aggression in Ukraine, the reluctance of China to take a stand opposing it, China's tacit support for it, at least until very recently, I think has been a wake-up call, particularly in Europe, where governments have seen
the effects of not taking sufficiently seriously the threat of aggression from a hostile authoritarian power in Russia and are now taking much more seriously the challenge that's posed to them as well as to the United States and countries in Asia by China. So we're beginning to see more of that coalescence and cooperation, but we've got a long way to go. And one of the most difficult aspects of this is going to be at least partially
ng (27:49.828)
Mm.
aaron_friedberg (28:03.536)
entangling this economic relationship to the extent that it allows China to exert leverage over democratic countries. There too, we're starting to do things. There's this concern about supply chains, the recognition after the COVID pandemic that most countries in the world relied on China to produce masks and personal protective equipment. And during the pandemic, it actually threatened to withhold them from countries that it thought
what it wanted them to do. That's again one of the things that provoked the backlash.
But it's also caused people throughout the democratic world to begin to think more about the wisdom of continuing with that kind of dependence and about the policies that might be necessary to lessen it to promote development of those industries, either in one's own country or in one's allies, to cooperate to make sure that democratic countries are not exposed to that kind of pressure in a future crisis or conflict. So a long way to go
But there's been a lot of progress in the last few years, and that is largely thanks to China's aggressive behavior, and maybe in particular to Xi Jinping, because he chose to step on the gas and to adopt a more assertive and aggressive stance. Maybe in retrospect, it'll turn out that he started to do that prematurely. He did it before China was really strong enough to get away with it, and he is provoking a counter response, which may foil his plans.
is ambitions, but we'll have to see.
ng (29:42.16)
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Aaron.
aaron_friedberg (29:44.578)
Thank you, it was a pleasure.