China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

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Apr 28, 2023 View in browser   By Phelim Kine Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, D.C.-based China Correspondent Phelim Kine talks to U.S. Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, about the challenges of being the Biden administration’s top man in Beijing. Follow Phelim on Twitter | Send ideas and insights to pkine@politico.com The Conversation U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns attends a plenary session for the World Peace Forum on July 4, 2022, in Beijing. | Ng Han Guan/AP Photo Nicholas Burns made his first trip to China in 1988 accompanying then-Secretary of State George Schultz. At that time, China had an annual gross domestic product of $312 billion, the Chinese government had begun experimenting with village-level democratic elections and Xi Jinping was toiling as the executive vice-mayor of the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Thirty-four years later, when Burns landed in Beijing to become U.S. ambassador, the value of China’s GDP had hit $17.5 trillion and Xi had become China’s unchallenged paramount leader at the top of an increasingly repressive authoritarian government that the Biden administration views as having “both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.” Burns began work in Beijing last April in the depths of the country’s draconian zero-Covid policy. His role as Biden’s point person in China has coincided with bilateral relations cratering over tensions related to Taiwan, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the discovery — and subsequent destruction — of a Chinese spy balloon over the continental U.S. in February. A possible reflection of those tensions: President Xi made Burns wait more than a year before accepting his credentials on Tuesday. Burns’ diplomatic career has spanned decades. He served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War era administration in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush’s director of Soviet Affairs in the early 1990s. He also did stints as State Department spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to NATO. I spoke with Burns about the rigors of 21st century U.S. diplomacy in China, the troubling communication gap between the two countries and the trouble with comparing the old Cold War with the Soviet Union with the much more complex U.S.-China rivalry.   DON’T MISS THE POLITICO ENERGY SUMMIT: A new world energy order is emerging and America’s place in it is at a critical juncture. Join POLITICO on Thursday, May 18 for our first-ever energy summit to explore how the U.S. is positioning itself in a complicated energy future. We’ll explore progress on infrastructure and climate funding dedicated to building a renewable energy economy, Biden’s environmental justice proposals, and so much more. REGISTER HERE.     The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. How did Zero-Covid and its aftermath affect your ability to run the embassy? It affected every aspect of our work. It affected the way we could live here, and affected our families and affected American kids in schools here. There were times here in Beijing and certainly in Shanghai, in Guangzhou, in Wuhan, Shenyang — where we have our consulates — that during the lockdown stores were closed. Government offices were off limits. It was hard to get on public transportation. Even the parks were closed at some points during the Beijing spring and autumn lockdowns. There were quarantine requirements on arrival. So if you arrived, even if you tested negative, you had to quarantine. When I arrived, my wife and I spent 21 days in quarantine. I think in my first nine months, I spent a total of 40 days in quarantine on three different trips back into China. We also could not travel internally. And that meant that a lot of our officers here at the Embassy in Beijing and our four consulates couldn't really do their jobs. If you're working for the Food and Drug Administration here, you have to inspect [manufacturing] plants, and they couldn't do that. If you're a public diplomacy officer or a political officer, you want to go to Yunnan, to Sichuan Province, to Guangdong Province, but we couldn't do that. We're beginning to arrive at some degree of normalcy, but it's been a difficult, strange beginning. What misconceptions do Americans have about China, and vice versa? The major issue here is that the American people have been largely cut off from the Chinese people — because of Covid. And because of three years of a lack of travel back and forth. We had thousands of business travelers going back and forth between the two countries pre-pandemic and that has largely dried up. And because of the paucity of flights right now, it's very difficult to get a commercial flight that's reasonably priced from one country to the other. We're seeing a trickle of business travelers, but not a flood. Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000-15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that's because of Covid —student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don't have the people-to-people connections right now that we've had in the past. On the Chinese side, because of censorship and because of the Great Firewall, it's very difficult for us to project the true sense of what our government believes in, what it's trying to do, what Congress is doing, or what the average American is thinking about China. Google and Facebook and YouTube are not permitted to operate here. And as the American ambassador, I am not allowed to print an unedited op-ed in the People's Daily, the way that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is welcome to print op-eds in our press. So all of us here worry that the Chinese people often aren’t able to get a true picture of who we are as a society because of all these because of all these barriers.  What keeps you up at night? We obviously want to avoid an accidental conflict. I don't think one is probable or likely but it's obviously possible. And so that leads us on our side in the U.S. government to focus on the need for reliable channels between the two governments. Many of our most important channels were suspended by the government here in Beijing in the wake of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. We think it's very important to resurrect the military channels that connect us from the Pentagon, from our command and Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii to the PRC government. Our diplomatic channels have been kind of on and off for the last year or two. We'd like to see them reliably stronger so that we can work together to head off any accidental conflict, any misunderstandings and deal with the normal business of government on a daily basis.   STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.     How difficult does the Chinese government make it to do your job? We do face many restrictions in our activities here that are familiar to American diplomats serving in Moscow, for instance, or previous generations of American diplomats serving in the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War. American diplomats here in China are routinely restricted from visiting university campuses in China. There are some exceptions to that. But we would hope that in the near future, it'd be possible for American diplomats at all levels to be able to visit a university campus and talk to faculty and students. It's important to be able to talk to provincial leaders because they’re so much a part of the governing structure here. I think it would improve the health of this relationship, but we've had a number of restrictions put on us. It's not unusual — it's happened to American diplomats here for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years — but the restrictions have probably been growing in intensity over the last year or two. What similarities or differences do you see between the old Soviet authoritarianism and authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party? When I think about the power that the Soviet Union had from the late 1940s into the early 90s, it was nothing like the power and the strength that China is exhibiting on the world stage. That's why I think this comparison that people have made between the old Cold War and our present great power rivalry [with China] can be helpful at times to think about the comparisons, but they're not exact. The Soviet Union was a colossal power. Its nuclear dimensions. Its military dimension when it had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing Americans in the Fulda Gap and on the north German plain. But the power of the People's Republic of China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. And it's based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity, and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future. I do think the challenge from China is more complex and more deeply rooted and a greater test for us going forward. Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard. SUBSCRIBE to the POLITICO newsletter family: D.C. Playbook | Brussels Playbook | London Playbook | Paris Playbook | Ottawa Playbook |EU Confidential | Digital Bridge | China Watcher | Berlin Bulletin | D.C. Influence | EU Influence | London Influence | Paris Influence   Follow us

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