The China Challenge, With Liza Tobin and Jake Werner (Election 2024, Episode 6)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the sixth episode in a special 2024 U.S. election series here on The President's Inbox. From now until election day, I will be sitting down with experts to unpack some of the most pressing challenges in the next president's foreign policy inbox. This week's topic is the China challenge.

With me to discuss the challenges the next president will face in navigating relations with China are Liza Tobin and Jake Werner. Liza is the senior director for economy at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-profit organization working to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness. She worked for a range of government agencies for almost two decades, starting as an economic analyst at the CIA, then as a special advisor to the China strategic focus group of the Indo-Pacific Command, and most recently as the China director on the staff of the National Security Council during the Trump and Biden administrations. Her work focuses on the development of U.S. strategy and policies related to China across trade, economic, environmental, and military issues. Liza's writing has appeared in numerous publications including Foreign Policy and the South China Morning Post. She's the co-author of "The Missing Piece in America's Strategy for Techno-Economic Rivalry with China," which appeared on the Lawfare blog.

Jake is acting director of the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center, a Harper-Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, and a Fulbright scholar at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. His writings on China and U.S.-China relations have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, the Nation and Time Magazine. He's the author of the recent Quincy Institute brief titled "A Program for Progressive China Policy." Liza and Jake, thank you for joining me.

WERNER:
Great to be on.

TOBIN:
Thanks so much, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Just to begin with, are either of you advising either the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign?

TOBIN:
No.

WERNER:
I'm not.

LINDSAY:
Okay. With that out of the way, let's talk China, and where I want to begin is with you Liza, and I'd like you to sort of define first from your perspective, the nature of the relationship between the United States and China today. I hear a lot of talk about, so-called great power competition. Obviously that comes after several decades in which U.S. policy was described as strategic engagement. So if you could sort of help us understand from your perspective the nature of the relationship between the United States and China.

TOBIN:
Thanks, Jim. I borrowed from the European Union the term that I think best captures the nature of the relationship and that systemic rivalry. Back in 2019 when the EU put out its strategic document on China, they used a few different phrases and that was one of them. This was a couple years after we in the United States had put out the Trump administration's national security strategy, which famously shifted the U.S. approach and kind of restored what they called great power competition as kind of the central focus of U.S. foreign policy and national security. So strategic competition is the term that the United States use in a lot of our policy documents, and that's a good term. I mean it definitely signifies the shift that we've made from decades of engagement policies to something quite different.

I do think the European term of systemic rivalry captures it a bit better for a few reasons. I think the term competition often brings to my mind at least soccer or maybe business competition where there's rule of law and transparency and kind of a beginning and an end, or a sports field where there's a referee and clearly understood rules and people are playing by the rules and they're enforced, and that just doesn't really capture the nature of how the U.S. and China are generally relating these days in the world, where the stakes are quite high. It's more of a street fight. There are no clear rules or if there are, China's frequently breaking them or not holding up to its commitments and it can get quite vicious.

However, the term rivalry sort of captures those higher stakes and the zero-sum nature of it, but that's not quite to the level of characterizing it as an all out enemy where it's necessarily a fight to the death or something of that nature. Sometimes, rivals can set aside their differences temporarily to fight a fire or address some kind of major global challenge, but that's challenging because of the deep distrust that the rivals have. And after perhaps that brief pause, they will return to that rivalry state.

LINDSAY:
Jake, I want to give you a crack at that question. How would you describe the nature of the relationship between the United States and China?

WERNER:
I agree with a lot of what Liza said. In particular, this very kind of bloodless term, competition, I think is inappropriate, and that's for the reasons Liza said, that we don't actually have a shared understanding or a shared stake in any kind of larger framework that the two sides are engaging in. And so I would characterize the relationship for that reason as heading towards very serious conflict, because I think when you have two great powers that each sees the other as the major perhaps obstacle to success in its own endeavors, it's only a matter of time before the two of them end up engaging in some kind of violent confrontation.

We're certainly not there yet. I think the Biden administration has done a good job tamping down the rhetoric, but underneath the kind of semblance of diplomacy, we have pressures building up. And at the same time, I think we have a lot of complacency, certainly on the U.S. side, about what that might mean because there are a lot of very pressing foreign policy sort of emergencies that people are facing. They certainly don't want to think about this even bigger one in the form of the second most powerful country in the world.

But I would really encourage people to think about the risks that we're engaging in as we move towards a confrontational relationship with China and also think about what that is going to do to the shape of the international order. Because I think that it's not just a question of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship, the nature of that bilateral relationship will be decisive in shaping what the global order looks like for the next forty or fifty years. I worry very much that we're on a path towards making it one of conflict rather than one under which we could work together to solve shared challenges and preserve our shared interests.

LINDSAY:
I want to talk a bit more obviously about where we're headed, but before we do that, I want to ask one more question about where we've been. And Liza, we're now in this period of what you call systemic rivalry, but it comes after a period in which we did have strategic engagement. The logic on the United States side was that if we brought China into the international system, particularly into the international economic system, that would be a win-win for both sides. So in your view, how did we go from a strategy that was going to solve problems of potential rivalry to ending up with systemic rivalry?

TOBIN:
Yeah, so there's a lot of history here and I think the U.S. has been very late and very slow. You could flatter us by saying we were very patient or insult us by saying we were very slow and stupid to kind of wake up to what the CCP was actually about.

LINDSAY:
Chinese Communist Party.

TOBIN:
The Chinese Communist Party, right. Going back a long time before 2017, before the U.S. strategic turn from engagement to strategic competition, the Chinese Communist Party has been clear about its long-term aims of making China the world's dominant power, which of course has knock-on effects for U.S. values, U.S. alliances. And so I think you have to take this part of the equation seriously and say it took a very long time for the U.S. to get to the point of realizing that the premises behind engagement, that by sitting down and talking to our Chinese colleagues, by hearing them out, we could come to some sort of common understanding. And I think what we dismissed for a very long time and that we perhaps haven't even fully grasped, was that there are these fundamental divergences in ideology and values and political systems and that these are really fundamental to the CCP and its ambitions in the world.

So I think we have to sort of start with that as the premise for understanding that we are dealing with a regime that is self-avowedly, Marxist-Leninist regime that they see socialism, their system, as something quite different from our system, capitalism and electoral democracy, and that they are out to prove that their system actually works better, and they're developing a lot of evidence for that, that they're using to kind of bolster their position. So I think we have to take those things that they're saying and the actions they're doing quite seriously and not dismiss them.

LINDSAY:
Jake, how do you think about this move from strategic engagement to systemic rivalry or great power competition? And I asked that question against the backdrop of a conversation I was part of recently, which included a senior Chinese advisor who laid the blame for the shift largely at the feet of the United States. And if I understood the argument correctly, it essentially is that China succeeded at the sorts of things America had encouraged to do in terms of its economy, and now America regrets the fact that China has become successful and is actively trying to contain or limit China's rise.

WERNER:
Yeah, I think this is actually crucial to understanding where we should go from here is figuring out how we got here. And I think actually both sides are very one-sided about their understanding of this. As you say, both as Liza articulated and as you heard from the Chinese interlocutor, both sides just blame the other side, and they either say that, "The other side was doing okay and then they suddenly changed and now they've really got it in for us and we have to fight back." Or they say, and I think this might be more common, they say that, "Secretly, the other side intended to sabotage us and prevent us from succeeding all along. And it's only in the last decade or so that they have come out into the open and revealed their true nature, which was there all along."

I think both sides are getting at important dynamics in the relationship, but they're doing so in a very one-sided way. And in particular, I think both sides are neglecting the changed global context that I think is the decisive factor, pushing the two against each other and causing both sides to change their nature. So I think up until about 2008, the Chinese Communist Party was moving broadly in the direction that American sort of ideological articulations of what China should do. It wasn't moving as fast as American leaders would've liked, but it was moving in an increasingly liberal direction economically and politically. And of course there were always very strong limitations on that.

But the understanding on the Chinese side was that, "We have to have these limitations because if we move too fast, that will cause the destabilizing currents within liberalization to run out of control and we will lose our ability to control the population." But that also means that China itself will face a catastrophe just like Russia did in the 1990s. There's so many countries that liberalized too quickly, led to political or economic disorder. The Chinese side understood, in a quite self-conscious way, what they were doing, but they were moving broadly in the direction that the United States expected, and likewise, the United States was facilitating that movement. So the United States was not secretly planning to restrict China, but was trying to find ways to support Chinese growth because it was supporting American growth, right? It is very important that this alignment came out of a sense that the success on one side was predicated on success on the other side.

And I think basically what happened is that an increasingly expansive global system that seemed to be making room for both countries and it seemed to align the interests of elites in both countries, it changed quite rapidly after the 2008 crisis. And you had a very sharp drop in global economic dynamism, much lower rates of growth, lower rates of global economic integration and a broad kind of slowdown across the board in all countries, including China. China was one of the only countries to maintain rapid growth, but even Chinese growth dropped and on the American side, growth stagnated.

In all countries and in the United States and China and many other countries besides, you have the response, the sort of political response, this stagnation in the form of political populism and attacks on elites, and I think elites in all countries including the United States and China, but well beyond the U.S. and China, became very alarmed and disoriented by this change in the tenor of politics and the way that the economy seemed to be working after 2008, and the steps that they took to try to rein in popular discontent, to respond to it, to domesticate it, to co-opt it, in some cases, the elites were pushed out of power or new political currents gained traction like Donald Trump and the Republican Party. That has I think turned the U.S. and China against each other and led them to define their interest in a zero-sum way. In part because at the level of thinking, they no longer see success of this major foreign power as compatible with their own success, but also because the global system itself simply doesn't have enough room to accommodate both countries anymore.

LINDSAY:
Help me understand something here, Liza. Both you and Jake have laid out how the United States and China are in a systemic rivalry increasingly eyeing each other with suspicion, seeing the other as trying to foil their success. As we sort of think about that, from your view, what do you think it is that the government of Xi Jinping wants to achieve? Do you have a sense of what China's goals are?

TOBIN:
Yeah, thanks. I want to return to something that Jake mentioned, the way he framed it as the U.S. and China turning against each other, kind of putting the onus equally on both parties and depicting it as kind of a parallel development in time. And I think I see it quite differently where I...As Jake pointed out for a long time, U.S. policy was premised on helping China grow and develop. As a young person living in China many years ago, that was my hope and dream, was to become part of this great historical project of helping China develop and doing educational exchange and technological exchange and all that. And unfortunately, that dream died.

But I think it's really important to note that even at the height of U.S. engagement policies, when we wanted nothing more than to help China rebalance towards consumption, which of course would be good for us, our businesses as well as good for their consumers, for their populace, for their companies, we had a win-win framework in mind. And I think economists always like to talk about win-win and comparative advantage and growing the pie and all of that. But at that same time was when China started really increasing the aggression against the United States and democracies around the world: the militarization of the South China Sea, massive IP theft that's estimated to be around the equivalent to the GDP of Virginia every year-

LINDSAY:
The Chinese have all of my personal data, I'm told, several times over.

TOBIN:
I'm sure they have that and all of CFR's as well...Massive cyber theft, environmental degradation, some terrible labor abuses that now have manifested in the worst genocide that we've seen since the Holocaust. My point is all of that predated 2017, and so I do think you have to kind of put the onus on Beijing for abandoning this path of reform and opening that Deng Xiaoping set out. But to your question of the CCP's ambitions, again, the CCP has long aimed to make China the world's dominant power across all the different domains that major powers, that great powers have historically defined themselves. And of course, the U.S. is their premier example of a great power, a superpower.

So it's important to note that this is comprehensive. The Chinese talk a lot about comprehensive national power, 综合国力, and this is a multifaceted concept. It's military, it's economic, it's political, it's even cultural and informational. It's media power. It's this cross-domain sense of power, and they have an almost mathematical system of measuring this, measuring themselves against the United States, against others. And this informs their strategy making. And so as they assess that their comprehensive national power is advancing or in some cases retreating, they are able to push forward more or less aggressively to achieve those aims.

And by mid-century, their intention is that China will be at the center of the world stage and China will be ahead of all of its peers as the world's leading power. And with that comes the values, the ideology, and making clear to the world that socialism with Chinese characteristics, which is their euphemism for their system of autocratic governance and their values that subordinate the dignity and the value of the individual to the needs and the goals of the state. So that is really at the heart of the distinction between our democratic system, as flawed as it is, and often as we don't hold up our own values to the extent that we should, that is at the heart of this, and these are the values that they're going to place in the center of this world of the future that they envision where the Chinese Communist Party is at the center.

LINDSAY:
Liza, I want to draw you out just a little bit on that answer, and I want to do so by posing two alternative arguments I hear from people about China's goals in the world. In one argument or line of argument, essentially amounts to China wants to be the world's dominant power, that it gets to set the rules worldwide. Other people say to me that China's ambitions are more limited to that, that in essence, what China is focused on is pushing the United States out of its neighborhood, that is Beijing would very much like to have a unipolar order in Asia that it dominates, and it's fine if the rest of the world is multipolar. Do you favor one argument versus the other? Do you see a distinction between the two?

TOBIN:
It's a terrific question, Jim. I'm definitely in camp A where their long-term ambitions are to make China the world's leading power. Certainly their regional ambitions—pushing the United States out of Asia, undermining our regional alliances, establishing themselves as a regional hegemon—is a step in the direction that they're hoping to travel, but certainly, they're already a global power. I mean, it's undeniable. They're the world's second-largest economy, the world's number one manufacturing superpower, very prodigious military, a technological superpower. We can all go on and on.

I think in this day and age in 2024, this debate has become anachronistic. I mean, let's close the book on this. They're already a global power, and the question is, will they be satisfied with the status quo where they're already the world's leading power in some domains and then number two in other domains, and then perhaps in others, we could say cultural influence, perhaps they're trailing distantly, places like Europe and the United States. But all that to say to characterize China's ambitions at this point in 2024 as merely regional, it kind of hearkens me back to when we had these debates when I was an analyst at the CIA in 2008 or around then.

LINDSAY:
Well, some arguments are contentions, never go away.

TOBIN:
That's right. It's a great debate of the China-watching community. We could go on and on I'm sure for your whole podcast and bore your listeners.

LINDSAY:
Jake, I want to bring you in here because I have a sense you have a different perspective on the nature of China's ambitions. How would you assess what it is that Xi Jinping and/or the Chinese Communist Party are seeking to accomplish? Maybe I should ask you if you see a meaningful difference between Xi and the CCP.

WERNER:
At this point, I'm not sure that's a meaningful difference anymore. Although it should be recalled, the Chinese Communist Party is an absolutely enormous organization. There are all kinds of contending currents within it, but all of those that Xi Jinping does not support have been marginalized over the last ten years. So in terms of the way the government is running now, it's really Xi Jinping. But I guess I wouldn't say that Xi Jinping or the Chinese elite more broadly...I wouldn't say that their goals are so specific or rigid. I think like any status quo elite, they basically want to maintain their own legitimacy, the stability of their rule and the economic growth that both perpetuates their rule and in their eyes, gives them the right to rule because they're improving the lives of the Chinese people. I think that that is relatively flexible how that is to be pursued.

And Xi Jinping himself has I think changed significantly over the course of his time in office as to how he's going to pursue that. We see a clear evolution from an early, very strong centralizing tendency to discipline the party and to impose repression on any dissident currents. Although disciplining the party should also be understood as including making party leaders more responsive to popular demands. So as always, in the last couple of decades of party rule, there's one very strong current of repression of anyone who is critical, and there is another very strong current of being responsive to popular demands. Those things actually go hand in hand in order to maintain social stability. And what was new about Xi Jinping early in his rule was the centralizing tendency. He did not change economic strategy very much at all.

By the time you get to the later 2010s, economic strategy has changed significantly compared to that earlier period. And partially that's because 2015, there was a near economic crisis that could have brought down the Chinese economy and even the global economy. So there is a set of adjustments coming out of that near crisis in 2015. And then there are a number of adjustments coming out of the rise of U.S. hostility to China, particularly starting with the trade war and then compounding under the Biden administration. And that has led to a very sharply different security focused approach to economic practice that sort of brought out some of the potentials that were there in earlier economic statecraft, but induced a qualitative change in the way that the leaders were thinking about economic strategy.

All of this is to say that I think the possibilities are more open than we give credit for. We should not think about Xi Jinping as a comic book villain who wants to rule the world. I think they certainly want security for the regime and they want China to rise in wealth and status, but I think there are potentially a number of different ways that they could be open to pursuing that. And I don't think all of them have to be zero-sum. Certainly if they could wave a wand and make the U.S. disappear from the Western Pacific, I think they would do so, but I also think that under the right circumstances, they would be amenable to the United States continued presence. The question is whether it's threatening to China or not.

LINDSAY:
Jake, the diagnosis you have laid out raises with me another question I'd like to draw you out on, and that is whether or not you see China as it's currently constituted reaching its peak power. There's been a lot of writing recently that China in essence isn't going to continue on an inexorable upward escalator in that there's a sense right now in the Chinese leadership that this is their moment. How do you assess that argument?

WERNER:
The Chinese leadership certainly is facing a number of problems and pressures internally and externally that I wouldn't discount, and I think that that has generally created a sense of insecurity and anxiety within the Chinese elite. That is part of the reason we're seeing a lot of what I would characterize as highly counterproductive moves both internally and externally. But at the same time, the Xi Jinping leadership seems very devoted to the idea they're going to develop advanced technology, and that's going to be a growth driver for the economy in a safer way than the real estate bubble for many years, drove growth. So a more sustainable and less volatile form of growth that can provide higher paying jobs and greater profits for the economy and a higher status forms of production that will make China a global leader.

I'm not convinced by the peak China discourse at all. I think that the bet that they're making has a good chance of succeeding, but I think that there are probably going to be consequences to the bet that they're making that they're not fully anticipating. And I think we already see those in the reaction in the U.S. and Europe, but also increasingly in a number of major developing countries to protect their markets from a huge influx of Chinese exports, but also domestically, the bet that they're making is they're going to automate a lot of production. That's going to drive productivity up within the economy.

If they can do that in an equitable way, in a way that distributes the gains of productivity broadly in order to create a broad and prosperous consumer market, that could work. That is not what they're doing right now. Right now, the danger is that the gains from productivity are going to be concentrated in people who are already well off and who are unlikely to be the future of consumption in the economy. And if coupled with protectionist measures in the rest of the world means that the market for Chinese production is restricted, then they'll have to find some way through this problem of a shortfall of consumer demand for the production that they're betting everything on.

LINDSAY:
Liza, I want to give you a chance to jump in here, your sort of view of peak China theory.

TOBIN:
Sure. And if you want, Jim, maybe we can go back as well to Jake's point there at the end about the need for China to automate production. I wholeheartedly agree with him there that that's potentially China's ticket out of this potential middle income trap that they may be caught in. And on the U.S. side, we need to do the same thing. So China's actually further ahead of us in developing really advanced manufacturing capabilities and we have the opportunity to do so, but we're not yet doing so at scale in the United States.

So is the regime in Beijing a status quo power or not? I think it's a really important question. All leaders want stability to maintain power, to stay in power, to kind of make sure the regime is generating enough wealth and legitimacy and respect to not be knocked out of power. I certainly agree with that, but I don't think it's particularly diagnostic. I think that statement could be made of many regimes. How a regime approaches that project is different, of course. And in democracies, we try to maintain the regime, so to speak, through elections and through things like that. And in autocracy like China, it's through the suppression of dissent, in some cases through technocratic reforms or giving benefits to the population, propaganda, shaping the information environment, and so on.

But the point is I think kind of defining the CCP's goals and what they're pursuing in such broad terms is not particularly diagnostic for where they're trying to go. I don't think it gives the CCP enough credit for this project that they're involved in where it's something that they feel is really distinctive, really a historical project to prove to the world that their system of socialism with Chinese characteristics is superior. It is the superior governance model that they have tested and tried through their own experience and that they're going to prove not only in China, but around the world, that it is the best. And so becoming the world's leading power also means earning the recognition of the world that this system of governance they've developed is superior to Western, liberal, capitalist, electoral democracy, which they depict is very unstable and in a mess and corrupt.

So they've thrown down the gauntlet essentially. Can we prove that democracy has a better offer? The Biden administration is trying or not? And I think we have to get to the heart of it that socialism with Chinese characteristics sounds very vague and just like perhaps communist propaganda, but how we've seen that manifest is in all of the abuses that are becoming more and more visible in recent years: everything from helping the Russian regime carry out their war in Ukraine to the suppressions of human rights across China and the genocide in Xinjiang, and I can go on and on. But we're seeing what this system looks like when it's taken globally. It's replicating some of the governance practices that they use in China overseas. Of course, tailoring them. It's not some kind of cookie cutter approach. They're much smarter than that. But it is saying that they have a proven governance system that is better than what the Americans and the other democracies have.

LINDSAY:
Well, Liza, let me pick up the gauntlet that's been thrown down and shift our focus and think about going forward. And we spent a lot of time talking about potential diagnosis for our current situation, but it's useful also to talk about prescription. What do you see as the most effective way for the United States to function in this systemic rivalry? And in doing so, what should the goal of U.S. policy should be? I ask partly because I've often read if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. But it also seems to me that there are divisions among analysts about what policy toward China should seek to achieve. I've heard some analysts talk about undermining the Chinese Communist Party. Other people are essentially just talking about deterring Chinese aggression. There are a variety of variations off of that. How do you view these issues?

TOBIN:
This is a tremendously difficult question, and the fate of much of the twenty-first century hangs on U.S. policymakers and our democratic allies around the world getting it right. We have this delicate need to balance the need for candor and realism and strength in the near term to deal with the current rivalry that we find ourselves in. We need to face it realistically and accept that we are no longer in the relationship we imagined and hoped for with China. We can't continue to base our policies around the dream that we're dealing with a normal partner, an ally, a friend, a good neighbor, basically a decent business partner that's following the same rules. That is no longer the framework. We're dealing with a bully, a bad neighbor, use whatever analogy you will. So there's a need for candor and realism in the short term.

At the same time, that negative vision is not enough. And I do hold out hope, and I think it's important for U.S. policymakers to hold out hope and speak publicly about this long-term vision and say that we hope in the future, and it may be the far distant future, to see a more free, a more open and a prosperous China in the future. In my view, that will not be possible with the current CCP regime in place. And ultimately, we should have us policies in place that buy time and create more space and raise the likelihood that that future will occur. But we'll have our hands full frankly, with developing policies that are based on candor and realism for dealing with the CCP that we face today.

LINDSAY:
Jake, how do you view U.S. policy going forward? What guidance or advice would you offer?

WERNER:
I think this gets to the larger context, right? Because I think that the U.S.-China conflict is coming out of a collapse of the global order that previously aligned the two countries. I think that is where we should be focusing our attention. What unfortunately, I think has been the knee-jerk response on the part of a lot of American leaders is to look at the eroding position of American power and in a reflexive way, just try to shore it up and push back against those forces that seem to be undermining American power. I don't think that is genuine leadership. Genuine leadership is not you're on top and you sort of fight desperately to keep on top. Genuine leadership, you step back and you look at the nature of the system, you reflect on the problems that have brought you to this kind of an impasse.

And indeed, I think that the whole project of a free market globalization created these problems, created massive inequality within and between countries that hollowed out global consumer demand, that led to very strong currents of populism, nativism, and authoritarianism in the United States, in China, and in many other countries. And to see that field of developments and say, "Well, we just have to make our alliances stronger and we have to push back against China." China is not exporting authoritarianism. If there is an opening for authoritarianism overseas, it is because of the domestic developments within the countries in question. And those I would again trace to this shift in the way that the global system has worked following from the devastating increase of inequality and insecurity over the last thirty to forty years.

LINDSAY:
Jake, I understand what you think we shouldn't do, most notably double down on old policies, but I'm not quite clear on what it is you would want the United States specifically to do, whether it's overseas or at home. Can you help me on that score?

WERNER:
It certainly is both. I think that on the basis of some very serious reflection on the failures of the period of unipolar American leadership and the kinds of policies that it attempted to impose on the world, we should be reckoning with how to overcome the zero-sum impasses that we've slipped into. And this is true in the global economy and in the global political system. So what I would suggest American leaders do is work with those forces that are amenable to it. And I think this could include China if we change the tenor of the relationship, but it certainly could include other in the developing world in particular because they share a lot of the same discontents that China expresses and that American leaders reject, in particular the access to wealth, to technology, to the ability to industrialize, access to things like public goods like vaccines. Remember that the United States and the other rich countries hoarded the COVID vaccine leading to the death of thousands upon thousands of people in the developing countries back in 2021.

These kinds of things which are not often expressed in American politics because those voices are excluded from American politics, but are crucial to the legitimacy of American leadership in the world. So that sets up a very serious challenge to American leadership if we're not able to discuss the kinds of discontent that are out there in the world with the so-called rules-based international order. And so what I would suggest is working together with partners in the developing world, China, Japan, Europe, I think there are possible partners out there to reduce the level of inequality and insecurity in the global economy and to democratize international institutions so that power is spread more broadly. This does not mean giving all power to China. This means spreading it more broadly in a way that would check the free action of both China and the United States and would allow for a more balanced system and more balanced discussion of what reforms are required in the system.

LINDSAY:
Liza, I want to come back to you on this because it seems as I listened to you and Jake discuss that you differ in a number of points, one of which is sort of the space for cooperation and the potential for cooperation. In any rivalry that can still exist, the potential for cooperation, and perhaps ideally, one would hope to transform a rivalry into a friendship and you could have more cooperation. I take your point that you see Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party as not simply presenting a geopolitical competition to the United States, but also an ideological one. So I'm curious, as you think about U.S.-China relations, do you see issues that might be building blocks for a better relationship or do you think that set of issues where we could actually work together is really small?

TOBIN:
It's a great question, and I think that the Biden administration and previous administrations have tried. One thing that is really important for rivals to be doing, especially rivals with the world's most powerful militaries, is to be in communication and try to avoid the risk that miscommunication could lead to some kind of accident. And the Biden administration has tried, and previous administrations as well, they'd like to set up a 24/7 hotline. The Chinese consistently shut these things down. Usually when there are military to military dialogue between the United States and China, our Pentagon puts enormous effort into planning these things and to try to get them scheduled and make them happen. And frequently, the Chinese cancel these things or pull them back as retaliation for some unrelated offense: Congress goes to Taiwan or the U.S. says something about Xinjiang or something of that nature.

And so the onus really is on China. We need to have lines of communication so that our leaders can talk to each other. We know that Xi Jinping is the ultimate decider, and it would be great to have our presidents be able to have this, and that's something that the U.S. has offered and sought many times and has been shut down. So I think that our policy stance needs to be that we are always open to cooperation from China. Our door is open. I think in the case of COVID-19, we had agreements in place, previous to the pandemic, to exchange virus samples with the Chinese, something normal that's done so that we can all be learning and developing vaccines as quickly as possible. The Chinese withheld those. They did not hold up their end of the bargain. They dragged their feet for a year after the start of the pandemic, before allowing the WHO delegation in there, by which time, of course, I'm sure all of the evidence of where the origins of the pandemic were long gone.

So my point is that I think the U.S. does have a good track record of being open to these things, and unfortunately, our Chinese colleagues, because of different goals, different political systems or what have you, have frequently not shown up with their end of it. I like imagining this world where the U.S. and China can be cooperating on global challenges. Any reasonable person looking at the situation of the world today, when we have pandemics, we have climate change, we have massive security challenges, economic challenges, inequality, all this, of course, it would make sense that the two countries with the biggest economies and the most technological prowess would work together, and we could do a lot together. And imagine if you added the European Union and some of our other powerful allies like Japan to the party, we could do a lot.

And so that vision is very appealing to me. Unfortunately, we have tried it. We have tried pursuing that for many years and have come up short. And so I think we have to just really accept that our partner or potential partner in building this vision has a very different vision than we do.

LINDSAY:
Jake, I'm going to give you a crack at that question because as I think back over the last decade, I've heard a lot of talk about the potential for U.S.-China cooperation, particularly around climate change, often held up as a great hope for forward movement. I think as Liza laid out, the Biden administration certainly tried to build in basic confidence building measures on the military front and can't seem to get an answer from Beijing. But you're pretty optimistic about the potential for cooperation. So I have to ask why?

WERNER:
I'm optimistic about the potential for cooperation in the abstract. Given where the leadership in the two countries is right now, I'm very pessimistic and I expect very serious conflict to come about, and that will...And that's this larger sort of context of hostility where both sides consider the other to be the primary obstacle to success of their own projects, I think that explains why both sides are acting in very counterproductive ways that just reinforces the antagonistic dynamics. But in the abstract, I see there is a potential there in the sense that the U.S. and China both have a very deep interest in a stable and prosperous global economy. They both have a deep interest in effective action to address climate change, to address pandemic disease, to improve public health globally, to support development and global macroeconomic stability. These are things that would have hugely beneficial outcomes for both countries.

So in the abstract, there is a lot of space there. The problem is that both sides are blaming the other for the deterioration in their relationship. Both sides are characterizing the other as the one that's undermining the status quo. Of course, we're very familiar with this on the U.S. side that China is trying to create its own order, but on the Chinese side too, the Chinese say, "Look, the United States has incapacitated the WTO. That's the rules-based international order. The United States is the one that has brought down the rules-based international order. We stand for the status quo. We stand for the market and comparative advantage." All of this very self-serving rhetoric coming out of the Chinese side, I think puts up a block. It antagonizes the U.S. side. It does not reflect what's actually happening.

And I think the same thing is happening on the American side, when Americans complain about Chinese industrial policy, for example, and then go and do the exact same thing through the Inflation Reduction Act or the various Biden initiatives. These are the same things that China is doing, and we say, "No, no, no, we're doing it to support markets, to perfect markets. The Chinese are doing it to destroy markets." These are very tendentious characterizations of the things that are happening. And I think unfortunately, getting in the way of a real recognition that the two sides are not so different on so many things.

We have drawn the conclusion that actually the free market is not the best way to run the economy. We need the state to structure markets so that they can serve the public good. This is something that leadership on both sides now have really embraced, and rather than recognizing that and saying maybe everyone else in the global system should be able to benefit from this insight; instead, we're sort of bickering about who's the one who's serving the market properly, and in the process, letting all these other countries that could benefit from industrial policy and from a greater role for the state and the economy, leaving them out in the cold because they are not strong enough to violate WTO rules in the way that the U.S. and China do.

LINDSAY:
On that note of civil disagreement about one of the biggest challenges facing the United States, I'll close up this special election 2024 episode of The President's Inbox. My guests have been Liza Tobin, senior director for economy at the Special Competitive Studies Project, and Jake Werner, acting director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Liza and Jake, thank you very much for joining me.

WERNER:
Thanks so much, Jim.

TOBIN:
Thank you, Jim. Thanks, Jake.

LINDSAY:
This special election 2024 series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. If you would like to learn more about what the candidates have said about foreign policy, please visit the Council's 2024 election central site. You can find it at CFR.org/election2024. Election2024 is one word. Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Kenadee Mangus, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.