Book Launch: “Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige”
“Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige”
Book Launch, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Washington, DC March 28, 2013
I owe the two words “interesting times” in the title of this book to my publisher, the redoubtable Helena Cobban. She thought the phrase captured the spirit of the exciting, trying, exhilarating, exasperating, but always surprising progress that China, the United States, and the world have registered over the past half century.
I see one or two notoriously finicky people here. Let me therefore admit at the outset that, while Chinese has many wonderfully descriptive epigrams, the celebrated curse, “may you live in interesting times,” is not one of them. It was apparently coined by the British ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen KCMG around 1937, after he had the “interesting” experience of being strafed and wounded by a Japanese fighter aircraft in Shanghai. So the curse originates in China but, given the inscrutability of Sir Hughe’s name, no one has ever been able to remember for long who first uttered it or where.
“Living in Interesting times” doesn’t even have a standard Chinese translation. In my view, the energetically vexing uncertainties of modern life in China deserve succinct expression in a snappy four-character phrase. So, by the way, does the other apocryphal Chinese curse, “may you come to the attention of people in authority.” Perhaps the publishers of a future Chinese edition of “Interesting Times” can crowd-source appropriate new 成语.
Let me turn to the book itself.
There is a mythical Chinese animal called the “四不像” – the “beast that is unlike four others.” It has a cow’s hooves but does not moo. It has a horse’s head but can’t be sold as beef in European butcher shops. It has a deer’s antlers but does not live near strip malls in the suburbs. It has a donkey’s body but is not an ass. Some say its bite is fatal and some are horrified by it.
This book may horrify a few people but I doubt it will bite, still less kill anybody. Like a “四不像,” it is tempting to define “Interesting Times” by what it is not. It is not your common Washington suck-up to the administration of the day, work of sinology, think-tank study, or belief-tank polemic. It contains an anecdote or two and, for better or ill, it reflects the author’s place and perspective about things when they happened, but it is not an autobiography. Nor is it a Washington-insider account of how the author invented devilishly clever policies, personally sold the president on them, and imposed them on unwitting foreigners.
The book expresses my views rather than those of any institution or group of like-minded people. In sum, it reflects who I was and who I am and what I saw and see changing in and with China. I was a career diplomat and am a businessman who dabbles in sinology, not a sinologist, securocrat, or policy wonk who dabbles in diplomacy or business.
China has been around for a long time but I first discovered it in 1963 in Widener Library at Harvard, when I sought refuge from the intellectual desert of law school by reading world history. Later, after I entered the Foreign Service of the United States, I fought to get into the Chinese language and area studies program so I could learn Mandarin and Taiwanese. I had convinced myself that geopolitics would force a Sino-American rapprochement. I thought it would be exciting to be part of that. As it turned out, it was. To one degree or another, I have been happily engaged with China for forty-four years.
“Interesting Times” contains observations about a half century or so of developments in Sino-American relations. It looks at changes in the regional and global orders brought about by China’s recovery from its previous catalepsy, convulsions, and foreign incursions. The book documents my efforts at various times to understand and explain what China was up to and to project where it might be going.
In addition to what is in print in the book, there are supplementary materials that reside online. For example, there is a memorandum inspired by a delicious bowl of noodles that I bought in Tiananmen Square in 1979. In the memo, I rashly attempted to forecast what China might be like after another 20 years. A lot of my hypotheses then and on other occasions did not coincide with the conventional wisdom and were controversial. Better analysts than I roundly criticized – sometimes denigrated – me for my views. Sometimes they were right to do so. China is a moving target that is hard to grasp.
It is difficult to overstate the speed and scope of the changes that have occurred in China and its foreign relations over the course of the forty-one years since I first set foot in Beijing. The Cultural Revolution had then shut down China’s foreign relations. China had only one full ambassador abroad – Huang Hua, whom Zhou Enlai protected by not recalling him from Cairo. Today, China is a presence everywhere and a major actor determining the reactions of the international community to events well beyond its immediate periphery. In this regard, consider, for example, G-20 and IMF meetings, peacekeeping operations in Haiti, the Congo, and Lebanon, proposals for foreign intervention in Syria, and sanctions against Iran. That’s before you get to current affairs in north Korea, the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands, or the Russian armaments industry.
The basis for the huge expansion in Chinese global and regional influence is, of course, mostly economic. In 1972, in current dollars, China’s GDP per capita was about $130. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, this had grown to over $1,000. Last year, it was over $6,000, with purchasing power equivalent to about $9,000. Think about what that means for ordinary people in China! That’s a 47-fold rise in wealth!
In 1972, Taiwan’s 16 million people had a GDP slightly larger than the China mainland’s 875 million. The Chinese economy is now expected to surpass ours in purchasing power terms by 2016, the year in which we will hold our next presidential election. China will almost certainly overtake us in nominal exchange rate terms before the 2021 centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
In 1972, China’s worldwide imports and exports came to $6.3 billion, including US-China trade of about $95 million. Last year China’s trade in goods alone was $3.9 trillion. US-China trade in goods and services came to $536 billion. There was no investment by either country in the other in 1972. Now there is US investment everywhere in China and our states and localities are pushing for some sort of Open Door policy for Chinese investment in the United States.
In 1972, there were no Chinese tourists or students in the United States. A few hundred Americans visited China. This year there are over 200,000 Chinese students here. Almost 1 ½ million Chinese tourists will visit and over 2 million Americans will go to China.
You get the point. This is a very consequential relationship that is in the process of becoming more so. I don’t have to drone on for you to appreciate the extraordinary dynamism of China and US-China relations and their effects on Asia and the world. And, having just waxed uncharacteristically numerical, I want to assure you that, while there are many references to facts and figures, there are no dreary charts and graphs or statistical recitations in “Interesting Times.”
The book does, however, contain a fair amount of exploration of how China changed and of the nature of what I call “cadre capitalism” – otherwise known as “socialism (or is it Leninism) with Chinese characteristics.” Cadre capitalism is something new. For ideological reasons, it’s poorly understood in China and greatly misunderstood abroad. Cadre capitalism is a party-based system that links political boosterism to economic entrepreneurship. It makes so-called state-owned enterprises formidably competitive and business in China highly efficient. It’s a unique artifact of Chinese culture that, in my view, cannot be exported as a model or borrowed abroad. Perhaps that’s just as well. If corruption is at heart the result of an inability to separate personal interests from public or enterprise interests, then cadre capitalism promotes corruption as well as business efficiency.
“Interesting Times” spends a lot of time looking at the origins and evolution of the question of Taiwan’s relationship with the rest of China and America’s role in this. One online piece looks at Taiwan in foreign strategies toward China since the 17th century. Mostly, however, the book tracks the evolution of the Taiwan issue in US-China relations, in whose development it remains a significant inhibition. And it examines the effects on China’s neighbors and the United States of China’s remarkable return to wealth and power. It looks back forty years, but it also tries to look ahead another forty.
On that incautious note, let me turn the podium back to Dr. Swaine before we turn to questions and comments.