China | Susan Shirk Fragile Superpower | Talks at Google

Thanks, everybody, for coming. I'm Kim Malone, and it is my very great honor to introduce Susan Shirk, who is the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and a professor of political science there. Susan, as you can see, is the author of several books, including How China Opened Its Door, the political success of PRCs foreign trade and Investment Reforms. And she is going to Talk for about 35 minutes, then open it up to Q&As, and then sign books. If you do have questions in the Q and A, we're going to be passing around a mic, so be sure to raise your hand and wait for a mic to come to you. So welcome, Susan, and thank you for being here.

Thanks, Kim. Thank you very much. Really a treat to be here talking about China and my new book, China Fragile Superpower. I know that China is very important to Google, and I believe that Google and information is also very important to China. In fact, there's a whole chapter in my book on the commercialization of the media and the Internet. So I'm hoping that we can spend a little bit more time talking about that, maybe in the question and answer session. I'm an old China hand, a China scholar. I've been traveling to China and doing research there since 1971. And in 1997, I went to Washington and spent three years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Department of State responsible for relations with China, which was really quite a rare opportunity for an academic to participate in history instead of just studying it. Well, I went in 1997, and as I moved to Washington, I really was very worried about the possibility of war because between China and the United States, because the previous year, 1996, China and the United States had come into an eyeball to eyeball confrontation over the island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims is part of China, but has ruled itself independently since 1949. The United States allowed the Taiwan president, Lee Deng Hui, to visit the United States and give a speech at his alma mater, Cornell. And of course, in Beijing's eyes, this signified that we viewed Taiwan as a sovereign country. They were very upset about this, and they launched massive military exercises, including missile tests, outside two Taiwan ports to show just how outraged they were. The United States responded by sending two carrier battle groups to demonstrate our resolve that we would not allow Beijing to militarily intimidate Taiwan. So we sent the two carrier battle groups, and China backed down. But what would happen next time? Crisis escalation has a life all its own, and wars can occur even if no one wants them to happen. Well, as I worked in government trying to prevent this kind of conflict from occurring in the future, again, I started to notice how very focused on their own domestic politics China's leaders seem to be and how insecure they seemed. Now, of course, this was the Clinton administration, so I was getting a pretty heavy dose of domestic politics and China policy from our side, because I don't know if you recall the accusations about the Clinton administration getting campaign contributions from China and that the Clinton administration had given away our satellite secrets, our nuclear secrets, to China. But in China, in contrast to the United States, there is really so much more at stake. For politicians, it's not just a matter of winning the next election. It's really a question of the survival of Communist Party rule. Now, you know, when I tell my American friends and colleagues that I'm writing a book about Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy called China Fragile Superpower, they usually say to me, what do you mean, fragile? But when I tell my Chinese colleagues that I'm writing a book called China Fragile Superpower, every single one of them has said, what do you mean, superpower? And not one of them has questioned the notion that China is fragile because this fragility is so apparent to people in China. Now, the fragility came through particularly clearly to me in the most traumatic experience I had when I was in government. It was a May evening in 1999. I was driving home, and I got a telephone call from the op center saying that the United States, flying a NATO mission, had bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Now, I, of course, thought, this is collateral damage, a stray fragment that just got in the wrong place. But as I turned around and headed back toward the State Department, I found out that, in fact, we had mistakenly actually targeted this building, which we believe to be a Yugoslav military facility. And it turned out to be the Chinese embassy we targeted, struck it with three bombs, killed three Chinese and injured 20 others. Well, I was in charge of coordinating the US response to this accident. And my first instinct, even as soon as I was driving back to the State Department, was that we had to apologize profusely from the President on down. Because I knew that if we didn't show how sincerely sorry we were, if we didn't apologize adequately, the Chinese would never let us forget it, just as they have never let the Japanese forget their failure to apologize adequately for their brutal occupation of China during World War II. So we had President Clinton call President Jiang Zemin. He wouldn't take the call. Secretary of State Albright went to the Chinese embassy that night to apologize. We tried to send a special envoy. The Chinese said, no, not yet. We tried to send our ambassador to the airport so he could be there when the plane with the remains of the victims came back. They wouldn't let him go. President Clinton apologized on television. Then we had President Clinton call Jiang Zemin again. He finally took the call a few days later, and we paid compensation for the victims and for the damage to the building. But all of our efforts were in vain. Shortly after the incident, swarms of students were on the street in Beijing and other cities where we have consulates, and they went and demonstrated and trashed our embassy and the consulates, throwing bricks, stones, and Molotov cocktails. The Chinese Communist party had informed people in China through the official media that this was a brazen and intentional act on the part of the United States. They provided buses for the students to go to our embassy and to go to the consulates. And so our efforts to apologize and make amends were in vain. Now, why did President Jiang Zemin do this? Why did they react in this way? Now, you have to. To understand this, I think you really have to put yourself in the shoes of China's leaders. And that's what I try to do in my book. I try to have you put yourself in the shoes of China's leaders as they look at their domestic situation, as they look at the world, to try to make sense of why they make the choices they do. So one important reason that Jiang Zemin reacted by allowing these protests against our embassy and our consulates, in other words, allowing them to go after the United States, was because just a month before, in April, he had woken up one morning to find 10,000 adherents of the Falun Gong, a spiritual sect that was quietly demonstrating around the compound where Chinese leaders work and live in order to demand that they be recognized as a legitimate organization. Well, needless to say, Chiang Zemin was greatly alarmed by the fact that this organization had been able to, using the Internet and cell phones, had mobilized this kind of demonstration with no forewarning. And I have been told by a number of insiders that the night of the Belgrade embassy bombing, Jiang Zemin stayed up late writing a memo not on how to handle this crisis of the Belgrade embassy bombing, but how to crush the Falun Gong. And I speculate that in his mind, these two threats kind of blurred together. Moreover, the Belgrade embassy bombing occurred in early May, and a few weeks later, it would be June 4, 1999. Now, some of you here probably know the Significance of that date. It was the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen pro democracy demonstrations and the crushing of them by the People's Liberation Army. These demonstrations had occurred in 1989, not just in Beijing, but in more than 130 other cities throughout China. The leadership split on how to react to those demonstrations, and the Chinese Communist regime almost fell. So Jiang Zemin and the other Chinese leaders were worried that in May, when the Belgrade bombing occurred, that the students who were probably organizing these demonstrations to occur on the 10th anniversary of Tiananmen just might move up the date for the demonstration. They would come out on the streets and they would actually go to Tiananmen or surround Zhongnanhai where the leadership works. And they would blame the party for being so weak in the face of foreign pressure that you allowed this humiliating event of the US Bombing our embassy in Belgrade. So that explains the buses. The buses were there to make sure the students went to the US Embassy instead of coming after the party leaders. In other words, China's leaders were willing to risk a confrontation with the much more powerful United States in order to protect themselves domestically now. So that, of course, was a very alarming realization. And based on that traumatic experience and others I had when I was in government, not quite so traumatic, but sort of of the same type, I started seeing a pattern emerge. And the pattern was that China's leaders really were very politically insecure. You know, to us on the outside, China's leaders look like giants because the country is so successful economically now, politically and militarily, too. It's a rising power, and we're kind of in awe of China. But in their own minds, China's leaders feel like scared children trying to stay on top of a society that has been turned upside down by all this radical economic change since they introduced market competition and opened up to the world in 1979. So China's leaders are struggling to maintain their own power and the authority and legitimacy of the Communist Party on top of a society that really is just so different than the society of the Mao Zedong era. And this makes them very anxious and insecure. And everything they do in foreign policy, as well as domestic policy, is motivated, I argue in this book, by this insecurity. And so to figure out how we should respond and what Americans should do and people in other countries, you really have to put yourself in the place of these leaders and understand why they feel so insecure now. So that's what I'd like to talk a little bit about today is why are China's Leaders so insecure. Now we have to go back to Tiananmen again because in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party almost fell because of these demonstrations in more than 130 cities and because the leadership of the party split over how to react to the demonstrations. And it's only because the military then followed Deng Xiaoping's orders and came in and forcibly put down the demonstrations that the regime survived. So China's leaders today know what a close call that was. Also in 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall. I mean, think about it. China could have toppled along with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So, so naturally, with the toppling of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China's leaders have to wonder, how long can they last? Are their own days numbered? So China's leaders also know that, that they, people like Hu Jintao, the current president, Wen Jiabao, the premier, the predecessors, Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji, they know that they are ordinary men. They lack the charisma, the prestige, the personal following of a Mao Zedong or a Deng Xiaoping. These guys are kind of colorless organization men and technocrats. And they know that they don't really have that much popular support and following. Also, they recognize that two decades of economic reform, and we know that China has been growing at more than 10% per per year, per capita income, more than 8% per year for 25 years. This is absolutely unprecedented in world history. No country has had personal income grow that fast for that long and that it has really changed China dramatically. The leaders are insecure because they know that they can't even keep track of the population, much less control it. The number of people working in state enterprises is way down. Most people work in private or collective companies where there's very little political control. More than a 100 million people have moved from the countryside to the cities. Millions of people travel abroad every year. So the party doesn't have the kind of control that they once had. Also, information. I really put a lot of emphasis on this, that in the Mao era, everything that people in China read in the newspaper, heard on television was propaganda. They had no information, really, other than what was interpreted by the Xinhua News agency about what was going on in the outside world. Now 144 million people, by Chinese estimates, get their news information online through the Internet. They also, and you know, people don't pay enough attention to the fact that there also is a tabloid press, there's commercial newspapers and television stations that are competing in the marketplace. And although they're still censored. And we can talk more about how that censorship works in the discussion section. But the fact that they're competing gives them the motivation to push the limits of censorship and provide more information to people. And there's a very interesting interactive effect of the commercial newspapers and magazines and the Internet because a story broken by a local paper gets posted and becomes a national news story and helps information penetrate from abroad and from one part of China to another part of China. So what does that mean? That means that if you're Hu Jintao, you can't keep people ignorant of what the politicians in Taiwan are saying, no matter how active, outrageous it might be to the ears of Chinese citizens or politicians in Washington or in Tokyo. The gap between the rich and poor has also widened. And China's leaders are very concerned about that. You know, in America we are alarmed because the wealth gap in the United States is wider than it's been in a century. But China's is worse. China's Gini coefficient, which is the internationally accepted measure of inequality with zero being perfect equality, is between 0.46 and 0.49. America's is 0.41. And the reason that China's leaders are so alarmed about the growing wealth gap in China is that most people believe that the wealthy folks got their money not through ingenuity and hard work, but through official corruption. And that's what makes this kind of inequality potentially politically explosive. China also has demonstrations every day in the cities, laid off workers in the countryside, hard pressed farmers who are upset about their land being taken for development and not getting adequate compensation. An important new issue that has stimulated a lot of protest lately is China's severe environmental problems. So that people go out and demonstrate because the rivers are poisoning them, chemical factories, dumping chemicals into the rivers and other environmental disasters. And you know, when large numbers of people are upset about the same issue at the same time is when you really have to worry about massive protests that threaten the regime. China's leaders are this administration, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. They're trying to head off the unrest by a kind of compassionate communism. You might say their slogan is harmonious society, that they want to build a harmonious society and they want to show that they care about the poor, the have nots, the people who haven't benefited as much as others from the economic changes in the last 25 years. You know, think about it. It's kind of interesting that the Communist Party has to do something really dramatic to show that it cares about the poor in China nowadays. So Premier Wen Jiabao is particularly effective. I spent all last summer in Beijing and I watch the 7 o' clock news every night. And at least once a week he's out there in the countryside visiting a village that's experienced some natural or man made disaster. And he puts his arm around this poor farmer and he shows how, how he sympathizes with the plight of this poor farmer. And he even kind of tears up like a Chinese Bill Clinton. It's incredibly effective. It really is. You can tell that he really feels it. But nonetheless, despite all this talk about the harmonious society and this kind of compassionate communism, these protests are occurring every day throughout China. But protests aren't the only thing that China's leaders have to worry about. They also have to worry about keeping the leadership united. Because remember I said that they took away three lessons from this Tiananmen close call in 1989. The first one is try to prevent massive social unrest. But the second one is also prevent public leadership splits. Because if ordinary people see that the leadership is not united, that makes them feel they can come out and demonstrate without the same risk, without fear, and it encourages more protest. So they have to hang together. But how do you maintain the unity of the party leadership despite the competition for power that inevitably exists in every political system? You know, it's often said that leadership succession is the Achilles heel of communist regimes. Right now we're actually in the middle of a political campaign in China, just as we are in the United States in the fall of this year. There's going to be a major party congress now, and Hu Jintao will be given another five year term. It's kind of become the political norm in China for people to have two terms in office, but at least four, four of the, probably more of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are going to retire because of age. And at this meeting, they will have to figure out who to promote. And most important, they really should pick a successor to Hu Jintao. Hu Jintao was chosen to be the successor and stand in the wings and get ready more than five years before he became the party secretary and president. So at this meeting, Hu Jintao's successor should be selected. So not a lot of people in this country are paying attention to this yet, but I am watching to see, can they get a consensus on one individual to be chosen as Hu Jintao's successor. Most people I talk to in China think they won't be able to do that. What they'll have to do instead is select two or three and promote them and let them compete over the next five years. If that is the case, it's going to be pretty interesting because it'll be very hard to keep, especially in this information environment, to keep all of this hidden from people in China, to hide this kind of competition from the public. The third thing they have to worry about, and again, this takes us back to, to Tiananmen, because if you have is the military, because if you have social unrest and the leadership splits, you might still survive if the military remains loyal to the Communist Party. That's what happened in Tiananmen. They had the military to backstop the Party. So it's hardly a surprise that Hu Jintao spends a lot of time chatting up the generals and folks in the military and trying to ingratiate himself with the military. It also helps us understand why the Chinese military has received double digit annual increases in the defense budget every year since Tiananmen. Now, that's not just or even mainly because China sees so many international threats. And it's not just because China wants a military that a great power can be proud of, although that is a factor. But I think the domestic explanation is just as important. Namely, they have to keep giving the military budget increases so that they can acquire all sorts of modern equipment and stay busy learning how to use it and remain loyal to the Communist Party and to Hu Jintao personally. Finally is the question of nationalism in talking about why China's leaders are so insecure. The lessons of Chinese history are very much in the minds of China's leaders. And that history is that the previous two two dynasties, the Qing dynasty that fell in 1911 and the Republic of China that was defeated by the Communists in 1949, both of those dynasties were overthrown by national movements in which the specific discontents of different rural and urban groups were fused together by the powerful emotional force of nationalism. The Qing Dynasty fell because people said this government is just too weak in the face of foreign imperialist pressure. And the Communists defeated the Republic of China in large part because they were more effective at fighting the Japanese than the Republican government. So this powerful force of nationalism can bring down a dynasty. And China's leaders today have to worry if the Communist dynasty might meet the same fate. Now, Jiang Zemin, who was the top leader of China, the party secretary and the president following Tiananmen during the 1990s, he was so desperate to find a way to build up to revive popular support for the Communist Party that he stimulated nationalism. He launched something called the patriotic education campaign in the schools and in movies and billboards. The focus was on the Japanese brutal occupation of China during World War II. That was the main focus of this campaign to stimulate patriotism. So this nationalism that now is so strong in China is. Some of it's just spontaneous. I'm not arguing that it's all brainwashing. Some of it's just a natural result. When you have a country that's reviving its power and remember China, China was such an important country and then it experienced what they call the century of humiliation. 150 years of being very weak and internally divided and sidelined internationally. So now China is coming back. And so nationalism is occurring in part spontaneously, but it's also reinforced by what the party has done through its propaganda and its textbooks. The result of that we saw in 2005, April 2005, you had large scale anti Japanese demonstrations in 25 cities in China. So the nationalism is focused on, primarily on Japan and also on the Taiwan issue. And we can talk more about that in the discussion. So what I see is that this insecurity of China's leaders is coloring everything they do domestically to try to extend their lifespan, their political lifespan, but also internationally. I know that China's leaders, I believe that they really are sincere when they say that they want to rise peacefully. They don't want to provoke any conflict with the United States or with other countries. Any conflict like that would be disastrous for China. It would interfere with the economic growth that is creating jobs and preventing unemployment and could lead to massive domestic unrest. But the question I have is, you know, I know that China wants to convince the world that it's a response, responsible power, that it doesn't want any conflict. But is this foreign policy domestically sustainable in the face of increasing protests, nationalism, and all the information that people now have about what's going on in the world? So I believe that Americans need to understand how the insecurity of China's leaders and this internal fragility affects their foreign policy. We have to realize that our policies, everything we say and do, resonates through Chinese domestic politics, so that we have to be very careful and we have to think twice and recognize that our policies, our statements, become domestic political issues in China. So I believe that if we're smart about this, we can help China become the responsible power that China's leaders claim it is, rather than reacting to their domestic predicament in a way that is dangerous internationally. So I end the book with advice to Americans about how, once you understand the fragility of China. We what that means for our own policy. I also am quite free with my advice to Chinese leaders. I'm happy to tell them how they should try to handle their domestic predicament in a way which is will be good for them. So we can talk about that in the discussion section, talk about the information issues or whatever you would like. So thanks very much.

Yes, could you wait for the microphone?

Thanks.

It seems that China is fairly obstructionist in the un, be it Iran or Darfur. They're very against US and European initiatives to intervene in other countries. And I'm wondering what drives their resistance or the reluctance on that front.

China has a traditional ideological notion that government shouldn't interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. But I actually see. And of course you can understand why they would believe that because they don't want people interfering in their internal affairs. They feel very vulnerable being the only large communist country left in the world. But actually, I think that China's positions at the United nations show tremendous change evolution. They're becoming much more pragmatic. They voted for sanctions against North Korea. They almost never veto anything. They hate to stand alone vetoing. And in fact, in most resolutions, they don't even abstain. They join the consensus with Darfur. I've been predicting that if this round of efforts to get the UN force into Darfur doesn't work, even though China actually, they say that they have been working and certainly have gotten credit from other diplomats for working together and trying to convince Bashir to accept the force. If this doesn't work, this round doesn't work. I'm predicting that China will not veto another sanctions resolution against Darfur. They probably would abstain. So in other words, I think China, because it cares so much about its international reputation now in order to avoid conflicts, is actually changing the way it votes at the un. Yeah.

In the States and other Western countries, we're seeing a growing number of Chinese students coming to study. When for those Chinese students that then return to China, how do they fit into the political dynamic you've described? And also how do they affect the demand for information from services like Google?

Chinese students who return to China, I think do become a force for political change within China. But on the other hand, they need to accommodate in order to make their own careers. There's a lot of mistrust, actually. There's kind of a competition between the people who get all their education in China and the people who go abroad. And of course, the people who got all their education in China kind Of like to cast doubts on the loyalty of the people who went abroad. So a little bit of tension. So those people who went abroad have to show that they are committed to China's development. As to information, I think that the demand for access to information is politically very, very important in China. I mean, the times I've been in China, like last summer when I was hooking up my system and I had this tech guy come and help me in my apartment having problems. This is a person who never went to college or anything. He had nothing but complaints about the blocking and filtering. And I hear this from lots of younger people. So I think that this can become a source of political pressure on the government. Yes.

So with all the people on the Internet, I guess, but the government censors everything and it requires all the companies that do business there, like Google, to self censor. And so I was wondering what your opinion of that is or what your stance on it is.

Well, without passing judgment about what's a wise decision or not wise decision, you know, it's kind of a half empty, half full story. On the one hand, the censorship has been more effective than the Internet optimists had anticipated. You know, a lot of people thought the Internet comes to China is the magic bullet to change China politically. That hasn't happened. But on the other hand, people have so much more information than they did before. The censorship and filtering on the Internet cannot be airtight. So what happens is people post things and, and it takes maybe an hour or two or three before somebody takes it off. And in that time it's gotten circulated very widely. People also see the heavy hand of the party. They see what's coming off. So they know what the Communist party is afraid of. It's a sign of weakness. So you know, the system because of the Internet is much more porous to information than it ever was before. It's not perfect. There is still this censorship, but the net result is just much more information.

One of the things one the of.

Can you hear me?

One of the things that is unclear to me is how, how would the protests and the complaints and the problems of the people, even if it's tens of millions of people, how does that actually translate into bringing down a government? And I know you talked about you need to have politicians who are in factions and you need to have military and the people, but how would you envision the people coming together with the military to actually have this happen? What would it look like?

I think there are a zillion different scenarios. There's not one way for it to happen. I do think what's critical is not just unrest, but what happens to inside the communist leadership. Because if the party remains united and they all favor just suppressing the protests, all or buying them off or whatever, then they can survive just fine. But if there's a tremendous temptation on the part of a leader in China to defect from that consensus, it hasn't happened quite well. It actually, it happened in Tiananmen. Jiao Ziyang, who was the party secretary at the time, was under a lot of political pressure. He was kind of being criticized by the conservatives, and he knew that he might not last that long in that position. He had nothing to lose, frankly. And he went to Tiananmen Square. He signaled a much more positive, supportive view of the demonstrations. That's how it would happen. And then it's not a matter of joining with the military. It's a question of will the military come in again and violently put down demonstrations. Now they bought a lot more tear gas, and, you know, they've got. They've been practicing crowd control. They've got technologies that they didn't have back in 1989. But I still think it's kind of iffy. You might get splits in the military. So those are the kinds of things that China's leaders have to worry about.

Something that's. In the last couple of months, there have been a few significant issues with regard to products being exported from China and the effect on health and safety in the US So it's the tires, it's the paint, and it's the toilet, it's the food stuff. I'm curious your views in terms of thinking about how that might play out, given that it's potentially goes at one of the key engines of China's development, which is its ability to export to Western countries. In terms of thinking about things to look for in terms of if it's headed toward a confrontational spot or whether it's headed toward a spot which would sort of manage sort of a key issue.

Well, of course, these problems of tainted products feed into American fears of China, you know, and they add to the fact that we have the largest trade deficit we've ever had with any country, you know, 200 over $230 billion with China, China's military buildup, the fact that the US is the dominant superpower and we see the hot breath of the Chinese dragon, as some people would describe it, sort of coming after us. So a lot of apprehension on the part of Americans, and this kind of feeds into that of course, it's not unique to China. I mean, every, we had some of the same scandals in the early stages of American economic development with poor health and safety regulation. So it's a big problem for China though. They have to try to get a handle on it. I mean, think of all the things these folks have to try to do. And you know, we think they're an authoritarian regime. This should be easy. But it's also now a market regime and regulation is very poor. And what's particularly problematic is that local officials are hand in glove with the folks who are cheating by putting in the wrong ingredients into products. They're hand in gloves with the intellectual property violators, the pirators of CDs. And Beijing doesn't have the control over the local officials and there's no democratic accountability for those folks.

We have time for one more question in the front row. Would you describe China as of today is very, very similar to something like 1920s and 1930s during the Nationalist control, because local government is basically corrupt, vast disparity of wealth and insecurity overseas and so on. So is that what really, really drives Chinese government in terms of their fear? Insecurity?

I think worries about corruption, protests, local officials who don't follow the law, all of that. Yes, I think images of 1920s very vivid in the minds of China's leaders and the policy elite. And that's why they believe their days are numbered. You know, they know what happened to the Republican government. So that's why I think it's really important for foreigners to understand this, you know, to kind of open up the black box of, of what is actually happening in China and see how complicated this predicament is. And to recognize that although by and large this insecurity leads to pretty pragmatic international behavior in a few areas, those emotional hot button issues of Japan and Taiwan in it could actually spell trouble.

Do you think we can strike a grand bargain? Is that in terms of Taiwan and Japan, it's really, really hard to deal with. In terms of China's end goal, we cannot really interfere, but the other side, the rest of it will just barter together.

Well, the United States can't tell Japan what to do and it can't tell Taiwan what to do do, but the US can at least avoid making things worse. And so in the last chapter of the book, I have some advice to American policymakers about that. Well, thanks very much. I really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate your coming.