We Are All Wrong About China. We’re Creating the Enemy We Fear

China. It’s one justification for why we’re racing headlong into artificial intelligence development. It’s why defense budgets keep climbing into the hundreds of billions. It’s why we’re restructuring decades-old alliances — even as those allies quietly slip off to Beijing for their own meetings with President Xi Jinping.

It was the organizing principle behind tariffs that reshape global trade, the justification for decoupling entire economies, the specter that haunts every discussion of semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and the future of manufacturing. 

It’s China, China, China.

David C. Kang, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, has done something remarkable with his colleagues: They systematically analyzed what China says about itself. Not cherry-picked quotes, but 12,000 official articles and hundreds of Xi’s speeches. 

Their findings, published in International Security, challenge every assumption driving current US policy.

What Kang and his colleagues discovered might surprise you. Or alarm you. Or both. Because while we’re spending billions on military posture and abandoning economic engagement, fewer than 1,000 American students now study in China, while 250,000 Chinese study here. 

We’re fighting yesterday’s Cold War with what probably should be tomorrow’s most important relationship — being reckless with our technology, our understanding, and the competition that actually matters.The gap between Washington’s certainties and the region’s realities keeps growing. 

The question Kang asks is whether we’re creating the very threat we think we’re containing.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:10] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. 

We’ve been told the story so many times, it’s become almost gospel. China is rising, ambitious, expansionist. A revisionist power determined to overturn the international order, displace American leadership and reshape the world in its authoritarian image. It’s a narrative that’s driven billions in defense spending, reshaped alliances across the Pacific, and created a bipartisan consensus in Washington that views military containment as our only viable strategy. But what if we’ve been reading China wrong? What if the evidence, when examined carefully, systematically, without the distorting lens of worst case assumptions, tells a fundamentally different story? 

My guest, David C. Kang, is professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Korean Studies Institute. Along with his colleagues, he’s just published a remarkable study in international security that does something rare in today’s polarized discourse about China. They’ve actually looked at what China says about itself. They’ve analyzed 12,000 articles from official Chinese sources, hundreds of Xi Jinping speeches, and traced China’s territorial claims, not just back to Xi or even Mao, but across dynasties and centuries. What they found challenges nearly every assumption driving current US policy. Their research reveals a China far more focused on regime stability and internal challenges than external conquest. A country whose territorial claims have actually decreased over time, rather than expanded. And a government that has consistently, if largely ignored by Western observers, stated it has no intention of displacing the United States as a global hegemon. This isn’t about being naive or dismissive of real problems in US-China relations. Chinese firms do engage in questionable practices. The government does violate human rights, and there are legitimate disputes over maritime boundaries and sovereignty. But understanding what China actually wants, as opposed to what we fear it wants, could be the difference between managing a complex relationship and stumbling into an unnecessary confrontation. 

Today we’re going to examine the evidence, question the conventional wisdom, and explore whether the generation-long focus on military competition, deterrence, and decoupling might be solving the wrong problem entirely. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor David C. Kang here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. David, thanks so much for joining us. 

[00:02:50] David C. Kang: Well, thank you for having me. I’m delighted. 

[00:02:53] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. How is it that we have evolved a policy that has been really so consistent with respect to China over so many years, and so many administrations, and arguably be wrong at its core?

[00:03:08] David C. Kang: Yeah, that’s a great question. There used to be a fairly rigorous debate in Washington, D.C. about China. Some people were skeptical. Some people were more optimistic. About 10 years ago, 10 or 15 years ago, everybody began to move, on the left and the right, began to move to the China threat viewpoint. And it has become now so entrenched in Washington that you can just simply say it. And that justifies, as you pointed out in your introduction, it justifies massive defense spending, decoupling, huge generations-long attention to potentially fighting a war against China. And in many ways, these aren’t necessarily justified perspectives.

[00:03:51] Jeff Schechtman: And arguably, they have been the policy of both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. There’s been remarkable consistency about China policy.

[00:04:02] David C. Kang: Yes, there has been. And that’s what’s particularly interesting, is that in foreign policy, both left and the right, come back to a view of a China threat. This is in part based on things roughly about China. It’s getting big. It will threaten us. It’s just as much based on an American view of ourselves. And it has nothing to do with China, that we have to be the biggest country and we have to be the leader. And so anyone who’s not going to either accept that, or that even potentially is going to be bigger than us, must be a threat. So it’s as much about American fears as it is about what China is actually doing.

[00:04:40] Jeff Schechtman: How much of it has been the result of China’s modernization and success, and that it has happened so dramatically, so rapidly, etc., that it has created concerns inherent in that?

[00:04:53] David C. Kang: That is one of the main reasons that we have this. I mean, the Soviet Union was a threat for, you know, a couple of generations, but the Soviet Union was never economically a threat to American dominance the way that China is. And the speed and the scale at which China’s economic reforms have, you know, catapulted it to be one of the largest countries in the world is something that’s relatively unprecedented for Americans to have to deal with. And that means that almost no matter what China actually is doing, the mere fact of its size and its reach allows people to say, “Well, you never know, it could be a threat.They could become threatening.” And that’s what’s happened is, as you pointed out, worst case assumptions or, you know, guesses have begun to be taken for granted as being reality.

[00:05:45] Jeff Schechtman: It is a classic case, I suppose, of fighting the current war with the assumptions from the old war. We are dealing with China as if it is still the Cold War against the Soviets.

[00:05:56] David C. Kang: Yes. Yes, we are. And one of the issues is the Soviet Union definitely had global aspirations and they had empires and countries that they conquered and were involved in, etc., etc. So we look at a China and say, well, they must have the same things. And one thing that you see in D.C. is, you know, just a multitude of studies about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And if they get Taiwan, who else could they invade? Maybe they’ll invade the Philippines. And so there’s this endless worst case scenario discussion about what might happen that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what is going on in East Asia itself.

[00:06:35] Jeff Schechtman: You talk about China today as a status quo power. What does that mean?

[00:06:39] David C. Kang: What we mean there is, my colleagues and I, Jackie Wong and Zenobia Chan, when we started talking, you know, we’ve been looking at this for years and thinking about, like, why, you know, why is the China that we know very different than the one that’s being talked about in America? And one of the reasons is, when we look at China, when we see a status quo country, what we mean there is they’re much more concerned with trying to stabilize the speed at which China has grown and changed domestically is dizzying. I mean, within one generation, from the 1980s till today, hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives have gotten richer and bigger and they moved to cities. And there’s all of those attendant domestic problems: Pollution, social issues, population issues, real estate. And so China is much more focused on trying to actually balance that and handle that than it is looking outwards to revise the way the world does business.

[00:07:38] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also this need for regime stability in China. That’s a big part of their actions.

[00:07:45] David C. Kang: Yes. And that’s one part of it, right? China is an authoritarian country. It’s a communist one-party system. There’s no question about it. And it engages in human rights abuses. It restricts freedom of speech. Yes, those are all absolutely true. The thing is, those are domestic issues that are going on in China, and the Communist Party and Xi Jinping, who’s the current leader of the party, are focused on making sure that the party retains power. And that regime, the government trying to stay stable on top of an incredibly quickly changing society and economy, is where, like when Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, I’m quite sure that’s what he’s focused on. Not necessarily invading other countries and reaching out. So the stability of the party and then the stability of the country is pretty clearly what leaders are focused on and the people are focused on.

[00:08:35] Jeff Schechtman: Which brings up this issue of whether China would ever try to become a hegemon or be successful enough or use that desire as a way to deal with internal politics.

[00:08:48] David C. Kang: Yes. One of the things that’s very clear in, first of all, in Chinese rhetoric in general, a hegemon in America, the word hegemon has a sort of neutral, if not positive, meaning. It implies someone who’s taking care of the world and watching out and stuff like that. The Chinese view of hegemony is actually much more sort of domineering and pushy and bullying. It’s not a positive word. In that sense, Chinese don’t talk about trying to become hegemons. Consistently, the rhetoric over decades from the leadership has been about multilateralism, about working with other countries. Now, China views itself as one of the leaders, but it’s not the sole leader and it doesn’t have any intention to be so. One of the things about hegemony is this. We laugh. It’s a very common Chinese phrase, which is “Chinese characteristics.” They talk about “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or they’ll talk about “business with Chinese characteristics.” Well, what we forget about that is that that phrase is not just an empty phrase. It’s a very different view of Chinese values than American values. We view American values as global, as enduring, as universal. [The] Chinese don’t. They say, this is a Chinese thing. It may not fit in your country. We’re not trying to export Chinese values to Africa or Indonesia. You do you. So the view of Chinese, its own civilization or its own culture is not an expansive universalistic one. It’s a very sort of almost ethnic, ethnocentric view of Chinese values, which is that they’re Chinese. They’re not necessarily global.

[00:10:36] Jeff Schechtman: Hasn’t China attempted to put its values out there by way of soft power, as we’ve seen in Africa, as we’ve seen in various Chinese endeavors?

[00:10:47] David C. Kang: Yes. One of the most interesting things, and Zenobia Chan, my co-author, she has done a lot of work on the Belt and Road Initiative, which is the sort of catchphrase for China’s foreign economic policies. Belt and Road, meaning China reaches out and has trade and investment deals around the world, etc, etc. Well, her research shows, and this is actually very interesting, that the attempt to use Chinese soft power, first of all, China gets criticized by the United States for doing deals in Africa without adding conditions. So we criticize China for doing deals in Africa. They’ll work with dictators, they’ll work with autocrats. They don’t only try and get them to reform. Americans are the ones who try to push our values onto African countries. The Chinese don’t do that. When they try to use soft power, it’s almost always aimed at gaining support for issues that China does consider to be central, fundamental national security issues, the main one being support for Taiwan. The issue of Taiwan, whether it’s Chinese or not, is an enduring Chinese issue. So when the Chinese use the Belt and Road Initiative to try and get soft power, they want countries around the world to support their view of the Taiwan problem. So it’s less about exporting their values out, but more about trying to get other countries to support a Chinese view of an issue that frankly only involves, say, China and Taiwan.

[00:12:20] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about that because there is the assumption repeatedly made that Taiwan is simply representative of greater ambitions on the part of China, that Taiwan doesn’t exist as a sui generis issue for China, but that it is simply representative of their reach.

[00:12:38] David C. Kang: And that is, I think, one of the most dangerous views of the Taiwan issue. We don’t have to agree with China on what they think. We don’t, right? That’s fine. But to not know how the Chinese view it is really risky. And the Chinese view is this: Taiwan has been a part of China for centuries. And I’ll talk about that a little bit. And it was always sort of on the frontier of China. 

In the 17th century, around 1600s, one of the dynasties fell, the Ming dynasty fell, and the survivors fled to the island. And then they had raids back. They’re fighting with the new dynasty, the Qing. The Qing eventually took over the island and incorporated it as part of Fujian province. They made it its own province in 1800. So, for centuries, it’s been viewed as Chinese. Nobody else thinks it’s theirs. In the 19th century, 1895, Japan took Taiwan from China after a war. Famously, the chief ambassador for China at the time said, if Japan does this, our two countries will be enemies forever, for generations, because this island of Taiwan is Chinese. This is not a new issue. This is literally a centuries-old issue that Taiwan was a part of China. That view went from the Qing dynasty in the 19th century to the Guomindang, the Republic of China that was sort of viewed by the, was formally recognized by the United States as the legitimate ruler of all China in 1925. And then in, during World War II, at Potsdam or Cairo, one of the meetings with the leaders to settle the post-war order, the United States and ROC and UK agreed that all those islands that were under Japanese rule will go back to China. Now, there was no disagreement about that up until we have now potentially the chance that this island wants to declare independence. But this is not a new issue. It’s a centuries-old issue.

[00:14:56] Jeff Schechtman: One of the points that you also make is that there were many other territorial issues that China might have brought to the fore and didn’t over the years. Lots of territory that China once occupied, and it is strictly Taiwan that is still at issue.

[00:15:13] David C. Kang: Yes, that is true. What’s particularly important to recognize, whether you, you know, you don’t have to like the PRC. This is not a sort of defending, you know, communist China issue, but what is the reality of what’s going on? The Qing dynasty in the 1800s, the Qing dynasty at its height was 13 million square kilometers. The current China that exists today is about nine million. So, China has given up on its borders around four million that it could be making all these extra claims to, but it’s not. It has stabilized relations with everybody. There’s a tiny little Indian debate over, you know, over where their border is. But in many cases, Vietnam, North Korea, etc., Russia, the Chinese, in order to stabilize the borders have, you know, when they weren’t sure where it is, they’ve given up 54 percent, 55 percent. And this stabilizes their relations. And they’ve said, “Okay, that’s fine. This is where we’ll stop. This is where you start.” The one that they have not been willing to do that on is Taiwan. They say, no, Taiwan is part of China. We cannot negotiate that. And the point I want to make is, it’s not, we don’t have to agree, but we do need to take that seriously, right? I mean, that’s, and that’s what the United States has done for about 40 years, has taken that seriously. We’ve said to China, PRC, we don’t agree, but we understand where you’re coming from. Just don’t change the status quo. The threat right now is that Taiwan would declare independence or Americans [who want] to perform democracy are going to make such an issue out of Taiwan that we change the status quo. And then we do risk a possible conflict.

[00:16:56] Jeff Schechtman: And then we do risk a possible conflict. Talk about the difference with respect to how the U.S. sees Taiwan and its relationship to China versus how much of the rest of the world sees that relationship.

[00:17:10] David C. Kang: Well, what’s interesting, so the United States, and again, the ROC, the Republic of China, up until about 1992, was also an authoritarian regime. It was under martial law in Taiwan. And both the KMT, the Republic of China, and the People’s [Republic of China], you know, the communists claim to be all China. So the ROC claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all of China, mainland China, in addition to Taiwan. It was only with the transition to democracy in the 1990s that it became possible to talk about an independent Taiwan. Well, the United States, we support democracy. We love democracy. So there’s a sort of view that we should help Taiwan against these awful authoritarian commies. And I mean, that’s a legitimate view, it just risks a war. 

So a couple of years ago, Nancy Pelosi, who was the Speaker of the House at the time, the third ranking American politician, visited Taiwan. It was very much a performative show of supporting democracy. Well, China got mad. Within that week, within days of her visit to Taiwan, every country in the region, every country in the region came out publicly and supported the one-China policy, which is Taiwan and China are Chinese. There’s no difference. Vietnam, the Philippines, all of ASEAN, Indonesia, Malaysia. Nancy Pelosi went from Taiwan to South Korea, which is a close ally and a democracy. South Korea had at the time a conservative pro-US president. He didn’t even meet with Nancy Pelosi because he was not going to legitimize that visit. So, I happened to be talking to one of their national security advisors the next year, and I said, “Does South Korea still support the one-China policy?” And the advisor said, we made our policy in 1992, which is when they normalized relations with PRC, meaning, yes, we have a one-China policy and we haven’t changed it. So everybody in the region is like, that’s a Chinese issue. What happens there does not affect how we think we’re going to interact with China, which is different from the way the US views it.

[00:19:28] Jeff Schechtman: At the core of this, and we’ve talked a bit about how we get it wrong and how we misunderstand China. Do they misunderstand us to the same degree or do they have a better understanding of the US and the West than we have of China?

[00:19:43] David C. Kang: Yeah, this is one of those things where I think the misunderstanding goes really more one way than the other. And we’ll just start with linguistics. There are so few people in the United States who can speak Chinese and actually read like we tried to do with 10,000 or 12,000 different newspaper articles to see what they say consistently over time, right? There’s very few people who can do that. So they have to rely on other people to tell them what’s going on in China. But obviously, in China, everybody starts learning English. And the most striking statistic is this. There’s an incredible need in the United States for people who understand [the] Chinese language, culture, who have lived there, etc. Right now, we have less than 1,000 students, American students, studying in China. Less than 1,000, like 700, I think, was last year in 2024. Chinese studying in the United [States], 250,000, right? There’s so much better knowledge of how America works than it is with how China works. And that’s not to our credit. That harms our ability to make good policy for the United States.

[00:20:52] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that you talk about is all the areas that we could be cooperating with China. Back in the 90s, we had this constructive engagement going on. What was that all about? And what happened there?

[00:21:06] David C. Kang: Well, okay. So one of the views is, and this, again, has become taken for granted in D.C., but it’s not true, is that in the 90s, all of us were naive and we thought, if we trade with China within a couple of years, there’ll be a democracy, right? And ha, ha, ha, you guys were all wrong. They’re not. They’re an authoritarian regime. Nobody thought that at the time. Nobody’s that dumb, right? The goal wasn’t that we’re going to transform China into a democracy. It was, there are so many places that we can cooperate and we need to cooperate. Let’s focus on those. And what happened was, there was a tremendous, I mean, one of the things about US-China relationship is, the last 20 or 30 years have been unambiguously successful for both sides. And what I mean is, yes, we can talk about, are they stealing intellectual property? Is a certain company not making money? But overall, our trade relationship with China and our student relationship, we got a lot of incredibly high quality goods, extremely cheaply. They got American dollars and were able to grow and become, you know, take, you know, the numbers like 400 million people moved out of poverty in China, right? Just [an] unbelievable transfer. Everybody got rich and there was no war, right? Yes, there’s quibbles and squabbles. Of course there are, that’s business, right? But you handle it. 

Well, the goal was that. We moved away from that in ways that have partly to do with China and partly to do with American politics. And this is for a different subject, but I never ever in my lifetime thought that the mainstream view in Washington would be that tariffs are good, right? I never thought that would happen. And yet the Biden administration not only kept Trump’s initial tariffs on China, they doubled down on them. They increased the decoupling from China. Bernie, right? I mean, I’m a big fan of Bernie Sanders. I actually helped his campaign in 2016 and 2020. I wrote his China stuff. On national security, he was all for diplomacy, but the far left is very much for labor unions and trade barriers. And obviously you go to the far right, you get labor, you know, anti-labor unions, but you get trade barriers and tariffs and decoupling. So you end up in the same place where I never thought we would. So part of this has nothing to do with China. Part of it is about American politics and where we are, but part of it is also about China. And as they began to get way, way stronger in the 2000s, views towards our ability to cooperate with them changed to, uh-oh, they might be a threat.

[00:23:44] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other things that adds to this threat assessment is that traditionally they have been difficult to negotiate with, and we have many times mistaken difficult negotiating with some kind of existential threat.

[00:24:00] David C. Kang: Yes, very much so. And that’s a great question. Chinese are notoriously difficult. They can be bullies. They’re pushy, both as diplomats and then as companies, you know, individuals. There are, you know, story after story, example, example of pushing as hard as they can until they don’t get any more. And so in a lot of ways, it’s really frustrating to deal with the Chinese. It absolutely is. My point about that is the solution to that is not a military solution, right? Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been about, you know, massively increasing defense spending. We need more aircraft carries. We need 350 ships in our Navy. That doesn’t solve the diplomacy problem. We need a better economic strategy and a better diplomatic strategy, not a military strategy, to deal with this stuff.

[00:24:56] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about it in the context of other Asian nations and how they are dealing with China, how they see China, and how they’re really operating between the US view and the reality of China.

[00:25:11] David C. Kang: Yeah, there is. One of the things about the United States is we’re so big even now, you know, we’re still by far the richest, you know, biggest country in the world. And we have an ocean between us and China. So we can trade, but a lot of the issues remain almost more speculative. The thing about countries in East Asia is they’re not moving away. They’re stuck, right? They have to live with a big China. There’s no other alternative. If you’re Vietnam, if you’re Korea, if you’re the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, whatever, you are living with a big, massive China. And the size of China, the scale of how big China is, it’s hard to visualize, but one way to think about it is they have 1.4 billion people. The next largest country is, you know, Japan, close, what, 130 million. So like 10 times the size. [The] Chinese population is 10 times the size of Japan, right? Vietnam has 100 million people, right? So this is, you know, China could have economic problems and still be much bigger than every other country. So many of these countries, however, have learned over literally the centuries how to live with a big China. And one of the best examples I heard was from a Vietnamese military officer, actually, when I was there a couple of years ago, who said, “every Vietnamese leader needs to know how to stand up to China. Every Vietnamese leader has to know how to get along with China. And if he can’t do both of those at the same time, he doesn’t deserve to lead Vietnam.” 

And what you see is the Vietnamese are fighting, you know, pushing, not fighting literally, but gray zone tactics, keeping, you know, defending their claims, the maritime claims in the disputed South China Seas with China vigorously. They’re not giving an inch. At the same time that the Vietnamese and the Chinese Coast Guard conduct joint patrols in Haiphong Bay, because they have to sort out fishing and commercial activities, and they have a virtually undefended border where it’s just, you know, a couple of border guards as trade goes back and forth. And so countries are doing both at the same time. And the reason is that countries in the region don’t view China as an existential threat. It’s really sort of interesting that Americans view China as an existential threat when there’s no conceivable way that China is going to invade America, right? They’re not coming across the ocean. And yet the countries in the region know they don’t like dealing with China in certain things, they have to push back in many ways, but they also don’t view China as about to invade them. And they’re not behaving as they should. So the Vietnamese are not arming their border to deter China. Neither North nor South Korea is worried about a Chinese invasion. They push, they have disagreements, but they’re not worried about surviving. And so they behave differently. 

[00:28:07] Jeff Schechtman: One of the aspects that you talk about that is so prevalent in Chinese discourse is this idea that there really is no intention on the part of China to be a replacement for the US. 

[00:28:18] David C. Kang: This is something that, you know, one thing that we, the longer article there, you know, it’s an academic article, but if anyone’s interested, it’s, you know, we try to go through in great detail because people will choose a particular phrase. And then they’ll say, “Aha, this is what the Chinese really think,” you know, read the tea leaves and things like that. I’ve had people say to me, we know the Chinese are lying because their lips are moving. Like, we don’t believe whatever they say, but then we’ll choose a particular phrase. And one of those phrases they use is, “The East is rising, the West is declining.” And people have seized on that to say, “Aha, they do have aspirations after all,” right? The thing about that phrase though, and the thing that’s really particularly interesting about that is, first of all, that’s a descriptive phrase. That’s not necessarily a goal or an aspiration. Many people around the United States would say, yeah, we’re in trouble, right? It’s descriptive. But when Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, uses that phrase, it is almost always followed by another sentence that we mostly overlook. And that sentence is, “but China has no intention to change the United States or replace it.” I mean, consistently, if you actually look at Chinese rhetoric, the rhetoric is about how do we adjust to this situation? But let’s also make it clear, we’re not out to try and compete with the US. The G2 summit, which is just the two big leaders, China has been the one that’s been hesitant to join that. The US has been trying to create a G2. China has been the one that’s been, eh, maybe G7, maybe G20, but we’re not sure we want to, we don’t want that mantle. We don’t want that yet, right? It’s about domestic policy, a success, rather than a goal of taking over the world.

[00:30:14] Jeff Schechtman: Are there dangers in the economic problems that China faces that could make them more aggressive?

[00:30:21] David C. Kang: Yeah, this is a good question. We are all waiting. We have been waiting for decades. We have been predicting the end of the Chinese miracle. I mean, literally, I can remember articles in the early 2000s about how this can’t last. There’s no way China can keep going. There’ll be a real estate problem. There’s going to be a massive problem, right? Like any economy, China has ups and downs. At some point, there will probably be a big, big recession or something even worse in China. The question is, first of all, why has it taken so long? Already, they have beaten every estimate you’ve ever had about, you know, books written in 2005 saying China’s trapped transition. They’re stuck. They can’t go on. And here we are, you know, 20 years later, literally. So yeah, the question is, when something like that happens, real estate bust, something even worse, there clearly can be economic repercussions. Because we’re going to see right now how much tariffs matter. We’ve watched the markets and prices and everything ricochet over US-China trade wars. So imagine that worse. It’ll have a worse impact here. Would, though, something like that cause the Chinese to sort of wag the dog or divert, you know, economic problems at home? And so now we’re going to try and do something adventurous overseas. Probably there’s far less chance of that. The main reason being, the only thing that we really see, excuse me, the only place we really see a place for actual conflict that anyone really thinks conflict could break out is over Taiwan. And Taiwan is not an issue that’s going to be started or not. A war is not going to start over Taiwan as a diversion. That will be because of what happened in Taiwan. So I think those odds are fairly, fairly low.

[00:32:20] Jeff Schechtman: What is the advent of gearing up this tech competition that is going on now? What does that do to the relationship? Because there’s the sense, again, comparing it to the Cold War against the Soviets, that this is a little like competing with the Soviets with regard to going to the moon.

[00:32:39] David C. Kang: And this is the other side. This is a great question. And you do a great job with the questions, because this is the other side of if there’s a problem. I think the problem from China comes much more from its success than from its failure. And what I mean is, right now, we are talking about NVIDIA chips versus Huawei, semiconductors and on and on and on. EVs, electric vehicles, batteries, all of that stuff, solar energy. There’s no question that China is in the lead. It’s just no question. You read these reviews of the Xiaomi or various Chinese electric vehicles, they are banned from the United States. And people write these reviews and they’ll say, if they were in, man, they would just destroy the market because they’re so good. So we are in a situation not really about the Soviet Union. It’s really, the best analogy is Japan in the 1980s that had amazing technology with all the cars and Sony and Mitsubishi and on and on. And what that would do to American manufacturing. That’s much more the question as the challenge from the success. And one of the issues is this. To my mind, I 100 percent disagree with the general American economic strategy of abandoning the region, of decoupling, of large fence, small yard, whatever else, all this kind of stuff to protect ourselves from China. We are dooming ourselves when it’s clear the future is in EVs and solar and batteries. 

And so I know this one American tech company, and I was talking to some of the leadership last year. Everybody would know this company if I told you the name. And they said, we think in America, we think that if we create a big wall with China, that all the innovation will happen on the American side. Americans think that. These people said to me, we’re not so sure. Half of our business comes from China. If we put our innovation compared to theirs right now, we benefit from it going back and forth. We think there’s as much of a chance that their innovation is better than ours. And this is coming from a top American company. And so the challenge is how do we do this, right? How do we interact with an incredibly vibrant economy that is moving forward in places? And I really disagree with us not being involved in trade in the region. And it’s not just China. It’s throughout the region. We’re not involved in things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. There are a bunch of regional economic, East Asian economic initiatives. And the United States is not involved. We have no policy other than tariffs and decoupling. And I think that is a big mistake.

[00:35:32] Jeff Schechtman: How much damage did the pandemic do to the U.S.-China relationship?

[00:35:36] David C. Kang: That did damage. Obviously, there’s a whole bunch of blaming COVID on China and things like that. One of the biggest places where we had damage is the number of students that went home from both countries. And the numbers came back much more quickly from China to the United States. But again, the number of Americans studying in China just plummeted and has never recovered. So there’s definitely issues there as everybody was sort of bunkering down. Although I think the relationship would be struggling anyway, right? I don’t think the pandemic, it just moved, accelerated it. But US-China relations were not that good anyway.

[00:36:17] Jeff Schechtman: Is there any conceivable vision that you have, even at this point, that the most optimistic vision might contain that there could be cooperation on things like climate change and renewable energy and pollution, etc.?

[00:36:32] David C. Kang: Right. That’s the hope. And one of the interesting things about the Trump administration is it is so subject to what Trump feels. And so many of the hawks, many of the real China hawks have been sidelined because Trump goes over there and he threatens the tariffs, then he pulls them off. Then he says they’re allowed to buy the chips. Then he goes and has a great meeting with Xi Jinping over in Korea in October. So the chance to have some cooperation is bigger now than it was under a Biden administration, where basically everybody from Biden through the foreign policy apparatus, the establishment was on board with decoupling, right? But the long-term goal should be to find those places where we clearly have to cooperate. And that, as you said, climate is one. China has done more than the United States to move beyond fossil fuels, to move to solar, to stop the pollution. We like to think of China as this really dirty, polluted place where these factories are just pumping out smoke. That’s a 20-year-old view, right? When I used to go to Beijing, even like 10 years, maybe 15 years ago, yeah, it would be so dark you couldn’t see anything. They have worked really hard and unbelievably quickly to begin to clean up the pollution, for example, right? This is great, but it should be with the United States, not in isolation. So there’s a lot of places for us to cooperate, despite the fact that we’re going to be competing on other things. And a president or an administration that would be willing to do that, I think, could make real progress in ways that right now we’re not.

[00:38:18] Jeff Schechtman: And of course, the other part of it is how much Taiwan and what China does vis-a-vis Taiwan plays a role in this.

[00:38:25] David C. Kang: Yeah, right? Right now, the real question is not what China will do. We don’t have to like what China says, but they are very clear. Do not change the status quo. Taiwan should not declare independence. They don’t say we will invade. They say we reserve the right to, right? So it’s not like Taiwan declares independence the next day they’re going to start lobbing missiles. But yes, they do say we may use force, right? This is not something we are going to give up. And most of us believe they’re not bluffing. Most of us believe what they say. Who is actually pushing the status quo are, in many ways, the Taiwanese leaders who over the last five or 10 years have more and more said things like, we’re independent anyway. We’re de facto independent. And it’s almost like they’re trying to poke China in ways you don’t need to provoke them. Because what the Chinese have said is this. The status quo over Taiwan that worked since the 1970s, it’s one of the most successful diplomatic maneuverings, if you think about it, among three countries. It’s unbelievably successful, which is this. We say to the Chinese, the Chinese say, Taiwan is ours. But Taiwan, you can have your own flag. You can have your own economy. You can have your own money. Just don’t declare independence. But you can act essentially independent. We say to China, okay, just don’t use force to change the status quo. And we say to Taiwan, don’t you declare independence. That status quo, where we don’t agree, but we agree to disagree, has worked since the 1970s. It’s been phenomenally successful. It allowed China to get rich. It allowed Taiwan to get rich and become a democracy. And it allowed the United States to buy goods from both of these countries that we really like. And nobody got shot. That’s an unbelievably successful diplomatic… Why would we change that? Just kick the can down the road another 40 years. Let’s worry about it then. Because the status quo is unbelievably successful.

[00:40:34] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent did Chinese actions vis-a-vis Hong Kong shape some of this policy today?

[00:40:41] David C. Kang: Yes, there is definitely a Chinese push in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, other places, Tibet, where the rest of the world agrees that those are Chinese. But we also see that they’re a little different. And China had said they would act with kid gloves, they’d act gently, and they have not. They’ve increasingly become authoritarian. There’s no question that the Chinese have basically abandoned the agreement they made with the UK, which was we will leave Hong Kong alone. Two systems, one country. And they’re interfering now. So that definitely has a part to play with what’s going on in Taiwan. That being said, it still is as much a Taiwan issue itself about domestic politics as it is about what they’re looking out over what’s happening in other parts of the world.

[00:41:33] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about Hong Kong another minute. What was it that they did with respect to Hong Kong that you think was consistent or inconsistent with all of these other attitudes that we’ve been talking about on the part of the Chinese?

[00:41:48] David C. Kang: The consistent part is, I mean, if we think about what China was in 1841, Hong Kong was clearly a part of China. And the British came in and they basically forced the Chinese to cede this land to them. And so that’s galling, right? I get it, right? That’s bad. They finally got it back 150 years later in 1997. And so the goal was to reunify China. “Retrocession” is the word they use, which is sort of honorably recovering territory, right? And so part of the task was, the deal in ‘97 was, we will let Hong Kong remain Hong Kong. They’ll have their own vote. They’ll have their own governor. They can have a free press. And we just want to have it be Chinese, part of China. And they sort of let that go for a while. But now it’s clear that Beijing chooses who’s the head of Hong Kong. The press is not nearly as free. Protests are suppressed and everything else. So that’s the part where they have not gone along with it. But also Hong Kong and Xinjiang, I have not been a precursor towards ambitions towards Vietnam or Indonesia or something like that, right? That’s the part. That was Chinese and they wanted it back.

[00:43:11] Jeff Schechtman: What would be today a realistic policy towards China on the part of the US?

[00:43:17] David C. Kang: One of the things that I say, and actually both Zenobia, Jackie, and I have a piece that we’re, I think it’ll be out in a couple of months, where we do this. If we’re right, if China is more status quo than revisionist, if it doesn’t want to take over the world, but it does pose just a simple coordination problem because it’s so big, what should American policy be? Fundamentally, I think there’s a major focus, which would be less military and more economic, or less military, more diplomatic. Right now, overwhelmingly, American grand strategy towards China and East Asia is a military-first, jut-jawed, forward-leaning, military-first approach, which is we need to be out there. We need alliances. We need to arm our allies. We need to put our forward station, our military forces in Guam, in Korea, in the Philippines, and almost non-existent. And when I say non-existent, I mean the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Forum, IPEF, whatever his plans, had five paragraphs that were completely substance-free on economics. They were completely substance-free. They were like, green technology and stuff like that. Nothing specific. So we have no economic strategy towards the region. And the region is continuing to move forward. The region is continuing to integrate with China. So I would reduce the military focus and increase the economic focus around the region and with China. That’s the overall focus. Then if you want to get more specific, many of these issues that we have with China are not solved with the Navy or with the Army. We need to focus on, okay, what is going to be our green strategy? What is this going to be? Are we going to try and protect our domestic markets from Chinese car imports? Or are we going to let them in because competition is good and they make great cars and everyone should buy an EV, right? We need to have that argument and discussion. And I think in many ways, we would benefit if we had much more open and forward leaning approach towards engaging the entire region in China with much more economics and business.

[00:45:43] Jeff Schechtman: Which brings us back almost to the 1990s policy of this constructive engagement.

[00:45:48] David C. Kang: Yes, I do. I absolutely think, right? This doesn’t say everything’s great. There’s going to be problems. That’s called life. You’re going to have to be negotiating and pushing back and learning how to deal and then finding out where they’re cheating and making sure they don’t. And then making sure that we do well. I mean, let me give you an example, right? There’s been a ton of talk in the West and DC blob, especially in Washington, about how Huawei can potentially steal our data and stuff like that, right? You’ve heard that. Huawei, right? Two points. The first one is the US government has never provided evidence that Huawei is actually doing that. They just say it’s potential. They’ve never provided evidence. But secondly, all companies do that, right? I’m totally in favor of banning TikTok if we ban all social media. It’s all awful. We know that. I have two teenage children and I’d love it all to be banned, but banning TikTok doesn’t solve the problem of companies stealing our data and selling and doing all that stuff, right? So, there’s so much more where we could be proactive towards China, but it’s not a Chinese issue.

[00:46:57] Jeff Schechtman: Professor David Kang, I thank you so very much for your time today.

[00:47:01] David C. Kang: Well, thank you for having me. It was really enjoyable. Thank you.

[00:47:03] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.