Last week, Jake Sullivan made his first visit to China as U.S. national security advisor. He met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, among others, and left the country telling reporters, “We believe that competition with China does not have to lead to conflict or confrontation.”
That such a point needs to be made tells the story of just how tense U.S.-China relations have often been in recent years. Examples of flash points abound—from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea—and it’s easy to imagine how they could spiral into conflict.
One person with a unique view of the world’s most important relationship is Nicholas Burns, who has served as U.S. ambassador to China for more than two years, and was present with Sullivan at his meetings with Xi and others in Beijing. I spoke with Burns on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full 45-minute discussion on the video box atop this page, or follow the FP Live podcast, which drops on Fridays. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript of key portions of our discussion.
Ravi Agrawal: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Beijing last week. What is your personal sense of how the meetings went? And what does that tell you about the state of the U.S.-China relationship?
Nicholas Burns: Jake Sullivan had a very productive, very constructive trip here. Most importantly, Jake, I, and others were able to meet with President Xi Jinping. This is a channel that we have had since 2021. Jake has had nine meetings now, either with [Foreign Minister] Wang Yi or with his predecessor, Yang Jiechi. And if you combine that with the very good channel that [U.S.] Secretary [of State] Tony Blinken has had with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, add Secretary Blinken’s April meeting with President Xi, add to those what Secretary Janet Yellen of the Treasury Department and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo have done, we now have connectivity with the Chinese leadership.
That might sound ordinary to some people, but it’s actually quite extraordinary and it’s actually quite important. As recently as February 2023, in the wake of the balloon incident, we were really at rock bottom in this relationship. We did not have reliable cabinet-level channels. We sought to create them in 2023 and again this year. And I think we’ve succeeded. It does not mean that we have resolved the vast number of disagreements or the competition we have between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. But it does mean that we’re connected diplomatically, that we can talk through some of these problems and we can avoid conflict, while defending our national interest. I think that’s a very, very important goal for this relationship.
If you assume, as I do, that this is a structural competition—structural in military, economic, technology realms—and it will remain structural and intensely competitive well into the next decades. So we have to manage this relationship in such a way that we defend American national interests, but avoid a conflict at the same time. President [Joe] Biden feels very strongly about that. And I know Jake Sullivan was very much in that frame of mind when he was here last week.
RA: It strikes me that when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, it really set U.S.-China relations back. What happens when there’s a new administration and you have other high-level delegations clamoring to visit Taiwan?
NB: Well, the United States has had remarkable consistency on our Taiwan policy ever since President [Richard] Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and in all the subsequent administrations. We’ve held every administration to a One China policy. We’ve been consistent across all those decades in what we’ve said to the Chinese leadership. And obviously, in a way, it’s been very successful despite all of the inflammatory rhetoric and some of the inflammatory actions. For instance, since Speaker Pelosi’s visit just over two years ago, we’ve seen a marked increase in Chinese naval and air activity in the Taiwan Strait. Despite all that, the Taiwan Strait has remained peaceful since the early 1970s. And so we think the One China policy is working, and we are resolutely committed to it. The Chinese leadership knows that. Jake Sullivan’s trip, Secretary Blinken’s trip, all my meetings, we’re able to make clear to the Chinese what we think should happen, in terms of restraint and adherence to the status quo and our insistence that there be a peaceful resolution of the cross-strait differences.
RA: Fentanyl is, of course, a killer that is affecting regular Americans in all kinds of unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Why is it so hard for Beijing to completely stop the flow of precursor elements to the United States?
NB: Well, this is a major issue for us. President Biden raised it directly with President Xi at the San Francisco summit last November.
The basic problem is that a majority of the precursor chemicals that the drug cartels in Mexico use to fabricate the synthetic opioid fentanyl come from China. Now, to be fair to the government here, they don’t come from the Chinese government. They come from illicit Chinese firms. And so we began an effort last November to make sure that they’re beginning to shut down the flow of these precursor chemicals, and we’ve made some progress with the Chinese government here. Just several weeks ago, the government of China listed three precursor chemicals now prohibited for export from China. As part of this effort, we’ve begun to have much broader and more successful law enforcement cooperation on the fentanyl issue. For instance, the Drug Enforcement [Administration] is doing a really fine job in connecting with the Chinese on this; the Department of Homeland Security, and specifically Secretary Ali Mayorkas, has formed a relationship with the minister of public security, Wang Xiaohong. And they’ve been able to work through some of these problems. So we’re by no means at the end of this process. Rather, we’re at the beginning, but I’m encouraged by some of the progress.
We want to see more specific actions by the government of China on the precursor chemical issue. We want to see arrests, obviously, and we also want to see attention to illicit finance. It’s a top issue for us, Ravi.
RA: You’ve been a diplomat since the 1980s, when there was a big push to get China to open up to the world. There was a belief that this would help both American companies and the global economy. And in the last few years, particularly since 2018, the consensus has shifted dramatically in Washington. There’s a bipartisan belief now that China is more of a challenge than an opportunity, and many people see it plainly as a threat. As someone who’s been in public service during both eras—the era that wanted more partnership with China and the one that wants to constrain it—how do you explain this immense policy shift?
NB: You’re right to ask the question. That policy shift has been motivated by changing circumstances and changing policies here in China.
China in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was a different country. It was, in a way, more open to the rest of the world. It wasn’t clear back then that China was going to be so aggressive toward its neighbors in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, or even in the Taiwan Strait.
But China changed. We’ve seen a more aggressive China in this region. We’ve seen a China that, in economic terms, through its forced technology transfer, through intellectual property theft, is not at all creating a level playing field for American companies. It’s a very different China.
Administrations have had to react to that change. We have a much more competitive framework, and I very much agree with that competitive framework. That’s a basis of our policy. We’re competing in the security realm with China in the Indo-Pacific, and that’s an intense competition. We’re competing technologically if you think about developments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology and quantum mathematics. We have a range of problems on the economic front. As I talk to you today, our undersecretary of commerce, Marisa Lago, is here, and she and I were addressing some of these issues with the Chinese just yesterday. And, of course, we have long-standing, abiding commitments to defend human rights here and to be critical when we have to be of what the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang, in Tibet, in Hong Kong, of the lack of religious freedom. So this is a very challenging relationship, and I think that is in many ways the centerpiece of this relationship.
The challenge is, can we compete and yet avoid the kind of conflict that would be catastrophic for the world? That’s a major responsibility that we feel in the Biden administration.
As we compete, we do want to look for areas of engagement, try to cooperate with China when our interests are aligned and when it’s to the benefit of the United States. John Podesta, the president’s climate change advisor, is also here this week. China is 28 percent of global emissions; the United States is 10 percent. But we are the two leading carbon emitters. And so we want to work with the Chinese to encourage them to meet their Paris commitments. We mentioned fentanyl. It’s very much in the interest of the United States not to walk away from this relationship, but to be in the trenches pushing for progress. Global public health is a third issue. So I spend the great majority of my time on the competitive side, but we do have the engagement side as well.
RA: That’s fair. But just as one can say the United States made the wrong bet on China three decades ago, there are critics who today worry that U.S. policy has gone too far in the opposite direction—toward and beyond the competitive framework you’re describing. And, you know, I should caveat, I am no apologist for China. I know it does things that are harmful for the global order and for democracy. But there is a case to be made that U.S. policy on China today can sometimes be counterproductive. Economists say that trade tariffs hurt Americans more than they help. With something like Jake Sullivan’s “small yard, high fence” strategy, there’s an argument that what constitutes a national security interest—the small yard—is not clearly defined. Has the pendulum swung too far in the other direction? Is America too tough on China?
NB: I don’t think so.
Here we have, in the People’s Republic of China, a government that is far too aggressive against American allies in the South China Sea. It has been far too belligerent and reliant on military intimidation of Taiwan, especially since Speaker Pelosi’s visit. The government has embarked on a major historic modernization of the People’s Liberation Army in a way that’s very much against the interests of the United States. China is dramatically increasing its nuclear weapons stockpile and yet refusing to talk to the rest of the world about this, so there’s no transparency. China is using the organs of its state power, whether it’s intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, cyber, in order to give advantage to its own companies, and yet, in a very unfair way, diminish the prospects for fair trade and fair investment. I could go on and on.
China is a major competitor of the United States. Our advantage here is that we have a group of like-minded allies that see the same competition and the same threat. If you think about our alliance with Japan, with the Republic of Korea, with Thailand, with the Philippines, with Australia, the development of AUKUS and, of course, the emergence as a real force of the Quad that includes India, Japan, Australia, and the United States. We have to respond to the challenge that China is posing and to the illiberal policies that it’s advocating, for the future of the United Nations and the future of the global liberal order. This is a very serious challenge to American interests. And we’ve had no recourse but to meet that challenge.
I also believe that while two governments can test and compete, we have to keep the people of the country meeting. Because of the pandemic and particularly because of the Chinese government policy of zero-COVID, we’re in a situation where we’ve had one congressional delegation visit China in the last five years. Until Secretary Blinken and Secretary Yellen visited here in mid-2023, we hadn’t had a secretary of state or treasury here in four years. And what I really worry about is a dramatic reduction of American students here, from 15,000 10 years ago to only about 800 now. Two-way tourism flights between the two countries are, at best right now, one-quarter of what they were pre-pandemic. In a situation like this, you don’t want to see a decoupling of two societies. That aspect, we call it people-to-people, is very important.
RA: Much of the world will agree with much of what you’ve said about China’s activities. And yes, it often breaks the rules, whether it is the laws of the sea, human rights violations, currency manipulation, intellectual property laws. These are all valid criticisms. But the response, both from Beijing and often from other countries, is that the United States itself doesn’t always follow the rules. If you look at how it approaches the appellate court at the World Trade Organization or how it approaches decisions by international courts or the U.N. when it disagrees with their findings, for example in the Middle East. When your Chinese interlocutors call out what they see as U.S. hypocrisy, how do you respond?
NB: I reject it. I don’t see any equivalence between the actions of China and the actions of the United States. We have been the major supporter of the liberal order that is the backbone and the superstructure of how the world works today.
The Chinese, of course, engage the government-controlled press here to contest the United States every day, and it distorts our positions. We’re engaged in a battle of ideas, trying to get accurate information about our society, about our government, about our alliances into the bloodstream and the cyber universe here to the hundreds of millions, if not more than 1 billion people, in China on social media. So that’s an important part of this.
I certainly do not see nor do I accept any equivalence. The United States has never claimed that we’re a perfect country, and we often will admit our mistakes when we make them. We stand for democracy. And if you take our Indo-Pacific alliances, the NATO alliance, and our close strategic partnership with the EU, we have countries that see China in the same way. We’re not alone in this fight.
When it comes to the global south, we’ve also been very clear that we’re not asking countries to choose between a relationship with the United States and a relationship with China. We know for many of these countries, their economic and trade relationship is probably larger with China. But we are asking them to keep an open mind and an open door about the U.S. so this is a fair competition, if you will. But it’s not a binary one where you’re with us or against us. The world doesn’t work that way anymore.
RA: Let’s talk about the White House’s China policy. What do you see as the end state of U.S.-China competition?
NB: An essential truth about the U.S.-China relationship is that it’s going to be competitive for years to come, well into the next decade. And so we have to pursue that competition. But in doing so, if you talk about an end state, we want a peaceful relationship between these two very strong countries with the two strongest militaries of the world. You see that in what President Biden says when he talks about this relationship. When Secretary Blinken, when Jake Sullivan was here last week, he said, our job is to compete, but to do so in a way that’s responsible and to manage these differences through intensive diplomacy.
And that’s my job here on a daily basis, so that while we compete and defend these very important interests to which we’re attached, we want to see our allies respected in the South and East China sea[s]. We want to see human rights respected. We’re not going to cease and desist in pursuing those interests. But at the same time, we have to keep the peace between these two strongest countries in the world. So that’s a major part of what we’re doing.
On “end state,” you know, history never really ends. It’s a continuum. But talking about an end state, it is to stand up for our values, stand up for our interests, compete responsibly, and yet make sure that there’s enough connectivity between us that we drive down the probability of a military conflict.
RA: This is obviously a live debate among China policymakers. Matt Pottinger, who worked on China policy in the Trump administration, says that the United States should not manage competition; it should win it. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, he defines winning as the time when “China’s communist rulers would give up trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict with the United States and its friends.” Sounds like a very different description of competition than what you just laid out.
NB: I have a lot of respect for Matt Pottinger and for former Congressman Mike Gallagher, who is his co-author on that essay. I read it carefully. Twice.
Two points I’d make in response. One there, there’s an insinuation that we’re running a feckless, détente-like policy more reminiscent of the 1970s than the 2020s. We’re running, as I’ve described in this interview, a very tough-minded policy based on defending American national interests and accentuating and building America’s military and diplomatic strength in the Indo-Pacific. And I think a fair assessment of President Biden’s policy is that we’ve been very successful in this region, that our alliances are stronger because of what we’ve done with Japan, with the Republic of Korea, with the Philippines, with Australia over the last three and a half years. I think what often is not mentioned is the success we’ve had in working with the European Union and NATO to focus them on the problems of both Taiwan and an aggressive China in this region. The fact that we’re all working for the same purpose is a very, very important strengthening of our policy.
Second, I think we’ll do best in U.S.-China policy if our allies support us. And all of those treaty allies of the United States have important trading relationships with the People’s Republic of China, as do we. China’s our third-largest trade partner after Mexico and Canada. So if the suggestion is that somehow we have an outright competition and decouple the two economies, I don’t think that policy would be successful. I think it would harm American economic and strategic interests. What we are doing is to strengthen deterrence in building up American military power, so that it’s very much respected, as I think it is, by the government here. And I think that, and relying on our allies, is a much more successful policy in the future for the United States.
RA: Are the Biden administration’s export controls on things like semiconductors hurting the Chinese? How do they react to that?
NB: They bring it up in every meeting with me and with all the visitors that we have here. This is a very important decision that President Biden made. We are not going to allow the export of highly sensitive, dual-use American technology like advanced semiconductors, because we know if we allow the export of those American products, they will give an advantage to the People’s Liberation Army and to the Chinese government. We cannot allow that to happen. That is straightforward; we’ve been clear about it.
What’s interesting about the Chinese complaints here in Beijing is that they’re doing the same thing, but they’re just not talking about it. China embarked in 2015 on a strategy to dominate these critical industries called “Made in China 2025.” And China does not allow its sophisticated technologies to be exported to the United States or to Japan or to Korea or to Western Europe. And so, this is a fair competition.
We obviously have the right policy here. We’re de-risking. It’s a small percentage of overall U.S.-China trade, but I think there’s large-scale agreement in our society that it would not make any sense to give China the kind of technologies that could allow them to seek to overtake us in military and technological power at the same time. At the same time, Secretary Raimondo and I have both said that we don’t want to decouple a major trade relationship. There are about 750,000 American jobs that depend on trade with China. We’re the two largest economies. Secretary Yellen has said several times it would be disastrous if we tried to decouple those economies. So it’s de-risking on the national security side. It’s not ending U.S.-China trade.
RA: I want to talk about climate change, and what seems like a policy contradiction. The United States—at least under the Biden administration—wants to achieve its emissions targets as set out in the Paris Agreement. And yet the White House is protecting against imports of electronic vehicles from China. How do you justify that?
NB: I don’t believe these are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, we’re very serious about meeting our commitments under the Paris Agreement. In fact, because of the Inflation Reduction Act and the billions of dollars we’re spending on green energy technology, that’s going to allow us to meet our international commitments on climate change. On the other hand, it’s very important for us to protect our own markets against unfair competition. And, you know, we believe, and many other countries believe, that China is engaged in what economists call overcapacity: The level of subsidies, both from the government in Beijing, but particularly the provincial governments, means that Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles, of solar panels, of lithium batteries, just to name three of these products, the total output this year and last year exceeds demand here several times over. These products are then being essentially dumped in Turkey, in Western Europe, in Brazil, in Mexico and Canada and the United States. And we’re simply not going to permit a loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States because of this unfair competition from China. We have to protect our own markets.
RA: Yes, but there’s the school of thought that goes that the climate crisis is so urgent and so important to deal with that you take anything you can get; you take the drastic measures, even if that means that one country is unfairly, as you put it, flooding the market with cheaper EVs, because those very EVs could then lead to infrastructure in countries like the United States— which does not have the best infrastructure for recharging EVs and what have you. This would help the fight against climate change.
NB: Thank you for that point, Ravi. The answer to that is that we don’t want a world where all of us are entirely dependent on China for the next 10 to 20 years for the green technologies that will propel a consistent departure from carbon toward a new economic future. We all have to have the ability, whether it’s Japan or Korea or Mexico or the United States, to be producing these products ourselves. So through the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re giving our industries a chance and shielding them from unfair Chinese competition so that we can be part of this. And I think one of the fundamental lessons of the pandemic is you don’t want to be reliant on a single source of a critical mineral or critical technology, certainly not from a country that’s willing to withhold those technologies for other motives. And they’ve proven that they can do that. So we stand by that strategy.
[What keeps Burns up at night? What has surprised him in his nearly three years in China? For the full discussion, try the video atop this page or the FP Live podcast wherever you get your audio.]
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