SHF2023｜James Steinberg

James Steinberg

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State;

Dean of School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

It is a great honor to be here today at this prestigious forum, and to share the stage with my friend and long-time colleague, Ambassador Cui Tiankai. Perhaps most of you may not know this, but Ambassador Cui is a graduate of my school, The School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and we are immensely proud of him, as we are of so many other of our graduates, including our distinguished US Ambassador to China, Nick Burns.

This is my second opportunity to speak with you; the last time was in 2012, shortly after I stepped down as Deputy Secretary of State. It’s great to be back.

Before I begin my remarks, I’d like to say a brief word about my dear friend Jeff Bader, who passed away earlier this week. Jeff was well known to many of you here as one of the great students of China and an architect of US-China relations over many decades. It was my privilege to serve with Jeff under two US presidents, and to work together to develop a constructive, forward looking approach to this most important bilateral relationship. We will miss him very much, but his memory should inspire us to work even harder to achieve the goal he so deeply believed in.

It has been over three years since I last visited China. Remarkably, my last visit was here to Shanghai, in December 2019. Little could I have imagined when I boarded my plane that day, that my next visit would not be until 2023, or how much the world would be transformed by a virus that was probably already emerging even before I left. The COVID pandemic imposed enormous costs on us all around the world, in loss of life, human suffering, and economic disruption. One of the important consequences has been the long -term break in direct contacts between friends and colleagues in the United States and China. Prior to the pandemic, I had the privilege to visit China almost every year since my first visit in 1994, so three years feels like a very long time.

A lot has happened since my last visit, and I want to reflect on those changes today. But I want to put this in a broader historical context. Because being here in Shanghai is especially resonant to me. It was almost exactly 17 years ago, in November 1996, when I accompanied Secretary Warren Christopher to Shanghai for a speech that he gave at Fudan, my first visit to Shanghai. Two years later, I returned to Shanghai with President Clinton, on his historic 10-day visit to China.

We have seen great changes in US-China relations over that thirty-year span. When I first came to China, US -China relations were tense and difficult, the events of June 1989 still resonated powerfully in the United States and profoundly shaped US-China relations in the first year of the Clinton Administration. By 1994, President Clinton and Secretary Christopher had determined that it would be important to try to find a way to build more cooperative relations with China while sustaining our deep commitment to human rights. But the task was not easy, and tensions over the Taiwan Straits in 1995 and 1996 were a reminder that there remained deep differences on important issues between our two countries. The danger of confrontation remained high, and cooperation was limited.

Following President Clinton’s re-election, the Administration determined that a more sustained effort was needed to improve relations, requiring a bold commitment by the leaders of our two countries. President Clinton invited President Jiang to Washington in 1997 and President Jiang reciprocated with an invitation for President Clinton to come to China the following year. Just last week, your new Ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Xie Feng and I had a chance to recall the memorable trip we took with President Clinton down the Li River at the end of his trip to the mainland. The intense personal diplomacy between the two leaders helped usher in a new era of cooperation between our two countries, culminating most vividly in the US support for China’s accession to the WTO at the end of President Clinton’s second term.

The first decade of the 21st century was reminder of the both the possibilities of cooperation between the US and China, and the risks of failing to manage the relationships. The decade began with a fraught crisis triggered by a Chinese jet colliding with a US Navy patrol plane; it ended with the United States and China working together to help manage the far ranging financial crisis of 2008-2009.

President Obama took office in 2009, and I was honored to be asked to serve under Secretary Clinton as her Deputy. We came to our jobs committed to deepen US engagement in the Asia Pacific region, to sustain our ties with our traditional allies and partners in the region, and build a sustainable cooperative relationship with China while acknowledging continued differences ranging from regional security and trade to human rights. We knew that this new relationship needed to reflect the dramatic changes that had taken place in China as result of the remarkable economic gains of the proceeding decade, a relationship of mutual respect and a sense of obligation to wider world.

Despite this promising start, the ensuing decade saw a steady deterioration in US-China relations, to the point today that observers in both countries broadly agree that our relationship has reached a low point not seen since I made my first trip to China in 1994. As a scholar, I have written at length about what I believe went wrong; and I know that my view -- and the view of many Americans, is not necessarily shared by many of our Chinese counterparts. It’s not my intention to litigate these issues here today, but simply to acknowledge that we have a reached a very difficult, and potentially dangerous moment, where mutual suspicion and mistrust is rampant. When Secretary Christopher came here in 1996 we began to imagine a day when our relationship could be seen as “partners”; today we increasingly call each other fierce competitors and some begin to use the pointed words of “rivals” or even adversaries.

I do not need tell this audience how dangerous this trend can be, and how costly it is for both our countries and for the world at large. Many of the great problems of world, from climate change to pandemic disease to global poverty and hunger require our cooperation. The broad benefits of globalization – the theme of this year’s Shanghai Forum – are at risk, as protectionism and a growing focus on self-reliance and “de-risking” threaten to create a more fragmented world. At the same time our prosperity and security are threatened by an accelerating arms race and provocative actions such as we are seeing in recent days in the South China Sea and across the Taiwan Straits.

Perhaps we will get lucky, and our deepening tensions will not lead to outright conflict. But that is risk I believe we should not run; hope is not a substitute for good policy. I applaud the efforts of the Biden Administration to try to restart meaningful dialogue with its Chinese counterparts, ranging from the three US Cabinet Secretaries – Blinken, Yellen and Raimondo – who have visited China and the intensive dialogue between Foreign Minster Wang Yi and National Security Advisor Sullivan. I deeply appreciate the words that President Xi shared with Senate Majority Schumer: “how China and the United States get along with each other in the face of world change and turmoil will determine the destiny of mankind.” Leader Schumer in turn noted that there was “serious engagement” during his bipartisan delegation’s talks. Minister Wang Yi is in Washington even as we meet today. I hope this is a harbinger of better things to come.

All of us have a part to play in helping to build toward a more promising future. But ultimately it is up to the leaders of our two countries to have the determination to turn around the direction of our relationship, to provide the vision that can guide both our officials and our publics to believe that we can do better than a cold and very unstable peace with widening gaps in a decoupled world.

In my view, this will require us to do three basic things. First, we must make a more serious commitment to cooperate on issues of mutual interest, particularly those where the world depends on us to lead the way. At the forefront are climate change and global health, two issues that directly threaten our own futures and the rest of the world. Together, we have enormous capacity to transform the global energy system to a world of zero carbon emissions, protecting our precious ecosystems and fueling economic growth for our people and the rest of the world. We have the ability to harness the amazing new technologies in the world of data and biology to protect against newly emergent pandemic disease and provide breakthroughs to cure cancers, break the back of malaria and other tragic diseases. These are not zero sum issues, but as you often say here, “win-win”. If the United States and the Soviet Union could cooperate in space and in eradicating smallpox during the Cold War, surely the United States and China can find ways, despite our differences, to do even better today.

Second, we must do a better job in managing our differences, however profound. Both countries seek security and both leaders have a profound responsibility to their people to achieve that goal. But I deeply believe that these objectives need not be mutually incompatible. It is easy for each side to point out actions the other is taking that appear to threaten the other, or their friends and allies. It is much harder to find creative approaches that the meet the legitimate concerns of both sides. Words are not enough; statements of peaceful intentions are not a substitute for concrete actions. Many of you will know of the concept of strategic reassurance I have talked about for a long time; despite the lack of progress we have made, I do not believe it is too late to return to a serious discussion about how that may be achieved. Confidence building is not a favor one side gives to the other, it is in profound mutual interest.

Nowhere is this more important than the question of Taiwan. It was arguably the most important and delicate issue during the normalization of our relations in the 1970’s, and remains so today. A lot has changed since the historic visit of President Nixon in 1972 and the equally historic decision of President Carter to establish full diplomatic ties with the PRC while maintaining an “unofficial” relationship with Taiwan. Over the past five decades, Taiwan has become a prosperous and thriving democracy. Mainland China has too experienced an extraordinary period of economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of out of poverty and produced a society at the forefront of science and technology.

Third, we must renew our commitment to robust people to people engagement across all sectors of our societies. The rapprochement between the United States was not something that was accomplished solely by leaders such as Nixon and Carter, Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Beginning in the 1970s, business people, students and scholars crossed the Pacific in both directions, providing a human and enduring set of ties that transcended politics. My own school, Johns Hopkins University, was a pioneer with the establishment of the Hopkins Nanjing Center at Nanjing University in 1986. Covid of course has had a major impact, but even as the pandemic wanes, we see calls on both sides to restrict the flow of people and ideas between our two countries. Of course, each side has a responsibility to protect its national security, but security fears threaten to overwhelm the invaluable exchanges that benefit not just China and the US but the world as a whole. It’s easy to err on the side “caution”, much harder to be sensitive the profound costs of an excessively conservative approach. We have our differences but we should not be afraid to debate them openly and candidly. In his Shanghai speech in 1998 President Clinton said “We must all value the ability of people to think and speak and debate. No one has a monopoly on truth. We have to make most of our progress with most people, and that requires us to understand and communicate and reciprocate.” As President Clinton went to observe in his speech, it was China’s increasing openness that fueled China’s success, a lesson that should be at the forefront of China’s strategy for the future. One place to start is to restore robust exchanges between our scholars and students.

Years ago, some scholars and analysts debated the idea of a “G-2” – a world organized by the United States and China. I have never believed that was a good strategy; the world needs engagement from countries large and small, north, south east and west. This is the idea at the heart of this year’s Shanghai forum. Neither the United States nor China can, nor should “rule the world” either alone or together, but there is little prospect that we can achieve a stable, prosperous and healthy world order without meaningful sustained cooperation between our two countries. I hope that the discussions here at the 2023 Shanghai Forum can contribute to that goal, and I am honored to be able to speak with you today.