The China Program at Shorenstein APARC had the pleasure of hosting Ryan Hass, Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution for the program "Partner, Competitor, and Challenger: Thoughts on the Future of America’s China Strategy." Hass explored cooperation and competition between the United States and China before engaging in a lively Q&A session with the audience. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

Presently, China is at once a major and increasingly hostile competitor to the U.S., a formidable challenger to U.S. regional and global leadership, and an important partner on a range of transnational challenges. An important and pressing question for many is whether or not it will be possible for both sides to coexist amidst intensifying competition. In his talk, Ryan Hass explored this question by delving into the present and future of US-China relations, as well as the discourse that shapes and is shaped by that relationship. He also discussed the likelihood of conflict between the two countries, particularly surrounding Taiwan, suggesting that it might not be as likely as many of us fear. Listen now: 

This op-ed by Oriana Skylar Mastro was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

A new administration in Washington faces a familiar problem: North Korea is once again testing missiles, including ballistic missiles, in contravention of a UN Security Council resolution. Rather than retread dead-end paths, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to think anew on North Korea, and it has already distinguished itself from its predecessor by signaling that it will consult with U.S. allies and partners to formulate a strong response to Pyongyang that does not rule out diplomacy.

Such a reorientation is welcome. But if the new administration really wants to move the needle on North Korea, it will need to rethink the assumptions it has inherited about China’s role there. So far, the Biden team has cleaved to the long-held view that the United States and China share a common interest in the nuclear disarmament of North Korea and that U.S. policy there must make use of Beijing’s tremendous influence over the government in Pyongyang. During his visit to Seoul last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted that “Beijing has an interest, a clear self-interest, in helping to pursue the denuclearization of [North Korea] because it is a source of instability.” Blinken further paid tribute to China’s “critical role" and “unique relationship" with North Korea.

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But Beijing has demonstrated for almost three decades where its self-interest really lies, and that is in maintaining the status quo. China certainly doesn’t want to see North Korea weakened and the United States strengthened on the Korean Peninsula. But neither does it want the balance to tip so strongly toward North Korea that the United States feels compelled to bulk up its military posture. China is toeing a careful line to keep the prospect of peaceful denuclearization alive without provoking Pyongyang or aggravating tensions with the United States.

If Beijing were to do nothing to assist in denuclearization, the United States could lose confidence in diplomacy and decide instead to increase its military presence on the peninsula or even to take military action. But if Beijing does too much to help the United States, North Korea could collapse, and the whole peninsula could fall within the U.S. orbit. China’s North Korea policy is therefore an elaborate balancing act. Through it, Beijing seeks to maintain influence over the regime of Kim Jong Un without emboldening it; participate in multilateral efforts to pressure North Korea, such as the UN sanctions program, without exposing Pyongyang to pressure that could precipitate regime collapse; and offer the United States just enough hope for a diplomatic solution to forestall military intervention while simultaneously ensuring that any resolution contributes to China’s relative power, not that of the United States.

China’s Balance

For better or worse, the past year has been one of great change in Chinese strategy and policy, especially toward its neighbors. China flew an unprecedented number of sorties into Taiwanese airspace, placed trade sanctions on Australia after the latter supported inquiries into the origins of COVID-19, and came to blows with India over a border dispute that had not seen armed conflict in decades. But in the case of North Korea, China has stuck to its balancing act.

Beijing and Pyongyang have been on tepid terms the past few years. On paper, the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty makes the two countries allies. But in practice, the Chinese government has distanced itself from the alliance, stating that if North Korea provoked a conflict, Beijing had no obligation to defend it. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson remarked in 2006 that China was not an ally of North Korea, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has characterized the relationship as “normal state-to-state relations.”

A flurry of diplomatic activity in 2018 and 2019 gave many the impression that the two countries meant to repair and normalize their relationship. Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met for the first time in March 2018, marking Kim’s first meeting with any world leader. Four more meetings between the two followed, in May and June 2018 and January and June 2019, and Chinese official media noted that the relationship “radiated a new vitality.” But despite numerous exchanges of platitudes since—just last week, Xi sent a message to Kim affirming that the countries’ traditional friendship is a “valuable asset” and seeming to suggest an intention to strengthen relations—Xi has maintained his distance from Kim and his regime.

The 70th anniversary of China’s entrance in the Korean War passed without a summit or fanfare about the nations’ closeness. Social-distancing requirements undoubtedly had something to do with the lack of a high-level meeting but could not explain the absence of the customary propaganda about how the two countries are like “teeth to lips.” Moreover, Xi continues to avoid referring to North Korea as an ally. After his state visit to Pyongyang in June 2019, Xi described the relationship as one of  “friendly cooperative relations,” and on a January 2021 phone call with Kim, he characterized the bilateral relationship as one of “friendly socialist neighbors linked by mountains and rivers”—in the language of the Chinese government, hardly an expression of closeness and solidarity.

Then there is China’s approach to managing international efforts aimed at reining in North Korea. Here too, China has continued the same dance, trying to come off as a team player while restraining the international community from acting too harshly against the Kim regime. China voted in favor of all three of the UN Security Council resolutions on North Korea in 2017. In 2019, Beijing even garnered praise from then-President Donald Trump, who said that China was “a big help” in dealing with North Korea. On March 25, 2021, Pyongyang conducted two ballistic missile tests in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions, and Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not condemn them but predictably “call[ed] on all parties concerned to work together to maintain the situation of detente, and promote political settlement of the Peninsular issue through dialogue and consultation.”

Beijing has always been skeptical of using sanctions to coerce North Korean compliance on the nuclear issue, expressing concern that too much pressure could push Kim to lash out and undermine international efforts. When the United Nations imposed sanctions in 2017, China at first appeared poised to strictly enforce them. But then Beijing quickly reverted to business as usual, teaming up with Moscow to try to ease sanctions. China also allegedly violated the regulations by supplying North Korea with 22,730 tons of refined oil and helping Pyongyang export about $370 million worth of coal. Three months ago, the United States publicly accused China of circumventing the sanctions to aid North Korea, and China denied having done so.

Beijing’s North Korea policy is primarily motivated by a desire to counter U.S. power in the Asia-Pacific region and increase Chinese influence on the Korean Peninsula. The nuclear issue gives Beijing a pretext to call for the United States to reduce its military presence and activity on the peninsula on the grounds that North Korea would halt weapons development if it felt less threatened.

Beijing decidedly does not want a war on the peninsula. Such a conflict could destabilize the region and end with a unified Korea under U.S. influence. Trump’s “fire and fury” approach and his willingness to meet directly with Kim threatened China’s ability to triangulate between Washington and Pyongyang in order to ensure its own maneuverability. The real possibility that the United States would forcibly displace the North Korean regime convinced Beijing to both strengthen its ties with Kim and put real pressure on his government. But the last Trump-Xi summit, in February 2019, was a failure; the Trump administration seemingly abandoned its focus on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, and Beijing returned to business as usual.

Biden’s Choice

To set a new course on North Korea, the Biden administration needs to throw Beijing off balance once more. The status quo—in which Beijing enhances its influence over the future of the peninsula and wins international image points while simultaneously undercutting the United States’ North Korea policy—is no longer acceptable. The United States needs to strike its own balance: one in which Washington makes progress on reducing the threat from North Korea while also gaining ground in its competition with Beijing.

Multilateral diplomacy that takes a more incremental approach to denuclearization, such as a freeze on North Korea’s current program, will not accomplish this end. Beijing would welcome such a move, as many in China thought that Trump’s demand for complete denuclearization was counterproductive and that Washington’s alienation of its allies risked spurring South Korea or Japan to develop nuclear capabilities. China sees a multilateral approach as one that affords it more influence on the relevant players and can help ensure a positive outcome for Beijing.

The White House should instead consider pursuing multilateral diplomacy that excludes Beijing or that at the very least does not give China pride of place. Such an approach would be consistent with the predilections of many of Biden’s advisers, who seek a pragmatic tack that does not rely on Beijing’s goodwill. China would likely react by scrambling to redefine its role in managing peninsular affairs in order to make sure that it is not cut out of any deal. China might tighten its relations with North Korea and Russia in order to influence policy through them as proxies. The United States could then join forces with European allies in response, whether to counter Beijing’s overreaching claims in the South China Sea or to buttress democracies against Chinese political interference.

Greater closeness between China and North Korea could prove useful to the United States. North Korea has in effect placed the harshest imaginable sanctions on itself, shutting its borders completely in January 2020 to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. The country’s trade with China is down 81 percent as a result. China’s economic leverage over North Korea has thus dissipated—and with it, the effectiveness of sanctions as a coercive tool. China may now work to create new leverage against North Korea, perhaps through positive inducements, which could supply another tool for the Biden administration to use later on. And if Beijing cannot forge closer ties with Pyongyang, it might even seek to ingratiate itself with Seoul—also a favorable development for Washington, as such relations may allow the United States to pursue deeper military cooperation with South Korea’s regional allies without fear of provoking a strong Chinese response.

Some Biden advisers, including Kurt Campbell, have called for a bolder approach. One possibility is for Washington to shift its focus from denuclearization to arms control. Under this scenario, the United States would accept North Korea as a de facto nuclear state and take measures to enhance deterrence against it, such as stepping up the U.S. military presence and tightening military cooperation with allies in the region. China would have a harder time than before delegitimizing the U.S. military presence in the region and just might be compelled to do what is necessary to induce North Korea’s denuclearization, even at the cost of destabilizing the regime.

Biden’s new approach to North Korea must force China to tip its carefully constructed balance toward either complete cooperation or obvious obstruction. Depending on which way China goes, the United States can then decide whether to include Beijing or cut it out of its North Korea policy efforts. But one thing is clear: conducting business as usual with Beijing hurts U.S. objectives in both denuclearization and competition with China.

Can China’s aggression towards Taiwan be stopped? Oriana Skylar Mastro joins the Munk Debate podcast to argue affirmatively that Chinese military capability has advanced too far for the United States to credibly deter the PRC through military means alone. Michael Beckley, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, offers the rebuttal. The full debate is available below.

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Many of China’s military development goals were set with a target date of 2020, which means the PRC is currently in a strong place with its offensive and defensive capabilities. By Mastro’s measure, China now has the most advanced ballistic missile program in the world, including the United States. For Taiwan, this means the reality of an aggressive neighbor who possesses offensive weapons that are very difficult to defend against.

China also has geographic benefits when it comes to offensive maneuvering. If a hot conflict began, neither Taiwan nor the United States has a comparable network of sole-sovereign military bases in the area such as China’s. Not only does this mean China can utilize its air defense capabilities — again, now one of the strongest in the world, by Mastro’s account — but it can also support a robust blockade against Taiwan across the strait and devastate the island both militarily and economically.

As Mastro points out, “Taiwan’s economy completely depends on China, so if China decided to use economic coercion, which is defined as a type of aggression, the United States has absolutely no way of protecting Taiwan from any economic harm coming from the PRC.”

Because of this potential for combined military and economic aggression, Mastro pushed for urgency on deterrence in Taiwan. “The United States and international community do not have forever. The Chinese are not happy with maintaining the status quo, and they will soon believe they have the military capability to [take Taiwan].”

Rather than continuing to act alone, Mastro hopes the United States will lead out in organizing an international coalition that includes other regional partners such as Australia, Japan, and India as actively contributing participants. With the United States no longer seen as a monolith in Beijing, only broad, coordinated cooperation will provide effective deterrence and security for Taiwan.

On another podcast, Conversation Six, Mastro joins Abraham Denmark to discuss China's Taiwan strategy and what the United States can do to deter China from invading Taiwan. The threat of non-military intervention by the United States and its allies is the way forward, she says. "The US needs to do more in non-military realms," she argues.

The China Program at Shorenstein APARC had the privilege of hosting Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies​ (CSIS). The program, entitled "What’s ‘Communist’ about the Communist Party of China?," explored the goals and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as what they might mean for the future of China in the global community. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the goals of the CCP became less clear. As the country began to adopt market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, CCP theorists were forced into contortions providing ideological justifications for policies that appeared overtly capitalist. Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” came to be seen as a theoretical fig leaf rather than a description of an egalitarian economic system, and by the 2000s, a consensus emerged that the CCP had completely abandoned any pretense of pursuing the Marxist vision it purported to hold. With the rise of Xi Jinping, however, the Party talks with renewed vigor about Marxism-Leninism and the goal of achieving actual, existing socialism. Has the CCP re-discovered communism?  In his talk, Blanchette discussed the abandoned and existing legacies of Mao Zedong, Marxism-Leninism, and the CCP’s vision of socialism. Watch now: 

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Introducing the new book, Lawrence H. Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at the Kennedy School, called the co-authors’ analysis of collaborative governance “micro microeconomics” that shows how particular tasks and particular commitments of resources, once decided on, are going to be best accomplished. This work, Summers noted, sheds light on situations involving both cooperation and competition — aspects that affect almost any complex problem yet are rarely considered by economists.

A key element of collaborative governance, noted Zeckhauser, is the sharing of discretion. Rather than contracting at one pole and complete laissez-faire at the opposite pole, in a collaborative governance process, the two parties involved play a role in determining what is produced and how it is produced. It is a process that calls on the best capabilities of both the private and public sectors and that grants each of them an element of control. Sometimes that process results in triumphs, sometimes in tragedies, and other times in outcomes that are “in-between.” The book analyses cases of this entire gamut. “We hope that this volume provides guidance on how the triumphs can become more common, the tragedies more scarce, and the in-between outcomes improved,” said Zeckhauser.

Collaborative Governance in the Time of COVID-19

The unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic provides dramatic current illustrations of collaborative governance. The urgent need for an effective vaccine created the conditions for a successful partnership between the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical sector, with the former offering both regulatory processes and significant financing, the latter its innovation. Consider the Moderna vaccine, which, based on evidence from clinical trials, is over 90% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 illness. The vaccine was created within less than a year using a new approach, based on Messenger RNA technology, by a company that had never before produced a commercial product. “This is a triumph of collaborative governance,” said Zeckhauser.

The vaccine distribution process in the United States, however, has proved to be challenging and chaotic. Zeckhauser contrasted this experience with China’s activation of technology giant Tencent, which is using its ubiquitous WeChat application to allow individuals to easily find where the vaccine is distributed and sign up for vaccination appointments. “There is probably a lesson here in the way these two outcomes came about. We hope that individuals in both China and the United States will examine the lessons in this volume to see how they can achieve outcomes for their citizens that produce public benefits more effectively.”

A Spectrum of Policy Domains

The book details how China and the United States grapple with the complexity of producing the goods and services they need to meet a broad array of public goals. Eggleston surveyed the five broad policy domains she and her co-authors examine in the book through detailed historical legacies and case studies of the application of collaborative governance in both countries.

These domains include the railroads that build the nation historically in both countries and China’s high-speed rail network; real estate's intricate tangle of public and private partnerships; hosting the Olympic Games and the experience of the public and private sectors in that endeavor in both countries; education provision; and state and market in population health and health care in both countries. The book spotlights the different ways in which both countries produce public goods and services in these broad policy domains.

East and West

Professor Yijia Jing of Fudan University, an expert on privatization, governance, and collaborative service delivery, participated in the discussion with the book co-authors and shared insights on public-private relationships in China. Collaborative governance in the country, he said, has undergone a gradual process of institutionalization. He observed that Chinese local governments apply different strategies in collaborating with private companies. For example, local governments like Guangdong and Shanghai partner in different ways with digital giants Tencent and Alibaba to build up their digital capacities — collaborations through which they have been learning how to balance their multiple roles as partners, policymakers, and market regulators.

Jing noted that China uses collaborative governance not only in domestic arenas but also in areas of international development, through entities such as the BRICS Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China is also promoting collaborative governance as part of its Belt and Road initiative.

A Call for Transparency

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector helps decision-makers apply the principles of collaborative governance to effectively serve the public. The book's overarching conclusion is that transparency is the key to the legitimate growth of collaborative governance. In the United States, said Donahue, the principle of governmental transparency is widely accepted as a broad-spectrum accountability device. He recognized that he and his co-authors do not expect China to adopt the U.S. approach to transparency, but expressed their hope to see more transparency “with Chinese characteristics.” “It is crucial for China to embrace the transparency imperative because the evil twin of collaborative governance is cronyism or corruption,” Donahue argued.

In many countries and policy arenas, collaborative governance could effectively increase innovation but is not available because the populace is convinced that any interaction between the public and private sectors amounts to corruption on the part of elites against the public interest. The potential in China to create public value through interaction between its public and private sectors is enormous, concluded Donahue. ”It would be a shame to squander that.”

On February 24, 2021, the China Program at Shorenstein APARC hosted Dr. Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

The program, entitled "U.S.-China Relations in the Biden Era," explored the future of US-China relations based on experience from past administrations. Under former President Trump, U.S. relations with China evolved into outright rivalry. In his talk, Dr. Wright discussed whether this rivalry will continue and evolve during a Biden administration by analyzing the roots of strategic competition between the two countries and various strands of thinking within the Biden team. According to Wright, the most likely outcome is that the competition between the two countries will evolve into a clash of governance systems and the emergence of two interdependent blocs where ideological differences become a significant driver of geopolitics. Cooperation is possible but it will be significantly shaped by conditions of rivalry. Watch now: