by Orange Wang in SCMP, Nov 16, 2023
A leading Chinese scholar on Beijing-Washington relations who visited the US last month was amazed to find that “stability” – more than any other word – dominated discussions on the outlook for ties between the two powers.

Wang Jisi, founding president of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, noted that the people he spoke to did not talk about deterioration “and for some strange reason, they didn’t talk about improvement”.

“Why? One think tank person told me that if they [talked] about improvement of US-China relations they might be criticised or even attacked in the United States,” he told a forum at the university in late October.

According to Wang, some voices questioned whether improved ties with Washington’s “greatest geopolitical rival” would be a good thing, even as a deterioration in the relationship was also widely viewed as detrimental to the US.

Wang’s remarks shed a rare light on the intensive backchannel diplomacy taking place behind the scenes in the run-up to Wednesday’s meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden at the Apec summit.

Informal discussions surged as the time window narrowed on the bid to mend China-US relations ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ forum in San Francisco, which opened on Saturday.

Known as Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues, the semi-official and unofficial talks are seen to give more latitude for non-government intermediaries to tackle the thorniest issues that could stall more official negotiations.

Wang, who was in the US as part of a delegation of Chinese scholars that visited in early October, has long argued for direct in-person unofficial communications between the two countries.

Earlier this year, he co-authored a report with a US academic that urged the restoration after the Covid-19 pandemic of direct connections across the entire span of the two societies.

At a time when both governments need to recalibrate their understanding of each other, a number of academics from China and the US have said there needs to be more open, candid – and even contentious – conversations.

But many are also convinced that bilateral ties will remain bumpy, with several scholars who spoke to the South China Morning Post cautioning that stumbling blocks persist in people-to-people communications.

They pointed to the mistrust underlying the fragile China-US relationship, as well as the bottlenecks faced by non-governmental interlocutors.

Civilian diplomacy
The surge in informal diplomacy has also coincided with Beijing’s intensified efforts to cultivate cross-Pacific interactions through civilian and subnational avenues – kicking off in June when Xi welcomed his “old friend” Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, to Beijing.

Since then, there have been visits to China by former US state secretary Henry Kissinger, a group of US Flying Tiger veterans, and Californian Governor Gavin Newsom, as well as a virtual conference between the Communist Party’s diplomatic arm and the Asia Society, an American think tank.

Notably, it is not only the so-called panda huggers in the US that have been visiting lately. Long-time hawk Michael Pillsbury – described by former president Donald Trump as “the leading authority on China” – also travelled to Beijing last month.

Pillsbury, 78, attended a two-day forum centred on China’s relations with the US and European Union, co-hosted by the Centre for China and Globalisation, a non-governmental think tank.

“I learned a lot,” Pillsbury told the Post after the conference, which was attended by a mix of retired Chinese officials, Beijing-based diplomats from several countries, and numerous Chinese, American and European policy analysts.

Pillsbury said several sensitive issues were raised at the forum, which he characterised as part of “a new initiative for the Chinese leadership to start the outreach programme”, after the country’s years-long closure to foreign visitors.

But when asked about the potential impact at an official level of such think tank exchanges, he said that the “Chinese decision-making process is [a] black box”.

Pillsbury said he took note of comments made at the forum by Chen Yang, a fellow with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an influential think tank under the Ministry of State Security, the country’s primary foreign intelligence organ.

Chen said that Beijing had not supported Moscow’s military efforts and that the picture of the Ukraine war would have been different if China had stood with Russia.

“This is to me the biggest surprise … It’s probably true,” Pillsbury said, adding that he took the remark as a “warning” that Beijing retained the card of military aid to Russia in geopolitics.

Pillsbury – best known for his book The Hundred-Year Marathon, which contended that Beijing was pursuing a century-long secret plot to usurp the US as the world’s pre-eminent superpower – warned that “super hawks” are gaining momentum in the US.

“Many American super hawks, they believe this: China wants to build a new world order and be the dominant power … Looks like that’s not correct,” he said, adding that they may not yet be on Beijing’s radar.

Traditional hawks

According to Pillsbury, who describes himself as a “traditional hawk”, the new category – typified by The Indictment, a book by Frank Gaffney and Dede Laugesen with a foreword by Steve Bannon – assumes China’s collapse and even advocates the overthrowing of its political system.

Traditional hawks have traditional security concerns but do not see Beijing as an enemy, said Pillsbury, now a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank.

“I don’t know if Chinese leaders are aware of the creation and the growth of super hawks.”

Echoing Pillsbury, the University of Denver’s Suisheng Zhao also expressed concern over the dominance of hawks in both Washington and Beijing, each seemingly reinforcing the other’s hardline stance.

“Recently, everyone may have noticed the moderate views of some American scholars, but these have no real influence in the decision-making circle,” warned Zhao, a professor of Chinese politics and foreign policy, in a speech in Beijing on October 31.

“[The two countries] should find a way to re-understand each other. China’s development is a good thing to the US and the healthy development of the US is also good to China,” he said.

Zhao, who was in China for Track 2 dialogues – which have no government participation – noted that it was hard for non-governmental forces alone to lever a substantial change in China-US relations, which still mainly depend on official engagements.

He harked back to the “ping-pong diplomacy” of five decades ago ahead of president Richard Nixon’s visit to China – still hailed as a model of unofficial contact between the two nations.

Zhao said the exchanges had been no more than the result of both Washington and Beijing taking advantage of the popular sport after already deciding to open the relationship.

“If leaders make up their minds to put China-US relations on a normal track, then civilian, Track 2 and Track 1.5 exchanges can only be icing on the cake,” he said.

Losing a passion for China

Zhao lamented the changed landscape in the US since he moved there nearly 40 years ago. Many young American scholars have lost the personal passion for China that he used to see and take on the research only as a job to protect US interests, he said.

According to Zhao, many among the younger generations perceive Beijing as a “rival”, since China’s rise as a power began during their upbringing.

He also said many young US researchers relied on literature to study China instead of taking part in long-term fieldwork. “In the past, those [American] scholars who came to China would spend years in a single village, very few people do the same now.”

Zhao noted that it is also more difficult to get a visa to China than it used to be. He also said that even a slight criticism of Beijing risked a denial of entry, leading to fear among foreign academics.

He is pessimistic about China-US relations, seeing no prospect of an improvement with “irreconcilable” rifts over ideology, the structural tensions between a ruling power and a rising one, and the issue of Taiwan.

Nevertheless, Zhao said he expected that exchanges across different spheres could enhance political dialogue and help to stabilise the relationship.

Colin Bradford, a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution who attended the same forum in Beijing as Pillsbury, said it was unlikely that gatherings of think tankers would lead to any immediate changes in the geopolitical realm.

“I think what happens is you do develop ideas … those kinds of conceptual innovations can help the official tracks begin to think a little bit differently about how they should relate,” he said.

Former US envoy for East Asia Susan Thornton – who also visited China in October – said that when official communications are atrophied or stopped, Track 2 could make sure signals are not misinterpreted and keep channels open.

“Now that official communication [between the US and China] is being restored, 1.5 and 2 channels can help official channels make progress on specific issues and maintain positive contacts between the two societies,” she told the Post during her visit.

But she also warned that there are still “a lot of obstacles and specific technical problems in getting people talking again”.

Thornton, who is now a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre, said the nearly four-year hiatus in communication caused by the pandemic had bred “an extreme amount of mutual suspicion, mutual blaming, invective and a lot of misunderstanding”.

Academic barriers and a downward spiral
Heiwai Tang from the University of Hong Kong also voiced his frustration at the growing barriers that deter his peers in the US from engaging in normal academic activities on the other side of the Pacific.

Speaking at the same Beijing forum attended by Pillsbury and Bradford, Tang – who taught in the US for more than a decade and is now associate dean of the university’s business school – recounted his difficulties in organising academic visits to the city.

Tang said he had recently gone to great lengths to invite some of his friends who are teaching at US public universities to come to Hong Kong for academic talks, but they declined.

“They told me [it was] not because they find Hong Kong to be very dangerous, [but] because they had to go through multiple levels of approvals in the universities [as well as] the requirements from the IT department … to bring an empty laptop to Hong Kong,” he said.

“This is not encouraging for people to exchange ideas and to learn about each other. I’m really seeing a downward spiral due to these kinds of restrictive policies,” Tang said.

At the Peking University event, Wang said he was cautious but not optimistic about China-US relations. He expects this month’s interactions between Chinese and American leaders will not be extensive, nor deliver anything like a fourth communique.

There are also elections coming up in both the US and Taiwan, Wang pointed out. Nevertheless, he is hopeful that the unofficial contacts between the United States and China will provide “some better atmosphere” in the relationship.

“If we look at the future [of China-US relations], we need two things. The first thing is joint efforts on both sides to increase cooperation,” he said.

“The second thing, unfortunately, is luck.”
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3241323/unofficial-exchanges-soared-ahead-xi-biden-meeting-smooth-path-talks