THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION CHINA’S NEW LEADERSHIP: THE OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS AND POLICY Washington, D.C. Monday, April 7, 2008 2 Welcome JEFFREY A. BADER Senior Fellow and Director The John L. Thornton China Center The Brookings Institution ALICE L. MILLER Editor, China Leadership Monitor Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution First Keynote Address TOM FINGAR Chairman, National Intelligence Council PANEL ONE – POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AND SUCCESSION POLITICS CHENG LI Senior Fellow, The John L. Thornton China Center, The Brookings Institution ALICE L. MILLER Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution DAVID MICHAEL LAMPTON George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, The Johns Hopkins University Second Keynote Address SUSAN SHIRK Director, UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego PANEL TWO – NEW SOCIO-ECONOMIC TENSIONS AND POLICY RESPONSES JOSEPH FEWSMITH Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 3 BARRY NAUGHTON So Kwan Lok Professor of Chinese and International Affairs, University of California, San Diego ALBERT KEIDEL Senior Associate, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace PANEL THREE – THE TAIWAN AND MILITARY POLICIES OF A RISING CHINA ALAN D. ROMBERG Distinguished Fellow and Director, East Asia Program, The Henry L. Stimson Center MICHAEL SWAINE Senior Associate, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace NANCY BERNKOPF TUCKER Professor of History, Georgetown University * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 4 P R O C E E D I N G S MS. MILLER: Good morning. My name is Alice Miller, and I’m a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, and I’m the editor of a strange publication called the China Leadership Monitor. I’m grateful to you all for showing up this morning to hear today’s presentations. Our event today grew out of several considerations, but I want to highlight two. One obviously, of course, is developments in China’s leadership politics in the last few months. These I’m sure everybody knows stem from two major leadership meetings. One, the 17th Congress of a Chinese communist party. Now, the other, the 11th National People’s Congress, the Chinese Parliament. These meetings are important because they do change the leadership in significant ways, and, second, because reports delivered at these meetings have a bearing on the future approach of policy, they lay out very broad guidelines and priorities for the next five-year period. And, so, it seemed an appropriate moment to try to take stock of these meetings. That led Li Cheng from Brookings and I to begin to talk last summer about doing that and staging this occasion. The other consideration is the China Leadership Monitor, which I edit at the Hoover Institution, and that Li ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 5 Cheng contributes to regularly, along with four other contributors. The Monitor is now in its seventh year of publication. It tries to provide authoritative analysis of ongoing trends in the Chinese leadership and trends in policy and major policy sectors. The methods that we use are the traditional tried and true methods of the good old days, that is chronology, as applied to China’s politics, now supplemented by the new sources of information and insight that have become available in the last two or three decades. So, who better to try to sum up trends in the leadership than the group that contributes to the China Leadership Monitor, and that’s the secondary point of today’s session, to try to bring all of these people together to try to offer their assessments of what’s going on in China’s leadership. We haven’t done this before, and, so, this is an inaugural effort to try to do that and to get reaction from the broader Washington community interested in China. And, so, I’m grateful that most of the crew from the Monitor has joined us today; four people, not including myself, have been with the Monitor right from the beginning. They include Li Cheng from Brookings, Joe Fewsmith from Boston University, ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 6 Barry Naughton from the University of California San Diego, and James Mulvenon, now at CIRA, here in town. The sixth contributor aside from those four and me is Alan Romberg, who joined us two years ago, two or three years ago, and replaced Bob Suettinger, and before Bob, Tom Christensen, who’s now deputy assistant secretary at the State Department. So, they almost all of those contributors are here today to present their views on what’s going on in Beijing for our session today. We do have one last minute change in our lineup, and that is James Mulvenon isn't here today. He was commandeered. Maybe the right term is shanghaied to go give briefings out at STRATCOM in Omaha, and, so, the American military unfortunately takes priority, at least unfortunately for our purposes. And, so, I’m grateful that Michael Swaine from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has agreed to come and offer his views on what’s going on in the leadership with respect to the military affairs. So, thank you very much for your interest in today’s event. Please, I encourage all of you to ask lots of questions of the panelists, everybody except me, of course. So, may I turn the podium over to Jeff Bader from Brookings? Thank you. ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 7 MR. BADER: Thank you. Thank you very much, Alice. I’m Jeffrey Bader. I’m director of the John L. Thornton China Center here at the Brookings Institution. I first want to thank Alice for proposing this conference. Alice came to Cheng Li, and I can't think of a better combination to pull together an event on Chinese leadership than Alice Miller and Cheng Li. It’s my pleasure this morning to introduce our opening speaker, Tom Fingar. You all have his bio, I trust. I won’t repeat it. He’s the deputy director of National Intelligence for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. I first met Tom in, I think it was 1987. I was deputy director of the China desk and used to go upstairs each morning for the daily intelligence briefings. Tom would come around turn to the assistant secretary and the deputy assistant secretary with the most sensitive intelligence that the U.S. Government had. I didn’t know Tom at the outset. He showed us this extraordinarily sensitive material and didn’t say much unless spoken to, and when he was spoken to, he gave the most extraordinarily insightful and intelligent answers. ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 8 And he knew more than anyone else in the room, I quickly discovered. Well, let me modify that statement. (Inaudible) was in the room, so it was a tie. It was a tie for first place, and but one thing I note, I was sort of neophyte in this game; I hadn’t been in the briefings by the INR briefer before this, and one thing that struck me was it didn’t matter where the discussion went, Tom refused to offer any policy guidance to any of us. He told us what the intelligence meant, he told us how he evaluated it, but he wouldn’t tell us what to do. It seemed strange to me at the time. That’s to say since he seemed to know more than anybody else, but now I get it. And with that same spirit of understanding, limits and understanding the lines between intelligence and policy had been better understood by more people in the U.S. Government. I do remember somewhere around May 24, 25, 1989 I wrote a memo to Secretary Baker describing what was going on in China at the time, and you all may remember that there were a few things going on in China at the time, and I purported to describe what was going on in the grounds because there seemed to be a need for such a memo. Tom ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 9 came by, I remember, to tell me ever so gently to remind me that I was supposed to do policy and not describe what was going on in the grounds and that he would take care of what was going on in the ground. But, anyway, he softened the blow by -- I asked him, so, what do you think of the memo? He said, oh, I thought it was quite good, except I probably wouldn’t have referred to that leader you referred to as Deng Xiaoping’s useful idiot. Tom was right in that case, too. We’ve now seen in recent months Tom’s commitment to courageous and quality analysis on the Iran national intelligence estimate. Tom didn’t want it to be public. Tom, like the craftsman who built the Notre Dame Cathedral likes to labor in anonymity. But I think it’s great that we did get to see it because what this served to do is to remind a broader public of the quality and courage of the people who labor on analysis and intelligence and who provide and who call it as they see it, not as the policy community would like them to see it.