CHINA-2018/10/18 1 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION FALK AUDITORIUM HOW WILL VALUES SHAPE U.S.-CHINA COMPETITION? Washington, D.C. Thursday, October 18, 2018 Moderator: TARUN CHHABRA Fellow, Project on International Order and Strategy The Brookings Institution Panelists: HAL BRANDS Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) RYAN HASS David M. Rubenstein Fellow, John L. Thornton Center The Brookings Institution TED PICCONE Senior Fellow, Project on International Order and Strategy The Brookings Institution EMILY RAUHALA East and Southeast Asia Correspondent The Washington Post * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 500 Montgomery Street, Suite 400 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 CHINA-2018/10/18 2 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. CHHABRA: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us here this morning at Brookings. My name is Tarun Chhabra. I'm a fellow with our Project on International Order and Strategy, here at Brookings Foreign Policy. As many of you know, we are here to talk about the way in which values and ideology will shape U.S.-China relations. Two weeks ago in a speech that many of you saw or read, Vice President Mike Pence underscored the Trump administration's commitment to, as he put it "Reset America's economic strategic relationship with China," which reinforced the administration's move in its 2017 National Security Strategy to describe China as a strategic competitor. And tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to mount over issues ranging from trade to technology transfer, to freedom of navigation, and the future of Taiwan. But amidst all of this, there's been less attention, I think many of us would agree, to the role that ideology and values will play as U.S.-China competition intensifies. So, we're here to talk about the subject today particularly in the wake of significant shifts in U.S. policy as well as major developments in China, such as a push toward mass surveillance, and the piloting of a social credit system, well documented reports of large-scale repression of the weaker minority in Xinjiang Province, which we'll also talk about. And efforts to reshape the international human rights regime; and we have a stellar panel to discuss all of this today. You have bios in front of you, so I'll just introduce them very briefly. ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 500 Montgomery Street, Suite 400 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 CHINA-2018/10/18 3 On the far end we Professor Hal Brands from the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We have my colleague Ryan Hass, the David Rubenstein Fellow here with our John Thornton China Center, as well as the Center for East Asia Policy. Ted Piccone; a Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy, and also our Latin American Initiative, and the Charles Robinson Chair. And Emily Rauhala with The Washington Post. So, we are delighted. Thank you all for making time to be here today, and looking forward to our discussion. Hal, let's start with you if we could, you just published a piece on this subject in the journal Survival, which I commend to all of you. And I think it would I recommend to all of you. And I think it would be useful to start a little bit with definitions. When we talk about great power competition, and someone mentions values a lot of people think of values as soft or peripheral to military competition or high- level diplomacy. And the notion of authoritarian values to many people sounds oxymoronic. Ideology too often carries a very negative connotation, as blindness to facts, or evidence. But as you have written, ideology has gotten a bad name in U.S. foreign policy because it's often taken to signify a commitment to dangerous, moralistic crusades. All that being said, do you mean something different when you write about values and ideology particularly as they're going to shape U.S.-China competition, so help us define these terms, and tell us why when we talk about U.S.-China relations, you think these concepts, as you’ve defined them, haven't enjoyed as much air time as they deserve? MR. BRANDS: Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me. And thanks to ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 500 Montgomery Street, Suite 400 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 CHINA-2018/10/18 4 everybody for being here. So, when I think about the role of values or ideology in U.S.-China relations I'm thinking about something pretty simple, but I would argue pretty important or even profound, which is just the clash liberalism and illiberalism on the one hand, or perhaps democracy and authoritarianism on the other. And liberalism and democracy, illiberalism and authoritarianism, they mean different things. I think of democracy as being essentially a procedural definition about the set of processes a country has for selecting its leaders, and choosing its form of governance, whereas liberalism is more of a commitment to a set of particular values about the relationship between the individual and society, but they overlap in the United States, just in same way that illiberalism and authoritarianism overlap in China. And it's the clash between those two sets of systems and values that I think about when I think the role of ideology in U.S.-China competition. And the argument that I have made, and that I would offer here is that this clash of values is far more central to U.S.-China tensions, and U.S.-China competition than we often recognize, for a variety of reasons, which I'm happy to go into in greater detail, but just to give you two very brief examples. One, I think the fact that the U.S. and China have different approaches to the relationship, say, of the individual to the state or of society to the state, fosters mistrust, and it makes it harder for us to understand each other. And it also leads to different views of what sort of international order is just and desirable, and so the United States being a liberal democracy has long sought an international system in which liberal democracy is prevalent. The Chinese Government being an authoritarian, illiberal regime, has long sought an international order in which such regimes can be protected and can ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 500 Montgomery Street, Suite 400 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 CHINA-2018/10/18 5 frankly survive. And so I think that is quite central to the U.S.-China competition today, and this actually isn't unusual, ideological disputes, clashes or values have been central to Great Power Competition going back to Athens and Sparta, and so this is very much the rule rather than the exception, which leads, I guess, to the second question you asked is:\, why haven't these ideas gotten more air time? And I think you alluded to one piece of it, which is that ideology did get a bad name in U.S. foreign policy after 9/11, and particularly after the Iraq War which was sometimes associated with, sort of, I think wrongly, but was often associated with ideological as opposed to pragmatic decision-making. And the other is that when we think about ideology competition, our minds naturally go back to the last Great Power Competition which was the Cold War, and because the Cold War was so fraught, and so dangerous, and so tense, naturally no one wants to go there when thinking about the U.S.-China relationship today, for very good reasons. And so, as a result of that, we tend to think that that was an ideological competition because it involved in the clash between two universalistic forms of beliefs, and forms of values. And so this one is more geopolitical, it's less ideological by comparison. MR. CHHABRA: And since you’ve raised the Cold War analogy, just tell us a little bit, let's talk a little bit about that. It seems to me that in the foreign policy community, the idea that we might be entering a new Cold War is becoming a bit of a third rail. If we talk about ideology and values often the immediate response is, you're trying to get us into a new Cold War. How do you think about that analogy? What's wrong with it, when it ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 500 Montgomery Street, Suite 400 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 CHINA-2018/10/18 6 comes to U.S.-China relations? But is there anything right with it? Is there a spectrum of competition that we ought to be thinking about in those terms? MR. BRANDS: Yes. I mean, I certainly wouldn't say that we're anywhere close to approximating the Cold War as it unfolded between the United States and the Soviet Union. And just to pick one aspect of this, although there is an ideological dimension to U.S.-China competition, it's different than the ideological competition we had during the Cold War. Or as I said, during the Cold War the United States was facing off against another ideological belief system that was universalistic in its own right, communism was going to spread to cover the globe, and I don't think that the Chinese think about it, think about authoritarianism in the same way.