An Interview with David M. Lampton: Living U.S.-China Relations

This book is different from your other research books in that it includes many personal stories and reflections. What inspired you to write this book? What is the benefit of studying Sino-American relations through an interpersonal lens?

The defining and unique characteristic of this volume is that it tells the story of U.S.-China ties as the relationship between two societies, not just two states. This account has nuance, avoids black-and-white caricature, and is empathetic.

Why did I write this book? To understand myself. To understand China to a greater degree. And, to enhance Sino-American cooperation and mutual understanding. My experience is that people write books for more than one reason. For me there were three: personal, field-related history and methodology, and then policy.

At the personal level: This book was my principal “COVID pandemic period project.” During that long period of isolation, this project, along with my family, were my companions. Also, even had there been no pandemic, China was itself becoming less accessible to scholars such as myself who relied on extensive field research. This project enabled me to use a lifetime of data that I already had accumulated.

A more deeply personal reason is that we’re all so busy leading our lives during middle age that we often are not particularly self-conscious about how we got to any given moment. One day, you sort of wake up and say, “Well, how is it that I ended up studying China in the first case? Why did I study it the way I did?” Finally, my father and my grandfather had left our respective extended families their autobiographies. I had found that their life stories grounded me, and I wanted to do no less for my children and grandchildren.

The academic reasons for this project were several. Serendipitously, during my career I had unusual access to players in U.S.-China relations in both countries, players at five levels: multi-lateral international, central government-to-central government, locality-to-locality, civil society-to-civil society, and individual-to-individual. One should consider all those levels, because all of them have shaped the way our two societies have interacted over the last 50 years–indeed way before that.

I’m an inveterate note taker. For most of my career I did not take and save notes principally to create an historical record, but rather because I listen more carefully to what people are saying when I’m writing it down. So, with the passage of time I accumulated an extensive data set recording interactions extending back to the early 1970s. Fifty years later I wanted to share what I felt these materials suggested–that U.S.-China relations needs to be understood as a society-to-society relationship. The bulk of those stenographic records are in the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow New York.

Scholars employ many different sources and research approaches. Some predominantly use big data and quantitative approaches. Others are grounded more exclusively in the documentary record.  As for me, I’ve always learned more by getting out in the field and talking to people. And, as you do so, you don’t start by having too many preconceptions about why subjects are behaving the way they are, at least initially. I use quantitative information when it’s available and, of course, documents are critical too—both are checks on what you are being told and inform you as to questions to ask informants.

Then, there are policy reasons I wrote this book. A principal purpose was to address head-on what I believe to be a distorted narrative about the more than four-decade period of Sino-American comprehensive engagement across eight U.S. administrations and several Chinese regimes. Concisely, a dominant current critique is that naïve U.S. elites (academic, business, and policy) confused their hopes for democracy and a globally responsible China with the actual prospects for those desirable ends and, in the process, unwisely traded away American interests, competitive position, values, and national security. In short, the U.S. bolstered the principal strategic threat that it is said to face today. This book is a fact-based challenge to that simplistic, indeed dangerous narrative.    

Engagement was not a strategy. Engagement was not a plan. Engagement was a happening between our two societies. Both our societies for about 40 years saw their interests as predominantly compatible and complementary. Many corners of U.S. society saw their interests and/or values served by positive interaction with China. Many in the American religious community, for example, were supportive of productive relations with China. In the case of Christians and Evangelicals, it was bringing souls to the Lord and doing good works. Universities saw their interests, educational missions, research aspirations, and their values served by ever-growing numbers of Chinese students who, over time, paid growing amounts of tuition. American farmers saw their incomes grow and the nutritional status of Chinese citizens improved enormously. So, I argue that engagement was propelled by powerful interests at all levels of both societies for a long time and those engaged in the interaction thought they not only were doing well, but also good.

Inevitably, along the way, there were growing numbers of people and groups in both societies who came to perceive themselves as either absolute or relative losers in the relationship as it grew and changed and globalization took root. Over time those losers in the U.S.-China relationship accumulated power and influence in both societies. The longer the engagement policy continued, the losers stacked up, and the emergent coalition finally gained political traction and became, in both of our societies, more skeptical of the other–policy gradually bent toward their suspicions and concerns.

This is a cyclical phenomenon. Now and in the future, the costs of growing conflict will mount and, at some point, a new coalition will come to dominate in each society, pushing for improving ties once again. Of course, we don’t know how long this cycle will last or what the intervening damage will be. But one thing is for sure: if the conflict continues to deepen, which seems likely, there will be more and more losers on both sides, and they will begin to search for a new, better, more productive, and more mutually beneficial relationship. And, when this happens the human resources created during the preceding upswing in relations will provide the human resources to reconnect.

Because this is a two-part interview, and in this first part we emphasize strategic and state-to-state issues, would you flag some of the other dimensions of Living U.S.-China Relations? [Ed., See also three personal anecdotes Dr. Lampton provided in the course of this interview, which you can find here]. 

Important parts of this book deal with what it took to build the academic field of contemporary China studies, and the parallel task of constructing the galaxy of NGOs that have linked academic and public affairs. I spend considerable time describing interactions with some of the individuals who played significant roles in shaping public, private, and academic institutions and their interactions with the PRC. Coming out of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, it took a cross-generational effort to reconstitute and build anew the human and organizational infrastructure capable of seizing the opportunities that Presidents Nixon and Carter provided when their times came in the 1970s and 1980s. What comes through in this volume is the importance of teachers, and other individuals who conveyed animating ideas, built organizations, and sought to improve public life and motivate their students.

In the volume I underscore the fact that the analytic frameworks one uses to try to understand China and our own behavior shape the kinds of information we seek and the conclusions to which we come. Another feature of the book is that it highlights the interaction among individuals, demonstrating that not only are Americans motivated by a variety of interests and values, but so too are Chinese, citizens and leaders alike. The fact that earlier in life I had spent time as a fire-fighter at Stanford University and subsequently was a medical specialist in the U.S. Army greatly shaped my own work.

Considerable time is expended looking at the ins and outs of managing actual U.S.-China non-government projects such as developing a land use plan for the Ussuri River Valley (straddling the Sino-Russia border) and another project involving a group going to Tibet, writing a report on economic and social development, human rights, and other challenges there, concluding the project with a meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, briefing him on the trip itself and future steps that might be taken.

Finally, many readers will find of interest encounters with a great number of Chinese, American, and other leaders at many levels, including: Queen Elizabeth, members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, with each vignette adding texture and substance to the accounts of why things evolved as they did.

The subtitle of your book strongly implies that the U.S. is in the midst of a “Second Cold War” with China. Why do you choose to employ this terminology, which remains debatable among scholars?

I chose the subtitle I did because I entered the China field as the first Cold War was in its most intense period in the 1960s and 1970s and, ironically, I am at the twilight of that career with Sino-American conflict mounting and, once again, China and Russia are in one corner and America and “like-minded countries” increasingly in another.  Some people question this terminology, disputing whether or not the current situation has quite reached the stage of a new Cold War. They point to the many economic interdependencies and cultural contacts we now have with the PRC that did not exist in the first Cold War.

Well, of course, there are differences between the first Cold War and what I’m characterizing as the emerging second. A dramatic illustration of the difference is found in economic relations. In the case of the Soviet Union and the U.S., there was virtually no trade, economic, or financial relationships in the First Cold War.  Today, probably the biggest instrument in Beijing’s toolbox of power is its economic strength, which provides leverage in its dealings with the outside world. So clearly, the economic dimension involves more interdependence and the PRC possesses more influence. There also are bigger economic problems by virtue of China’s economic role: issues of equity in trade, theft of intellectual property, etc. The economy cuts both ways. But on balance, it’s certainly a different dimension than existed in the first Cold War.

Second, on culture. The interaction with China on the cultural, student, and scientific exchange fronts dwarf anything that existed in the first Cold War. The Soviet Union in its entire 70-plus-year history never sent as many students and scholars to America as China sent to the United States in the mid-1980s in any single year.  President Jimmy Carter made a fundamental strategic decision that we were not going to limit student exchange with China, as we had done with the Soviet Union. As long as the federal government wasn’t paying for Chinese students, as many as could come to the U.S. were welcome. By 2020, we had about 375,000 Chinese students here at any one time. We even had PRC students in K-12.

Differences in the two periods aside, let me explain why I find the similarities compelling. First, the U.S. and China are now in an arms race. Both sides are growing their military budgets with each side principally concerned about the other. Last year, each of us boosted our military spending by 7 or 8%–that’s fast growth for a government budget. That direction is clear, and it has been clear for a number of years.

Our strategic competition with the Soviet Union was particularly focused on fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, notably in the heart of Europe. The arms race now with China is more complicated than it was with the Soviet Union because now we have cyber tools that can disable civilian and government systems essential to life and civilization—power and water, medical records, financial records, etc. Also, artificial intelligence. We’re both developing weapons that could be autonomous, and that raises questions about human agency in war fighting. We’re in a space race with China, both in terms of the moon and Mars, with norms concerning militarization and international ownership in space becoming blurred, indeed abandoned.

Then, there’s the Taiwan Strait and the South China and East China Sea issues, giving rise to intensifying naval competition today. In the first Cold War, the Taiwan Strait itself was a boiling pot giving rise to crises in 1954 and 1958. Another aspect of the second Cold War is alliance behavior. In the first Cold War, it was essentially the “free world” and our alliances with NATO, Japan, the ROC, and Republic of Korea (ROK). We competed to build alliances, get friends, and encourage them to spend and mobilize so that our burdens would be less than would otherwise the case. This is the exact same thing that is happening now. In addition, now we have AUKUS, the Quad, and Japan and the ROK now cooperating to a greater extent. China is moving closer to Russia, which gets you back to the first Cold War directly. And Beijing is aligning itself more closely to the DPRK (North Korea) and Iran.

Also similar to the first Cold War, both sides have trouble judging one another’s actual strength, feeding each side’s “worst case analyses”. You have people who say in the public debate in the United States that “China’s not as strong as you think given all its economic problems. Look at their demographic problems. Look at the problems Beijing has with social security and healthcare financing. Look at unemployment among young people. China’s not as strong as it appears. We can push.” Another set of arguments in the United States is that China is stronger than you think and Washington needs to arm itself fast. That is the dominant view in our security apparatus. All this analytic dichotomy finds reflection in China as well, with many PRC analysts seeing the U.S. as fundamentally weak and distracted, what Mao called a “paper tiger.” Others in the PRC argue that a principal danger is that Beijing will underestimate American power. In short, we have many of the same analytic problems judging how strong each of us is in comparison to the other as we had in the first Cold War.

After the first Cold War, in the fullness of time when we really had the information, it turned out in many respects that the Soviet Union wasn’t as strong as we thought. But, like the first Cold War, today’s analytic uncertainty drives dangerous competition forward. Also important, a state’s power in one setting, say the Taiwan Strait, can be greater than in another setting, say dealing with Europe. We could underestimate China’s strength, and will in the Taiwan Strait, and overestimate it elsewhere. For me, the cautionary tale has always been the Korean War. Washington thought that a poor, weak, new PRC wouldn’t dare take on the nuclear-armed United States, winner of World War II. Mao Zedong did take Washington on and fight it to a standstill!

On balance, I’m not arguing that the two Cold Wars are identical. But, I think it is what we Americans would call “whistling past the graveyard” to deny the direction in which our relations are moving and the important similarities with the first Cold War. I’m not arguing identical, I’m arguing frighteningly similar dynamics in important respects. But, you cannot say all that in the book title, so you just simplify and go with it.

Why in your book did you characterize the U.S.-China relationship during the period of engagement as moving from “elite-centric to an increasingly society-to-society, globalized relationship”? How did you argue against the current critique that U.S. elites naively fostered its most substantial competitor?

Our societies are very complicated. The nature of the engagement period was that Mao Zedong (at the end of his life), Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and eight parallel administrations in the United States mobilized various elements of our societies to pursue their interests in one another. At the very start of the rapprochement in the early 1970s, and with normalization at the end of that decade, the decisive action of a few leaders (Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, Zhou Enlai, Carter, and Brzezinski), elites, started the ball rolling down the hill. But soon many other sectors and levels of both societies saw how their interests could be positively affected by joining the process, and shaping it. The relationship rapidly broadened from Ping-Pong, gymnastics, basketball teams, orchestras, and wushu (martial arts) groups, to multinational corporations, localities, mass tourism, and policy dialogues in all manner of domains. The organization I later headed, the National Committee on US-China Relations, brought the Ping-Pong team to the United States in 1972. The entire initiative was importantly financed by the U.S. government, but it also relied heavily on a huge volunteer effort from varied segments of society to organize a nationwide tour for the team, and many large-scale activities thereafter. The very beginnings of this effort saw the U.S. government initially hesitant to take the lead improving relations with China. Our Committee had conversations with President Johnson around 1966-67, encouraging him to move towards China, but he was unable to do so due to the Vietnam War and electoral considerations.

And so, the book recounts how even in the 1960s, groups — importantly the National Committee — mobilized society, including philanthropies such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Luce foundations. We mobilized domestic groups to encourage the government to change its policy. Eventually, under Nixon, Kissinger, and later President Carter, the government responded, but much of the activity was shrouded in secrecy and elite negotiations. Elites in both societies realized that the Soviet Union was a bigger problem for each of us than we needed to be for each other. This was an elite initiative that once taken opened the flood gates to society-to-society interaction on an ever-increasing scale.  At first, we moved towards each other to apply more strategic pressure on the Soviet Union, but soon the rationale for engagement spread across all domains of human interaction.

Almost immediately the business community began to recognize China’s potential and China, initially under Deng Xiaoping, was convinced that the PRC’s economic success would depend on access to knowledge, technology, and the markets of the West, opportunities to which the United States held the keys. Additionally, of importance for President Carter, was the nineteenth and twentieth century role of religious missionaries in China. One of the first things President Carter asked Deng was to permit the printing of Bibles and the reintroduction of missionaries into China. Deng agreed to the first request but not the second. Illustrative of this spiritual motivation, the president of Notre Dame University, Father Theodore Hesburgh, on the National Committee Board of Directors, believed that it was a Christian obligation to improve relations with 25% of the world’s population.

In the second half of the 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s, I was in the State of Ohio where the governor was concerned about the decline of heavy industry in the state. Despite being a conservative Republican and a staunch anti-communist, Governor James A. Rhodes was in favor of growing economic relations with China because he hoped it would revitalize the manufacturing industry in Ohio. His support stemmed from economic concerns. Thus, what I am trying to convey in my book is that the engagement process wasn’t animated simply by Nixon and Mao. Rather its dynamism reflected the fundamental interest groups within both of our societies that wanted to push it along.

However, over subsequent decades, gradually more individuals and groups in both societies came to perceive themselves as relative losers in the process of engagement and globalization, and they began to exert increasing pressure on their respective leaders to adopt a tougher stance with respect to the other side. This process progressively undermined engagement and productive relations. This is the main line of my argument.

Another major aspect of this is that I believe currently we are almost sleepwalking into higher levels of conflict between the United States and China. Armed conflict is not to be excluded. One reason for this is because, in our discourse in both countries — and China is just as guilty of this as are we — we both fail to recognize the significant gains both sides made in U.S.-China relations under globalization. By failing to acknowledge the massive gains of the past, we inadvertently make the seeming costs of current and future friction less than they actually are, and will be.

Living U.S.-China Relations devotes a lot of time to discussing dimensions of gain. Let me highlight a couple. The World Bank recently assessed that about 800 million people in China moved above the international absolute poverty line of $1.90 per day per capita in the last forty-plus years — 800 million is approximately two-plus times the population of the United States. China accounted for 80% of the reduction in world poverty. Now, if you want to talk about human rights, you better start with that fact. Not to ignore all the other problems, all the other injustices, but, you have to start with the fact that two-plus times the population of the United States was lifted out of absolute poverty. That’s a pretty fundamental fact. Then some Americans say, “Well, that’s fine for China, but the United States was a big loser here.” Not so, and I’ll just highlight an economic statistic. If you look at per capita GDP in the two countries over time, at the end of engagement, American per capita GDP was further ahead of China than when reform started. However, there is a problem in the U.S., and that is we didn’t equally (or equitably) distribute the gains of globalization across our society, thereby leaving many people and groups out of the relative gains. So, there are many people who associate globalization with rising inequality, unfairness, and defective rules of the game and failure to even observe what rules there are. That perspective also exists widely in China. Not everybody benefited from globalization in China, and many are not very happy. Even if they did benefit, they might not have benefited as much as someone else, leading to what the Chinese call “red eye disease” — envy. So, it’s all very complicated. But broadly speaking, economically and in terms of human rights defined as economic welfare, both countries, as an aggregate, are infinitely better off than they were at the dawn of engagement. If you just consider the life opportunities of people in both our societies, the winners dwarf the losers.

You might ask, “Okay, what are some of the other benefits that we can identify?” Well, first of all, for the last 40 years, there hasn’t been any major war in this region. The two biggest wars of the first Cold War, as far as the U.S. was concerned, were Korea and Vietnam. Korea was a direct war between America and the PRC. Moreover, most Americans don’t realize how directly involved China was in the Vietnam War. That’s a whole story I delve into.

So, I’m not suggesting that globalization was great for everybody all the time. I’m not denying there were losers, because there were, in both societies. However, we need to appreciate the gains that were made. Without recognizing that, we won’t realize the true costs of conflict now and in the future. It’s not an attempt to gloss over problems. It’s an attempt to provide a balanced perspective. And I believe over time, we will come to see things from a more balanced viewpoint. I just want to minimize the damage imposed before we reach that hopeful day.

Since 2010, the relationship between the U.S. and China has been more competitive than cooperative. In the book you write that “the ascribed goal of each country is unacceptable to the other.” Can you explain your point further? Do you think this stair-step action-reaction cycle can be broken?

Remember, what led Mao, Nixon, Carter, and Deng Xiaoping towards each other was, most importantly, a confluence of recognition that the Cold War strategy of China and America fighting each other was weakening them in the face of their primary strategic problem–the Soviet Union. Defining moving toward each other as in our respective strategic interests opened the floodgates to all other interest groups broadening and pushing the productive process along a wide front.

Well, what’s happening now is that the convergence of strategic interests is no longer evident or bringing us together. Now, by way of contrast, the divergence of strategic interests is pulling us apart. My basic proposition is that if you have a security problem, that problem outweighs economic and cultural considerations–when you’re concerned about your security, you tend to prioritize that over potential damage to your economic or cultural relationships and interests. So, what strikes me as the core of the current problem is that we have each identified the other as our core strategic problem. Some of Living U.S.-China Relations examines the core strategic statements and documents of each of our countries. For instance, if you look at the United States, we have a national security strategy that came out in 2022, along with a nuclear posture review that same year. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech in May of 2022 on relations with China, which is the most comprehensive statement on the PRC Washington has made under President Biden.

All of the current strategic documents have some version of the following thought: “China is the principal threat to American values and interests.” Well, you can interpret that to mean China is the major long-term threat to the United States. That’s how to decode that sentence. Now, we can debate whether that statement is true or not, and under what circumstances it could be made less true. But, that’s the definition that we’ve put out there.

It’s not all the U.S.’s fault; just because I mentioned the U.S. first doesn’t mean I think we’re always the principal problem. I think China is a major mover in this direction too. You can see the most recent statement in March of 2023 by President Xi Jinping at the National People’s Congress and related meetings. He talks about the comprehensive suppression and containment policy of the United States to keep China down and he has made it clear that, along with Putin, he wishes to weaken the role of America in the post-World War II international system. I’m sure that if Americans actually saw Beijing’s unexpurgated strategic plans their blood would run cold.

So, it seems to me that the security apparatus in both our countries has defined each other as the principal problem in terms of national security and each side has adopted a national security strategy that is unacceptable to the other. Consequently, each side begins to think about how it could complicate the economic and security life of the other. How can we each gain more friends in the international system than the other? How can we get our friends to spend more money on defense? Elite circles in Beijing begin to consider how Beijing can take advantage of problems in the Middle East, or bolster Moscow as it destabilizes Europe, thereby diverting Washington’s attention from the PRC. That’s what is happening.

So, once again, you can see this Cold War idea resurfacing. I think this is the core issue. Our two leaders (and groups at all levels in both societies) need to sit down and ask themselves and one another, questions: “Should we be in this position? Is it inevitable? Are we, should we be, each other’s principal security problem?” There are lots of candidates to be problems at the top of our respective agendas: Climate change and global pandemics, for example. If we’re at each other’s throats, how are we going to deal with those challenges? Secondly, let’s address the issue head-on. Is China our principal threat? Well, it seems to me that right now you could argue that Russia, in the heart of Europe, is a bigger, more intractable threat, if Beijing and Washington can manage the Taiwan issue