Interview with Andrew Mertha: The Past, Present and Future of U.S.-China Relations

Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and Director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). From 2019 to 2021, Professor Mertha served as the Vice Dean at SAIS. He is a leading scholar in the study of U.S.-China relations in the United States. In this interview, Professor Mertha discusses the role of Chinese and U.S. leaders in navigating the relationship between the two countries, the interaction of U.S.-China relations with domestic politics, his views on engagement policy, the prospects for the development of Sinology in the US, the Taiwan issue, and the role of Cambodia in the U.S.-China competition.

I heard that you lived in China for many years. Could you talk about how these experiences of living in China have influenced your career in US-China relations or China studies?

I have lived in China for a little bit over seven years, beginning back in 1988. That’s a long time, although not nearly enough! During that period, I lived in various parts of the country, particularly the Southwest, the Lower Yangzi Region, and Guangdong/Hong Kong. I believe this experience has had several benefits. Firstly, it allowed me to gain a much better understanding of China, the Chinese people, their lives, and the ways in which they interact with one another, with the state, and directly with the economic forces shaping it all. Secondly, living in China for such a long time has influenced my work in a significant way. I tend to engage research questions and agendas that require me to be on the ground in China, outside of libraries and universities, immersed in the thick of it, so to speak. And that has been vital for the kind of work that I do, which is not Beijing-centric. It’s also work that I hope represents larger parts of the country and can incorporate some of the local elements that are such a key part of governance in China and state-society relations and Center-local dynamics, which are the engine of Chinese politics. So, this length and breadth of experience in country has been vital to shaping my work.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when you are studying China, even on your best day, maybe you’ll have 20% of the information that you need. Because of this, a lot of scholarship on China is – must be – inductive; you have to constantly make inferences based on very little information. Ultimately you rely on instinct, and the only way you can develop a robust instinct for a place is to have spent time there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think about things systematically. However, there are times when you must make a judgment call, and it’s important to base that judgment on, at least in my case, experience that only comes with having spent a considerable amount of time in the country. As opportunities for such exposure are drying up, it make me worried about the quality of analysis required by both sides to manage the relationship.

You have taught courses at SAIS on contemporary Chinese politics and Chinese leadership. What do you think are the philosophies of Chinese leaders after reform and opening up in dealing with U.S.-China relations? How have U.S. leaders responded?

Well, that’s a huge question. I think the one thing that has been a constant, really going back to the end of the 19th century for China’s leaders, whether they’re China’s communist leaders, China’s nationalist leaders, or Qing dynasty royalty, at least the reformists within the late Qing court, is for China to become rich and powerful. There have been different strategies to accomplish that, but I think a lot of people in the United States today are surprised that China has become so powerful. My reaction to that is none of us should have been surprised. That was always something that China sought to do. We should spend less time on feeling hoodwinked and more time on objectively and maturely managing the relationship. Of course, which leader you’re working with has a huge bearing on how to go about doing that. For most of the pre-reform era working with Mao Zedong, the United States and China simply didn’t have a relationship.

And that changed dramatically in 1972, for the most part because of geopolitics, to balance the strength of the Soviet Union and provide some degree of security between the US and China. Deng Xiaoping’s post-Mao approach was very much an extremely self-confident one: China is weak and requires investment in money, expertise, and capital from the West, particularly from the United States. It was in the US’ interest to be on the other side of that equation. So, it was very much along the lines of mutually supporting one another, even as the domestic politics in both countries made managing that relationship difficult, particularly during the 1990s. In the early Jiang Zemin era, while he was trying to figure out his own political footing, there really wasn’t much of a China policy on the United States’ side during President Bill Clinton’s first term.

It was only in 1997 and 1998 that the two leaders were able to find mutually literacy in an economics-based language to create a logic of engagement. Unfortunately, this was eclipsed by the events of 9/11, and, as a result, the United States didn’t have a coherent China policy during the George W. Bush administration. There was an attempt to fashion a China policy in the Obama administration, but I don’t think there was enough commitment or strength on either side to make it a priority. Things are very different now with Xi Jinping, and things are very challenging right now, not simply – but in no small part – because President Trump reacted to a growing set of grievances that had been on the table since the 1990s and finally took action, at least in the view of his supporters. But taking a sledgehammer to the delicate and intricate US-China trade policy has had a hugely negative effect economically and politically on the overall bilateral relationship. And Trump’s anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 crisis didn’t help. I think there has been some disappointment since President Biden came to power in that he and Secretary of State Blinken have not really worked to roll back some of those key measures, perhaps in part to the domestic political situation in the US, which is as bad as I have ever seen it in my lifetime.  And I was alive – albeit quite young – in 1968.

So, it’s always been a difficult relationship. I think the two presidents, or rather maybe three presidents that had the most success – I would say there maybe two and a half – one was President Nixon; the other was President Carter, who does not get nearly enough credit for his deft handling of the relationship; and then finally in Bill Clinton’s second term, I think he realized how to move the relationship forward. In each of those cases, there was a real coherent commitment to improve and build up the bilateral relationship that you really don’t see other administrations.

You’ve just pointed out the U.S. presidents that you think have been more successful in handling U.S.-China relations. How do you assess what Chinese leaders after Deng Xiaoping have done for U.S.-China relations?

It’s a tough question. I think perhaps out of the three post-Deng Xiaoping leaders in China, the one that has been the most effective in fostering US-China relations has been Jiang Zemin. I think Hu Jintao represented much more of a consensus and inward-looking relationship, and there were at the time a lot of criticisms within China that he wasn’t strong enough to manage the relationship. I think the proof is in the way in which the relationship was allowed to drift. I think Xi Jinping sees the relationship in cold, unsentimental, geopolitical terms. Even if he were to soften up a bit, there is unfortunately insufficient will by the leaders in either of our countries to isolate – elevate – the relationship from domestic political concerns.

Could you comment more on your views on isolating the relationship from domestic political concerns? Why it’s important to do that?

I think that the relationship has been captured by domestic politics in both countries, and that’s a very difficult filter through which to manage this relationship. Because, at the same time, China is becoming much stronger than it had been, it has become much more outward-looking in terms of its foreign policies and investment strategies. This is the time when we should be the most engaged with one another. But, in fact, we’re losing many opportunities because of this domestic capture of what should be an independent and autonomous bilateral relationship, freed from the constraints and challenges of domestic politics.

Of course, I’m a scholar, not a policymaker, so I understand just how difficult it is to work in the policy world. Nonetheless, I don’t see either side really making a sustained effort, expending the necessary amount of political capital. I think a lot of that has to do with the dissolution of the vast professional networks between US policymakers, their staffs, and their Chinese counterparts because of Donald Trump’s dismantling of as many China desks within the US government as he could. Now we have a lot of emptiness instead of this important membrane within the relationship that could act as a shock absorber for any kind of events and prevent them from turning into crises. Much of the re-staffing taking place is with smart people who nevertheless do not have the depth of China experience necessary to be knowledgeable, let alone effective. The disincentive of people who wish to work in the US government from going to China, even for language study, will only contribute to this lack of deep mutual understanding. And that’s not a forward-looking way of pursuing our common interests.

What is the implication for U.S. policymakers of understanding the role of China’s domestic affairs in the bilateral relationship?

Smarter people than me have said that one of the reasons why American policymakers don’t understand China’s international behavior is because we assume, like our own, it’s based on responses to international events. In fact, they and I think the opposite is true; that is, China’s international behavior abroad is based on its own security preoccupations at home. To misunderstand that, as I think many policymakers do, leads to a lack of understanding of what China’s leaders prioritize and leads to suboptimal policy towards China. I think it’s always been the case that we tend to think more in terms of international relations than on the salience, importance, and primacy of domestic politics in China. So, that’s not an ideology per se; it’s a preoccupation, a prioritization of policies. Once we understand that, I think we have a much better roadmap in terms of how to manage the relationship.

After reading your book chapter, A Half Century of Engagement: The Study of China and the Role of the China Scholarship Community, I believe you are a supporter of the engagement policy. Why do you support it? What do you think the purpose of the engagement policy should be, if not to change China?

The journalist John Pomfret has written about the US-China relationship and how over the past two centuries it has been a cycle of excitement, enthusiasm, disappointment, and disengagement, and then the cycle starts again. So, I don’t think there’s anything new under the sun in US-China relations. I think we’re in a particularly low point in the cycle now, but I still am confident that it remains a cycle. That said, there have been a lot of people who have criticized engagement and the engagement strategy, saying that the people who had been advocating for engagement were wrong, and here we have the breakdown in US-China relations as proof of that. I disagree pretty strongly with that assessment for several reasons. I think some of them start with the assumption that the purpose of engagement was to change China. I think that’s historically untrue with the current China watcher community.

This community that’s been in place for the past 50 or 60 years, I think learned from their predecessors who had tried to change China and failed miserably. So, I think there are two reasons why this notion of changing China is a fool’s errand. First, such a mission almost always fails, and I think it’s presumptuous of us to even think about effectively doing so. But the other part of that is that China has been changing, just not necessarily in a direction that we might want or anticipate. I think the current generation of China scholars recognize that, and for them, the goal of engagement is not to change China; it is to understand China and to allow China to understand us.

Today in Washington, DC, there are a lot of people who say that those who are pro-engagement are weak on China. Essentially, what that logic suggests is that to be stronger on China means to disengage from China and means denying ourselves information on China and denying China information about the US. And I’m not just speaking as a scholar, but as policymakers, I think we should be in pursuit of more information rather than less. So, engagement really has very little to do with whether one is a China hawk or a China dove, if you want to call it that. It has everything to do with people who are pro-information versus people who are anti-information. And so, I stand by the engagement strategy that has brought us so much knowledge about China and has been so critical in managing the relationship because the people who have most successfully managed the relationship, at least on the US side, are those who understand China.

Do you feel that scholars who support engagement policies are being marginalized? Do you think it’s possible that Sinology will disappear in the U.S. in the future?

Absolutely, we feel marginalized. However, that makes our job that much more important, that much more valuable. One of the good things about being an academic is that I’m not angling for any kind of political position. My contributions, hopefully, are in my scholarship, teaching, and in my observations about China. So, that’s something that is, up until now anyway, pretty much unaffected by the politics here.

And I don’t think China Studies will disappear in the future. I believe that China is too big and the tradition of Sinology is just too deeply entrenched and embedded for that to happen. That said, it has become increasingly challenging, particularly for younger scholars. All the incentives they have to get tenure, promotion, and to make a name for themselves in various disciplines are contingent upon their ability to do the kind of fieldwork or data analysis that has become increasingly difficult, again, largely because of access. As a result, there are a number of workarounds that people have been trying. One is studying China from outside of China. Another would be to focus on those subject areas where it’s easier to collect the kind of data they require. The problem with that, of course, is that it becomes distortionary as far as our understanding of China is concerned. Rather than seeing the elephant, we’re kind of moving backward, so that all we’re really seeing is the trunk, and maybe a leg and an ear instead of the whole thing, and that’s something that would, I think, set things back quite a bit.

All that being said, in my recent trip to China, I found that our colleagues in Chinese universities and research institutes are extremely welcoming. I’ve been able to speak to them frankly about some of the challenges that we all face, and they’ve been extremely positive in sharing many of those and trying to find solutions to move forward. They are frustrated, too, with the status quo, and that is oddly encouraging to me.

It was the first time I had been in China in four years, yet things felt comfortably familiar. I was only there for two weeks, so I couldn’t go into too much depth, but I did get a strong sense that things are not quite as bad as even we scholars were thinking they might be. The last point I would say on that is that despite all these challenges, there’s been some terrific work by both us and Chinese scholars, sometimes, maybe oftentimes, in collaboration with one another, that have brought us the type of information and understanding about the structure and process of the Chinese state that’s as good as anything that’s come out in the past. It requires a lot more work, it requires a lot more innovation, and there’s probably less of it than there would be at any given time, say 15 or 20 years ago, but it hasn’t disappeared completely. And that’s also a hopeful sign.

You traveled to Taiwan last month to observe the election. What impact do you think Lai’s administration would have on U.S.-China relations?

That’s a good question. I think we’ll have a much better idea when we hear Lai Ching-te’s inauguration speech. That said, one of the things that we are seeing is, given the mainland China’s behavior towards Taiwan in recent months and years, combined with, I think, a potentially dangerously ambiguous US approach to Cross-Strait relations, Lai has his work cut out for him and it’s not going to be easy. I think it would be helpful if both China and the US take a bit of a step back and see how things actually are, while reassuring one another that there won’t be any actions that appear to be a deviation from the status quo. For me, the biggest worry, frankly, is the 2024 U.S. presidential election. That’s something where I think, depending on who’s in office, might have a very different impact on what the mainland’s incentives might be vis-a-vis how it engages Taiwan. And I’m not showing my political stripes here, but given Donald Trump’s recent comments about NATO, as well as the ongoing criticism of U.S. policy supporting Ukraine, if I were Taiwanese, I would be very worried indeed.

How do you think U.S. domestic politics will affect the Taiwan issue?

I would imagine that Taiwan would play a bit more of a role in US domestic political discourse. In fact, we’ve seen that in recent media coverage of aid to Ukraine and Israel. I’ve noticed an increasing number of individuals expressing concerns about what the US is going to do vis-a-vis Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Taiwan has become a regular part of that sentence, it is being elevated in the domestic political discourse, and that’s something potentially worrisome. Moreover, I’m uncertain whether, if the House of Representatives were not in the terrible state it’s currently in, there would be more congressional delegations to Taiwan. I believe we’re using it as a domestic political tool to criticize the administration, as well as to provoke Beijing. If those are the motivations behind these visits, then I consider them irresponsible. I think the bipartisan delegation that visited Taiwan after the elections was appropriate and should serve as a model, but Speaker Pelosi’s visit, and McCarthy’s flirtation with the idea of doing the same when he was Speaker, seemed to mark the beginning of a potentially dangerous trend of Congress delving too deeply into sensitive matters.

You have done a lot of research on Cambodian politics and Sino-Cambodian relations. What do you think the role is of a small Southeast Asian country like Cambodia in the competition between China and the United States?

It’s a great question, and I think Cambodia, as a small Southeast Asian nation, would otherwise be insignificant were it not for its geography. This is a point where the United States and China truly diverge. China, I believe, recognizes the strategic importance of having a reliable partner in mainland Southeast Asia, which grants China access to the Gulf of Thailand and beyond. Additionally, Cambodia could potentially serve as a form of counter to Vietnam—I hesitate to say “counterweight” because it’s asymmetrical, but at the very least, it could provide some form of ballast.

Unfortunately, the United States does not prioritize that part of the world. To quote an old chestnut, “war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”  Much like what we saw 50 years ago, I’m afraid we might realize that this kind of neglect can ultimately be quite costly, and China is very much succeeding where we don’t even choose to compete. I make no apologies for the regime in Cambodia. It is one with which one must hold one’s nose to work with, given their human rights record and the ways in which they’ve moved in an illiberal direction since 1997. But if they’re the only game in town, then we have to deal with them. I find it somewhat ironic that it is in Southeast Asia where the US seems to be lacking a geopolitical gene that we see in U.S. behavior elsewhere in the world, and that is something that China is exploiting as any rising power would.