A Progressive China Policy: An Interview with Jake Werner Part 1

Miranda Wilson: Much of your report focuses on recognizing likenesses between the U.S. and China. In your opinion, what are the most important similarities between the two nations that leaders on both sides should recognize? (Common challenges, goals, etc.)

Jake Werner: I think that leaders on both sides recognize some important common challenges. They often talk about climate change, pandemics, global economics, security, and stability. Both countries have a deep investment in a prosperous global economy and maintaining their country’s ability to succeed in that economy. That’s a good starting point.

What I would push them on is to be more open to recognizing similarities between their societies. This is a lot harder because leaders on both sides tend to view the other as the symbolic opposite of their own country. America sees itself as representing freedom and democracy, and China as a symbol of state control of politics and state intervention in the economy. On the Chinese side, leaders tend to think of the United States as a bullying superpower and China as the one standing up for the underdogs of the global system. There’s a kernel of truth in both of these views, but what’s missing is how similar the two countries really are.

In both countries, there’s a pronounced individualism at the level of everyday life. The societies are both highly competitive and market-driven. That leads to sharp inequalities and very serious exploitation and oppression facing a lot of people. It leads to unaffordable healthcare, housing, and education, which amps up the competitive pressures. On the positive side, the United States and China are the two most technologically innovative and dynamic countries in the world. All of that competition leads to positive outcomes for those who win the game, and it plays an important role in encouraging innovation.

If we could think about it at the level of people living in the countries rather than at the level of the leaders of the countries or their symbolic value, we would see more clearly that people in the United States and China have a great deal in common. They face a lot of the same challenges. They suffer from a lot of the same injustices internally, and that means that they could potentially work together on reforming their societies. Seeing that would help both sides humanize the other and inspire more empathy.

Chris Mao: You mention that U.S. attempts to exclude China from global power structures may lead to destabilization. How do you envision the role of smaller, non-aligned states in the process of transitioning to a multipolar world that prioritizes peace and inclusivity?

JW: The United States and China are increasingly fixated on their bilateral conflict, and that’s making it very hard for them to see opportunities for cooperation. Third countries are caught between the two elephants. They’re in danger of being trampled, and they can see much more clearly how important it is for the United States and China to maintain peace and work together on some of these core challenges. Third countries, whether they are closer to the United States, closer to China, or in between, have all expressed a desire for the two countries to move away from conflict. They say that loud and clear.

There’s also a deeper level to this issue. I argue that a great deal of the feeling of a zero-sum competition between the United States and China comes from the belief that the global system simply doesn’t have the space for both countries to succeed at the same time. If you accept that belief as reality, then almost inevitably you have to engage in conflict because only one side can succeed. The obvious alternative — which is not obvious enough to the leaders in the United States and China — is that we could open up space within the global system for both countries to prosper. How do we do that? Well, the United States, China, and all of these third countries should be working together.

In the global economy, growth and investments are distributed in a highly uneven way. We have stagnant growth, we have low levels of productivity, and we have much lower levels of trade and foreign direct investment than in the 1990s. The system is dysfunctional. We also have extreme inequality both within countries and between countries. That’s what is making it seem like for one country to succeed means others will have to fail.

If we could work together to correct that, speed up development, and increase the equity with which wealth is distributed, that would create more jobs and consumers, which would create space for Chinese companies and American companies to succeed together. But because the United States and China are so focused on the conflict, they’re not looking for opportunities to cooperate. It’s the role of third countries to demand that the United States and China pay attention to the common good and the urgent need for economic development.

This is also true on the climate question, on public health, and on global security; all of these things are deeply related. Third countries need to apply pressure to the United States and China to work together on reforms to make progress on all of these serious dangers for humanity.

American leaders in particular are very defensive about this. They feel their power is slipping away. One significant motivation for hostility towards China is the sense that China is taking our power away. Adopting a cooperative mindset is very challenging for American leaders, but their broader goal of reviving the rules-based international order and guarding against any Chinese bid for hegemony would be much easier to achieve if they distributed power more broadly and allowed other countries — Brazil, India, Indonesia — to have a greater say in the system. That would create checks and balances against any one superpower dominating the system.

MW: Are Brazil, India, and Indonesia the countries most willing to work with both the United States and China? The conversation is often dominated by discussions of who is on whose side.

JW: With only a few exceptions, almost every country wants to avoid conflict and maintain close and productive relationships with both the United States and China.

U.S. allies have been reluctant to publicly criticize the United States, but privately, they have been resistant to America pushing them to adopt a more antagonistic posture towards China. They haven’t always refused to go in the direction the United States wants, but they have been cautioning against it and asking to slow things down and change the rhetoric. The rhetoric within the Biden administration changed after the first couple of years partly in response to these complaints from very close allies.

But there is a special role for countries that are not leaning to one side or the other. Brazil has really been at the forefront. You see similar non-alignment from Indonesia and South Africa. India is more complicated, but it is also trying to play a role between the two countries rather than aligning entirely with the United States. These are the biggest, most consequential countries in the Global South, and they have said very explicitly they don’t want to be forced into a choice. They want to maintain constructive relations with both sides.

CM: You mention that both countries are locked in a security dilemma, with defensive actions perceived as aggressive by the other side. What measures, such as confidence-building protocols or arms control discussions, do you think could successfully reduce the risk of miscalculation and military escalation in the region?

JW: Both sides have gone a long way toward lowering the overheated rhetoric. The United States has put a lot of effort into reassuring China that it is not trying to permanently separate Taiwan from China. China is helping the United States with fentanyl-related issues. Steps like that have improved the atmosphere, but in terms of more practical and more demanding forms of confidence building, there is very little progress.

For example, it’s been a real priority of the United States to establish a workable crisis management relationship with China. This should be an easy ask. It would not demand that China change its core behaviors in any way, it’s just an attempt to create a protective system in case an accident takes place. But China has been very resistant to putting together such a crisis management system. China thinks that the United States wants to create a crisis and escape the consequences of it, which will lead the United States to be more reckless. So, the lack of trust can be really damaging to something that at first glance seems so simple.

The same thing can be seen the other way around. China has suggested that all the nuclear powers begin negotiations on committing to a “no first use” nuclear weapons policy. As far as we know, the United States has not responded to this. Again, this seems like it’s not demanding that the United States change its doctrine immediately, it’s just opening negotiations. China, up to this point, had been unwilling to discuss nuclear issues because the United States and Russia have massively more nuclear weapons than China. This is a chance to draw China into discussions around nuclear weapons. We shouldn’t assume that it’ll be successful, but talking is better than not talking.

We should continue in the direction of low-stakes discussion, but I think that something deeper is going to be required. We need to change the tenor of the relationship. The Chinese side has concluded that the United States is committed to preventing China from growing in wealth and power and for that reason it has nothing to talk about with the American side. If we’re to get ourselves off the trajectory toward conflict, the United States will have to convince China that judgment is wrong but will have to do so without compromising core U.S. goals. I think proposals for robust cooperation to overcome zero-sum pressures in the global system could achieve that.

Likewise, China needs to do the same thing. China’s rhetoric at least has been more responsible on this front. China has continuously held out the possibility of mutual gain and even offered to bring the United States into the Belt and Road. But there are core U.S. concerns that China just dismisses. China will have to start being responsive on some of these things to change that basic conclusion on the American side that China is essentially our enemy now.

Reframing the problem of production overcapacity is a good example of how to open more ambitious possibilities for cooperation. The United States has been claiming that Chinese industrial policy distorts market forces and causes disorder in the global economy. Chinese leaders think that U.S. critics are simply jealous of their success. I think Chinese economic behavior is understandable in the existing context, but that means that there’s something wrong with the existing context.

Another way of saying “overproduction” is “underconsumption.” The world doesn’t suffer from too much wealth but from too much deprivation. The solution, then, is not to end the use of economic development techniques that have made China far richer today than when it first integrated into the global economy. The solution is to bring the possibilities of development to all those billions of people who have languished in poverty as wealth in the global economy became more and more concentrated in the hands of wealthy people in all the major countries.

If the United States is not asking China to unilaterally repudiate its whole economic strategy but rather to join together to make the world richer, that opens a huge range of possibilities for cooperation that could build trust even as they make progress against the underlying zero-sum drivers of conflict.

MW: The U.S. election is quickly approaching. I’m curious: if Harris were to win, do you think she would do anything different than Biden’s currently doing with China policy? If Trump were to win the election, do you think he’d learned anything from his last presidency, or would we just see another very trade-focused China policy?

JW: There are a lot of questions for both presidential candidates about what the personnel would look like. We don’t have a good sense in particular with Trump. With Harris, there’s a question of how much continuity with the Biden administration we would see.

Most of those close to Harris on national security issues have been serving within the administration. So it’s a little bit hard to judge because they haven’t been writing publicly except to support the administration’s agenda. If you look at some of their writing during the Trump years, it’s fair to say they might be a bit more flexible in their thinking around China. But one major assumption would push them toward conflict: they think that the United States has to be the one to build world order.

What we would need to see instead is a commitment to reform as an inclusive process. When global rules were written after World War II and then significantly revised in the 1990s, only a handful of rich countries dominated the process. Today, when power is more broadly distributed, no reform agenda will succeed if it doesn’t include at a minimum China and the other developing members of the G20.  

I’m doubtful we would see that under Harris, but I also would say that the larger political context is going to be decisive. The administration’s decisions will be conditioned by what is happening in American society and the rest of the world. That means those of us outside of government have a role to play because we’re going to decide the context they’re operating in. 

In a Trump administration, I would expect very aggressive and exclusionary economic warfare. This actually is a point of continuity with Biden’s policy. Biden adopted the substance if not the rhetoric of Trump’s economic nationalism, trying to exclude China from the U.S. market, and trying to cut China out of important global markets. The Biden administration took what Trump started and further developed it. A new Trump administration would take what Biden developed and ramp it up even further. At some level, it would be a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.

The big question is on the security side of things. The Republican Party is very deep into a debate about what its foreign policy future should look like. The kind of nationalist and nativist currents represented by JD Vance have been skeptical of the application of American power globally. They are in contention with neoconservative elements and offensive realist elements that are much more comfortable with assertive U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, the more restraint-oriented elements around Trump are also the ones animated by xenophobia and a sense of cultural or civilizational threat coming from China. Given a context of very deep bilateral tension, I wouldn’t be surprised if that pushed them in a more confrontational direction.

A new Trump administration would be very unpredictable, and the personnel would probably be unstable. Its direction could change over the course of the term, and we could see both a more restrained orientation and a more aggressive orientation in different periods. My guess is that the economic conflicts and the xenophobic and nationalist currents within the Republican Party would tend to push toward a very serious conflict with China.

CM: Your report mentions that China is leading the world in the deployment of clean energy technologies like solar and electric vehicles. What potential do you see for the U.S. and China to collaborate on large-scale climate initiatives, especially in the Global South?

JW: There’s a couple of things to be said here. First, there are different currents in the Biden administration, but the basic way the Biden administration came out on this was an attempt to assert U.S. leadership on climate issues in a way that would leave China out. A good example is the negotiation they pursued with the European Union on green steel and aluminum, kind of a buyers club, that would’ve excluded dirty producers of steel and aluminum. It didn’t end up succeeding, but it illustrates the approach. The idea was that if the United States defines high standards that China can’t meet, we make China look bad. That will either make the United States look better in the competition or China will feel pressure and improve what it’s doing. That approach to U.S.-China climate policy is terribly counterproductive. It encourages zero-sum competition, and maybe most importantly, it’s simply unrealistic to think that China, which is leading in so many of the climate-relevant technologies, could be cut out of the climate solution.

The Chinese record on climate is mixed. On the one hand, it’s currently the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions by a wide margin. But on the other hand, China is the only country that is expanding clean energy at the rate that would be necessary to avoid a climate catastrophe. It has done more than any other country to bring down the cost of clean energy and to build up the supply chains necessary for the climate transition. China absolutely has to be at the center of any global climate solution, and it’s a dead end both politically and practically to try to box China out.

So how could the United States and China work together in a more realistic and productive way? One suggestion is co-financing climate transition-related projects in the Global South. A lot of people in Washington have been very critical of Chinese lending and investment in the Global South. They say it doesn’t meet basic standards, whether those are environmental, labor rights, or community input into projects. They neglect the fact that American companies don’t have a very good record on these things either, but the criticism is valid.

One way to address that criticism that doesn’t deepen hostility but rather overcomes it would be to draw Chinese lenders and investors into projects that are also being financed by, for example, multilateral development banks like the World Bank or regional banks like the African Development Bank. If Chinese lenders are co-financing with these development banks or with bilateral agencies, then they would have to meet the higher standards those agencies have for these projects. That would lead to better outcomes for the projects because the workforce would be happier, the environmental outcome would be better, and the local community would be more bought into the project. It would also encourage China to put more money into these kinds of projects, which is important because Chinese funding for development projects in the Global South has dropped quite a bit in recent years. The world desperately needs all the capital it can get to support the climate transition.

Another problem with the Biden approach to global climate policy has been the sense that the United States is going to develop its own version of everything that China is doing. For example, the United States is developing a solar panel manufacturing industry or electric vehicles industry — if China is doing it, the United States needs to do it, too. In some cases, this kind of duplication is smart and important, both for economic reasons and for climate reasons. It’s a bad policy for the production of important goods to be in only one country. Production needs to be in multiple countries — though not necessarily in the United States — so that the supply chains are resilient.

But duplicating everything is not a good use of resources or a realistic approach to the climate transition. There is another path: China can specialize in some parts of the climate transition and the United States can specialize in other parts. European companies, Japanese companies, and Brazilian companies can specialize in other parts. I don’t think the United States is ever going to have a competitive solar panel manufacturing industry, but American software producers could be an important part of how global solar power generation gets implemented. We need to look for those kinds of complementarities. If we’re assuming that the United States will go to war with China and so we need independent capacities in all of these things, then honestly we’re not serious about the global climate transition. The only solution on climate or any of these other major global problems is through an inclusive global system.