Thank you Rickey, for that kind introduction and to Barbara Smith, Yawei, and the team at the Carter Center for inviting me here today. It is an honor to be here today at the Jimmy Carter Forum on US-China Relations to celebrate the role of women in the US-China relationship, recognize the role of President Carter in normalization, and reflect on the lessons we have learned over the last 47 years of US-China diplomacy, and in particular in this age of strategic competition. I first met the former President when I was working on the Middle East Peace Process, and later as part of election observer missions. His spirit of public service after he left office serves as an inspiration for those of us who left government service earlier than expected and seek to remain involved and effect positive change.
Before I begin, however, in keeping with the theme of this Forum, I want to recognize the women, many of whom are in the audience, that have played critical roles on US-China relations over the last several decades:
- Jan Berris, the former diplomat at the Consulate General in Hong Kong who was instrumental in organizing ping pong diplomacy
- Susan Shirk, the day-to-day manager of China policy at the State Department during the Jiang Zemin era and the run-up to WTO accession.
- Charlene Barshefsky, the tough, exacting trade negotiator during the 1999 US-China bilateral agreement that paved the way for WTO succession.
- Susan Thornton, the top US diplomat on Asia during the shift from a policy of engagement to one of strategic competition in the first Trump Administration.
- And of course, outside track 1, the many, many women who helped both sides of this complicated relationship understand one another – Bonnie Glaser, Elizabeth Knup, Liz Economy, Meg Rithmire, Jessica Chen Weiss, Bonny Lin. I am certain that I am leaving out more names than I can count, but these scholars in particular played a critical role during my time in government in explaining and providing historical context that helped us craft policy.
Like Jan, my journey on China started with sports diplomacy – I was part of a high school soccer team that travelled to the Pearl River Delta, shortly after Deng Xiaoping made his southern tour to kick off the reform and opening era. At the time, there were still two currencies – one used by foreigners and one by Chinese, two tiers of prices, and no access with the outside world once we entered China – no email, no cell phones, and no internet. At some point, despite losing every single soccer match we played, I realized I was hooked. I studied Chinese in university, traveled to Beijing to study abroad, and returned after graduation to work in a joint-venture before joining the foreign service as a US diplomat specializing in China. Of course, the State Department in its infinite wisdom sent me to the Middle East for the next decade, but eventually I returned to China.
Observing China over this period of rapid change reinforced for me how unexpected the path ahead may be, and how nimble we must be both in our practical approach and also in our intellectual framework. The China we dealt with in the run-up to WTO accession is not the China we are dealing with today. There are different patterns of diplomacy and very different leaders on both sides. China’s hard power projection in the region has grown and the impact of the Chinese economic model on our own economy has sharpened.
As any student of international relations will tell you, structural dynamics are important in charting the course of a bilateral relationship, but I will not use our time today to repeat the well-known debates over rising and status quo powers. As a practitioner who has had a ringside seat to US-China diplomacy for the last 25 years, I will focus on the idiosyncratic elements that can have an equally critical impact on the relationship’s trajectory.
First, the personalities of leaders matter more than observers outside the system realize. And oftentimes more than strategy. This is particularly true in an era of more centralized authority on both sides. They inject an element of uncertainty and possibility. Leaders can hit it off and it can put the relationship on a new trajectory. I saw this dynamic firsthand with the strengthening of the US-India relationship, for example. The affinity between Indian Foreign Secretary Jaishankar and his US counterparts – they genuinely liked and trusted him – led both sides to take greater risks in their respective politics. While trust and affection is in short supply between the US and China, the relationship between the leaders does affect how Beijing deals with the White House and vice versa. President Biden and Xi Jinping spent significant time together as vice presidents, both in China and in the United States, and that familiarity bred some predictability, allowing space for progress on some issues.
Predictability, of course, is no longer a feature of leader-level meetings. That lack of predictability has limited the value of preparatory channels in building towards concrete progress. Instead, Beijing has learned that elevating all issues to President Trump will mean a more favorable hearing for its position. This is a significant deviation from its previous strategy of trying to shape the U.S. approach by building favorable constituencies bottom-up through dialogues.
Second, the maxim that all politics are local applies to foreign policy, and it is even more true in the era of the internet and social media. Presidents watch inflation, consumer sentiment, and yes, the bond market, shifting approaches unpredictably on foreign policy issues in response. President Biden held off on sanctioning Russia’s energy sector over concern about prices at the pump during an election year, leading Moscow to doubt his stomach for tough measures. This White House backed away from doubling tariffs on China – and indeed on European countries – over concerns about rising bond yields. And while the nature of the Chinese system means Chinese leaders are much less responsive to the concerns of their citizens, they still exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to staying on the right side of vocal netizens. These domestically-driven shifts are often misread by foreign counterparts as giving greater leverage than actually exists – very rarely does a counterpart understand the domestic politics of the other to a degree that they can calibrate strategic advantage. Instead, it can lead to miscalculation. Exhibit A: One of the primary drivers of today’s tactical truce between the US and China is Beijing’s need for a stable external environment to encourage recovery of consumer sentiment and the domestic economy. However, the Trump Administration gambled – and lost – in 2024 that the decision on whether to confront or fold in the face of US pressure would be an economic one. It was not. It was a political decision driven by Beijing’s need to show it would not back down in the face of US aggression.
Third, neither the US nor the Chinese system operates as a monolith, and major decisions often emerge from internal bureaucratic competition between institutions, factions, and worldviews. In the Trump Administration, there is a visible tension now between those who favor a more hawkish posture towards China and those who approach China through a transactional ‘dealmaking’ lens. The lack of a consensus – and no central policy coordination mechanism – leads to contradictory and sometimes incoherent public messaging and policy actions. And in China, unclear leadership guidance, competing bureaucratic priorities, and interprovincial rivalries drive competing approaches, even if public talking points suggest unity.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, China has increasing agency in the direction of the relationship. A perception – and maybe even reality – of parity is driving this change. Beijing is now acting pre-emptively, not just mirroring US actions in proportional retaliation. Informed at least in part by what it sees as its success in forcing the Trump Administration to climb down twice from the threat of tariffs in April and October, China now views itself as an equal to the United States. It will hit back harder when the US hits first, not merely absorb the blows, as one Chinese analyst told me recently. This will have implications far beyond trade negotiations.
So, with these considerations about personality, domestic politics, bureaucratic fragmentation, and relative power in mind, let’s move on to lessons drawn from the frontlines of diplomacy in an age of strategic competition:
While it may seem a lifetime ago, 2017 – the first year of the first Trump Administration – was one of relative stability in US-China relations. The patterns of diplomacy felt familiar: preparatory channels and visits by the Secretary of State to Beijing, the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, a state visit, and the announcement of joint cooperative projects. The second year was one of escalation -four rounds of tariff increases, and eventually an off ramp to negotiations which eventually led to the phase one trade agreement signing at the White House in January 2020. We looked set for a year of stability. Then COVID hit, and everything stopped. Channels went dark, the world shutdown, and amidst the lack of transparency over COVID origins, Trump blamed Beijing for the meltdown of his first term.
On the ground in Beijing and in Washington on the front lines of diplomacy, this sine curve felt even more volatile – dueling consulate closures; visa restrictions on journalists, academics, and students; a DOJ initiative that appeared to target Americans based on ethnicity, and heated language about Communist China. It felt like a fundamental break on both sides.
Despite that volatility, I walked away with a few lessons from the first Trump Administration, most of which were learned the hard way:
- Don’t be afraid of some friction in the relationship – both sides need stability and introducing friction is often the only way to effect change.
- Build in off ramps with diplomacy.
- Know what you want when you enter negotiations.
- Insist on written text and designate a clear, empowered negotiator.
- Unexpected crises – black swans as my Chinese counterparts would say – are a feature not a bug of the US China relationship. Build in buffers to withstand these crises.
- Protect some level of exchange between the Chinese and American people. That is the real ballast in the long-term relationship.
When the Biden Administration entered office in January 2021, the priority was rebuilding American faith in institutions at home, infrastructure needed for long-term economic growth, and alliances with partners around the globe. China policy was in fact not really about China, it was about focusing on American sources of strength: invest, align, and compete.
President Biden was clear about his desire to compete vigorously with China, and his goal was to manage that competition with diplomacy to ensure it did not careen out of control. But travel to China was nearly impossible, meetings were largely virtual, and China was in a defensive crouch following COVID. Global crises like the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine distracted attention from US-China, and Beijing was in no mood to manage the competition or, as a Chinese official said at the time “provide a seatbelt for a speeding car.”
That changed in early 2023. The brush with the possibility of US-China military conflict when Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, followed a few months later by the week-long journey of the Chinese surveillance balloon over the United States and its shootdown by a US jet over the Atlantic brought both sides to their senses – both sides had a glimpse of the risks of competition without diplomacy, the risks of being in a speeding car without a seatbelt, as my Chinese counterpart would have said.
My lessons from the slow, painful process of building back diplomatic channels from 2023-2024:
- Create space for diplomacy. In times of tension, both sides need no profile, senior channels to manage and stabilize the relationship. This provides space to avoid grandstanding or playing to domestic audiences, and builds predictability that what is said behind closed doors will remain behind closed doors.
- Avoid miscommunication. Communicating about intentions and the drivers of the action/reaction cycle is critical to avoiding a downward spiral.
- Positive optics matter. They are important to keep both sides coming back to the table, especially at the leader-level. Both leaders need to show they are delivering results for their people and manage voices within their ranks arguing against diplomacy.
- Be realistic: cooperation in this era of strategic competition is not realistic, at least in government-to-government channels. Instead, seek overlapping areas of interest where some degree of coordinated action is possible: law enforcement cooperation on threats both recognize like counternarcotics or cyber scams, military to military channels for crisis management.
The relationship has shown more resilience than originally expected over the last 10 years of strategic competition, demonstrating that both sides have an interest in keeping it from spinning out of control. But it has also exhibited a nearly uninterrupted structural decline and it is unclear where that decline will end.
Rising Chinese confidence and risk tolerance mean we are in uncharted territory. Washington is also far from a predictable actor, with fraying alliances, and no consensus on the approach to China. And there will be other unexpected crises – black swans – in the US-China bilateral relationship in the coming years that will challenge our capacity to manage the competition with diplomacy: an AI enabled destructive cyber attack, another pandemic, AI hallucinations in military hardware, changes in both countries leadership. Are we prepared for these crises? Do we have diplomatic channels that can withstand and buffer shocks? How will changes in leaders and lack of predictability affect action/reaction cycles in both capitals?
Absent concerted effort on both sides, over time, unfettered strategic competition could lead to a bifurcated, less stable, more conflict prone world. The path ahead is not an easy one, and leaders and diplomats on both sides will need flexible, patient approaches to grapple with this continued transition from the previous era of engagement through strategic competition to whatever awaits us on the other side.