伯恩斯大使谈美中关系（5月2日史汀生中心在线活动文字记录）
Watch via link: https://youtu.be/p7YyFpIXxec
Participants:
- Brian Finlay, President and Chief Executive Officer, Stimson Center
- John Bellinger, Board of Directors, Stimson Center
- Yun Sun, Director of the China Program, Stimson Center
- Nicholas Burns, Ambassador of the United States to the People’s Republic of China
Brian Finlay
Well, a very good morning, good afternoon, good evening, from wherever you are tuning in from. My name is Brian Finlay. I’m the President and CEO here at the Stimson Center. This is a great opportunity this morning. Thank you for making the time to join us for a conversation with the U.S. Ambassador to Beijing. This is clearly a complicated moment in U.S.-China relations, and it is reflected, I think, in the interest we have seen in this particular conversation. Here at Stimson we are trying to redefine the role of foreign policy think tanks and the role, indeed, that a think tank can play in promoting peace and prosperity around the globe. We start always with solid, independent research, and we run our research to ground, implementing our ideas in the field wherever and whenever possible. But the intermediary step is to bring diverse constituencies together, to try to build uncommon alliances, find common ground and expand upon that common ground. And that is what this conversation here today is going to help us build a roadmap toward identifying opportunities between the United States and China on critical global issues. We are joined today by my colleagues who are going to carry this conversation forward: John Bellinger, a board member here at Stimson. Thank you for participating. John is a senior partner at the law firm of Arnold and Porter, and in their national security practice. And of course, our very own Yun Sun, who is a senior fellow and director of our China program. I will leave it to them to introduce the Ambassador. But thank you again for joining us, John, Yun. Please take it away.
John Bellinger
Thanks very much Brian. Good morning, good evening to everybody. We have this morning, this evening, Ambassador to China, Nick Burns, who arrived in China in March one year ago. Wonderful to have you with us. Ambassador Burns has had a distinguished career in the State Department. He started in 1983, served in a number of posts, including as ambassador to Greece and ambassador to NATO. I first met Ambassador Burns in 2005, when we had our Senate confirmation hearings together in the second term of the Bush Administration, he to be the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the third ranking official in the State Department, and I as the legal adviser. I have been grateful to Ambassador Burns ever since that day of our confirmation hearings because he was such a highly respected diplomat at the time that he drew all of the questions from the Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, leaving me a free ride, so I’ve been grateful ever since that day. We then spent almost every day for the next three and a half years together, meeting in the morning and in the evening. After he left the department, he has been a professor of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard University, before he went to China a year ago. Ambassador, Nick, it’s great to have you with us this morning, this evening. Welcome.
Ambassador Burns
John, thank you very much. Good morning to everybody on the screen or good evening, depending where you are in the world. I’m delighted to be with you and I’m looking forward to a good conversation.
John Bellinger
So you are just a little over one year in. It’s been an eventful year. I won’t tick off all of the ups and downs. But there have been ups and downs. We’ve had, most recently, the balloon incidents. We’ve had tensions over Taiwan, we’ve had the 20th Party Congress. We had the Biden-Xi summit last November, which you participated in, which I’d like to get to in a bit. But reflect on the last year — what is the state of the relationship? Is it, in the year that you’ve been there, better, worse, or about the same? And what would you say your own accomplishments have been in the year that you’ve been there?
Ambassador Burns
John, it’s a complicated relationship. It’s very competitive. And it’s one that matters a lot to the United States for obvious reasons. And I think in the past 14 months now that I’ve been here in China, we’ve seen a continuation of all that: a difficult relationship where we’re trying to stabilize ties between us, deepen the channels between us. Fortunately, and of course, you know, I represent the president here and his administration, we have a very clear policy.
And what we’ve been trying to do, since the President came into office, is to invest in the strength of our own country for this long-term competition with China in the economic, technological, and military-security realms. And the President, I think, has had a very, very good beginning doing that with the passage of the infrastructure bill, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021, with the major target investment that we are making in semiconductors and advanced chips and the CHIPS Act of 2022, and with the Inflation Reduction Act, $369 billion dollars in clean energy research and funds designed to stimulate a clean energy future. That’s the greatest amount of capital we’ve ever invested in our energy future. It ought to put us in line, we hope, to meet our Paris climate change reduction goals by 2030. So I think the President’s theory of the case, and he’s right, obviously, is that we’ve got to strengthen ourselves at home, if we’re competing with China, in so many different realms, for the next decade or two.
Second, you know, he very deeply believes, President Biden, that we’ve got to prioritize our alliances. I’ve been coming to China since 1988, and I’ve been involved with our policy in this part of the world for a long time, we’ve never had a stronger position, at least in my working lifetime in the Indo-Pacific. The extraordinary strengthening of the U.S.-Japan treaty relationship. You saw in Washington yesterday and today, the visit of President Marcos. And the fact that our president, of course, enunciated yesterday our commitment to the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The strengthening of our relationship with Australia and now the advent of AUKUS, which is going to strengthen – with the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Australia – Australia’s capacity further in the next decade or two. And I think, John, the emergence of the Quad, which is not a military alliance, but a strategic partnership of sorts between India, Japan, Australia, and the United States. We are stronger now, because of these relationships, vis-à-vis China, than we’ve been in a long time. And the President, in addition to investing and aligning, of course, we’re focused on competition.
And that competition is in many realms. It’s certainly in the security realm, where we’re trying to, of course, strengthen our security forces, our military forces in the Indo-Pacific, with a lot of success. It’s a competition with China on economics and trade. In the last six weeks, I’ve been meeting the American business community in Guangzhou and South China, in Shanghai and Hangzhou in East China, in Shenyang in the northeast corner of China, in the Dongbei. And of course, in Beijing. And I’m hearing a consistent message from American businesses: they need a level playing field here. And they often don’t get it because of intellectual property rights violations or subsidies to the Chinese competitors of these American firms. So we’re asking for a much broader effort and aggressive effort by the government here in China to treat our firms as they should be treated. We’re competing there. We’re competing in technology, and I think that’s the heart, in many ways, of the competition of the future. There’s a commercial competition between our companies, our researchers, our university research labs, in AI and machine learning, quantum sciences, biotech, but many of those technologies will be militarized. So that is a very important competition and you’ve seen us take some very strong actions with export controls, to make sure that American companies are not selling to China in ways that would be to the advantage of the People’s Liberation Army.
And finally, and this is really the primary, I think, difference between us. We’re competing on values. We believe in religious freedom and human freedom. We believe in our First Amendment and Bill of Rights, freedoms for every American. We want that for the rest of the world. And of course, there’s a very different philosophy here. And our president is one of the strongest advocates among modern American presidents for the future of democracy. So he put all that together, invest, align, compete. This is a considerable agenda of issues, hundreds of them separating the United States and China. And I’ll just say one more word about our relationship with China, John. In addition to competition, President Biden, and President Xi Jinping agreed at the Bali summit on November 14 of last year in Indonesia, that we ought to also be trying to work together in areas where our interests might align. So certainly that’s true of climate change. We’re the two largest emitters of carbon and John Kerry, my friend, and Xie Zhenhua, the Chinese negotiator, I think, have a practical, effective working relationship. We’ll see what we can do there.
We want to work with the Chinese on global public health as we try to anticipate future epidemics and pandemics in the world and be ready next time to face them, hopefully together. We certainly want to work in the area of food security, which has been such a problem globally, especially since the advent of Russia’s brutal, illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the disruption of the Black Sea grain trade to the Horn of Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, South and Central Asia.
And we also want to work on counternarcotics. And John, I would just say there, we haven’t made the type of progress that the United States wants to make. The central problem we have is that there are illicit firms here, not the government of China, but black-market firms here that are selling precursor chemicals from China to the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America producing the fentanyl that is wreaking such havoc in our society, so many people dead in our society. We want to make much greater progress there. So a highly competitive relationship, but also one in which the two strongest powers in the world [are] trying as best as we can to work together on some of these big global challenges. Put it all together, daunting relationship to manage on both sides, but one that my colleagues and I are out here in China for the United States government are proud to work on behalf of the American people.
John Bellinger
Well, thanks so much, Nick. That’s a lot to unpack. We’re going to try to cover a few of those. I’m going to turn it over in a minute to my colleague, Yun, but let me ask you just briefly first about literally your role as ambassador. I have personally seen you over the years as an extremely effective ambassador, probably one of the best we’ve got, perhaps the most experienced diplomat we’ve had in China. I know you are not one just to read your talking points and listen to the other side and then move on. You try to make some progress. But this is, as you said, a very difficult environment. It’s my understanding that you’re not getting the high-level access that you would normally have. Of course, that’s been complicated by COVID. But how are you able to do your job? Are you able to meet with the people you want? And of course, as I understand that, Xi Jinping is calling all the shots himself, so it’s not clear whether the messages that you convey, to whoever you convey them to, are really getting to the person who needs to hear them?
Ambassador Burns
Well, John, I answer the question this way. I think access for all of us in the U.S. government, that includes members of our Cabinet, has really ebbed and flowed over the last year. There have been periods of time — I’m thinking now of early summer last year — where we’ve had a lot of access back and forth, a lot of communication back and forth. And then other periods, say just in the immediate wake of Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last summer, where the Chinese shut down channels. They shut down on August 4, I believe, just following her departure from Taiwan, eight different channels between us: three of our most important military channels, including our military leadership and the Pentagon, and the Chinese wouldn’t talk to them and to us. They shut down our counternarcotics talks, they shut down Secretary Kerry’s channel to Xie Zhenhua for about two months. And then, after the 20th Party Congress, for instance, I had a very good meeting with the then-Chinese ambassador to the United States Qin Gang here in Beijing. I had another very good meeting just the week after the 20th Party Congress with then Foreign Minister and State Councilor Wang Yi. And of course, the Bali meeting was a very good, I think, productive exchange between President Biden and President Xi Jinping and we had a pretty good pattern of communication until the balloon incident. And that coincided with a public disagreement between us on the issue of Chinese assistance to Russia for Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. So it’s kind of gone back and forth. And I can just tell you, our view is, we need better channels between the two governments and deeper channels, and we are ready to talk. And it’s particularly important to do that, of course, when you’ve got big problems and when you have major disagreements in the relationship. We’ve never been shy of talking, and we hope the Chinese will meet us halfway on this.
Yun Sun
Thank you, Ambassador. I’ll just turn the question a little bit to China itself. In your observation, well, we know that China’s priority this year is said to be economic recovery after three years of self-imposed restrictions related to COVID. And during the first quarter, we have seen some impressive numbers in terms of the foreign trade, gross, [which] the government reported to be 4.8%. But at the same time, there’s a high unemployment rate, and there’s also a very high savings rate, which seems to suggest a lack of confidence about the country’s economic future. So in your observation, what’s China’s economic outlook for the rest of 2023 and potentially for the next year?
Ambassador Burns
Well, Yun, thank you very much. We could create an entire course at most of our most universities on that very good question. We watch, of course, the Chinese economy very closely here, because it’s the second largest economy by nominal GDP in the world. And, as a leading export and leading manufacturing country in the world, has a decisive impact on global macroeconomic stability. What we hope is that the government here is going to be open to fair trade between the United States and our countries and the message from the Double Sessions, the Lianghui, the National People’s Congress in March here in Beijing, especially from the Premier, the new Premier Li Qiang, has been that China’s open for business, that China wants to attract the investment of private sector firms from all over the world, and that those firms from overseas, beyond China, will be treated equally in accordance with the law here with state enterprises. If that’s the message, I think, from my own discussions with the American business community over the last couple of weeks, I think that’s going to be a positive message for many of them. But the other message from the 20th Party Congress was a somewhat different message: it was, the emphasis, was more on statism, the power of the state, national security, perhaps trumping economic growth.
And so I think that as I read the international business communities here, and if you look at the reports of the European, Japanese, and American chambers of commerce, of their memberships, they’ve been very, quite common and equal in their emphasis. Most firms are staying here because the China market is so big, but a lot of firms are delaying major investments until they can see some consistency and messaging and until they see, maybe 6-12 months from now, that the period of openness is continuing. We have as you know, a $690 billion two-way trade relationship. China is now the third largest trade partner, after our neighbors Canada and Mexico, of the United States. And in agriculture, for instance, China’s our largest export market, one fifth of all of our ag exports go to China alone. So this is an important market for American companies. We should get to the question of some of the actions we’ve taken to curtail trade in some technology areas that we think will have a negative impact on our national security. And I’m glad to get into that if you’d like.
Yun Sun
Thank you, Ambassador.
John Bellinger
So before we turn to Russia, Ukraine, and other sectors, let’s just go back for a minute to the relationship and the the issue of visits. Of course, Secretary Blinken’s visit was postponed because of the balloon incident. What is the road back to a visit? Is a secretarial visit planned? What would be the preconditions? Do we think President Xi will be invited and accept the invitation to come to San Francisco in the fall? What is essentially the road back to high-level meetings?
Ambassador Burns
Well, Secretary Blinken was set to come out here to China on February 5 and 6 for a long-anticipated visit. He had to postpone it on February 3rd, because of the balloon incident. And he said, and I’ve been telling the Chinese, he’ll come here when conditions are appropriate for his visit. It gets back to the general issue of how the two governments communicate. And the instinct that we have, and it’s not just an instinct, it’s a conviction, is that we need better, more reliable, more consistent channels between our two governments. There’s just too much going on in the relationship. There are too many issues where we’re highly competitive with each other, that we ought to be talking consistently. So we’ve been saying very consistently, since Speaker Pelosi’s visit, let’s open all those channels. We have not had a productive exchange on the fentanyl issue, and we ought to have it. We are back, however, to contact between Secretary Kerry and Xie Zhenhua on climate change, which of course is positive.
What we really need is a more broad-based engagement at the cabinet level, and the United States is ready for that. So we hope that the government here will be ready as well. And it’s hard for me to predict at this point when this kind of reengagement will reoccur, but we have never supported an icing of this relationship. You know, when the President speaks about this relationship, and he’s often asked about it, of course, he notes the fact that we’ve been in a competitive relationship, but he often says we don’t want to conflict with China, we don’t want to return to a Cold War with China. And we need greater stability in this relationship. I feel that acutely. We have 46 U.S. government agencies out here in Beijing and in our consulates in Shenyang and Wuhan and Guangzhou and Shanghai. This is one of the largest American diplomatic missions in the world. We’re ready to work. We do need to have a two-way street. And I hope that we’ll return to that as soon as possible because we do want stability in the relationship.
John Bellinger
And just a quick question, and I’ll turn it over to Yun. Are the Chinese really not returning many of our phone calls? I had heard over the balloon incident that literally it was difficult to reach the right people.
Ambassador Burns
Well, I think, you know, this has been an issue going back decades, in crises, and not just an issue for now. Yes, but we did have instances when we wanted to have certain very high-level conversations when it wasn’t possible. But I have to say, in recent weeks, in the last month or so, there’s been a consistent communication between myself and senior officials in the foreign ministry, my colleagues in the U.S. Mission and their counterparts in the foreign ministry here. So I think that’s been a good sign, that we’ve been able to pass messages, trade views, talk about difficult issues, sometimes at great length here in Beijing. But you do need a broader relationship than that, and we have a Cabinet full of very experienced people who need to have relationships and contacts with their Chinese counterparts. So you know, we have much broader ambitions for this. But it’s not as if we don’t have any contact whatsoever and we can reach the government here, really within an hour or two, even more quickly than that when we really need to do it.
Yun Sun
Great, Ambassador. Turning to another difficult issue, which is the Russian illegal war in Ukraine. We know that recently the Chinese offered to mediate, or the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s phone call with President Zelenskyy has been on the topline news for almost everybody. So how do you assess the impact of the Chinese action? And if they do offer to mediate? What would the success look like? What would that constitute of? So in terms of China’s primary goal, in making this very interesting offer, is it really aimed at peace or is it aimed at expanding China’s influence and leverage, particularly vis-à-vis Europe?
Ambassador Burns
We’ll have to see. Of course, we have been suggesting to the Chinese for many, many months that they be in contact with the highest levels, with President Zelenskyy. So the call from President Xi Jinping was a good first step. But I think the answer to your question Yun is we’ll have to see what happens from here. China has a very close relationship with Russia, a supportive relationship with Russia. I can tell you because we read the Chinese press every day. The press here is blaming the United States and blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine, which of course is preposterous. The problem in the war in Ukraine was created by one man, Vladimir Putin. And to go after NATO, just because the NATO countries are standing up for the United Nations Charter, for a sovereign Ukraine with its territorial integrity respected. 141 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to criticize Russia, based on Russia’s lack of adherence to civility and international law.
I think that what we need to see from China is to push Russia to withdraw its troops so that Ukraine can have all of its territory back and can be fully sovereign again in all aspects of that word. And it will be helpful if China pushed Russia to cease bombing of Ukrainian schools and Ukrainian hospitals and Ukrainian apartment buildings, seeing the tremendous loss of life just in the last month or two under this vicious Russian aerial assault and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians. So I think that’s what we would like and I’m sure that’s what the European countries would like. That’s what Ukraine wants from China. I don’t know if they’ve offered to be a mediator. China has enunciated 12 principles. They did that some time ago. But certainly, we would like to see China be much more tough-minded in its advice to the Russians. And we’d like to see action to end the war as quickly as possible, on terms, of course, that the Ukrainian government can accept.
John Bellinger
To ask the flip side of that, suppose the Chinese go the other way, and were to actually begin supplying arms or something similar that would be helpful to the Russians. Obviously, you and the Administration made clear that that would be some kind of a red line. If the Chinese were to do that, what would be the consequence? Would it be additional sanctions? What have you told the Chinese?
Ambassador Burns
Well, John, obviously this is a central issue in the relationship between the United States and China. And Secretary Blinken, and our National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and many other officials, including myself, have warned the Chinese not to provide lethal military assistance to Russia. We’ve been watching that issue very carefully now for many months. We have not seen evidence that the Chinese are doing that, but we continue to watch it. And I don’t want to go into the private conversations we’ve had with the Chinese leadership, but they’ve been at the very highest levels. And we’ve been unmistakably clear about how serious this would be, so it’s an issue we continue to watch. And obviously, you know, there is a lot of concern about a strengthening of China’s relationship with Russia over the last couple of years, but particularly over the last year or two, and that gets into many different issues. It pertains first and foremost, to this illegal, unjustified assault on Ukraine by the Russian military and the Russian president. But it gets into different kinds of issues even larger, global issues about our concern that Russia and China are out to undermine some of the central tenets of a liberal world order that’s been established and has been so successful since the close of the Second World War. So it’s been good to see the democratic countries of the world, not just our democratic allies here in the Indo-Pacific, and I’ve referred to them before, but also Europe, acting and thinking very strategically about China, very concerned about what China’s doing in Ukraine, but also what China’s doing in the Taiwan Strait. And I think that help from Europe, the fact that NATO and the EU countries have been so clear about their concerns about Chinese actions and behavior, that really helps us out here in the Indo Pacific to send a unified message to the Chinese leadership.
John Bellinger
Well, I want to turn to Taiwan. Let me just say briefly, in about 10 minutes, we’re going to open the floor to questions from the audience which Yun and I will be reading. So if you do have questions for the ambassador, you can send them to us here at www.stimpson.org/questions and we will be posing those to the ambassador. But you raise Taiwan, which of course we want to talk about. It’s been a long-standing irritant in U.S.-China relations anyway. It’s become even more complicated in the last couple of years because of actions on the Chinese side, but candidly, also, because of Nancy Pelosi’s visit, Kevin McCarthy’s visit in San Francisco. It’s gotten to be more difficult. On the Chinese side, President Xi has made clear that he would not rule out the use of force, and President Biden has made clear that he would be prepared to defend Taiwan. So what is the state of the relationship over Taiwan? Do you think a conflict seems to be closer now than it has been in the past? And what are we doing to prevent it?
Ambassador Burns
Well, John, Taiwan is a central issue. It has been for decades and remains so now between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. We’ve been very consistent, and we have not changed our one China policy. It’s been based on the same principles that have guided us for 50 years now: the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. And at every opportunity, and I have had a multitude of discussions privately with the Chinese leadership on this issue, I enunciate that point. But we also say that, of course, the United States believes, and this is critical, that any resolution of the cross-Strait differences has to be peaceful, because that’s the right thing for us to be saying, because that’s the only possible way that this is going to be resolved on a fair basis, this long time dispute. And because, of course, the Taiwan Strait is a critical international waterway. Would it ever to be closed because of force of arms, it would have a major impact on the global economy, on container traffic, and on all the major economies that are in this part of the world.
And so we’ve been consistent in that. You mentioned Speaker McCarthy and Speaker Pelosi, we have supported the right of both Speaker McCarthy and Speaker Pelosi to meet with the Taiwan leaders. And they both have led a co-equal branch of the United States government, and I have defended them both. And we hope that the government here in China will commit itself to a peaceful resolution of the dispute. That’s the most important thing I can say publicly, it’s what we say privately, and it’s been very good to hear that refrain from the Japanese, from the South Koreans, from the Filipinos, from the European Union, from the NATO countries, from a lot of countries in the world worried about the potential for the use of force in the Taiwan Strait. So it’s something we watch very, very carefully and of course it occupies a big space in this relationship. Following Speaker Pelosi’s visit, for instance, I was called in to the foreign ministry that very evening. They issued a press statement about what they said to me, which liberates me to say that I defended the right of members of Congress to travel there, and of course, made all the points you’d expect me to make, that American diplomats have been making for five decades now, about the importance of making sure that the Taiwan Strait remains peaceful going forward.
Yun Sun
Thank you, Ambassador for that, for that statement and clarification. You know, in the policy community, the year 2027 is somehow regarded as a watershed year for the Taiwan issue, because one of the popular assessments is that China is aiming to achieve the military capability to take Taiwan by force by the year 2027. So do you believe that China still prefers peaceful unification as the preferred approach to the Taiwan issue? Or is peaceful unification simply a signal to military coercion, which is [in] the Chinese definition “use of force without war?”
Ambassador Burns
The Chinese position often articulated here in Beijing by the government of the People’s Republic is that they say that they want a peaceful resolution of cross-Strait differences, but they reserve the right for the use of force. And of course, we reject that, and we don’t believe that is a proper way to proceed. They know our position on this issue. They know the position of many others in the international community. And of course, under the Taiwan Relations Act, and that goes all the way back to January 1, 1979, retroactively applied, the United States has the obligation, as well as the interest, to make sure that we can provide defensive arms to Taiwan so that the Taiwan authorities can have a proper defense and we can help them build up a deterrence. So that if Taiwan has a sufficient deterrence in place, and if other countries around the world are supporting a peaceful resolution, one would hope that that would lead the Chinese to understand the consequences of the use of force in the Taiwan Strait. And we’ve been impressing that point upon them, as you can imagine, quite regularly out here.
John Bellinger
So let me end our questions with a question about the implications for the U.S. business community, which you’ve mentioned. Of course, that follows on to both the war in Ukraine and particularly the tensions over Taiwan. This makes it extremely difficult for U.S. companies to try to plot their future in China. Of course, the economies are completely integrated or have been, but at the same time, U.S. businesses who need certainty, can’t make decisions if they don’t know what’s going to happen in Taiwan or they don’t know what’s going to happen in Russia. So much talk, as we all know, about decoupling or at least de-risking. What has been your advice to U.S. businesses as they try to navigate all of these uncertainties?
Ambassador Burns
Well, we advise, as I said before, John, I have spent a lot of time with the American business community here. We’ve had a number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies come here for the China Development Forum, and the Bo’ao Forum, over the last six weeks or so. And our advice is, look, we’re going to try to help you succeed here. And there are many areas where American companies can trade quite successfully with no impact on American national security. I gave you the example of agriculture, $40.9 billion in sales by American ranchers and farmers and our fishing industry, to China last year, that’s a record high. And that’s an area where the interests of our farmers and ranchers and fishing communities matches up pretty well with China.
But we’ve also said look, there’s the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act passed by very large majorities of Democrats and Republicans in December 2021. That means if you’re an American company trying to export a product from Xinjiang, you’ve got to meet a very high bar, and that is to prove that there’s no slave labor content at all, forced labor, in your supply chain. And it’s meant to be a difficult, high bar to pass, and we are watching very carefully, and one of our jobs is to help to enforce that law. So I’ve been messaging, and very, very clearly, to the American business community: don’t get close to the line on that particular law. Observe it in every respect. Don’t get close to the line and pass it.
And of course, I talked about technology. Jake Sullivan, our National Security Adviser, gave a very important speech last Thursday at the Brookings Institution, which was largely about our industrial policy, the targeted investments we’re making to strengthen our domestic economy and infrastructure, but he also talked about China. And he talked about the fact that we ought to be de-risking. He used that word. Secretary Janet Yellen gave a very important speech the week before at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies just down the road, Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. And she said the same message that I just said, we’re not looking at a separation of these two economies. But there are areas where we have taken and will continue to take measures that would protect our national security interests. The most prominent one was back in October of 2022. The Commerce Department’s action on advanced chips for semiconductors and supercomputers, to prevent the sale of those types of articles to Chinese companies because it could strengthen the military and intelligence communities of China and there’s no reason in the world why the United States would want to do that, given the fact that we’re in a major competition with China in that area.
So it is a complicated landscape. And that’s why we spent so much time, Secretary Raimondo, Secretary Yellen, Jake Sullivan, Secretary Blinken, myself, in talking to the business community, to make them aware of where they can safely trade and invest. And our two-way trade relationship is increasing, not decreasing, but there are certain areas in these advanced technology fields, where we’re going to be putting up, we’ve already announced, some restrictive measures because that’s clearly in the national security interests of the United States. And Jake Sullivan made that argument again, very clearly, at the end of his speech, at the Brookings Institution last week, last week, so I recommend that to you as a way of thinking about this question.
John Bellinger
So some of those are really certainties, or close to certainties, right now. I mean, some of those are laws on the books, like that Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act or the new export controls, or if they’re not on the books now, we know that they’re coming. But others, we just don’t know what might happen if the Chinese were to provide arms to the Russians, if they were to put a blockade on the Straits, if they were to use force against Taiwan. Those are things that we don’t know, at this point, what the Chinese would do, and we don’t know what the U.S. government would do in response, and that makes it extremely difficult for U.S. businesses. U.S. businesses have various contingency plans, and maybe that’s the difference between the decoupling that has to happen right now over certain high-tech items, and the de-risking things that might happen. But let me just bore down as the last question on the de-risking. What are you telling businesses about what they contingencies they may have to take into account, if the Chinese were to take the most aggressive actions?
Ambassador Burns
Well, John, there’s no lack of conversation between the Administration and the American business community on these technology issues. Commerce Secretary Raimondo has been talking to the business community consistently since she took office. Jake Sullivan, and Secretary Blinken, and Secretary Yellen, Secretary Vilsack on the agriculture side, Ambassador Tai on some of the trade issues, that do impinge in part on some of these issues that you’ve raised. Obviously, out here, we have 1100 American companies here, and so I see businesses almost daily out here. I took a trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou, the Silicon Valley of China last week, and it was really mainly a trip to look at educational institutions that have intensive engagement, all throughout last week with the American business community. So we try to answer the questions as best we can. We try to guide them as best we can. We point them to the law, in the case of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. We point them to our clear actions in some of these technology areas. We are frankly just not going to give or allow the sale of advanced technology in some of these critical areas in the digital economy, to the Chinese military or the national security civil military fusion here in China. We’ve been clear about that. I think businesses are not confused about our message, but they are operating on difficult terrain, there’s no question about it.
Yun Sun
Here’s a question from Professor Bruce McDonough, who you might remember from the State Department. He’s currently at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, and he raised an important question about China’s nuclear modernization plan, which we know is to be rather ambitious. So the question is what it will take for China to agree to participate in the discussion about joining the START process, potentially in the post-Ukraine war environment?
Ambassador Burns
Well, that’s a good question. That’s a very good question to ask, I think, of the government of China, of the People’s Republic of China. The Pentagon has put out public reports on the dramatic increase in the nuclear weapons forces of China, and projections of where they will be by 2030 and beyond, and the Pentagon has been clear about this, as well as in congressional testimony. And it’s an issue of course, of major importance to every country in the world. Because of achieving nuclear stability and driving down the probability of any use of nuclear weapons, of course, is of the highest order of importance. So it’s an issue we’re clearly focused on. But your question, I think, or the question from the professor, I think ought to be directed not at us, but at the government of China.
John Bellinger
So here’s a question from Barbara Slaven, who’s joined us here at the Stimson Center, and it’s about the Middle East. What’s your evaluation of China’s new diplomatic role in the Middle East? Can China build on the Iran-Saudi deal to promote nonproliferation, encouraging Iran to roll back its nuclear advances and Saudi Arabia not to try to catch up to Iran?
Ambassador Burns
Well, we’ll have to see. You know, when the handshake occurred between the national security advisors of [the Kingdom of ] Saudi Arabia and Iran, you saw the reaction from Washington from both the White House and the State Department. We said it was a positive development that we hoped would end the possibility of any further bloodshed in Yemen, that it might help regional stability, but of course, the devil is going to be in the details here. Will the government of Iran meet its commitments? That’s always a question. I dealt with Iran, and you’ll remember John, back when we were both worked for Secretary Condoleezza Rice, and convincing the Iranians to meet their commitments was always a major part of what we were trying to do in those difficult years, as we were sanctioning the government of Iran.
So I think the jury’s out on whether or not there’ll be the type of, you know, roll up your sleeves, very intensive months or years of negotiations. As an outsider, China, being an outsider in the Middle East, it just remains to be seen. It is an issue we talked to the Chinese leadership about, obviously, but it’s hard to forecast exactly. How much of this is strategic and how much is tactical, and whether or not a central mediating role is going to be possible or not. It’s just another question, a question mark, I guess I would say, that maybe we’ll have the answer to six or twelve months from now.
Yun Sun
We’ll have to see. A question from Mr. Roger Phillips, about the tariffs that are currently being imposed. Where is the Biden Administration in terms of rolling back some of the Trump-era tariffs that presumably has been in discussion for several months for now?
Ambassador Burns
Well, our policy hasn’t changed since the beginning of the Administration. We’ve looked at the Phase One trade deal between the Trump Administration, President Trump, and the Chinese leadership. And Ambassador Katherine Tai has been leading on this for us and we’ve maintained the tariffs in place. And of course, that’s the decision that the president, only the president, can make in our system. But we’ve been consistent in that policy, and also consistent in drawing attention to those areas of Phase One where the Chinese have not met their commitments to the United States, and there are many of them. And so Ambassador Tai has given congressional testimony, and she has been very active in that relationship and, and we have, I think, a lot of consistency in what we’ve done the last two years.
John Bellinger
Here’s a question from [inaudible] at Radio Free Asia, asking about the dialogue about the environment. Seems that the only thing that the Chinese have been consistently talking with us on is the environment. Is that the case? And what do they say on the environment? And how are the talks going? Are they on the same page as the U.S. on climate change?
Ambassador Burns
Well, first of all, thank you for the question. I wouldn’t say that. This isn’t the only issue where we’ve had a consistent engagement, because for instance, we’ve had a consistent engagement on Taiwan, on Chinese assistance to Russia, quite consistent. We haven’t resolved the differences between us, but it’s been a consistent dialogue. And as I said before, the lines are open from our embassy here in Beijing, to the Chinese foreign ministry and some of the other ministries in the government here.
The issue on the environmental side has really been climate change. And China’s the largest carbon emitter in the world. About 30% of global emissions are Chinese. We’re second, about 10%. We have about 10% of global emissions. And so we have self-interest, both governments, to work on this together. And I think we have a responsibility, frankly, to the rest of the world, to try to lead in the Paris, the UN-sponsored COP process, Conference of the Parties process. And as I said before, we have two negotiators in former Secretary of State John Kerry, our special climate negotiator, and Xie Zhenhua, a highly respected, Chinese negotiator. They know each other, they work together, I think as an observer to this and trying to help in this, very effectively. It doesn’t mean they always see eye to eye. But I think both governments want to work to see if we can achieve the UN target of limiting the average global increase to 1.5 degrees centigrade. The U.S. is committed to that. We’re also committed to net neutrality by 2050, China by 2060.
So we’d like to see movement from the government here in Beijing to be more aggressive in driving down their own carbon emissions over the next decade and beyond. So that’s kind of a macro view of this. And I think it’s a good sign that since late October, early November, we’ve been able to talk again, and President Biden just had a virtual meeting of global leaders on climate goals, and there was a Chinese government official representative at that virtual meeting, so we felt that was positive too. And on these issues, we feel we have a self-interest in working with the government here. We’ll continue to do our best.
Yun Sun
Thank you, Ambassador. Another question related to the business community, from Jack Powell of the Asia Times. How will Beijing’s newly amended anti-spy law affect U.S. businesses and nationals in China?
Ambassador Burns
This is the so-called counter-espionage law that was announced last week. Frankly, we’re very concerned about it. We need to know more about it. So we’re asking questions here in Beijing, of the Chinese authorities, we will continue to do that. But if you combine that, and this is a law that potentially could make illegal in China the kind of mundane activities that a business would have to do to seek due diligence before you agree to a major investment deal, to have full access to economic data, to make rational economic decisions. It could possibly imperil academic researchers, professors, journalists could get caught up in this. What we know of it so far is not positive. But again, we’re digging deeper, and we intend to have a full discussion with the government here about it. If you put that together with some of the punitive actions that the government here in Beijing has taken against several American companies recently, we’re very concerned about this. We’ve made our concerns known.
We think American businesses here ought to be free of intimidation from the government, and that the rule of law should prevail, and that they shouldn’t be targeted if mainly because there are political differences and competitive differences in the U.S.-China relationship. So it’s something that I take very seriously as the ambassador here. We’re in touch with the business community. You’ve seen a very strong statement just last Friday, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, and I am hearing about it from American businesses here. So we’ll continue to focus on this and engage the government here and hope that we can have an environment here where American business people and journalists and academics can feel safe. That if they’re operating here in China, that they can do the jobs that they came here to do, and that they’re not subjected to this kind of intimidation.
John Bellinger
May I ask the question about human rights. This comes actually from an official in one of the U.S. government agencies. Can you comment on what the United States is doing to press China to respect human rights, in particular in Xinjiang?
Ambassador Burns
Well, President Biden, and Secretary Blinken, and all of us in the Executive branch, have been speaking out quite regularly about our opposition to what’s happened to the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. We’ve been critical of what’s happened in Tibet, and we’ve been critical of course, in Hong Kong, and the denial of ordinary rights and civil rights to the people of Hong Kong. We’ve also been critical with a lack of religious freedom. And we’ve been quite clear in our criticisms over the last two and a quarter years now, and we’ll continue to do so. This is one of the profound differences between the two governments, one of governing philosophy. It’s, as I said at the beginning, one of the issues that really separates the two governments in a very clear way, and we have a responsibility here to speak out when there are human rights abuses. And we’ve done that quite consistently. John, you remember, we have a congressionally-mandated Human Rights Report. We just issued it last month, and it was a very long, hard-hitting report. Anybody listening to this can go on the State Department website and look at that report and see the kind of work that we’ve been doing here to analyze and call attention to the substantial differences we have in terms of how to treat people in one society, and to consider the lack of freedom here for most people in this society.
Yun Sun
Wonderful. Another question related to national security, from Kevin Barron from Defense One. And this is about U.S. domestic politics. How has American domestic, or partisan, politics around China helped or hurt U.S. national security goals? As more Americans recognize China as a threat, but are divided over what to do about it, do you see it helping or hurting U.S. national security?
Ambassador Burns
Well, first of all, I’m going give you a nonpartisan answer because as a federal employee, we don’t engage in partisan politics. And obviously, we have a responsibility to adhere to the law in that respect. And that’s something we take very seriously out here. But I have to tell you, it’s a good question. I think personally, it’s very helpful that Congress, in many respects, that both of our major political parties are really speaking with one voice on many of the issues we’ve talked about tonight. Whether it’s human rights, or the trade issues that we have, the trade complaints, IP and intellectual property infringements, for instance. Whether it’s on the issues concerning Chinese activities in the South and East China Seas, that we think are contrary to international law. Whether it’s China’s activities to try to intimidate the Philippines or the activities, very assertive, by the government in the PLA on the China-India border. It is very helpful for us, and I can tell you, as an ambassador, to have members of Congress, in both parties speaking with one voice, is very helpful.
And I hope we’ll get to the point, now that zero-COVID has ended, that we’ll be able to have members of Congress travel here, hopefully in bipartisan delegations, to deliver that message to the Chinese leadership. And it does point to a wider issue. I’ll just take advantage of the question by saying COVID and the enforcement of zero COVID here in China over three years, meant that for three years, we didn’t have a single member of the executive branch, the last year of President Trump and the first two years of President Biden, travel to China until just two months ago. We didn’t see a single CEO of a major company here until just six weeks ago. And we didn’t see, and haven’t seen, members of Congress travel here because of the onerous restrictions under zero COVID, because of the quarantine restrictions. Now that that’s ended, we very much hope we’ll have more business leaders out here, members of Congress here. And we’re beginning to see executive branch travelers here. Why is that important? Because governments in a complicated, difficult relationship like this, you need connectivity, and we haven’t had that. And so we’re trying to deepen our channels between the two governments. And that includes the other branches of government, the legislative branch as well as the executive.
On the citizens side, and you know, people-to-people diplomacy is really the ballast in any relationship. I’m going to give you a startling data point. And that is, there are about 295,000 Chinese students in the United States, and they are welcome in our country. And there are about, we think, 350 American students in China. Think of the difference of emphasis there. Now, why are there only 350 American students when there were many thousands of American students here 10 years ago? Well, COVID. They couldn’t get visas to come here, they weren’t being given out by the government here in Beijing. Or junior year abroad or summer study programs were shut down because it was impossible to manage during the zero-COVID period, three years, in China.
I just visited NYU Shanghai. They have a major new campus in Pudong, in the heart of Shanghai, last week. I know that they want to have, and they have, a full complement of students coming back. I’m going to be visiting Johns Hopkins Center in Nanjing very soon. I was at Tsinghua, one of the great Chinese universities, and met the American Schwartzman scholars there, about 70, 75 young Americans, really impressive, but we need more of this. And we need it between our students, certainly. We need tourist travel. And we certainly need business travel. Because that is kind of the foundation, if you will, of any relationship between two countries. So a lot of people have been worrying about decoupling of the economies. We’ve had a decoupling of our societies over the last three years. It’s not healthy. It’s not smart. And despite the fact that our Administration is really focused on the competitive aspects, in large measure, in our relationship, we do want to see students travel back and forth. We ought to want to see young Americans learning Mandarin, learning the culture and history of this country so that if they go into business or government, they can understand, in a sophisticated way, the other power in the world in the 2030s and the 2040s. It’s in the American national interest for this to happen. And so we’re making a major effort to try to open up these channels, business, tourism, and students between the two countries, and it’s going to take a while, but it’s certainly in the national interest of our country to do that.
John Bellinger
Education has certainly been one of our great American exports. Let me leave you with this question. You’ve been there for about a year. I hope you’ll be there for about another two more years, for as long as you’re willing to stay. You must already be thinking how you would define success personally. At the end of your stay, what do you hope that you will have accomplished in being the principal American diplomat in the relationship with China?
Ambassador Burns
John, I have only one personal goal. And my wife Libby and I were just talking about it over dinner tonight. Before we came on to this, I came on to this platform, and that is, we want to learn Mandarin. We’re struggling first year students of Mandarin, and it is so helpful just to have a few phrases when you travel to a place like Hangzhou or Guangzhou or Shenyang. So that’s our personal goal. But seriously, you know, an ambassador ought not to have personal goals. [As] ambassador, I’m the personal representative of President Biden, I represent him, I represent his government, his Cabinet, and in a very important way, try to represent the interests of Congress and the American people. So I try to represent the President’s goals here.
And the President’s goals are that we have a competitive relationship, we need to succeed in that. We need to build our alliance structure and we need to invest in our own country. And that’s been the President’s, you know, primary focus, to make the necessary capital investments, investments in people, investments in critical industries, so that we can be strong in this relationship. Not just this year or next year, but 10-20 years from now. And so if we can do that, and if we can serve the President, in our government out here in China, being on point for them, and trying to manage this very difficult relationship in a way that brings a greater measure of stability, and connectivity. If we can drive down the probability of, or the possibility of, conflict between us, put America’s best foot forward and compete because we have to compete to retain our position in the Indo-Pacific and globally, then that will be success. And as you know, John and Yun, we will hand the baton, at some point, off to the next group, for the next ambassador. And we hope to leave the American position out here stronger, and that takes a lot of conviction. It’s standing up for American interests, it’s competing in all these different realms with the government out here. That’s going to be success for me. And if we end up in a relationship that is peaceful, where the United States and China manage their differences and compete, but have a peaceful relationship, I think that’s success that every American can agree upon.
John Bellinger
Well, thank you for that. Thank you for your service. And let me thank Libby, who I hope is watching this, for her service as well. Because all of us know that for ambassadors who go out with a partner, that it is a mission of two people and the entire family. So thank you to Libby. Nick, Ambassador, thank you for being with us today, thank you for your service.
Ambassador Burns
John, thanks so much. Thank you to Stimson for organizing this and looking forward to future conferences just like this. Thanks so much.