Jeffrey Wasserstrom: belief

Transcript context

…rtain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China. Now after that, Xi Jinping broke silence on April 11th, and again on April 14th, and since, basically saying that China is not backing down and positioned himself in China as the “responsible superpower,” that promotes, as you were saying, the promoter of the reasonable multilateral global trading framework in a stable global supply chain. He said “For over 70 years, China’s progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handoffs from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression. Also, he said there are no winners in a trade war and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation. This was all set as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying. At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, “We will never yield.” My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go? So I think one persistent, there’s a lot to unpack there, of a historian too. I think that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically, and plays to this notion of a hundred years of national humiliation that’s been talked about by generations now of Chinese leaders, to talk about that period from the 1840s to the 1940s. There were a group of foreign powers who were involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. So there is a way in which this can be. And if Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he’s speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times of the past when the United States was an aggressive force there. It’s also a part of the world where there have been times when China has been that. So there is a way of positioning vis-a-vis other parts of the world, that is crucial part of this, that I think, I guess I’m circling around it, but there’s a tendency in discussions of US-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute. Even though time and again, we realize that places other than the United States are key variables in these things. So the US and China being at odds in the Mao era, what changed things dramatically for that wasn’t so much even a change in… Yes, Nixon was the one who went to China, but what made it possible for Nixon to go to China was that the Sino-Soviet split happened, that actually it was tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered equations for the United States and China. I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died. And there was tremendous discontent about that, anger about that it within China. And there were some rare protests that the government allowed to happen, but students were worked up about it, and there were protests outside the American Embassy and the British Embassy. That happened. And then in 2001, there was a spy plane incident that happened. So there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see US-China tensions being the major force in the world. 9/11 happened. It was a dramatic reset for the trajectory that the US and China were on, which these are two totally different things, the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11. But in both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next five years for US-China relations get dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn’t the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it’ll be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe. ething that happened that wasn’t the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it’ll be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe. This is something that Europe’s view about the United States is changing right now. These are all kinds of variables that are outside of simply Washington and Beijing as being the two actors. And sometimes, Beijing can’t control what’s happening outside, and sometimes Washington can’t. So I guess this is simply saying that when you’re watching and you’re trying to keep the eye on the ball, it matters a lot what India’s relationship to China and the United States is. So all of these are happening there. So I think that’s it, that it’s both tremendously important what’s going on between China and the United States, but it’s important to remember that they’re not the only players in this dynamic.…

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