China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

[beijingwalker]

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’​

By PHELIM KINE
04/28/2023 09:30 AM EDT

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns attends a plenary session for the World Peace Forum on July 4, 2022

Nicholas Burns made his first trip to China in 1988 accompanying then-Secretary of State George Schultz. At that time, China had an annual gross domestic product of $312 billion, the Chinese government had begun experimenting with village-level democratic elections and Xi Jinping was toiling as the executive vice-mayor of the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Thirty-four years later, when Burns landed in Beijing to become U.S. ambassador, the value of China’s GDP had hit $17.5 trillion and Xi had become China’s unchallenged paramount leader at the top of an increasingly repressive authoritarian government that the Biden administration views as having “both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”

Burns began work in Beijing last April in the depths of the country’s draconian zero-Covid policy. His role as Biden’s point person in China has coincided with bilateral relations cratering over tensions related to Taiwan, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the discovery — and subsequent destruction — of a Chinese spy balloon over the continental U.S. in February. A possible reflection of those tensions: President Xi made Burns wait more than a year before accepting his credentials on Tuesday.

Burns’ diplomatic career has spanned decades. He served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War era administration in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush’s director of Soviet Affairs in the early 1990s. He also did stints as State Department spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to NATO.

I spoke with Burns about the rigors of 21st century U.S. diplomacy in China, the troubling communication gap between the two countries and the trouble with comparing the old Cold War with the Soviet Union with the much more complex U.S.-China rivalry.

How did Zero-Covid and its aftermath affect your ability to run the embassy?

It affected every aspect of our work. It affected the way we could live here, and affected our families and affected American kids in schools here. There were times here in Beijing and certainly in Shanghai, in Guangzhou, in Wuhan, Shenyang — where we have our consulates — that during the lockdown stores were closed. Government offices were off limits. It was hard to get on public transportation. Even the parks were closed at some points during the Beijing spring and autumn lockdowns.

There were quarantine requirements on arrival. So if you arrived, even if you tested negative, you had to quarantine. When I arrived, my wife and I spent 21 days in quarantine. I think in my first nine months, I spent a total of 40 days in quarantine on three different trips back into China.

We also could not travel internally. And that meant that a lot of our officers here at the Embassy in Beijing and our four consulates couldn’t really do their jobs. If you’re working for the Food and Drug Administration here, you have to inspect [manufacturing] plants, and they couldn’t do that. If you’re a public diplomacy officer or a political officer, you want to go to Yunnan, to Sichuan Province, to Guangdong Province, but we couldn’t do that.

We’re beginning to arrive at some degree of normalcy, but it’s been a difficult, strange beginning.

What misconceptions do Americans have about China, and vice versa?

The major issue here is that the American people have been largely cut off from the Chinese people — because of Covid. And because of three years of a lack of travel back and forth. We had thousands of business travelers going back and forth between the two countries pre-pandemic and that has largely dried up. And because of the paucity of flights right now, it’s very difficult to get a commercial flight that’s reasonably priced from one country to the other. We’re seeing a trickle of business travelers, but not a flood.

Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000-15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that’s because of Covid —student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don’t have the people-to-people connections right now that we’ve had in the past.

On the Chinese side, because of censorship and because of the Great Firewall, it’s very difficult for us to project the true sense of what our government believes in, what it’s trying to do, what Congress is doing, or what the average American is thinking about China. Google and Facebook and YouTube are not permitted to operate here. And as the American ambassador, I am not allowed to print an unedited op-ed in the People’s Daily, the way that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is welcome to print op-eds in our press. So all of us here worry that the Chinese people often aren’t able to get a true picture of who we are as a society because of all these because of all these barriers.

What keeps you up at night?

We obviously want to avoid an accidental conflict. I don’t think one is probable or likely but it’s obviously possible. And so that leads us on our side in the U.S. government to focus on the need for reliable channels between the two governments.

Many of our most important channels were suspended by the government here in Beijing in the wake of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. We think it’s very important to resurrect the military channels that connect us from the Pentagon, from our command and Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii to the PRC government. Our diplomatic channels have been kind of on and off for the last year or two. We’d like to see them reliably stronger so that we can work together to head off any accidental conflict, any misunderstandings and deal with the normal business of government on a daily basis.

How difficult does the Chinese government make it to do your job?

We do face many restrictions in our activities here that are familiar to American diplomats serving in Moscow, for instance, or previous generations of American diplomats serving in the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War.

American diplomats here in China are routinely restricted from visiting university campuses in China. There are some exceptions to that. But we would hope that in the near future, it’d be possible for American diplomats at all levels to be able to visit a university campus and talk to faculty and students.

It’s important to be able to talk to provincial leaders because they’re so much a part of the governing structure here. I think it would improve the health of this relationship, but we’ve had a number of restrictions put on us. It’s not unusual — it’s happened to American diplomats here for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years — but the restrictions have probably been growing in intensity over the last year or two.

What similarities or differences do you see between the old Soviet authoritarianism and authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party?

When I think about the power that the Soviet Union had from the late 1940s into the early 90s, it was nothing like the power and the strength that China is exhibiting on the world stage. That’s why I think this comparison that people have made between the old Cold War and our present great power rivalry [with China] can be helpful at times to think about the comparisons, but they’re not exact.

The Soviet Union was a colossal power. Its nuclear dimensions. Its military dimension when it had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing Americans in the Fulda Gap and on the north German plain. But the power of the People’s Republic of China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. And it’s based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity, and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future. I do think the challenge from China is more complex and more deeply rooted and a greater test for us going forward.

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

www.politico.com

 

[Mirzali Khan]

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’​

By PHELIM KINE
04/28/2023 09:30 AM EDT

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns attends a plenary session for the World Peace Forum on July 4, 2022

Nicholas Burns made his first trip to China in 1988 accompanying then-Secretary of State George Schultz. At that time, China had an annual gross domestic product of $312 billion, the Chinese government had begun experimenting with village-level democratic elections and Xi Jinping was toiling as the executive vice-mayor of the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Thirty-four years later, when Burns landed in Beijing to become U.S. ambassador, the value of China’s GDP had hit $17.5 trillion and Xi had become China’s unchallenged paramount leader at the top of an increasingly repressive authoritarian government that the Biden administration views as having “both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”

Burns began work in Beijing last April in the depths of the country’s draconian zero-Covid policy. His role as Biden’s point person in China has coincided with bilateral relations cratering over tensions related to Taiwan, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the discovery — and subsequent destruction — of a Chinese spy balloon over the continental U.S. in February. A possible reflection of those tensions: President Xi made Burns wait more than a year before accepting his credentials on Tuesday.

Burns’ diplomatic career has spanned decades. He served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War era administration in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush’s director of Soviet Affairs in the early 1990s. He also did stints as State Department spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to NATO.

I spoke with Burns about the rigors of 21st century U.S. diplomacy in China, the troubling communication gap between the two countries and the trouble with comparing the old Cold War with the Soviet Union with the much more complex U.S.-China rivalry.

How did Zero-Covid and its aftermath affect your ability to run the embassy?

It affected every aspect of our work. It affected the way we could live here, and affected our families and affected American kids in schools here. There were times here in Beijing and certainly in Shanghai, in Guangzhou, in Wuhan, Shenyang — where we have our consulates — that during the lockdown stores were closed. Government offices were off limits. It was hard to get on public transportation. Even the parks were closed at some points during the Beijing spring and autumn lockdowns.

There were quarantine requirements on arrival. So if you arrived, even if you tested negative, you had to quarantine. When I arrived, my wife and I spent 21 days in quarantine. I think in my first nine months, I spent a total of 40 days in quarantine on three different trips back into China.

We also could not travel internally. And that meant that a lot of our officers here at the Embassy in Beijing and our four consulates couldn’t really do their jobs. If you’re working for the Food and Drug Administration here, you have to inspect [manufacturing] plants, and they couldn’t do that. If you’re a public diplomacy officer or a political officer, you want to go to Yunnan, to Sichuan Province, to Guangdong Province, but we couldn’t do that.

We’re beginning to arrive at some degree of normalcy, but it’s been a difficult, strange beginning.

What misconceptions do Americans have about China, and vice versa?

The major issue here is that the American people have been largely cut off from the Chinese people — because of Covid. And because of three years of a lack of travel back and forth. We had thousands of business travelers going back and forth between the two countries pre-pandemic and that has largely dried up. And because of the paucity of flights right now, it’s very difficult to get a commercial flight that’s reasonably priced from one country to the other. We’re seeing a trickle of business travelers, but not a flood.

Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000-15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that’s because of Covid —student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don’t have the people-to-people connections right now that we’ve had in the past.

On the Chinese side, because of censorship and because of the Great Firewall, it’s very difficult for us to project the true sense of what our government believes in, what it’s trying to do, what Congress is doing, or what the average American is thinking about China. Google and Facebook and YouTube are not permitted to operate here. And as the American ambassador, I am not allowed to print an unedited op-ed in the People’s Daily, the way that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is welcome to print op-eds in our press. So all of us here worry that the Chinese people often aren’t able to get a true picture of who we are as a society because of all these because of all these barriers.

What keeps you up at night?

We obviously want to avoid an accidental conflict. I don’t think one is probable or likely but it’s obviously possible. And so that leads us on our side in the U.S. government to focus on the need for reliable channels between the two governments.

Many of our most important channels were suspended by the government here in Beijing in the wake of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. We think it’s very important to resurrect the military channels that connect us from the Pentagon, from our command and Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii to the PRC government. Our diplomatic channels have been kind of on and off for the last year or two. We’d like to see them reliably stronger so that we can work together to head off any accidental conflict, any misunderstandings and deal with the normal business of government on a daily basis.

How difficult does the Chinese government make it to do your job?

We do face many restrictions in our activities here that are familiar to American diplomats serving in Moscow, for instance, or previous generations of American diplomats serving in the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War.

American diplomats here in China are routinely restricted from visiting university campuses in China. There are some exceptions to that. But we would hope that in the near future, it’d be possible for American diplomats at all levels to be able to visit a university campus and talk to faculty and students.

It’s important to be able to talk to provincial leaders because they’re so much a part of the governing structure here. I think it would improve the health of this relationship, but we’ve had a number of restrictions put on us. It’s not unusual — it’s happened to American diplomats here for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years — but the restrictions have probably been growing in intensity over the last year or two.

What similarities or differences do you see between the old Soviet authoritarianism and authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party?

When I think about the power that the Soviet Union had from the late 1940s into the early 90s, it was nothing like the power and the strength that China is exhibiting on the world stage. That’s why I think this comparison that people have made between the old Cold War and our present great power rivalry [with China] can be helpful at times to think about the comparisons, but they’re not exact.

The Soviet Union was a colossal power. Its nuclear dimensions. Its military dimension when it had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing Americans in the Fulda Gap and on the north German plain. But the power of the People’s Republic of China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. And it’s based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity, and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future. I do think the challenge from China is more complex and more deeply rooted and a greater test for us going forward.

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

www.politico.com

Soviet Union’s economic policies eventually led to its collapse.

China does a nice system of market socialism where it provides dividends to its people but ensures that it’s corporations are competitive on the world stage.

 

[Maula Jatt]

Soviet Union’s economic policies eventually led to its collapse.

China does a nice system of market socialism where it provides dividends to its people but ensures that it’s corporations are competitive on the world stage.

I think India would outdo China in the long run
But they need to remain a cohesive, united society for last couple of years there's been a lot of infighting

US is a great country but they're messing up thier society other than that it'll always be a very powerful country


Democracies take time to develop but in the end they outperform everyone

 

[beijingwalker]

I think India would outdo China in the long run

lol, how?

 

[beijingwalker]

Many here compare China's rise to the former Soviet Union, but actually there's no comparison of the two at all.

 

[ProudThamizhan]

China is indeed much better off than the erstwhile USSR mostly because of their prudent dependence on western markets. They also have people scale that USSR did not have.
As their dependence on west gradually comes down, it is important however for China to show maturity in decision making and not give in to irrationality of emotions. In this they could learn from India.

 

[Maula Jatt]

lol, how?

Y'all lack a system of correcting you mess ups or removing the man who messes or stopping that mess up from happening in the first place or sometimes even acknowledging that y'all messed up

In a functioning democracy they have such a system

Why you're successful up till now?- cause Chinese society was always going to be successful despite what happened in the last century or 2, at a core level Chinese society is a high performing society

CCP is great at doing stuff, getting things but that's not the only part of running a great country like China

 

[beijingwalker]

Y'all lack a system of correcting you mess ups or removing the man who messes or stopping that mess up from happening in the first place or sometimes even acknowledging that y'all messed up

In a functioning democracy they have such a system

Why you're successful up till now?- cause Chinese society was always going to be successful despite what happened in the last century or 2, at a core level Chinese society is a high performing society

CCP is great at doing stuff, getting things but that's not the only part of running a great country like China

​

India seems unable to match China on technocratic talent，India’s civil service as a legacy of British rule can't tackle complex challenges​

25 Apr 2023, 11:35 PM ISTPankaj Mishra

The world’s newest most populous country faces steep challenges

In a historical shift, India is surpassing China to become the world’s most populous country. But the question of whether India can realize its demographic dividend and outperform ageing China economically does not go far enough.

More attention is due to a fundamental and oddly neglected issue: whether India’s government has the technocratic capacity to transform the country into a major economic, scientific and tech power like China.

For more than half a century since Mao Zedong’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, well-educated leaders have mapped China’s trajectory to modernization. Mao devised quack solutions for China’s challenge of rapid industrialization, such as making steel in family backyards.

But his colleagues began to check his ideological excesses even while he was alive. Since Deng Xiaoping’s momentous tenure, China has seemed able to tap its available intellectual potential no matter who is in power.

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, argues in a forthcoming book that Chinese President Xi Jinping, considered more autocratic than his predecessors, has empowered a new generation of experts in IT, aerospace, 5G, robotics, AI and more. Many of these technocrats have experience competing globally at China’s state-owned enterprises.

Observers of India will struggle to find a comparable consolidation of talent at the highest levels of the country’s political and economic leadership. India’s civil service, unlike China’s, is a legacy of British rule. Originally meant to enforce law and order and collect revenue, it implements welfare schemes and development plans now. Though increasingly diverse, this bureaucracy does not seem as well-equipped as China’s to tackle complex challenges.

This is hardly because India lacks talent. A handful of educational institutions in India have produced arguably the most impressive global intelligentsia of any non-Western country. Indians today occupy senior positions across Western academic, financial and corporate institutions. Indeed, the Chinese diaspora in the West, though longer established, can’t match the impact and visibility of the Indian diaspora. Yet, it would be misleading to draw a picture of India’s intellectual capacity and potential by looking at Sundar Pichai of Google and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Indeed, they are a reminder of how much Indian talent exists outside of India (or is eager to leave).

The occasional homecoming is rarely successful. Take, for instance, Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Invited in 2013 by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to head the Reserve Bank of India, Rajan returned to the US in 2016. His criticism of crony capitalism and ideological extremism in India did not endear him to the regime led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since Rajan’s departure, new appointees appear to have compromised the independence of India’s central bank, with other major institutions, from financial regulatory bodies to universities and security and intelligence agencies, are not faring much better.

Facts and data in India often appear increasingly fudged; political expediency seem to have blocked even a routine national census that would shed light on India’s population. Today, it’s questionable whether a system of government that hinges on power of the kind Modi wields can help accelerate India’s modernization beyond a point, no matter how many infrastructure projects he inaugurates. Nor can this essential task be left to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. China has powerfully demonstrated that nations that start belatedly on the task of economic modernization need long-term policy and coordinated action by a dedicated national elite consisting of bureaucrats and technocrats as well as political leaders.

Modi’s own educational credentials aren’t the issue. Nor is his Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu nationalism an obstacle by itself. Pragmatic-minded nationalists can learn on the job. But the regime displays elements of Mao-style, arbitrary decision-making, illustrated pointedly by India’s devastating policy of demonetization. The ruling party also seems to have prioritized its own cultural revolution against India’s previous, highly educated ruling class above all else. After nine years in power, references are still made to the BJP being victimized by entrenched secular elites. What are seen as bastions of social and educational privilege often come under fire.

Rather than catching up with China, India seems to be replicating China’s past, when ideological fervour and indoctrination of the masses disastrously took priority over social stability, political cohesion and economic growth. The world’s new largest country may need fresh leaders before it can realize its immense intellectual as well as demographic dividend.

India seems unable to match China on technocratic talent

The world’s newest most populous country faces steep challenges

www.livemint.com

 

[Muji.Iqbal]

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’​

By PHELIM KINE
04/28/2023 09:30 AM EDT

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns attends a plenary session for the World Peace Forum on July 4, 2022

Nicholas Burns made his first trip to China in 1988 accompanying then-Secretary of State George Schultz. At that time, China had an annual gross domestic product of $312 billion, the Chinese government had begun experimenting with village-level democratic elections and Xi Jinping was toiling as the executive vice-mayor of the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Thirty-four years later, when Burns landed in Beijing to become U.S. ambassador, the value of China’s GDP had hit $17.5 trillion and Xi had become China’s unchallenged paramount leader at the top of an increasingly repressive authoritarian government that the Biden administration views as having “both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”

Burns began work in Beijing last April in the depths of the country’s draconian zero-Covid policy. His role as Biden’s point person in China has coincided with bilateral relations cratering over tensions related to Taiwan, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the discovery — and subsequent destruction — of a Chinese spy balloon over the continental U.S. in February. A possible reflection of those tensions: President Xi made Burns wait more than a year before accepting his credentials on Tuesday.

Burns’ diplomatic career has spanned decades. He served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War era administration in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush’s director of Soviet Affairs in the early 1990s. He also did stints as State Department spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to NATO.

I spoke with Burns about the rigors of 21st century U.S. diplomacy in China, the troubling communication gap between the two countries and the trouble with comparing the old Cold War with the Soviet Union with the much more complex U.S.-China rivalry.

How did Zero-Covid and its aftermath affect your ability to run the embassy?

It affected every aspect of our work. It affected the way we could live here, and affected our families and affected American kids in schools here. There were times here in Beijing and certainly in Shanghai, in Guangzhou, in Wuhan, Shenyang — where we have our consulates — that during the lockdown stores were closed. Government offices were off limits. It was hard to get on public transportation. Even the parks were closed at some points during the Beijing spring and autumn lockdowns.

There were quarantine requirements on arrival. So if you arrived, even if you tested negative, you had to quarantine. When I arrived, my wife and I spent 21 days in quarantine. I think in my first nine months, I spent a total of 40 days in quarantine on three different trips back into China.

We also could not travel internally. And that meant that a lot of our officers here at the Embassy in Beijing and our four consulates couldn’t really do their jobs. If you’re working for the Food and Drug Administration here, you have to inspect [manufacturing] plants, and they couldn’t do that. If you’re a public diplomacy officer or a political officer, you want to go to Yunnan, to Sichuan Province, to Guangdong Province, but we couldn’t do that.

We’re beginning to arrive at some degree of normalcy, but it’s been a difficult, strange beginning.

What misconceptions do Americans have about China, and vice versa?

The major issue here is that the American people have been largely cut off from the Chinese people — because of Covid. And because of three years of a lack of travel back and forth. We had thousands of business travelers going back and forth between the two countries pre-pandemic and that has largely dried up. And because of the paucity of flights right now, it’s very difficult to get a commercial flight that’s reasonably priced from one country to the other. We’re seeing a trickle of business travelers, but not a flood.

Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000-15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that’s because of Covid —student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don’t have the people-to-people connections right now that we’ve had in the past.

On the Chinese side, because of censorship and because of the Great Firewall, it’s very difficult for us to project the true sense of what our government believes in, what it’s trying to do, what Congress is doing, or what the average American is thinking about China. Google and Facebook and YouTube are not permitted to operate here. And as the American ambassador, I am not allowed to print an unedited op-ed in the People’s Daily, the way that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is welcome to print op-eds in our press. So all of us here worry that the Chinese people often aren’t able to get a true picture of who we are as a society because of all these because of all these barriers.

What keeps you up at night?

We obviously want to avoid an accidental conflict. I don’t think one is probable or likely but it’s obviously possible. And so that leads us on our side in the U.S. government to focus on the need for reliable channels between the two governments.

Many of our most important channels were suspended by the government here in Beijing in the wake of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. We think it’s very important to resurrect the military channels that connect us from the Pentagon, from our command and Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii to the PRC government. Our diplomatic channels have been kind of on and off for the last year or two. We’d like to see them reliably stronger so that we can work together to head off any accidental conflict, any misunderstandings and deal with the normal business of government on a daily basis.

How difficult does the Chinese government make it to do your job?

We do face many restrictions in our activities here that are familiar to American diplomats serving in Moscow, for instance, or previous generations of American diplomats serving in the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War.

American diplomats here in China are routinely restricted from visiting university campuses in China. There are some exceptions to that. But we would hope that in the near future, it’d be possible for American diplomats at all levels to be able to visit a university campus and talk to faculty and students.

It’s important to be able to talk to provincial leaders because they’re so much a part of the governing structure here. I think it would improve the health of this relationship, but we’ve had a number of restrictions put on us. It’s not unusual — it’s happened to American diplomats here for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years — but the restrictions have probably been growing in intensity over the last year or two.

What similarities or differences do you see between the old Soviet authoritarianism and authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party?

When I think about the power that the Soviet Union had from the late 1940s into the early 90s, it was nothing like the power and the strength that China is exhibiting on the world stage. That’s why I think this comparison that people have made between the old Cold War and our present great power rivalry [with China] can be helpful at times to think about the comparisons, but they’re not exact.

The Soviet Union was a colossal power. Its nuclear dimensions. Its military dimension when it had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing Americans in the Fulda Gap and on the north German plain. But the power of the People’s Republic of China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. And it’s based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity, and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future. I do think the challenge from China is more complex and more deeply rooted and a greater test for us going forward.

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

www.politico.com

My Chinese friends told me that the Soviet Union is not the gold standard.

But an alternative to USA is desperately needed and China fits the billing. At least Chinese are anti-crusade.

 

[Zsari]

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’​

By PHELIM KINE
04/28/2023 09:30 AM EDT

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns attends a plenary session for the World Peace Forum on July 4, 2022

Nicholas Burns made his first trip to China in 1988 accompanying then-Secretary of State George Schultz. At that time, China had an annual gross domestic product of $312 billion, the Chinese government had begun experimenting with village-level democratic elections and Xi Jinping was toiling as the executive vice-mayor of the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Thirty-four years later, when Burns landed in Beijing to become U.S. ambassador, the value of China’s GDP had hit $17.5 trillion and Xi had become China’s unchallenged paramount leader at the top of an increasingly repressive authoritarian government that the Biden administration views as having “both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”

Burns began work in Beijing last April in the depths of the country’s draconian zero-Covid policy. His role as Biden’s point person in China has coincided with bilateral relations cratering over tensions related to Taiwan, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the discovery — and subsequent destruction — of a Chinese spy balloon over the continental U.S. in February. A possible reflection of those tensions: President Xi made Burns wait more than a year before accepting his credentials on Tuesday.

Burns’ diplomatic career has spanned decades. He served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War era administration in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush’s director of Soviet Affairs in the early 1990s. He also did stints as State Department spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to NATO.

I spoke with Burns about the rigors of 21st century U.S. diplomacy in China, the troubling communication gap between the two countries and the trouble with comparing the old Cold War with the Soviet Union with the much more complex U.S.-China rivalry.

How did Zero-Covid and its aftermath affect your ability to run the embassy?

It affected every aspect of our work. It affected the way we could live here, and affected our families and affected American kids in schools here. There were times here in Beijing and certainly in Shanghai, in Guangzhou, in Wuhan, Shenyang — where we have our consulates — that during the lockdown stores were closed. Government offices were off limits. It was hard to get on public transportation. Even the parks were closed at some points during the Beijing spring and autumn lockdowns.

There were quarantine requirements on arrival. So if you arrived, even if you tested negative, you had to quarantine. When I arrived, my wife and I spent 21 days in quarantine. I think in my first nine months, I spent a total of 40 days in quarantine on three different trips back into China.

We also could not travel internally. And that meant that a lot of our officers here at the Embassy in Beijing and our four consulates couldn’t really do their jobs. If you’re working for the Food and Drug Administration here, you have to inspect [manufacturing] plants, and they couldn’t do that. If you’re a public diplomacy officer or a political officer, you want to go to Yunnan, to Sichuan Province, to Guangdong Province, but we couldn’t do that.

We’re beginning to arrive at some degree of normalcy, but it’s been a difficult, strange beginning.

What misconceptions do Americans have about China, and vice versa?

The major issue here is that the American people have been largely cut off from the Chinese people — because of Covid. And because of three years of a lack of travel back and forth. We had thousands of business travelers going back and forth between the two countries pre-pandemic and that has largely dried up. And because of the paucity of flights right now, it’s very difficult to get a commercial flight that’s reasonably priced from one country to the other. We’re seeing a trickle of business travelers, but not a flood.

Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000-15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that’s because of Covid —student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don’t have the people-to-people connections right now that we’ve had in the past.

On the Chinese side, because of censorship and because of the Great Firewall, it’s very difficult for us to project the true sense of what our government believes in, what it’s trying to do, what Congress is doing, or what the average American is thinking about China. Google and Facebook and YouTube are not permitted to operate here. And as the American ambassador, I am not allowed to print an unedited op-ed in the People’s Daily, the way that the Chinese ambassador to the United States is welcome to print op-eds in our press. So all of us here worry that the Chinese people often aren’t able to get a true picture of who we are as a society because of all these because of all these barriers.

What keeps you up at night?

We obviously want to avoid an accidental conflict. I don’t think one is probable or likely but it’s obviously possible. And so that leads us on our side in the U.S. government to focus on the need for reliable channels between the two governments.

Many of our most important channels were suspended by the government here in Beijing in the wake of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. We think it’s very important to resurrect the military channels that connect us from the Pentagon, from our command and Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii to the PRC government. Our diplomatic channels have been kind of on and off for the last year or two. We’d like to see them reliably stronger so that we can work together to head off any accidental conflict, any misunderstandings and deal with the normal business of government on a daily basis.

How difficult does the Chinese government make it to do your job?

We do face many restrictions in our activities here that are familiar to American diplomats serving in Moscow, for instance, or previous generations of American diplomats serving in the Soviet Union during the worst years of the Cold War.

American diplomats here in China are routinely restricted from visiting university campuses in China. There are some exceptions to that. But we would hope that in the near future, it’d be possible for American diplomats at all levels to be able to visit a university campus and talk to faculty and students.

It’s important to be able to talk to provincial leaders because they’re so much a part of the governing structure here. I think it would improve the health of this relationship, but we’ve had a number of restrictions put on us. It’s not unusual — it’s happened to American diplomats here for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years — but the restrictions have probably been growing in intensity over the last year or two.

What similarities or differences do you see between the old Soviet authoritarianism and authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party?

When I think about the power that the Soviet Union had from the late 1940s into the early 90s, it was nothing like the power and the strength that China is exhibiting on the world stage. That’s why I think this comparison that people have made between the old Cold War and our present great power rivalry [with China] can be helpful at times to think about the comparisons, but they’re not exact.

The Soviet Union was a colossal power. Its nuclear dimensions. Its military dimension when it had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing Americans in the Fulda Gap and on the north German plain. But the power of the People’s Republic of China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. And it’s based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity, and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future. I do think the challenge from China is more complex and more deeply rooted and a greater test for us going forward.

China ‘is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was’

www.politico.com

China still has not appointed an ambassador to the US. The position is vacant for month now.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

China has huge population compared to USSR and China's manufacturing makes USSR look like a toddler.

 

[White and Green with M/S]

China has huge population compared to USSR and China's manufacturing makes USSR look like a toddler.

Population don't make you rich but its a burden on economic condition of the country

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

Population don't make you rich but its a burden on economic condition of the country

Bigger population = bigger army.

 

[White and Green with M/S]

Bigger population = bigger army.

Bigger expenses lol

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

Bigger expenses lol

Bigger population = bigger economy.