Transcript: Back to the Future — David M. Lampton and Thomas Fingar on What Went Wrong and How to Fix It
Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Thomas Fingar and David M. Lampton, recorded on March 15, 2024.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China.
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I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Seattle, Washington This week on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome Tom Fingar and David Lampton — two gentlemen who are well known, I daresay, to many of the listeners. Thomas Fingar is Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He was Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research. He served as the first deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. And he’s the author of many books, including, most recently, From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform. Thomas — Tom, if I may, welcome to Sinica.
Thomas Fingar: Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting us.
Kaiser: Hey, thank you. David M. Lampton — Mike, as he’s known — is Professor Emeritus and former Hyman Professor and Director of SAIS-China and China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute. Mike was also formerly president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. His latest of several books is called Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War, published just a couple of months ago. Mike Lampton, welcome to Sinica.
Mike Lampton: Thank you. Good to be with you, Kaiser.
Kaiser: Well, great, Mike. I have my copy of Living U.S.-China Relations, but I have a hard-and-fast rule against interviewing anyone about a book that I haven’t read cover to cover. As soon as I finish, I hope to have you back on the program for a deep dive into that. But what I have read and have read now quite a number of times is a paper that the two of you co-authored in The Winter 2024 edition of the Washington Quarterly. The paper is titled “China’s America Policy: Back to the Future.” And as brief as it is, it is nonetheless one of the most compelling diagnoses and sets of prescriptions that I’ve seen for what ails the bilateral relationship.
If I didn’t emphasize the importance of strategic empathy or cognitive empathy, it wouldn’t be an episode of Sinica, right? This is a recurrent theme for me, and this paper does that extraordinarily well.
It really captures how American policy, as perceived by Beijing, I should emphasize, has been a major driver, but importantly, by no means the only, and maybe not even the biggest driver of Chinese behavior. I think it right sizes, at least in my own estimation, the part played by American behavior and does an excellent job in highlighting the important domestic Chinese drivers of their foreign policy and of their handling of the relationship as well. Just as an aside here, gentlemen, since I don’t know who contributed what to this paper, I’m going to just sort of put my questions to both of you and whoever wants to jump in can just…
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