Transcript: Broken Engagement: Veteran China reporter Bob Davis on his new collection of interviews

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

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 how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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This show launched 15 years ago in the midst of what some of us realized, even then, was a pivotal moment in U.S.-China relations. A relatively untroubled relationship had prevailed in China for much of the preceding, well, almost decade, several years anyway. But in the aftermath of the great financial crisis, for a great many reasons, even before Xi Jinping took office, it was clear that we were entering into a different era of bilateral relations. And this podcast has, to a significant extent, been a long kind of project to chronicle, to examine, possibly to ultimately explain what went wrong.

So, I’m delighted to have someone else on the show today who has made significant contributions to that very same enterprise. As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Bob Davis closely followed the vicissitudes of the relationship, and, in the course of his reporting, interviewed many, many important decision makers across multiple American administrations. He’s collected many of these interviews in a new book published by our friends at The Wire China. The book is called Broken Engagement: Interviews with those who have made — and remade — the U.S.’s policy towards China. And while some of them made me want to set my hair on fire, they represent, in aggregate, a fantastically edifying picture of the state across time of American China policy. Bob was on Sinica five years ago, I think it was, with his coauthor, Lingling Wei, who’s still at The Journal, of course, to talk about their excellent book, Superpower Showdown, which chronicled the first Trump trade war. Here, in the midst of the second, I thought it’d be a great time to ask Bob back to talk about this new book. Bob Davis, welcome back to Sinica.

Bob Davis: Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Kaiser: So, let’s set the stage first and frame the book and the arc of engagement, as it were. Bob, you’ve covered U.S.-China relations for decades now, but broken engagement takes a very unique approach. It lets U.S. policymakers speak in their own words across six different administrations. When you reflect on these interviews collectively, do you come away believing that engagement was doomed from the start, or was there a genuine window when it might have succeeded on its original terms? And yeah, I get that “original terms” is something that we can debate. It’s been endlessly debated. We’re going to get into that. But yeah, was it doomed from the start?

Bob: No, I don’t think it was doomed from the start at all. One thing that really came through to me was when talking with people from the George H. W. Bush administration, particularly Robert Gates, reminding me that engagement wasn’t about economics — it was all about national security. And Gates was talking about how unusual it was for him, at that point, a young CIA officer wandering around Tiananmen Square, walking or going into the areas where Chinese military people were learning how to read telemetry of Soviet missiles, which the CIA was teaching them, and that it really was a security relationship. And that actually worked out really quite well for the U.S.