Transcript | Edge of Ruin: Mike Lampton and Wang Jisi’s Warning on U.S.-China Relations
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink.”
Written against the backdrop of President Trump’s planned visit to China (and before the outbreak of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran), the essay is less a routine policy paper than an urgent intervention — two veteran scholars, one American and one Chinese, throwing a rope across a widening chasm. They argue that strategic rivalry has become self-reinforcing, that the greatest danger is no longer deliberate conflict but accidental war driven by miscalculation and escalation dynamics neither side fully controls, and that a rare, narrow window for “a new normalization” may now be opening.
We range across the essay’s boldest claims — on Taiwan as the unlikely starting point for stabilization, the corrosive logic of securitization, the ghost of the first Cold War, and the looming talent crisis in serious China studies — in a meaty, substantive conversation.
3:39 How the Lampton–Wang Jisi collaboration came together
6:31 The division of labor and the essay’s unified voice
9:15 Wang Jisi’s cognitive empathy and his unusual depth of American understanding
13:57 The essay’s emotional register: veteran scholars and the specter of another Cold War
16:32 From reassurance to deterrence—and why deterrence keeps getting harder to maintain
25:02 Mirror-image threat narratives as self-fulfilling operating systems
32:08 Securitization, the “one-way ratchet,” and whether economic interdependence can be rebuilt
39:23 Accidental war: what has changed since Hainan 2001 and Belgrade 1999
44:16 Where the most damaging choices were made—China’s Ukraine pivot, U.S. arms-control withdrawals
51:29 The window of opportunity: Trump’s China visit, the 4th Plenum, and post-Iran recalculation
1:01:30 Taiwan as the counterintuitive starting point for stabilization
1:10:03 Collapse fantasies, hubris, and the Pearl Harbor danger of “act now or lose the window”
1:13:14 The looming China-talent crisis and the future of the field
Paying It Forward
Mike highlights Rosie Levine, executive director of the U.S.–China Education Trust, where she is leading a major new initiative to expand serious American scholarship in China and encourage Chinese institutions to open their doors wider to foreign researchers and students.
Recommendations
Mike: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt (Knopf, 2025) — a biography of Major Evans Carlson, the swashbuckling Marine officer who trained with Chinese Communist forces in the 1930s, befriended Zhu De, brought the word “gung-ho” into English, and died in 1947 just in time to miss both the PRC’s turn away from liberty and McCarthyism’s persecution at home.
Kaiser: “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” a New Yorker piece by Chang Che on the remarkable renaissance of interest in Greco-Roman philosophy and literature in contemporary China — and what it says about the world we now inhabit.
Transcript:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we 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 this week from my home in Beijing.
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Today, we are going to tackle one of the most consequential questions in international politics right now — whether the United States and China are drifting into a conflict that neither side actually wants, and what can still be done to arrest that drift. My guest is someone who has spent decades thinking about that problem. David M. Lampton, Mike, is one of the most distinguished scholars of U.S.-China relations in the United States.
He is director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University’s college, and it’s the School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS, and is the author of a long list, really far too long list, of influential works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. Regular listeners will remember his last appearance, along with Tom Fingar to talk about a terrific paper that they had in the Washington Quarterly about the two modes in Chinese politics and how the perception of external threat is such an important factor in determining which mode Beijing enters.
Mike joins me today to discuss a new Foreign Affairs essay that he co-authored with Wang Jisi, the prominent Chinese scholar of international relations at Beida, at Peking University. The essay is a serious warning about the trajectory of the U.S.-China relationship and a plea for what the authors call a new normalization. It has the rather ominous title “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink” The two of them argue that the United States and China have entered a phase in which strategic rivalry is becoming self-reinforcing and that the greatest danger may not be deliberate war, but accidental war, triggered by crisis, miscalculation, or escalation dynamics that neither side fully controls.
With President Trump scheduled to come to China in just three weeks, and in light of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, which was just launched two weeks ago, I thought it would be a great time to bring Mike on to talk about this important piece. Unfortunately, Professor Wang Jisi was not able to join us today, so Mike will be speaking for himself and, where appropriate, about the thinking behind their collaboration. Mike Lampton, welcome back to Sinica.
Mike Lampton: Good to be with you, Kaiser.
Kaiser: It’s so wonderful that you could join, and thanks for getting up early. Let me start not with the argument itself, but with the collaboration that led to this piece. The piece doesn’t read like a routine co-authored journal article. It reads much more like an intervention. Almost like two very senior scholars, one American and one Chinese, trying to throw a rope really across a widening chasm and pull it back together. So how did this come together? Was there a particular moment when one of you, when Wang Jisi or you, reached out to the other and said, more or less, you know, “We need to say something now”?
Mike: Well, this was a project that, surprisingly enough, was easy for both of us, I think, to write. And that’s because I think we came to the conclusion that there was so much we agreed about. So, in this age of contrary analyses in both our society, we found a great deal to agree about and thought we ought to share that. The background was that actually there was a book by Debbie Davis and Terry Lautz, a set of biographies about various Chinese and how they had interacted with the United States over time.
And I wrote the chapter on that on Wang Jisi. So, for the last couple of years, Wang Jisi and I had been interacting. I did a series of interviews with him, and I go to China frequently and we see each other. And so, with that deep background, on one of my last trips, I’ve been there three times in the last seven months, I sort of said to Wang Jisi, “Aren’t you worried about the trajectory of U.S.-China relations?” Haven’t we learned something from the first Cold War? And are those lessons applicable to our current circumstance? Because, frankly, I see, and I think you do, the trajectory of U.S.-China relations moving in a very dangerous direction. And we found we agreed, and we had a framework of basically lessons — where do we think we are? Lessons to the past.
How do they apply to the current time? And in light of this, what might be some positive steps that we have, given that President Trump is going, as we now believe, to China in about two weeks? And then what might they be able to do in the context of that trip? We don’t have great expectations for what might be accomplished, but we think positive steps can be made, and there is an agenda of future meetings. You’ll notice the title said — a last chance — not the last chance.
Kaiser: Right, right. That definite article would have made it even more dire. So, I’m delighted to hear that there was very little area of disagreement between the two of you, but I am going to press you on whether there was any. But before we get to that, how did the actual collaboration work? Was there a sort of tacit division of labor or an explicit one even? Were there sections of the finished piece that were more recognizably yours and others that were more Wang Jisi’s? Or was it one of those pieces where the argument was just kind of jointly hammered out until the voices became inseparable?
Mike: Well, I think in the end, it’s basically inseparable. I think the place where it’s most clearly one or the other is where we talk about, say, American perceptions of the costs of the first Cold War. And given it was about American perceptions of the cost of the first Cold War, I played a heavy role in that. But I think one of the interesting things, particularly for a Western audience, is the discussion of the article about how
