Transcript | Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan on Shifting Views of China

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, 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 this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Sinica has been running now for more than 15 years, unbelievably, and over that time, I’ve tried to stay attuned to, among many other things, the shifts in the American discourse on China. It’s a long enough arc now that I flatter myself that I can actually detect when the conversation is moving in a new direction. Lately, I’ve had the strong sense that such a shift is underway. This isn’t something I’ve verified with any kind of textual analysis. I mean, it’s more than a gut feeling, but not much more. It’s an impressionistic take from reading widely and talking to lots of folks. But it seems to me that the change is reflected in the pages of some of the most important American publications, and perhaps none more so than in Foreign Affairs.

For over a century, Foreign Affairs has been the journal of record for American foreign policy and probably the single most influential publication among the U.S. strategic class. I’ve been reading it since I was a graduate student, I think 1989 or ‘90, under its current editor, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan. I have noticed, or anyway, I think I’ve noticed, not just more attention to China, you know, attention commensurate with how important China’s gotten, but also an openness to heterodox views, to voices that push against conventional Beltway wisdom, while still maintaining, you know, the rigor and the seriousness that have always defined the magazine or the journal. It’s not just the explicitly China-focused essays either, it’s pieces on technology, about the Middle East, about Russia, about India, or anywhere in the global South — they all seem to resonate with questions about how we think about China, you know, the bread and butter of this show.

I find myself reading just about everything now and finding it connects somehow with China. Anyway, this is all by way of explaining why I am so delighted to have Daniel on the show today to talk about how he sees these shifts, how editorial decisions are made there at Foreign Affairs. And what that tells us about where American strategy and the debate around it is actually headed. So, Daniel Kurtz-Felan, welcome at last to Seneca. We’ve been talking about doing this forever.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan: Yeah, Kaiser, I’m thrilled to be here. We’ve talked about this for a long time. I’m a regular listener of the podcast. And so, the only real downside of this for me is that I will not have an episode to listen to this week, but it’s worth it.

Kaiser: You’re going to want to listen to it anyway. I know what you mean, though. I hate listening to myself on other people’s podcasts, but it’s always like, goddamn it, you know what I should… Why was I so tongue-tied? Anyway, let’s jump in, though. Foreign Affairs has been the journal of record, as I said, in American foreign policy thinking for a century. Every editor, though, inevitably leaves a personal imprint. So let’s think back to when you came in first as, well, executive editor in 2017, I think it was, or if you like, you know, when you took the helm as editor, what you call editor, what most people would say editor in chief in 2021. I mean, either start dates, though, works because these were both moments of pretty significant shift in American attitudes toward China.

But whether you know China or anything else, what did you feel most needed updating or re-emphasizing? Did you see yourself mainly as, you know, a steward of this venerable tradition or as somebody who needed to make deliberate course corrections to keep the magazine central to the foreign policy conversation in the U.S.?

Daniel: Yeah. Thanks, Kaiser. It’s a good question. If I can step back a little bit further even, I spent a few years at the beginning of my career at Foreign Affairs as a junior editor, as a young editor, at a time of the Iraq war was kind of the central issue in American foreign policy debate. And that was formative to the way I thought about the whole set of issues that that we cover at Foreign Affairs. The China material, there’s not a ton of it back then, but it was the era of China’s peaceful rise. There was a lot of talk about economic engagement. It was shortly after China joined the WTO.

Kaiser: Yeah. The Golden Age.

Daniel: Exactly, exactly. A different time. I went from there into government during the Obama administration. There were pretty pronounced shifts in views of China over the course of the administration. Obviously, the big one came in Donald Trump’s first term, but you can kind of see the shift change from the early days of the strategic and economic dialogue. I don’t know if you remember that.