This week on Sinica, I’m joined once again by Ryan Hass, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and co-host of the Beijing Brief podcast. Ryan has just published two pieces that couldn’t be better timed: a long essay in China Leadership Monitor, “China’s Great Power Vision Comes into Focus,” which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade Beijing finally laid its cards on the table — and a shorter Brookings piece, “Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump,” on why Xi Jinping has answered an unusually accommodating American president with a poker face, and what that means for Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month.
We start with the perennial question — what does China want? — and Ryan’s own two-decade journey with it, from chasing a supposed secret strategy in Zhongnanhai as a junior political officer to concluding that Beijing’s vision is now legible and consistent: an international political order stripped of its liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the “global majority.” We talk about “American decline” and “strategic stalemate” in Chinese discourse, the tension between China’s pitch to the developing world and its export juggernaut, the Middle East and Northeast Asia as test cases, and the central riddle of Ryan’s essay: why a country so willing to articulate its ambitions has been so unwilling to pay for them. Then we turn to the summit — constructive strategic stability, escalation dominance, and what will and won’t be on the table when Xi comes to Washington.
03:11 – The “What does China want?” genre — and why Ryan concluded there is no secret plan locked in a Zhongnanhai vault
06:10 – From participant to architect: what actually changed, and whether Beijing is revisionist or, as I cheekily put it, restorationist
09:12 – “American decline” (美国衰落) and “strategic stalemate” (战略相持): reading Beijing’s rhetorical restraint and the Maoist echo
14:34 – Champion of the global majority, or the world’s factory? The $6 toaster problem and the credibility gap on Ukraine and Japan
19:36 – The Middle East as a test case: economic enabler, not security patron — and the good-faith maximalist rebuttal
24:38 – Northeast Asia: why Beijing keeps generating the very encirclement it fears
26:59 – Rhetoric without resources: flat foreign aid, shrinking BRI lending, and the SCO as China’s proving ground
32:28 – The Pew swing that hasn’t materialized, and why Biden may have been America’s last restorationist president
36:01 – Why Beijing isn’t taking the bait: Xi’s poker face, “constructive strategic stability,” and the G2 refusal
41:55 – Confident abroad, anxious at home: the purges, the memory of 2020, economic escalation dominance, and a viewer’s guide to the September summit
Paying It Forward
Ryan flags two women doing important work in China studies, both with books out this fall: Emily Matson of Georgetown, whose China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II examines how the start date of China’s war with Japan was moved from 1937 back to 1931; and Shuxian Luo of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, whose Simmering Seas: Escalation and De-escalation in China’s Maritime Disputes is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in October. He also gives a shout-out to the engines of the Brookings China Center, research assistants Allie Matthias and Joyce Yang.
Recommendations
Ryan: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which he’s late to but found poignant for its eerie echoes of today’s battlefields — and Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change, an inside account of the second Trump administration that he calls harrowing but essential for anyone trying to anticipate the president’s behavior. (He also finally read The Three-Body Problem, and now knows his sophons from his Trisolarans.)
Kaiser: Robert Harris’s Agrippa, published September 1 — the memoir of Marcus Agrippa, the general who won Octavian’s battles and built half of Augustan Rome, and a story about the pivot from republic to empire that feels uncomfortably relevant. And if you’ve read Tuchman, do read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Not my official recommendation, but astonishing.
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.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there, and yes, they start to add up, but this one is very worthwhile. In addition to Sinica, you also get great content from partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project, and you get Jay Carter’s This Week in China’s History. So, please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more.
What does China want?
It’s the question that never seems to go away. It feels at times like it’s the question underneath nearly every other question in the discourse on China, and every year somebody takes another serious run at it. My guest today, Ryan Hass, has just undertaken one of the better efforts in recent memory, an essay in the new issue of China Leadership Monitor called China’s Great Power Vision Comes Into Focus, which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade when Beijing finally laid its cards on the table.
A vision for an international political order stripped of what some would call that order’s original liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the global majority. Ryan then asks whether China is actually willing to pay for it. He’s also just written a shorter piece for Brookings, where he works, that couldn’t be more timely with Xi Jinping due in Washington for a state visit later this month.
The piece is called Why Beijing Isn’t Taking the Bait with Trump. President Trump has given Beijing an awful lot of what it has wanted from an American president for a long time now, 75 years. But Xi Jinping has responded with kind of a poker face. Ryan explains why. Ryan Hass is Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
He’s a co-host of the excellent, excellent Beijing Brief podcast. From 2013 to 2017, during President Obama’s second term, he was director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia on the National Security Council. He’s someone I’ve come to rely on for exactly the kind of analysis these two pieces represent. Sensitive to, but unsentimental about Beijing. Sensitive to, yet also unsentimental about Washington.
And really grounded in what Chinese strategists are actually saying rather than what we’d like to imagine they’re saying. He’s been on the show many, many times before, and it’s always a pleasure and an inspiration. Ryan, welcome back to Seneca, and good evening to you.
Ryan Hass: Well, thank you, Kaiser. It’s really, it’s a pleasure and a privilege for me to be with you.
Kaiser: So, Ryan, let’s jump right in, and let’s start with the framing — What does China want has been asked so often that it’s almost become a genre unto itself, and I have heard answers to it that seem plausible enough and others that sound completely unhinged or are based, as far as I can tell, just on mere projection. Before we get into your answer, what do you make of what’s been suggested by major voices in the discourse focusing on the U.S. to date? Some of the answers, to me, don’t seem that far off. What’s out there?
Ryan: Well, I think that there’s a range of views in Washington about this question, what does China want? I think some of them, as you suggested, are ideological in their orientation. Some of them are rooted in a view that only one country can lead. So, if China rises, it must therefore displace the United States and assume the roles and responsibilities that the United States has held for 75 years. I’m arguing something different. And to be honest, Kaiser, this has sort of been a long, torturous journey. When I was a Foreign Service officer in the embassy in Beijing in 2008 to 2012, one of the things that I was asked to explore was exactly this question.
04:22
And so back then, I would go to the policy planning department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ask Le Yucheng, and I would go to the universities and ask Wang Jisi and Yan Xuetong and go to CICIR and talk to Da Wei and Yuan Peng and all these folks. And back then, there was sort of this question in Washington about whether there’s some secret strategy locked in a vault deep in Zhongnanhai that the Chinese are meticulously following to assert their dominance on the world stage. And the answer I came away with back then is it’s not there. You know, it just doesn’t exist because they were more consumed by more approximate issues and more approximate debates such as whether hide and bide still applies.
Kaiser: Right, right, right. So you had ruled one thing out that there was no 100-year marathon plan.
Ryan: Yeah.
Kaiser: Some of the answers that are on offer, like I said, they don’t seem too far off. I mean, there was that formulation that Jessica Chen Weiss popularized, you know, China wants a world safe for autocracy. There was this RAND report from, I think, 2017 or 2018 that described China as a kind of selectively revisionist state, not interested in hegemony beyond the region, not interested in overturning the apple cart. That seems to align pretty well with you, no?
Ryan: I think that broadly aligns with where I ended up based upon the research and the evidence that I found. But Kaiser, I think that there are two ways of getting at the answer to this question. One is knowing what conclusion you want and working backwards to fill in the blanks. And the other is trying to take the evidence as it comes and use it to let it guide you towards a hypothesis or theory. I’m hoping that this work falls in the latter category because it was really intended to try to provide as clear and accurate a reflection of my understanding of Chinese strategic thought as possible.
Kaiser: Yeah. So, I would say the most common answer I would hear was one that was rooted, I guess, admirably, in uncertainty that we just can’t really say for sure. But you’re saying the ambiguity is now mostly gone. China has moved, in your phrase, from participant to architect. Would you have answered all that differently five years ago? I mean, and if so, what has actually changed to make the vision more legible now? Is it that Beijing has said new things or that it started saying old things with a confidence that it didn’t have before? What’s changed?
Ryan: I think the principal thing that has changed is that the Chinese have just become much more open, direct, and consistently repetitive about articulating what type of world they want to see emerge. And this is a stark contrast to when I was
