Transcript: The View from China: Leading IR scholar Da Wei of Tsinghua's CISS

The following is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast interview with Da Wei. Thanks to Lili Shoup for her enormous help with the transcription.

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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This week on Sinica, we are talking about the state of Chinese understanding of the United States — how China’s strategic class, its senior analysts in academia and in think tanks within its decision-making organs, among its media elites, how that class assesses what’s happened across the last two decades or so in the U.S.-China relationship, what it focuses on as it diagnoses what brought on the worsening relationship, and what it would prescribe for how the relationship can be improved, if it indeed can be. 

I am delighted to be joined by Dá Wēi 达巍, one of China’s foremost scholars of China’s foreign relations, and especially relations with the U.S. Da Wei is the senior director of the Center for International Security and Strategy, CISS, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and is a professor in the Department of International Relations in the School of Social Science at Tsinghua. Before September 2017, Professor Da served as the director of the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations — CICIR — a leading think tank in Beijing. He was at CICIR for more than two decades and directed the Institute of American Studies from 2013 to 2017. Professor Da, welcome to Sinica.

Da Wei: Yes, thank you, Kaiser, for inviting me. That’s really my great honor and a privilege to join you.

Kaiser: Really, it is entirely my honor and my privilege, but thank you so much. Professor Da, you have just returned only two days ago to Beijing after wrapping up a few months, I think, as a visiting China studies fellow at the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, and at the Freeman Spogli Institute, both at Stanford University. Listeners will recall that very recently I spoke with a gentleman from both of those same affiliations, Tom Fingar. So tell me, Da Wei, did anything surprise you either positively or otherwise about your time at Stanford, about attitudes you heard when it comes to the U.S.-China relationship?

Da Wei: I won’t say it surprised me a lot, but I do, I think at least, it verified some of my beliefs that the United States as a country has different, I will say, very diversified view towards China. I think, of course, Stanford or let’s say the West Coast, I think, is quite different from the East Coast particularly, for instance, Washington, D.C., so-called “inside the beltway.” I think they’re very different. And also I think there in the… I think in the West Coast, first, I think it’s more about, for example, people care about economy, technology, but less about politics. And China, of course, is a background of a lot of discussion. But at the same time, I won’t say China is very much a focus of the discussion.

China is more or less a background. So, not so many people really cares about China or talking about China. Yeah, that’s something I think is quite different. Comparing my experience in D.C., China has been a kind of focus, I will say. In Stanford, I’m very glad that they have very good experts on China, on China per se. I mean China’s politics, even local grassroots level politics, rural development, Chinese economy, culture, arts. I think that’s very good, very interesting expertise there in the West Coast, and particularly at Stanford.