All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
01:10:12
How the Trump Administration Permanently Transformed U.S. China Policy—Fmr Pompeo Advisor Miles Yu | American Thought Leaders
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Chinese Communist Party is probably the most ideologically intoxicated, most dogmatic political party of Leninist stripe in human history.
Yet we don't tend to think of the CCP that way.
How should we understand China's remarkable economic growth in the last four decades?
So the Chinese economic growth, in other words, is not because of the Chinese Communist Party.
It's in spite of that.
According to Miles Yu, who served as senior China policy advisor to Mike Pompeo when he was U.S. Secretary of State, The Chinese Communist Party is a parasitical system that exploits the wealth created by the enterprising spirit of the Chinese people.
They want to basically replace the U.S.-led international order with its own authoritarian model of governance.
Yet many today still harbor illusions about China and the Chinese Communist Party.
Their internal designation of the United States as chief adversary has never changed.
Because of our enormous inspirational impact upon Chinese people.
Miles Yeh grew up during China's Cultural Revolution, a decade of revolutionary change and violence in which millions were killed.
In 1985, he came to the U.S. as an exchange student.
He's been a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy for 26 years, and after finishing his time at the State Department, he's now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
I interviewed him in his personal capacity.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
As you may know, YouTube has demonetized our channel.
To stay connected, please sign up for our mailing list in the description below so you never miss an episode.
Miles Yu, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Glad to be with you.
So, Miles, you were...
The senior China policy advisor to Secretary Pompeo.
Just about all the China policy, as I understand, is something that you played a significant role in.
Before we jump into this whole world, which is, of course, a big focus of this interview, your own perspective on China, in the writings that attracted Secretary Pompeo to you and your work, You want to give me a kind of a summary, a picture of what that is?
Basically, what you see is that China is a big country with a sort of binary image in the West.
On the one hand, China is a great war.
China is a country of history.
China is a country of incredible people.
The pandas and the great cuisine.
That cultural aspect is very important.
And that's what the Chinese Communist Party wants the world to know about.
China is, on the other hand, also a Marxist-Leninist entity ruled by a Marxist-Leninist political entity with absolutely dictatorial tendency and disposition.
And it's a system that Basically prohibits Individual thinking and individual freedom.
It's a system that also demands unanimity of opinions.
And it's a system of brutal dictatorship.
They call it in a very Leninist way, dictatorship of the proletariat.
Basically, China is a country of great repressive nature.
So we can see that in recent years in particular because the Communist Party has been enabled by High technology, which encourages them to fulfill its tendency to control people, to monitor people, to exercise complete Marxist-Leninist control of the country.
So that two sides of that It's very confusing.
So people who wish China well always take the former as the definitive dominant nature of China, that is traditional China, non-confrontational, nice people, great heritage.
So that is a mistake.
As a policy advisor, we have to understand both.
This is one of the beginning points I think many of our previous policy makers in the U.S. government have made a mistake of.
And I think this administration, actually, we tried to change that.
And to a certain degree, we succeeded.
This administration had a completely different understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist rule.
As Secretary Pompeo often said, the Chinese Communist Party is not the same as the Chinese people, and the Chinese Communist Party is not the same as China.
As a country.
So there is a completely different concept.
That actually is a very important distinction.
And I think the world is taking notice of that.
And more and more countries are rallying around that concept in making their own policies toward China.
Well, I was thinking there's this one sort of traditional culture element and cuisine and all this sort of element.
Then, of course, there's the Marxist-Leninist element.
But there's also, in the collective consciousness to some extent, or for years, there's this idea that China is actually becoming capitalist.
That there's this ability for people to rise, lifting millions of people out of poverty, to be rich is to be glorious, that whole mantra.
How does that fit into your vision?
Again, this is very important for us to understand the distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people.
And I think in modern society, we're heavily dependent upon two very important concepts.
One is free enterprise, which is more reflective of human nature.
So be capitalistic is not really guided by some kind of theory, complicated hypothesis, economic theorems.
Capitalism, in a way, is kind of a reality.
People have this natural tendency To expose their free enterprise spirit, to make self-interest not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a regulated self-pursuit.
And that's what the American system is all about.
That's what the enlightenment spirit is all about, based upon free market idea, because the market has the invisible hand to regulate some of the things, to make people inspired to excel.
Another aspect of that is a free market spirit, enterprising spirit, must go along with individual freedom.
And that freedom is a great idea because without that, nothing can happen.
You cannot have a free market system without the freedom.
Freedom basically means many things, right?
The most important thing, obviously, is freedom of speech, freedom of expression.
And basically, government will be checked by the consent of the people.
So I think what you're talking about, the capitalist society in China, is basically a reflection of the Chinese people and their The Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand, goes against that.
And so that's one of the reasons why the Chinese system as a whole is still a planned economy.
Free enterprise sector going on.
But the Chinese Communist Party is sort of parasitical, sitting on that kind of wealth created by the free enterprise system, capitalist sector of China.
And also, the Chinese Communist Party obviously is an enemy of freedom for the Chinese people.
That's why they spend more money each year On suppressing the people, on internal security, surveillance, than its entire defense budget, which is second in the world.
Incidentally, nobody can deny the fact that the Chinese economy is the world's number two, and the Chinese economic growth is tremendous.
But almost 100% of the Chinese economic growth comes out of the The Chinese economic growth, in other words, is not because of the Chinese Communist Party, it's in spite of that.
So that's why you see this very big seismic struggle in China between the freedom-loving and freedom-loving system expressed by the very capitalistic people.
And the opposite, that is the Chinese Communist Party.
So the idea somehow the Chinese Communist Party can speak for 1.4 billion Chinese is absolutely absurd.
The Chinese government knows this.
That's why when Secretary Pompeo said the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party are different things, they basically panicked.
And that's one they care about most, because the facade is so profoundly absurd.
And they know it, and they fear that that facade will crumble under its own absurdity.
Well, okay.
But there's an overlap in here.
For example, let's take someone who's been incredibly successful in China, Jack Ma, for example.
Of course, recently he's been checked by the Chinese Communist Party.
That's kind of an interesting story in itself.
But of course, He had to work within the system.
It's not like he had a free hand to do whatever he wanted.
How does that work exactly?
That's perfectly illustrated my point.
Jack Ma became Jack Ma precisely because of the government making Jack Ma.
Jack Ma started with the cooperation with Yahoo.
Yahoo cooperated with Alibaba initially in China.
And Alibaba basically got this technology, the operating model from Yahoo, from Amazon, from other things.
And then the Chinese government, they use various kind of restrictive regulations to kick those companies out.
And then what you have is Jack Ma, right?
It's Alibaba.
So in a way, it's state-protected monopoly.
Not direct monopoly, but the very indirect, oblique way to protect people like Jack Ma, who is very enterprising, very smart guy.
He uses state protection to become what he is.
But that's also very ironic, because once it becomes too big, Once it's become too big and once his operational model touched upon some of the monopolistic economic and financial practices of the Chinese Communist Party, he has to be disappeared.
He has to be gone.
For example, Giacomo, in my view, his major problem with the Communist Party is that He's too smart, too enterprising, and he ventured into the financial sector, the payment system.
That has to be a monopoly by the Communist Party.
So that's one reason why, in my view, he explained his downfall.
In other words, the Chinese economy is a very weird hybrid of some sort.
The Chinese Communist Party controls major economic operations.
It can't allow private sectors to strive only to a certain degree, only to serve its own self-interest.
Once that economic growth unleashed by the free enterprise system, and the party is not going to tolerate it.
Virtually one of the most dangerous professions in China is the billionaire.
Because the two influential parties take precedence.
So that's not a free market economy.
So it's actually in a philosophical way.
It's insane to allow a non-free market economy to participate in the free market system of the global trade.
That's why China's participation membership in WTO is kind of very, very ironic.
No major institution, no international financial institution, no major country in the West recognizes China's economy as a free market economy.
Keep that in mind.
Yet it has full access to the international system.
Exactly.
So that's fundamentally unfair.
That actually is the major reason why China could thrive, because by taking advantage of international free market system.
So, Miles, Perhaps you knew this all along, but when did you realize that U.S. policy towards China was fundamentally flawed?
And what was it that was the starkest to you?
Well, I cannot really pinpoint to a point that I have a piece of sushi and I have a sudden epiphany about what went wrong.
I think it's a gradual realization.
And I think one of the turning points perhaps is about the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.
And I was not the only one who reflected on our China policy at the time.
The entire Western world was shaken by the brutality and the callousness of the Chinese Communist Party toward human lives.
But because of my personal experience, so there is this kind of weird sense of You know, shot and fraught because I said, you know, hey, I told you so.
Because I hope that finally there is a wake up call because of Tiananmen people would have a fundamental change of course on China.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
We still harbor the same kind of illusion about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
We still have this kind of 19th century, very obsolete missionary sentiment somehow.
The Chinese government and Chinese people have this burden of history.
It's incumbent upon us to bring these hapless Chinese from the pre-industrial age to the modern world, to make China a stakeholder, a responsible stakeholder, so to speak, And that is completely, completely off the wall to me because, as I said, there is a fundamental difference between Chinese people yearning for freedom, just like anybody else, and the Chinese Communist Party, which is a very, very brutal Marxist-Leninist entity.
And we, in the West, constantly, constantly underestimate the degree to which China is still a Communist Party.
If you look at all these Communist parties in the world, the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese, and the Koreans, North Korea, and Cuba, Laos, the Chinese Communist Party is probably the most ideologically intoxicated, most dogmatic political party of the Leninist stripe in human history.
Yet, we don't tend to think of the CCP that way.
We always think about China as somebody with the burden of 5,000 years of history, led by some kind of reformers like Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, all those people.
Without thinking about them, first and foremost, they're dogmatic followers of the Western-origin Radical ideology.
Look at their domestic policy.
Look at international policy.
Every single major policy move there is motivated by this kind of ideology.
We don't look at it that way.
I think that's the ultimate shortfall of the U.S. foreign policy.
It's fascinating when you describe it this way.
To me, having been watching this unfold for some years, I guess what I'm thinking is, one of the very, very successful forms of what's called unrestricted warfare in a famous book by the two Chinese military leaders is the information warfare,
is the manipulation of information, is the creating of narratives, it's the sort of We always have the best wishes for the Chinese people to succeed.
In a policy circle, it's China to succeed.
Again, China, Chinese people, Chinese Communist Party were without distinction before, until the Trump administration.
We made that very clear.
And I think there is a very interesting dichotomy here.
While we have always harbored good wishes for the Chinese people to succeed, the China that was ruled under Communist Party never ever considered United States as the ultimately friendly country because the Chinese Communist Party always regards the United States as a leading force of an anti-China conspiracy.
Try to Sort of stifle the rising socialist experiment in China.
And that's why their strategic paranoia has been completely deep.
Every single policy engagement with the United States, they frame it in this way.
And everything, either trade talk or engagement with the U.S. So the internal tension against the United States, the internal designation against the United States as its ultimate adversary has never been lax inside the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party.
So that's basically paranoia.
If you look at their Belt and Road initiative, they look at trade.
It's a Leninist fighting group.
It's a very, very vigilant group.
So that's something that we have to keep in mind.
As a policy advisor, when I hear the Chinese leaders talking about the mutual respect, the win-win, you have to look at the other side.
You look at some other speeches they make.
It's widely available in China.
It's actually very astonishing to me sometimes to see in American news media, in American climate opinion framework.
We don't see that part.
When Xi Jinping makes some hostile bludgeoning speech, praising the socialist triumphant return of Chinese leadership under the glorious Communist Party.
We tend to think he's joking.
We tend to think that's just not a natural way.
So that's what they are.
We don't want to create the Chinese Communist Party.
That is not true.
And we look at them as what they are and not what we wish to be.
And that's one of the things that we did during the Trump administration.
Okay.
And so just to clarify, so basically, up until the Trump administration, you're saying that the foreign policy establishment was looking at China and the CCP through these rose-colored glasses, basically?
Yes.
Intentionally or unintentionally, that's the case.
I think there are some kind of conceptual shortfalls there, one of which is that we American foreign policy establishment is such a big machine, a big bureaucracy.
Just maintaining this bureaucracy is a daunting task.
So that's why much of our foreign policy toward China in particular has been consumed by how to maintain and manage a smooth Operatable relationship rather than doing the right thing and we are concerned with doing things right.
And that's the shortfall of ourselves.
We don't look at how the policy has been sort of flawed, but we only operate it based on how to maintain and run a relationship based upon a flawed framework.
And what we did is we tried to change the framework rather than focus on how to do things right.
We focus on how to do the right thing.
And it's a combination of both.
And that's really explained, I think, the success of the Trump administration.
Of course, we didn't do everything right, but at least we did the right thing.
And that's actually a very important legacy of Trump's foreign policy toward China in particular.
The second most important straw fall is that You know, every president has its priorities.
China has always been top there, but it's not always the top.
We tend to sort of reach some other short-term political objective, foreign policy objectives.
By playing the China card.
In other words, China is never the ultimate objective of reform policy.
Rather, it's a conduit through which other strategic goals, being defeat the Soviet Union, getting out of Vietnam, or solve the North Korean nuclearization problem.
So China always is a conduit.
We play China card for some other reasons.
China knew that.
So China basically took this advantage and manipulated us.
So while we try to play China card, the Chinese Communist Party played the U.S. card much more adroitly, much more successfully.
And it is President Trump since Richard Nixon.
Who first realized this problem, and he called China basically the top strategic priority.
And we have sort of changed the dialogue, changed the mechanism on US-China relations.
We put China as the focus, the objective of our foreign policy initiative.
And because there is no other major challenge Then the Chinese Communist Party in our foreign policy.
So China is no longer a card.
China no longer is a conduit.
China is China itself in our foreign policy circle.
Well, okay, and that's very interesting.
So we know that, at least from what I've understood, that the National Security Council, in the current Biden administration, is going to have every department will have some kind of China-related activity.
Basically, the entire NSC is supposedly going to be China-focused, which is very interesting.
Perhaps this is something that's inherited from the Trump administration.
Now, I guess my question is, so there are, of course, a number of very large foreign policy challenges.
I mean, you could say Iran, you could say North Korea, right?
You could say Russia even.
Why are you so certain that China is the absolute top, most important in the class of its own?
You can look at this from three perspectives.
One is intention.
Secondly, it's capability.
Thirdly, it's opportunities.
In terms of intention, in the old days, since Richard Nixon, we only care about political expediency, right?
And we only care about managing the relationship, managing the US-China relationship.
So we rarely talk about intent.
The Chinese Communist Party is not going to compete with us peacefully in a nice, genteel way with dialogues, coffee, and banquets.
They want to basically replace the US-led international order with its own authoritarian model of governance.
They were okay.
Many people thought they were comfortable when they were ruling China this way.
Now they're expanding globally.
So that became a challenge not to the United States, but also to the entire world.
So from the very beginning of this administration, we believe that Chinese Communist Party's threat is not just to the United States, but also to the entire freedom-loving world.
So we try to bring all the friends and allies together in a very multilateral way.
And Secretary Pompeo, I know, he spent most of his time building this global awareness, global coalition to face the China challenge.
Many of our friends and allies didn't see it that way initially.
As a matter of fact, they were the ones who accused us of being unilateralists, but they were the ones the most unilateral because they didn't want to go along.
Only in the last year or so they came around facing the China challenge as a global threat, particularly because of the COVID. So many more countries, friends and allies came to our side.
So that's basically a very important part of the story.
So that was the intent part.
That's the intent.
So we understand China is not going to be nice because they always look at the United States as its chief adversary.
By the way, one of the most important reasons why they think that way, not only because of Marxist-Leninism tells them that, also because of the enormous inspirational impact of the American democracy, American model of governance.
It's extraordinarily appealing to the Chinese people.
And not scare the Chinese Communist Party enormously.
So that's why they spent no effort trying to discredit the American system, American democracy, and COVID given the opportunity.
Listen, this country is not perfect.
There are a lot of inadequacies when it comes to racial equality, when it comes to gender equality, many other things.
But the Chinese Communist Party is in no position To criticize the American as systemically racist.
The Chinese Communist Party is the most racist political entity in the world.
It classified the entire ethnic group, the Uyghurs, for example, as some kind of pariah of the society.
And it took action against them, put millions of people into some kind of restrictive confines.
Yet this is a country that criticized the United States as being racist after the death of George Floyd.
And the hypocrisy couldn't be more disgusting.
So that's basically the intent part.
Capabilities.
Because of our failed policy in the past decades, China took advantage of the global free enterprise system, become very rich and wealthy.
And much of its practice is actually very predatory, particularly in forced technology transfer, industrial trade espionage, and many other aspects to make China rich and wealthy and rich.
And also, most importantly, because of the hardworking Chinese people.
Who contributed to China's collective wealth.
But the Chinese workers, working class, they were sort of alienated in a way.
Their own creation comes back to torment them because their wealth, they created the wealth, but the Chinese Communist Party owns it and come back to To haunt them.
And working conditions, union rights, they don't exist in China.
And also the working condition is pretty bad.
So that's why there is this aspect.
Because of all these very good conditions, the Chinese government's party could take advantage.
They become very wealthy and they become technologically strong.
And advanced.
So they're much more capable than, say, 30 years ago when Tiananmen massacre took place.
With that kind of technology, with that kind of capability and economic power, they have built a very powerful military, for example.
They have built some of the critical weapons platforms In space, cyber, undersea, to name just a few.
And so their capabilities are much more threatening to us.
So we have to take China more seriously.
That's why I qualify China as number one.
It's much more capable than Russia.
Russia is more capable than China only in perhaps one area, that is the nuclear arsenal.
A nuclear war between the United States and Russia has a long-lasting impetus.
It's highly unlikely.
There's no deterrence reason for Russia and the United States.
Russia and the United States is not a really real match.
Chinese economy is about seven, eight times bigger than Russia's.
It spends twice as much money on its defense than Russia.
So that's the capability we have to take China very seriously.
And China and Russia is very different in a way that I talked about my third point, why China is the number one national security threat to the United States and in the world.
That is opportunities.
So I've mentioned intent.
I've mentioned capabilities.
Third aspect is opportunities.
In the old days during the Cold War, It was the United States against the Soviet Union.
Each country led a camp of their own, a coalition of their own.
They were completely separated economically, militarily, and even socially.
Very good interaction.
China is different.
China enjoys many, many more opportunities than the old Soviet Union.
To enrich and empower itself, because China is integrated into the global system under a strict Communist Party guideline.
So they have a lot more opportunities to explore.
And that's why China is much more difficult to deal with.
And it's integrated.
China is within us.
So its technology is penetrating globally.
It's a full member of the global trading system.
It's also a member of the many technological regimes.
So China, for example, can send its near-monopolized WeChat, for example, to the United States and gather enormous amount of information.
And still, we have a problem dealing with that, mostly from a legal point of view.
So that's why it's a much more serious threat Than anybody we know.
So that's why, based on the three points I just laid out, intent, capabilities, and opportunities, China is this country's number one security challenge.
And we have said from the beginning, we said it from beginning, in December 2017, at the beginning of the Trump administration, The White House published a national security strategy and that clearly said that we have to really focus on the threat, the primary of which came from China.
So you mentioned earlier that the Chinese Communist Party is basically parasitic on China and the Chinese people.
And this sort of integration to the global system, does that effectively make it parasitic essentially on the whole world?
You can say so in a philosophical way.
And I think much of the world has come to the conclusion that somehow it has to change.
It has to change because it's always very nice to think that there are two systems.
We can peacefully compete with each other.
But no, it's not.
The Chinese always say the struggle against international capitalism is a matter of, you live, you die, or I live.
So that's basically what, from their perspective, so they're not going to basically peacefully compete with us.
When Khrushchev said to the Eisenhower administration, let's just compete peacefully, he didn't mean that.
Because the Soviet system was meant to bury the imperialism.
They were supposed to eliminate the international capitalism system.
China has to carry the mantle in a much more sophisticated way.
And we allow China to be part of that international order.
And I think the world should wake up.
I think I have a direct quote here from an article about you a little while ago.
You said that the Chinese Communist Party has been able to capture a significant portion of our China policy elite class.
True.
But what does that mean exactly, capture?
It means that China can use its influence, its extraordinary control of access to China, to Chinese leadership, and its influence of money, funding, to create a dependency upon Beijing so that many people,
after their work in the government, would have to Go to the Chinese Communist Party elite to gain any access to China.
So that created a very unhealthy and a very dangerous permanent class of China lobby group.
There are so many people who were in the U.S. government in a very high position.
When they retire, when they get out of government, they do consulting, right?
And they consult not only the corporate world, Which is okay.
They also consult for the Chinese government.
So they're for hire.
And that's what the free enterprise system is all about, very ironically.
But unwittingly, they become the agent of China.
And they exert tremendous influence in our country's foreign policy, and particularly China policy formulation process.
And that's extremely dangerous.
And I think, you know, one of the chronic achievements of the Trump administration is that we minimize that kind of unhealthy influence of the China lobby during our China policy formulation.
And trust me, I know this because I was in the whole play.
I think we can summarize the Trump administration's approach to the Chinese Communist Party in something that Secretary Pompeo said in his speech at the Nixon Library, right?
The distrust and verify.
Again, I don't know if you'll agree with that, but that seems like the three-word summary.
Can you describe for me briefly the core tenets in your mind of the Trump administration approach?
One of the most important things that we see in the last 20 years or so is obviously a phenomenon called globalization.
Globalization, not in terms of economic integration, technological integration, but also national borders will change, and people's travel habits changed, and the Europeans become more united.
So all of this is wonderful in a very philosophical way.
But because of globalization, there are also There is a danger to eliminate the individuality of a particular nation's characteristics.
So there are two major things that are going on simultaneously.
There is a natural reaction to seek to the roots.
The Chinese Communist Party is doing that.
So does the United States.
So we're doing that too.
Let's talk about China.
The Chinese Communist Party since Xi Jinping, in the last eight years of his rule, has been going back to its fundamental roots in defiance of the harmonizing international globalization trend.
Xi Jinping said, Which means that, go back to your initial ideological commitment, by which he means, don't forget we're a Communist Party.
Don't forget we are the Communist Party with a mission to carry out a socialist system to its ultimate triumph.
That's what Xi Jinping's first and foremost achievement during his reign, that is, to Bring the nation back to its Marxist-Leninist ideological roots.
I mean, you can say every nation, every aspect of the nation is geared up, hyped up for that.
If you look at the internet apps, there are Xi Jinping's thoughts here.
There is a reintroduction of political studies and ideological training, indoctrination, the lack of the Uyghurs in the camps to study not only So this is basically going back to the root movement in response to
the globalization phenomenon.
In the United States, And we also went through similar experience.
The 2016 election victory by Donald Trump was a reaction toward that harmonizing globalization trend that threatened to eliminate national uniqueness.
So that's why I came up with the thing, we've got to go back to our roots.
Our roots is what?
America first.
America first.
Everything we do, we have to place American interests first and foremost, foreign and domestic policy, right?
So we cannot, we could no longer allow the elimination of American jobs, elimination of American sovereignty in the name of globalization.
So that's what Trump's essential message was all about.
So America first.
America is a sovereign nation.
We are going back to the roots.
Under Secretary Pompeo, our foreign policy carries exactly that kind of message.
We created, for example, the Commission on Unalienable Rights.
And we'll go back to the fundamental impetus of American democracy, that is freedom versus tyranny.
This nation was built upon that.
So that's our original A blueprint of this nation.
So there is this kind of tendency to look for the roots, the nation's spiritual roots, both in China and in the United States.
So that's one of the reasons that the Secretary Pompeo to say, if you pay attention, in the Nixon Library speech you mentioned, which was a wonderful speech, And he said we could no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between China and the United States, because we represent something that's fundamentally different in terms of values, ideologies, and governance models.
There are many other things, too.
One of the very important things that we carry out, obviously, is to try to restore America's international Reputation.
Our trustworthiness in the world.
You know, it has to show that we mean business when we say something.
When President Obama told the Russians that, here's my red line in Syria.
If you cross the red line, we're going to do something against you.
And Vladimir Putin never took President Obama seriously.
So when they did cross the red line, and the Obama administration didn't do anything.
The Trump administration is different.
When we told Russia's A, B, C, D, that you cannot cross, we made business.
When they did cross, we took action.
We literally stopped Russia's interference in Syria.
And we did the same thing to the Syrian dictator in Syria and in Iraq.
And we say, if you do this, if you massacre people through biological chemical weapons, We take action, so we bomb the military facilities.
When we say we're going to basically move a U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, many, many presidents said the same thing, have said the same thing before.
Nobody took any action.
So Americans' credibility was on the line.
And it was basically challenged, and this administration did it.
So when we do what we say we will do, we do it.
And that's why Americans' reputation was on the rise, contrary to popular belief.
Many people didn't like President Trump's personal style.
That's understandable.
But whatever we did, We gained world's attention because they took us seriously and our credibility was back significantly.
The idea somehow we were doing this unilaterally, we're going solo with our international community running around us is not true because multilateralism has to have a goal.
We have to have an object.
What's the purpose of multilateralism if we don't have any common vision, right?
So We say the China challenge was the global challenge, was our number one global challenge.
We want our friends and allies to face that challenge multilaterally.
Many of them resisted.
And we spent many, many efforts to form that multilateral coalition.
And so that's the hallmark of the Trump administration's foreign policy, that is to forge a multilateral alliance to face the China challenge.
To say that we are unilateralists is completely untrue.
So as the Trump administration came to the close, how did that alliance look like?
Or better than ever.
When you hear NATO Secretary Stoltenberg say that NATO should consider the China challenge in the Indo-Pacific, That is amazing.
We convinced them.
I mean, if we said this three years ago, it would have been unimaginable.
He said that last year.
When we send our warships through the Taiwan Strait, which is international water, in defense of China's ridiculous demand of claiming that we have to get the permission first, When we did that, major countries, allies, friends, followed through.
France, Germany, UK, and even Canada sent warships through that.
So that's leadership.
That's basically stick to your first principle.
And I think we did that.
And I think America has to be the leader of the world.
When we take the lead, Free nations will follow.
It's not because we're being arrogant, it's because we're the country that is capable, and also we're the country that has the capability to, we're the country of consequence to China, to stem the Chinese expansion globally.
So that's why we're in the position to do a lot of things that other countries cannot.
And I think more and more countries are more comfortable with that.
We have some very staunch allies all along.
Australia, for example.
Japan, obviously.
So even some countries are not necessarily lining up with us ideologically, but for geopolitical reasons, we share common interests and we do things together, like in Vietnam, for example.
So this is a global effort to face a global challenge, and I think we should be proud in serving this administration and achieve these many good results.
Well, so let's jump to the Biden administration's approach to China now, which is just beginning to see how it's looking.
There's been discussion of holding China accountable and making sure that there's been, I think, the term extreme competition has been mentioned.
At the same time, it's been said that it's going to be different than what the Trump administration did.
Why don't we start here?
One of the last things that the State Department did—and I know that you were involved in this to a great extent—was to basically designate what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uyghur people as a genocide.
Extremely significant.
To me, knowing what's in the 1948 Genocide Convention, what the meaning of that is, What should the U.S. do now, in your mind?
Because the Biden administration has inherited this and agreed that this is indeed happening.
What should the Biden administration do now?
Well, just follow the legal consequences of what that actually means.
And because this is not just designation, it's significant as you say, because if you're a genocidal regime, there are a whole bunch of international and domestic and national policies that should go along with it.
But the 21st century should never repeat what we saw in the 30s and 40s of last century.
And so we have enough evidence To make such a decision, and the only thing that we have to be concerned about is political leadership and courage to face the regime with candor.
So the best way to stop such genocidal practice is to tell the perpetrator of such genocide the truth.
And then only when we do that can the international community solve such a problem to prevent future genocide from happening again.
So I think the Biden administration obviously is new and they have a right to carry out this own policy orientation.
But I think this is one of the areas that you can see a Larger extent of continuity in terms of policy.
And to designate China's Xinjiang atrocity as a genocide is no small feat.
And the new administration agrees with us, and that's very reassuring.
Obviously, my biggest hope is that the Biden administration will not go back to Just treat the relationship as a simple matter of management, a simple matter of engagement, for the sake of engagement.
There has to be a goal.
And also, we should also realize It's not going to be a nice, peaceful competition.
I don't know what serious competition means.
Serious competition means that the Chinese system is basically poised to replace, to eliminate us as a competitor once and for all.
We use the word existential.
I hope that they will agree with me on that definition of serious.
So implementing this may be a bit of a challenge for the Biden administration.
China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi The Chinese Communist Party wants to look strong.
They have this tendency of bullying its people.
So that kind of bullying has become a habit.
So they are in the business of telling its own people what to do, what not to do.
And they were expert on that.
And they carry that kind of habit to international foreign policy arena, telling the world what not to do, what's good for them, what's kosher to the Communist Party.
Some of them are clearly ridiculous, right?
They keep saying international ships, particularly foreign warships sailing through Taiwan, It's a red line.
Don't go there.
And for decades, since 1969, as a matter of fact, right after Nixon sort of de-escalated the 7th Fleet Patrol in the Taiwan Strait, we gave up on that, right?
So we basically listened to or succumbed to China's bullying and demand.
That's a red line.
And the Trump administration basically took it a different way.
If it's legal, if the international law allows, we have the right to pass that without the Chinese government telling us it's the red line.
We did it.
So we have done dozens of worship passages through Taiwan Strait.
And as I mentioned earlier, allies follow our example doing the same thing.
That is very significant because it shows two things.
One is that, yes, China has a red line, but China's red line constantly shifting if they're facing international resistance, particularly from America.
So there is kind of a bullying side of that, calling us bluff.
If you basically care so much about how Chinese Communist Party feels about how much their feelings will be heard, And then we're going into a vicious cycle of constantly downgrading the relationship, right?
So in a way, we have to listen to them, operate the bilateral relationship on their terms, void of international rules and mutual agreements.
We sell the worship through Taiwan Strait multiple times.
I think last year it was about 13 times.
A year before it was like 17 times.
I forget the exact number.
That is very significant because we follow international law, follow our own principle, and we essentially internationalized the Taiwan Strait.
That's the best defense to Taiwan.
And that's also the best example of implementing the original agreement between China and the United States back in 1972 or 79.
That is We want two countries, the United States and China, to agree to a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan situation.
The United States has always maintained that any application of force in the Taiwan Strait to solve this Taiwan Strait problem is against our national interests.
So this is a way to restore international credibility.
That's one example.
China has a red line in Hong Kong.
China has a red line in Xinjiang.
So what China is essentially telling the world is that we're going to lock up a million Uyghurs in concentration camps.
We torture them, we suppress their freedoms, and you, international community, cannot or are not allowed to say a word, protest.
Otherwise, you're not respecting us, and you are crossing our red line.
The world has to wake up to that kind of bullying, and we cannot really agree to that kind of red line.
I'm trying to tell you the Chinese Red Line is part of the Red Line, that's all.
It's not the Red Line based upon international law, international conventions that China had to sign on to, but never willing to implement.
So this is not an interference of China's domestic policies, domestic sovereignty.
Because at some point, you cannot really kill people committed genocide in the name of sovereignty.
And I think the International Committee has long established that rule.
Since the 1930s, 1940s.
So I think that's my perspective on Chinese red lines.
And I think the international community should have its own red lines, and its Chinese government is incumbent upon the Chinese Communist Party to really heed those red lines.
Fascinating.
So what do you make of the fact that the Beijing Olympics are happening in 2022, ostensibly, without too much challenge, we are hearing a little bit of some challenges now, but and with the regime that's committing genocide?
It's always soothing to say politics and sports do not mingle.
I'm for that.
But from Beijing perspective, politics And sports essentially are the same, because they use international sports events like the Olympics to propagandize the Communist Party's all-around greatness.
To demonstrate to the world, China is a country that nobody could be critical of, no matter what it does.
So it is the Chinese Communist Party that politicized international sports events like Olympics all along.
So I think the burden of proof should be on the Chinese side, not on the international community.
And as you mentioned, as you phrased very well, how does our conscience reconcile the fact that we reward China with such honor of hosting international events while knowing it has committed genocide?
So, I mean, bottom line, what would you recommend to the Biden administration vis-a-vis the Olympics in this scenario?
First of all, so far I don't think the U.S. government has taken any concrete action on that.
So there's no policy change.
But there has been growing international human rights organizations, NGOs, pressure to call the world's attention to this profound irony of late-night genocidal government hosting international sports events.
And I think, you know, we as a government, I think we should take advantage of this situation to press China to change its behavior.
That's probably the safest way to do, short of calling for a total cancellation or boycott, right?
So boycott probably is not fair to athletes.
But this is a dilemma in future Olympic awarding standards.
That is, we should be very, very careful and stringent not to award regimes of totalitarian nature any kind of honor like this.
Now, I must say, there's also a historical lesson to learn from here, right?
China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics.
It gave China enormous prestige, but also gave the Chinese Communist Party a great opportunity to fancy itself as the ultimate representative of Chinese nationalism.
So it basically legitimizes the Chinese Communist regime as the national government rather than a Leninist Party government.
So the International Committee went along with the sincere hope that such international support events being held in Beijing would force China At least the reformers within the Communist Party to reform, to change.
That didn't happen.
And that's the lesson.
And instead, the international community has been used I think that we got a hint from the chief editor of the CCP propaganda mouthpiece,
the Global Times, This idea that Beijing will sanction any country that basically boycotts the Olympics or do some kind of sanctions.
Obviously, they think this is very important that the Olympics go ahead without any issues.
Well, actually, this shows China's paranoia because the world should take advantage of that.
One of the very unique and comical features of the Chinese Communist regime is that it has done enormous things, perpetrated many crimes against its own people, yet it wants to look good.
It wants to be respected.
That probably is not a bad thing, because we can exert pressure on them to change.
If you want to be respected, they behave better.
So the Biden administration has indicated that it's going to continue some elements of the Trump administration's China policy and that it's going to do many things differently.
One of the things that it indicated is going to do differently is this fairly recent rule about universities or other educational institutions disclosing their relationships with these Chinese propaganda organs, Confucius Institutes.
So I think it was in December this was a new rule that was submitted, and then I think in January it was actually pulled back.
So there's a change there.
So my question is, What elements of the Trump administration's China policy that you've been so deeply involved in do you think are permanent, are going to make it through, and which ones will be tougher to keep?
Let me ask the Confucius Institute question first.
Many people have to understand that Once you make a policy recommendation, you have to make it official through a labyrinth of bureaucratic processes.
This is one of the examples.
So we made the decision about Confucius Institute, but the bureaucrats have to go through all these procedures to officially register.
So the cancellation you're talking about, about disclosure, is that by the time the Biden team came along on January 20th, that registration process did not finish, had not finished.
So that is a reason, that's a bureaucratic reason to have this canceled.
But of course, it all takes leadership to overcome that.
You can continue this process, right?
Go back.
So it's all boils down to the new team's leadership.
Now, one of the things that we did was we designated The Confucius Institute is the U.S. headquarters as a foreign mission.
I don't think that has been changed.
That's something very concrete.
We designated the Confucius Institute as the U.S. headquarters, which is based in Washington, D.C., which directly reported to Beijing.
We designated that as a foreign mission.
I think that's been done.
It's that the requirement of American universities and campuses To disclose their agreements, deals with the Confucian Institute.
That's the bureaucratic process we're talking about.
That to me is one of the minor issues.
Again, I still remain cautiously optimistic that the new team will continue what we have done.
As a matter of fact, they agree with virtually every major initiative we have done.
On Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, those major pieces we've done.
And so I understand they have some issues about trade.
They have some issues about the approach, unilateral versus multilateral.
Give some time, they'll realize we actually have done similar things.
And they also realize how difficult it is to do those things in the larger framework.
But we did our best and So to answer your question, to what extent that some of the Trump administration foreign policy will stay, to what extent it will be temporary?
I think we have led the foundation of a renewed understanding of the Chinese Communist Party's intent, capabilities, and opportunities.
We have won the argument We have not completely finished the entire policy orientation, but we're almost done.
But winning the argument About the nature of the China challenge is actually most insignificant to me.
So that, I think, is going to stay.
I don't think anybody can look at China in 2021 the same way we look at China in 2012, 2015, for example.
The Trump administration Starting with President Trump's campaign, it had a unique approach to the nature of the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Initially, it was from the economic and nationalism point of view.
Gradually, under the leadership of Pompeo, for example, we expanded our understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist threat.
To not only economic, military, economic, cultural, and you name it.
So it's a comprehensive reorientation of our understanding of the Chinese Communist Party's challenge to the world.
Secretary Pompeo repeatedly said the threat, the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the world is the central threat of our time.
And I think that part is going to remain.
And I even heard President Biden says China's challenge is number one, and the entire government is thinking about that.
So to finish up, I'm still thinking about basically the way that the Chinese Communist Party has, let's say, Co-opted to some extent international organizations.
We have the WHO, which basically recently discounted the U.S. intelligence community perspective on the origins of the coronavirus.
At the same time, we have the Biden administration's interest in cooperating on certain issues, for example, on climate change.
It would be a big one.
And then, of course, there's this threat of the China lobby, which you said is still quite powerful.
I guess my question is, what do you see as ultimately the biggest challenge the Biden administration faces in basically keeping this clear position on China?
Again, I think the most important thing is to appreciate the The new argument about China, about the nature of the Chinese Communist regime, about the separation of the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party, and about China's intent, capabilities, and opportunities.
And I think if you keep these major things in mind, it will be fine.
One of the most important things is that The U.S. is a global power.
The U.S. deals with major countries, not just China, Russia, Iran, from a multifaceted area perspective.
There are hundreds of regulations and policies toward one particular country.
U.S.-China relationship is extremely complicated, and there's thousands of regulations over there.
There's thousands of policy decisions to be made.
But We should always stick to the most fundamental ones.
That is America's interest first.
America first.
And we're not dealing with China for the sake of political expediency.
We're not dealing with China through compromise.
We're not dealing with China for the sake of dealing with China.
So there's always a result in our mind.
And I think if you keep the goal, In our mind, and that's the first step to success.
And I think, to be fair, by the way, the Chinese Communist Party never lost its goal.
It played the long game.
And one regime after another, from Mao to Deng to Jiang to Hu and even to Xi Jinping, there's remarkable ideological consistency.
Their policy towards the United States has never changed.
Their internal designation of the United States as chief adversary has never changed because of our enormous inspirational impact upon Chinese people.
So that freaked them majorly.
So we should be confident in our own strength, in our own virtues and merits, and to deal with China not only as a primary adversary, but also to look at China as an extremely weak and fragile empire based upon Myles Yu, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
▲
Export Selection