Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Did you see the article in The New Yorker recently about the United States and China. It carried the headline Sliding Toward a New Cold War. Used the term "Cold War." It says, "Not since the Berlin Wall fell has the world been cleaved so deeply." Are we really sliding toward a new Cold War? If so, whose fault is it? Only China's or also ours? Are their perverse political incentives to escalate rather than deescalate right now? Remember the Iraq War based on assumptions of a credible threat? Oops. That started 20 years ago this month. How short are our memories?

In just the past few days, we've seen from China's side, a speech by China's President Xi Jinping on Tuesday, being described as rare direct criticism of the United States. "Western countries led by the United States," he said, "have implemented all around containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country's development." He gave another speech yesterday calling for China to more quickly elevate its armed forces to world class standards. From the US side, there's a growing bipartisan hawkishness. A New Yorker article, the one I cited, mentioned Kirsten Gillibrand in an interview with our reporter Brigid Bergin, saying Xi Jinping is bent on a world war, never mind Cold War, bent on a world war. On this show on Monday, Gillibrand stood by invoking a potential world war. Listen.

Kirsten Gillibrand: China has spent enormous amount of resources doubling their military defense spending, really trying to create state of the art offensive weapons in both air, land and sea and space, and so the constellation of what China's putting forward as a projection of power is very worrisome to me personally.

Brian Lehrer: That's Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat. Republican Nikki Haley in her first presidential campaign appearance last month said, "Communist China will wind up on the ash heap of history," which sounds like a threat of regime change coming from a US presidential hopeful. In a new US intelligence report released just yesterday was also the subject of congressional hearings yesterday, maybe you've heard some of the sound bites, featured a significantly expanded section on the intelligence community's concerns over China. We should say it's not even just the US from the Western side.

The Guardian ran a UK-based opinion column a couple of weeks ago headline Liz Truss' delusional speech about China is digging the trenches of a second Cold War. Does she really think Xi's threats to Taiwan will be stopped by the saber rattling of the failed prime minister of a former colonial power? That was from The Guardian. What's going on here and can a new Cold War, and, to listen to Haley and Xi Jinping and Gillibrand, maybe even a new world war be avoided?

Joining me now to discuss is Susan Shirk, research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a book that's out, I think, a couple of years now called Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. Very relevantly, Professor Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs during the Clinton administration, and also had an older book from 2007 called China: Fragile Superpower. The new book Overreach was just published last October, to get that part straight. Professor Shirk, thank you very much for getting up early on the West Coast and joining us on WNYC today. Hi, there.

Professor Shirk: Well, thanks so much, Brian, for inviting me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your comments or questions on this. Who's leading us into a new Cold War or maybe even a world war and how can we stop it? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Professor Shirk, do you think Xi Jinping is bent on a new world war?

Professor Shirk: No, I certainly don't think he is, but we are in the middle of what I would call a Cold War even though it's very different than the Cold War that we had with the Soviet Union because China is, of course, one of our leading trade partners. Our economies and our societies are much more integrated than we had with the Soviet Union. Beginning actually not with Xi Jinping, but even earlier under the previous leader Hu Jintao, China after exercising a lot of self-restraint and good diplomacy in order to reassure other countries that it wasn't a threat even as it grew more powerful economically and militarily and had a very different political system, it really changed in the mid-2000s.

Under Xi Jinping, it has started overreaching even more, in the sense- and, of course, overreach means to take things too far in a way that snaps back to harm yourself. There are many people in China who are not supportive of the aggressive foreign policy and repressive domestic policy of Xi Jinping, so we might want to consider that as well.

Brian Lehrer: What's an example of how this overreach-- Again, I'll tell people your book title, the new book Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. What's an example of it coming back to hurt the Chinese people, which you just referred to as a result of the overreach?

Professor Shirk: Well, let's just talk about foreign policy beginning with a more assertive stance in the South China Sea in the mid-2000s. Now, a lot of pressure from Coast Guard, marine surveillance and fishing vessels and energy drilling against Japan in the East China Sea, against Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait, the coercive sanctions against Australia when Australia called for an international scientific study of the origins of COVID, China stopped purchasing Australian products except for iron ore. They did similar sanctions against South Korea, even Norway, because of the Nobel Prize, which isn't even connected to the Norwegian government when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a democracy activist in China.

This action has led to an international backlash in which we see not just the United States, but Japan, Korea, the European countries who were very concerned about China's pro-Russian stance in the Ukraine war. These actions are leading to a whole bunch of international coalitions designed to balance against an increasingly threatening China. Even the most bullish foreign investors are now taking political risk in China a lot more seriously, and so foreign investment is being very cautious and stagnating or declining in China too.

The economy in China is growing much more slowly than it had previously. There are secular structural reasons for that having to do with demographics and other factors, but a lot of it was caused by Xi Jinping's crackdown on private business in China, and private business generates the most employment possibilities in the Chinese economy. There are really quite a few people in the Chinese elite, whom I've spoken with, who are very concerned that Xi Jinping is taking China down a path which is going to be very damaging to Chinese economy and society.

Brian Lehrer: Is Xi Jinping like Putin? I think that I've tended, a lot of people have tended to see him as a more complex character than Putin because China has had this remarkable economic growth for decades now and they may have violated people's human rights to a large degree. They may be committing genocide as the US has labeled it against the Uyghurs but they've also acted in the interest of hundreds of millions of Chinese, maybe a billion or more Chinese economically to have all this growth and grow a middle-class out of the poverty of 50 years ago.

I'm looking at the review of your book from the, let's see, I think this is in Foreign Affairs, and it says, "The governing class enthusiastically backed Xi Jinping concluding that democracy, even if only at the local level would eventually be a threat to their power and privileges. There's long been a stream of Chinese thinking that envisions the country's destiny as being the preeminent global power. If we think of Putin as just caring about Russian power, and we think of China as much more complicated than that, is Xi Jinping more like Putin than we might have thought in the past?

Professor Shirk: No, you're absolutely right to identify these differences between China and Russia and Xi Jinping and Putin. Xi Jinping didn't steal power. He got a mandate from the Chinese elite in 2012, because collective leadership, which they had tried during the previous decade had not worked very well and led to massive corruption. Then Xi Jinping launched this anti-corruption campaign in 2013, which also was a purge of potential real or imagined rivals to Xi Jinping. It continues to this very day and including very senior leaders. That put tremendous pressure on all the officials in the system to show their loyalty to Xi Jinping by jumping on the bandwagon of his policies and over-complying, you might say, overdoing the way they carried out his policies.

That's the dynamic under Xi which is leading to these more extreme and less restrained social control domestically, as well as more aggressive policy internationally. It is more complicated. One of the shocking things to many of us and many people in China is that, as you say, we used to see China's leaders as very pragmatic that they would adjust their policies in order to keep the Chinese economic growth humming along because that's how they kept popular support for Communist Party rule. What is shocking about the current leadership is that it is so much less pragmatic and also less competent.

Look at zero COVID, three years of this extreme zero COVID policy with lockdowns constant testing, huge amounts of money going to test the population regularly, but not enough vaccinations to prepare for the eventual transition out of zero COVID. Then when there were protests in China because after three years people were really fed up with the lockdowns, they suddenly just almost overnight dropped the zero COVID policy. People were left on their own resources. The government hadn't vaccinated the older population and large numbers of people died. Right now in China, there is I believe quite a lot of dissatisfaction with Xi's rule, and I think some of this more aggressive stance toward the United States is designed to divert attention to a foreign threat and distract people from domestic complaints.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you just joining us, my guest is Susan Shirk, who was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs in the Clinton administration, now teaches at UC San Diego and is the author of a new book called Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise but we're talking about whether China and the United States are overreaching, moving us into what Professor Shirk just said is already a new Cold War, and perhaps into what Senator Gillibrand told WNYC might be a new world war if Xi Jinping gets his way.

Listeners, we will take your calls in just a second. Nate in Mawa, I'm looking at you. You're going to be first, but I want to get to the US side of this a little bit with Professor Shirk first. 212-433-WNYC for everybody else who tweeted @BrianLehrer. Are you surprised or alarmed, professor, by some of the rhetoric on the US side, like Nikki Haley saying that thing about communist China winding up on the ash heap of history or the remarks from Senator Gillibrand?

Professor Shirk: I'm certainly frustrated by it because I believe that America's overreaction to China's overreach is leading us down a path which is actually going to harm our own competitiveness and has already led to a very dangerous action-reaction cycle so that we're in this war of words, domestic politics inflamed on both sides, which makes it very difficult for the governments of the two countries to get back to some kind of diplomacy. We haven't had any real diplomacy with China in six years, starting with the four years of the Trump administration.

We thought things would change under Biden but in fact, so many of the Trump policies have been retained by the Biden administration including restrictions on visas for Chinese students in many scientific specialties, the tariffs on imports from China which, of course, raise prices in the United States. The problem on the US side now is in a sense this bipartisan consensus because there isn't any rational debate about what are the costs as well as the benefits of the policies we are pursuing toward China.

Brian Lehrer: Nate in Mawa, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nate.

Nate: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Nate: Perfect. Just a quick question for the professor. I believe this was an op-ed published, I forget which newspaper, by an army general who predicted that the US would be at war with China by 2025. Now, personally, it's hard to imagine the US going to war with another major power like China because that would have devastating implications for the global economy, but do you really think it's possible that if we were to go to war with China it would happen that quickly by 2025?

Professor Shirk: I don't. I'd say most of the China experts who study, I think what he's talking about is a fight in the Taiwan Strait if China were to attack Taiwan. The US has a very close relationship with Taiwan. It's not a formal diplomatic relationship but it's a very close informal relationship. US law commits us to consider any attack on Taiwan as a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific. I think in Beijing, they certainly believe that if they attack Taiwan, the United States will come to Taiwan's support. We do provide military equipment to Taiwan, and we have been encouraging other countries like Japan to also prepare to defend Taiwan if need be.

It really all depends on whether or not Xi Jinping would dare attack Taiwan. Previous leaders have been very cautious about doing that because if they were to attack Taiwan and fail they believe that that would be the end of them. They would be brought down by the furious nationalist public in China, and it could also mean the end of Chinese Communist Party rule. They have been self-deterred in that sense. The question with Xi Jinping is does he have the same prudence or not? That's what has people worried. I don't see any indication, and we would know way in advance that there are plans to move militarily against Taiwan anytime that soon.

Brian Lehrer: Does the US agreement with Taiwan commit the US to more than we're doing now for Ukraine? Because we're giving Ukraine a lot of stuff, and we're giving Ukraine a lot of money, but we're not giving Ukraine American blood. Is the US committed on paper to sending troops to Taiwan if China invades? I can only imagine the backlash in this country, probably from left and right if we were to start doing that.

Professor Shirk: No, it isn't a firm commitment of that sort. It leaves it somewhat ambiguous exactly how we would help defend Taiwan, but it doesn't say that we can't send forces to the region to help defend Taiwan. We have something called the Taiwan Relations Act that Congress passed in 1979 that frames it in this way. I think most people believe that we would step forward to defend Taiwan. I think that's what the folks in Beijing believe, and that's what we want them to believe. Right now in this country, there's kind of a debate over how explicitly we should commit to the defense of Taiwan, should we make it clear that we would defend Taiwan and send our own forces.

The reason we haven't done that up until now is we want the folks on Taiwan to also be prudent and not to provoke the mainland government by, say, holding a referendum to declare independence. That would really put the United States on the hook, put us in a very, very difficult position. Right now Taiwan has so many of the benefits and the status of operating. It's an independent government and we would like it to not declare formal independence. There are rumblings from Capitol Hill in Washington that some members of Congress are grandstanding by threatening to have Congress recognize Taiwan as an independent country. That would be highly provocative and probably force Xi Jinping to some military action against Taiwan, even despite its risks.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about whether we're already in a new Cold War with China and whether there's a risk of a hot war with China, with UC San Diego professor Susan Shirk, author of the new book Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise, but we're talking about overreach on both sides. Lance, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lance.

Lance: Hi. When I'm listening to this, I'm thinking about the fact that, and you know this, the United States spends so much money on the on upgrading its military and talks about it all the time. There's never seems like a military expenditure that doesn't get funded somehow. I'm very wary of China too, just like everybody else is, but being another superpower [sound cut] look it up, we are going to improve our military too. I don't know why we should be so alarmed and surprised about that. We are doing the same thing and they're doing it in their own self-interest, and so, are we.

Brian Lehrer: Lance, thank you. Moral equivalency or no, in your opinion, Professor Shirk?

Professor Shirk: Sure. It's very difficult not to think in moral equivalency terms when both sides their policies are so influenced by domestic politics in the two sides. I believe that what we should worry about in China is China's actual policies, their actual behavior, not the fact that how much they spend on their military. I agree with the caller in that respect. I think that we should to the extent that we use sanctions to put barriers between our two economies, our companies, our universities, our research establishments, which is what we're doing, and we're even contemplating putting restrictions on American investments in China.

These are actions that will really undercut America's distinctive advantage, which is openness. They are open market economy. I think that if we impose sanctions on China, it should be part of a diplomatic strategy to try to get them to moderate their own policies. That's what we did in the Clinton administration when China was proliferating missile and nuclear technology. We would threaten to impose sanctions. We'd negotiate with the Chinese using that leverage, and then they modified their behavior. I think that's what we should be doing now, not just imposing sanctions in order to keep the lead between the United States and China, and to slow China down.

Brian Lehrer: When Xi Jinping gave that speech on Tuesday, that's being reported on as rare and blunt direct criticism of the United States, was he wrong when he said the quote that's making the rounds, I'll read the quote again, "Western countries led by the United States have implemented all around containment and circumvent and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country's development." Is anything in that sentence wrong?

Professor Shirk: It's unfortunately more true than false. Our policy is very much becoming a kind of containment policy rather than an effective diplomatic strategy to test whether or not the Xi Jinping government would be willing to negotiate some resolution of our key disputes and to moderate its own policy in order to reduce the costs to China. I think we haven't given the Chinese people or Xi Jinping any good expressions of goodwill towards Chinese society and the Chinese people. That also has had a really dangerous effect inside American society with all these hate crimes and bias against Asian Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about TikTok and the spy balloon, obviously both in the headlines recently and for that matter other spying allegations. When Senator Gillibrand was on the show on Monday, she weighed in on the espionage capabilities of China in defending her statement that Xi Jinping is bent on a new world war.

Kirsten Gillibrand: My language is intended for people to wake up and to understand when we're talking about issues related to China's ability and the Chinese government, not the Chinese people, but the Chinese government's ability to spy on this country, to spy on our allies, to spy through its digital Yuan, to spy through spy satellites, to spy through spies that are in the United States right now, despite through technology, through Huawei and through TikTok that they need to be aware that this is not benign anymore.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you agree with all of that, Professor Shirk?

Professor Shirk: I think it's definitely an overreaction. Of course, China is spying on the United States. The United States is also spying on China. China spies on the United States targeting commercial businesses, which is something that most other countries don't do. They take it too far, for sure. I think we're exaggerating the threat to the United States in a way that this whole idea that the American people need to wake up to the Chinese threat, I'd say that they have woken up and there's so much about the way we're talking about the threat now that hearkens back to the McCarthy era of the first Cold War, which really is quite counterproductive because in the end we're going to harm ourselves, the openness of our society and our economy.

Brian Lehrer: There's also the question economically, because we're so economically intertwined in so many ways. How many shows have we done on that over the years, whether it's manufacturing moving to China under free trade agreements, or whether it's China's investment in US government debt, so many ways, all the items that we buy from China at low cost. In the intelligence committee hearing this week, Senator Angus King raised the issue of the US economic dependency on China as, I think, he framed it, Senator King independent from Maine, and how that's intentional on the part of China. We're going to play a one-minute exchange between Senator King and Avril Haines who is President Biden's Director of National Intelligence.

Senator Angus King: China now is on track to control 65% of lithium-ion battery market, 40% of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients, and their global share across all manufacturing of solar panels is 80% now, certainly go to 90%. This is an important information for us in terms of informing us about the dangerous dependency that we've developed in a whole lot of areas, and semiconductors is one that we've talked about. It suggests to me that this issue of dependency is something that really has to have some serious policy examination. Would you concur?

Avril Haines: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the things that we're really trying to expose here is the fact that it's not just simply about China trying to create indigenous supply chains, but actually to control global supply chains.

Senator Angus King: That seems to be a deliberate policy, does it not?

Avril Haines: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: A related concern, Professor Shirk, is China getting into the US backyard now, economically, with their so-called Belt and Road Initiative, which we might think of as being more directed toward places in Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia. From what I read, they're investing heavily in South America and the Caribbean, having recently completed what's called the largest embassy in the world in the Bahamas. 80% of Mexico's telecommunications infrastructure is provided by Chinese companies, I read. Talk about that whole economic competition/interdependency.

Professor Shirk: Well, international relations experts, and I'm not one, I focus on comparative politics, but they generally think of economic interdependence as motivating the trading partners to behave in a more restrained way toward one another because they share an interest and sustaining the trade and investment and flows of human capital. That was definitely the story of US-China relations in the past.

Once we started viewing China as more of a threat due to China's own behavior, we started worrying that our dependence on China is risky. We started also putting restrictions on our flows economic and technology flows to China, because we wanted to slow down China's progress, really. We saw much of this technology going into improving China's military capability. The way it's sometimes put is that both sides are weaponizing this economic interdependence.

How do we get back to a point where we-- Well, I think, for one thing, what we need to do is we need to look hard at the data of where collaboration has really benefited us and benefited people all over the world. The IMF is now saying that the decoupling of China and the United States will lead to at least a 7% reduction in global growth, in global GDP. That's really, really significant.

Brian Lehrer: There are people who argue, and we are going to get into this in this segment, that some of that decoupling will be good for US wages. It'll bring US manufacturing back to some degree. That's a whole economic argument people can have. On people being alarmed that China is doing so much business in the Western Hemisphere and on our doorstep like I was referencing before, President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership, remember that? That wound up dying under the weight of the 2016 presidential campaign. Obama would talk about how that was intended, this economic free trade agreement with so many East Asian as well as other Pacific Rim countries, to make sure that China didn't dominate economically in their own hemisphere, and that we could be very strong on China's doorstep. Again, I'm at least confused by what might be a double standard here.

Professor Shirk: Well, actually, the Trans-Pacific Partnership did not die. It's just that the United States is not part of it. It's continuing under Japanese leadership and China, and China is working to try to join by making adjustments in their own policies in order to join the agreement. Yes, you're absolutely right, that the United States right now is focusing entirely on the security dimensions of our presence in Asia. We need an economic leg to stand on. We are very important in the region. There's more American investment in Southeast Asia than there is Chinese investment. We do need regional trade agreements that will firm up America's economic presence in the region.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. It doesn't even help the Russian people that Russia has invaded Ukraine. How could it help the Chinese people? I'm going to play one more clip from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday. Again, it's Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, asking the National Security Adviser Avril Haines about the relationship between China and Russia, and China considering going more all in on Russia's side, the senator speaks first.

Senator Angus King: What's the current analysis on the relationship between China and Russia? Is it a temporary marriage of convenience, or is it a long-term love affair?

Avril Haines: It is continuing to deepen. I think maybe the latter, although I hesitate to characterize it as a love affair. There are some limitations that we would see on where they would go in that partnership. We don't see them becoming allies the way we are with allies in NATO.

Brian Lehrer: Are they becoming allies with Russia like we are allies with Ukraine and the other countries in NATO, and if so, why?

Professor Shirk: Well, I think the love affair is the love affair between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Putin showed up before the winter, Beijing Olympics. Other leaders did not show up. Xi Jinping feels a real affinity for Putin. Both of them feel that they are targeted by Western efforts, they call them color revolutions, to change their political systems. These two autocratic leaders, Xi Jinping certainly feels a real affinity for Vladimir Putin.

Other members of the Chinese elite, including the political elite, are not enthusiastic about strengthening ties with Russia. They see it as too dangerous. For one thing, we have explicitly threatened to impose sanctions as severe as those that we imposed on Russia, on China, if China assists Russia with military support. Also, they've always been cautious about climbing out on a limb with the Russians, which isolates these two autocracies from the rest of the world.

China is just too integrated in the global economy to do that. What's interesting about the situation now is that despite the propaganda on CCTV every night on Chinese television, which is filled with Russian propaganda about how well they're doing, the more educated people are in China, I have been told by a number of people, the less they support this "pro-Russian" neutrality that is Xi Jinping's position.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting times in the United States and all the way on the other side of the world. We thank Susan Shirk, former Clinton Administration State Department official, research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego now and author of the new book Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

Professor Shirk: Well, I really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for asking me.

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