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Assistant United States Trade Representative Charles Freeman III
Assistant United States Trade Representative Charles Freeman III
November 12, 2019

Charles Freeman III

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U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast

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What trade tools does the United States have to address imbalances with China? What is it like to go toe-to-toe with Chinese trade negotiators, equipped with Mandarin and a deep knowledge of the intricacies of U.S. and international trade law?

Did China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 bring a wave of trade liberalization or simply pave the way for China's brand of state-led capitalism? Charles Freeman III spent his youth in greater China, then a career in and out of the United States government addressing wonky commercial issues like market access, services, tariffs, agricultural standards, and industrial subsidies. This former assistant United States trade representative (USTR) for China has also seen up close and personal how two senior Chinese leaders operate – one who ascended to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, the other who now sits in a Beijing jail cell.

James Green: Welcome to the U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast from Georgetown University.

This podcast series explores diplomacy and dialogue between China and the United States during the four decades since normalization of relations in 1979. We'll hear from former ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and White House advisors who will share how they shaped the course of the most complex relationship in international diplomacy today.

I'm your host, James Green.

Today on the podcast, we talk with Charles Freeman III.

As the headlines whipsaw Americans back-and-forth about a possible trade agreement with China, we sit down with a second-generation China watcher who is an expert in trade negotiations. Charles Freeman grew up speaking Chinese, graduated from law school, and served as the Assistant United States Trade Representative for China shortly after China entered the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Just before joining USTR, Freeman worked in the U.S. Senate, which at the time was considering legislation as part of an agreement for China to enter the WTO. Congress was debating whether to grant something called “Permanent Normal Trade Relations,” or PNTR. Here's Finance Committee Ranking Member Max Baucus, later Ambassador to China himself, at that debate and vote in the Senate in September 2000:

Max Baucus (audio): Mr. President, I am very pleased that we are about to complete the debate on the PNTR, and we are about to have a final vote. I think it’s been a good debate; it’s been a time where the American people have an opportunity to think, learn more about what PNTR with China actually will be. There are good arguments on all sides, but I’m quite happy, frankly, that now that we’re near the end of this long process, that finally the United States will grant a permanent normal trade relationship to China.

James Green: In his conversation with me, Charles Freeman talks about his time at the Office of the United States Trade Representative, both the considerations for bringing cases against China at the WTO and what worked in bilateral trade negotiations in the early 2000s. But we begin the conversation with Freeman's early exposure to a Chinese professor who went on to become an ideological soulmate of President Xi Jinping and the number five member of the ruling Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee -- Wang Huning.

Charles Freeman, thanks so much for spending time today. You have a very interesting personal history, as second-generation China hand. Can you talk a little bit about growing up in China and how that influenced your future career?

Charles Freeman: Well, I never actually grew up in China, unless you consider Taiwan to be part of China and I know many of us do. Some of us don't. I did spend some time growing up in Taiwan where my dad was in language school in Taichung.

And my dad of course was embarking on a career that would be heavily China-focused. He was Nixon's interpreter in ‘72 when Nixon went to Beijing. And so, it was really from that period of time where I watched black and white TV and these images of monotone figures running around in Beijing, but it just seemed so fascinating. So much opportunity that to be part of U.S.-China relations and the growth thereof. That really at the time, I was about seven years old, I knew that China was a big part of my future.

James Green: Wow. And your sister, too? Because your sister was also in the China field.

Charles Freeman: My sister, yeah. Both of us were heavily influenced. And my brother too. My younger brother, who did spend a lot of time, and actually when he was growing up, he started in Taiwan. He didn't actually speak any English when we moved back to the States. He only spoke, minnanyu 闽南语and some Mandarin.

James Green: Wow.

Charles Freeman: So, we all kind of got the China bug growing very early on.

James Green: So, then college and then Fudan or law school?

Charles Freeman: I took a year off in college, and just went back to Taiwan to work on my Mandarin. And ended up working for banks and stuff and going to a buxiban 补习班and learned decent Chinese. Much better than it is now.

And then came back, finished up at Tufts, and actually did a couple of courses here at Georgetown to get my degree. And then I got what was then a USIS scholarship to go to Fudan and study whatever I wanted to study. And I studied China's post-Mao economic development policy, which at the time was-

James Green: What year was this?

Charles Freeman: This was ‘86, ‘87. And actually, one of my professors at the time was Wang Huning. Who now is of course a fairly ideological advisor to, to President Xi.

James Green: On the Politburo Standing Committee, sure.

Charles Freeman: Yeah. And at the time, he was working on a draft to the foreign investment law. And he came in and I was auditing his class. And I was the only foreigner there, obviously.

James Green: What, what was his class? Economics?

Charles Freeman: It was law and economics. Something like that. He’d come in with a new chapter basically every week. And the students would go through it and I remember thinking as we went through his, all this “you should do this. You should do that. We should do this. We should do that.” And I kept waiting for the part that says, “or else.” This is what will happen if you don't do this. And, I went up to Wang Huning, Professor Wang and said, "Is that coming?" He said, "Young man, you don't understand. In China, a law is a 理想刀子, it's an abstract guiding principal." And that was when I decided to go to law school in the states.

James Green: To learn some U.S. law? Some real law?

Charles Freeman: Some real law, something other than abstract.

James Green: And so, at that time in Fudan, was that your first trip to the mainland or had you gone earlier when you were in Taiwan?

Charles Freeman: No, no, no. My dad and mom had gone there in '81. My dad was DCM. And so I was there and back for a lot of time between ‘81 and ‘85.

James Green: Oh, and just describe for those who haven't seen photos or didn't travel to China then, what it was like to go to mainland China, both from Taiwan and also compared to the United States.

Charles Freeman: It was very different. And I think a lot of younger people like yourself who have more recent experience with China, they have higher expectations of China than those of us older types because I remember those early years in ‘81, ‘82. It was illegal for the 老百姓, the average Chinese people to have any interaction with foreigners.

And I remember there was this period where people would come up to you on the street and practice their English with you. And I remember we were staying in the old Beijing hotel right off of Tiananmen Square. And coming off and being accosted by one of these people who wanted to practice English. And grudgingly agreeing, and sort of saying, "Okay, yes, in the States there are skyscrapers and things like that."

And then at the end of it, the guy saying, "By the way, those guys over there, these plain clothes kind of guys with sunglasses, they're not happy that I'm speaking to you, and they're probably going to give me a hard time." And I remember watching this guy wander over and these guys following him and strike him and knock him to the ground.

And so, my perceptions of China today are probably pretty different from a lot of people's because it has changed a lot.

James Green: So, you go to law school. You start to learn some real law and then end up on Capitol Hill.

Charles Freeman: After a long period. I practiced for a couple of years. I practiced law for a couple years, corporate law, I hated it. Decided I wanted to move my family to Hong Kong. My family didn't want to move to…well, my wife at the time didn't want to move to China proper. She was willing to move to Hong Kong, so I took the first job I could get, which was I ran conferences for the International Herald Tribune for a while. We did these big huge dog and pony shows in Beijing, actually in capitals all over Asia which was a great…I mean, that was a really interesting time in China's rise.

James Green: And at, at that time the IHT was both the New York Times and The Washington Post, is that right? It was co-owned?

Charles Freeman: Yeah, IHT was co-owned. We did these Davos-style conferences all over the region. It was great fun. I learned a lot. I quit the day the baht dropped in '97 and went to work for the Asia Foundation doing their Hong Kong, or their China reform policy. So, I actually got to work with people like Li Ningfu at Beida.

And a lot of the guys that were working on doing the pre-WTO accession legal reforms. They were sort of scrubbing stuff and what needed to change once they joined WTO. So, I had a really cool seat at the table for a lot of the stuff that was happening in China, and knew that I wanted to, when there was a period in '99 when Zhu Rongji came back and was trying to cut the final deal on WTO accession and there was a mix up with the Clinton administration. They published, they released the terms of the deal before Zhu had a chance to come back to China and get consensus, so basically blew up the deal. And I decided I wanted to come back and work on permanent normal trade relations for China at that point.

James Green: Oh, so that's when you decided, when that visit for Zhu Rongji came to the US and you were in Hong Kong.

Charles Freeman: Yeah, so I came back, took the first job on the Hill I got, which was really terrific. It was for a Senate Finance committee member from Alaska. And I was a Republican, so it was kismet, and that was terrific. That was a lot of fun.

James Green: And then I wanted to ask you about, you talked about your work on the legal issues on WTO preparation. On Capitol Hill at that time, ‘99, 2000, 2001, as the legislation was moving forward to grant China permit normal trade relations, what was the mood like on Capitol Hill towards China and what did you see your role in part of that?

Charles Freeman: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make too much of my role. The Senate actually was a relatively minor player in that exercise. The House really was the primary place where that happened., although we did our part. But remember, this was a period when you had these annual most-favored nation debate and you had members of the business community coming up but also the human rights advocates, Taiwan folks, Harry Wu and that gang and the labor people arguing for and against MFN. It was a very chaotic period, but the business community always prevailed in that debate. And so, the business community was gearing up for one final big push. We're going to do this one last time. So, there was no question it was going to happen, I don't think. It was just a question of what needed to be, what we needed to pay off.

James Green: What would be extracted.

Charles Freeman: What would be extracted in the process. And I think the, the Clinton folks and Charlene Barshefsky and the folks that were lobbying for PNTR, they did a pretty masterful job of working the Hill and managing things and so it was a privilege just to watch that process unfold.

James Green: And on Capitol Hill, members of Congress or in the Senate where you were, what did think about what was going to happen in China or what PNTR and then WTO entry mean for U.S.-China relations or for China?

Charles Freeman: I think there was some sense that China was moving towards becoming more of a “normal country.”

James Green: And what does that mean to you? Or do you think they meant by it?

Charles Freeman: I think where there was more pluralism and greater freedom, generally both political as well as economic. I don't want to oversell that. I think that was in part something that those of us who wanted the deal done for any variety of reasons used as a kind of political talking point but I think there was some people who genuinely believed that China was going in the direction of something more like Singapore than it's turned out.

James Green: We'll get to that in a little bit. So, then PNRT passes. China enters the WTO in December of 2001. And you join USTR in 2002.

Charles Freeman: Yeah, I joined Jeff Bater, who was the ouster for China during the final period of passage. The Bush administration took over, did the final push on PNTR. And Jeff Bader had been the ouster and I knew I wanted to do something in the Bush administration, either in Commerce or USTR.

And Jeff and I spoke. I'd known Jeff since I was sixteen and he was a political counselor at the embassy working under my dad. And he and I talked, and he said, "Oh, you should take over for me. I'm leaving." And I was extremely flattered and didn't know you could actually do that. But they actually downgraded the position to a douster, because Bob Zoellick wanted to signal to the Chinese that China was no longer that important, that China and japan and Korea could all be managed by one ouster.

I went to work for Wendy Cutler, who, of course, went on to negotiate TPP and has been a great mentor to me.

James Green: And the Korea Free Trade Agreement, as well.

Charles Freeman: Korea Free Trade Agreement. Yeah.

James Green: I guess, one of the things that Wendy mentioned when we spoke with her was at the beginning of the Bush administration during Bob Zoellick’s time at USTR, there was an internal discussion that when would be the good time to bring cases against China at the WTO. For all countries that are joining WTO, there's a normal implementation process, a number of laws have to be adjusted and certain new policies have to be put forth. And so, you have to allow that to happen, and there was a schedule of tariff reductions and other changes to the Chinese regulations. And so, what was the balance between moving ahead with the legal case at the WTO and letting that happen? What was your view on the ground in the inside? How did you see those things?

Charles Freeman: Well, we kept getting pushed by folks on the Hill to bring cases, bring cases, bring cases. And the reality was that there wasn't this roster of cases to be brought. Frankly, at that time, MOFCOM, the Ministry of Commerce, still had a fair amount of juice and was still in a mindset that we want to get this WTO thing right. So, we bring issues that we saw over there with WTO implementation and nine times out of ten it would get solved.

James Green: So, could you just walk through, since you were on the USTR end, how that would happen? So a company would come to you or an industry association and say, “Hey, we have this regulatory issue that seems to be WTO inconsistent. Charles, can you help us?”

Charles Freeman: There were things, for example, one of the things that USTR negotiated with the Chinese was the right of distribution, that companies could distribute throughout China. And that was supposed to happen on I think day one. And companies still did not have that ability, including some of our bigger agricultural commodity companies. And they came to me and said can you help us with this? And I went to the Chinese and they said, “Sure, give us an example company that wants to get this done.” And so, at that time, one of them stepped up and said, “Okay, we want to actually go through the process.”

James Green: A U.S. company was willing to be the guinea pig.

Charles Freeman: They were willing to be the guinea pig and so things like that. It was not uncontentious, but I think the relationship between the U.S. government and MOFCOM in particular but also AQSIQ and some of the other agencies, it was pretty cooperative, very cooperative, for the most part. Not always; we had our shouting matches. I lost my temper more than a few times, but that was mostly at the planning associations.

James Green: And so, I wanted to ask you about different kinds of mechanisms.

Charles Freeman: NDRC.

James Green: NDRC, yeah, the former planning commission. So, when you guys would have a problem, you'd go to MOFCOM or NDRC. There also were other structures in addition to legal routes, the WTO, the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. That's the way to do that. Can you just talk through how you use different interactions and touch points with your Chinese counterparts to push these sorts of things?

Charles Freeman: Well, I mean, we realized very early on that MOFCOM's juice, its political capital, was eroding very quickly. And other agencies, by and large, stopped listening to them about six months after WTO accession.

James Green: Wow, that soon.

Charles Freeman: Yeah. I mean, I remember going in and talking to one agency, and saying, “You agreed at the WTO to do this.” MOFCOM wasn't in the room. “You've agreed to the WTO to do this. You need to change this to comply with your WTO commitments.” And they said, “Well, of course you'd say that. You're a trade guy.” Well, no, this is a national legal commitment. And they would say, “Yeah, well, okay. Thanks for your time.”

So, one of the things that we wanted to do was we realized that there was no interagency process within China to manage some of these challenges, so we wanted to create an interagency process. So, that's what we did by elevating the JCCT at the time to a vice premier and to a Cabinet level U.S. official structure. And the first couple of times it worked pretty well.

James Green: One of the rights that other WTO members had under Chinese accession protocol was a safeguard measure. I seem to recall that there a couple of, not many, but there were a couple of industries that had applied for that safeguard provision. Can you talk a little about what that is and what the discussion was inside the administration?

Charles Freeman: Sure, it was a little controversial. It was very controversial with the Chinese. It was one of those things that the Chinese negotiator…it was called Section 421 here in the States. It was essentially that if imports from China spiked to the point that they were harming the U.S. economic interests, then the United States could unilaterally put on safeguard measures to limit the imports of those products.

James Green: And the safeguard measures would be tariffs or quotas? What would the safeguards usually be?

Charles Freeman: I think it was open ended. It's been a few years. But for example, companies would come to us and say, we are suffering from this, that, or the other thing. One of the things that we kind of…honestly, we made a bit of a political decision early on that we would only do this as a last gasp and if we really saw a rather dramatic economic harm, in part because we knew this was like a bit of a third rail for the Chinese side. And the Chinese side would say to us, put a 201, put a broad safeguard in process. Don't single us. Don't discriminate against China. We'll play ball.

James Green: Because under the 421 it was China specific.

Charles Freeman: It was China specific.

James Green: And it was specifically allowed under their accession protocol and so what they wanted to avoid was being called out as being the only offending country.

Charles Freeman: Exactly. And I have to say, the cases that we got, the first one we got under 421 was something for a product called a pedestal actuator, which was something that raised and lowered seats in scooters used by disabled people. Very tiny market, one producer in the United States. It was really hard to see what the economic harm, the mass of economic harm was. And we got a couple others that was pretty clear that on balance, there was greater economic benefit to the U.S. than harm. So, that process wasn't used until the Obama years, when the tire quotas were put in place.

James Green: You had mentioned, and I had stopped you, talking about the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade, and Wu Yi, who was the vice premier on the Chinese side, and I wanted to ask your impressions of working with Wu Yi. I think within MOFCOM, I think there are still many who respect her very much. She really did quite an incredible job of herding their side. So, I'd appreciate your views on her and I'll ask you about a couple of other MOFCOM folks.

Charles Freeman: Yeah, I would be surprised if the WTO accession could've gotten done without her. She didn't take any crud. She was very forceful and worked with an assistant. I don't think a lot of her male contemporaries in China really had a great deal of love for her, but she busted heads in ways that people just went along with it. And I think she's resented for it. But certainly, her leadership really helped raise MOFCOM’s profile and its ability to get things done in that system in ways that certainly haven't been seen since.

James Green: I want to ask you about what you thought, at that time, what worked and what didn't work in dealing with Chinese counterparts? Was it getting ready for a meeting with the vice premier that scared the Chinese side into taking U.S. concern seriously? Was it in preparation for a higher-level meeting like a presidential visit? Was it they were afraid of having to face Charles Freeman showing up from Washington?

Charles Freeman: No, they were never afraid of that.

James Green: What do you think worked well and what didn't in that early WTO accession process?

Charles Freeman: I think we actually played it pretty well, at the time. There’s this false sense, I think that Chinese are strategic planners to the enth degree, and they see the end game ten, twenty years down the road.

In my experience, they're much more incremental in their approach to things. And they're much more likely to say let's get to this place, see where we are, and then reassess and take the next step. So, one of the things that we really tried to do at the time was to say, “Okay, what is the one thing that we really want next?” What thing will have both the most economic and political benefit? What will have the most impact? And let's go for that.

Rather than throwing thirty things on the table and saying, “Here's all the things we want,” we threw thirty things on the table and pointed to this is what we really want. And our experience was we could get one thing we really wanted and probably two things that we're happy to get. And so, it was really steering the Chinese in the direction of what would really be useful. And I think at the time we really wanted to, especially since we recognized that MOFCOM's political capital was dissipating rapidly. We wanted to empower them as much as possible, so we wanted to arm them with what would make them look good, as well as us.

James Green: So, by prioritizing you were able to focus the Chinese side's efforts to get the couple one or two things that would really help the U.S., and without that their internal process wasn't one that would come up with priorities or come up with policy solutions.

Charles Freeman: Exactly.

James Green: I wanted to read to you a little bit of your testimony from ...

Charles Freeman: Oh, dear.

James Green: ... 2003 and get you to comment on it. This is Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony. So, this would have been about a year in.

Charles Freeman: This was probably written by Terry McCartney.

James Green: I'm sure. I'd be very curious on your take on it now. “As a general matter,” your testimony starts, “China took positive steps to implement many of its specific WTO commitments during the past year. It may require tariff reductions to benefit of many U.S. industries.” And then at the end you say, “The administration is committed to seeking improvement in China's efforts in this area apart from the systemic concern. Three other areas generated significant problems and warranted continued U.S. scrutiny: agriculture, intellectual property rights, and services.”

Charles Freeman: Hey.

James Green: And you make that comment because ...

Charles Freeman: It continues to be an issue. Yeah, I mean, agriculture is always politically difficult in any trade area. Services, the Chinese really undervalued, the commitments they had made on services. And intellectual property, this was at a time when you'd have conversations with Chinese officials, and they'd say things like, “Why are you complaining about intellectual property rights? You were able to use gunpowder for years and years, and why shouldn't we now use Microsoft Windows, for free?”

It took some doing. I'm not sure we're there yet. The thing about intellectual properties, it was very, from the beginning of the form in Opening Up period, using foreign IP, however acquired, was part of the modernization plan. So, our idea was that they'd pay for it, and proved to be more difficult than we had hoped. But it's gone for a period where it was just stolen, to now there's just active efforts to mine for IP in the States is really a bit appalling.

James Green: I want to ask where you see China today but before doing that, when you left USTR, you went to CSIS.

Charles Freeman: After a couple of years. I consulted for a couple of years, and then went to CSIS.

James Green: And one of the things that I just wanted to ask about your experience on was, I seem to recall one of the working groups or bilateral track 2, track 1.5 efforts you worked on was on cyber security.

Charles Freeman: Yeah.

James Green: And it was kind of early on when people weren't focused on that.

Charles Freeman: That was Jim Lewis's thing at CSIS, yeah. It was with CICR, which was the security agencies’ think tack. They were willing to talk about it, so we had some interesting conversations.

James Green: And what do you think brought the Chinese to the table on that issue, or brought CICR to the table to talk about it?

Charles Freeman: Well, and CICR brought in, actually they brought in folks from the security agencies and others. I think in part because they had their concerns about U.S. efforts on the cyber side. Obviously, we're pretty good at that stuff.

James Green: And which years are we talking about here? This would have been mid 2000s?

Charles Freeman: This is 2006, 2007 I think it started. No, 2008. Yeah, and I think they still, although those conversations have been told, that they still go on in theory. I think that there was some desire to kind of learn more from our side. There was also a desire to work with the U.S. on criminal stuff, because they did face some challenges from cybercrime themselves. So, I think the FBI really wanted to have a much more collaborative relationship on cyber issues with their Chinese counterparts which were frustrated very quickly, but some of the conversations that we had at CSIS enabled some of the discussion to take place.

James Green: So, the Chinese, do you think, did have some questions on just evidence collection and how you would prosecute a crime or how you would even detect?

Charles Freeman: Yeah, how do you track down, locate, and what are the forensics on cybercrime.

So, that was very interesting and there was a lot of discussion on can we get to a common view of norms of behavior and that kind of thing, and the answer is no. But it was a very good conversation, marred only by the fact that the Chinese insisted that they didn't engage in cyber activity with respect to the United States.

James Green: So, I'm looking at China's WTO entry and cyber. Where do you see China now? You had alluded to what Zhu Rongji and Lin Yifu and others were kind of looking towards in terms of bringing the Chinese system away from its past. Where do see the current Chinese administration and the front lines?

Charles Freeman: Well, without getting too philosophical, maybe, the World Trade Organization was created out of a series of discussions where there's a set of fundamental assumptions. And the primary assumption is that what we want in a global, rules-based trading architecture is to increasingly eliminate the ability of governments to interfere in the activities of private commercial actors.

And at the time if you go back and are wonky enough to read the accession protocol and the working part of your report to the accession protocol, there is all this conversation where someone asks someone meaning, the U.S. asks the Chinese representative, “We're worried about subsidies. We're worried about state owned enterprises. We're worried about industrial policies.” And the Chinese side said, “Don't worry. We're going to get rid of all that stuff.”

And so there really was...and I don't that they were making it up. I think they really did anticipate that they were moving toward a much more open and free market approach, at least from the disciples of Zhu Rongji. And, of course, that's not where we are. And so, if you were to ask me, is China abiding by that or did they abide by that fundamental assumption behind the creation of WTO, I'd say categorically no.

The model now such as it is, and I'm not sure that the China model that everybody touts these days is the model that gave China such economic success. In fact, I’d say probably not, but the China model is not compatible with that fundamental assumption behind WTO. So, I think we are in a very different place than we started out back when the negotiators on both sides, or on all sides, were working towards getting China into the WTO.

James Green: Could you just talk a little bit about how the WTO mechanism works in Geneva? And you had mentioned the questions put to the Chinese representatives in Geneva. How does that work and what’s the role of the WTO in that?

Charles Freeman: Well, you're all sitting around. It would terribly frustrate advocates of unilateralism here in the states these days. But you sit around, and you put your flag up and you raise questions and the Chinese respond or don't. And you can ask 72 questions and the Chinese or anybody else can respond to as many or as few of those questions as they want. It's a frustrating exercise for those who are just trying to get something done.

So, there were lots of WTO processes that were baked into the accession protocol that we were supposed to check on China's progress of implementation, all that stuff. And those didn't work particularly well at all for a variety of reasons.

So, I think China very quickly found that the WTO process was gameable pretty easily, so the WTO, abiding by WTO commitments, the letter of WTO commitments, as well as to spirit was something that you could do a little bit. You could do it a little, here and there. The WTO is not a particularly effective organization for policing the kind of behavior that I think many of us are concerned about these days in China.

James Green: I think one of the problems is around transparency, regulatory transparency, and how companies don't know exactly which rules are in place when or normative documents that come out and are not published in any public place and then trying to use the Geneva process to get that out often fails.

Charles Freeman: Well, notification is the big thing, right? You're supposed to notify all your rules and your laws and one of the things that the Chinese told us very early is, “We have all these laws, these rules. We don't know which are in effect. Many of them are contradictory. It's very difficult for us to notify all this stuff.” So, , they say we're trying to notify, but I feel their pain. I understand why it's been so difficult. It doesn't excuse it, but again, when your rules and your laws are abstract guiding principles, let's be honest. Their utility in terms of what they actually mean is less than might be appreciated here in the States.

James Green: So, you have thirty plus years at an official level dealing with China, longer with your own personal history. At a big level, what lessons have you learned on what works and what in dealing with Chinese counterparts? And I’d just follow up: what changed and what hasn't changed in your experience?

Charles Freeman: What's changed is I think there really was a core cadre of Chinese officials that believe in the utility of the rules-based architecture to drive Chinese reform and to help China move up the value chain. And I think those people have been either mustered out or just lost their way. So, we always say, and I always say, there’s still a group. There are still Chinese that believe profoundly in the principles of market openness and reform and transparency. They aren't exactly front and center these days.

James Green: They're not driving the boat at this moment.

Charles Freeman: They're not driving the boat. So maybe they'll come back. And I certainly hope they do. I don't wish ill on the Chinese economy, but it's hard to see how with the direction it's going in now that there isn't some sort of significant bump in the road. And maybe that will bring back more of a sense of okay, let's return to first principles here. What’s always been effective with the Chinese is multilateral pressure as opposed to unilateral or bilateral pressure. So, I do worry, for example, with the tariffs, the unilateral tariffs that the President is placing these days on China that it's missing out on the multilateral strategy, which I think would be more effective, and frankly give less comfort to Xi Jinping that this is all an American plot.

James Green: Do you think Chinese officials still care about what happens in the rest of the world and how the rest of the world sees China?

Charles Freeman: I think China does care about its place in the world, very much so. It does not want to be viewed as a bully. And it's one thing for the U.S. to say, okay, you're a bully. And they say, “Well, no, you're the bully.” And then you get into a name calling thing. If the entire world says you know, “Hey, we're unhappy with what you're doing,” I think there's more likelihood that China stands up.

Charles Freeman: So, I do think multilateralism is important. I think incrementalism is important as opposed to kind of okay, change your entire system. I think the answer to that is no. So, I worry, again, that current pressures on China lose sight of that. And I understand why one gets frustrated with the lack of progress on certain part of U.S. concerns with respect to China's economic policy, but that's the game. It is about getting that next thing done still.

James Green: And part of that, in your experience, was the interagency process important in terms of teeing up the next to the next thing?

Charles Freeman: It was important to get agreement from, I mean, I have to say at the time, USTR was pretty strong in terms of pushing things and Commerce was obviously very effective and helpful in the JCCT process. I'm not sure that my personal friendships with members of the Commerce team survived the experience but that was a good partnership.

The agriculture folks were very…getting on board with them was very important. So, making sure that we were all on the same page was critical. And that was the most fun that I had in my government experience was getting the interagency on the same page.

James Green: Charles, thanks so much.

Charles Freeman: A genuine honor.

James Green: Really wonderful to have your experience and appreciate you taking time.

Charles Freeman: Pleasure, James.

James Green: Charles Freeman III, speaking with me from Washington, D.C. You’ve been listening to the U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast from Georgetown University. I’m your host, James Green.