Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Welcome to season five of the U.S.-China Nexus. This season picks up where we left off as we dive deeper into different dimensions of a global China. We’ll hear from students, scholars, and experts about China’s sweeping international presence. Keep listening for a teaser of conversations from forthcoming episodes. 

Here are a few snippets from a conversation with four Georgetown students who participated in our U.S.-China Student Dialogue program last year:

Eleanor M. Albert: I'm going to put two questions together, and one of them is for you to look back at the work that you did in your small groups. Is there a takeaway that you came away from? Were there things that you and your counterparts aligned on? And then to sum everything up, why are student dialogues and exchanges like these so important, and what role do they play?  

Evie Steele: The overall takeaway was it's so important to keep having dialogues and student dialogue in general. Getting the opportunity to go from the classroom to the place you're reading about in class is just an incredible opportunity, not just in terms of where we go, what future careers we end up going into, but also as students, the opportunity to expose yourself to different perspectives and to see perspectives that go against what you might've said in class, what you might have read in class.

Niel Swanepoel: We're in an unfortunate reality which makes this type of experience so, so precious, but also very rare. One of the stats that has kept on ringing in my mind, and this was from the first student virtual dialogue, was that there are currently 1,000 Chinese students at Georgetown alone, international students. There are currently less than 1,000 American students in China. This to me was quite shocking. You're dealing with a country and you're dealing with a culture and a people who you're not interacting with, you're not engaging with. I think that kind of humanity is lost. That is what, to me, was so important from this dialogue—meeting with these students. That people-to-people aspect was really important.

Raghav Akula: The U.S. and China obviously are locked in so many types of strategic competition, but we also fall down that rabbit hole of us versus them. I think it's imperative for things like the U.S.-China Student Dialogue to exist to make sure that once the fog clears, there's at least some appetite for cooperation, and already established relationships and friendships that can facilitate that cooperation. The project, and the experience, and the dialogues between people, it helped reveal something pretty deep. That was the fundamental tension between a competition and cooperation that extends to some of humanity's greatest challenges that China and the U.S. have to deal with. 

Aanika Veedon: To the point of why these dialogues are so important, is that there is a level of openness and trust that you get between students that I think is incredibly hard to do in higher-level dialogues, especially between government and state officials. I think that this dialogue, amid the trade war, the fact that people have been so willing to open up, to show us their campus, to take us around Beijing.... It really comes down to genuine human connection, which I think often can be lost in this day and age. It was a really powerful experience. I know it gave all of us a very large amount of optimism looking toward the future.

And now for a few clips from our conversation with journalist Patrick McGee: 

Eleanor M. Albert: I wanted to talk a little bit about where you did some of your reporting from. You worked out of Hong Kong covering China. What was the reporting environment like then? How would you say it may have changed since?

Patrick McGee: It's changed drastically, and it probably changed most in Xi Jinping's first term, and that's when I was living in Hong Kong. Of course, Hong Kong, for all intents and purposes, was an international city, really not a part of China. Of course, now it is. [...] I don't desire any sort of conflict between these two superpowers whatsoever. There's nobody that wins that battle. The way we're going to avoid it is by understanding each other. If we've got 20 American journalists even covering China… you just think of how little we know of a city of Chongqing, 32 million people living there. What's going on, on a daily basis? Our ignorance is vast.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to turn to your book. In describing it, you've said in many ways China built Apple and in turn, Apple built China. How can we understand and unpack that relationship? 

Patrick McGee: My point is that it's really not Apple and China or Apple and Shenzhen in the earliest years. It's Apple and Foxconn. Foxconn is the company that's largely playing the role of political power player. How do you negotiate with the local cadres, and how do you get factories built, and where's the real estate going to be? 

I'm just trying to say read the book because it's such a complex answer. China as an entity doesn't really enter the picture until 2013. That's staggering because Apple's first entity in China is in 1993. So it's two decades into the relationship where all of a sudden there's this wake-up moment where Apple has to understand who they're working with and understand, “We don't understand China, its culture, its politics, its people. We need to change that immediately.” That's how the book opens.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.