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

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 Ambassador James Keith.

Jim Keith grew up in Asia, born into a family serving the U.S. Government overseas. When it was his turn, Jim joined the Foreign Service just as the United States and China were establishing official diplomatic ties. Over the subsequent four decades, Jim was involved in crafting and executing U.S. policy with Asia and China: from human rights to nonproliferation, Taiwan to Hong Kong. Twice detailed to the White House National Security Council, Ambassador Keith has both the long history and the bureaucratic insights to explain how the U.S. has interacted with China since the 1980s—and what's worked, and what hasn't.

One of the most challenging and confusing issues, still with us today, that Jim had to deal with firsthand was Hong Kong. From 2002 to 2005, he served as the U.S. Consul General to the territory, which U.S. law considers separate from mainland China in many areas of policy. To set the stage for our conversation, in July 1997, this former British colony was returned to China after over a century and a half of British rule. It was a triumphant moment for the People's Republic of China, as Hong Kong's return was a significant step in restoring territorial sovereignty after China was carved up by European powers and Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here's Prince Charles at that official handover ceremony on a rainy July 1, 1997 in Hong Kong:

Prince Charles (audio): The British flag will be lowered, and British administrative responsibility will end. But Britain is not saying goodbye to Hong Kong…

James Green: So, as unrest in Hong Kong never seems far from the headlines, Ambassador Keith's experience in Washington and in Asia should help provide the foundation for guiding us forward on this and many other issues in the region.

Ambassador Jim Keith, thanks so much for taking time this morning, great to see you. Before we get to your long career on China and in the Foreign Service, I just wanted to have you talk a little bit about your history, and your family. You joined the Foreign Service, but you were in a family that was serving overseas, can you talk a little bit about that?

Jim Keith: Sure. So, I was born in the middle of the Baby Boom generation, toward the latter half I suppose, but still pretty solidly in that middle third anyway. My father and mother both came from the South. My father had to get permission to join World War II as a 17-year-old, made it just at the very end, took a cruise on the U.S.S. Champlain to Italy and back, and that was the end of war for him. But he had ambitions, I suppose, to serve one way or another, and ended up serving as a civilian in the end, and lived the embassy life, along with his family. Before I was born, he was in Germany in a kind of paramilitary role. My sister was born there, my older sister, and then came back to the states. I was born in Virginia, and we first went overseas, I first traveled overseas with a family as an infant to Tokyo, spent four and a half years in Tokyo, before the Olympics. Actually lived in Air Force housing that eventually became dorms for the athletes for the Olympics. So I spent, late '50s early '60s in Tokyo, and I'm told I spoke Japanese with my

James Green: Really well-

Jim Keith: But I don't remember it all of course. I vaguely remember seeing things like Bonanza in Japanese, and-

James Green: On a black and white TV.

Jim Keith: Oh, no doubt. And then came back, we went to Indonesia during the Vietnam War, and then Hong Kong. The Cultural Rev- Revolution was still going on, so that would have been '68 or so that we started, '65 to '68 in Indonesia, and '68 to '71 in Hong Kong.

James Green: So, you were finishing up your schooling.

Jim Keith: I was in middle school, and then came back to the U.S. for three years of high school, and then went back to Taipei in, '74 for my senior year of high school. Graduated from the Taipei American School where I met Jan, my wife, so it was a momentous move from a retrospective perspective. Came back, went to college, joined the Foreign Service. In 1980 joined the Foreign Service, went out to Indonesia for my first tour, came back to the China desk, and then served almost all of the rest of my career in East Asia, both Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

James Green: So, thank you. On that, in the mid-1980s when you were working for the East Asia Pacific Bureau on China what were U.S. goals with China, and what was your part in that, and how did you execute those goals?

Jim Keith: So, the sort of founding generation, I suppose you could say, of China hands had come before me. You know, the liaison office days, and then Deng’s trip and normalization preceded my arrival on the China desk, but it was still early days. It was those days when, we were still pretty much at the center of everything that was happening because the White House and the State Department, there was so little going on as we were generating things that we really could control almost all of it.

James Green: And by we you mean EAP-CM, or you mean that part of State?

Jim Keith: It's a good question because it started out to be just EAP and the NSC Asian Affairs Office really was the nucleus, and along with the civilian side and people like Jan Berris in the National Committee. But gradually, even during my time, it was expanding, so the Pentagon came into play, much more of a role, and so of course PM came to play a much larger role, and-

James Green: The Political Military Bureau of the State Department.

Jim Keith: And, other functional bureaus and other aspects of other components of the White House. The goal really was illustrated by that bureaucratic reaction, to broaden and deepen the relationship. I think on the foreign policy side, the broader international side, it was to put in place this, to implement this concept of it being better for U.S. national interests for China to be on the inside than the outside. Well, what did that mean? It meant institutionalizing the relationships that China had across the board, so all kinds of covenants, all kinds of government and non-government organizations kind of came into play. Was China to be a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross? Was China to sign on to key UN covenants? So, on the international side it was that sort of institutionalization.

James Green: Because China was out of most of those having just joined the UN in 1971, and somewhat ambivalent about some parts of the international system.

Jim Keith: Indeed. I mean, keep in mind that we're transitioning from the Cold War, and the treatment of the former Soviet Union and China identically, to a new set of rules and rationales. And that meant both changing those rules, and changing the political environment associated with those rules in the United States, as well as implementing a back and forth with the Chinese as to how those changes should occur. So, for example on export control, we had to go from the old rules that prohibited everything essentially to new rules that created what were called new “green-lines,” or new thresholds for allowing a bit more export control that go to China than went to the former Soviet Union, for example.

And then bilaterally, similarly it was institutionalizing the new sets of relationships and the new context. Remember, Jesse Helms was as I recall the Senate Foreign Relations Committee head, and he still used the term “red China,” and meant it.

James Green: Right, right.

Jim Keith: And around the country-

James Green: It wasn't a rhetorical flourish. He believed that that was what we were dealing with.

Jim Keith: It came naturally to him because that's what he knew.

And traveling around the country as a young officer, and entering the Foreign Service young, and was still quite young and very green, but at that point there were so few of us. We definitely delegated down, so as a brand-new officer on the China desk I was sent off to...I've forgotten where it may have been in Washington University in St. Louis, but anyway, off to a university in the Heartland, and shared the stage with a congressman. And we talked about U.S. China policy from the perspective of a university that had large endowments from Taiwan, a long history of relationships with Taiwan, and had to be sort of brokered into this new world of a normalized relationship with the People's Republic.

James Green: And some new arrangement with Taiwan.

Jim Keith: Indeed. And that was typical I think of state legislatures, governors' offices, they all had liaison with Taiwan because they, obviously in many of those places had reason for being, which is the international offices of those places, have a reason for being, which is to raise money. And Taiwan was quite effective, completely above board and legal and legitimate and transparent lobbying, obviously over the years. In fact, over the course of that decade there became a reason, to not only have Taiwan representation, but also mainland representation. But in those days, those early days, it was really swimming uphill from the perspective of trying to create a worldview that allowed for something other than the relationship with Taiwan.

And, and of course, the key element of normalization was how to treat Taiwan, and not my idea, so I'm not patting myself on the back, but the brilliance of a fairly simple notion of setting Taiwan aside and letting the rest of the relationship move forward to the interest of both countries. The '82 communique was clearly an important part of that, and, in retrospect, might have been better if we hadn't done it. It's easy to say that now.

And I can empathize and sympathize with the people who were working it at the time. I mean this was normalization at stake, I mean this was not a modest second-tier issue; this was front and center, and a question of whether we were going to be able to continue on this path of institutionalizing the relationship in the interest of the United States.

James Green: Right, in some ways almost a decade after Nixon's trip is when that communique comes to you. You've got that decade of figuring out how the two, the U.S. and the mainland, are going to work. And as you said, Taiwan is the central issue that the Chinese are presenting and that we had to deal with in a legal and political way, and so it took some time for that to happen. And I would say for the people I've talked to for this project, few were happy with the communique, but you’re judicious and correct to say something had to be done.

Jim Keith: Yes, I mean, I agree with that. It's easy to say now that it would have been better to come up with a different solution, but that's I think that’s reflective of the revisionist point of view that is popular today; that is, you have to really in the end ask yourself, “compared to what?”

It did some damage though, there's no doubt about it. The Chinese clearly believed…took us for our word, and believed that we meant to reduce quantitatively and qualitatively the way of the arm sales to Taiwan, and in fact, there was on political will to do that, and there's no way we...even if that was our intent there's no way as a democracy, as a representative government, that we could have delivered on that promise. And, so that plays into not only how the Chinese see our policy on Taiwan today, but also their view on the sincerity of our respect for the rule of law, which is really, at heart, a misunderstanding. I think the Chinese see cynically our manipulation of a belief in the rule of law, when in fact, I think Americans do actually believe in it. And the Taiwan communique was, the '82 communique was I think an aberration in the sense of making a promise that we couldn't keep, not cynically manipulating the rule of law.

James Green: On this time in the '80s, I just wanted to ask two aspects of your time on the China desk and working on China. One is just the day-to-day; who were you dealing with in the attorney's embassy, or what were those, did you talk to them daily, weekly, hourly? And then on the DoD side I just wanted to ask, this was the time when Soviet Union was still around, and one of the reasons why Nixon went to China, and Kissinger built the relationship up was to try to bring Beijing closer to the U.S. and their view of the Soviet Union. And talk a little bit about DoD programs and how that figured in, and then we'll get to Tiananmen where that kind of all unravels.

Jim Keith: Sure. So, daily is the short answer to your question. It was quite intense interaction with the Chinese representatives. I was pretty junior in the beginning and more mid-level by the time I came back later in the '80's, quite late in the '80s by the time I got back. But at any rate, in the end, the desk director and the deputy director would have had a quite a lot of interaction with the front office of the embassy, and in those days the State Department was different too. So, things that an assistant secretary or maybe a deputy assistant secretary does now, an office director and a deputy office director would have done back then. Smaller organization…

James Green: And you're saying reaching out to the ambassador for example, or what sorts of things?

Jim Keith: Having direct contact with the Secretary of State for one thing, and briefing the Secretary of State before a trip, or a Chinese visit to the United States of which there were many. And I would say that, just as an aside, that the relationship throughout the '80s and '90s was characterized by visit-driven diplomacy, and certainly in the '80s that was true. And each major visit was sort of a way to lurch forward, in part because of the challenges and new territory on the American side, and the bureaucratics on the Chinese side where, no one knew on the Chinese side what was safe. And therefore, any new direction, any step forward into unknown territory had to be top down.

James Green: And, so in that case just taking the example of joining a UN covenant or the ICRC or something like that, the U.S. and the Chinese side would talk about it, maybe the U.S. side would say this is an organization you should join, and then there'd be discussion, the Chinese would take it back to Beijing, and then at the time of a visit would say yes, we'll do that. Is that kind of roughly the orchestration?

Jim Keith: That's the dynamic, yes.

So, you would get in, and on this I think still to this day. You have the necessity for these long, drawn-out conversations, so rehashing very well-understood and known positions on both sides that really take the discussion not very far until more senior people get involved. But the advantage of it is it's educational, but it does flush it out, and sort of creates the opportunity to discover if there hidden traps in there for both sides and that sort of thing. But, you know, during ... As, as you suggested by the question on the Pentagon, I mean the, this, this period in the '80s was an expansion of the U.S. governments' engagement, so, you know, new relations- relationships were being formed such as the Drug Enforcement Administration's nascent relationship with the Chinese, et cetera.

James Green: All right, well, fascinating. So, I want to start with Tiananmen, and you are a political officer at the embassy in the run up to that. Can you just describe your first trip to China, and then a little bit about what Beijing was like in the late '80s?

Jim Keith: Sure. So, the first trip would have been in the early to mid-'80s as a desk officer.

And, the embassy of course was in its old quarters, and we were still feeling our way, that this was in a positive atmosphere, I suppose. The sense was that the sort of overriding momentum was toward closer relations, more engagement, more activity in the relationship, but it wasn't at all clear how to go about doing that, so we really were just, sort of feeling the stones crossing the river.

James Green: But at a personal level people were happy to see Americans, and your interactions were generally kind of positive?

Jim Keith: Yeah, I wouldn't go that far, because of course there wasn't a well-worn route, so there was potential risk. And so the engagement was wary but I think clearly sanctioned, and therefore positive, but it wasn't warm and friendly, it was a bit of-

James Green: People were cautious.

Jim Keith: A little bit of caution and conservatism.

And then in Shanghai, as well. Even Shanghai, which was looser of course than Beijing, and more open, and obviously with a more cosmopolitan history. But even there, more of a sense of risk and opportunity, but with the emphasis on the risk. And, if the opportunity were missed that would be fine, so long as the risks were minimized.

And then in the run up to Tiananmen, of course, as the time passed in the decade of the 1980s, little by little, things got more and more open. When Ambassador Lord was the ambassador in the early part of 1989, and we had a ten-year anniversary, of course, of normalization. And it was at the Great Wall Sheraton, something of a surreal kind of event with…I’ve forgotten precisely the characters, but it was quite lively, and a real celebration on both sides.

James Green: And at that time, you were in the political section. What was your job in the embassy?

Jim Keith: So, I started out, in I guess, '86, '87, doing internal political work, working on rule of law and human rights issues. I took a long trip out, to Gansu province to report on freedom of religion. Ed Meese came as Attorney General with, something like 40 states’ attorneys general for the first all-China Legal Reform Conference.

I remember Jim Brown was the interpreter at the Great Hall of the People, and it was just maddening for him, he's phenomenal. And the way he managed that was something else because Ed Meese, the then Attorney General was in the habit of throwing out his prepared remarks and just speaking off the top of his cuff, and this started on the trip. He added states’ attorney generals to his official delegation on the plane so much so that we couldn't fit them all in the motorcade coming from the airport. And, I had no idea of what that meant in Chinese protocol terms and whether you're in or out of the delegation, whether you're in or out of meetings, had people wandering into meetings. So, the Great Hall of the People, driving Chinese security crazy, because they weren't on the list, because Meese had added them without telling anybody. But it was a major focus on legal reform, and really an historical event. We didn't realize, I think certainly I as a young political officer, didn't realize how important that was, and what a milestone that was for the development of at least what turned out to be in the fourth plenum of the last central committee, and a real focus on using the justice system and the rule of law under the Party's authority as a means of making life fair and more egalitarian for the Chinese people.

James Green: At a time when there were very few lawyers in the whole country at that point in the '80s.

Jim Keith: Absolutely, and particularly as you got outside of the Eastern Seaboard.

No, that's right. And then the second year, I was on the external side and did foreign policy including Korean Peninsula. And then-Political Counselor Ray Burghardt and I were the first to meet with the North Koreans in what eventually became the New York channel, and then led to the framework of court. But we had three meetings with the North Koreans at the old International Club. At that time the Chinese were genuinely facilitating and no more, I mean they set up the room-

James Green: They told both sides where it is, and they stepped back.

Jim Keith: Didn't do anything else. And we did, we did that in Chinese in fact because it was the only common language.

James Green: They didn't speak Russian.

Jim Keith: We didn’t speak Korean. So, that was my second year. Cambodia was a big issue. Bill Stanton was in the political section then; he did the Cambodia issue. We had a number of important foreign policy issues. We were working together with the Chinese at the time, not as important as, issues like say Iran, came to be later, but still, issues that were at the forefront of our policy toward East Asia. And we needed the Chinese, and they were willing to respond, and at least to some degree.

James Green: And, so generally speaking if you met with a deputy director general in the Foreign Ministry, or a director of an office about some regional issues say, on Cambodia they would listen to the U.S. side, have their points, but there was an exchange of views, is that a reasonable way of summarizing it?

Jim Keith: Sure. I mean of course we'd be instructed with demarches so we received instructions to go in and ask the attorneys for support for “X” resolution on Cambodia where some element of our policy toward Korea, and we'd go into the requisite branch of the Foreign Ministry and talk to them. Also, at the time I was…the reason I mentioned DEA earlier was I was the narcotics coordinator for the embassy, which was in those days…it started in the mid-'80s or so, and really picked up toward the latter part of the '80s, and was a good insight into the dynamic that we'd been talking about of sort of paving new ways of cooperating, looking for a mutual interest, and then discovering how different our systems were. So, in the end this, turned out to, to, to be quite productive, but there was some stumbling.

James Green: Did you get a lot of lectures? I mean putting Taiwan aside, because I think everyone has had their share of Taiwan lectures in dealing with the Chinese officials on any issue. But putting that aside, on the foreign policy side, or even the domestic politics side, was there a lot of posturing and maybe anti-Western or anti-Americanism in what you heard from Chinese officials at that time?

Jim Keith: Surprisingly, not so. Certainly, from the foreign ministry there's never any shortage of that but this was quite operational.

It was the Ministry of Public Health, it was Ministry of Public Security, it was people who were responsible for things where they could see an advantage to working with us. So, if you had drugs as they did coming across the southern border, and the official line was we don't have any problem with drug abuse in China, but these were the people at Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Public Security who were responsible for the problem that existed in Yunnan from the Golden Triangle; drugs were coming across. Eventually the official line changed to “we have a transit problem.” They're coming across and going out through Southern China to the rest of the world, and all those decrepit and terrible capitalist regimes. But in fact, obviously just as there is on our southern border, you get the drugs flowing in, and it's not just non-Chinese who have a problem with it. So, they were actually quite sympathetic to working with us, and willing to go pretty far.

James Green: You left Beijing in 1989 to come back to Washington. What month did you leave in '89, do you remember?

Jim Keith: So, we were scheduled to leave that summer. The embassy, in those days, it was pretty much a wholesale turnover at the embassy every two years because people were on two-year tours and it started at a certain point, and there hadn't been enough time for variations at that end. So almost everyone left, every two years, and I guess it would have been on odd years, since I was due out in '89. Maybe two-thirds at the embassy, something like that. So, we were scheduled to leave that summer. Over the course after Hu Yaobang and it's well-known in terms of that spring leading up to Tiananmen, the tensions rose, and the Chinese people started to take matters into their own hands a bit. Normal diplomatic activity dwindled, as we all became reporters on Tiananmen, and we all became internal political officers essentially.

We must have been scheduled to leave sometime mid-summer or something like that. And it never actually came to point of scheduling a departure, I don't think because it was so much up in the air.

James Green: So much demand for people to stay there and do things and report.Jim Keith: It's the only time in my entire Foreign Service career where all of our effects—our car, our household goods, everything—just put in one shipping container and shipped to the United States.

We thought as the stuff was leaving our house, we thought we'd probably never see it again, but, you know, it turned out all right, and it all got there. But the families were evacuated of course, in the immediate aftermath, and typically, as is the case of most of these evacuations probably after the most dangerous point. But, as I can recall it was Friday, Saturday, and after Tiananmen itself on June 4th, there was this following incident where the PLA, which had been encamped next to one of our diplomatic housing compounds, shot into the building.

Actually, we were holding at precisely that moment we were holding a meeting on the main compound, trying to decide whether we would go to voluntary or mandatory evacuation for non-essential personnel. And, so of course that made the decision for us. Families and other non-essential personnel were all evacuated. And those of us who are deemed essential personal stayed on, so it would have been probably September or so by the time I left and rejoined my family in the States. And then went back to work on one of the remnants of that period, although I went back to be a Pol-Mil officer. I had spent most of the next year or so as a supporting player in the ongoing negotiation to get Dr. Fang out of the embassy and out of China.

James Green: Oh. Before getting to that and winding down the military programs, I just wanted to get your sense when you were walking around Beijing in 1988, 1989, and you were saying it was a liberalizing atmosphere. What did you understand from Chinese people what they thought was happening, or what they thought might happen, what was that like? It's just hard to remember, being in Xi Jinping’s China, in which things seem quite tight, that there was a very different time in which people were, I don't want to say feel free to say whatever they want, but it was just a much more liberal atmosphere.

Jim Keith: Sure. One has to sort of put that in context, of course. That is you dependent on whom you were speaking to.

James Green: How well you knew them, how comfortable they felt talking to you, of course.

Jim Keith: I don’t want to make it sound like…I mean there were efforts by the ambassador and his wife to create and help add momentum to that sort of atmosphere and that was allowed to happen. So, I don't want to go too far in the other direction, but there, it was still a set of official relations that you would recognize today in the sense of the conservationism and wariness and caution that Chinese officials would use with us. But as that spring wore on, I remember speaking to foreign policy specialists who…the sixty-something professor would say that his thirty-something mentees were all out marching and he was quite open about it and wasn't worried about anybody listening in and hearing that, and that was that generational divid. He wasn't going to go out there, but he wasn't condemning them for doing so either.

So, it was a more of that sort of an atmosphere where this was life happening and it was being allowed to happen, and therefore people were allowed to talk about it. And then, of course, that all came crashing down. We literally...the gates were closed to government ministries. We literally went to places like the Ministry of Public Security and elsewhere and knocked on the gate, the outside gate.

James Green: That was the one right by Tiananmen Square at the time, yeah, it's still there, I see.

Jim Keith: And of course, no one was home, because the government had shut down, and didn't have marching orders from the Party, so it didn't do anything.

But that atmosphere was, you know, was genuine, and I was on the Square at the declaration of martial law and even then, there wasn’t a sense that this was the beginning of the end. It was that the people can trust the government, it takes time for them to come around, but they'll come around.

James Green: And then at what point either in the embassy or just kind of talking to Chinese contacts was it clear that actually the PLA was going to come into the Square?

Jim Keith: Yeah. I think throughout. Famously, the residents of Beijing, I mean I can't really speak for anywhere else but Beijing, but the residents of Beijing setting up these sorts of outposts on the city outskirts where they had set up roadblocks using city buses. And essentially the attitude was the PLA will never turn against the people.

I mean they accepted what the ideology had conveyed and portrayed to them. I think the embassy point of view was quite skeptical, not to the point of cynical, but certainly skeptical of that throughout from the very beginning.

I think there was a very firm sense, not just at the U.S. Embassy, but for the diplomats at large that this was not going to end well and there wasn’t a color revolution, to use a term that hadn't been invented yet. That this was a color revolution rather than that this was likely the people getting too far out in front and they would be, in some way they would be drawn back. I'm not suggesting that anyone predicted Tiananmen itself but that this wasn't the beginning of the flowering of democracy in China, but rather that this was going to end badly.

James Green: The party's going to reinsert control. It wasn't going to be the summer of love of Beijing of 1989.

Jim Keith: Precisely, and there was no Haight-Ashbury.

James Green: Right. So, then you came back to Washington, were united with your car and your stuff and working on Pol-Mil issues. Clearly, the job had changed from what you thought it might have been in 1986 or whenever you were assigned to the position. You had mentioned a little bit about what you were working on. Can you just talk a little bit about those projects?

Jim Keith: I came back and the Pol-Mil job was basically a matter of—for all us really, and it wasn't just the Pol-Mil officers, all the economic and political officers—it was how do you manage the U.S. government’s response to Tiananmen and the sanctions that were put in place, the communications and the public relations strategy associated with that. And the political strategy of how we work with the Congress and with the institutions of the executive branch to redefine the relationship for the time being, recognizing that steps you take at times like that sometimes take a decade to undo.

And I think in many ways that, in many ways, the Office of Chinese Affairs at the State Department, in the early '80s, it was sort of pushing the relationship, trying to develop momentum and move it in the ways that we described, as far as broadening and deepening and institutionalizing it and thickening it. By the late '80s, I think we had a sense that there was some irrational exuberance especially in the economic and commercial side, but in general we were trying to act as something of a break on the aspirations and perhaps irrational objectives that in retrospect now we can say were premature.

And then, again, in the '90s, after Tiananmen, I think the State Department's, guided by the National Security Council, was to try to develop an ongoing rationale for promoting and protecting U.S. national interests in China, that just because Tiananmen happened, didn't mean that U.S. interests disappeared. Uh-

Whether it was with regard to Middle East policy, or Southeast Asia policy, or Korean Peninsula policy, or in the bilateral relationship, and the sorts of things that would serve longer term interests and would serve to help us both compete with as well as cooperate with China.

And in my particular case, the two things that the Pentagon, and working with the lifting of those military sanctions…not lifting, but the imposition of those military sanctions was yet another case of the cultural distance be- between our two countries. Clearly, the Chinese didn't believe that our system worked the way it did.

It took us a year to just tell them how much was at stake, and where how much moneys they had and how many different programs. And the accounting at the Pentagon was so labyrinthine then and byzantine that it was things that we just couldn't tell them, and they didn't believe, and thought that was rubbing salt in the wounds. And I think that for many years afterwards especially effected the PLA Air Force’s relationship with the U.S. Air Force.

James Green: Interesting.

Jim Keith: I think for years afterwards was lagging behind the rest of the military-to-military relationship. And then the other much larger component of my work just because of my experience and the personalities on the desk at the time, was working on the Fang material, and trying to negotiate his release.

James Green: On both the Fang case and for the military reordering of things, were you dealing regularly with the PRC Embassy here in Washington, and what were those conversations like? I think if you were a Chinese diplomat defending the regime, that's a tough job to do, so what were those conversations like?

Jim Keith: And precisely because of that, most of the communication, the substantive communication was U.S. Embassy to their masters, the Chinese Embassy's masters, back in Beijing.

So, the main conversation both with the military and with the diplomatic community was out in Beijing where we were in Washington formulating the policy and instructing the embassy as to how to proceed. We, of course, did have conversations with the embassy, typically higher than my level as a desk officer, and that would have been, the assistant secretary and DAS for the most part, and to some extent the office director as well, but those would have been keeping them in the loop, really to be honest.

James Green: Saying, “here's what we just told our colleagues in Beijing.”

Jim Keith: Yeah.

James Green: So, you know we're requesting this information, or we're imposing this new restriction…

Jim Keith: And as you'll recognize, I think there was also some effort to informally, if not solicit their advice, at least keep them well enough informed probably beyond what they were getting through their own channels to get some of their reaction. And with different personalities it worked differently.

But then there was some, not as much as one would like, or what, might exist in, obviously in a U.S.-U.K. or U.S.-Germany kind of relationship, but still it wasn't completely absent. So, I don't want to say they weren't there, but really it was Washington through Embassy Beijing to Beijing.

James Green: To the ministries in Beijing.

Jim Keith: This was the way that it was discussed, just to be honest. The Chinese Embassy wasn't a player.

James Green: Right. I want to move to your time at the National Security Council, and you spent two tours there. Could you just talk, stepping back a little bit, about the role of the NSC in China policy from the two times you served there, and having worked on different parts of Asia there, and how you saw that evolution of White House involvement in China policy?

Jim Keith: So, having to keep in mind that a decade separated the two times and, as we were discussing earlier about how the relative paucity of personnel working U.S.-China relations in the beginning. That was true of my first stint which really, in my own work, was kind of utility and fielder, but focusing a lot on Southeast Asia. At that time, I think that the Brent Scowcroft NSC was under 100 people.

Very small group not seeking to do anything and everything on policy related to Asia or China, but rather really just those issues where there was a debate over priorities and helping to set the priorities is the way I would describe what Brent Scowcroft's NSC did. Clearly, because of his personal proclivities and experience, and because the president, Bush 41, because the two of them were intently interested in China. Remember that trip that the elder Bush took to China within a month of inauguration before Tiananmen, which resulted in the Fang case that to some extent was a function of the elder Bush's very long history with China, and very strong interest in China. So, the NSC was very much central to U.S.-China policy at the time, still true of course later.

I think later, not because of the personality of the National Security Advisor, but just a different time with so many more players, and more of a cacophonous environment than then; the role was different. I think where Scowcroft could be kind of a conductor in a way, but one where the soloists were allowed to shine. I think it was necessary, in the Clinton NSC, for someone to kind of bring order out of chaos and made a little bit more active role in setting issues up and still making sure that outsize personalities had their say. But it was much more the case by the time I got to the NSC the second time around that what we all have all come to and, and know and love now in, in terms of the way the bureaucracy worked.

I mean in the Scowcroft NSC the meetings actually were about discussion, whereas later the senior level and just below senior level meetings at the NSC were part of the orchestration of a clearly formulated plan. So, the meetings were a means to an end, whereas in the Scowcroft NSC, the meetings were an end in themselves, so you really wanted to get together to have a discussion. Nowadays too I think it's the case that you have to bring people onboard and the meetings are a mechanism for doing that, and entirely appropriate, but it wasn't the case my first time around that your whole eight hour day was the kabuki and the eight hour day that-

James Green: I preferred 京剧jingju, Beijing opera, but yes.

Jim Keith: There you go.

James Green: Yeah. And then right, you'd use the meeting to essentially tell the rest of the inter-agency what had already been decided. I guess part of it is the new cycle had changed even by the '90s, and the number of players as you were saying. At the beginning of the Clinton administration, there was this sense that we had a bunch of different China policies, and particularly on defense and that kind of commercial issues, people were kind of going their own way, and so there was some need to rein that in.

Jim Keith: Yes, and to be fair to the actors at the time including the presidents, in the early part of the relationship, we were deciding our way and setting the channel, and it wasn't really clear what the other alternatives were, or who the spokespeople might be for those other approaches. Whereas later as that effort had succeeded in broadening and deepening the relationship, you had many more voices who not only were part of the discussion, but who had strong feelings about alternate points of view. So, it was much more difficult I think, too. It would have been impossible, I guess is what I'm trying to say, to run it the Scowcroft way with 100 people because it was just a different time and such a richer relationship with so many different strands in the tapestry, so to speak.

James Green: Is there one of those strands from your time at the NSC in the Clinton administration that you can think of as being particularly illustrative of that time, or something you're particularly proud of that you worked on that you felt like yes, we did a good job as the White House?

Jim Keith: Well, it doesn't quite fit into any of those boxes, but I had been deputy director on the China Desk, and then moved over to be the director at the NSC. Before I got my boxes unpacked, the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade happened, and, I mean we tried our level best including a trip that Tom Pickering and I put together. He and I were the only clear participants and we had to sort of negotiate to get everybody else to go along and then went and made our case in a quite stark and brutal environment. It's more like something a playwright would have produced than any other part of my diplomatic experience.

James Green: And so, in that, it was a NATO operation, DoD function in some ways that started the chain reaction, but in the response was that mostly the NSC and you folks over there, or at the NSC and State, or what's your recollection of that? You had mentioned your trip with Pickering of how that all kind of came together.

Jim Keith: It was NSC and State. I think we worked closely together, the two sides, clearly. The White House played a prominent role because it wasn't just a matter of the priority and setting the boundaries, but also how to cajole other players along, and that was something that as a peer was difficult for State to do, but as a nominal commander in chief and has his agents, so the White House could do it a little bit more easily, and had a chief of staff, the chief of staff relationships where there could be a little bit of patience, and a little bit of willingness to allow for venting. It was necessary on the part of the White House, and it wouldn't have been possible at State. So, I mean there was an outsize role for the White House, but it was definitely something that the two sides did together. Langley also was an important player, of course.

And in the end, just to reiterate what's been said publicly over the years, it was human error. Not human error that the Chinese were prepared to accept even to this day I'm sure. But I'm persuaded having seen everything, having gone deeply into this for months, having lived it for many months, I'm persuaded that not only was it a combination of human errors, but…

James Green: And the error was, just so that we're clear about what the error was on the U.S. side?

Jim Keith: Well, clearly, we hit the…American military forces hit the target they intended to hit, but they had misidentified the target. They thought they were hitting a warehouse not the embassy. As hard as that is to believe, that's actually what happened, and it came so close—including stories of an individual who was on vacation and they came back from vacation—very close to being caught. And in the end, personally I think the person who is responsible and who should have taken responsibility at the time is the senior NATO commander, the person in charge. Certainly, other operations, other commanders have had systems in place to prevent this sort of error, and that's exactly why we have such a high reputation in military circles is that we are professional and thorough about making these things work when the stakes are quite high. The other thing that stands out from that time is the EP-3 incident which again is not so much in one of those boxes that you suggested. But here was something that easily could have been in the threshold for a long-term souring of the U.S.-China relations.

I remember it wasn't within 24 hours of the news breaking that the yellow ribbons started to come out in the United States, which of course signifies prisoners of war, and we weren't in a state of war, we weren't even calling ourselves adversaries really at the time. So, there was a lot at stake there and I think I was in a position…no, I was back at State by this time, but I was in a position there to make a contribution because we weren't…I wasn't surrounded at more senior levels by China hands or people who kind of like the elder Bush team had either come to government with a fair amount of background on China, or because the president cared about it, had developed that pretty quickly because they recognized that that was a professional necessity. So, I felt in that case I was able to help quite a bit because I was one of the voices that had the experience and judgment based on many years of having worked with the Chinese.

James Green: So, on both of these, particularly though for the Belgrade bombing, did you have to…as a China person and someone who dealt with the Chinese, you realized immediately this is going to be an issue to deal with at a very senior level, the presidential level.

From your recollection on both of these, but I'm thinking particularly of the Belgrade bombing, was this something you had to convince people of inside the system? That, “oh, my gosh, we really need to get something out at a senior level, we can't handle this at a deputy assistant secretary level?”

Jim Keith: No. I think they understood immediately. The NSC executive secretary got it right away and was able to ensure that the communications to up and down were such. There were things that I wrote that I know went to the President. That wasn't true always, of course.

James Green: I'm sure everything you wrote went to the President, Jim.

Jim Keith: Right. But, in this case, it actually is true. Not because it was me, but because of the content of the conversations.

James Green: Yeah. There was a deep understanding right away that these were things that the top officials of the United States just had to deal with immediately.

Jim Keith: And recognize that this was a WTO accession negotiation time too, so it's not as if China was off the radar. It was never really off the radar, but it was on the radar in a way that did involve many of those people.

James Green: That's right.

Jim Keith: So, they had kind of a ready-made reason to understand that there was a lot at stake.

James Green: And Zhu Rongji had just been in Washington a couple months prior to the Belgrade bombing, in which there was no conclusion of a bilateral WTO deal.

Jim Keith: Yes, one of the rare occasions when both Secretary of State and NSC advisors’ recommendations to the president had been rejected, and it was a mistake, and it was all because of one individual's influence over the president, and his assessment of the political ramifications of giving this to Zhu Rongji in Washington, and his easy assumption that it could always be done later. There’s a case where the China expertise wasn't brought to bear because that decision was made without reflection on the damage that would be done and in fact was done to Zhu Rongji to the detriment of U.S. national interests in economic reform in China.

And of course, it was two weeks later that the actual bombing occurred, so the lesson there is, don't believe that…if you think there's a deal on the table, maybe you should take it, because it might not be there two weeks later for reasons that you can't predict.

James Green: Right, right. I want to move to your time in Hong Kong.

Jim Keith: I should mention by the way that another element that runs through this period that you talked about was the human rights side. Lots of battles between EAP and what was originally the HA, the Human Rights Bureau, I don't know why it was called HA now that I think about it, but then became DRO. But those battles were over the wording and the margins really. The driving force of human rights as a part of the policy I think was there in a way that most people don't describe. And for me it was not, “you had to avoid this,” going back to your point about proselytization and education on the religious side.

By talking about human rights, we immediately fell into a sterile conversation about Chinese sitting on the hill and American exceptionalism, and why the Chinese should be like Americans, but rather what we should have been talking about what was civil society and rule of the law. And I think that was an important part of everything we did, and really part of the institutionalizing of the relationship, and what was behind the kind of responsible stakeholder notion that underlying all of that was this notion that if China was going to be on the inside, what that meant was it was going to accept both the benefits, but also the obligations of being a part of that system, which meant that rules matter, and you had to play by rules.

James Green: Both internally and externally?

Jim Keith: Internally and externally. And so, an important part of what was achieved, not by me, but that I supported during those periods was kind of using the model of Fang, the release of a number of dissidents, which China came to believe was in its own interest, I think, because by getting them out of the country they had devalued them and diluted their effect. But in fact, it did make a difference for those particular individuals who got out and also, I think symbolically was important, as individuals went from unjust detention, administrative detention, et cetera, long-time incarceration in China, to the airport, to the outside world. Yes, it's true; their ability to influence politics in China was degraded because they were seen as damaged goods.

James Green: They weren’t in China, within China's society.

Jim Keith: Even more, they were seen as damaged goods, and I think from Weijing Sheng to the students. Throughout that period, I think those who were abroad not only in the practical terms, couldn't do much, but also their symbolic weight was…

James Green: Discredited internally.

Jim Keith: To some extent discredited because they had turned their backs on China one way or another. Fair or not, the honorable thing to do I suppose if you're sitting comfortably drinking tea somewhere in Beijing you can say is, you should have stayed and suffered further. It’s a little harder to do that when you're actually in the prison yourself. But anyway, I didn't want to neglect that because I think through the '80s and '90s, it’s the economic and security issues who really got a lot of the attention including on proliferation, which we haven't talked much about. But I don't want to neglect the rule of law and civil society because that was an important part of what was going on and goes all the way back to that early Meese visit and his focus. The whole point of his trip, the attorney general traveling to China, was to focus on precisely that set of issues.

James Green: I wanted to move to your time in Hong Kong. Before getting to your job as consul general, can you just talk about why Hong Kong's important to the United States, and what we're supposed to be doing there?

Jim Keith: Yeah. So, going all the way back to that first job I had on the China Desk, '83 to '85, that as a desk officer I was an economic and consular officer. I would come back from lunch and we had cubicles in those, little offices, not cubicles, with old wooden desks made and delivered from the Bureau of Prisons, and this huge wooden desk in my office. And I'd come back from lunch and those little yellow notepads—for telephone messages that were standard issue in the U.S. government in those days—would cover my desk. I would have like 30 or 40 of them because I was the only person in the U.S. government outside of the consular bureau who would talk to anyone about consular issues. So, my office director, and in the old days, the senior people had not done consular work, so they really didn’t know.

James Green: Oh, they were not required to do…

Jim Keith: No, it was really my generation that started out as, the first tour or two would be consulars. So, they didn't really have a feel for it, and didn't understand the very nuanced relationship between the chief of mission, and the consular section, and the issuing officer that comes second nature to those who've been through it. So, I spent a lot of time on consular work, some of it just the standard when it comes up with visas. But in those days too, part of my responsibility was the program overseeing Chinese students in the hard sciences, and the liaison between the State Department and institutions. Faculty members who, as you can imagine, were somewhat hostile to U.S. government intervention, and what they saw they considered to be free speech in the end.

As an economic officer, we had split Hong Kong between its political and economic influences. So, a colleague whom you'll know very well, Steve Young, was the political officer at the time, and, so he did Hong Kong political and I did Hong Kong economic. In those days, textiles and apparel were a big issue in Hong Kong, and there's lots of troublesome and nettlesome commercial issues, but also the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the time was Allen Wallace, who was a well-trained economist, and who saw Hong Kong as the paradigm of a tariff-free regime, a free port, and this is what capitalism should look like from his perspective.

He was prescient, I think. He was concerned way back then that we weigh in, and that we be a player, and that we be a part of the discussions that this wasn't just something we could walk away from and leave to the negotiation between the U.K. and the Chinese, so that we had a stake, and we had a national interest in Hong Kong as an economic institution. And over time, that argument developed into the extent that we were making the argument that Hong Kong as an economic model for the mainland was useful, from a U.S. national perspective, that is, and it did work that way, I think.

Those who predicted that everything would fall apart in '97 and that the Communist Party couldn't keep its hands off the goose laying the golden eggs, et cetera, were proven wrong in the immediate aftermath of '97. And I think that the most stark evidence of that was all the Hong Kongers who had created rights of the boat elsewhere as a safety net came back and property prices went up. That in the immediate aftermath, that worked pretty well.

Clearly, it hasn't in more recent times, and those who predicted at the party, I think they were still wrong in their mechanism as to how this would come about, but I think they were right to be pessimistic about the potential for Hong Kong to exist as a separate entity. I think “one country, two systems” was dismissed pretty quickly, mainly because Taiwan's would have nothing to do with it. So, it wasn't ever the U.S. government’s acceptance of Hong Kong as a precursor for Taiwan, from the mainland point of view, but rather that Hong Kong had important models, important lessons to teach the mainland and that it could. That was the simply-put U.S. perspective.

James Green: And just to pause there on “one country, two systems,” this was the formula that Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese came up with to say Hong Kong would be able to run many parts of its own affairs under the two systems, but it would be one country that when it returned to China would be under Chinese sovereignty.

Jim Keith: Yes, and it's sort of a '92 consensus for Hong Kong, I suppose in a very rough way of speaking. Right, the notion being that, and the accompanying promise from Deng Xiaoping that the system wouldn't change for 50 years in Hong Kong. And the argument was that if you were trying to look 50 years out would the mainland look more like Hong Kong, or would Hong Kong look more like the mainland? I think today, one would make that argument that Hong Kong's obviously looking a lot more like the mainland, but the jury's still out.

It would have been wrong to sum up and call it finished work in the immediate aftermath of 1997. I think it'd be wrong to do that now, too. I mean the central conundrum continues to exist, this isn't original with me, it’s sort of commonplace to talk about it now, but this notion that history hasn't seen this before, that you've got a one-party system trying to run a market-oriented economy that makes decisions on the basis of prices for the allocation of resources. This sense that you can have market forces at work and that they can be allowed to work to an extent, such an extent that the economy is genuinely influenced by them.

But at the same time, have a one-party state that can avoid the problems of moral hazard and simply can't abide the Party getting stuck with things, and therefore it intervenes before market forces can be finally brought to rest. And I think that question—whether that will work, whether that kind of a system will work—is still an open one. I think it's still worth working on that question from an American point of view. I think there's still an American national interest in trying to keep those options alive to the extent that that's possible from the outside, and it is only in the sense of creating windows or creating doors that the Chinese can walk through if they choose to.

If they don't, they don't, but if they do then that can move them further down the road of actually having an economy that is market oriented. So, I think it's too early to determine that Hong Kong's influence will necessarily be curtailed, and that the future of Hong Kong is to be a small part of the Pearl River Delta. Maybe, and part of the prescience of some people who predicted things would be more like they are today than they were in 1998 say is human nature. Greed, and clearly the business class, an opportunity…

James Green: And when you say business class, do you mean the Hong Kong business class?

Jim Keith: The elite Hong Kong business class an opportunity and drove Hong Kong in a direction that made it more difficult to make “one country, two systems” more than a slogan. Not all of it to the detriment of the Hong Kong people. So, for example, by taking the manufacturing out of Hong Kong, and shifting it across the border, at least until the pollution drifted back, for a while there, Hong Kong was better off, not only in terms of air pollution, but industrial accidents, everything else that goes with the transition from a manufacturing hub to a service center. And people's lives in Hong Kong got better as a result of the political stabilization that came with the deal, and that came with American support for the deal.

James Green: So, 2002, 2005, you were in Hong Kong, that was only five, six years after Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. We're speaking now a couple years after that. What was it like at that time? The PLA garrison was there, the Party was still operating there through different mechanisms, but what did you feel like when you were there about what Chinese influence was, and how did it affect your day-to-day work as the consul general?

Jim Keith: It was a transition period. Not quite the same transition as '97 of course, but we went from '97 happening, and then people holding their breath waiting to see what would happen, and seeing then, indeed, there was life after 1997.

To the ascension of the business class and the subordination of political to economic objectives in Hong Kong. So, when C. H. Tung exercised his role as the number one man in Hong Kong, he did it with a sense of trying to preserve, I think honorably and with a sense of trying to preserve what he thought was most important in Hong Kong, but at the same time with an eye toward the future, and how Hong Kong could turn into something else. Because the question after '97 was always: what's the role for Hong Kong, what makes it special, what makes it different? If the overriding dynamic in pre-'97 Hong Kong was how do we compete with Singapore on the international stage, after '97 it was how do we compete with Shanghai on the China stage? Are we a way of helping people go in, are we a way of helping Chinese go out, are we both, are we something different? Are we just another city in the Pearl River Delta, and we're destined to become Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou greater metropolitan area? What is it? What's our identity? That was very much the flavor of…

James Green: I was in Shanghai at that time, and there was a very meta-triumphal wisdom up there about “Hong Kong, it's really going to be. But why do you need that? We, Shanghai, we can do financial services with all the major manufacturing around us here; that matters. I think Shanghai's been taken down a notch since that time, but at that time, it was this unclear future of what the constellation would be like at those different cities.

Jim Keith: And, and I think Hong Kong had a pretty realistic perspective on that, that is you never thought it was going to be the financial center of greater China, certainly not as a southern city. Certainly not as nominally “one country, two systems,” and certainly not as a country that used to be a British crown colony. That was in some ways a false competition, and never as true as it really was true with Singapore. But they also didn't...they knew it was easy to just describe what Hong Kong wasn't anymore. It wasn't going to be just another Chinese city, they wanted to say, because they retained elements of “one country, two systems” that were real.

So, for example, to this day you have Commonwealth countries contributing justices to sit on the bench in Hong Kong, and there is something much more substantive to the rule of law on Hong Kong than there is on the mainland. But what you would wanted in pre-'97, you would have wanted to be able to say with confidence that looking ahead to the digital economy, if a company were to locate its server in Hong Kong that Hong Kong rules would…

James Green: Always apply exclusively.

Jim Keith: With some sense of guarantee, and of course you can't say that today. So, I think C. H. Tung bears some responsibility, but I think it was a Sisyphean task. The notion that you could maintain a separate system in Hong Kong absent evolution on the mainland side. I think it was a realistic prospect if both, even if from different paces and from different starting places, if the mainland and Hong Kong had evolved together, and in roughly the same direction; clearly, the mainland did not. And then separately, I think none of us foresaw that Hong Kong would be eclipsed not so much because of the Party and its political machinations, but rather because of the economic success of the mainland. I mean Hong Kong became less valuable and so it was easier for the politics to erode because the economics were no longer that bull work.

The mainland didn't need Hong Kong as much, and therefore all those people that wanted to get their hands on it were able to get their hands on it.

James Green: Then you came back, working again on China as the deputy assistant secretary for China. And I know we've talked earlier about Deputy Secretary Bob Zoellick's “responsible stakeholders” speech, and how that tried to frame the bilateral relationship, and the Chinese side at least seems to be looking for what the bumper sticker is, so they'd know kind of how to interact.

Could you talk a little bit about kind of that concept, and then the Chinese reaction to it, and how that kind of framed the discussion at that moment in U.S.-China relations?

Jim Keith: Sure. You're right, about the Confucian notion that if you understand where you are and all the boxes are clear, and you've got a clear characterization of all the relevant relationships, everything will go well. And it was really more of Sandy Christoph and Jeff Bader who were burdened with this. In previous administrations, for the constructive strategic partnership, and the endless discussions on all of those. And of course, later, the Chinese proposition that we ought to have a major power relationship of however that slogan goes, I'm forgetting it for the moment, but, a new kind of major power relationship. As you know, and many of the people listening to this conversation will know, it means something to the Chinese, and it's not to be brushed off. So, it was in recognition of the depth of the importance of an ability to be able to capture the relationship, and that's sort of a soundbite that drove Zoellick. I mean it was recognition that this would be important to the Chinese that drove Zoellick toward that speech.

And obviously the phrase itself was embedded in the speech that made most of the listeners up in New York when the speech was delivered pretty unhappy because it was in the context of—keep in mind that I was there not at that moment as deputy assistant secretary, but as senior advisor because the White House, and in particular the Office of the Vice President, were unwilling for me, a career officer, to have that title. It wasn't until a deal had been made for my exit that I was given retroactively the title. The whole rest of the time I was senior advisor because I was, from their point of view, on the way out, and only a temporary occupant of that seat."

So, in other words, the context was in a fairly robust discussion of whether, and these are my words, but whether competition or cooperation should reign supreme in U.S.-China issues. And Zoellick's effort was, to enter—and again, he'll speak for himself—but from a supporters point of view, and from one of his staff’s perspective, my sense was that he was more than willing to enter into something of a void, that while there was a lively discussion with stronger vocalization of the competition perspective than in years previous, there wasn't anyone who had taken the reins of the relationship and decided to drive it forward. Anyone in the sense of a Cabinet member, or a president, or a vice president, someone with the gravitas and the political oomph to make it happen, to move off in a direction and make everyone else follow. Instead there was this cacophony.

James Green: And this is mid-Bush administration, Bush 43.

Jim Keith: Correct. Yeah. I think the attempt was to recapture the notion of China “better on the inside than on the outside,” but to reemphasize to the Chinese side that well, we understood—the architects of the relationship understood from the very beginning—that China being on the inside meant that China had to have a bigger voice on the inside. And, of course, we hadn't been able deliver that in various contexts like the IMF, or in specific other instances where the Chinese sought a bigger voice and we didn't deliver it, in my judgement.

James Green: I wanted to end with your time as ambassador in Malaysia and in Afghanistan, to take a regional look, having spent a lot of your career on China, and then to be in these two U.S. missions, and in those capital cities, in KL and in Kabul. From that perspective, and this is towards the end of your retirement, and more closer to the time we are now, how did China look as a regional player, and how did you see your role as ambassador? Was China an important factor and how so, and how did you see that?

Jim Keith: So, always important to try to see that the relationship, and the two countries from outside, either one, and outside the relationship. So, in Malaysia, this was running up to 2010, so pre-Xi Jinping, but still during a period when the South China Sea and, of course, Malaysia and ASEAN, key players in the South China Sea. When the Chinese efforts to expand in the South China Sea were in one of their acceleration phases, this wasn't new. I can still remember back as an economic officer in 1983, '84 on the China Desk going to inter-agency meetings about China and the South China Sea, and what to do about it, and the discussion never really changed from the '80s to the '90s to the teens.

James Green: Just the overhead imagery got much better.

Jim Keith: Yeah, that's true. And I suppose the implicit arguments became explicit. But, Malaysia as country that saw itself kind of like Indonesia in the middle, not on the U.S. side, not on the Chinese side, not wishing to choose, but alarmed by some of the commercial implications of the security steps. I think there was confidence in ASEAN and Malaysia in particular that the Americans could push back enough on the security and military side such that the capacity of trading vessels to transit the South China Sea was not at risk, at least not in the immediate future. But they could see in Vietnam in particular not just incidents that were not very helpful, and they didn't want to have to repeat and deal within the terms of domestic politics on their side, but also commercial implications, so blocs that couldn't be explored because they were in dispute. So, they cared and there was a push for an institutional regional resolution.

The Malaysians were not the most important voice, but they were an important cover for the most important voice. And it was, I think, in a period when that issue was escalating, and it went from, “have you heard about this, are the Chinese doing this or that in your region” to “well, the Chinese are clearly doing this, and they have decided to ramp up, and how do we respond?”

James Green: What should we do to try to, yeah.

Jim Keith: Part of how the Malaysians responded was to allow for more American symbolic presence. So, before I was there, it would have been relatively rare for an American warship to pay a port of call in Malaysia. And this was part of a larger non-China related evolution of the relationship under Najib and with respect to Iran. And a larger set of issues after 9/11 in which the so-called moderate voice of Islam in Malaysia was deemed more important. But certainly, a part of that relationship with China was Malaysia trying to expand and deepen its economic ties to China while at the same time, clearly and quite publicly, broadening its security ties to us.

James Green: And also, the economic ties to the United States, and joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, I wanted to ask on that economic side. You were there at a time—the global financial crisis, 2008 Beijing Olympics—there were a lot of events that happened in 2008 that if you're looking for a time when China arrives on the global scene, that's a good proximate year, '08, '09. Xi Jinping comes to power at '10 kind of that phase. As ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, did it feel different at all for those years?

Jim Keith: Yeah, I guess, yes and no. And, I would put it a little differently in the sense that…I would, identify '92 to 2012 as a period in China's development, that 2012 really marked the time when China decided that its moment in history had arrived. Part of this was the personality and part of it was events. And, clearly as I'm sure a many of your interlocutors have said, that the Chinese looked back on the Great Recession as a moment when the U.S. stock was falling, and China's was rising. And clearly this notion of American decline, which had been around for a long time, of course, and was intimately tied up in the social, cultural, political and economic distinctions between us, in a sense, that democracy is this truism. Everybody who works on U.S.-China affairs knows that the Chinese believe that U.S. democracy is too chaotic, never really going to sustain global leadership because it has too many weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Only a system like China's can work, and, of course, we say the same in reverse. So, you can't blame the Chinese for being proud of their own system, and what they've accomplished, because they've accomplished a lot. We do, however, have a fundamental disagreement about the ultimate strength of a one-party system versus a democracy, and that hasn't gone away and won't.

So that was the backdrop, where the Malaysians during that same period, for them you have to go back to '97, and the Asian financial crisis was the…to put it incorrectly, come to Jesus moment for them.

James Green: The earthquake for them.

Jim Keith: That’s inapt, but yeah. If you went to their central banker who was quite chilly toward the U.S. in many respects, quite professional, one of the most accomplished bureaucrats in Malaysia, but clearly was emotionally involved in her, and was passionately unhappy with what happened to Malaysia after the financial crisis and the strictures that it was put under in order to survive internationally. So yes, Malaysia during this period had become, and particularly under Najib, had come through a transition from Mahathir and become much more focused on, as Hong Kong had been for many years, on its future, and what was Malaysia's role in the future?

Was it going to be a center of Islamic finance? Well, they wanted to, they obviously didn't have the critical mass to do it, but that was an ambition. Could it be a leader in the food industry in the Islamic world? There are many different ways in which it was reaching out and trying to find its new place, and I think Najib, all of his faults notwithstanding, actually had a pretty clear sense of the Malaysian economy’s reliance on integration with the global economy, which was not alien to the Chinese experience. And, so the Chinese experience did reverberate. It struck a responsive chord in Malaysia, and there had been a history of Najib's father opening the relationship with China, so a history of close relations with China in a sense of Malaysia as a spokesperson the for the Third World too, particularly the Islamic Third World.

So, there are all kinds of reasons why they, both at the government and the people-to-people level, there was reason for expansion of U.S.-Malaysia relations. But, that said, it was always with the awareness that they were analogist experiences. That is, China and all of its faults are different from America and all of its faults, but both of them have to be managed, and we have to find a way to balance and get the most out of each without paying too much ourselves.

That was the relationship before all those things happened and that was a relationship after what really...less so the Olympics and China's rise to prominence, and more so the operational terms of especially the South China Sea, but just China's greater involvement in everything. It wasn’t just security.

James Green: Finance, commerce, it's everything, yeah.

Jim Keith: Just everywhere, it's sort of a pale version.

James Green: Tourists.

Jim Keith: Maybe the best operational or rather mundane way of looking at this is, it used to be you'd go to the Peak in Hong Kong, and Cantonese would be the main language, and if you wanted to go in and get a special deal, and you could speak Cantonese or bring a Cantonese speaker with you in a shop, a retail shop you would. Post-'97, certainly now, it's all Mandarin, and you wouldn't think about using Cantonese, and it goes back to this sort of Shanghai perspective that Hong Kong looked down their noses at the mainland, and now the mainland's looking down its nose at Hong Kong. A certain amount of that going on in Southeast Asia and Malaysia too, where these hordes of Chinese tourists come in. They're wanted for their dollars, their renminbi, but there's a certain...Taiwan would be an even better example of that, but they're resented for being ugly Americans in Chinese clothing or for their cultural insensitivity and their desire to bring China with them wherever they go.

A lot of things that Americans are very familiar with, that the American and Latin American experience would be with any of those who had that experience we find that very familiar.

James Green: And then your last overseas tour in Kabul, this was many years after 9/11, and we still at that point had a large presence in Afghanistan, and China has a small border with Afghanistan, but is an important global player. How was that time, and how was China seen, and what was that like?

Jim Keith: Similar to what I was just describing in Malaysia. I think individuals or individual businessmen, or municipal or regional leaders welcomed Chinese money, essentially, the Chinese presence. But it's plain as day that the Chinese were not interested in community building, or nation building, or broader aspects of their commercial engagement. There was a big Chinese copper mine, and they built the road to it, they developed the mine, they worked the road out of it. It was a secure route to get money in and then resources out, period. There was just no desire to be part of a larger picture, which on the one hand, one could understand. I mean this was a country still ruled at the center by someone who is nothing but a balancer of warlords, and so the Chinese know how to deal with warlords.

And that's kind of how it worked on the political and security side. They really weren't very active players; they had no desire to risk political capital of any sort and I think even…I'm less connected to it now, but my overall impression is, this is a place where if China were truly interested in developing a role for itself as a major player in the economic and social development of those border regions on that side, it would have to invest a lot more political will, in particular.

Clearly, the place that has money and can make a difference in Afghanistan is India, and to the extent that we had some success during my time there on the economic side, it was in persuading the Pakistanis to allow Afghanistan to transit Pakistan economically in order to get to the benefits of the Indian market as well as to entice the Indians to invest more. And some day if Afghanistan is not simply the sight where Indian-Pakistan quarrels play out or Chinese-Russian quarrels are played out, or if it's ever going to be anything but a means to an end for these countries in the region, they're going to have to invest political will and a fair amount of treasure in the Chinese now.

And to my knowledge they've shown no interest in that at all and therefore they have limited influence in Afghanistan. They haven't risked much, and they haven't gained much.

James Green: Well, quite a regional and inside China tour de force. Just looking back on your many decades of dealing with the Chinese government, and different parts of the U.S. bureaucracy, is there any parting wisdom you have on what works in dealing with the Chinese officials, and in moving U.S. objectives forward?

Jim Keith: Well, I don't have any well-defined nugget or pearl of wisdom for you. I do think as I was working on my second career, for seven or eight years, as a business consultant, my advice to businesses was to take seriously the decline in U.S.-China relations. And to anticipate, not just because of President Trump, but for much more fundamental reasons that the relationship was headed toward a rocky period, and that it wouldn't be just a “rough patch” as George Schultz used to say, but that we're headed toward a realignment. And this was non-inevitable in my view, and isn't done yet as I'd alluded to earlier, I think it's still worth the Americans keeping in mind their short, medium, and long-term national interests and working to preserve options for realization of those interests. It's a fools' errand to close down those options and determine now that our worst-case scenario is upon us, and we should just accept it, embrace it and live with it, but that's not a reason to be supine, right? So, as there are cyber-attacks on the United States, we have to respond. This is an issue that I dealt with toward the end of my diplomatic career that as we define the rules for cyber offense and cyber defense we have to think about international law and we have to make sure that the diplomats and the warriors are looking at these questions, not just one or the other, or the counter-terrorist.

In a way it's just the overall global situation influencing U.S.-China relations, in addition to the narrative that, started with wherever you want to start, but started at least 150 or 200 years ago, and is one that is unique to U.S.-China. And there's also this global setting that we have to keep in mind, and try to remember that, in some respects, the relationship brings damage to U.S. national interests in that global context. In some respects, it brings benefits. And again, it's a matter of balancing those risks and rewards, and trying to ascertain how best to rein China into equilibrium in that equation of both benefits from and obligations to the international system.

The bottom line for me is, it's tempting now to start drawing conclusions about what U.S.-China relations are and I think at any point in the past had we done so we would have been mistaken. I would urge people not to do it now, but rather to work toward what our definition is of desirable outcomes, and not accept the Chinese definition of an undesirable present.

James Green: Ambassador Jim Keith, thanks so much for your time, it was a pleasure to talk to you, I really appreciate it.

Jim Keith: And with you.

James Green: Ambassador Jim Keith, 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.