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 Susan Shirk.

Imagine you are a young scholar researching an issue or a place that is, for some reason, inaccessible. You watch and record what you can from the outside, looking for glimpses of truth from behind a tall curtain. Then, one day, quite suddenly, you are invited to go behind the curtain and find yourself sitting face-to-face with one of the key leaders of that thing you are trying to study.

In the spring of 1971, that happened to Professor Susan Shirk, who accompanied a small group of scholars to visit China. At that time, enmeshed in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, China had become nearly impossible to visit. Shirk's group ended their month-long tour behind the bamboo curtain with a courtesy call with the urbane Premier Zhou Enlai. That visit was several months before President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, when he toasted Zhou Enlai at a state banquet:

President Nixon audio: Mr. Prime Minister, I wish to thank you for your very gracious and eloquent remarks. At this very moment, through the wonder of telecommunications, more people are seeing and hearing what we say than on any other such occasion in the history of the world.

James Green: Shirk returned to the United States and began an academic career at the University of California, San Diego. On the road to building one of the premier academic centers for studying contemporary China, Professor Shirk was called to serve the U.S. Government. From 1997 through 2000, at the end of the Clinton Administration, she was able to draw on her academic expertise as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State covering China.

During our conversation, Professor Shirk talks about the challenges facing the premier at the time, Zhu Rongji, known as the architect of Chinese economic reforms.

But let's start with her visit to China five decades ago when she was one of only a handful of Americans permitted to visit Beijing.

Susan Shirk, so nice to see you again. Thanks for taking time. you have an incredible history of working in and on China. I wanted to start by your trip to China in 1972-

Susan Shirk: '71.

James Green: '71. I'm sorry, '71-

Susan Shirk: (laughs).

James Green: With the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Could you just talk a little bit about what the group was and your trip and your meeting with Zhou Enlai towards the end?

Susan Shirk: Well, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was the anti-war wing of the Association of Asian Studies. And we were Ph.D. students doing research in Hong Kong because that's how you studied China. Nobody could go to China to do research. And we were at University Service Center, which still exists I'm happy to say, based in Chinese University of Hong Kong.

And we kind of constituted ourselves as the Hong Kong branch of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars because we were very opposed to American policy in Vietnam. And then the so-called patriotic Chinese in Hong Kong, which is basically the underground Community Party in Hong Kong, cultivated us. They came over and chatted us up and tried to make friends with us and-

James Green: Oh, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: That was interesting for us.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And then I guess in the spring of '71, we decided to apply to go to China. I think we were a little bit encouraged by these folks, these journalists and people like that in Hong Kong to do that. But our idea was: it'll be good to have on record our interest in going to China because ten years from now when things maybe open up, they'll see that we were really keen to go. So, we applied to go.

So, in any case they knew about us. And then, after the ping-pong team they came to us and said, "How would you like to go to China?" And of course, this was a dream come true because all of us had decided to study China at a time when we might never have gone to China. So, that's still to me a puzzle: why did I pick a place I might never have gone to see for myself?

So anyway, we went to China for a month, all expenses paid by the Chinese government. Traveled all over China. Dazhai, the agricultural model-

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And, Chen Yangui, the leader, hosted us for three days there. We went to Yan'an. We went all over for a whole month. And then, when we were in Beijing, we suddenly learned that Henry Kissinger had come at the same time to arrange the Nixon visit.

James Green: While you were traveling around the rest of China, he had come to Beijing?

Susan Shirk: Well, I think we were in Beijing when he came-

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And at that point, Zhou Enlai invited us to come in for a conversation and bring our tape recorders because I think he wanted to communicate with the outside world and maybe also with the Chinese people themselves to explain this 180-degree turn in reaching out to the United States.

So, we had a four-hour meeting with Zhou Enlai. and he had Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao sitting on either side of him, two of the Gang of Four, who appeared to be there mostly to make sure he didn't say anything wrong. And he was very impressively smooth, suave, clearly understood English even though they used interpretation.

We asked Zhou Enlai what had happened to bring about this change in Chinese approach to the United States. And his answer was pretty anodyne. It was, "Well, the Chinese people and the American people want to be friends. So, if the people want to be friends, the governments have to talk to each other. And if the governments are going to talk to each other, we have to invite the President."

And then he said, "Now I wish Susan Shirk were President of the United States-"

James Green: (laughs)-

Susan Shirk: "But she's not. So, we have to invite Richard Nixon." Wow.

James Green: Very charming.

Susan Shirk: That was amazing.

So, that was kind of the high point of my life at that point. And so what was interesting, is that the transcript from the interview actually became an internal study document in China.

James Green: For others within the system to read?

Susan Shirk: Right. And so, for years afterward people knew who I was because of that.

I had tremendous luck. And of course, I feel also very fortunate to have seen China when it was still in the Cultural Revolution era, and nowadays when I go to North Korea from Beijing, the contrast is very similar to going from Hong Kong to the PRC in 1971.

James Green: I want to ask you about the Cultural Revolution. This is the time-

Susan Shirk: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

James Green: You guys go in 1971. It's kind of big, heavy political turmoil happening.

Susan Shirk: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

James Green: How much of that came out in the meeting or came out in what you saw when you traveled around, that this was a country in modest internal strife?

Susan Shirk: Well, we didn't see any Red Guard confrontations or anything like that. The Red Guards had been pretty much disbanded. But it's clear that the Mao cult and the emphasis on ideological remolding and everything was still very intense. So, we for example visited an wuqi ganxiao, a May 7th cadre school, which they made to sound- of course now when you look at Xinjiang and this ideological remolding of the Uighurs, I think about that-

James Green: Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: Because they tried to make it sound like, oh, this was summer camp and, you know, these, middle aged officials were there, or intellectuals were there, doing manual labor in the fields and this was such a great experience for them.

James Green: They loved it was a great chance for them to connect with their agrarian roots. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And of course, the Dazhai model of self-reliance which in Shanxi province, this place where, they were supposed to be relying entirely on themselves. And then later on of course, after a few years later, we learned from research that in fact the whole thing was completely subsidized by Beijing.

James Green: Hmm.

Susan Shirk: I mean, talk about a Potemkin village. It was a complete fake.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And then little red books. The place was very – even in the summer, because we were there in the summer – everybody was kind of monochrome.

James Green: In what they were wearing?

Susan Shirk: In what they were wearing. There were some summer skirts-

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: That had flowers and the kids were always more colorful. We saw some of the model ballets and operas.

James Green: Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: That Jiang Qing, that was the only cultural activity really allowed.

James Green: Were these Cultural Revolution-era operas?

Susan Shirk: Right. And then we went to universities where the only thing going on in universities was manual labor in factories and military training. There were really no classes.

James Green: No teaching? No instruction?

Susan Shirk: Right. And then I remember we went to these housewives’ neighborhood “factories” and basically it was a recycling of metal and stuff. These women were sitting there pulling metal shreds out of old rags.

James Green: To then be recycled?

Susan Shirk: To be recycled. I mean, it was really pretty pathetic. And that was the start of these township-village enterprises.

I mean, my perspective was somewhat different from that of others in our group. Many of the others in the group studied Chinese history or official policy from reading People's Daily and Red Flag and that kind of thing. I was interviewing refugees.

James Green: Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: About Chinese high school students and what life was like and how the political criteria for university admission affected the social relations of the school in a system that I later called virtuocracy.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And one of the things that really frustrated these refugees and I absorbed this from them was that at that time, getting into university was a matter not just of your own political behavior, but of your family class background. And in a kind of reverse affirmative action, if your family came from a capitalist or landlord family, but also from just middle peasant or intellectual or a family with some relations with people who'd gone to Taiwan-

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: It was very difficult to go to university. And worker, peasant, soldier, but officials, too.

If your father or grandfather had been a Communist official, then you would have an advantage.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: So, I ended up raising that contradiction in Mao's thinking between giving people who are political activists and really enthusiastic supporters of revolutionary values the chance to go to university but then also this ascriptive characteristic of your family background. I thought that was totally wrong and I ended up arguing with a lot of people.

But also, I just had learned a lot about, life in China at the grassroots even before the Cultural Revolution and then during the Cultural Revolution. So, I was no longer kind of starry-eyed, excited about Mao's visionary ideas and the Cultural Revolution, but whereas many of the other people in my group still had believed. Because remember, 1968 was a time you had student rebellions all over the world.

So, people in Europe, people in the United States were somewhat inspired-

James Green: Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: By Mao's ideas-

James Green: By what Mao had to say.

Susan Shirk: Yes, about collectivism, going after inequality. People serve the people. This kind of thing. But I was already pretty disillusioned.

James Green: Having heard what students had to say? And talking to refugees and just seeing the inequalities and the unfairness of it?

Susan Shirk: Right, right. So, we had a number of interesting debates within our group, too, about that.

James Green: Fascinating. And then how were you perceived or received by local Chinese people? I mean, you went to a lot of different places. Did people stay away from you because you were foreign? Did they run up to you and want to chat?

Susan Shirk: They were very- we were a curiosity, but there was no unfriendliness at all.

James Green: Maybe we could move to your time of coming into government. I was reading what you said publicly earlier about coming into government in which you thought you were going to get the keys to the kingdom and understand the way that leadership politics worked once you had access to the top-secret documents-

Susan Shirk: Intel.

James Green: That senior officials in the US have and you were sorely disappointed by-

Susan Shirk: I was.

James Green: What that was. Could you just talk a little bit about the process of coming from academia into the government?

Susan Shirk: Sure.

James Green: And, what that felt like, and some of the differences?

Susan Shirk: Well, first of all, obviously it's a rare privilege to have the chance to serve in government as an academic. And I really admired Dick Solomon, Mike Oxenberg, I knew them quite well and I wanted to emulate what they had done in helping make history and improve US-China relations.

And so, I was thrilled with the chance to do it. But I was worried about a few things. I mean, one thing I was really worried about is as an academic you never have a boss.

James Green: (laughs)- Just like in government.

Susan Shirk: No boss. But in government, everybody has a boss. And that's the amazing thing to me. I mean, even in the State Department; assistant secretaries, undersecretaries, they're still staff to the secretary.

James Green: Right.

Susan Shirk: And they still kind of think that way.

James Green: Yep.

Susan Shirk: I was fortunate. I was a deputy assistant secretary in the East Asia Bureau, working for Stanley Roth who was Assistant Secretary. But because I was a political appointee, DASS, I kind of had a little bit more status and Stanley was very nice at sharing responsibility for China with me. He basically put me forward as the China person in the bureau. So that was great.

I was harassed by my secretary, who was one of these long time Foreign Service secretaries who told me, "Oh there's no way an academic could ever learn how to do this job." That's what she told me.

So, it was very demanding trying to learn the game and that kind of thing. But it was a great opportunity and, I think Madeleine Albright had been an academic, too. I mean, of course she'd been involved in politics for a very long time, but she was very supportive, and I felt in some ways we were on the same wavelength. I mean, I'll just give you one example.

Once we were in her office and I was trying to explain why we should push hard on one issue and give up on another issue because I said, I'm a comparative politics person. I study Chinese domestic politics. So, there's no way that Chinese leadership will be able to do this, whereas this other thing I think they really can. And so, I was making the domestic politics case and one of Secretary Albright's top advisors said, "But Susan, you know there are no domestic politics in China. It's a communist country."

And she just looked over at him with this withering look and said, "Don't be ridiculous."

Because she had studied Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, so she knew very well there are plenty of domestic politics in communist countries.

James Green: Could I ask you on that kind of broader point. I mean, we're at a time now where China dominates the headlines and people at all levels of government and society and business, they all have to know something about China. But at that time, in the late 1990s, what did you think of the general level of China in the US government?

Susan Shirk: I was super impressed with the Foreign Service expertise. You know, they brought me in as an academic because after the Taiwan Strait Crisis in '95-'96, and there was like a major big push to try to put a floor under U.S.-China relations and prevent them from going downward even more and, they felt that they needed some more expertise about China. So, I was the beneficiary of that perception.

But I have to say the Foreign Service people, I thought, were extremely knowledgeable. I really didn't think they needed me actually. I'm glad they thought they needed me but people like Jeff Bader understood Chinese domestic politics very well and he had been my predecessor in that role and then he went over to the NSC, so we worked in partnership.

Susan Shirk: So, you know, I thought it was pretty good. Now of course senior level people don't necessarily have specific China expertise, but, I thought at the middle level, it was really quite good.

James Green: So, if you don't mind, could we move to Jiang Zemin's visit to the U.S. in ’97? My recollection was that at some point you rode on Jiang Zemin's plane?

Susan Shirk: I went out and rode on the Chinese plane. So, I went to Pearl Harbor with him, was there in Hawaii when he was playing the zither. “Home on the Range,” or whatever he was playing, I can't remember, at the dinner.

And so, I actually had a chance to see him pretty close up and Zeng Qinghong too. I'm trying to remember. I think Jiang Zemin did go out swimming. In Hawaii, and Zeng Qinghong was on the shore. We were chatting and that was very interesting.

So, I felt as I observed Jiang Zemin on that trip and then later when President Clinton, we took President Clinton back to China, and other meetings when Secretary Albright would go, we'd go see Jiang Zemin again. I felt that he was really China's first modern, 20th century- maybe not 20th century, late 20th century, leader to play the role of global statesman. Zhou Enlai did what he could, but it was pretty limited to the nonaligned world-

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And the Communist Bloc. And Zhou Enlai was not welcome in Europe or wherever.

So, Jiang Zemin- and that of course, Deng Xiaoping, after Tiananmen in '89, he made this call to give the top leader in China three jobs. The General Secretary of the Party, which is really the most powerful job; the head of the Military Commission, second most powerful; and then the presidency, which actually has no real power at all except you are the head of state. So therefore, you go around representing China internationally.

And I felt that Jiang Zemin really loved doing that. He relished it. And that created a great opportunity because we could lavish that kind of respect on him personally and on China as a rising power through ceremonies, through dinners, that kind of thing. And that was incredibly useful because we were trying to get China at that time to join all of these international regimes and that required China changing its behavior and making what for them are big concessions.

There wasn't much we could do. And we were already in conformity with those global regimes. What were we gonna give China? Of course, what they always wanted was something on Taiwan, which we're not gonna do. So, what else are we gonna give them? What we gave them was status, respect.

James Green: And these regimes are largely nonproliferation ones or the ones that I'm thinking of are on trade as well.

Susan Shirk: Right.

James Green: Access to those global organizations and clubs which have rules that China would then have to adhere to.

Susan Shirk: Right.

James Green: And so, the pomp and circumstance of a state visit was something that- this was the first leader of a Chinese leader since the Tiananmen crackdown, so the Chinese took it extremely seriously.

Susan Shirk: Right, and I think he took it extremely seriously as an individual.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And that was just a wonderful asset. And actually, I have to say, even today, I think that a desire on the part of China's leaders to have status, respect, in the world is a really positive motivation. It gives us something to work with.

James Green: Even today you think?

Susan Shirk: Yeah. Compared to Putin?

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: I mean, Putin and Russia, is a spoiler. But that's not true for China.

James Green: I want to ask you about the return trip of President Clinton to China. But first, Qian Qichen was the Vice Premier then if I recall, or the one handling foreign policy either as a state councilor or vice premier, and my recollection was he was kind of the top of the top of that profession in the Chinese system. I just wanted to ask you if you have any impressions of working with him?

Susan Shirk: Yes. Very modest and modestly spoken, didn't act like a big ego, and certainly around the leader, he's a staffer, too.

James Green: (laughs)-

Susan Shirk: But impressive in the same way Zhou Enlai was impressive. He seemed very much in the Zhou Enlai tradition.

James Green: Well, let's go to President Clinton's trip back and when he takes this kind of almost epic journey to many different cities in China, I think it was about ten days in 1998. What I remembered most, and I shared this with Jeff, my memory of it, was the focus at the White House on what the optics were for the arrival ceremony for President Clinton in Tiananmen Square.

Susan Shirk: Yeah.

James Green: And that was the first visit of a U.S. president since the Tiananmen Square crackdown and in an age before YouTube, that image of a Chinese protestor standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen was what most people knew in the United States of Tiananmen Square, was that image and the crackdown, the PLA crackdown at Tiananmen.

And so, there was a lot of talk about literally what are the camera angles and what's the imagery of the arrival ceremony and the Chinese insist on it and yes they insisted on it because that's what they do for heads of state that come and that's their protocol.

But could you just talk a little bit about why such a length trip and then on the policy side, the U.S. is not as interested in the pomp and circumstance as Chinese officials might be, but what are the sorts of things that you recall the US was looking for in kind of having China sign up to or work towards during that trip?

Susan Shirk: Well, it was a good period in China in '98. There were some really positive things going on domestically including the strengthening of the legal system. There was a man named Xiao Yang who was the head of the Supreme Judicial Court who was introducing all sorts of reforms to the legal system to strengthen the autonomy of the legal system. There was some loosening up of controls over intellectual life, over religion. It was a little blooming and contending period. Not quite One Hundred Flowers but maybe sixty flowers.

James Green: (laughs)-

Susan Shirk: I mean, we were feeling pretty good, and this relates of course to how our objectives in terms of liberalizing China, which would be better for people in China, and bringing the two countries a little bit closer together in values and that goes along with market reform.

But on the political side, nobody expecting China to democratize anytime soon. But the idea was, definitely we felt always that when things were moving in a little looser political control over society in China, it was always easier to do other things together. And that was important for the United States.

So, it was that kind of period and what I remember the most is how the entire party, meaning mainly President Clinton, the First Lady Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, and Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor, really had such a positive feeling about that visit for two reasons: one, that the Chinese side allowed the press conference to be televised live.

James Green: Why don't you mention why that's such a big deal?

Susan Shirk: Well, because it had never been done before and because this press conference, you compare that press conference, watch it today and compare it to the press conferences we have with Chinese leaders today, which are so highly structured. Only maybe two or three questions from each side and there's just no spontaneity at all. But that press conference was very freewheeling. There was a lot of back and forth. And one of the things that President Clinton said was in response to a question about Tibet, he raised Tibet and said to Jiang Zemin, "You know, you really would like the Dalai Lama. You know, you really should talk to him. I think the two of you could really make some progress in mutual understanding."

And, you know, Jiang Zemin, of course that put him on the spot. He didn't say anything terribly new, but he handled himself with great aplomb, really.

And then the other thing that happened, was the Chinese side allowed President Clinton's speech at Beida to be televised live to the Chinese public. And what was great about that is it signified a kind of confidence on the part of the Chinese leadership that, they could allow the Chinese people to hear the words of the American president and not worry that somehow, they were gonna rise up and overthrow the Communist Party. And you don't have that today.

And in fact the contrast with President Obama's trip in 2009 is very striking because I think, from what I've heard from my colleagues who were in the government then, the Chinese leadership and the people around Hu Jintao were scared to allow the Chinese public to hear what President Obama had to say because they thought he's such a charismatic speaker that they might rise up. And they had seen what happened when he went to Egypt.

James Green: Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: And how people got so excited in Egypt and then there was a kind of color revolution later. So, they didn't want that to happen. So, I'd say ever since that Obama visit, things have been much tighter.

But the Clinton visit was quite relaxed in that respect and it really opened the way for greater cooperation between the two countries and across the board.

James Green: Yeah, my recollection was on the mil-mil side, on the-

Susan Shirk: Yeah.

James Green: On the non-proliferation side-

Susan Shirk: Maritime-

James Green: WTO accession. All those-

Susan Shirk: Everything-

James Green: Big baskets of things.

Susan Shirk: So, it created tremendous positive momentum.

James Green: Let's bring that momentum down for the next question I'm gonna ask you about is for when the NATO planes mistakenly bombed the Belgrade Embassy, which was May of '99.

And you were at the State Department at the time. And I've heard Secretary Albright talk about this visit she took to the Chinese Embassy-

Susan Shirk: Oh yeah, it was really-

James Green: I don't know if you were there as well?

Susan Shirk: Well actually, I wasn't there because my daughter was a ballet dancer and she was dancing, she was at the Pittsburgh Ballet, so I drove off that evening. Ken Lieberthal was there but I was not there, but I've heard about it.

I was very involved in the American response after we heard about it and when I heard about it and turned around and went right back to work-

And the approach we took, which is something I thought about as I drove back to the State Department, was this obviously was a horrific mistake, accidental mistake. We'd really screwed up royally. And the way I thought about it is: we have to apologize profusely in every way we can because if we don't want to be reminded of this and be asked for apologies forever after, just as we have between China and Japan. he whole question of apology has become so critical and the Chinese side I think uses it against the Japanese to give themselves the moral high ground.

James Green: And then you went with Under Secretary Pickering to Beijing to explain what happened-

Susan Shirk: Yes.

James Green: The following month?

Susan Shirk: So, one of my jobs was I was in charge of putting together the investigative report of what had happened, which included the CIA and the NATO forces, which means the US military. And that was really shocking, embarrassing, that we had made such an amateur mistake, especially the targeting.

James Green: And just for the record, what was the mistake that happened?

Susan Shirk: Well the mistake was the NATO forces, the United States, had been trying to degrade the Serbian military in and they had tried to find as many military-related targets as they could, and they were frankly sort of running out of targets. So, a contractor for the CIA who worked on nonproliferation had picked out an arms depot that he believed was engaged in proliferating activity from Yugoslavia to I'm not sure where actually, but a proliferator.

Susan Shirk: So, he had some information about that depot. He tried to place it, on the maps or the overhead projection of it, and he did that through a very primitive method of taking the address of one place and then going to several parallel streets and saying, "Oh, this big building must have that same address on that street." And so that's how he mistakenly thought that the building which is the Chinese Embassy was that arms depot.

So, and then what's supposed to happen is you're supposed to run the targeting information through a bunch of other databases to make sure you don't have collateral damage striking a school or a hospital or something. But I think- okay, so the first mistake was this contractor placing the arms depot in the Chinese Embassy.

James Green: On the target list for NATO?

Susan Shirk: On the target list. The second mistake was when they ran it through two or three additional databases that the military has, that it didn't pop up that this was actually the Chinese Embassy. And I think that's probably because people get lazy and those databases are supposed to be independent but they're not. People just repeat or replicate the wrong information in the next database. So, that running through the databases didn't pick up that this was a mistake.

James Green: Actually, a Chinese Embassy.

Susan Shirk: Right. So, that's basically what it was.

But of course, one of my frustrations is that the report, which is very straightforward, we got the goods, the information, it explains it. I wanted to add an appendix of other mistakes the US has made, which I thought would make this mistake more credible.

James Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Shirk: But they wouldn't let me do that. They thought, "Oh no, that's too embarrassing."

Susan Shirk: And then the other thing is, yes, we did translate it into Chinese. It was on the U.S. Embassy Beijing website for many years. I don't think it's there anymore. I think it needs to be there and I think it needs to live there forever. Because now in China if you go on Baidu and you try to find- some young person wants to know what happened, there's no way to know the facts. Instead you get all these conspiracy theories. About why the U.S. purposefully bombed the Chinese Embassy.

James Green: Maybe I should switch, ending your time as DASS to a happier visit, which is basically, I arrived at the Embassy right after that, and there was kind of no interaction with Chinese officials and then they restarted when Larry Summers came out as Treasury Secretary to meet with Zhu Rongji to restart WTO negotiations-

Susan Shirk: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

James Green: And I remember you came on that trip-

Susan Shirk: Yeah.

James Green: The meeting was in Lanzhou. You were so nice to me. I was sent by the embassy to set up this meeting because the Ministry of Finance said, "Okay, Larry Summers is coming. Zhu Rongji really respects Larry Summers, so why don't you come out to Lanzhou for this meeting?"

So, they sent me out to kind of set up the mechanics of the meeting. And I remember you came on the plane-

Susan Shirk: Right.

James Green: So, the Ministry of Finance chartered a plane to go from Beijing to Lanzhou so you guys could on it.

And the Chinese, as they always do in these meetings, they restrict who can attend and who can’t, and they gave us a ridiculously small number. I don't remember, there were ten positions or something like that-

Susan Shirk: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

James Green: I said, "Well, that's gonna be really hard to do." And I still remember to this day, I'm embarrassed, we spent an hour-long ride from the airport to the meeting place in Lanzhou and the minders from the Ministry of Finance said, "Oh, I'm gonna ride in your coaster in your van, just so I can tell your American colleagues what's happening in Lanzhou, what they should know about the scenery."

And I said, "Oh no, no one's interested in that. Thank you very much, we really don't want it." So, all you guys get off the plane, we're all riding in, I'm explaining what the day's gonna look like. Larry Summers's wanted to visit a market and do some other things. Ken Lieberthal stands up in the first ten minutes and says, "James, what can you tell us about the surrounding hills and things like that?"

And I said, "Ken, I'm sorry, I just really haven't had time to get a briefing on, the topography of Lanzhou on Gansu. I'm here to kind of tell you what the meetings actually are."

But I still remember the Ministry of Finance person was there, he was pretending that he was gonna do that just for that purpose to tell about, but really, it was so that he could kind of listen to what our side had to say-

Susan Shirk: Right.

James Green: Before the meeting. But you were very kind. Before the meeting you said, "James, I know I'm not on the list and I didn't fly all this way to be sitting outside the meeting room, so I'm just gonna go in there and get a seat."

And I said, "You go for it, Deputy Secretary Shirk.” And sure enough, you got into the meeting as far as I know, so that meeting went well. And I think that I don't want to say changed the Chinese perception of the Belgrade bombing but that, in my mind, signaled that they were willing to resume official relations with the United States and the WTO negotiations were part of that.

Susan Shirk: Yeah, because you forgot to mention that the reason we had to go chase them and try to get those negotiations back on track was that we had President Clinton's domestic political advisors, including Rubin, had persuaded him not to finalize and sign the WTO bilateral deal when Premier Zhu Rongji came to the United States, which was another- I mean, talk about a major mistake, and, we were talking about domestic politics in China. When I heard that, and I was on the Zhu Rongji trip and I was on the plane, so I was coming in with Zhu Rongji, and then I heard that after all this accomplishment, we weren't gonna conclude the agreement? It was essentially done and we weren't going to conclude it because the domestic advisors convinced President Clinton that we should just wait until, oh, a week or two after he leaves because if we conclude it when he's there it's going to look to Congress and to the media as if we had compromised too much to get it done in time. Just the optics of that.

Susan Shirk: And of course, nobody had looked at what the deal was. It was a fabulous deal that Charlene Barshefsky had negotiated, and it was just outrageous and it was really as if, nobody had given any thought to- or these domestic advisors, Gene Sperling and Bob Rubin, said, you know, because we have to go to Congress for permanent normal trade relations and that's gonna be hard, so we want it to look like a really good deal and it won't look like a really good deal if we sign it now.

Susan Shirk: So, meanwhile, of course, I and Ken Lieberthal and our bosses, Sander Berger and Madeleine Albright, we're all saying, "You can't do that. You shouldn't do that. That's a big mistake. We could lose the deal." And then- but that's what happened. And- and then it was very embarrassing because I was traveling around on the whole trip with Zhu Rongji.

But who knew that we were going to accidentally bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade just like six weeks later after this fiasco of not signing the WTO deal? The Chinese cut off all diplomatic interaction with us except, interestingly, some discussions about North Korea. And so, President Clinton basically had to try to chase Jiang Zemin to restart WTO negotiations. And he knew he made a big mistake.

James Green: You had mentioned North Korea and I wanted to move past your government time-

Susan Shirk: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

James Green: To your academic work coming back here to San Diego and interacting with Chinese officials and their kind of vision for northeast Asia. Could you talk a little about what that experience has been like and what's work and kind of what hasn't at that time and kind of where we are now?

Susan Shirk: Well actually before I went into government in 1993 as the Director of the University of California System-Wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, as the Cold War ends, I'm looking at Asia and I'm thinking that we need- the United States really should sustain its presence in Asia not just through bilateral alliances but by building some regional multilateral architecture.

You compare Asia to Europe, we see for example Germany and France where we were able to reconcile after World War II because they're part of a kind of regional, multilateral structure. Maybe that could really help China and Japan. I really thought that some regional multilateral institutions would be of value to the United States and to the whole region.

So, we started the Northeast Asian Cooperation Dialogue. The very first meeting, I went around to all the capitals to try to talk to the foreign ministries to get them to participate. Winston Lord was the assistant secretary at the time; he was very supportive. And, I went to Pyongyang. And the North Koreans came. Actually, I like to point out that at that '93 meeting, the North Koreans were more enthusiastic about participating than the Chinese were.

But what we saw was over time, and I saw this through my work in these NEACD meetings, that some folks in the Chinese Foreign Ministry saw that participating in regional multilateral institutions might be a good way for China to reassure its neighbors that as it grew in economic and military power, it wasn't a threat and that its intentions were friendly.

And so, in the beginning I worked with the only other female in the group because we had Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, and academics, it's what's called a track to dialogue, was Fu Ying. And she had a very successful career in the Foreign Ministry, Ambassador to the UK among other countries, and, was ice foreign minister. But she's retired now. But at the time she was kind of a junior diplomat in the Asia Department and she came to the NEACD meetings and she and I, every night, would sort of figure out what to do the next day because she was coming to see that participating in these kind of activities was a good way for China to be reassuring and to show it's a responsible power.

James Green: Did she have ideas? Was she-

Susan Shirk: Yeah, she was really- she was kind of trying to encourage others on the Chinese side to participate more actively. And of course, it was also the time when the ASEAN Regional Forum was starting, so she would go to that, too.

Susan Shirk: And then, I remember we rotated the hosting duties among the different countries and when it was in China, she wanted me to meet Wang Yi, who I think at the time was Director General of the Asia Department-

James Green: Okay.

Susan Shirk: And so, I had a good conversation with him about the importance of multilateral cooperation in the region. And from that time on I would meet with Wang Yi and Fu Ying to talk about their Asia policy.

So, I talk about this in my book, Fragile Superpower, because I really admired the way they crafted China's kind of “good neighbor” policy toward Asia in the '90s and early 2000s. And that all went pretty well until about 2008, 2009.

James Green: And so, on the big kind of meta question of how to deal with a rising China or what kind of negotiation strategies work, you've been in and out of China now for a few years, a couple decades. You had mentioned this notion of face and being perceived as a good public actor, in some cases having an influence on Chinese decision making, to this day.

Are there other areas or other kind of helpful hints that we can think about as we deal with the China that's kind of powerful and global?

Susan Shirk: Well the China of today, especially under Xi Jinping, is- I'm just not sure what Xi's intentions are. And there's a lot of overreaching, which is now provoking a whole global backlash against China. So, this earlier formula of China under Jiang Zemin and at least half of Hu Jintao, which is China works at reassuring the world that as it grows more powerful its intentions are still benign. It's a responsible power. And the US pursues an engagement policy to give China the expectation that it could gain respect and status and regional and global leadership through that approach.

That's broken down. And now the Chinese side is overreaching, and I am afraid that the US side is overreacting in ways that, in the end, may be very harmful to ourselves. So, I believe that it's important to push back more than maybe we did at an earlier time. But then you gotta follow that pushback with a smart negotiation. You have to give the Chinese side the sense that if they fix some things, change their behavior, that we might be able to resume a constructive relationship.

Right now, Chinese side has concluded that the United States is engaged in containment, just trying to slow down China's rise, block China's rise. And if they believe that, there's no motivation for them to fix or change their behavior at all. So, I believe that we've gotta push back but we have to follow it by some smart negotiations and also by continuing to cooperate in, areas of common concern, especially global issues like climate change.

And I'm really worried that right now we're in a real cycle, very negative, self-reinforcing cycle of overreach and overreaction.

James Green: Well, on that note, Susan Shirk, thanks so much for taking time. Really appreciate hearing all the great history and your thoughts where we are today.

Susan Shirk: Thank you.

James Green: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Shirk - speaking with me from San Diego, California. You’ve been listening to the U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast from Georgetown University. I’m your host, James Green.