The Idea of China
46:50 Share

China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed.

Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system. I'm Jude Blanchett, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, and this week I'm joined by Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is now serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, based here in Washington, D.C. Today we're going to be discussing his recent co-authored book,

The Idea of China, Chinese Thinkers on Power, Progress, and People, which was just published by ECFR this year. Mark, thanks for joining the podcast. Very happy to be here.

As always, I want to start with a biographical question. You're someone who I always look to for a deep thinking about China, but I don't think folks would typically classify you as a China expert. How did you get interested in China? And I guess the specific question is you come at it from a really unique angle. You are one of the few who is deeply and consistently interested in the world of ideas in China. How did that come about?

It was a bit of an accident. So I was working over almost a quarter of a century ago.

On British foreign policy, I set up and ran a think tank under the patronage of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary at the time, Robin Cook, which was trying to develop a progressive approach to foreign policy and international relations and was working on lots of different issues which had nothing to do with China. But I found that on issue after issue, China started to become a feature in it, whether it was on Iran and the Iran nuclear file, whether it was on

climate change, whether it was on globalization and

I went to China to do some interviews as part of a project that we were working on and was completely blown away by the fact that there were thousands of researchers in some of the institutions that I've been working in who were thinking really big thoughts in a way that felt very high stakes and where they were real contestation of big ideas, which you didn't really have so much in the West at that time because it was the kind of narcissism of small differences between

the Conservative Party and the Labour Party in the UK at the time. And in the US, the Democrats and the Republicans were a lot more similar at the turn of the century than they are at the moment. Whereas in China, there were kind of huge gulfs between the new left and the new right and the way that they were thinking about these issues. So I found lots of really interesting people having big debates about ideas. And I hadn't heard of any of them. And I hadn't read about any of them in the New York Times or the Financial Times or the New York Review of Books.

And I sort of felt there's a big gulf between how literate a lot of the Chinese intellectuals I met were in terms of the kind of fine gradations of debates between different types of neoconservatives in the US or different types of thinkers in British academia and the sort of total absence of knowledge that we had about these currents of thinking in China.

So I kind of became really interested and went back a few times. And then I got some funding to set up a project on China and globalization. And we got Wen Jiabao, who's then the prime minister, and Tony Blair to launch this program of work. And we started working with some Chinese institutions like the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and KICA, the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations. And it was brilliant.

really interesting. I got to know more and more people. And then I was writing essays at the time, long essays for the Financial Times. And I wrote a long essay about the different currents of thinking in the US around the Iraq war and the kind of unraveling of the Bush revolution. And they asked me whether I'd do a piece like that on China. So I went out to spend a few weeks in China, interviewing lots of people and wrote a kind of long essay on the sort of battle of ideas in China.

And then out of that process, I just got more and more interested in it and was commissioned to write a book about some of these debates there. So I spent a few years going back and forth every few weeks to China and spent some time living in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as a visiting fellow. And in 2008, I wrote my first book on China, which was called What Does China Think?, which was an attempt to try and chart what I had seen over the sort of five or six years before that, which was a

really ambitious attempt to emancipate China from Western ways of thinking about things and to start thinking about what Chinese solutions were and what a China model to deal with the world was. And I've sort of carried on going back and forth a few times a year, except during COVID, and have kept a lot of those relationships going over the last couple of decades. I actually was recently browsing through What Does China Think?, which I remember reading. I was living in Beijing at the time.

And before I read it, I have to admit my first guardian gatekeeper thought as I'm sitting there in Beijing is who is this interloper writing this book on China without having gone through all the way stations that all of us have to go through. But then I remember just finding the book so illuminating, especially the categorizations you constructed then, like the neocoms, as you call them, sort of a Chinese analog of neocons. And I was reading the book recently and just thought how interesting and important a book it is, in part because it comes out in, I think,

the summer of 2008, which was such an important juncture in China's development, one that was so stark that it really burst into the Western press. This was the year of the Olympics, global financial crisis. It really felt like an inflection point. Maybe this is a segue in the new book, or maybe I should instead ask you about the book, which is your way of answering this question. But when you think back about the conversations you were having in the lead up to the publication of that book,

What strikes you as having changed the most between that sort of mid-2000, mid to late 2000 period and the time you started the concerted discussions for this book? Is this just a different universe? Do you see through lines that are quite clear to you? What are your impressions about what change has occurred?

In terms of the main intellectual contours, I think there are very powerful through lines. And I think that that actually was a turning point in terms of how China saw itself. The Olympics was a very important moment in terms of China, you know, reaching prime time, entering the world stage, introducing itself to the world as a different kind of power and the financial crisis that came after my book came out. But it was a moment where

where people started to look at the US in fundamentally different terms, and as a result, to look at China's relative place in the world in a very different way. And a lot of the debates, which were sort of sublimated before that about China models and things like that started to come out a bit more forcefully, and people were sort of thinking about these things in a more concerted way.

So I think a lot of the themes which I looked at in the book, and essentially the core of that book is about how there had been a sort of concerted attempt to move beyond a model of emulating the West to one where China was emancipating itself from Western models of thinking and trying to develop its own solutions to different things. And a lot of the book is about the big debates that are taking place around what

model of political economy China should have, what model of politics it should have, and what model of foreign policy it should have. And what I think is good about that book is that a lot of people then were still talking about China as a responsible stakeholder and thought that China was going to liberalize and become more Western orientated.

And my book is very, very clear that actually the direction of travel is towards greater involvement of the state and a different kind of model of capitalism to the West. I called it Yellow River capitalism at the time. But there was a kind of big debate going on within Chinese economists about where it was going to go. There was a lot about the idea of developing a different model of dictatorship, which was more kind of deliberative, using technology and better data and things like that, which I think has been borne out. And then on the kind of foreign policy and power aspect,

It was also an idea of thinking about Chinese power and China playing a different role on the world stage. So they're very, very powerful through themes. But at the same time, what is totally different is the world outside China is fundamentally different. So, you know, China is a much bigger economy, is a much more powerful, much more serious country, is much more embedded in the lives of everyone outside of China. So it is structurally a different kind of player to what it was back in 2008.

And then also within China, the sorts of debates and discussions which I enjoyed so much then, and which in fact became even more public a few years after the book came out. I edited another book called China 3.0, just as Xi Jinping was coming to power.

where you had the kind of dying embers of the who when era and they were all sorts of debates with Bush Eli, you know, between the kind of Chongqing model and the Guangdong model and things like that coming out into the open, which, you know, it was a very, very different world was now, you know, you have a

much, much more tightly controlled public sphere. You don't have any of those sorts of debate coming out of the elite. And I mean, you know, there are still, I think, as this book shows, some really, really interesting ideas and there's discussion going on in lots of different areas. But the number of topics which are deemed sensitive

is much greater than it was now. The level of political control is much greater. And a lot of the really interesting thoughts which people are having in China at the moment won't ever see the light of day. You know, they might be discussed privately in conversations. They might even, you know, appear briefly on social media before being kind of closed down. But you definitely don't have the sort of public discussion that you had 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

Mark, one final question about what does China think, or at least about that epoch before the near modern era that we're going to talk about now. You wrote back in 2008 that as China's global footprint grows, we may find that we become as familiar with the ideas of Zhang Weiyin and Wang Hui, Yu Keping, Pan Wei, Yan Shuetong, and Zhang Bijian as we are with those of American thinkers in previous decades, from the Reaganite economists in the 80s to the neoconservative strategists of the 9-11 era.

Do you still agree with that sentence? And actually, depending on how you're going to answer, I have a follow-up. So that's one of my big disappointments, actually. I thought that that book, which I wrote in 2008, would be one of millions of books. And the idea of writing about Chinese intellectuals now would be so banal.

Because China would be so much part of our everyday conversations and our emails. And unfortunately, that hasn't happened. I think there's very little doubt in anyone's minds that China is an important force to be reckoned with, that it is part of our world, that it's reshaping our world. And you can't get very far on any kind of significant topic without running into a Chinese element.

But I think there's still not a huge amount of knowledge about the ideas that are taking place in China. There's not a vast amount of curiosity. And in some ways, what's happened is the human contacts have gone down, if anything, since when I wrote those books. You know, some of it is a product of COVID and, you know, things which are beyond people's control.

Some of it is deliberate political closing on both sides. But the other thing that's happened is that the debate about China and where it's going has become so politically contentious and so freighted with geopolitics that people often are

trying to position themselves within a domestic debate rather than being curious about what's happening. And I think that in some ways that's quite disappointing because even during the Cold War, there was a huge amount of knowledge and there were lots of attempts to try and understand what was going on in the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was taken very seriously on the level of ideas as well as a military and political threat.

And I think when it comes to China, people do take it seriously as a military threat, but they often just dismiss the ideas that they come across as talking points rather than trying to understand where they're coming from and to work out how to counter them if you don't like what China's doing on the world stage. So I do think that like the names that you mentioned, you know, some of them have retired now and are less active than they were 15 years ago, but none of them are household names in the West.

I mean, Yang Shui-Tung, who's written about in the new book, you know, maybe gets as close as could be. And folks like, you know, Zhang Weiyin were of the more liberal or new right economist school, which obviously doesn't have much purchase per se. But I was going to say, for all of us who complain about the lack of understanding of China's intellectual community, you're one of the few who can both lament it and say that you've done everything you can to highlight the debate going on inside of China.

Let me now turn to the new project. And I realize this is a co-authored book and I'm only interviewing you. So I want to make sure that credit is given to the other co-authors. But if I can just ask, tell us a bit about the origins for this book. It's such an interesting, rich book. I'm curious how it came about. And I'm also curious how you and your co-authors conducted the research for this.

Great. Yeah. So thanks for mentioning my co-authors who are called Alicia Barulska and Janka Ertl. And we basically started talking about doing this book at a time when there was very, very little contact with China during COVID. When China was completely shut down, there were very few Chinese scholars or even officials coming in and out of China, very few Westerners willing to brave the quarantine regime and go into China. The

information that was coming out of China was also becoming less and less expansive and reliable because a lot of journalists had left China, new visas were not issued to replenish their numbers, and greater and greater controls were placed on who journalists or diplomats who are based in Beijing could talk to. So there was a sense that China was very, very important, but

that we were actually losing a real sense of what was going on within China and the channels of information that we'd enjoyed and the contact that we'd enjoyed over the last couple of decades was drying up. And I started after the Russian Fusco invasion of Ukraine, I was wondering how Chinese people were sort of thinking about these events. So as an experiment, I wrote a bunch of emails to friends in Beijing and said, you know, been a long time since we've had a chance to talk.

Can we try and have a chat either on Zoom or on Teams or something like that? And I had no idea what was going to come back. And to my great surprise, almost everyone I wrote to wrote back in extremely friendly terms and were quite keen to talk. A lot of them had been shut away in lockdown and were very frustrated, hadn't gone out very much.

And they were really talking in a way that was really strikingly open, much more open than I'd expected. And it wasn't, in fact, the first bit of contact, the first bit of contact I had after COVID. I did have some Chinese friends writing to me when they read the news coverage about how dangerous London, where I was living at the moment, the horrible conditions in London, offering to send me masks and offering other kinds of solidarities.

which they actually did. I was a beneficiary of mask diplomacy on a sort of human to human basis. But I hadn't had any substantive discussions with anyone in China for a while. And anyway, so I started having these conversations. And we then wondered whether with Janka and with Alicia, we talked about whether it was possible to do something a bit more structured.

So we started a process of both kind of talking to people off the record, seeing whether it was possible to kind of re-engage with some of the people that we knew, either, you know, if they were leaving China or in third countries or in other places. But at the beginning, most of the contact which we had was virtual and online because there was so little travel.

Wang Jisoo did come out of China a couple of times during COVID and he spent a week with us in Berlin and we kind of talked to him. And then later on, as the restrictions lifted, other people were able to come out. But we also started to look at some of the big debates and the discussions which were taking place in different academic journals, but also looking at some of the things which were happening within the think tanks.

And what was interesting was that the way that a lot of the big topics which were very active in the West were being framed in these publications. What was striking to me, though, through that whole process was how different the conversations that you had with people were to what people were willing to write down. And that was radically different from, you know, earlier attempts to do these sorts of books.

and made us realize that actually, you know, if you were going to understand anything about the written things that you were reading, you had to have these conversations with people as backdrops so that you could situate where the ideas were and what they were coming from. But basically, we spent about two years talking to dozens of different people, reading thousands of pages of different publications. And we structured it around these big themes, which you talked about in the title around power, looking at how kind of China's thinking about global order and its own foreign policy within it.

thinking about the idea of progress, so how China kind of moves from a catch-up era to one where it's trying to define its own idea of the future, whether it's on AI and technology, whether it's on green modernity, whether it's on sort of financial power. And then finally, around the idea of people, where we looked at a lot of these questions to do with demography and identity within China, looking at some of the really, really interesting debates about aging, about gender, but also some of the intergenerational struggles that are taking place within China.

Mark, going to the limitations of time, unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to go into the entirety of the book. But I'll just say for listeners, the book open here, and just to say that the spread of ideas discussed here ranges from something I want to ask Mark about, which is how the Chinese conceive of power transition and big structural shifts in the international order and what risks and opportunities those provide to China.

But there is really two other big, fascinating sections that Mark just mentioned, one written by Yonko, which I find interesting, you know, really looking at how the Chinese conceive of and think about progress and its relationship, for example, to technology and how many in China are far more optimistic about technological innovation than here in the United States, for example. And then Alicia wrote a really, you know, just fascinating stuff on, again, Mark just mentioned, looking at aspects of Chinese society, whether that's laying flat, which I think many listeners will

know things like leftover women. So really important, both conceptual, but also very pragmatic elements of a rapidly evolving Chinese society.

Mark, something I was just thinking about as I'm sort of squinting, looking at the table of contents and listening to you read is I struggle in my mind thinking about whether or not China is turning inward or actually exploding outward, because there are some elements in which I can talk about, you know, the intellectual environment feels to be looking inward. The political system seems to be closing off. But then you have the flip side of this, which is, you know,

now concerns about Chinese companies flooding markets with these really great EVs. EV sales to Brazil are up a thousand percent year on year. You have the leadership in Beijing talking about things like the global security initiative, the global civilization initiative, as if you couldn't get more heady and abstract. What's your mental model for China right now? Inward looking, outward looking, or some sort of Marxist dialectic of both?

I think it's very much the dialectic because in a way, one is a product of the other. The more entangled you become with the world and the more engaged you become with the world, the more important it is to understand who you are and to protect yourself. And that kind of dialectic has been true since China's

encounter with Western modernity in the kind of late Qing era, where there's both been a kind of fascination and an engagement with what's going on elsewhere, but also an idea of trying to defend the essence of Chineseness and to define that more clearly. And I think the more China becomes embroiled with the rest of the world, the more interested it is in protecting itself and sort of defining its interests.

And it is also very much part of the kind of ethos of the book. Because I mean, you know, I wrote this section on power, which kind of starts with this idea that the world's going through great changes unseen in a century and kind of chaos. And that

leads to a kind of idea that, you know, you have to brace yourself and work out how to survive your contact with a world that's going through kind of profound, disruptive changes. So I think the two things are seen as related to each other. And you can see that, you know, in all the different areas that we've written, that there is both a sense that China's becoming more embroiled with things outside, that there's going to be a lot of chaos and disruption and change. And therefore, you need to start by looking inwards.

and work out how you can build your own resilience and your sense of who you are. So it's a kind of odd situation where on the one hand, there's much more of a focus on internal security, holistic security, on developing sort of Chinese solutions to everything and working out the essence of what China is.

But at the same time, you know, one of the features of these big changes is that China is becoming a different kind of power. It's not just a kind of regional power, but is increasingly part of the sort of core furniture of the global system and is dealing with the increased scrutiny, responsibilities, opportunities and threats that come from becoming at the very least the kind of second most powerful country in the world, but in some areas, you know, moving towards primacy.

Well, actually, that's what I wanted to ask you next. If I can try for a minute to stick with the furniture in the room analogy until it runs out of utility. You know, 25 years ago, Beijing might have been maybe a small coffee table, maybe a footstool, maybe a lamp. Today, it's maybe in one corner of the room is actually the sofa. So it's obviously growing in stature, size and importance. If I can read one section of this and then ask you to unpack this a bit.

In your section on power, you write, Chinese thinkers tend not to focus on laying out the details of what a China-led order might look like.

Instead of seeing this as a time for grand designs, they expect the world to endure a protracted period of disorder, reflecting Xi Jinping's, quote, great changes unseen in a century. They, meaning Chinese thinkers, direct their energies into finding ways for China to survive the turmoil and position itself for a new era in international relations. They are certainly not interested in preserving the status quo, but they do not want to replace the United States as a global policeman either.

A couple of follow-up questions I want to ask you about that. One is something that you have discussed before, but I'd like to hear your thoughts now on this. I sense that the Chinese for, I don't know if this is reasons of political structure or political culture, tend to be better about identifying and getting initiative ahead of big structural changes. This is not just at the highest elevation of international order, but

you know, changes in paradigm shifts in technology, military relations. Do you sense that too? And if so, what do you attribute that to? Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. I think one of the extraordinary things about China over the last 25 years has been the extent to which they have anticipated a lot of the big changes in the world and then gone about trying to position themselves to reap the rewards.

of these changes. And I think that phrase, which Xi Jinping loves to use and uses so often about great changes unseen in a century, is a really good clue into understanding where that worldview comes from and why this is happening. So it's a phrase which is very resonant to Chinese intellectuals, because it's not something which comes from Mao's Red Book, but is in fact a phrase which

echoes the way that a lot of statesmen and women were writing about the world in the late Qing era after China encountered some great changes which were outside of its purview. And so it's about China's encounter with Western modernity and technology when the country, a period of enormous turmoil, semi-colonization by foreign powers, the century of humiliation. And a lot of Chinese writers are trying to make sense of this period. And they talk about

how they're encountering great changes unseen in millennia. And there are lots of different variants of this pattern of thinking. But at that time, China's on the wrong side of these great changes. They overwhelm it. They completely destroy a lot of the certainties about how the world worked for Chinese intellectuals at the time. And they therefore start reading all sorts of Western...

texts about what's going on and they kind of replace in a way a lot of the elements of traditional Chinese thinking about the world with Western elements. So new words come into the Chinese vocabulary, words like science and democracy and progress, which hadn't been there before. And one of the big ideas which comes in is also this idea of evolution and the survival of the fittest, which hadn't been there before because Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley and social Darwinism and things like that get translated into Chinese.

And they have this idea that foreign policy, international relations is a kind of another example of Darwinian evolution, where states are like organisms which either survive or they fail. So they think about international relations in those terms. And what's interesting is that if you fast forward to today and the use of this language of great changes, essentially what they are seeing now is new changes taking place, which they're expecting on the scale of the changes which overwhelmed China in the 19th century.

And they're thinking about changes in the balance of power. They're thinking about AI and the rise of new technologies, which change everything, including what it means to be human. They're thinking about demographic changes, which are kind of fundamentally changing the world. They're thinking about climate and the energy transition. And there is a sense amongst a lot of these Chinese thinkers that they missed out on the great changes in the 19th century, and they were on the wrong side of these great changes.

And they therefore want to be on the right side of the great changes this time, spot them earlier. And, you know, this debate about great changes came out at a time when people were talking about how the sun is rising in the east and setting in the west. And so there's a sense that actually the west is on the wrong side of the great changes this time around and that China might actually benefit from. So what's interesting, if you look at Xi Jinping's time in office, he's kind of often tried to spot these paradigm shifts earlier.

quite early on, whether it's about new technologies and EVs we've made in China 2025 and China standards 2035, whether it's ideas about changes in the global financial system and sort of moving beyond the dollar, whether it's about these changes in the balance of power, whether it's about the rise of the global south and the kind of demographic importance of these new places.

What the Chinese policy is often about trying to do is to think about where these changes are moving and to try and position China to benefit from them in the end by mobilizing all of the force of the Chinese state behind it. And, you know, I think we're seeing that happening on EVs, on batteries in various different areas now. And, you know, sometimes they spot paradigm shift. You know, it's a bit like economists who I don't know what the quote is exactly, but how they spot, you know, 10 of the last three financial crises or whatever. So they do spot...

paradigm shifts everywhere and they try and prepare for them. But as a result, there has been a remarkable track record of anticipating where the world is going through these paradigm shifts and try to put all of the force of the Chinese state behind preparing for that shift.

whether it's through the sort of Belt and Road Initiative, whether it's through Made in China's 2025, whether it's through other elements of policy on climate change and the kind of green transition. That's definitely a big difference with the way that things are framed in the West, because in the West...

The big debate at the moment is about how you preserve the global order. Whereas in China, it is about how do you survive these great changes? How do you position yourself for these great changes? It's quite a different way of thinking about where we're going and what our goals are. And it leads to quite a different set of policies as well.

The last part of that paragraph was, I think, your correct analysis that what's lacking often when you read the writings around these paradigm or liminal shifts in whether high-level order or even at a lower elevation is lack of specificity on what the world looks like on the other side of this. And I think this is

An important question that I'd like to hear your thoughts on, important because there is a big wide open debate right now about possibilities of coexistence between major powers if China is able to continue to aggregate comprehensive industrial, manufacturing, military, global governance power. And then there are those who think that coexistence is impossible because China can't achieve some of its larger grand strategic objectives if the United States and the West is still functioning.

you've read around through the discourse on this for a very long time. If I saddled up next to you at a bar and I didn't know you and I said, what is the Chinese vision for what order looks like in the next 20 or 30 years? How would you answer that person? So I think one of the interesting things about the sort of way that we've been talking about thinking about change

is something which is very contemporary, but also draws on antecedents which people have earlier. And we often misunderstand the way that the Chinese are framing things and thinking about things because we get distracted by kind of the way that we think about things.

So, you know, if you go back to like some of the classic sort of old school thinking about Chinese versus Western patterns of thought, people like François Julien, the French philosopher, he writes about how in the West, we often think about ends and means. We have a kind of telos which we're trying to move towards an end point. And then we work out how to get there.

Whereas the Chinese way of thinking about things in his sort of model is to think more about the propensity of things, you know, where is the world kind of leading and then to sort of try and position yourself so that you can benefit from that. So it's more about context and consequences than means and ends. I think that tells you a lot about the way that they're thinking about things at the moment. So they're not being passive. They're doing all sorts of things to prepare for this new world. They're building new relationships. They're investing in new technologies. But

the way they do it is quite different. And one of the really interesting things for me was when I first started going to China and I heard about five-year plans and saw five-year plans everywhere and those sorts of things. I thought that these would be five years plans, you know, in a kind of Soviet way with tractor production targets. Yeah.

you know, which were very clear where you had an end point was actually what you realize about these five-year plans is they're sort of metaphors, which are quite open and very flexible and they change. And it's a way of essentially getting people to think about future and to kind of point in a different direction.

But they're often quite sort of vague. That's very different from what a European or an American version of a five-year plan would be. And I think that that's still true. I think that people focus on how ideological Xi Jinping is and the return of ideology and the way that he's using those sorts of things. And it's definitely true. There is a lot of red China coming back in different ways and a rehabilitation of ideology. And there's a lot of Xi Jinping thought everywhere. And it's an important part of people's lives. But

Again, I think that ideology is playing a slightly different role to what Westerners often think it is. I don't think that he has a kind of ideological view about where the world is going, about the sort of perfect end state, and that that is guiding his decision making. I think that ideology is being used as a means of social control and of trying to keep society that's becoming much more complex, much more diverse, much more difficult to govern, to

under control. So they're using the trappings of the Communist Party as means of social control. But I think that they're still quite pragmatic about where they're getting to. What has happened in a big way is a sort of shift from economic growth driven agenda to one which is much more based around security. So security and control is definitely prevalent in everything.

But we saw with zero COVID how the government is willing to kind of turn on a dime if things aren't working out and to make quite sort of dramatic compromises with what's going on in the real world. So I think there was a lot of pragmatism about,

where it is that they're trying to go. They definitely want China to be stronger, to be more powerful. And they want China to play a more and more important part in the world in different ways. And some of the ways that China is operating are very threatening to elements of Western model of political economy. We're seeing it with all the debates around EVs and batteries at the moment, where European countries are very worried about de-industrialization and seeing their kind of auto industries wiped out. And there's going to be more and more competition around technology and around different areas. But

I think what you have is a government that's still doing a lot of trial and error. There are all sorts of experiments going on in different ways. And ultimately, there is quite a lot of pragmatism about how you go about achieving your goals. So, you know...

I suspect that the competition that is taking place between China and the US is going to hot up in more and more different domains. I think that the areas of cooperation are going to carry on shrinking until they're almost invisible in different ways. But the China that we're dealing with is not like a kind of new Soviet Union. The challenge is much more subtle to the West than a lot of the commentary suggests and is very kind of

experimental and pragmatic and it's quite difficult to pin down in some different ways because they are trying to predict where the big forces of the world are taking the world and then putting themselves in the right place for it. Sorry, that sounds super abstract, but if you think about it in practical terms, one of the most interesting things that's happened for me is the way that China's been dealing with Ukraine and Gaza in recent times.

what they've essentially been trying to do is they're seeing kind of Gaza, Ukraine as examples of this chaos and disorder which we're talking about. And they're sort of leaning into it and trying to think about how do you benefit from it. And on both Gaza and Ukraine, what China's tried to do is to position itself where it thinks the majority of global public opinion is.

So people don't want the war to be carrying on. So China's basically tried to create a situation where it can frame what the US and the West is doing as waging a new Cold War, blame them for a lot of the negative consequences of sanctions and other types of escalation to try and position China as if it is a sort of pragmatic, peace-seeking country in the middle of it and using that as a way of

of showing the contradictions in Western foreign policy to delegitimate the West in the eyes of particularly the global South, whilst making China look reasonable, and at the same time, extracting the benefits that it can from deeper relationships with Russia, with Iran, and with other players through that. But it's quite a sort of subtle positioning that it's adopting, where on the one hand, it doesn't want the US to do well, it doesn't want the West to do well, it doesn't want Ukraine to win. But at the same time, it's not...

wanting to alienate the kind of vast amount of the rest of the world. So you're seeing this sort of slightly experimental way of going through it, looking for limits, looking for ways of extracting what it can, and also course correcting when things aren't working out too well. I think that's all really fantastic and spot on. I just had one adjacent point.

which is, I also think there's a subtle move being made by China, which is also leaning in and actually building momentum behind the narrative that the established status quo order constructed after World War II is now in full deterioration mode, and we, China, have answers. And they haven't spelled out concretely, but if you look at things like the Global Civilization Initiative, Global Security Initiative, especially the Global Security Initiative,

It's this one-two move of the war in Ukraine proves that the Western-led security order does not deliver security. Quite the opposite, it delivers insecurity and war. This is why I think they are really leaning in on the Asian NATO narrative. Even though there's no Asian NATO, there's no Article 5 that I know of in discussion. But because they're trying to, again, paint a picture of that, deterioration is now going to

come out into our own waters. And China's now in the business of creating order through things like this, the GSI. Now you scratch it and poke it and try to interrogate it and there's not much there, but there really doesn't need to be at this point for the conception to be taking hold

that the United States and the West no longer have answers and their architecture is crumbling and China is a forward-looking power which is embracing this new era of multipolarity and the democratization of international relations and is creating new architecture like the GSI.

And it's subtle the way that they do it. It's also a sledgehammer when you look at it in the right alignment. And I think it's one where we underappreciate how much traction that can build, not in Tokyo, but when you travel around Southeast Asia and pockets of the global South, I think there's an exhaustion and frustration with the West, which is seen as hypocritical, narcissistic, focused on quote-unquote great power competition. And China's able to wedge into that space imperfectly,

right? And oftentimes, the closer people see the China model in action, the less enamored they are with it. But still, I think that is a battle of ideas, which we're not serious about confronting yet. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that the whole idea, which you mentioned, is the democratization of international relations is a very interesting way of trying to reframe this question about what order we're entering. Because on the one hand,

The US and Joe Biden has been very kind of loquacious about a world split between democracies and autocracies, but where democracy is about the kind of internal governance of countries. And what the Chinese have done is to say, actually, that's Cold War thinking and appealing to the fact that for many countries around the world, the Cold War wasn't very cold.

it was quite disempowering and quite unpleasant. And these countries that a lot of them were colonies beforehand and then found themselves very constrained by Cold War dynamics and are now enjoying fresh sovereignty. And China is trying to say, look, the US is trying to take your sovereignty away. They're trying to create a new Cold War where you're forced into blocks, where you don't have a say over your future. But China is a partner for development.

And this idea of democratization of international relations is kind of playing on that, where instead of focusing on the internal democracy, what they're saying is having a different idea of democracy, which is about giving more countries a voice on the world stage. And they say that we're in a hegemonic era where the West calls all the shots, creates all the institutions, makes the rules, then changes the rules.

So democratizing international relations means giving you more of a voice on the world stage. And that is quite a powerful insurgent challenge to the West because you don't have to be as good as what the West is offering if you're giving people options so that they can then have more of a say, they can leverage the West off against you. That means that you don't have to be as attractive as the US. You just have to be another option in order to be kind of interesting.

It's one of the many ways where you see quite an asymmetrical challenge emerging, where China is basically trying to turn its weakness into strength, because it realizes that with North Korea as its only ally, it's never going to be able to compete with the US alliance strategy. So therefore, the challenge is to try and make a virtue out of necessity and say, okay, alliances are

bad. We're not going to force you into blocks where you're subordinate. We should have a world without blocks, without alliances. And to recognize the current vogue for having sovereignty, for multi-alignment and to make China a power for multi-alignment, which is an example of them sort of trying to understand where they think the world is going, where countries want to go, and then try to put China in a place where it can be helpful to do that rather than trying to support a status quo, which is under a lot of pressure, which is where

the West is in danger of ending up. Yeah. And just to foot stomp something you just said, Mark, I private conversation often say, I completely understand the enticement of the cold war 2.0 analogy. If you squint and you look at this, you've got two major superpowers with rival political systems in a,

global struggle for preeminence in the international order that's multidimensional, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I get that. But I also think we have agency and choice in how we think about the type of relations we're engaged with. And I'll just say the Cold War 2.0 works as a domestic mobilization narrative because we can immediately envision what it looks like. And oh, coincidentally, we also won the Cold War. The challenge is

As you just mentioned, if we're saying that we're in a Cold War and the key theater of the Cold War is Asia, the Cold War did not go well for Asia. From the Korean War to Indochina to the Vietnam War, it is where the vast, vast, vast majority of the bloodshedding occurred. And so it's not a great mobilizing strategy if you're thinking about building a coalition or offering solutions in the area where competition with China is the fiercest and

the sharpest, which gets me, Mark, to my last reading from the book, which I want to end on because I thought this was really well done. And in some ways, I feel like the most important line of the book is literally the very last line of the book.

But in the final few sentences you write, "European strategists will need to do much more to engage with and understand China as it is and what it aspires to become. Taking on the challenge emanating from China is the first step. Investing in European ideas about the world we ourselves want to see would be the next."

And that in some ways feels like a banal point, but in some ways I feel like that is refreshingly put and is really the point. And one that I think we're in a competition with trying to thinking about these ideas about how we communicate and how we think about

what the world will look like and offering solutions and really creative thinking about what this next decade or two of international order looks like. I feel like there's a paucity of that going on within the rubric of great power competition. So I just wanted to read that to get that out there because I thought that was so well put and so important and ties in with what you and I were just talking about of how we think about what solutions the West is offering to the world. So

This is less a question than more just I wanted to read that and say I very much agree with it. But why don't I, without really any closing question, I'll just turn the floor over to you if you had any final or concluding thoughts or anything you wanted to do to build on that clarion call to invest more in how the West will think about ideas for governing the world. It's a great place to end because I think the big danger for the West is that we end up becoming superpowers.

so attached to the world of yesterday and so keen to preserve the status quo that we miss out on a lot of these big structural changes which are taking place in the world and that we lose our ability to talk to the rest of the world about how to deal with these big changes and to position ourselves as partners for them. And I think the

If we try to understand how these big fundamental structural shifts in the world are being conceptualized by the Chinese and how they are preparing for it in terms of how they think about their economic policies, their technology policies, their demography policies, their environmental and energy policies, then I think we'll be able both to do a much better job of understanding and responding to the real China challenge rather than some kind of imaginary China challenge, which is often part of our debates.

But also we can adapt our policy so that we can get on the front foot and be more responsive and more creative as well. And I think that one of the things which gets in the way of that is, in fact, the way that we kind of think and talk about China. Because my experience over the period of time that we've been talking about from when I first started engaging with China to where we are now is one where Western policies often geared towards our own fantasy of China rather than the real China landscape.

that is out there. And when I first started working on China, there was a fantasy of China as a country that was becoming like the West, that was going to be a responsible stakeholder for the existing world order, which was completely obviously wrong once you started talking to Chinese people. And that's what my first book was about, was kind of challenging this idea that China's goal was to become like the West and to become a stakeholder in the existing global order.

But I think we've flipped almost immediately from that myth of China as a responsible stakeholder to now seeing China as a kind of new Soviet Union against which we need to wage a new Cold War in the way that we waged the last Cold War. And I think that that's no more helpful than the responsible stakeholder one. I think there is a

really, really huge China threat, which we need to understand better and which we need to adapt to. And that's really, I think, the challenge of our generation is getting to grips with the new China, trying to understand not just China as a country, but also how China is thinking about these big changes to the world and how it's engaging with the world. And for us to reinvent the ways that we're engaging with the world so that we are adapting to these changes rather than being trapped

by sort of Maginot lines of the mind where we're trying to preserve an out-of-date order that is actually really very difficult to sustain in the face of technological, demographic and environmental change. By the way, has anyone written that before, the Maginot lines of the mind? Because if not, I think you should run out right now and copyright that.

It's a phrase that my friend Ivan Krastev used when we were talking about, I'm not sure if we wrote it down in the end, but we were writing an essay together. And it was actually him who came up with it. But it's a very, I think, a very powerful way of talking about where we're at. Well, Mark, thanks so much for this conversation. And again, to say something that I referenced earlier, it is striking to me that you are just one of the few analysts, intellectuals looking at China who takes...

ideas seriously and takes the ideas emanating out of and impacting China seriously. And the books that you have done on China, as well as I just say that I think ECFR is one of the most refreshingly original think tanks out there, not only in Europe, but in the United States and globally. And that you can feel in talking to you for the last 58 minutes, it's obvious why it is because you're so keenly attuned and engaged to

these sort of macro ideas that really shape a lot of the micro policy discussions occurring in capitals. So thank you for all the work that you and your comrades at ECFR do. Thank you, especially as someone who focuses on China. Thank you for all the work you've done to help enrich my understanding of China. And thanks for the last 59 minutes of your time in a very busy Tuesday afternoon. Thanks a lot.

If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts from Into Africa, The Asia Chessboard, China Power, The Trade Guys, Smart Women, Smart Power, and more. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.