U.S.-China Crisis Management and Crisis Prevention, with Michael Swaine
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Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Andrew Methvin's Sinica Chinese Phrase of the Week, and more. So today we are tackling a topic that strikes me as increasingly urgent given Donald Trump's recent electoral victory. We could well be in for a period of heightened tension between Washington and Beijing. At the very least, we're in for a period of great uncertainty.

Trump's appointments of noted China hawks like Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and just announced today, Fox News host Pete Hegseth tapped to head the DOD, a guy with the crusader battle cry, God is great, Deus Vult tattooed on his bicep.

It sure seems to be a clear signal that we are entering an era where confrontation will be the default American posture vis-a-vis China. But this being Trump, we really don't know. Given Trump's own pronouncements on China and Taiwan, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance's apparent distaste for interventionism, which he's made plain in several speeches,

And the views of some of the others who appear to have Trump's ear, Elon Musk for instance, who for his own reasons may urge a more conciliatory approach,

Will those who, like Mike Waltz, appear to have been listening to Elbridge Colby and are more concerned with confronting China than continuing to support Ukraine, will they have their way or will the restraint faction win the day? This is all still very much up in the air. Beijing, for its part, has so far been circumspect, but will undoubtedly be preparing for any contingencies, including coups.

That truly worst-case scenario. As my guest today has argued in a recent report and in accompanying op-ed piece, the historical track record in both Washington and Beijing when it comes to managing crises between the two nuclear-armed giants has not been particularly good.

I am pleased to welcome back Michael Swain, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for the last couple of years. Prior to that, he spent two decades as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he led extensive work on Chinese defense and foreign policy, the U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations more broadly. He was also a Senior Policy Analyst at the Rand Corporation, where he developed a reputation for rigorous research on Asian security and crisis management,

Today, we are going to be diving into his recent report, Avoiding the Abyss, an Urgent Need for Sino-U.S. Crisis Management, which offers both a framework for understanding the forces driving U.S.-China crises and a roadmap to prevent or manage these crises more effectively.

He drew on his many decades of experience working on the security dimension of the bilateral relationship, including, very interestingly, his participation in many Track 2 dialogues and simulations of crisis scenarios over the years. He's also got extensive input from many greats in the field, like Ian Alistair Johnston and Taylor Fravel. So today, we're going to explore the factors that make crisis management with China so challenging and difficult.

What steps could be taken to avert the worst-case scenarios? If, as some fear, the Trump administration brings an even harder line on China, Mike's insights on crisis management will be essential for understanding how these tensions could play out and whether there's a way to keep things from boiling over. Michael Swain, welcome back to Seneca. Hey, Kaiser. Very happy to be here. Thank you very much for having me back.

Yeah, it's wonderful to have you. Let's start with some basic terminology, if that's okay with you. In your report, you distinguish between crisis management and crisis prevention, two strategies with overlapping goals, but that are nonetheless distinct. Could you explain how these differ in their objectives, especially when applied to sensitive issues like Taiwan or the South China Sea? Sure. Well, maybe I should just start very briefly to say, you know,

If it's okay, what is a crisis? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Even better. What we're talking about mainly when we're talking about crises or what I've been talking about and I've been talking about with Americans and Chinese are major sort of political military crises that could occur between two countries or more, in this case, the United States and China. They usually...

involve a few things. They're a threat to important interests by one or both sides. They involve high levels of uncertainty and risk, in some cases, including the possibility of military force. And usually there's a sense of urgency. In other words, there's usually a kind of a timeline involved to them. And so a crisis is not your ordinary sort of political upheaval of one sort or another. It's something that really poses some real dangers.

and puts pressure on all the players. And the crisis occurs because no one is immediately willing to just back down. Right. And just say, yeah, you're right. I'm wrong. Let's finish the crisis. Both sides begin to kind of maneuver. And the whole point of a crisis, when you're in it,

is unless you want war, which in many cases, you know, then you're not really dealing with a crisis, you're dealing with war termination or war intent. Unless you want war, what you want is to get out of the crisis in a way that is acceptable to you and doesn't permanently damage the relationship you may have with the others. And in doing that, you want to try to balance two things. You want to send signals that will

indicate your commitment to whatever vital interest may be involved in the crisis, but you don't want to do it in such a way that it provokes the other side to overreact, to get really sharp in their reaction. And on the other side, you want to signal some willingness to accommodate and to reach some kind of modus vivendi or understanding, but you don't want to look weak. You don't want to expose yourself to weakness and manipulation. So the challenge of crisis management is really about that.

striking that balance between those two types of incentives that you have and disincentives that you have in managing a crisis. Now, crisis prevention, of course, is exactly what's implied there. It's how do you avoid getting into such a crisis in the first place? Right. And so there, it depends a lot on what the crisis is.

In certain respects, you can say, well, if a crisis is an incident at sea, let's say, and you don't want to have an incident at sea that is going to have the potential to escalate, what you want to do then is you want to establish certain ground rules.

confidence building measures, whatever, that are going to avoid you getting into some kind of incident at sea or really, really deescalate it very quickly. And so you're really dealing in confidence building measures, things that will make the other side not do stupid things so that you really don't get into a crisis in the first place. And, you know, we've got certain

types of confidence building measures that exist between the United States and China, particularly regarding incidents at sea or incidents in the air, to make sure that operators at that level don't cross signals, don't start escalating when they shouldn't be, et cetera. So a crisis really doesn't happen.

unless there's some kind of totally untoward accident that comes out of the blue and kills somebody or something, in which case you really have a mini crisis of some kind. So you have that kind of thing. That's a very low level kind of crisis prevention. Then you've got the bigger issue of, okay, now how do you prevent crises in general from happening? Let's say a crisis in the South China Sea between the United States and China.

You don't want them shooting at each other. You don't want them to be really trying to get involved in competitions of resolve with each other. So what you do is, or the argument could be, the Chinese would say, best way to prevent that crisis?

don't be involved in the South China Sea. This is our area. This is our territorial sovereignty for our territorial waters. And we claim the land features in the South China Sea. The United States is really an interloper. It's really intervening. The best way to avoid a crisis here is for you not to get involved. So there you have a basic policy-based issue. Does the United States get involved in the South China Sea or not? From the Chinese point of view,

you won't have a crisis if the United States isn't involved there or if the United States is only involved there in a very minimal way. So, you know, this is a question that becomes what are the confidence-building measures and what are the policies that each side could enact that would really reduce greatly the chance of a crisis occurring in the first place? Right. In the interest of fairness, of course, the American perspective would be there wouldn't be a crisis, China, if you didn't

stake these territorial claims if you would sort of erase the nine dash line, if you would, you know, not claim things outside of your exclusive economic zone, blah, blah. Exactly. Right. Right. Exactly. I mean, you could make the argument on both sides. You know, policy can change. So what are we in right now? What is this, I mean, this sort of low boil that we have constantly going on with Taiwan and with the South China Sea? It's not a sharp crisis, obviously, but...

It feels sort of like a continuous sort of low intensity quasi-crisis, and it has for a very long time now. Well, I'd say it depends on the issue you're talking about. But in the case of Taiwan, I would say that in many respects, you can call it as the trend lines are indicating that we're moving, that we're increasing the possibility of having a crisis. So we're on a path.

We're on a path that could very well result in a crisis because the United States or China or Taiwan does something that one of the other players or all the other players really find unacceptable and demand it be undone or are trying to deter an action that they think is imminent. And so, you know, you're doubling down then on sending very strong signals of resolve and doing things you've not done before.

And so the question then becomes, okay, is Taiwan really that kind of situation? And, you know, people debate this a lot, but I think that in general, the kinds of trends that we're looking at regarding Taiwan, the changes on Taiwan's political system and who's the dominant party in Taiwan, more pro-independence oriented,

The Chinese increased reliance on military deterrence signaling to show their resolve regarding their commitment to Taiwan being part of China. And then the U.S. increased in its own deterrence signaling to try and get the Chinese deterrent from using force.

with increasing dialogue and expectations among many pundits that, oh, we're moving towards the possibility of war, we need to double down on deterrence, and not enough reassurance in the messaging that we're sending each other about a desire not to really threaten the other's most vital interests. So

All of those things are really kind of moving in the wrong direction regarding Taiwan. So I'd say we're in a situation where the possibility of a crisis in the future, not necessarily a war, not necessarily a shooting thing, but a serious crisis,

could emerge. And that likelihood, as I'm saying, is increasing over time. We've already had four, depending on how you count, possibly five Taiwan Straits crises, two in the 1950s, of course. Right. And then, of course, the '95-'96 crisis, whether you count that as one or two. And then after Nancy Pelosi's visit there, some people are calling that the fourth Taiwan Straits crisis.

In any case, your paper goes into quite a bit of history of crises, and you identify nine situations involving the U.S. and China since 1949, including, like I said, several of these Taiwan Straits crises, the Korean War, obviously a very, very big one, Vietnam. I'm not sure if you caught the Belgrade Embassy bombing in 1999. It was one among your nine? Okay, sure. Then there was, of course, the EP3 collision in early April of 2001, the near collision in 2009 of the Impeccable with a Chinese vessel,

And then the October surprise of 2020 when Trump ratcheted up rhetoric on Taiwan and there were a lot of people saying that we were in yet another crisis. Now, without going through all nine, could you show how some of these past crises have influenced current crisis managers' approaches and whether some of the assumptions or strategies that they've developed have proven resistant to change for better or as more likely for worse? Yeah.

Well, I think there's been certainly some learning from past experiences in Sino-American crises. Probably the most important is the learning that I think on the American side took place as a result of the Korean War. Right. I mean, there you had a major, major conflagration between Beijing and Washington, right, that occurred in part, I mean, obviously the original origin of it was that the North Koreans invaded the South.

And they started the conflict. But then the United States became directly involved in this, basically altering its stance, became very directly involved in it, and then began to really defeat the North Koreans and move up the entire peninsula towards the Chinese border. And what happened at that time was, and MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, was in command of U.S. forces on the ground at that time, is that there really was a failure to appreciate the

how much of an alarm was felt in Beijing about the U.S. actions on the peninsula and their movement up the peninsula, and the warnings that the Chinese issued to the United States about crossing the parallel between North Korea and South Korea, and then much more than that, moving up close to the Chinese border.

To the Yalu River, yeah. The Yalu River. And many Americans believe the Chinese would not intervene in the war because the United States had such superior firepower.

The United States had a nuclear weapon. The Chinese didn't have a nuclear weapon. The Chinese were distracted. The feeling was because of their domestic situation. The communists had recently come to power. They were still stabilizing their order within mainland China, trying to control things. So the argument was they're too distracted. They're really too...

Too weak. They're unlikely to really intervene. So we just need to defeat the North Koreans and take this up to the border. And of course, some people wanted to go over the border and attack Chinese on the other side. Well, all of these American views were basically miscalculations, of course, and the Chinese came in with a vengeance. So what's the lesson here?

The lesson is you want to listen very carefully to what the Chinese say. There are certain phrases that they've used in the past, will not sit idly by, various types of things that they've communicated authoritatively that indicate that just because we're talking and not acting doesn't mean we're not going to act. Right. And if certain thresholds are crossed, we are likely to act. And you don't want to regard those kinds of statements as just bluffing.

You want to look very seriously at what they're doing. And the other thing there is you want to make sure you have people on the ground

who are going to be very prudent, going to be very balanced in assessing the situation there. MacArthur was not one of those people. No, indeed. MacArthur was extremely confident, arrogant, you might say. He believed he understood the Chinese better than anybody did. He ignored the intelligence that he was getting that the Chinese were massing along the border in very large numbers. And all of these things, I mean, you do not want to repeat. Now, fast forward to the Vietnam War.

In the Vietnam War, the Chinese made it very clear to the United States, they were supplying assistance to North Vietnam, right? As were the Soviet Union at the time. They also were putting personnel on the ground in North Vietnam who were assisting the North Vietnamese, particularly in air defense. And the Chinese made it very clear that they did not want the United States to put ground forces on the ground in North Vietnam. Right. Right.

past the border and start moving up the same way we did in Korea. The United States took those warnings seriously. And the United States, as a result, never really seriously engaged the possibility of deploying ground forces in North Vietnam. The man who wrote the book, of course, on the Korean conflict, on, you know, the book literally called China Crosses the Yalu, happens to have been my... Right. He was my mentor. Oh, he was? I was a graduate student. Yeah, yeah. Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, so I'm very familiar with it. And, you know, another theme, of course, that he often sounded and is really relevant to this is empathy. And we'll talk quite a bit about that. But yeah, I think Vietnam is a very positive example where the U.S. really was restrained, avoided drawing China in more directly.

And, you know, I think China did some things right. There was clearer signaling of intentions maybe than there was as well. It wasn't just American learning. No, on the negative side, if you have a minute, on the negative side, there were cases where, you know, the United States and China both had such hostile views towards each other during the height of the Cold War. They had no direct lines of communication with each other.

So their signaling was not as clear and unambiguous in real time as it should have been. And also each had very sort of hostile images of the other side. Right. And saw themselves as peace-loving, peace-preserving, you know, resisting the threats posed by the other side. Each side was kind of had this hostile image towards each other. Each side very self-confident. Each side in some ways kind of arrogant. This kind of

feeling, particularly on the U.S. side, with the U.S. having what it's thought was real military dominance, led to things like during the Taiwan Strait crisis, Eisenhower actually threatened the use of nuclear weapons against China during that Strait crisis to try and deter the Chinese from seizing the offshore islands and the momentum in that crisis. Now,

A lot of people don't believe Eisenhower would have actually used nuclear weapons, but he rolled out and he did it in a very elliptical way, but he rolled out the possibility of a U.S. use of nuclear weapons at a time when the Chinese still didn't have any nuclear weapons. And that, I think,

produced a real, I don't know if you call it trauma, but a real reaction in the Chinese mindset about the extent to which the United States would threaten massive weaponry against China in an area that affected its vital interests. That got the attention of the Chinese, and they've always had that kind of sensitivity and suspicion about the United States and what it might actually end up trying to do.

So, I mean, you offer some really good examples of these sorts of obstacles to the work of crisis prevention and management. These are problems on both sides. I think we've talked a little bit about some of the American blind spots that come out of that kind of hubris, that arrogance.

There are also idiosyncrasies of Chinese security thinking that we Americans don't tend to understand so very well and these tend to exacerbate crises. But on the Chinese side, you made what I thought was a really astute observation about the way that China does the sort of moral framing of crises and how that is itself often quite problematic. So in the Mao era, the maxim was, which you can't

you translate as on just grounds, to our advantage, and with restraint. So, youli, on just grounds, you know, rational. To our advantage, youli, advantageous, and with restraint, youjie. Now, that sounds very reasonable, but you observe that this can actually produce quite inflexible moralistic stances and symmetrical escalation that leaves very little room, as you say, for accommodation or de-escalation. Can you unpack that a bit?

Sure. I mean, this concept, bio, lio, lio, jes, is really commonly understood

among many Chinese officials and military officers. I mean, it was a really developed during the Mao era to do with conflict, to do with actual war. I think war against the Japanese primarily at the time, but also extended over to the nationalists. And I had Chinese interlocutors when I was interviewing years ago about crisis behavior. When I would ask them what guides Chinese thinking in approaching a crisis, many of them would immediately raise this concept to me. So what does it mean?

On the one hand, it has some positive resonance to it. It says we will not get involved unless it's on grounds that we think we're justified in being on, not unless we have some kind of an advantage to be able to resolve the particular conflict to our advantage. But at the same time, we will act with restraint. We'll be very clear about what it is we want to have, and then we're going to get it, and then we're not going to get anything more than that.

So you have this kind of sense of balance, the sense of restraint, the sense of being on the right grounds.

However, at the same time, you have alongside of this the notion that when you're on the right ground, boy, oftentimes that ground is principle. It's moral. It's we stand on the moral high ground here. So you, whatever you are, whoever you are, Americans, whatever, you need to recognize your error and back down. You need to understand that we have the moral high ground. You're not on it.

And you therefore need to alter your behavior. So it's very one directional. It's not so much, well, is your middle ground compromise here? It really does limit flexibility by having a moralistic stance like that. And of course, that often is the case if the issue involved is territorial sovereignty.

because the Chinese will then say, this is our national territory. This is territorial integrity. You know, there's a principle of sovereignty in the United Nations. You're violating that. Therefore, you know, you're in the wrong. You have to undo the problem. You tied the knot, as the Chinese saying goes, you need to untie it. And that becomes, you know, one of the elements of it. Another element of it that can become dangerous and reduce flexibility. Another element of it

is really the Chinese tit-for-tat kind of reaction, which is when you say with restraint, the concept of restraint is often understood to be a kind of tit-for-tat approach to a crisis. In other words, the Chinese think, you know, we're not going to just launch into a major escalation

One thing the Chinese will always say is we won't shoot first. We won't undertake the first violent action in a crisis, but we will be sure to respond if you do it. So if you do this, we'll do that. So it becomes a kind of a tit for tat sort of reaction that says, you know, we're going to show our resolve in this, but we're not going to go overboard.

But what happens is that that often becomes kind of a rigid thing. It's almost inevitable. If you will do something, then we will do something just like it in response. And so you could then fall into a continuously escalating pattern of tit-for-tat responses and not have the willingness, particularly if this involves a principal issue like sovereignty, not have the willingness to say, okay,

I'm going to get out of this loop and step back from that. I'm not going to respond to this provocation. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to intentionally avoid doing that and see if the other side does the same and they step back. I'll step back. You step back.

And so that is what is needed, not to be so rigid. And in game theory, actually, when you're in a prisoner's dilemma, in a game theory, the best of the games to be played that you can win the most is in a modified tit-for-tat approach where you're willing to go both up and down. Right, right, right. Unfortunately, that requires some level of communication between the two, and often in the prisoner's dilemma, there isn't that, and so they both defect.

Exactly. If you don't have good communication, then... And that underlies all of this. I mean, the absence of good communication, Kaiser...

is absolutely critical in causing problems in crises that you don't signal clearly enough. And you don't have interlocutors on the two sides who have some familiarity with each other, not just in a sort of suspicious arm's length kind of familiarity. While I've met with you several times and we've exchanged our various notes,

but one where they've actually been able to establish a sort of rapport, a certain understanding, and a certain level of, dare I say it, trust. One thing that many participants in the simulations I've been in over many years

And many of them, including former officials on both sides, have said is probably the most important single thing for crisis management is to have channels of communication between individuals who are familiar with each other. Right. Who understand each other. They don't have to be actually don't have to be sitting officials.

They can be people who used to be in government. Yeah. Like Dai Bingguo, for example, on the one side, or Hale Paulson on the U.S. side, and have a good relationship. Or maybe a Henry Kissinger on one side and a Chen Qichen, the former foreign minister, on the other side. And they knew each other pretty well, and they could communicate without immediately thinking, well, you're just trying to spin me.

This is what you call the non-conversation. A non-conversation channel. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, right. It's not my term, but it was a term that was applied actually, I think, in the Japan area. Alan Romberg, a dear friend of mine, used to be involved.

in that sort of thing and was involved in my crisis management work as well. And he said, that's exactly right. You don't really acknowledge that what you're doing has, you know, you're not officially expressing government policy. I'm not an official, but I am very knowledgeable about what the policies are and I have access to officials on my side. And so what I'm telling you is something that's going to be conveyed, but, you know, I can tell you in confidence whether or not it's going to be reciprocated. Right, right, right.

So, Mike, you talked a little bit about some of the sources of inflexibility on the Chinese side. This, for example, the fixation with sovereignty and territorial integrity, that kind of unbending moral stance when they decide that they have reason on their side. And, of course, the tendency to respond reciprocally to things. Let's talk a little bit about this.

the kind of American parallel to that. And that might be, I mean, as one good example is the U S concern over the credibility of its Alliance commitments, right? These, these both seem to be rather deeply ingrained and are not likely to change. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, the Alliance commitment thing, uh, that that's something that I keep wondering about, especially since last Tuesday and the election, uh,

and, and how that's going to play out. So, you know, if you, if you care to walk out onto that thin ice, I welcome you to, but, but, um, uh, talk a little bit about the, I mean, cause this is something, interestingly, I, I, I spoke with a Schwarzman scholar, uh, who had done a study actually, where he talked to probably including you, a lot of, of individuals, uh, both on the Chinese side and on the Western side. Uh, his name was Ryan Hawk and he, uh,

He actually found that among Chinese security analysts, people who understood this pretty well, they really understood American alliance commitment as a major motivator on the Taiwan crisis. So at least there is an understanding of that as a factor. But talk a little bit about the American anxiety about being perceived as not. Well, clearly, the United States has been for many, many decades the major maritime power.

in the Western Pacific and, of course, in Europe and other places as well. It's a global superpower. It has a very broad-based alliance network with many countries around the world. Much of these include what's called extended deterrence. So the United States is willing to come to the assistance of countries that are attacked, even to the extent of using nuclear weapons.

if they are attacked by a nuclear power. And that makes it possible for these other allied countries to not use or not acquire nuclear weapons. And so much of the American security position is based upon the confidence that other countries have, that allies have in particular, that the United States will indeed assist them and support them if they are confronted by another power, particularly a stronger power than they are.

And so the United States needs to maintain the credibility of its alliance-based commitments to these countries. And what does that mean? Well, that means that if they get in trouble, it will come. The U.S. will come. The U.S. will help them. But the problem with that, though, is that it can also...

It can also incline the United States to become very rigid in looking at what it must do in order to support one of its allies. Because of a U.S.-allied relationship with some other country, it could get drawn into a dispute with that other country in ways that the United States doesn't want to get drawn into. And it could end up

In some cases, though, overreacting because of the fear that the other side is going to think the United States is not really strong enough in supporting the ally. So the United States has to really disabuse the other side of the idea that has no credibility by really coming in strong.

So you have a certain kind of default towards acting very assertively and a default to being rather rigid in how you approach a crisis in order to protect the idea that you're credit. Because if you lose your credibility with one country, one ally, the argument goes, you're going to lose it with everybody.

Everybody's going to say, you've screwed up here. You're going to screw up with us too. I mean, so you have this exact argument that's been leveled in the Ukraine war, right? Right. The United States did not actively defend Ukraine, even though Ukraine was not an ally, did not actively defend Ukraine. That allowed Putin to go in and attack Ukraine. Oh, look, we're not doing enough to actually try to defend Taiwan either. Right.

And Taiwan, I should add, is not a formal ally either. But we should be doing more to defend our credibility because we've damaged it in Ukraine. We don't want to damage it with Taiwan. The Philippines, though, is a treaty ally. Correct. We are obliged. And, you know, I think...

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think some of our allies might forgive us if we weren't willing to enter a shooting war with a nuclear power, with a very, very large and formidable Navy over a fleck of coral that's mostly underwater most of the time. The second Thomas Scholl doesn't seem like it would be...

I think our allies would probably understand our reluctance to do that on behalf of the Philippines. The dominoes would not fall. It's true. You get into the definition, though, of what the treaty says itself. And the treaties, one important point to note is that most of these mutual security treaties

don't absolutely obligate the United States to come to the military assistance of the treaty ally. They don't say, in other words, if that ally is attacked, the United States shall intervene.

It gives the United States some wiggle room in every case. However, the expectation is, and the United States creates that expectation very assiduously, is that if indeed the ally is attacked, the U.S. will intervene. In some way, shape, or form, it will intervene.

Now, in the case of Taiwan, which is not a formal ally, does not have a treaty, a defense security treaty with the United States, it is less certain, less sure. So you have what's called strategic ambiguity, right? That's right. So the United States actually is not obligated in any sense...

to intervene if China attacks Taiwan. All the United States has said is a threat to the security of Taiwan will be regarded by the United States as a serious threat to peace and stability in the region. If indeed Taiwan is threatened, its security is threatened, the president must then consult with Congress as to what to do about it.

So quite one step more removed from we're going to, you know, cavalry's coming over the hill. And so what I would say, bringing us back to the point here, credibility is that the credibility of the U.S. commitment to Taiwan in terms of military intervention and its behavior in a crisis and the credibility of the U.S. commitment to formal security allies like the Philippines, like Japan, like South Korea, I argue is different.

These are not the same types of commitments. And the United States needs to try to be more flexible in looking at its credibility issue, because I don't believe that the Taiwan issue in and of itself should be a simple measure of the credibility of the United States' willingness to come to the assistance of formal treaty allies. I think they're very different situations.

No, it's not like Article 5. Right.

I think the best we can do is really change the ability of each side to recognize those fixations and concerns and to factor them in in their thinking during security dilemmas, right? So the central concept, if you've listened to the show at all, you probably know is I've always pushed this idea of cognitive empathy or things that are related to it, you know, strategic empathy, security dilemma sensibility. And you and I are really singing from the same hymn book,

at least in this paper, with its focus on perception, which I think is really the nub of this. So can you talk a little bit about the problem of perception and the skills that each side really needs to cultivate, to hone, to avoid the worst in a security dilemma? Well, the problem of perception really goes back again to

What are your baseline assumptions about the motivations of the other side and what their risk calculus is in a crisis? Those are really important things. And there tends to be too easy a kind of blasé set of assumptions or conventional wisdoms

that each side holds towards the other about what they are and what their risk calculus might be. And as I said earlier, even though you had these deep suspicions at the height of the Cold War, and you might think that, well, that was the Cold War, and that was then, this is now, we're getting back into a situation where perceptions are again becoming very hardened. And the idea that each side is really after zero-sum objectives with the other

and is out to undermine the other, and will do whatever is necessary to undermine the other. And if they get into a crisis, the objective of the other side is going to be to win the crisis, not to end the crisis, not to destabilize it and get out of it, but to try to use it to win.

And if you have that kind of a negative perception, that kind of a zero-sum set of assumptions underlying your approach to the other side, then you're already at a huge disadvantage. Right. Because you're already excluding certain options that you might want to give to the other side that would be possible basis for mediation, possible basis for some kind of mutual accommodation. Because you assume the other side just won't use it or it will manipulate it, it will agree to it, and then it will violate it.

And so what's the point of really dealing with them? You just want to level threats, level deterrence threats to the other side to get them to back down. So you don't want to be in that kind of a perceptual matrix in talking to each other in a crisis. You want to have greater flexibility. You want to be able to think that the other side will be willing to do certain things to avoid escalation.

because they can't be sure that they can win in a conflict. They can't be sure that they're absolutely dominant and neither are you. So these are both nuclear powers as well. So you've got to be able to signal in ways that allow for off ramps, allow for clear off ramps by both sides in a crisis. And if the perceptions are becoming harder and harder, the ability to do that

Just goes down and down and down. Mike, you had some really interesting examples of how each side is often unable to see how its own actions are seen as provocative or advantage-seeking and how each tends to view its own actions, of course, as stabilizing and unprovocative. Can you share a couple of these examples with the listeners? Oh, sure. I mean, some of these were from simulations that we ran.

Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about simulations too, but go on.

that was birthed in the vicinity in the Philippines, near where the crisis was occurring between Manila and Beijing, right? And the United States obviously was watching this very, very closely. And the United States Navy made a decision with presidential approval that it would bring the carrier out of port and draw it away from the scene of the crisis. In other words, back away from the crisis. And the intention was by the U.S. side to say, look,

We're not engaging the carrier here. We're backing it off. We're backing away from the crisis area. So don't think we're about to threaten you. The Chinese took that exactly the opposite way.

The Chinese said, here's a carrier that was in port. Now it's gone into active alert and it's moving off into the ocean and it's trying to draw itself away from us outside of our range, but still within their fighter range. So it was a question of ranges. And the Chinese took the U.S. carrier movement as placing the carrier at a safe distance from the Chinese, but still within the distance of the U.S. to hit them.

And so they saw it as an escalation. So in that situation, I mean, you have to really be aware of the sensitivities involved there and what it is that could trigger the Chinese. I'll give you another example. We had a crisis where it involved the Japanese. And the Japanese deployed several assets into the area. And one of these assets, and it was near Taiwan, one of these assets was a ship called the Iseng.

And this ship was named after a ship that was very active in the Sino-Japanese War that was very, very basically centered in the defeat of Imperial China at the time by the Japanese. And the Chinese saw this as an affront. They saw the deployment of that named ship as deliberate, as deliberately provocative.

And, of course, the Japanese, this again was a simulation, but the Japanese, the people playing the Japanese had no notion of it. No notion that this was provocative. But there you have it. Right, right. Was the ship's number 731? I don't know. You know, actually, that anecdote is drawn from a section in your paper about historical memory. Right.

Can you talk a little bit about not just the dangers of failing to understand the other side's historical memory, just as this was the case here with Japan not understanding that the Issei was a

an imperial naval vessel during the war but also and this is actually even more common these days about this mistaken assumption or imputation of historical memory and I'm thinking here about this trope that we so often encounter about you know China wanting to revive the old imperial tributary system oh yeah that it has a Tian Xia ideology oh yeah wants to dominate the globe absolutely some historical reflex right what do you do about that

I mean, this is so common. I mean, this is really... It's not just a sort of intellectual abstract issue. I mean, it's very often referred to. Just in passing, again, as a sort of conventional wisdom. Well, we all know that China was the dominant state during centuries of Chinese history. It was the dominant state in Asia. And it had relations with all of its neighbors that were tributary relations in which the neighbors came to them on bended knee

hit their head on the floor three times and would give tribute to the Chinese emperor in order to establish peace and stability, maintain peace and stability. And the Chinese demanded that. They demanded that tributary gift from the other neighbors. When you look at Chinese history, a couple of things you find out. First of all, not all imperial Chinese powers utilize tributary relations. Not all of them utilize tributary relations in the same way.

and not all of them had the same attitude towards tributary relations. In many cases, tributary relations weren't a firm, consistent, and always power-oriented type of technique. They were means that were used to try to establish relationships

peace and understanding between the different sides. And in many cases, the Chinese would pay off, they would give tributary gifts to the other side to, in effect, what is called the supplicant in order to satisfy them, in order to say, look, we don't want war with you, we want peace with you, and here's what we're willing to give you for that. So it was very... In fact, I remember reading that...

The value of the gifts given by the Chinese to these neighboring states was three to one over what they had received typically. Oh, there's a famous book by Thomas, a scholar named Thomas Barfield, who discusses the relationship between imperial Chinese dynasties and the nomadic

federations and groups along the border. Now, there was a huge amount of variation in all of this, of course. You talk to someone like Alice Miller, she'll tell you, Michael, don't generalize. Every dynasty was different. Each one had a very different policy. And that is very, very true. So you can't just broadly summarize and say, oh, well, the Chinese always demanded supplicants

to give them gifts, etc. The main purpose of tributary relations, as I saw that when they were used, was to maintain peace and order as much or more than it was to try to exercise Chinese dominance in the area. And as I say, as you say, imperial dynasties often paid off other states rather than looking for them to pay them. And at least one dynasty, the Song dynasty, I should add, actually had tributary relations that were explicitly equal

They were directly equal with the other states around them. They weren't, in fact, hierarchical at all. So you had enormous amounts of variation. Two Sons of Heaven was the name of a very good book by Tao Jingshan. So you had huge amounts of variation. So this trope, and it's right to call it a trope, that China had tributary relations based upon hierarchy and a supplicant coming to China and giving gifts and such, and that

And that today, China is trying to resurrect the same type of relationship with states around its periphery and in the region. It's just a gross, gross simplification. Yeah. Even if it did have such a system in place, and even if it was uniform across multiple dynasties, that still doesn't mean that the modern nation state of the PRC is going to resurrect this thing at the first opportunity. Well, of course. I mean, it's very silly.

I want to get into signaling because this is really a huge point in your paper.

It's vital to be able to both send and receive and interpret signals accurately. And there are lots of obstacles to that. Can you talk about some of the problems of signaling that you've seen in your studies of the bilateral relationship in times of crisis? Are there common types of misinterpretations that each side is especially prone to? And what changes might we pursue to reduce this risk? And military signaling particularly. Right.

Well, one basic problem that exists on both sides is there tends to be an assumption that signals that are being sent out by the other side are well-coordinated, well-understood, and directed from the top.

And that you're basically, when you're getting a serious signal from the other side, it's a signal being sent to you from the senior command authority and it should be unambiguous. And in many cases, that just isn't the case. You have different types of outlets for signaling. It's not entirely clear in every case

Because of the difficulty of having real-time ongoing communications in a crisis, you're not always on the phone with president to president talking to each other as a crisis unfolds. You're having different actors within the systems signaling to each other to do certain things. Are they supposed to be coordinated and directed from the top? Yes.

Do they always show that? Are they always in fact that? No, not always. And so you need to be appreciative of the fact that there could very well be unauthorized signaling going on in various ways. And not just by government signaling, but also there's also an interpretation here that some areas of the media, particularly on the Chinese side, because all the media tends to be viewed as rigidly controlled from the top,

But some media may be sending out some signals, op-eds that are being written, other things during a crisis that are interpreted as the word or the view of the government, in this case, Beijing, but they're not. And so you have that ambiguity there that you really need to try to reduce as much as possible.

So what's the solution to this? I mean, it seems like short of sending everyone in the Pentagon who works on China to graduate school. I think the best solution is you've got to have that at least one authoritative channel of communication between the two sides that can say, what you're seeing, what you're hearing is not policy. It is not our policy. We are not

sending you that signal. And then, of course, you need to be more, much more disciplined in controlling how and when your own people speak in a crisis. And we've had trouble of that on both sides. During the EP3 incident back in 2001, in my opinion, I think the United States signaled to the Chinese early on in that crisis in ways that

that they weren't entirely what I would regard as authoritative in the sense of coming from the president and being endorsed every word from the president, but they were coming from lower levels within the system, particularly the Pacific Command at the time, and they were not helpful to trying to resolve the situation. And so the U.S. side had some problems with

signal discipline at the time. And I think the same thing can be said on the Chinese side,

If you have different Chinese officials at different levels saying things that don't quite seem to track with each other, one is the foreign ministry, one is the Chinese military. It's a very common knowledge that within the Chinese system, the foreign ministry and the PLA do not coordinate as well as they should on a lot of different things. The PLA can often take actions out in the field that the foreign ministry knows nothing about.

and the foreign ministry has not sanctioned. So it's sending signals by doing that that are not necessarily authoritatively coordinated all the way up through the system. So it's obviously worse in times of crisis. Right. This is a problem that plagues the relationship just more generally. And I mean, part of the problem lies in, Chinese are almost inured to the idea that America is this sort of multi-headed hydra, right? That there is no, you know,

What is the voice coming out? Is it from the presidency? Is it from the dominant party in Congress? Is it from the Pentagon? Is it the editorial board of the Washington Post or the New York Times? Exactly. That's why you need to have trusted channels that can cut through all of the smoke and say, look, this is what the position is. This is what the president's saying. This is what we want. Another problem you have

is interpreting the meaning of certain words that are used. I referred to this earlier, like, well, let's stand idly by. We've talked about establishing a glossary

of crisis-based terms. There's actually a dialogue going on between the United States and China about terminology that's used. It's often applied most often to the strategic realm, to the nuclear realm. But I think it needs to be applied to the crisis management realm as well, so that each side

has a clear understanding of what is meant by the use of certain words, certain phrases, so that you're not misinterpreting them. If you're using this phrase, you're meaning this, you're not meaning that. And we don't have a mutual understanding about those kinds of phrases.

Yeah, no, the crisis lexicon would be really, really useful. And that could be, as you suggest in your paper, part of a kind of crisis toolkit. What are some of the other specific elements that you would prioritize in such a toolkit that would be, you know, useful for addressing the quite unique challenges inside of U.S. crisis communication? Well, I think you really, I mean, you should have, there are several things you should have, and this speaks right to it, a pre-existing

crisis management channel between trusted high-level representatives that says, if we get into a crisis, if we get into a crisis, at some point, Minister X and Minister Y are going to have to communicate with each other to establish what the situation is and to understand clearly how each side looks at what went down.

And that needs to be, you know, people will say, well, that's what the foreign minister does. That's what the, you know, or that's what the president does. If the president gets on the horn with the other side and calls up the general secretary, Xi Jinping in this case, talks to him man to man, problem solved. Well, not necessarily the case. In many cases, you've got to have individuals who are going to be somewhat flexible in how they talk with each other.

high level. This is a common problem. People think you kick it up the stairs to the higher levels, you'll resolve it. No. In some cases, you could just make it worse.

Xi Jinping or before him Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin, if they get involved early on in a crisis, they will be more inclined. And this could also work on the U.S. side to be more rigid, to be more protective of his or her legacy, to want to defend his position in that crisis. Presumably because they need to appease somewhat nationalistic constituency. Yeah, they might need. And they're thinking about their legacy. They're thinking about their image.

You've got all these other issues that come into the problem that you don't want. So it's not always good to have that kind of high-level communication, but you need to have some kind of pre-existing communication

crisis management channel nonetheless. And as we say, even better if it's among a kind of non-conversation channel, you also, I think, need to have communication between intelligence agencies. We've actually had this before between the US and China. We've had a lot of communication between different intelligence agencies. Now, some people will say, total waste of time. All you're going to get is spin. They're going to lie. They're going to not tell you the truth. They won't tell you...

But if the two sides are not engaged in a crisis together,

with a deliberate desire to move towards conflict, if they want to get out of the crisis, if they really want to be able to understand what the other side is doing and what they're doing, having intelligence, people talking to each other with authorization, with clear authorization from above, and being able to disabuse each side of what it is they may be seeing or misperceiving, I think that's a really important thing. We've done that in the past, and we should try and do it again. Now, another thing

that some people advocate is to have, really have people that you might call crisis managers, people who know a lot about

managing crises. I mean, crisis management is not a science. It's not like a rigid science. It is in many ways an art and it's very subjective in nature. But you need to be aware of the pitfalls involved in crisis management for any two countries involved in each other, and even more so for the US and China. Having individuals who are very steeped in and understand the problems of crisis management and crisis avoidance and know where the pitfalls are and

and can advise governments on what they may be doing right or wrong or what they might be considering that they haven't been considering. That sort of a thing, I think, could be very, very useful, having that kind of a body of crisis managers to call on, to draw on if a crisis emerges between the two sides.

Couldn't agree more. You actually proposed a kind of civilian-led, two-tier dialogue structure. Could you explain how this structure would actually improve on existing crisis management infrastructure, particularly in situations? Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, this is really kind of a puzzle. It's not really like hard and fast. This is absolutely something that, because it would be very hard to do, I think, in some ways. But what it's attempting to do is address this problem

of crisis prevention versus crisis management. And it's a problem in the track one crisis, that is to say the official crisis dialogue that goes on between the U.S. and China, because the Chinese look at crisis management, and this alludes to what we were talking about before in talking about crisis prevention and management. The Chinese look at crisis management

as a way for the United States to sort of avoid getting into a war, but still push China's envelope as much as possible. Right.

The Chinese use the image of a seatbelt. They say, you're trying to put a seatbelt on the relationship so that you can have it in, but then allow you to continue to provoke as much as you do. And so what you need to really do is start talking about the basic underlying policies that can produce a crisis in the first place. Let's talk about not managing so much, not having a crisis. So my view is, and the U.S. has actually acknowledged

Both crisis management and crisis prevention need to be discussed. But my point is, in order to have a productive conversation about these two things, and particularly crisis prevention, which relates to policy questions, you can't just have it as a mil-mil dialogue that occurs at the lower levels of each military, because both militaries are

a little bit more hard line, a little bit more rigid in how they talk, and they can't talk about policies. They can't talk about basic policies. So what you need to have is a two-tier system where a certain level of civilians...

at the higher level are engaged in talking about various aspects of policies. And those don't have to be mega policies. They don't have to be the basic U.S. policy towards Taiwan. They could be lower level policies that relate to crisis, to confidence building measures of different types.

But you have civilians in the room who have authority who are talking about possible flexibilities and trade-offs involving policies that could reduce the possibility that you get into a crisis in the first place. So it's a civilian-led forum for that kind of thing, but with some military participation.

Below that would be the more traditional crisis management forum, where you're talking about crisis incidents. You're talking about reducing escalation in a crisis. You're talking about military standard operating procedures and rules of engagement.

but you're also having civilians involved as well, particularly Defense Department related civilians involved. And the two levels, the policy oriented and a prevention level and the management oriented, more military, but not entirely military level, they need to coordinate with each other. You need to have regular coordination, maybe some common memberships to both groups, but both of them should be talking and coordinating internally with each other and to the other side.

Mike, just now when you were talking about the possibility of restoring intelligence agency communication, kind of IC to IC dialogue, you said that there were a lot of people who were really dismissive of it. They said it would just spin you. This is an assumption that's common to a lot of dialogues, to track two dialogues as well, and of course the track one dialogues as well.

And a lot of people think that there really isn't much to be gained from sitting down and talking to the Chinese. I obviously disagree. You, as I mentioned at the top of the show, have participated in a lot of track two dialogues. You've had a lot of extensive personal experience. You've come to see how the Chinese attitude is quite different in track two versus track one dialogues. You wrote about this in your paper. Can you break that out a little bit and talk about the kind of

maybe good faith and more flexible kind of ability to think out of the box and to maybe extend a little bit of empathy that you've seen. Right. Well, I mean, in our crisis simulations, which were all track two, that is, except for one exception very early on, they've never included an active duty U.S. official, either military or civilian.

And they have, by and large, not included active duty Chinese officials or military officers either. And so nobody was absolutely obligated to make sure he was towing the current official line in every way, shape, and form, which is what you have when you get into these official exchanges. You oftentimes just exchange talking points or flight rifts on talking points. In a track two environment, you do have more give and take. Now, that said...

Obviously, people involved in these track two dialogues, they're interested in both trying to avoid a crisis, avoid a conflict, but they also want to protect their interests. And they want to protect their personal interests and they want to protect their government's interests and their national interests. They're in it because they want to help their own country and hopefully help their relationship.

And so on that level, there are certain things, there are certain areas, there are certain topics, there are certain issues where you're just not going to go. You're not going to get into certain types of topics because they're too sensitive, because they're too controversial, maybe even within your own government. And you just don't want to get into that.

And so you can't actually have a fully free-ranging, fully flexible kind of discussion like you might have between two academics talking privately in their office about a certain issue. But nonetheless, nonetheless, you still have

The ability, particularly if you have a kind of free-ranging simulation, we found this out in some of what we've called scenario development dialogues, where we've laid out an entire hypothetical crisis from beginning to end with all of the different decision points at different points along the way. And then we've had a discussion about it, about the crisis. In other words, is this accurate?

Is this decision really a decision point? What are the likely reasons for going in this direction or that?

And in that dialogue, in that conversation with ourselves and with the Chinese, there's been a lot of differences, a lot of argumentation. I've sat and watched Chinese argue among themselves as to whether or not a particular issue would be kicked up to the general secretary or kept at a lower level, a particular crisis issue, one other criteria that would determine whether that issue is kicked upward or kept at a certain level. And

whether or not the response by the Chinese would be to initiate a response or to wait for the United States to respond, and then only respond to the United States. I don't believe all of these arguments and discussions were choreographed in advance.

They weren't all laid out as some kind of choreograph that you said, oh, let's pretend to disagree about this. I mean, I've known these people for 30 years, and I do not believe that they engage in that level of manipulation of the discussion. You think? You think. Hey, listen, so many of us who work on China, we are aware of just

how the urgency and the enormous potential for utter catastrophe have really just failed to register among political leaders, at least in this country. I can't really speak for China. But I am alarmed at how they often just appear to treat the issue as somehow abstract, unreal. You know, there's no appreciation for the stakes. You know, China's just this sort of idea. It's just sort of used for domestic purposes to scare constituencies or whatever. But

how are we going to better impress upon those leaders the reality of this, short of something like a near miss, like the Cuban Missile Crisis? I mean, we don't want to get to that point, obviously. Well, I mean, it's a big problem because, you know, senior leaders in both governments have huge time constraints, right? They don't have a whole lot of time to sit down and attend a seminar on crisis management. But I think what you need to do is you need to

really work hard to educate lower level officials who have communication with higher levels in the system

in ways that relate directly to their practical concerns. And by that, I mean, you take an example of a crisis that happened. It actually happened. And you lay out what occurred in that crisis. And you see the dangers that occurred. And we were able to dodge that bullet or not dodge that bullet because this happened and that didn't happen. And you make that very concrete to the person that you're talking with in the government or connected to the government

and reinforce the point to them that if you don't get on top of what these phenomena are that produce miscalculations, misperceptions, bad signals, overreactions, underreactions, if you don't really understand these processes that happened in the past and which have been validated in certain ways by simulations,

you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage if you're coming into a crisis. You need to be educated. And this is a big problem I have with a lot of the way people think about crisis management in some respects. Many people say, oh, well, you've got a hotline. You've got a communication line. So we're talking to each other. What's the problem? Or something else that I used to hear from

people in the State Department and people in the foreign ministry in China. Well, this is our job. We communicate. You're saying we can't do our jobs? You're saying we don't know how to do our jobs? Our job is to communicate to the other side, and that's exactly what we're doing. I don't see any problem with communication.

You've got to have the idea that this is not a simple question of that responsibility for that agency doing that. It's a question of understanding we have certain impressions, images, impulses, biases, you name it.

that are both attitudinal and structural. We haven't even talked about the decision-making process that goes on in both governments, which also can obstruct effective crisis management. So you've got to have educational efforts. It's not just a question of incidents at sea, having a hotline, et cetera, et cetera. It's really being able to educate leaders all up and down the system about what the pitfalls are, the do's and don'ts.

Well, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about the decision-making system and the structural issues there. I mean, you mentioned in your paper that China's decision-making system will stovepipe information. It limits the flow of critical updates during crises.

First, is this something that your Chinese interlocutors are aware of? And are there feasible reforms that they could get behind that could improve communication? And second, are there analogous issues like that in the way that American decision-making works? Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's as evident and as severe as it has been in the Chinese case. But I think it does operate on both sides.

And you often, I mean, you will have a case where, in the Chinese case, of course, I referred to it before. There is a stovepiped intelligence system. The military is an entity unto itself to a great extent. It only really links up at higher levels of the system. It has its own operating procedures in many ways. It will do things that the foreign ministry won't know anything about whatsoever. Right.

And so what you need to have, obviously, is

a greater level of systemic thinking, of network thinking, where you can try to break down some of these barriers, but it's really, really hard to do. You have to have a strong leadership at the top that is not going to tolerate the kind of blinders that you have within the system. And that's really difficult to do unless you have good relations, very good relations in the Chinese system with PLA officers and with people on the civilian side as well.

That's why having close relations between the party and the military at the senior levels in particular is so important to try and not be surprised by anything that might happen, as Chinese civilian leaders have been surprised at different times in the past by certain things that the Chinese military has done. And now on the U.S. side, you know, you've also had

military actions that are taken by the U.S. military. I believe that the U.S. Navy believes we're going to fly and sail everywhere international law allows. We want to conduct ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights along the Chinese coast as much as we think we need. These could be up to 2,000 sorties a year, so several a day, right along the Chinese coast. And

Not every one of these sorties is vetted and approved by civilians higher up in the system. You will be told that, oh, well, no, no, no, it's okay. Everything gets approved. Everything's known by the White House. Everything's known by the State Department. Everybody's in sync. Well,

I'm here to tell you that that's not what I've heard at many different points in the past. There have been very, very different types of approaches to coordinating U.S. military actions along the Chinese coast. So it's a difficulty on both sides. Now, how do you redress it? Again, you have to have education. You've got to have higher level leaders who are aware of the problem and they're willing to expend some political capital in order to try to address it.

They need to be able to say, this is important. You know, we can't have this going on. I need to have more information. And it also has to be done by people who really are willing to weigh that information and balance it and not just sort of apply a set assumption or bias or ideological prism to it when you interpret that information. My proposal with the sort of

overflights would be to remind them every time that it's just like when you've got the two kids in the backseat of the car and you say, Bart, don't touch your sister. And then he, you know, comes right up to her inches away and says, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. Right. I mean, that's... Exactly. I want to send them that cartoon.

Mike, thank you so much for taking this time. The paper, again, is called Avoiding the Abyss in Urgent Need for Sino-US Crisis Management. And you can download it at the Quincy Institute website or just Google for the title, Avoiding the Abyss in Urgent Need for Sino-US Crisis Management. And it is the first thing in result. So definitely give it a read. It's the result of an awful lot of painstaking work. And it's only 50 pages, so it's fast to get through it.

Mike, let's move on to recommendations. First, a really big thank you to the great folks at the University of Wisconsin's Center for East Asian Studies for their generous support of the show this year. Madison, I love you. All right, recommendations. Mike, what do you have for us?

Well, you may not know this, Kaiser, but I, in my spare time, am an artist of sorts. I oil paint. Oh! So I paint all kinds of things. I paint portraits of my daughter. I paint landscapes, still lifes, etc. And I try to keep up with a lot of the literature in the art world, particularly painting. And I'm very often reading art criticisms.

And I will recommend a book for anybody who is interested in really interesting, provocative, kind of over the, over the edge in some ways. Art criticism is by a, a, a art critic. Uh, he's now passed away, but he was British art critic named Brian Sewell, S E W E L L. A lot of people might not know who he is, but he was an art critic for a major daily. I think it was a standard in England for many, many years. And, um,

He has just the most amazing acerbic kind of writing style, but extremely erudite, very well-informed. But boy, does he have no tolerance for what he regards as bad art. So he has a compilation of his articles that's called The Reviews That Created the Rumpus.

It sounds like a very British title. And in it is the collection of his best articles on some of the most famous artists in the world. And boy, does he take a lot of them down. So if you, I'm not even sure if it's still in print, but if you can get a copy of it, and I got one copy of it, you can probably get it on eBay. I think I got a copy of it when it was through eBay, and I am enjoying it immensely.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's not on Amazon. I just looked for it there. That's a pity. But we'll find it. I mean, maybe there's a copy floating around on eBay. I would definitely like to read that. That sounds like fun. It is fun.

I'm going to go with something that I'm going to do a show on in not too long, but I urge everyone to try to read this before I actually interview one or both of the authors. It's The Great Transformation, China's Road from Revolution to Reform. The co-authors are Arnaud Vestad and Chen Jian.

It's just terrific. It's already out, so if you're looking for a really in-depth account of the period, I mean, it actually stretches from the mid-'50s through the mid-'80s, this is your book. I was just really intrigued by the accounts of 1976 through the end of 78 with, you know, Zhou Enlai's death, the Tiananmen incident of April of that year, which I think was just really fascinating, Mao's death, and the eventual coup against the Gang of Four. I

I really just couldn't believe how good this stuff is, you know, really detailed. There's lots of stuff about Lean Bial. It's just fascinating. I'm going to have one or both of the authors on the show soon to talk about the book. So please get a jump on that, read it, and you'll get more out of the interview, I'm sure. A brand new book that just came out, Kaiser. Do you have just one second? Yeah, sure. No, go. One more. Let me just recommend a very recent book. Sure. That just came out. It's by Bob Suttinger.

and it's called The Conscience of the Party, and it's a biography of Hu Yaobang,

Right.

I think it would be great for anybody to read that. It'd give you a good idea about some of the thinking that went on in the party pre-Xi Jinping that was aimed more at political reform, not just economic reform. Now, I've had my differences with Bob over the years on various issues, but I respect him enormously. So this book, I'm sure, is a great book. Yeah, yeah. I look forward to reading it. It's certainly on my list. I'll

for some reason nobody's bothered to send it to me yet. That's unusual. I usually get all the books, but... Well, now maybe he'll send you a copy.

I hope so. Bob, send me a copy. Thank you. That was fantastic. And it was a real pleasure talking to you. And I look forward to having you back on the show. Make sure everyone to check out Mike's piece. And you wrote an accompanying op-ed. Where did you publish that? It's sort of the short version. Well, the op-ed has not yet come out. I think, I hope, it's going to come out very soon in War on the Rocks.

Okay, great, great, great. All right. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. Sure, absolutely. Thank you very much, Kaiser.

You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.senecapodcast.com. There you will find a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio. Email me at senecapod at gmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out. And don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Michael Swain. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. Take care.