Coronavirus and the Korean Peninsula

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle, Zhao Tong & more on May 27, 2020

As nations confront the pandemic, rumors of Kim Jong-un’s death and a flurry of North Korean missile tests injected even more uncertainty in the international landscape. How do views in Washington, Seoul, and Beijing differ or align on North Korea? What are the prospects for the resumption of diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang? And how do tensions on the Korean Peninsula affect Northeast Asia more broadly? Paul Haenle spoke with Carnegie experts Chung Min Lee and Tong Zhao during a live recording of the China in the World podcast, where they discuss the outlook for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia Pacific.

A New U.S. ‘Consensus’ on China May Not Be as Solid as It Appears

By Ali Wyne on May 21, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought ties between Washington and Beijing to their lowest level since the countries normalized relations in 1979, with many observers warning that they have entered into either “a new Cold War” or at least “a new type of Cold War.” While the Trump administration was initially circumspect in its criticism of China’s response, it has increasingly taken to blaming Beijing as the coronavirus claims more American lives and inflicts greater damage upon the U.S. economy. Beyond echoing widespread condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party for its initial targeting of doctors and journalists who tried to sound the alarm, it has temporarily suspended U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, which it charges with being unduly deferential to China; suggested that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan that studies bat coronaviruses; and floated the idea of seeking reparations from Beijing.

How Will Historians Look Back at the Coronavirus Outbreak?

By Sulmaan Khan on May 21, 2020

Imagine that a historian decides to reflect on the pandemic, asking quite simply, “How did it come to this?” There would be many ways of telling that story. But one way would be to chart a series of off-ramps on the road to disaster. Some of these off-ramps can be located in China, at least one in the World Health Organization, and then several in the United States. Some are structural. Some are tied to specific decisions. Had any one of them been navigated differently, the pandemic would have been easier to handle.

U.S.-China Relations 2020: Coronavirus and Elections

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle & Xie Tao on May 20, 2020

China is facing growing international scrutiny due to its initial mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak. Countries are increasingly questioning the motives underlying Beijing’s recent international aid efforts, and there is growing concern over developments in the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and Hong Kong. In this episode, Paul Haenle spoke with Xie Tao, Dean of the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at Beijing Foreign Studies University, to better understand China’s perspective on recent pushback against Beijing, the implications of regional security developments, and China’s role in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Chung Min Lee

on May 20, 2020

Chung Min Lee is a Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Prior to joining Carnegie, he taught for 20 years at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) in Yonsei University in Seoul. He is a Council Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). From 2013 to 2016, he served as Ambassador for National Security Affairs for South Korea, and from 2010 to 2011 as Ambassador for International Security Affairs.

Lee works primarily on Asian security with a focus on Northeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula. He closely follows defense planning, force structures, military strategies and weapons systems, domestic political trends, net assessment in conflict-prone areas, and political-military intelligence estimates in key Asian states. While his major area of expertise lies in Asian security and defense, Lee has been an avid follower of European political and security developments through his long-term association with the IISS. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Yonsei University in 1982 and his MALD and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1988.

He began his think tank career at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (1985-1988) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and worked at the Sejong Institute in Seoul (1989-1994) as a Research Fellow. He then moved to Tokyo’s National Institute for Defense Studies as a Visiting Fellow (1994-1995), and subsequently worked at the RAND Corporation as a Policy Analyst from 1995 to 1998. He also served as a visiting professor at the Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo (2004-2005) and at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (2005-2007).

At Yonsei University, Lee served as Dean of the GSIS, the Underwood International College, and the Division of International Exchange and Education. When he was in Korea, he served on various advisory panels including the President’s Foreign Policy Advisory Council, the National Security Council Secretariat, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Since the late 1980s, Lee has written extensively on Asian and Korean security issues primarily in English but also in Korean. His latest book is Fault Lines in a Rising Asia (Carnegie, 2016), and he is currently working on a book on North Korea’s political and military developments. Lee has conducted extensive interviews with major media groups such as CNN and the BBC and is a contributing columnist in the global opinions section of The Washington Post. He has also written a number of op-eds for The Wall Street Journal. Lee has lived in 10 countries including Korea, United States, Japan, Uganda, Germany, France, Indonesia, Republic of Congo, and Singapore.

What Are the Right and the Wrong Ways for the U.S. to Support Taiwan?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Daniel R. Russel, Yu-Jie Chen & more on May 19, 2020

What are the right and wrong ways for the U.S. to support Taiwan? Traditionally, America’s goals have been to deter the mainland from aggression and coercion, support Taiwan’s democratic system, strengthen economic ties, and help it maintain sufficient international space to help address regional and global priorities. Are these still the central objectives of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Taiwan? And if so, to what extent do these latest U.S. actions advance or impede them?

James B. Steinberg

on May 18, 2020

The Honorable James B. Steinberg is University Professor of Social Science, International Affairs, and Law at Syracuse University and previously served as Dean of the Maxwell School, from July 2011 until June 2016 and Dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas from 2005 to 2009. His government service includes Deputy Secretary of State (2009-2011), Deputy National Security Advisor (1996-2000), and Director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff (1994-1996).

Recent publications include “What Went Wrong? US-China Relations from Tienanmen to Trump,” Texas National Security Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Fall 2019/Winter 2020); “The Good Friday Agreement: Ending War and Ending Conflict in Northern Ireland,” Texas National Security Review, (May 2019); “China-Russia Cooperation: How Should the US Respond,” in Richard J. Ellings and Robert Sutter, eds. Axis of Authoritarians (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2018); “US versus China: A Technology Cold War,” Nikkei Asian Review, March 19, 2019; and “A Glass Half Full? Rebalance, Reassurance and Resolve in the US-China Relationship (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) and Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: US-China Relations in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2014) (both with Michael O’Hanlon).

Karl Eikenberry

on May 18, 2020

Karl Eikenberry is the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Lieutenant General, U.S. Army (retired). He is a faculty member of Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University.

Previously, he was the Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University.

Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 until 2011. Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a 35-year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of lieutenant general. His military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces. He held various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; and Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China.

He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has earned Master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Ambassador Eikenberry earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office while studying at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence Chinese Language School in Hong Kong and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.

‘A Letter to My Friend under Quarantine in Wuhan’

A Roundup of China’s Best Photojournalism

By Ye Ming, Yan Cong & more on May 15, 2020

Highlighting Chinese visual storytellers’ coverage of COVID-19 inside China. Some of these storytellers were on the ground documenting the experience of residents and medical workers in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged. Other storytellers were not able to travel to the outbreak’s epicenter because of Wuhan’s lockdown, which lasted from January 23 to April 8. But they found creative ways to cover the news from afar: photographing life under quarantine in other cities, stitching together social media footage, using publicly available information to explain the supply chain of medical masks. Their stories, told from diverse perspectives, depict pain, strength, and sacrifice amid the outbreak, and they leave us with lingering questions about what China—and the world—will look like, when they emerge from the crisis.

Missing in Action: U.S.-China Cooperation on Coronavirus

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle & Evan A. Feigenbaum on May 14, 2020

The coronavirus outbreak has highlighted the many issues in the U.S.-China relationship. Why can’t Washington and Beijing better coordinate a response to the pandemic, replicating their cooperative efforts during the 2008 financial crisis and 2014 Ebola outbreak? Paul Haenle spoke with Evan Feigenbaum, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the dynamics preventing bilateral cooperation and the implications for a post-coronavirus world.