Gerard DiPippo

on February 28, 2023

Gerard DiPippo is a Senior Fellow with the Economics Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He joined CSIS after 11 years in the U.S. intelligence community (IC). From 2018 to 2021, DiPippo was a Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Economic Issues at the National Intelligence Council, where he led the IC’s economic analysis of East Asia. He also was a senior economic analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, focused on East Asia, South Asia, and global economic issues. DiPippo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Philosophy from Dartmouth College. His research focuses on China economic issues, U.S.-China economic relations, sanctions, monetary and currency issues, and industrial policy.

Weisi Xie

on February 28, 2023

Weisi Xie is the Shanghai Director at the Economist Intelligence Corporate Network (EICN), and is responsible for engaging with top executives in the region on key economic and political issues as well as industry-specific analysis to support their businesses in the dynamic Chinese market.

Xie served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University before joining EICN. As a trained trade economist, his teaching and research mainly focused on the fields of international trade, industrial economics, and economic development, with a particular emphasis on China’s economy in a global perspective. He also possesses extensive expertise in the non-profit sector through work experience with think tanks and international organizations, including the Shanghai Institute for National Economy and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland, where he contributed to multiple government counselling projects and policy studies. His work has appeared in leading academic journals as well as major economic policy publications.

Xie has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a B.A. in International Business from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

U.S.-China Trade Stayed Robust in 2022. Will That Last?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Wendy Cutler, Gerard DiPippo & more on February 28, 2023

Trade figures for 2022 released earlier this month show U.S.-China goods trade hit a record high of $690.6 billion, despite ongoing tensions. How should we interpret these latest figures? Do these numbers obscure medium and long term trends? Or will the U.S. and China remain strong trading partners despite growing restrictions and strains in their broader relationship?

How Much Does U.S.-China Tension Threaten Decarbonization?

By Scott Moore on February 27, 2023

A striking contradiction has emerged between Beijing’s growing geopolitical isolation on one hand, and its apparent continued commitment to tackling global climate change on the other. The big question, for China and for the world, is whether political and economic decoupling threatens long-term decarbonization. Unfortunately for the planet, the answer is likely yes, at least to some extent. How much will depend in large part on how hard and how lasting China’s inward turn proves to be. To understand how much China’s role in global efforts to address climate change has shifted over the past six months, it is helpful to recall Xi Jinping’s landmark speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020.

Craig Allen

on February 27, 2023

On July 26, 2018, Craig Allen began his tenure in Washington, DC as the president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC), a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 260 American companies doing business with China. Prior to joining USCBC, Craig had a long, distinguished career in U.S.. public service.

Craig began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA). He entered government as a Presidential Management Intern, rotating through the four branches of ITA. From 1986 to 1988, he was an international economist in ITA’s China Office.

In 1988, Craig transferred to the American Institute in Taiwan, where he served as Director of the American Trade Center in Taipei. He held this position until 1992, when he returned to the Department of Commerce for a three-year posting at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing as Commercial Attaché.

In 1995, Craig was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, where he served as a Commercial Attaché. In 1998, he was promoted to Deputy Senior Commercial Officer. In 1999, Craig became a member of the Senior Foreign Service.

From 2000, Craig served a two-year tour at the National Center for APEC in Seattle. While there, he worked on the APEC Summits in Brunei, China, and Mexico. In 2002, it was back to Beijing, where Craig served as the Senior Commercial Officer. In Beijing, Craig was promoted to the Minister Counselor rank of the Senior Foreign Service.

After a four-year tour in South Africa, Craig became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Craig was sworn in as the United States ambassador to Brunei Darussalam on December 19, 2014. He served there until July 2018, when he transitioned to President of the US-China Business Council.

Craig received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in Political Science and Asian Studies in 1979. He received a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1985.

Touting ‘Ethnic Fusion,’ China’s New Top Official for Minority Affairs Envisions a Country Free of Cultural Difference

By Aaron Glasserman on February 24, 2023

Pan’s election to the Central Committee suggests that the Xi administration’s hard turn toward assimilationism will likely continue and perhaps intensify. Pan is the second Han official in a row to head the Ethnic Affairs Commission, which for nearly 70 years had been led by a Party member from a non-Han nationality. Since the beginning of Xi’s second term in 2017, measures related to “managing” ethnic minorities have run the gamut from destruction of what officials deem “foreign” architectural elements such as mosque domes and removal of Arabic signage on restaurant awnings and storefronts to the imposition of Mandarin as the sole language of instruction for certain subjects in some schools. Pan did not initiate these policies, but he is poised to extend and expand them.

Aaron Glasserman

on February 22, 2023

Aaron Glasserman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University. His research interests include the history and politics of ethnicity and religion in China; minority nationalism; law and legal history; comparative religion-state relations; and modern Islamic political and religious movements. He was previously an Academy Scholar (postdoctoral fellow) at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2021 and a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2013.

10 Years of U.S.-China Diplomacy

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle, Yan Xuetong & more on February 14, 2023

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the China in the World podcast, in this podcast episode Carnegie China is looking back on 10 years of U.S.-China diplomacy following the postponement of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned visit to China in early 2023. The China in the World podcast has spanned three U.S. administrations and covered several historic bilateral meetings, from Obama and Xi’s summit in Sunnylands, California in June 2013 to Trump and Xi’s meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017. This episode gives a glimpse into the evolution of U.S.-China relations during a pivotal decade and sheds light on what can be accomplished during high-level meetings—what went right and what went wrong during past meetings.

‘I Wonder How the Protesters Felt When They Heard Their Own Voices’

By Yangyang Cheng on February 6, 2023

On Sunday, February 5, after a polar vortex brought the coldest weekend in decades to the region, scores of people gathered in the heart of Boston to commemorate the third anniversary of the passing of Dr. Li Wenliang, the young Chinese ophthalmologist who blew the whistle on COVID-19 and later died of the disease. Similar events were held in over a dozen cities across four continents, from New York to Sydney and from Tokyo to Berlin. In the three years since his death, Dr. Li has become a symbol of speaking truth to power. His name is a rallying cry against censorship and state oppression.

Last November, after a fire in a locked-down building in Urumchi claimed at least 10 lives, thousands across China took to the streets, demanding an end to the draconian zero-COVID policy. For a moment, it seemed like the government acquiesced to public pressure and swiftly lifted pandemic restrictions. But arrests soon followed and have continued into the new year.

In mid-January, I received an anonymous email with the subject line: “Invitation to speak at our rally—2/05.” The organizers explained the occasion and its theme: to advocate for the release of the detained protesters and to voice support for free expression against tyranny.

I said yes without any hesitation and spent the next three weeks pondering the consequences of my decision. I had participated in a solidarity vigil for the victims of the Urumchi fire and been to public demonstrations on U.S. political issues, but this would be my first time speaking at a rally. On this freezing Sunday afternoon, by the 54th Regiment Memorial—a bronze sculpture dedicated to one of the first Black regiments during the American Civil War—I gave the following remarks:

* * *

Hello Boston!

I have never spoken at a rally before. This is terrifying. It’s truly humbling to be here. Thank you for your attention.

I remember the first time I witnessed a rally. It was a late summer day in 2009. I had just arrived in the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Chicago. That afternoon, I took a bus—the No. 6 Jackson Express, if there are any Chicagoans out there—up from the Hyde Park campus, to check out what downtown Chicago looks like. When we drove past Millennium Park, there was a small gathering. I did not get a chance to read any of the posters, so I have no idea what the protest was all about. But the scene is etched into my memory.

For just about anyone else on the bus, a street demonstration was as common as a McDonald’s sign and as mundane as the evening news. But for my 19-year-old self, newly out of China, the sight was a revelation: I had indeed completed a passage and arrived at a different place. I had never before seen people assert their presence and voice their demands the way the protesters did that day, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I kept replaying that scene in my mind as I asked myself if this is what freedom looks like.

Not long after, one evening alone in the office, I typed into Google “Tiananmen, 1989.” Growing up, I had sensed the presence of a seismic event in my birth year by tracing the hazy contours of censorship, but I had never probed the forbidden truth. Politics and death, as I was taught at a very young age, were the two biggest taboos. That evening, I held my breath as I clicked enter. The screen did not go dark. Crows did not fall from the sky. No government agents came knocking on my door. Sometimes, the only power of a taboo is fear itself.

Years later, after I had graduated and moved across the country, on another evening alone in the office, I wrote my first essay critical of the Chinese government. The clock slowed with each stroke. It felt like someone else’s fingers were pressing the keyboard. Words appeared on my screen and the page became a mirror, revealing a side of myself that I did not know existed, that I was told should not exist, that must be killed or banished or at least muzzled for the rest of me to live.

That night, I wrote, and a cage shattered around me.

These tiny, intimate moments, known only to myself, have stayed with me. I have stashed them in a most cherished corner and return to them when I’m in doubt, when I need clarity on who I am and what really matters. I was reminded of these moments on the closing days of last November, when protests erupted across China and spread to its diaspora. Over the long weekend of unrest, I was glued to my phone as videos and images flooded social media. I had never before witnessed my mother tongue uttered in such a bold fashion in my birth country. I wonder how the protesters felt when they heard their own voices, the tremor in their throat meeting the air, slicing through lies and taboos. I wonder how many passersby caught the sound of the unspeakable, even if by chance, and sensed a tingling in their chest.

Beyond the fleeting spectacle of a public demonstration, a lasting change begins with a private moment, when an individual confronts herself and peels back her fear, unearths an inner voice, and recognizes its power. She then walks out into the world and finds the lights shine a little differently. The colors have shifted a shade. There’s an extra lift in her step. Nothing is ever again the same.

When I received the invitation to speak at this rally, I asked the organizers which language I should use. We agreed that English would be the most inclusive. The decision might appear obvious, but as with everything about languages, it is also not so simple. Dr. Li Wenliang, in whose memory we gather here today, said that “a healthy society should not have just one voice.” He too was talking about languages. More than a medium of communication, language is a tool of power, a map for worldmaking. The only Chinese language I speak, standard Mandarin, is as old as Chinese civilization and as young as the modern Chinese state. It is rooted in three thousand years of words and song, but also tainted by propaganda and maimed by censorship. To speak Chinese is to contend with the legacies of empire. To speak Chinese freely is to wrestle history and identity from the brute forces of the state.

Since I started writing about Chinese politics and society a few years ago, I have only used English in my publications. I reckon that it is the only way I can write. My adopted tongue is my first language of freedom. Yet I cannot help but question the ethics of my practice, whether I am a coward, residing on a foreign land and hiding behind a foreign tongue. What is the point of writing across such distances? Who am I helping? Who can I help?

Similar questions may be raised about our rally today. I have been following the heart-wrenching news of mass arrests in China over the past weeks. Many of the detained protesters are young women. One of them, Qin Ziyi, is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, my alma mater. I try to picture a younger version of myself: If I were living in China, would I have stood on a street corner and held up a blank sheet of paper? Would I have heard the sound of my own voice venturing the unspeakable? I cannot say that I would have had such courage. This realization only compounds my guilt.

What is the purpose of protesting from an ocean away? I think part of the answer lies in the fact that all of us here have assumed a degree of risk, especially for those of us with loved ones in China. An act cannot be dangerous if it has no power. Presence is power. Attention is power. Raising public awareness and sustaining international pressure are well-tested tactics against state abuse.

But more importantly, the response from Chinese authorities should not be the primary measure of our actions. To do so is to give the Chinese state too much credit. To frame the question only as what we can do from here for people over there is to fall into the trap of false binaries. It is the same faulty logic Beijing wields when it blames dissent on “foreign hostile forces.” For many here in the U.S. who take their liberties for granted, casting a sympathetic gaze at another people on faraway land is a convenient way to exonerate themselves. The plight of the Chinese people is used to prop up the West’s pretense of moral superiority.

Before that fateful weekend last November, migrant workers, who sustained society under lockdown and bore the brunt cost of pandemic restrictions, were among the first to organize and resist, most notably at the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone factory. By their actions, these Chinese workers have exposed the complicity of global capital and blazed new paths for transnational solidarity.

For those of us who have crossed oceans and political systems, who carry the weight of a border on our backs, there is no division between the work here and the people there. Home for us is not a place; it is an idea. It is nowhere and everywhere. To be in exile is to be a prophet: to stand on the edge and make it a new beginning. We have all journeyed from a homeland that never existed—but one which, if there are enough of us, maybe will.

My teenage self once believed that freedom was the treasure on the other end of the rainbow, that the path was a one-way street. But freedom is not a gift; it is not found or bestowed. Freedom is a state of mind, a means of existence. The work of liberation may begin with a private awakening, but true freedom can only be achieved collectively. No one is free until everyone is free.

I hold no illusions about the long night ahead. If there’s any lesson from a global pandemic, three years and counting, it is that there’s no return to the normalcy of yesterday or escape to the comfort of elsewhere. Each of us with a stake in the future will be faced with some very difficult choices. When that moment comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—I hope memories from this gathering can be a source of strength and affirmation. I hope we can keep the names of the forcibly silenced close to our hearts. Let them hold us accountable. Let them make us bolder and more honest and more loving.

Let this site of a past revolution be our witness. Let us give testimony. In the words of Lu Xun, “so long as there shall be stones, the seeds of fire will never die.”

石在，火种是不会绝的。与大家共勉！Thank you very much.

Straying off Course

A Spy Balloon Q&A with John Delury

By John Delury & Susan Jakes on February 4, 2023

On the evening of Friday February 3, about one day after news broke that a large balloon from China was surveilling the skies over Montana, ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes spoke with historian John Delury, whose recently published book, Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China, centers around a U.S. spy plane downed in China during the Korean War. Delury spoke from his home in Seoul and Jakes was in Washington, D.C.

The following transcript of their conversation was being edited as news broke that the U.S. had shot down the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean.

Susan Jakes: John, over the last several years you’ve become something of an expert on airborne espionage in the context of U.S.-China Relations. This balloon is kind of a Rorschach. When you first saw the news, what came to mind?

John Delury: After laughing for a little while, maybe because the word “balloon” makes us all laugh, I was struck by a series of ironies. I get this feeling a lot. And I use it when I teach U.S.-China history—about these reversals in the relationship. For me this is a classic ironic reversal moment. My book is all about one big mission of the CIA flying a plane into the People’s Republic of China to pick up an agent and instead being shot down and leaving behind two agents for 20-plus years. [In my research for the book] I was scouring for material on what was the full scope of what the U.S. did not only to spy on China but also to infiltrate it, to overthrow the regime during the Korean War and afterwards in the 1950s and ’60s. And there’s plenty of it.

When you look at Tibet, for example, there’s a very good book called Eyes in the Sky about all of the aerial surveillance that kicked in in the 1950s when the technology got good enough: overflights with the new state-of-the-art cameras taking pictures and kind of remapping Tibet. And of course, that was a period when the CIA was training Tibetan guerilla commandos—ironically, in Colorado, not all that far from Montana—at Camp Hale. There’s this whole history that most Americans don’t know. I didn’t know about it until I did the research.

So there’s this ironic reversal moment with China where ok, now here’s China with at least the capability—we’re still trying to fathom the intention of this—to send this high-tech stuff over our airspace and what do we do about it.

And this has been a thorny issue in post-Cold War U.S.-China relations for a couple of decades. Some of the major crises in the relationship have been over surveillance, but it has been U.S. surveillance. The Hainan EP-3 spy plane incident in 2001 was a major crisis. In that case, there was loss of life. That’s a big difference. There was a Chinese fighter pilot who died, so it was much more charged. The issue of the apology was very important, with Jiang Zemin demanding it of George W. Bush. And there was [intense scrutiny] of the language of the apology, in English vs. Chinese. And then they had the plane, so they kept the plane for a while. I mean if they can bring this balloon down safely, then you would have a nice parallel of a hostage negotiation [over spy equipment]. Also, there was the issue of payment. The United States sent a reimbursement for the cost of the whole thing and then, China [who had demanded far more] didn’t cash the check.

So I think we’re potentially facing some of that. If this is a prolonged process, we don’t know what the end game could be. So far, the Chinese Foreign Ministry is not saying they’re sorry and they’re not acknowledging it’s a spy balloon even though our side says they’re 100 percent certain it is.

Which is also an ironic echo of past crises involving espionage, like the one in your book.

For sure, because then the United States was in a position of lying quite a bit publicly, to its own public, about all the stuff it was doing.

So this looks likely to become a pretty dispiriting moment for people who hoped Secretary Blinken’s visit to Beijing might serve to somewhat deescalate tensions between the two countries. How are you thinking about what the fallout might mean for the larger relationship?

I was disappointed that Secretary Blinken decided to cancel the visit, because this is just the kind of stuff that we need to talk about. And talk about it face to face. And also contextualize it, because there’s a lot else at stake in the relationship. To me, it doesn’t rise to the point of everything else has to stop and we have to resolve the balloon incident for the diplomats to meet. I guess they don’t feel they have the space. There’s a public aspect to this, too, and a media aspect. Blinken made the point, and it’s totally fair, that if a U.S. spy balloon showed up in China days before a high-level visit, or anytime, basically the Global Times would be having a conniption fit.

And the meeting would be canceled.

It would. But I do think we should have gone through it with it. I think there’s a certain confidence to being able to say, “This is ridiculous. What you’ve done is laughable and we have to figure out if we’re going to blow this up safely or bring it down . . . so I guess we can add that to our agenda.” I guess it’s really delaying the trip, and I don’t think it’s going to kill the underlying process, which is a resumption of dialogue.

But there’s also the question of intent. We have to do our best to figure out what we think was behind this. If it’s true, as the Pentagon is saying, that the balloon is not very sophisticated in terms of its surveillance and it’s not adding anything to what they have, then that raises the question of why China is doing this. Presumably, they thought they could send the balloon over and it wouldn’t be detected or it would be ignored, but again, why even do that if you’ve already got the information from your satellite. Then you go down the list of inferences, and it’s basically redundant, in terms of the information-gathering. Or maybe it’s a kind of power move, whether the government sees it or the public and the government see it. Maybe they want us to know that they’re watching.

Another possibility is that this has been going on for a while and we’ve known about it and just not viewed it as a major threat, but what was different this time was that members of the public saw it.

The Pentagon said that this balloon was lingering longer [in U.S. airspace] which would be the one obvious advantage in terms of the snooping. Because if thanks to the wind it just sits there floating right over a spot then it can stare at that spot, whereas the satellite is moving around.

But to go more meta for a minute, these kinds of issues are very neo-Cold War. When we talk about the Cold War, there was a lot of stuff that was like this, kind of in the shadows, and this kind of sparring where both governments are denying it.

One of the big problems with that for the United States is that it poses different problems for a democracy than for a non-democracy. China’s media continues to try to gaslight the public that protests never occurred in November. There’s no acknowledgement that those things happened. And as we know, Chinese people are super critical of their media and they take it all with a grain of salt because they know they’re not getting the full story. Americans expect the truth. So something like this poses problems of transparency and how much does the public know—what’s the role of media in this kind of event?

One thing I would praise is that that Pentagon readout seemed pretty straightforward and forthcoming. That was Department of Defense, but we’ve seen that from the CIA and the intelligence community around Ukraine, being more forthcoming than people are used to and putting stuff out there. As a historian of intelligence, I think this is incredibly healthy for a democracy. You need to err on the side of telling people too much, because that’s the strength of a democracy in the long run.

The problem with this incident is the danger of its spilling into media frenzy and hype. . .

Oh it’s spilled in. I know you’re in Seoul and you just woke up. I mean, now the people who think it’s cool to wear pins in the shape of AR-15s are pointing actual guns at the sky. And it’s a new outlet for the drumbeat of “Biden is weak.”

When is American culture going to recover from LBJ’s tragedy in Vietnam? That’s why I’ll be one of the one’s saying we either should have stuck with the trip or we should reschedule it as soon as possible, because once you start playing the game of “we don’t want to look weak” you kind of never get out of that trap. And the Democrats, in particular, have a really bad history of making really bad decisions in order to avoid looking weak.

But do you really think it’s just about the optics? I mean, it seems like not a great thing to have going on while trying to have a wide-ranging diplomatic engagement, if you have your espionage aircraft breezing around our sovereign territory. That’s pretty loud background noise.

Again, I think that’s when you talk. I guess it depends on what your expectations were for the meeting beforehand. I had very low expectations. I have low expectations of the relationship. So it’s not like, there was a breakthrough but now it would be awkward to announce the breakthrough because there’s a spy balloon in the country. This meeting was going to be about [“putting a floor under” the U.S.-China relationship].

It seems like the best most people hoped for was no breakthrough, but no breakdown.

To me, this doesn’t meet the threshold for stopping talking. Of course, I’m not there, and in a healthy administration there would be two sides to that argument. I’m not saying it’s absurd that they canceled it. I just wish it would have gone through. And Blinken is still going to have to go at some point.

Right, and so then what’s the threshold that has to be crossed to make that possible? I guess the other possibility is that at some point they do shoot it down. Whether they do that or not, what will you be looking for, apart from trying to better understand Beijing’s intent in sending the balloon in the first place?

That’s still the big one. But a lot unfolds with that. The problem is, I doubt [China is] going to budge from that first statement, that it’s a meteorological device and we regret it floated into your territory. We’re going to have to figure out why they did this at this time or why they let this happen at this time. That’s going to be a known unknown for a while. But that’s important to the longer response. This could turn into their giving their list of all of the surveillance things we do.

I assume one of the less visible elements of ballast in the relationship is that the two countries are aware of one another’s espionage activities to some extent. You think that’s the case?

In the history of intelligence, it’s often the case that in even intensely adversarial relationships like the U.S. and the Soviet Union, there are plenty of instances of a kind of gentleman’s agreement to the effect of: we know you’re doing this and we know you’re doing that. There’s even an argument that a certain amount of espionage is stabilizing and allows both sides to pass certain messages and also to not worry about certain things because they’re confident they know what is going on enough to know certain things are not going on. So there is this whole logic of intelligence, of covert relations, which gives room for the other side to do x, y, and z. And it sounds possible that the U.S. has treated these balloons as kind of “meh” insofar as it’s apparently happened several times before in previous administrations and we haven’t been told about it. That’s what we were just told [in the Pentagon readout]. That seems pretty significant. It was almost a throwaway in the transcript. But this is not the first time. It’s happened before and it wasn’t so significant that the public had to be informed, and now it’s become a big public issue. But again, there’s no information yet that this has any particular intelligence value to the Chinese. Which raises the question again of why are they doing it, but also of how forceful does our response needs to be. And, of course, we do need to retain some skepticism of our own government in times like these. That’s a lesson of the past. They’re not automatically telling us everything.