Strategic Trust-Building

David Firestein Speaks at the Beijing Foreign Studies University

Here's a round-up of some of the extensive web coverage of these events:

Renmin (People’s) University of China

U.S.-China Relations in 2013 and Beyond: Issues, Challenges and Prospects (IN CHINESE)

Firestein maintained that the major themes in U.S.-China relations should be strategic mutual trust and cooperation after the U.S. presidential election and power transition in China. However, he pointed out that there are some key differences between China and the United States—in civilization and culture, ideology, foreign policy doctrine, national interests, diplomatic style, and discursive method—which are sources of distrust in U.S.-China relations. Firestein also noted the shift in the perception of China within the U.S. political discourse over the past decades, as China is no longer seen through a human rights prism. Instead, it is now viewed through a prism of economics and trade. Thus, China has been transformed from a foreign policy to a domestic issue, and is now less a measuring stick for a candidate's personal toughness than a measuring stick for America's national worth. Looking forward to the post-election era, Firestein anticipated challenges but expressed a hope for long-term improvement in the U.S.-China relationship.

Write-up from the RUC school of Marxism Studies (Chinese)

RUC News entry (Chinese)

Western Returned Scholars Association

Choice Point: The U.S. Presidential Campaign of 2012 and Its Implications for America and China

Firestein discussed the 2012 U.S. presidential election and its implications, beginning by introducing the economic context within which the election was taking place; because the United States is experiencing its most serious sustained period of economic weakness since the 1930s, the economic issue had inevitably become the focal point of the presidential election. He also analyzed policy differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and their respective strengths and weaknesses, concluding with a prediction that China policy would not be significantly affected regardless of which candidate won the election.

Notice and write-up from the Center for China & Globalization (Chinese)

Write-up from ChinaValue.net

Peking University

Choice Point: The U.S. Presidential Campaign of 2012 and its Implications for America and China

(See WRSA entry for write-up)

Write-up from Peking University's School of Government (Chinese)

China Foreign Affairs University

Choice Point: The U.S. Presidential Campaign of 2012 and its Implications for America and China

(See WRSA entry for write-up)

Write-up from China Foreign Affairs University (Chinese)

Beijing Foreign Studies University

Hearts, Minds and Electrons: Public Diplomacy in the Age of Social Media

With both the theory and practice of public diplomacy deeply influenced by the tremendous changes taking place in the Internet era, David Firestein addressed these developments by raising several questions for students to discuss, including: whether public opinion can influence foreign policy; which part of public opinion should be influenced by public diplomacy; and how public diplomacy’s influence can be measured. He explained how the rise of social media—including blogs, Facebook, and Twitter—has affected U.S. public diplomacy in recent years. Despite the widespread use of social media today, Firestein pointed out that the human factor is still among the most important factors in public diplomacy and that face-to-face interaction remains the most effective.

Write-up from Beijing Foreign Studies University (Chinese)

More video coverage

Tsinghua University

The Dragon, the Donkey and the Elephant: China’s Changing Role in American Politics

There has been much discussion and speculation on how the 2012 U.S. presidential election would affect China. Firestein examined the role that China has played in U.S. presidential elections and, more gnerally, in U.S. politics in recent years and how that role has evolved. Forty years after the process towards normalization of U.S.-China relations began, with the bilateral relationship now entering its fifth decade, he asserted that U.S. China relations are facing new and unprecedented challenges. Two interesting attributes combine to create this complexity: the absence of what Firestein termed "a grand common objective" and a United States undergoing sustained economic difficulties. He also discussed the role played by the U.S. Congress and business community in further complicating the issue of China in the U.S. political discourse. In the end, Firestein concluded that China has become a more complex issue in U.S. politics at all levels.

The re-election of Mr. Barack Obama as President of the United States represents both a remarkable moment in American political history and, at the same time, a reaffirmation of the broad contours of US foreign policy – towards the world, towards Asia and towards China in particular. Notwithstanding broad policy continuity from Mr. Obama’s first presidential term to his second, however, challenges loom.

In any number of ways, this election marks a significant milestone in US politics. With his victory earlier this week, Mr Obama became the first sitting American president in history to win a second term against the backdrop of a US unemployment rate in excess of 7.1 per cent.

Less commented upon is the fact that he also became the first US president since Mr Ronald Reagan to twice win the majority of the national popular vote – and the first Democrat to do so since Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt (who last did so in 1940 and 1944). (Mr. Bill Clinton, the last two-term Democratic president, never won a majority of the US popular vote, winning 43 per cent in 1992 and 49 per cent in 1996, both three-way races.)

And with his win, Democratic candidates for president and vice president have now won the national popular vote in the United States in five of the last six elections (1992 to 2012) – an impressive run that matches the similar GOP run from 1968 to 1988.

Clearly, Mr Obama has made political history in a variety of important ways. With respect to the implications of his re-election for US foreign policy, though, the story is much less dramatic – at least at first blush. In a second term, “continuity” will largely be the name of the game, including in the Asia-Pacific region and with regard to China – America’s single most consequential diplomatic partner.

Click here to read the rest of this column at The Straits Times.

Click here for a round-up of media coverage on David Firestein's most recent trip to China.

The piece, originally published in The Globalist, identifies three major shifts in U.S. perceptions of China in the context of the 2012 Presidential campaign.

Click here to find the article at The Straits Times.

Click here to read it at China US Focus.

The article was adapted from Firestein's speech given at the 2012 Affordable World Security Conference, viewable here:

 Click here to comment and rate this video on EWI's Youtube channel.

A convergence of the U.S. political season (specifically a U.S. presidential election) and a Chinese political transition is something that happens only once every 20 years. The last time this happened was in 1992. The next time it will happen will be in 2032. That's because China is on a five-year political cycle and the United States is on a four-year cycle.

Notably, in 1992, the last time in which these two events happened in the same year, there wasn't a power shift in China. President Jiang Zemin, who was in power and who came into power after Tiananmen in 1989, didn't leave high office.

Rather, he continued on as general secretary and as president for another ten years, and as chairman of the Central Military Commission for a little longer still.

So, this really is the first time in U.S. and Chinese history in which there is going to be a power transition in China and a possible presidential transition in the United States in the same year.

That's very significant. What it means is there are political pressures being brought to bear on both the U.S. leadership and the Chinese leadership in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of U.S.-China relations.

So, what are the ways in which China enters into the question of U.S. politics and, specifically, how does China manifest itself in the context of U.S. presidential politics and the presidential campaign? In 1992, in the first U.S. presidential election after the student protests in Tiananmen Square, the key issue vis-à-vis China in the race was human rights.

In fact, the presidential election in 1992 was really the first in the post-Nixon era in which China was a controversial campaign topic. And it manifested itself as essentially a proxy for the question of human rights.

Accordingly, when Bill Clinton was still the Gov. of Arkansas and was running for president, he spoke a lot about human rights problems in China. He even referred to the leadership, as he put it, as the "butchers of Beijing."

This was the dominant theme — and the dominant prism through which China was viewed and addressed in presidential discourse.

But there has been a clear evolution in the way that China is framed and discussed in the context of U.S. presidential politics nowadays. I see three significant shifts.

The first is a shift from looking at China through the prism of human rights to looking at China through the prism of economics, trade and, more broadly, national competition.

The second significant shift is that China is looked at less as a foreign policy issue than as a domestic policy issue. That represents a rather radical reframing of China in the U.S. political context. The Republican Party's presidential primary debates earlier this year and in 2011, for example, offer a great insight into our politics.

What is remarkable is that China virtually never came up in the foreign policy segments of those debates. On the contrary, when China did come up, it was in relation to issues like education, manufacturing, the loss of jobs, economic growth, trade and so on.

The third shift is that whereas China used to be a measuring stick for the toughness of U.S. presidential candidates, it has now become primarily a measuring stick for our national inadequacy.

It used to be that when U.S. presidential candidates talked about China in their campaigns, without fail they would use the word "tough" in the same sentence: "I'm going to get tough on China if you elect me president." Or: "My opponents aren't tough on China, but I am."

In the 2008 campaign, and even in rare instances in the current campaign, candidates have talked tough about China. But even in those cases, it is about China's impact on the U.S. economy — not China's role in human rights or China as a foreign policy issue.

Let me give you some examples. First, in 2010, Ed Rendell, then governor of Pennsylvania, made a very interesting comment. An NFL football game on a Monday night was cancelled because of a blizzard — the first time this had happened in the modern history of the NFL.

This happened in Philadelphia, where the Eagles were hosting the Minnesota Vikings. (To the uninitiated, or to non-Americans, Monday Night Football is a television institution, a big football game broadcast nationwide.)

Here is what Gov. Rendell, a Democrat equipped with a folksy as well as populist streak, said:

We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything … If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.

The next comment that illustrates the notion of China as a kind of existential competitor was made by President Obama. In his 2011 State of the Union address, he referred to China as basically a threat to the United States, not in a military sense, but rather, in the such areas as education, manufacturing, economics, job creation, clean energy and so on (He has often made similar points on the 2012 campaign trail.)

That was striking for an official presidential address — and it may have been the first time in American history that a President of the United States spoke about China not in the foreign policy section of the State of the Union address, but rather in the domestic policy section.

And then there was Newt Gingrich earlier this year. The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-proclaimed futurist and history buff, made this comment in his run for the White House:

I do not want to be the country that having gotten to the moon first, turned around and said, 'It doesn't really matter, let the Chinese dominate space, what do we care?' I think that is a path of national decline, and I am for America being a great country, not a country in decline.

So he's talking about an enormous and significant domestic policy program — space — and a classic frontier on which modern America has defined its own greatness. But this proud American patriot and unrelenting America booster is now doing so with reference to the Chinese.

And then, most strikingly perhaps, here is a comment made by Gov. Romney, the Republican nominee for the 2012 presidential campaign, at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington, D.C:

For each program that we have in the government, I'm going to look at them one by one. I'm going to ask this question: Is this program so critical, so essential, that we should borrow money from China to pay for it?

Gov. Romney doubled down on this statement in his debates with President Obama, giving this viewpoint even greater exposure to the American electorate.

Now, in my recollection of U.S. presidential contests, I have never heard a candidate for the office before Gov. Romney measure all federal spending dollars against the China test. Is it worth borrowing from China or is it not? That, I would suggest, demonstrates just how deeply China has gotten into the American psyche and under our skin.

China is no longer just about human rights in American eyes nor, oddly enough, even about foreign policy. Now, China is invoked as a presumed existential competitor to the United States.

Americans no longer feel China can be compartmentalized or pushed to the side of presidential discourse. Instead, China has become a proxy for all that is ostensibly wrong with the United States.

We have moved, in short, from a narrative of "they don't share our values" to "they're eating our lunch." We have moved from a narrative of "they're different from us" to "they're beating us." And that is going to complicate the relationship.

China and the United States are not preordained to be either friends or foes. It will take effort to make them the former rather than the latter. Given the political season here in the United States — to say nothing of the political season in China — that work promises to become quite a bit more complicated from late 2012 onward.

Click here to read this column at The Globalist.

Even though most cannot really explain why, who the US president will be seems to really matter to the rest of the world. The US presidential debates therefore excite much interest, more outside the US see them within the US. A young, buoyant John Kennedy got the better of a seemingly tired Richard Nixon in the live debate in 1960. Since then instant perception influencing the elections has come to make a huge difference.

Ronald Reagan was decidedly trailing the meticulous Jimmy Carter in 1980, but his self-deprecating, laidback “there you go again” spiel took the incumbent president off his feet. Al Gore squandered a considerable lead against George W Bush by his ponderous debating style. Though Obama did not land any knockout blows against John McCain in 2008, his enhanced debating skills easily outscored the much older senator. In the mass aspirations for change public perception ignored Obama’s relative inexperience in government.

A record US audience of nearly 70 million viewers, second only to the Super Bowl, watched the first debate on Wednesday, October 3. By the end of the evening President Obama had blown his comfortable lead in public opinion, the Republican contender clearly scoring over his seemingly listless opponent. It was a dramatic 67 percent victory, according to a quick CNN poll after the debate. To quote The New York Times, “voters want someone who can stand in the public square and not only sell themselves but the power of their ideas.”

Within days voter sentiment in the polls had swayed 4-6 percent in Romney’s favour, turning the race into a statistical dead heat. One may forgive the rest of the world for being mystified as to how in one single evening the tide had turned enough for the momentum to go with the feisty Republican aspirant for the presidency. Obama’s problems notwithstanding, the tracking of countrywide polls show Democrats retaining their narrow lead in the US Senate in close races, even doing better in the US House of Representatives presently controlled by the Republicans.

The Democrats have done far better in the voter’s registration drive, maintaining an average majority of 6-8 percent in the swing states among registered voters. The commensurate registration of independent voters constitutes an average of 25 percent in each state. A majority leans towards Romney after the first debate. Not enough in the six battleground states, but combine these with the so-called “Reagan Democrats” who tend to vote for Republican contenders and you come up with a whole new ball game, a huge difference in the Southern states and a wide swath across the Midwest. The counter-balancing is achieved with New York and California having many electoral votes, definitely going for Obama.

For someone from the Third World it was a privilege to gauge at first hand the reaction of a cross-section of US citizens of some standing during my current visit to the US. Their perception of a generally ineffective president was reinforced by Obama’s rather strange and inexplicable performance during the first debate. Even then, informed outside observers can never really comprehend how the US voters can forgive the Republicans for squandering the fiscal surplus generated by Clinton and not give credit to Obama who inherited this horrendous economic situation for containing further economic damage.

His major mistake was in opting to give “Medicare” rather than the economy the pride of place in presidential attentions. Disappointment over his performance, and even dislike, one can understand, but the virulent hatred that seems to overwhelm dislike was a shock. Even more surprising: given that the financial stimulus by the federal government generally profited the elite one percent, why will a major portion of the less than privileged (including Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe) still vote against him?

To quote from a recent article: “The O-Man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tactical empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.”

It goes on to say: “He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, like his first two names, which he hides. Obama is not the descendent of slaves, he is the descendent of slave-owners, thus he makes the perfect liberal Messiah. Thank heavens the voting majority of Americans remain ‘Christian’ and are in no desperate need of a phony saviour. His candidacy is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any ‘thinking American.’”

This was not written by an extreme white racist supremacist but by a respected former Reagan advisor who devised the “Star Wars” strategy that brought the Soviet Union down to its economic knees. This “thinking American,” Dr Jack Wheeler, represents the diehard whites never coming to terms with a black in the White House. Governor Romney may not be their favourite, but any alternative to Obama is acceptable to this lot.

In 2008 nearly 65 percent whites voted against him. While the black vote remains rock-solid, Obama will lose more of the white vote. His appeal to the Hispanics who voted for him in 2008 in strength is somewhat suspect. He may well lose the popular vote but to be ousted as president he has to lose in the rather complex Electoral College system. Here Romney has a real problem.

In crucial swing states with big electoral counts like Ohio and Florida, Obama seems to be holding onto his portion of the white vote, the Electoral College mathematics giving him enough to retain the presidency. The joker in the pack could be former Republican New Mexico governor Gary Johnson as the Libertarian Party Candidate, taking away crucial votes for Romney similar to Ralph Nader’s erosion of Al Gore’s vote bank in 2000. The Republicans allege that the Obama campaign machine put Johnson up to it.

Much depended upon the vice-presidential debate between incumbent Biden and challenger Ryan. Ryan held his ground against Biden’s experience, his youth giving him an image advantage over the much older Biden on TV. A virtual draw gave heart to the Democrats but did not entirely stem the Romney momentum. The second TV debate on Tuesday, therefore, assumed enormous importance, Obama needed to erase the memory of his last performance. Otherwise he could forget being re-elected.

The dilemma: how feisty could he get without turning off the voters by seeming to be rude and losing the presidential high ground? Romney just had to imitate Ryan in not losing his cool and contain Obama’s frontal attack without crossing the failsafe line of good behaviour and manners one expects from a would-be US president. The incumbent had to somehow stem the challenger’s surge or anything could happen in the presidential stakes. Obama was a different man last Tuesday, a quick CNN poll giving him 49 percent to Romney’s 46 percent. The race may go down to the wire but the question is: does it really matter to us in the Third World who is chosen as the leader of the greatest nation on the face of this earth?

Click here to read this column at The News International.