Susan Thornton: It takes courage to improve US-China relations

作者：Susan Thornton  来源：中美印象

Remarks for Carter Center/Global Times /Peking University Young Scholars Forum on U.S.-China Relations

June 29, 2020

I would like today to commend the perseverance of the organizers for ensuring that this kind of essential scholarly exchange continues despite difficulties, and hope I can offer some encouragement to our young academicians.  Encouragement: from the French, to give courage. 

US-China relations at the moment are not going well, but whenever we get discouraged, we need to keep in mind the big picture and the long-term future.  Many things are changing and US – China relations is being swept along with these changes in ways that are difficult to manage.  This is a moment of great consequence, when statesmanship can either play a pivotal role or be overtaken by events.

We are still, and perhaps more than ever, prisoners of our narratives, misperceptions, and stories we tell ourselves.  As the brilliant American Sinologist Richard Madsen pointed out in a book called China and the American Dream, our understanding of someone else is closely connected with our understanding of ourselves.  American debates about China have been connected with debates about American identity and the same is true for China about America.  This is happening today. 

Many people now say we are on the brink of a new Cold War.  I do not believe this will happen and this should not happen.  I grew up in the Cold War, and my entire young life was suffused with stories and propaganda about the threat from the Soviet Union – duck and cover drills, the missile gap, the space race, the invasion of Afghanistan.  These stories produced a nagging doubt, however, and a curiosity to find out how those on the other side viewed it.  I started studying Russian and became interested in the structure of the Soviet economy.  This was when Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire,’ and I remember people joking about my choice of study: “The only thing to know about the Soviet economy is ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’”  I read articles about Leonid Brezhnev’s “Treadmill of Reforms” that highlighted the political obstacles to producing economic vibrancy, and this is when I first took notice that China was doing something very different with its economic reforms.  I moved to Leningrad during graduate school, which is when the Berlin Wall fell.  All of a sudden, my field of study – Soviet Studies – disappeared, and people were surprised.  And along with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, America’s story about its purpose in the world also evaporated. 

People now talk about America’s purpose being a “strategic competition” between the US and China.  I hope you can deliver something more ambitious.  We all love our country and want a bright future.  We all want our lives to have meaning and purpose and fulfillment.  The American Dream and the China Dream.  We are both large countries in search of our place and mission in the world, our populations are proud, hardworking, nationalistic and to some extent agitated and anxious about the future, about our status, about being irrelevant or disadvantaged.  As major powers, we are curiously insecure.  And in the current moment of fast technological and societal change, leadership is more difficult to exercise effectively, while trust in government is declining.

Yet, you are coming into an exciting period of change in which the international system will be reordered, hopefully to be made more fair, more resilient and more accessible.  Average people will have to become more involved with the world, as transnational issues continue to be of primary relevance to people’s lives.  And diplomats will have to work harder on coordination as the global system evolves and countries evolve together within it.

This co-existence or co-evolution is where we will inevitably end up.  The question is how much cost will we incur in getting there or can we adopt a proactive approach that would provide a stable glidepath?  As Henry Kissinger has often noted of late, the key questions are what is it that the United States and China each need to satisfy their idea of themselves in the world, their national story and identity, and can these identities, these self-conceptions, co-exist?

I believe we will find what it is that we need and that there will be room in the new global order for both the U.S. and China to meet their national purpose.  But it will not be easy.  We will need people in both countries who will persist in looking behind the headlines and the propaganda wars to see what is really happening, to see and seize the opportunities for progress.  And so to you I say, Courage!

来源时间：2020/7/16   发布时间：2020/7/16

旧文章ID：22342