Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with James Crabtree.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to not only our great daily newsletter, the Daily Dispatch, but all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This episode will drop for the public the very day that the 20th IISS Shangri-La Dialogue opens in Singapore, put on each year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It’s described by some as the Munich Security Conference for Asia. Given all the attention currently being paid to security issues in that region, for better or for worse, the Shangri-La Dialogue has taken on increasing importance in recent years. This week on Sinica, I am delighted to have, as my guest, James Crabtree, who is the executive director for Asia of IISS, and it is no exaggeration at all to say that he’s the man running the show when it comes to the Shangri-La Dialogue. James has had a fascinating career, including a long stint as a journalist with, among other fine publications, Prospect and The Financial Times, where he served as Mumbai Bureau Chief for several years.
He is the author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, and he continues to contribute very insightful essays to various publications. James, I can only imagine how busy you must be right now, so I am especially honored to have you on the show. A very warm welcome to Sinica.
James Crabtree: Thanks, Kaiser. Longtime listener, first-time caller. So, thanks very much for having me.
Kaiser: It’s wonderful that you could be here. I should note that we are taping on the morning of May 24th there in Asia where you are. But as I say, when most of you are listening to this, the Shangri-La Dialogue will be underway in Singapore, and that will be the focus of our conversation today. James, this being, as you said, first-time caller, your first turn on Sinica, why don’t you first tell our listeners a little bit about your own career path, leading you really from the world of think tanks into government, into journalism, academia, and now into a leadership position as an executive director at double IISS.
James: Yeah, it’s very kind of you to have me on, Kaiser. I’m a big fan of the podcast. My background is a funny mishmash of things. As you say, I used to work for the British government way back in the middle of the 2000s. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were Britain’s Prime ministers, I worked in a thing called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. When the Blair-Brown Project then hit the rocks, I parachuted it out and went to become a journalist, a magazine journalist, and then I worked on the comment page of the Financial Times. Then, despite the fact that I didn’t know very much about India or business, I managed to persuade the FT to send me to Mumbai. I spent five very happy years writing about Indian business, so banks, capital markets, nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about today.
I moved to Singapore in 2016 with the aim of doing something not terribly unusual, which was, as a white British journalist, to try and write a book about India. The shelves of books are heaving with these things, but I felt I had something slightly original to say, which was I had spent time in India and understood the business elite as opposed to the political elite. And so I wrote a book about India’s changing political economy through the lens of these colorful billionaires. A gentleman called Kishore Mahbubani, who will be known to some of your listeners, who was the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School in Singapore, he was kind enough to give me a visiting fellowship, and I took this one-year sabbatical to write this book, and I discovered, to no great surprise, that having a sabbatical was rather more fun than having a job.
I turned that one-year sabbatical into a five-year sabbatical and became kind of a pretend academic at the Lee Kuan Yew School, and taught, wrote, enjoyed myself, and saw my way through COVID. Then it was a happy coincidence that the IISS, which has had an office in Singapore for 20 years, my predecessor who had both been the co-architect of the Shangri-La Dialogue and had run the office here, was approaching retirement age. He took me out for lunch one day and said, “What do you think about applying for this job?”. The more I looked at it, the more I thought, actually I should apply for that job. That looks really interesting.
The Shangri-La Dialogue is a very unusual platform in this region for diplomacy, for defense diplomacy as we’ll talk about. As you said, I had a background in think tanks originally. If you go right back to the beginning of my career, I started out in London, after I graduated undergrad, working in British think tanks. So, I’ve always had think tank careers as part of my background. So, yeah, I have a very mixed background. I, unlike some people in this world, have not spent their entire career thinking about defense and geopolitical matters. But I, myself, have been enjoying learning about that as I have picked up this role and started to lead the team that we have here at the double IISS and also restarted the Shangri-La Dialogue after the two years during COVID when we weren’t able to run the summit. The first one that we did after COVID was last year. And we’re just about to do the second.
Kaiser: Yeah. I mentioned that the Shangri-La Dialogue is often compared to the Munich Security Conference. Outside of the world of national security and foreign policy wonks, I would venture to guess that maybe the first time that ordinary people heard about Munich was when Vladimir Putin gave that fiery speech in 2007 in which he kind of set his course squarely against the West. Of course, Munich, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February of last year, has taken on even greater significance. Is this comparison warranted, first of all, and are there significant differences between Munich and the Shangri-La Dialogue that you would point out?
James: Let me paint a picture for those listening. The Shangri-La is a fancy hotel in the middle of downtown Singapore. If you walk into that hotel on the weekend of the Shangri-La Dialogue, you’ll find not very many guests, but the dialogue itself has more than 3,000 people milling around in the lobby. Lots of uniformed officers, a kind of ryot of military color because we gather more than 30, 40 countries together. Typically, the people who come to the dialogue are defense ministers, heads of military, meaning chiefs of defense force and the heads of the defense department. It’s a very defense-focused summit. The link with the Munich Security Conference is actually a very real one. My boss who runs the organization is a guy called John Chipman, and it was his idea to set this up 20 years ago. This year is the 20th anniversary.
Some 20 years ago, he sat down with Lee Kuan Yew, the then the Prime Minister of Singapore, and pitched him on the idea of there is a Munich Security Conference, so why don’t we do an Asia security conference in Singapore? The IISS will run it and will invite all of the defense ministers from the region. At that time, there wasn’t a place every year where defense ministers from Southeast Asia and around Asia, including the United States, would meet. As John Chipman tells this story, Lee Kuan Yew said, “Sure, give it a try.” In that initial year, John Chipman took a trip around the world and went to the Pentagon and went to other capitals and said, “Well, if we do this, will you come?” And enough people said that they would come. It started out reasonably modestly and then grew over time to become this calendar point in the annual diplomatic calendar for defense and regional diplomacy.
The thing that is unusual about it at this moment in particular, and I think this is what we’ll go on to talk about, is it’s one of the few places in Asia where the United States and China tend to be in the same room. On any diplomatic calendar, you have a meeting like the G-20 when President Xi and President Biden this year, also the Apex Summit, but there are not very many places left where you have senior leaders from the United States and China. By convention, both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the Chinese Minister of National Defence will come to the Shangri-La Dialogue, they will both give speeches. And in many years, although we’re not sure yet, and this year they will meet with one another and have a bilateral meeting in which they discuss how to compete and cooperate with one another. So, yes, there are differences with the Munich Security Conference. I mean, Munich has more heads of government, they have more foreign ministers. We’re more focused on defense ministers. But it’s sort of basically the same idea of bringing together a whole bunch of government people in one place to try and talk about defense security cooperation.
Kaiser: The other really notable thing about it is that it’s named after a hotel chain. I don’t think there’s ever been a bigger branding score for a major hotelier. I have been trying to get my Best Western Dialogue going, and so far no defense ministers have returned my calls. I’ve been reduced to, like, ROTC students. But maybe I’ll do a Comfort Inn Dialogue instead.
James: The story behind that is that if you look at the letterhead, our letterhead still does say Asia Security Dialogue, or Asia Security Conference, like the Munich Security Conference. But when they were originally thinking about how to put the conference on, then there was a sense that that sounded a little bit assertive maybe, and that the fact that it was being held at the Shangri-La, gave it a more local feel. So that was what it was called from the very first time. We’ve always done it in the same hotel, in the same ballroom. It’s just a sort of aspect of history that people have got used to.
Kaiser: James, can we talk about what some of the notable past Shangri-La Dialogues have been, something interesting or memorable that has happened during one of them? Or maybe an instance in which something that happened there translated into something in the real world, concrete results, bilateral or multilateral agreements, new security initiatives, exchanges, exercises, has anything like that happened?
James: Yeah. That sort of stuff happens all the time. It’s one of the fun things about being able to run this. I mean, if I might point out a difference with Munich. Munich often will have a theme. A couple of years ago, Munich’s theme was restlessness. In all of its literature, it said this year the Munich Security Conference is talking about restlessness, meaning a world in which the West isn’t that prominent. You might remember this. It wasn’t this year, it was, I think, two years ago. So, people often ask us, “So what’s the theme of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue?” And we don’t do themes because the theme, to be honest, is pretty much the same every year. There was a period, long before my time, after 9/11, in which you might have said that the most prominent theme of the Shangri-La Dialogue was terrorism and the War on Terror.
But really, from its inception with those brief few years put to one side, the main theme of the Shangri-La Dialogue is the relationship between the United States and China. And what does that mean for the other countries in Asia? In particular, the U.S. allies and partners, on the one hand. That would be Australia, Japan, now India, I think, would fairly be kind of categorized in that group, but also the Southeast Asian countries. Singapore is the host, but it’s hosted in Southeast Asia. So, the dialogue has a kind of particular cadence to it. Because you have the United States and China coming to Southeast Asia, a region which is more worried than any other really, about the rise of great power competition and what might flow from that because they fear getting caught in the middle and, in a sense, losing, in that process, the economic advancement and security gains that they’ve made over the last couple of generations.
One of the challenges, if you are the Chinese defense minister, or the U.S. defense secretary, is coming to Singapore and calibrating your remarks for multiple audiences, partly for an audience back home, which wants you to sound reasonably tough, and partly for an audience in the region and in the room which doesn’t want you to sound that tough. That I think is the balancing act. I mean, in terms of two specifics, there were a couple last year. Last year, you had the AUKUS agreement between the United Kingdom of Australia and the United States. That had annoyed the French, so relations between Australia and France were kind of in the cooler. There hadn’t really been much contact between Australia and France. The first meeting between the French and the Australians happened last year at the Shangri-La Dialogue, where the new Australian Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who’d got on a plane barely a week after having come in as the defense minister for Anthony Albanese new government, and Sébastien Lecornu, who’s the new defense minister of France, who had been appointed in President Macron’s second term, they sort of led bygones be bygones and had a little bit of a rapprochement.
They both kind of reached out to one another in their respective speeches, and then they had a meeting on the sidelines of the summit. That’s an example of the kind of diplomacy that will happen behind the scenes. Even last year, the meeting between Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Defense Secretary, and then Chinese Minister of National Defence, Wei Fenghe, was the first time that they had met in person in the period that Lloyd Austin had been defense secretary. I mean, that was slightly more to do with COVID and the fact that there was very little defense diplomacy that had happened in those periods.
Typically, the U.S. and Chinese defense ministers only meet twice a year. They meet once at the Shangri-La Dialogue, and then they meet at another meeting. This is a bit of a word salad here, but it’s called ADMM-Plus. The ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus, and that’s a kind of part of the ASEAN security architecture, ASEAN being the group of Southeast Asian nations. They have an annual meeting of defense ministers at which other countries come along, including the U.S. and China. So, there’s only really two times every year in which the U.S. and Chinese defense ministers meet, which, in and of itself, is a kind of sign of how perilous things have become between the two countries. One of them is at the Shangri-La Dialogue.
Kaiser: So, who’s coming this year? Last year you had Kishida from Japan, obviously Secretary Austin, as he said, and Wei Fenghe. You also had Volodymyr Zelenskyy piped in right via Zoom or whatever. Who are some of the other big names you anticipate are coming this year?
James: This year, the keynote speaker will be Prime Minister Albanese of Australia. He’s now more than a year into his term in office. As you say, last year we had Kishida from Japan. He gave a quite sort of full-throated keynote address. The takeaway line from that was Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow. He issued a warning. We were then four months or so into the Ukraine conflict, and people were beginning to kind of grapple with what that might mean for Taiwan and other potential flashpoints in the region. This year we have Prime Minister Albanese. He’s more than a year into his term in office. It’s an interesting time for Australia. You’ve had the recent announcement of the second stage of the AUKUS deal with President Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in San Diego.
You’ve also had a few big announcements in the world of Australian defense. They published a big review of where they were going in terms of how they deal with China. So, we have him. We don’t officially comment on who’s coming, but I think it’s widely anticipated that the U.S. Defense Secretary and the new Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu will attend. That will be an interesting dynamic. General Wei Fenghe, who was the previous defense minister, enjoyed the Shangri-La Dialogue. I met him last year. We, as the double IISS, tend to have a meeting with the Chinese delegation prior to the start of the dialogue. General Wei Fenghe was a quite charismatic figure. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of the dialogue.
One of the things that you have at the Shangri-La Dialogue is these ministers give speeches, but then they must face a period of question and answer, so you have 600 people at the VIP delegate sitting in the main ballroom of the Shangri-La Hotel, and that includes a cross-section of both the other government delegates, but also a range of experts and think tankers of the sort who would’ve appeared on the Sinica Podcast at some point in the past. All of the ministers have to face questioning. That’s why it’s called a dialogue as opposed to just a series of speeches. And that’s quite unusual in the Chinese system. If you were to think about the other equivalent events like the Xiangshan Forum, which happens at the tail end of the year, or some of the other summits at which Chinese leaders go to, then the idea that they would participate in an open and unscripted series of Q&A is quite unusual. It’s one of the things that makes the Shangri-La Dialogue special. And General Wei Fenghe actually thrived in that environment. He was quite fun and combative, and he seemed to quite enjoy the cut and thrust of this format, which is, to be fair, maybe a format with which those in the Western world are slightly more familiar than those in the PRC.
Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely.
James: I think a lot of people will be watching the dynamic between the U.S. and China. We’re in an interesting place with the U.S.-China bilateral at the moment. I mean, obviously, things are not in a good place. There has been a sharp deterioration over the last couple of years, but just in recent weeks, and I think you’ve discussed elements of this on the podcast, you’ve seen, on the U.S. side at least, elements of what appears to be a kind of softening of tone. You’ve had a few speeches from cabinet-level officials talking about meetings, trips to China. And so, one of the things, the kind of the nerds in the audience are always watching for…
Kaiser: Count me among those nerds.
James: … are the precise phrases that are being used to telegraph the intent of the two sides in terms of the bilateral U.S.-China relations. In terms of who else, Zelensky last year was unusual. You’re right, we did have him piped in. Typically the Shangri-La Dialogue is in person only. We have no virtual participants at all. Last year, Zelenskyy was the exception that proved that rule. This year, there won’t be anybody joining virtually. You can expect to have the defense ministers of pretty much all the other countries in the world who matter to the region. That is the Southeast Asian countries, those from the rest of Asia, who are major security players. The Quad nations, the Republic of Korea. You always have a good smattering of Europeans, the larger European countries who have a strategic interest in the Indo-Pacific, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, but also some of the smaller ones, the sort of smaller and middle powers, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few of the Pacific Islands as well tend to come. Last year we had the Solomon Islands came for the first time.
Kaiser: The Fijians as well.
James: Yeah, the Fijian last year. The Fijian minister, last year, brought the house down in the final plenary. He was a real character. There’s been an election in Fiji since then, so he’s been replaced by another minister. He’s now the leader of the opposition in Fiji. Nonetheless, one of the other things that’s interesting about the dialogue is that we do try and give platforms to voices in the region who are heard less often. And so that in South Asia and in the Pacific Islands, some of the island states also will appear on the plenaries alongside the larger names.
Kaiser: Just now, James, you’ve touched on a whole bunch of topics that I want to dive into in greater depth. Obviously, the U.S.-China bilateral relationship, the participation of European countries, because things have very much changed for them in part because of the Ukraine war, but for other reasons as well. We want to talk a little bit more about Japan, and we’ll talk even a little bit about Fiji and about what the Fijian Defense Minister brought up in his comments that, as you say, brought the house down. But let me finish out this sort of intro to the double IISS’ Shangri-La Dialogue by asking a little bit about the programming of it. We have gotten a very good sense now of what kind of people attend. Do they roll deep? You said 600 people in the audience, from 30 countries. I’m assuming they’re a fairly good-sized entourage. It’s not like Li Shangfu will be there by his lonesomes, right? He’ll have an entourage. Yeah?
James: From what I remember, I first came to the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2016, the year that I moved to Singapore. When I said it a few minutes ago, I imagined what it’s like to walk into the lobby on Shangri-La Dialogue weekend. I remember that because I remember it myself. I walked in and was kind of slightly wide-eyed. What you will see, the Vietnamese Defense Minister will be walking across the lobby on his way to meet the Indonesian Defense Minister. As you say, there will be a kind of crocodile train of sort of 25 officials in identical uniforms trailing after him as he strides across the lobby. So yes, you have these 600 or so VIP guests who are delegates who go and sit in the ballroom, but they all come with these big entourages. The U.S. Defense Secretary will come with between 150 and 200 people on the plane, including a whole bunch of journalists.
For continuity of government reasons, the U.S. Defense Secretary has to be able to do the business of government while he’s traveling around in Asia. Typically, when he comes, he will not come just to Singapore. He’ll have a regional swing where he’ll come to Singapore and a couple of other countries as well. Singapore will be the anchor for that stop, and that’s true for all of the rest of them as well. So, you have a large cohort of accompanying officials. In terms of how we do the programming, this is a little bit different from the Munich Security Conference. The Munich Security Conference has a lot of side events. There’s a lot of things going on. The Shangri-La Dialogue is-
Kaiser: Closed-door bilaterals and stuff.
James: Well, so that is the same. So yes, you have the programming and the bilaterals, which I’ll talk about in just a second. But in terms of the way that our program works, it’s quite simple. The only people who speak are defense ministers, apart from the keynote speech on Friday. You have the Americans who speak first thing on the Saturday, and then you have a run of plenary sessions in which you have three defense ministers each, and then the Chinese speak on the Sunday morning. Then you have a couple more plenary sessions, and everybody heads off to the airport after Sunday lunchtime. In terms of what you are doing, let’s imagine that you are Lloyd Austin. You come and give your speech. You might stay for a couple of other plenary sessions, but mostly what you’re doing is sequestering yourself somewhere else in the hotel and having a series of meetings with other defense ministers.
Really the value of coming to an event like this, I remember Richard Marles, the Australian Defense Minister, who hadn’t been to the event before, said this last year, that he hadn’t realized before he came that the real value is you get to have in one weekend as many meetings as it would take you six months to do under other circumstances because everybody’s in one place. Although public messaging, the ability to come and give a speech that represents your government is valuable, for the ministers who come, the real value is that they just get to have a whole bunch of bilateral meetings, one after another with countries big and small. I remember last year, the minister from the Solomon Islands, his name is Anthony Veke, who is a very pleasant guy, and he’s not actually the defense minister because Solomon Islands don’t have a defense ministry. He’s the ministry for prisons, correctional reform, and internal security, which is as close as Solomon Islands has to a defense ministry. He took me aside at one point and said, James, we love your conference, but far too many people are trying to talk to us. And so, the Solomon Islands, particularly last year, they were-
Kaiser: Kind of in the news. Yeah.
James: They were very much in the news because they had become a kind of focal point in the U.S.-China competition. Everybody wanted to meet the Solomon Islands because there were many ministers who hadn’t met the minister from the Solomon Islands. That’s the sort of value of the dialogue for the main audience. I mean, we, as IISS, describe this as a track one event, meaning that although we do invite journalists and think tankers and university people, the only people who speak are the government people. The main function of the event is to provide a diplomatic platform for the government. That’s the game that we are in. We are trying to help the governments talk to one another by providing this platform.
Kaiser: It’s terrific, and it doesn’t sound like you do much than to proactively shape the agenda. You don’t title panels and that sort of thing. Right?
James: I mean, I can talk about this for many hours because this is, in a sense, what my job entails. To give you an example, for instance, you are not very likely to come to the Shangri-La Dialogue and find a plenary session about climate change. It’s a sort of slight struggle that we have internally because we do like to use the dialogue to promote issues that are of strategic importance of which the defense and security implications of climate are one. We do have some side events where we can sort of focus on these narrower topics, but if you ask a defense minister to come and give a speech to all of their peers in Asia, they don’t really want to talk about climate change, or they don’t only want to talk about climate change. They want to give a comprehensive overview of their country’s strategic position and their concerns. Our agenda reflects that. Typically, if I think about the agenda this year, you will have plenary topics of the type of building a stable and balanced Asia Pacific. So, quite broad, and giving the ministers the space that they feel that they need to say what they want to say. Then we have these smaller side events where we will look at slightly more focused issues. Last year, we looked at Myanmar, for instance, as a flashpoint in the region, or maritime security. This year we have six of these sessions. One of them looks at cyber. There’s one that looks at the balance of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific region, which really is a kind of code for the fact that that will be a session where people will talk about Ukraine and the after-effects of the Ukraine conflict. We try to balance the specific issues that are of interest to people with the fact that we are also in the business of providing a platform for these ministers. We have to, in a sense, sort of provide them the kind of platform that they want.
Kaiser: This being a show about China, I do need to ask, Chinese Minister of Defense, Li Shangfu, will be attending, but according to Demetri Sevastopulo, he will not be meeting on the sidelines with Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. What do we know so far about that? Or I imagine it’s not something you can talk comfortably about, but any guidance on that?
James: Well, what I would say, we, as IISS, don’t set up bilateral meetings. In a sense, that would be, if we were a kind of dating service, then that would be a whole level of organizational complexity. You have, as I discovered when I took this job, a whole infrastructure of defense diplomacy, which maybe none of your listeners will be familiar with. So, you have these civil servants who are called defense attachés, whose job it is to talk to one another and set up all of these meetings. In the run-up to Shangri-La, this is when the defense attachés in Singapore own their paycheck, and they go and set up all of these meetings. I remember last year, on Thursday night, I was sitting having a meeting with someone in the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel. I glanced over to the other side of the lobby, and I saw the defense attaché of the United States and the defense attaché of the People’s Republic of China meeting in the corner of the lobby.
It was pretty clear that they were meeting in order to establish the parameters for the meeting that would happen between Wei Fenghe and Lloyd Austin, the subsequent day. The story that you’re referring to, so Demetri Sevastopulo, who is probably well known to many of your listeners, is The Financial Times, sort of China watcher in chief in Washington. He wrote a story saying that although it is widely expected that Lloyd Austin and Li Shangfu will attend the Shangri-La Dialogue, there may not be a bilateral meeting this year. The reason for that is that Li Shangfu has been sanctioned by the United States for, nothing to do with his current role, but a role that he had previously. While that isn’t a challenge for the United States side, as in the U.S. has said, well, we’re very happy and we would be quite keen to meet with Li Shangfu, it is a challenge for the Chinese side.
What Demetri was picking up was that the Chinese side were not happy with the fact that these sanctions had been placed on their defense minister, and that they weren’t feeling minded to meet with the United States until the sanctions had been lifted. There’s then been a couple of other stories. There was a story that went around where Secretary of State Tony Blinken hinted or appeared to hint that maybe the sanctions would be lifted. There was then a subsequent clarification from the State Department that actually there weren’t any plans to lift the sanctions. Exactly where that stands, I’m not sure. I suppose all I would say on this is let’s wait and see what happens. There are various gradations of meetings that can happen in these settings. Last year, Lloyd Austin and Li Shangfu had a sort of formal sit down for an hour.
I obviously wasn’t in the room, but that’s the most that you can have. It is possible to have smaller meetings. They call them pull-asides meetings that are shorter, that don’t fit the category of a full bilateral. Equally, it is always possible that this is a form of negotiation on both sides as they talk to one another about how a meeting would happen. I think, let’s wait and see. Let’s wait and see what happens. It’s still entirely possible that they do meet. One of the reasons why there is at least reason for hope that they will meet is that, again, this meeting happens in Southeast Asia, and the Southeast Asians, in common with many other observers of the region, will be keen to see that the United States and China are talking to one another.
It’s not a good look to turn up in Southeast Asia and not appear to be being conciliatory on either side. Both the United States and China have an incentive to go that extra mile because that is what the region would like to see. Let’s see what happens in the end. There haven’t been many meetings between the two sides, and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that bilateral relations are not good. There’s not much back and forth between the security establishments of China and the United States, and that’s part of the problem of the situation that we’re in. We’ll see. It may be that at the last minute, a meeting is possible, and to keep our fingers crossed.
Kaiser: Minister Li does, according to reports from the Japanese press, plan to meet his Japanese counterpart, Hamada Yasukazu. Japan’s rearmament, I think they’ve allocated something like $320 billion to expand the Self-Defense Force, is bound to be something that they discuss. It’s something very much rattling China these days. How do things look on this sort of Sino-Japanese front right now, especially after G-7?
James: I think that a lot of what the U.S. calls the allies and partners are also trying to calibrate a response with China. They don’t want to be seen to be more assertive than the United States, as in to be out in front of where Washington happens to be. They’re all trying to strike their own balance. The Japanese, as you say, have recently had a new national security strategy, and they have committed to nearly doubling defense spending in the near-term, which is a big, big change in Japanese defense posture. I was in Washington about two months ago, and in February, the U.S. and Japan had just come off a series of meetings that happened in January. There were so many of them that I sat in the Pentagon with one of the senior officials there who described it as Japanuary because there had been so many U.S.-Japanese meetings.
So you have a kind of funny balance that Japan is trying to strike. On the one hand, Japan is very pleased that the relationship with the U.S. is going, well, its relationship even with the Republic of Korea is going quite well at the moment. You have this thickening of the bonds between the U.S. and its allies in the region. Japan will want to talk about that and to, as their prime minister did last year, kind of sound a warning about the trajectory of the region and also to be critical of some of what they perceive to be China’s assertive or unhelpful behavior. On the other hand, Japan and China have a very important economic relationship. Prime Minister Kishida has tried to strike that balance. The same, incidentally, is true of Australia.
Australia has been moving in a much more hawkish direction on China. Its recent defense documents and reviews have revealed that AUKUS is part of that picture. On the other hand, they’ve also been trying to reestablish, in effect, a normal working relationship with the Chinese. As your listeners might recall, Australia and China fell out after Australia’s previous Prime Minister had a few choice things to say about the origins of COVID, and basically the Chinese whacked them over the head with some economic sanctions on…
Kaiser: Barley.
James: Yeah, barley, wine, lobster. I think lobster. There were various things that were removed. One of the aims of the Albanese government has been to put that relationship back on a stable footing. I don’t think that they are in the mind of thinking that they’re going to have a kind of wonderful, sunny relationship with Beijing, but they do want to be able to talk to one another. The defense ministers want to talk, the senior officials want to talk. There’s been a kind of move by Canberra to try and get that relationship back on a kind of regular footing in which they can talk to one another about common issues. So, they will also be trying to strike that balance.
Kaiser: The Europeans as well. I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that Europe has gotten a whole lot more interested in security in the Asia-Pacific region just in recent years. If that is so, and I think that it is so, is this increased interest reflected in the number and the size of European delegations at the Shangri-La Dialogue this year?
James: We do actually have probably the largest group of Europeans coming that we’ve ever had. We have all of the ones that you would expect. As I say, I’m not going to go into the specific names, but, basically, most everyone you’d expect to be coming is coming. The issue for the Europeans is an intriguing one, and it’s all wrapped up with Ukraine. You’re right that over the last three or four years, a number of European countries have been saying, “We want to do more in the Indo-Pacific.” The United Kingdom has what it used to call a tilt to the Indo-Pacific. It sent one of its new aircraft carriers on a tour around the region. France styles itself as a native power to the Indo-Pacific because it has a whole bunch of islands that it controls. And so, it has a big footprint.
It also has been doing this, the Germans, the Dutch, a couple of others. The European Union itself, so the high representative, Josep Borrell is coming to the Shangri-La Dialogue, and has said that on social media. They’ve all been saying, “Well, we want to do more in the Indo-Pacific, and that’s partly to do with China, as they are thinking about, how do you manage the rise of China? But it’s also, as the world’s economic center of gravity moves east, not just to China, but also to Southeast Asia and elsewhere, they want to be part of that conversation. Ukraine raises interesting questions about that, as European countries don’t spend that much on defense. If they’re suddenly having to focus most of their resources on trying to push back the Russians, do they then have any money left over to do anything meaningful in the Indo-Pacific?
There’s been some skepticism about this new European engagement. I mean, a little bit of this is a kind of post-colonial hangover, as in there is, to be fairer, residual skepticism of the West in general in some parts of this region, and its intent over Ukraine and in general because of their colonial legacy. But really, it’s a skepticism about resources where the idea that the British and the Germans and the French, or the Canadians as well, you might put into this bracket, want to do more in the Indo-Pacific.
Countries like Singapore or Vietnam or Malaysia aren’t against this. They’re not opposed to it. I mean, they’re slightly worried that all of these European countries coming into the region might make things more unstable rather than less. They’re slightly worried that they might antagonize the Chinese in some way and make the region more complicated. But really, they’re also worried that the Europeans just won’t have the resources. Basically, they’ll say that they’re going to come over and do interesting things in the region, and then when push comes to shove, they’ve got big problems on their own doorstep. That’s what the main sort of task, I think, for the Europeans is to come over and tell a story about their role in the region where they are upholding what they call the rules-based international order, but not doing that in a way that destabilizes the region that, in a sense, is unnecessarily antagonistic towards China, but also comes with money. As in, sort of show us what you’re actually going to do that is useful. Don’t just come and make speeches about the future of the Indo-Pacific, but show us what you’re going to do that’s practical and helpful, that’s going to make our region more stable and more prosperous. I think that’s the challenge the Europeans have.
Kaiser: James, you seem to have completely embraced the rebranding of the region as the “Indo-Pacific.” To me, that’s always been a loaded word, a loaded phrase. And it’s quite recent, right? You’ll own. What does that mean now that it has become the term of preference among, well, western governments, military, security, and intelligence agencies? What is the connotation of Indo-Pacific as opposed to the Asia-Pacific?
James: I should say that we, as IISS, actually don’t use that language. If you look at all of our literature, almost exclusively, we say Asia-Pacific. If you look at the plenary titles in the Shangri-La Dialogue, they all say Asia-Pacific. We have always had that, and we haven’t changed it. To be fair, the rest of the region outside of China, now almost everybody uses the Indo-Pacific. The heritage of this was a Japanese rebranding that began under Prime Minister Abe, really as a way of getting the Indians more involved in wider Asian security discussions.
Kaiser: Well, I mean, what does that really mean? That means getting the Indians involved in the encirclement of China as Beijing sees it, right?
James: I mean, yes, from Beijing’s point of view, that’s exactly what it means. What the Japanese wanted to do was to bring India into this broader conversation about, how do we manage the rise of China? And therefore conceive of the region as one in which India played a full part. This was a time in which Japan was trying to set up the Quad as a grouping. I mean, this goes back to 2009, I think, when Abe first started doing this.
Kaiser: Oh, I guess it’s quite recent.
James: Yeah, the end of the last decade was when it really kicked off. Gradually, because the Japanese first and then the Americans, and then the Australians, and then the Indians started using the Indo-Pacific. Then the Southeast Asians, somewhat reluctantly, said, okay, well, we’ll use the Indo-Pacific too, but we use it in a slightly different way. Everyone has a sort of slightly different meaning, but it has just become the term that most people use, and why? I suppose the reality that it reflects is that India is an important part of this region, and it is now increasingly hard to think about security in Asia without India playing a full part. I mean, you’ve seen this, just as we speak, over the last couple of days, you saw Prime Minister Modi taking a trip to the Pacific Islands.
Prime Minister Modi is in Australia today as we speak, speaking in front of a football stadium. Particularly within the context of President Biden canceling his trip to Australia and his trip to Papua New Guinea, it’s a mini moment in which India is taking a lot of the profile that would’ve come for the U.S. president. I think in that sense, there is a kind of an archness to the use of the word Indo-Pacific. As you say, it’s not one that the Chinese have been keen on because they see it as geopolitically loaded. But it does reflect a reality in the region, which is that China is moving west and its footprint in the Indian Ocean is increasing, and increasingly India is moving east. India’s sense of its strategic space now is east of the Malacca Straits. India has strong relations with Japan, with Australia, with Vietnam, and some of the Southeast Asian countries. So, I don’t think it’s entirely a kind of neat turn of phrase. It does reflect an underlying reality. As someone who lived in India, India is much more of a player now in the broader regional security than perhaps it was 10 years ago.
Kaiser: China’s Minister of Defense, Li, actually went to India in early May. That was the first visit, I think, by the defense minister since the ugly brawl in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh in, what? Summer of 2020? Can you talk a little bit about what came out of that visit?
James: Yeah. We were very pleased to see this because Defense Minister Li Shangfu has traveled twice since taking office. The first time was to go to Russia where he traveled with President Xi to visit President Putin. Then he went to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting which happened in India. And there wasn’t a great deal that came out of that. As you note, relations between China and India are pretty frosty at the moment. I mean, that is as a consequence of these border clashes that happened in 2000, which came pretty close. More close than most people realize, to a full conflict between India and China and which have become, basically, a barrier to having proper cordial relations ever since. The geopolitical consequence of this is that India has been, you could say pushed or has decided to associate itself much more closely with the West, with the United States, with the European countries, with Japan and Australia in particular.
Ukraine, I think, gave people a slightly false impression of India’s position. During the Ukraine crisis, people noticed that India was not willing to do what the West wanted it to do, which was to kind of criticize Russia and unpick itself from its heritage — defense ties with Russia, which is a big defense exporter. But if you look at what India is doing as opposed to what India is saying, then month by month, India is getting closer to the countries that are also concerned about China’s rise. So, the United States principally, but also Japan and Australia in the Quad, and then some of the European countries. That is primarily because India sees China as its number one security threat. It doesn’t like the fact that China is popping up in the Indian Ocean, Chinese military exercises, and Chinese submarines.
It doesn’t like the fact that the Chinese are building infrastructure on the other side of the border in the Himalayan Mountains. You have this very frosty relationship between India and China, where India sees a big problem. China, oddly, doesn’t really see a big problem. I mean, we at the IISS, had a meeting recently with some senior officials from China and India, and the striking thing about that, the meeting itself was off the record, but the gist of the meeting was the Indians saying, “We’ve got a big problem here.” And the Chinese saying, “Actually, we don’t really have a big problem.” We’re Asian countries, we can sort this out. And the suspicion on the Chinese side that a lot of what the Indians and other partners of the United States in the region, these complaints were being kind of orchestrated from Washington, I think is a suspicion that exists on the Chinese side.
The Chinese side sometimes finds it a little difficult to recognize that China’s actions in the region are prompting concerns from countries like Japan and Australia, and India that are entirely separate from their relation with the United States. India is an example of that, where India feels very threatened by China’s rise and China’s behavior. The fact that China is economically much more powerful than India and getting more so. That its military is more powerful. Therefore, it’s taking steps to try and balance that in classic international relations terms. Partly it’s trying to grow its own economy and invest in its own military, but it can’t invest quickly enough in its own military to balance China. So, its best option is to draw closer to those other countries who are worried about the implications of China’s rise. That is why if you see the Indian Foreign Minister, Mr. Jaishankar is a very dynamic, eloquent diplomat. He’s always dashing around the world, and he spends a lot of time building bridges with America and the European countries and Japan and so on.
Kaiser: Building those bridges, but also reaching out now increasingly to the global south. You tweeted recently that, “The contest”, I’m quoting you here, “between China and India, rather than China and the West, for who really is the leader of the global South, remains one of this year’s most intriguing subthemes, especially given India G-20.” So, you think that for leadership of the remnants of Bandung, now the contest seems to be between China and India?
James: The West, as in the rich democracies, recognize that they have a problem in the aftermath of Ukraine, which is they all see the Ukraine crisis in these very stark, sort of mannequin terms — Ukraine, very good, Russia very bad. In much of the rest of the world, they don’t see it like that at all. In Southeast Asia, only really Singapore has done much of what the West was hoping other countries would do in terms of condemning the invasion and introducing sanctions. If you go and talk to people in Indonesia or Malaysia or Vietnam, they’re much more equivocal about what’s going on in Ukraine. The West has, I think, recognized that it has a kind of problem with the global South. And both China and India see themselves as natural leaders of the world’s emerging economies.
China in the aftermath of COVID, has launched a number of initiatives. In fact, the session at which it’s widely expected the Chinese Defense Minister will speak at the Shangri-La Dialogue is titled China’s New Security Initiatives. They have the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and now most recently, the Global Civilizational Initiative. They’re putting kind of flesh on the bones of these things. Particularly the development and security initiatives are designed to reach out to emerging economies in Central Asia. You saw the summit last week when China met with the five Central Asian countries in South Asia in the Pacific Islands, and then outside of Asia, in Africa and Latin America.
India is also trying to position itself as the natural leader of those countries, and its chairmanship of the G-20, a lot of that is speaking to that agenda on climate change, on post-COVID economic recovery, on a whole bunch of issues, which are not to do with great power competition or whether or not we’re going to have a war over Taiwan. They’re meat and drink concerns about development, which are the primary focus of leaders of most poorer and emerging economies. Right.
Kaiser: Right. My sense is that even as this kind of bipolar frame is being pushed by some of the participants, the United States in particular, this sort of U.S. versus China, or democracy versus autocracy dimension of geopolitics that’s being pushed. At the same time, the importance of emerging countries like India and Indonesia, of course, is increasing, it’s greater and greater. This is maybe a force that’s tweaking it into a more polygonic arrangement rather than a dyad. How would you characterize this in increasingly complex geometry?
James: Even though China and India are not very cordial with one another, they share a vision or they share elements of a vision for the way the world should be in the medium term, which is a multipolar world. Which, by definition, means one in which Americans and Europeans have relatively less sway than they have at the moment, given the accident of their economic development and colonial histories. So, I think that there is an overlap there. At the moment, it still makes sense to think of the region as dominated by the two superpowers. I mean, really, only the United States is a full-spectrum superpower. China approaches it on some dimensions of power, but not all. Everybody else is a league step below that. For instance, if you look at our friends at the Lowy Institute who produce the Asia Power Index every year, they have a reasonable attempt at quantifying this, using a whole bunch of different indicators. Their research shows that the U.S. and China are just in a different league. The U.S. is sort of marginally more powerful in the Asia-Pacific region, to use that title, then China, and then you have Japan, India, Australia, the Republic of Korea, and then sort of downwards through the Southeast Asian countries in terms of various aspects of power. I think it’s fair to say that the region is becoming more multipolar. India styles itself are, what Mr. Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister, calls a leading power, which he defines as one that is in a sense the dominant power in its sub-region, meaning India wants to be the dominant power in South Asia, but one that increasingly is able to shape the global conversation, as in one that in common with the United States.
China and, to some degree, the European Union and Russia, are able to sort of lay down some of the rules of the road, or at least have a say in the rules of the road that govern the global system, whether those are economic or security. Over time, it’s perfectly clear that India is going to become a kind of great power of its own, absent some disaster that we’re not kind of anticipating, but on a normal safe to assume trajectory in a period of time, India is already the largest country in the world by population. That will continue. China’s population will decline. India, given where it is in its economic growth trajectory, let’s imagine that it grows at 4% or 5% a year for the next couple of decades, then India is going to become a far more significant pole in the regional conversation. Then I think most people would assume that you have a sort of security picture in this region where you have three poles. You have the United States, China, and India as the dominant players, and then a range of middle powers, and others around there.
That’s okay. If you’re sitting in Southeast Asia where I speak to you this morning, actually, the Southeast Asians are quite happy with that as a future vision. The thing that they didn’t like was in the Obama era where you had talk of a G-2. Basically, the U.S. and China would come to some agreement with one another and kind of carve up the region because that gave the middle and smaller powers no agency whatsoever. They would basically have to agree with whatever division of labor the U.S. and China came up with. The notion of a more fluid multipolar order is one that people, in theory, like. The difficulty is how do you deal with problems in that circle? That’s the issue that we’re at, at the moment, if the U.S. and China are basically not talking to one another, and they are competing with one another across a number of domains, which are likely, in some circumstances, to lead to conflict of a sort, at least bad feeling.
If the United States is coming and hitting China over the head with semiconductor regulations, and then China decides that it’s going to retaliate in this way because they’re competing with one another, well, that competition has a nasty habit of spilling over into conflict of one form or another. And that’s even while putting flashpoints like Taiwan to one side. I think that’s the challenge. In theory, a more multipolar region in which the United States and the Europeans are not as dominant is one that most people in the region are kind of broadly supportive of. The question is, how do you run that region? What are the security rules? Who’s in charge? How can you diffuse conflicts? That is the transition path that we’re on, and a big part of why the region at the moment is so unstable.
Kaiser: And why you’re convening Shangri-La Dialogue. This, of course, brings us back to the bilateral relationship between the United States and China. I want to devote what remains of our time to prospects for a thaw right now in that relationship. As you know, Biden spoke very directly about the likelihood of one. He actually used that word likely at the G-7. Watching the G-7 from Beijing, that might have sounded a little bit jarring following on, as it did, what Beijing saw as kind of a gathering of hostile foreign forces, all making common cause against China. Beijing’s response was, unsurprisingly, pretty cold. By your lights, where are we right now? Does the groundhog not see his shadow or are we in for a longer winter?
James: I think the big picture is bad, and there are some reasons to have a sort of glimmer of optimism. If you go back to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in the latter half of last year, that was really the low point of where things reached. I think people in the region in particular found that very shocking, for two reasons. Firstly, when you looked at it on television, it really did look like the beginning of World War III. You had sort of missiles flying and things that looked like a blockade, and it looked very bad. And so, obviously, not just in this region, but elsewhere, people were very spooked by that. I think that level of anxiety has tapered a little bit. I mean, you had some meetings that were more positive since then.
You also had idiosyncratic moments like the balloon which caused problems. I think the challenge that we have is a pretty simple one, which is that there’s a lot of downward pressure on the relationship. As the U.S. and China compete with each across a whole range of different domains, the risk is, as I said, that that in and of itself causes conflict, or at least it causes ill feeling. It’s quite hard to see what these guardrails that the American side talks about actually are in practice. It’s not really in China’s interest to have these guardrails. If the Americans say, “Well, we can compete across all of these areas but we’re not going to do these things,” that would, in a sense, remove China’s room for maneuver. And so, the talk of guardrails, it’s never actually been very clear what these guardrails might amount to.
We’ve never really had that conversation. You are left with attempts to have high-level dialogue to manage the rough edges of the competition. The reason why I say cautious optimism at the moment is you have had a period in which there haven’t been any unexpected balloon-like disasters, and you have had a series of reasonably cordial meetings. Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor, met with Wang Yi, the former Chinese Foreign Minister.
Kaiser: In Vienna. Yeah.
James: You had a somewhat conciliatory speech in tone from Janet Yellen, the U.S. Treasury Secretary. You’ve seen a bit of reporting about potential visits later in the year and bilaterals involving figures like Commerce Secretary, Gina Armando Katherine Tai, the trade rep, and their opposite numbers in Beijing. You also have, this year, a particularly kind of propitious diplomatic calendar because you have the G-20 meeting in India where President Biden and Xi can meet, and then the Apex Summit in the United States, and the rather intriguing prospect that President Xi may come to San Francisco to the Apex Summit. If both of those two things happened, then Biden and Xi could meet twice in the second half of this year. The one thing that you can generally say about the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China over the last three or four years is that when the two leaders speak, they make things better rather than worse. They have met only once in person, but they’ve had five or six phone calls. Typically, and this gets into a topic which I think is very core to what you talk about on Sinica, the challenge is you have these two systems in the U.S. and China. They operate very, very differently, these two bureaucratic systems. But the incentives within those two systems veer towards escalation, as in it’s very hard for a senior administration official on the U.S. side to be out in front in Washington saying, “I would like to offer this olive branch to the Chinese,” because they will then get whacked over their head by people in Congress. Marco Rubio will suddenly be on their case.
Kaiser: Because he wouldn’t otherwise be, right?
James: I mean, the Chinese system is more opaque, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption among the China watchers who know the system better than me, that the same set of incentives exist if you’re a senior Chinese official. That going out on a limb and saying that you’re going to try and come up with some new cooperative initiative with the Americans would be quite risky, particularly if you don’t think that you’ve got the full backing of President Xi. What tends to happen at these meetings is Biden and Xi sort of give people air cover to move in a slightly more cooperative relationship. In a sense, it diffuses the kind of somewhat bad-tempered exchanges that happen at lower levels of the system. It opens up space in which cooperation can happen. And that cooperation can happen at a number of levels. I mean, it could be on things like climate change. One thing that happened after the Pelosi visit is the Chinese shutdown of the bilateral dialogue on climate change. One of the things they discovered was that it was very unpopular in the Pacific Islands. The Pacific Islands started talking to China and said, “Well, why on earth are you doing this? You’re not being very helpful to us. We really need you to talk about climate change. And so, China would get some pushback. Eventually, they restarted that dialogue.
Kaiser: In fact, John Kerry is going to go to Beijing later this year. This year is, as you said, a fairly propitious year. Ryan Hass wrote about this today in Brookings, talking about how in 2023, there is no election in Taiwan, there’s no election in the United States, there’s no major Party Congress in China. The political calendar is a relatively free one where there is room to maneuver. And if, as you say, some of this summitry opens up a space for a little more political maneuver on both sides, there is room for optimism. I wanted to point out a piece that you wrote in the Straits Times, which I thought was interesting, and which I’m surprised you didn’t bring up, because this really fits into the narrative that you were talking about just now, how the Biden team, you wrote, ‘actually was quite deft in its handling of the Tsai Ing-wen visit to the U.S. and her meeting with house speaker Kevin McCarthy. And I agree. I think that was handled. That gave me a lot of hope. I mean, I had to tip my hat to the Biden administration for the way that they handled that as well. Can you talk a little bit about that and say what you think this says about their current intentions when it comes to the bilateral relationship?
James: Yeah, I thought this was a really interesting example of the complicated position that policymakers are in, in the U.S. As I said, I was in Washington about two months ago, and the thing that struck me was that, as in any government, there’s a sort of divide within the U.S. administration about how you handle China. There’s a bunch of people, many of them in the White House in the National Security Council, who are spending their days thinking about new competitive measures to kind of target China. So, we’ve done semiconductors, now we’re going to do outbound investment screening, and we’re thinking about cloud computing and submarine cables, and who knows what else. Areas in which the U.S. needs to up its game on competition with China. But then there’s another group of officials who are worried that the bilateral may be spinning out of control, and that you could sleepwalk into conflict without wanting to. There’s a conversation going on within the administration at all times about, how do we handle this? One of the things that they noticed about, first, the Pelosi visit was that it didn’t look very good in the region, putting it very frankly. People in Southeast Asia, where I sit, blamed the United States for this. They felt that, why did you need to go and do this thing? It was unnecessarily provocative, and Beijing reacted like this, but what did you expect that they were going to do? It made the U.S. system look disorganized. It didn’t look great for the Chinese system, and it made the Chinese system look maybe excessively escalatory, but on balance, I think most people in the region thought the U.S. shouldn’t have done this for good orle.
There were people in the White House who learned some lessons from this, and they saw the fact coming, very early, that if there was a change in the majority after the congressional elections, there would be a strong incentive for whoever the Republican speaker was to go to Taipei. They sort of set about trying to manage this. Now, they don’t get the only credit for this. I mean, part of the reason why Speaker McCarthy decided not to go was because, I think, the government of President Tsai in Taiwan said, “Look, this wouldn’t be very helpful for us either from a bilateral relations with Beijing,” or indeed for the potentially, I mean, I wasn’t privy to any of this, but one could imagine the fact that people realized it might not be very helpful for the election prospects of President Tsai’s party, where there is an election in the early part of next year. Some credit also is due to McCarthy himself, who clearly decided that on balance that doing something this provocative, with respect to China, might not be the best thing to do early in his term as speaker.
But there was a lot of work being done in the National Security Council and the State Department behind the scenes to try and manage this. There was a senior official from the State Department who went to Beijing around the time that this was kind of looming, and at least part of what they were up to was trying to kind of work out how you didn’t have this spin out of control accidentally. As in, people knew that the Chinese would respond to this, but the level of response that they came up with was calibrated. In some ways, it was a little bit further forward from what they did before, but it wasn’t something that spooked the region in the same way as Pelosi. But the politics of this, very briefly, either it was very difficult for the White House to talk about this because if they talked about the fact that they had carefully choreographed this and found a way of making sure they didn’t spin out of control, they could have been portrayed, domestically in Washington, as being a bit soft on China, and you would’ve had the kind of the hawks on the hill going after them. They had managed this thing very responsibly in exactly the way that many in Southeast Asia would’ve wanted, but they didn’t really tell anybody, so they didn’t get any credit. I thought that was just an interesting episode of the complexity of the way that handling this relationship from both sides, from Beijing and from Washington. How difficult it is for them to try and manage the back and forth of the ties between Beijing and Washington.
Kaiser: Well, now they have gotten a little bit of credit, and I always like to go out on a kind of positive note with that.
With that, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your morning during what is certainly an insanely busy time for you with the start of the Shangri-La Dialogue just 10 days away. James, what a pleasure to speak with you. Let’s move on now to recommendations. But first, a quick reminder that if you like the work we’re doing with the Sinica Podcast, with other shows in our network with things like The Signal with Lizzi Lee, which is just fantastic, then please support our work by becoming an Access subscriber to the China Project. You will receive our newsletter, the Daily Dispatch, you’ll unlock that terrible paywall so you can read all the great stuff on our website. Do your part, become a subscriber, and help us out. All right, on to recommendations. Hopefully, you’ve had a little chance to think about this. What do you have for us, James?
James: Well, I suppose one recommendation I would have is that all the bits of the Shangri-La Dialogue are available to watch online. I mean, it’s a bit of an unfriendly hour of the morning if you’re sitting in North Carolina, but you can watch all the speeches online on YouTube, so everything’s on the record. I would thoroughly recommend all of your listeners do that. In terms of a book, this is a history book that I thought I might recommend. An Australian historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book about a decade ago called The Sleepwalkers. You see this pop up from time to time. There are these books that have become light motifs in the U.S.-China bilateral. I mean, the most obvious one or it’s not quite so much a book, but a phrase — Graham Allison talking about the trap that he wrote about in his book. But you do from time to time, see people talk about The Sleepwalkers. Henry Kissinger talks about it. Anyway, I read it over Christmas. It’s a big thick book about the run-up to World War I.
Kaiser: World War I.
James: It talks about the accidental process in which the then, the six powers, who were sort of contesting Europe stumbled into a war, to the point that in the six months prior to World War I, if you look at the sort of diplomatic proceedings, people thought the relations between the great powers of Europe were as good as they had been in a decade. It’s a really fascinating dive into a period of history that I didn’t know very well. And I read it because you hear people talking about the risk of the U.S. and China sleepwalking into a conflict over Taiwan that they weren’t really anticipating or intending to get into. And so, I suppose, I felt that while none of these parallels are exact, the periods of history are very different, the regions are very different. There’s all sorts of different parallels. I felt that I learned something interesting, in particular about how little the bureaucrats of the time really understood what was going on.
They were very confident that they knew what they were trying to do and what they were heading towards in relations in early 20th-century Europe. In actual fact, it turned out that a lot of the forces that were at play were ones that they were only kind of peripherally aware of. And I thought that that held some quite deep lessons for the kind of, the people that we have at the Shangri-La Dialogue, because in that room, those 600 people are the people who, to some greater or lesser extent, are going to decide whether or not the century ahead is peaceful or whether it’s going to be one of conflict. There’s a certain kind of modesty that I think should come from reading history and understanding that your predecessors who are often very confident in the position that they’re in, and then history shows that they should have been much more circumspect about how much they knew and the decisions that they were taking. So, I would recommend that. It’s very well written for a history book. Christopher Clark tells a good story, and I got a lot out of reading it. So, that would be my recommendation to you.
Kaiser: It’s a fantastic book. I mean, most people have read The Proud Tower or The Guns of August, but if you really want to understand how the First War broke out, how the Great War broke out, this is really what it’s all about. I heartily endorse that recommendation. Let me recommend something myself that bizarrely I hadn’t read. I don’t know why because I’ve read pretty much everything else that John le Carré had ever written, but I had somehow missed A Perfect Spy. And not long ago I was reading a kind of biography or just sort of… I can’t even remember where it was. It was like in the New York Review of Books or something, talking about John le Carré, and singing the praises of this book. I suddenly realized I hadn’t read it, and so picked it up and it… I have to say it’s this recency bias speaking, but I think it’s his best. Actually, it probably is my absolute favorite of his. I mean, the prose is just outstanding. It’s very autobiographical if you haven’t read it. It’s all about his relationship with his father, who was a conman of epic proportions as is the main character of this, the father of the protagonist. There are all sorts of pains to great literary figures like German literary figures like Stefan Zweig, I think I detect that in there. I think there’s some sly references to it. And to Thomas Mann. And it just happens that I’ve been reading a lot of that recently. So, this is just perfect.
James: If you’d let me come in and do another, Kaiser, I last year read, belatedly, The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré’s sort of autobiography, which is also just a wonderful book. I mean, it’s not really a kind of, I was born in this year, and then I sort of did this and did that. He basically tells a series of a dozen stories of elements from his life, some of which I think have kind of thematic similarities to A Perfect Spy, his relationship with his father, his early work for the UK Secret Intelligence Service, completely fascinating and very jolly. I mean, it’s a book that’s written in the style of a man telling a good series of… A raconteur telling stories over a long dinner. And it was just a great joy to read.
Kaiser: Well, you don’t need to recommend that book to be invited back onto the show. I hope to have you on really soon. I put out a note to Ely Ratner to see. I imagine he’ll probably be going with Secretary Austin, and hopefully he’ll respond and come on for a sort of post-game with me. But if that doesn’t happen, gosh, I would love to have you back in any old time. What a fantastic conversation. I had so much fun talking to you, James.
James: Thanks so much, Kaiser. Keep doing the pod. It’s an enormous kind of public service that you do, kind of curating these conversations about China. So, you have a big fan base in Singapore and elsewhere around the region.
Kaiser: Thank you so much. That’s very encouraging to hear.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows on the Sinica Network. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week. Take care.
