Transcription
One is many in the Chinese elite believe that the United States is a fading power. I spent all my time trying to disavow them, uh, disavow that sentiment and convince them we're not dying. But Voice of America got in and Radio Free Asia got in, and both have been dismantled by the Trump administration. Um, this doesn't make any sense. It leaves us defenseless. It leaves the entire platform to China.
We've underestimated Chinese power in the world. Those trains are fabulous. We rode those trains. So, and I think the PLA, some people have said, well, it hasn't fought since 1978. What is what it's worth? I've seen the PLA. I think we've underestimated their military strength, their technology strength. And one other thing, the Communist Party of China is strategic.
Fore! Foreign! Foreign! Fore! Foreign! Foreign! Fore! Essentially, how are we doing? Who's ahead? And and how do you know when you get there?
>> Uh Xi Jinping began to say publicly as early as 2020, the East is rising and the West is falling. And in all of my time in China, you know, I met, of course, the entire leadership, spent a lot of time with Xi Jinping and his cabinet. Uh, we went to 26 provinces, met governors, met party, Communist Party secretaries, professors, business people. I think in general, I have two observations. One is many in the Chinese elite believe that the United States is a fading power. They point to our dysfunctional political system and political reality in Washington. They point to our sagging infrastructure. Although President Biden and the Congress, both parties were able to pass a trillion-dollar bill, and let's hope we can rebuild the infrastructure of our country. I spent all my time trying to disavow them, uh, disavow that sentiment and convince them we're not dying.
And one of the ways that I tried to do that was on social media and public diplomacy. But on Weibo and WeChat, there are million, there are hundreds of millions of Chinese on those social media platforms to wage what we call the battle of ideas. You think we're a country of the past. We believe in human freedom. We believe in human rights. And we went after the Chinese on Tibet, on Xinjiang, the mistreatment of the Uyghur population. I was just in Hong Kong this past week and I saw what's happened to Hong Kong and the national security law that has extinguished the political rights of the people of Hong Kong. And so we went on the offensive because they were after us to say, actually, we're not a country of the past. We have a big future. We have self-confidence in our system of government. And so it was a very combative relationship and, um, they used the power of the press to attack me and attack President Biden. But that's part of this push and pull in this relationship.
>> Thank you. So you're actually anticipating something that I wanted to ask about. Um, how public diplomacy, or does public diplomacy actually matter? Of course, at World Boston, in our way, we engage in it. Uh, we, of course, are a big host of the International Visitors Leadership Program. So we think it's important, but, but is it really? Are the Chinese taking, for example, the challenge of public diplomacy seriously?
>> Just for fun. You know, we like the exchanges.
>> So, unfortunately, if you think about the natural advantage that a democratic society like the United States, think of Hollywood, think of our IT system, we should have. We're way behind the Chinese. They have CCTV and CGTN. If you go to any hotel room in the world, you're going to get a Chinese government broadcasting station spewing out a lot of misinformation about us and a lot of misinformation about their model democracy. They call themselves the "whole process democracy." What have we done? Well, Elon Musk and the Doge team destroyed the Voice of America, dismantled it, fired everybody. That was created back in the Truman administration to combat the war of, the battle of ideas we had with the Soviet Union. We figured there are about 300 million Chinese listening behind their firewall. You know, they can't get Google. There's no free internet. They live in a closed environment, 1.4 billion people. But Voice of America got in and Radio Free Asia got in. And both have been dismantled by the Trump administration. Um, this doesn't make any sense. It leaves us defenseless. It leaves the entire platform to China. I'll give you one example. The Indonesian government has a good relationship with both China and the US. So, their state broadcaster until about two months ago gave an hour of time every week to Voice of America and an hour of time to CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster. Well, we destroyed and dismantled Voice of America this past spring and summer. So that second hour, our hour was given to the Chinese broadcaster. So in terms of our outreach to the rest of the world, to explain in 194 other nation-states who we are, what we believe in, to give our side of the story, we've just emasculated ourselves. We have no more state capability in the US government, which we have had now for nearly 80 years because President Trump and Elon Musk decided that it wasn't worthy.
I'll give you another example. The Belt and Road Initiative. I think you've all heard of that. The Chinese have put out about a trillion US dollars to the rest of the world in loans and grants, particularly in the Global South since 2012. We had an organization called the US Agency for International Development. It wasn't perfect, but it was doing a lot of good work. President George W. Bush, through PEPFAR, we were supplying vaccines and HIV treatment and saving not just millions of lives, tens of millions of lives through American assistance. USAID was dismantled in eight days in February of this year. They actually took a blowtorch to the moniker of USAID above the building on Constitution Avenue. 8,000 people were fired summarily, friends of ours, colleagues of ours, in one week. I mean, you didn't go through the organization the way a normal manager would say, "Okay, where's the fat? Who's performing? Who's underperforming?" Every government agency needs a lot of reform, constant reform. But to destroy it in one week and fire 8,500 people, it was just officially dismantled a couple of weeks ago. It has ceased to exist. And so China is out with its tremendous world-breaking in terms of a trillion US dollar program, and we have nothing going for ourselves.
So here's the story to illustrate it. I flew into Lima, Peru last November 15th after our election. President Trump had won, and President Biden was going to have his last summit meeting with President Xi Jinping. And when I landed, I read a New York Times article, front page that day, which had a graphic, and it showed South America. And the New York Times said, "In 2002, the United States was the leading trade partner of every country in South America. In 2024, China was the leading trade partner of every country except for Colombia in South America." And then I turned on my TV in Lima, and there was President Xi Jinping, who'd arrived a day before us, and he was dedicating a $3 billion port for the people of Peru that the Chinese people paid for. Um, you have to admire their ambition, their strategic focus. They are out there trying to claim what you would call in business, market share, but allegiance. They want other countries to follow their model and follow them and choose them, not us. And we have now taken ourselves off the field with the destruction of USAID and Voice of America. Does that make sense for the American people?
>> There is, uh, a meeting between Xi and Trump coming up. Uh, probably.
>> They hope.
>> Probably. Um, so there's that to look for. What, what will you be looking for to accomplish or or or understand from that? And then in the, you know, in the near term, let's, I don't know, pick the 2026 elections as a, a, a near term. What are the key, um, moments in the relationship that you're going to be looking for?
>> Well, I think first, I hope that President Trump and President Xi will be able to meet because the Chinese system is now really a party of one. Xi Jinping is the unrivaled power. Deng Xiaoping's theory after Mao was that Mao, Mao's excesses during the Cultural Revolution nearly ruined China. So Deng said, "We've got to have a committee of equals in the Standing Committee of the Politburo." And that's what he practiced. President, um, Xi Jinping since 2012 has made it into a really an administration of one. So you really can't get anything done in terms of our big relationship with China on these major issues unless you're meeting with President Xi. And, and so President Trump had a pretty good relationship with him in his first term, and they want a meeting. And there's speculation, I don't know if it's going to happen, that there's an APEC, uh, Asia-Pacific Economic Conference meeting in Seoul, Korea at the end of October. Could they meet on the margins of that meeting? We'll see. But here's the kicker. The Chinese tradition is when you have summit meetings, that everything is worked out before the two leaders walk in. So, will Scott Bessent, our Treasury Secretary, and Vice Premier He Lifeng be able to work out a new trade deal that would lower the tariffs between us and also look at some of the other problems in the economic relationship? If they can work that out, I think there probably will be a trade meeting. And since we're the number one and two economies in the world, we've got to hope that we can climb down from these stratospherically high tariff levels and and try to work something out. Think about what's happened on tariffs since January. We began this calendar year with, I think, an effective tariff rate of 2.5%. We now have an effective tariff rate because of the president's Trump tariff policies of 18.6%. These are the highest tariff levels since Smoot-Hawley in 1931. And the great majority of economists in the United States would say that was a critical strategic mistake for President Herbert Hoover to put such high tariffs on our economy, and one of the principal reasons we ended up in a Great Depression. Now, let's hope that doesn't happen with our country. But I think unfortunately, the Trump tariffs have completely made this a wild west globally. The, the world of order that Truman and Eisenhower and JFK and Reagan created on tariffs, on the United Nations system, on a great power peace, is gone. And I think unfortunately, we are now entering a world of disorder. And the tariffs problem right now is a very good example of that. So I think that's the biggest impediment to a Xi Jinping-Trump summit. But both countries have an interest in not having these high tariffs. So let's see if they can succeed.
>> Thank you very much. Thank you, Ambassador Burns. Thank you, World Boston. My name is Lamin Savadug. I want to push a little bit back on the question that you were asked about who is ahead. You know China more, most than more than most people. Some of your academic colleagues think that China has peaked. Some of them think that it's, they are not impressed by the show in, uh, you know, a couple of days ago.
>> Okay.
>> Could you talk to us about the underbelly? We talk about the Evergrande. We talk about the unsustainable, uh, debt at the provincial level. The, uh, infrastructure that looks very impressive, but that those trains are not really running well. The "tofu dregs," I'm sure you've heard the expression. Could you talk to us about the underbelly a little bit? Thank you.
>> Underbelly? Interesting question. It really, I mean, all the questions have been interesting.
>> We could probably organize a course at Northeastern or Harvard or Boston College or BU on every question. Um, I, if Libby were here, she's in the audience. Um, I don't want to force her to come here and speak. There she is. Libby and I have been talking a lot over the last couple of months since we came home to Cambridge, Mass, to say, you know, what did we learn? What did we process? And certainly Libby thinks, and I agree with her, we've underestimated Chinese power in the world. Those trains are fabulous. We rode those trains. You know, you can go from Beijing to Shanghai in four and a half hours, and that's, you know, a thousand kilometers. We have Amtrak's just not like that. If you've read a sellout from Boston to New York. But the level of infrastructure, here's the strengths. The infrastructure. That's one strength. Second, their scientific and technological capacity. That's the coin of the realm in the, in, in our decade, in the next few decades. Which society will turn out more scientists and engineers? Here's a data point. 34% of first-year students in Chinese universities study engineering or a STEM field. The United States of America, 5.6%. And they're a much bigger country. Uh, Harvard graduation, where I teach, when we ask our graduate students to stand up as a class, chemistry majors, biology majors, physics majors, largely Asian-Americans, some American citizens, excuse me, Asians, American citizens of Asian ethnicity or Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese. Last week, when President Trump gathered all the tech titans of the United States in the White House, a tremendous number of those tech titans are Indian-Americans and Chinese Americans or Taiwanese Americans. We're not competing when it really matters for the future, and that's on technology.
So, and I think the PLA, some people have said, well, it hasn't fought since 1978. What is what it's worth? I've seen the PLA. I think we've underestimated their military strength, their technology strength. And one other thing, the Communist Party of China is strategic. And they don't have to worry about, and you know, we want to worry about what the press says. I mean, that's a good thing to have the press challenging the government. They have nobody opposing them. And so they can make big bets over 10, 20, 30 years. Mary and I were mentioning one of them for 35 consecutive years, the Chinese foreign minister, whoever that person is, has made his first trip of the year in January to Africa to show the Africans, you are our priority. I think President Trump never went to Africa in his first term. President Biden went once to Angola for two or three days in December just before he resigned. They're strategic, and we're not competing on that level. So actually, I think the Chinese, in technology, military, economics, are stronger than we think they are, and I think we've underestimated them, and we can't do that any longer. So that's my answer to your question. It's a complicated subject, but thank you.
>> Uh, so, uh, Tim down here. Hi, Tim.
>> So we believe as, as sort of a network, that every person in this room, every person in this country is a citizen diplomat. As the government steps back from diplomatic engagement, what can we all do to fill in that space?
>> So, um, you know, so you know, a lot of this conversation is about what divides us and how tough-minded we need to be, but we also need to be dedicated to a peaceful relationship. And I think part of that is a function of, can we keep the two societies meeting and co- really interrupted things. Data point. There were five million tourists that went back and forth between our two countries in 2019. And I think that number went down to something like 190,000 by 2022 because the Chinese government shut down China. We all quarantined. We quarantined 21 days on arrival, Libby and I. So, uh, we need to get tourism back. Students, we have a healthy number, unfortunately, of America, of Chinese students in America. We had 15,000 American students 10 years ago in China. We went down to 350, 350 by 2022. So I made it a major priority to work with Duke University, Stanford, Georgetown, Yale, um, UCLA, Berkeley to try to get them to come back with their Mandarin language programs, come back with their junior year students, come back with their summer programs because I had this huge advantage as ambassador. My embassy was filled with Americans, diplomats, and military officers who were fluent in Mandarin because they had it in grade school or college. And they had experience, two or three times experience of living in China. And if we keep going at the rate we are, we only have 1,14 students now, American students in all of China, then my successor 10 or 15 or 20 years ago is not going to have the bench I had. And, you know, China is the other great society. So whether you're in business or academics or education or healthcare or government, we need Americans who speak the language, Mandarin, who've been there, who understand the other culture, if we're going to have a peaceful relationship. So funny story, I didn't, my staff didn't know exactly how many students, American students, we had a year ago today. So at a staff meeting, I said, "Call every Chinese university and ask them, how many Americans do you have?" And the number came back about six weeks later, 1,14. In December, I went to Guizhou province, which is one of the poorest provinces, very beautiful place. In China, I went to Guizhou University. I met with the president, 40,000 students there. I said, "Mr. President, I understand you don't have any American students." He said, "We do. We've got one student." And he's right behind this curtain. And he called out this young man, 19-year-old, and I can use his name because he told me I could use his name, Jared Shelley from Berkeley, California. And I said, "Jared, you're number 1,15." He had no idea what I was talking about. I said, "We've upped the number by one." I said, "How did you get here?" It was fascinating. He said, "Two reasons." He said, "My mom and dad are PhDs in Chinese studies from Berkeley." So, in our household, you know, we talked about China and my mom and dad were inspirations. He said, "But the real reason was I had a girlfriend in his Sacramento, California high school from the Miao community, that's a minority community in China, and she was an immigrant to the United States." And he said, "My Miao community girlfriend convinced me that Guizhou University was the center of the world and that I should go to college there." And I said, "So, are you still with her?" He said, "No, we broke up." But it was interesting because as Jared was talking to me, he kept breaking into Mandarin. I said, "Jared, are there any other Americans here?" He said, "None. 40,000 students." He said, "I'm living with six other Chinese guys. It's perfect." He said, "I'd never speak English." And he was becoming fluent in Mandarin. We need more Jarretts because that's the way to keep the peace between societies, integration, cultural integration. The work that World Boston does in receiving Chinese visitors to this country. I walked through Harvard Yard today, huge groups of Chinese tourists around the John Harvard statue. I thought, good, because, you know, we can be hardline on the military, on human rights. The Chinese people are not our enemy, and we have to live in peace with them. And what better way than to understand them? So I, I think it's great that we have Mr. G here from Northeastern, from China, from Guangzhou, uh, here at Northeastern. Can I just say that? Welcome.
>> David Leonard, Boston Public Library. So I get the last question. Um, welcome, uh, ambassador. Um, I want to pull back out to the state of expertise in the federal agencies as a result of this radical change in, um, policies. Because one of the ways to diagnose a problem is to ask yourself, how easy would it be to correct or put it back later? And so I'd love to get your take on, um, the state of our, uh, diplomacy state and international relations capacity.
>> Thank you. And first of all, thank you for maintaining this jewel, the Boston Public Library, for our city. Um, you know, look, I, I spent a long time in government in both Republican and Democratic administrations. I would never say that government's perfect. And because we don't operate in the profit, uh, motive and we don't have to even show a profit or revenue stream, there's a lot of fat in government agencies, not in every government agency, but in many, and I've seen it. And so I've really respected the Secretaries of State. I've mentioned Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, who launched a major reform effort. And sometimes you need fewer people. Sometimes you need to cut the budget. That's totally understandable. But the way we did it in January, February, and March was to bring a bunch of people in who didn't know government, and they were acting, you know, they just fired people en masse without interviewing them, without giving them a chance. These are 30 and 40-year veterans of our government. So, what value do you bring to this agency? None of those questions were asked. They just had, they had quotas. You know, Senator Secretary Rubio just fired 3,000, excuse me, American diplomats. We're a very small service. We're about 15,000 people. That's small for government. There's two and a half million people in the military. They're about 15,000 American diplomats. We just fired 3,000 of them. And they fired people. They said, "We don't want to fire anybody overseas." And so we rotate back and forth from overseas to the State Department. They just picked 3,000 people in Washington, some of whom were just about to go overseas, and said, "Because you're here and we have a quota, you're all gone." And it wasn't done respectfully. Our tradition when we let people go, and I've had to do this as ambassador and as Under Secretary of State, is we respect them. We say, you know, you've got a two-month or three-month window. We're going to treat, we're going to give you a goodbye party. They actually went into the State Department offices and said, "You're out in three hours. Take a box. We're going to watch you as you unpack." I mean, it's just kind of stuff you see on TV. It was done very disrespectfully. So I think when the pendulum swings to another Republican president or a Democratic president, really, I think if a president comes in who really cares about the federal bureaucracy and understands that they have value, we're going to have to recreate these institutions, probably not exact replicas of Voice of America or USAID, but we're going to have to recreate these institutions because China is outcompeting us by a long mile. We're not telling our story. We're no longer vaccinating kids who can't afford to be vaccinated in global South poor countries. It's a shame. It's not where the American people are. We want to be generous. So that would be my answer.
Fore speech. Fore speech.