For the Open Questions series of interviews with global opinion leaders, Josephine Ma speaks with Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defence. Nye is university distinguished service professor, emeritus and former dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and has been ranked among the top 100 global thinkers. He discusses China’s soft-power challenges, its economic and technological hurdles, the state of relations between Beijing and Washington, and the chances of an armed conflict breaking out.
You are most well known in China for your book on soft power and even former Chinese president Hu Jintao mentioned it in the 17th party congress report. China has invested heavily in expanding its soft power and President Xi Jinping has told officials to “tell the China story well”. How do you comment on these efforts? What are the achievements and what are the failures, and why?
Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment and China has a good deal of soft power growing out of the attractiveness of its traditional culture and the success of its economic performance. So it’s doing well, but if you look at polls that were taken recently in 27 different countries asking which countries were most attractive, China did not do so well in Asia or Europe or North America or Australia.
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It did pretty well in Africa, but I think that in that sense, it is not getting a very good return on its investment. And I think the biggest problems for Chinese soft power are in Asia, the conflicts that China has with a number of its neighbours such as with India over the Himalaya border. And the other problem that it has which affects Chinese soft power in democratic countries, like Europe or Japan or Australia, is the insistence on tight party control, which means that civil society does not have the full range that it has in European countries or United States and so forth.
So you have a great artist like Ai Weiwei, and he gets crosswise with the party or with the government, either goes to jail or to exile and that hurts your soft power. So does China have soft power? Yes. Could it do more? Yes.
You said earlier that relations between China and the United States should be based on “managed competition”. Amid the rivalry and hostility between the two countries, how can China engage the US in a more effective way?
I think having the contact at the high levels is important and I think the meeting between presidents Xi and [US President Joe] Biden last November was a very useful step. But it would also be useful to find some issues which demonstrate to public opinion that the two countries benefit from cooperating, and probably the best candidate for that is climate change. Both countries will be hurt by climate change and also pandemics because Covid wasn’t the last pandemic. There are more that are going to take us by surprise. And having good scientific cooperation and public health cooperation, I think it is clearly beneficial to both countries.
A lot of people are watching the US presidential election closely. How are the results going to affect US-China relations and what are the possible scenarios?
One possible scenario is if Biden is re-elected, I think you will see a continuation of the policy as we’ve seen it over the last three or four years. The other scenario is that Trump is elected and that is much more unpredictable because Trump himself is very unpredictable, and you never know quite what his policies will be. But he has threatened to put high tariffs on Chinese goods. So one possibility would be a trade war.
You mean a full-scale trade war between China and the US?
Yeah, I think it’s a very bad idea, but Trump has talked about it.
Do you think the risks for armed conflicts [between China and the US] will increase if Trump is elected?
I think there is always a certain danger that could grow out of something in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, a miscalculation. I think the danger is there whether it is Trump or Biden, but I think it’s a little more dangerous under Trump.
Joe Biden knows how to work with US allies, but Donald Trump seems to isolate himself from a lot of countries. Will it benefit China if Trump starts isolating the US from its allies?
The allies that are probably most at risk if you believe what some of the things Trump said in his first term would be for Europe, the Nato allies, and that does not directly affect China, except the extended effects – Russia.
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But in Asia, Trump has not had that sort of threat to the alliance with Japan or Australia. So I don’t know whether it would make as much of a difference in Asia as in Europe.
You have said the US and China were not destined for war. One reason you mentioned was that the two economies were intertwined. You also mentioned China’s productivity growth had peaked in 2015. How do you see China’s economic development in the next five to 10 years and its role in the global economy?
China has done very well economically and it should get full credit for that. But I think China is now facing another, or different problem, which is sometimes called the middle income trap: a decline in its population and the workforce has peaked.
The answer to the declining workforce is technology and productivity to replace workers. But if you look at the statistics, China’s total factory productivity has been going down, not up. And then if you ask where we get the new technology, most people would say it comes mostly from private entrepreneurs.
But instead the policy recently has been to encourage state-owned enterprises more than private enterprises. So those are three trends which I think make it unlikely that China will return to the high levels of growth that it had in the past.
And when you talk about how this will affect the China competition, there are some people in Washington who exaggerate the China threat. I think in fact, we should not exaggerate the China threat, and if you look at the economic prospects that I describe, that would be my reasoning.
Some scholars have predicted the Chinese economy might surpass the US in certain years. From what I’ve heard from you, that would be an unlikely scenario.
I think it’s unlikely. I mean it used to be conventional wisdom that China would pass the US in total size of the GDP at [current] rates by 2030. I would take a bet that that does not happen.
China has been promoting the idea of new production forces, which means developing new technologies and training as much talent as possible for the new tech sector [as a driver for economic growth]. Do you think it is achievable, or will there be a bottleneck if China sticks to its policy to prioritise the state sector?
China has done well in some technologies and some state-owned enterprises are quite good at technology. Generally speaking though, when you have a state-owned enterprise, it tends to be responsive to politics rather than fully exploring the options in technology.
Entrepreneurs are more likely to explore things that are not obvious. So China will make progress in technology. I think it would make more progress if it gave more free rein to private entrepreneurs.
We mentioned briefly about the possibility of armed conflicts in the region. There are a lot of things going on in the South China Sea for the time being, such as the stand-off between Chinese and Philippine ships. How do you assess the risk of armed conflicts in the South China Sea?
I don’t think it’s high risk. I think both sides want to avoid armed conflict, but sometimes in relations between states and history, people miscalculate and the Philippines does have an alliance with the US, and you can conceive of a situation where if China treats the Philippines too badly, the US tries to help it and that one thing may lead to another that neither China nor the US want or expect but they get themselves into deeper water than they originally intend. So, I don’t expect a conflict in the South China Sea, but I don’t rule it out either.
On Taiwan, some scholars have predicted there will be a war. They believe Beijing may invade Taiwan in certain years. But many Chinese scholars said that is not possible unless Taiwan declares independence. What is your assessment?
I think it’s very often cited in Washington that President Xi would like to have the PLA ready to be able to take over Taiwan by 2027. I don’t know whether that is what he thinks or not. But that is often cited in Washington, which makes a lot of people talk about providing defences to protect Taiwan from a military takeover.
I don’t personally think that is likely. I think we saw in the failure of Putin’s ability to invade Ukraine and take over Ukraine quickly a lesson, which is that a big land army cannot do it, then amphibious invasion over a hundred miles of sea is going to have a very hard time.
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So I don’t think that the prospects of a military conflict are as high as some people in Washington think. On the other hand, I think it is very important that the United States maintains its adherence to the one-China policy and the way the United States interprets the one-China policy is no de jure independence for Taiwan and no use of force.
That has worked for 70 some years and I think it can continue to work, which means that as Nixon and Mao put it: Chinese people on two sides of the Taiwan Strait will have to work out their relationship. If we adhere to that policy then I don’t think there will be a war.
China has made it clear that it wants to challenge what it calls the “US hegemony”, which refers to the post-war world order led by the US. China has tried to come up with alternative global structures and economic blocs such as Brics, the SCO and Belt and Road Initiative. It has also reached a lot of currency swap agreements in settling trade deals. Do you think these moves will pose a challenge to the US and the post-war world order?
I remember China has done very well from the post-1945 world order. It has provided an international economic framework in which China has benefited very greatly and in that sense, as some people say, that China wants to overthrow the playing board, the chess board or whatever, and I think a better way of putting it is that China does not want to overthrow the table on which the game is being played, but it would like to tip the table a little bit in its favour. And so things you mentioned are efforts to tip the table.
I don’t think it will succeed in terms of replacing the dollar, for example, as a key reserve currency because the dollar is about two-thirds of the holdings of governments in reserve. A reserve currency depends upon deep and flexible capital markets convertibility and the rule of law. And China is not willing to go that far soon. So yes, China will have more clearing of trade, and the renminbi will have more interactions with the countries you mentioned, but I don’t think it’s going to overturn the post-1945 world order.
China has been trying hard to promote the so-called e-yuan, which is a digital currency under the control of the government. A lot of people believe China is trying to bypass the United States. And also, when things go wrong, the US cannot sanction China the way it sanctioned Russia by banning the use of SWIFT. Do you think the development of digital currency will succeed in challenging the US dollar?
When you look at the role of the dollar or any currency, it has different functions. One function is a payment to clear trading accounts. And so the digital one would be useful for that. But the other value, or important role of currency, is a store of value: how you hold reserves, how your banking system is organised, and the digital yuan is not going to escape the problems I mentioned earlier about the reserve currency. So it will have some effect, but it will not be a total overthrow of the dollar.
You are a supporter of free trade, but you also mentioned we can coerce through economic means. What do you think about US restrictions on Chinese chips and other sanctions, and the talks about divesting TikTok in the US?
On TikTok, I cannot get all that excited about it, but it’s worth noticing the problem of reciprocity. Why should Americans allow TikTok to transfer information about Americans when China does not allow Facebook to operate inside China? So there are a number of people who feel that China’s not playing fair on this and that is the issue of TikTok.
On the issue of chips or high technology, if it relates to security then I think there’s grounds for slowing down the transfer of technology, but it shouldn’t go to the economy as a whole. National security adviser Jake Sullivan called this “putting a high fence around a small yard”. So in the small yard of things of technologies that directly affect security, I think that is justifiable. I think China does the same thing.
So I think the danger I see would be if people think that total trade war would be a good idea. I think that is not a good idea.
In your view, what were the best and worst policies China has made in terms of dealing with the United States in the past 10 years? And vice versa, what were the best and worst China policies made by the US?
I think the biggest mistake that China has made was thinking after the 2009 financial crisis that the US was in decline, and dropping Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy and replacing it with a more assertive foreign policy. Some people have called it wolf warrior foreign policy. I think that was a bad decision.
I think a good decision by China was agreeing to work together with the US on climate change by both of us adhering to the Paris climate accords in 2015. And I think that is an example of a good decision by the US as well. I think that is one of our better decisions regarding China. On bad US decisions. I think Trump’s use of tariffs against China strikes me as a bad decision.
But I think we have to realise that in both governments, people make mistakes and do things that are good and do things that are not so good. So I’m afraid we’ll see more good and bad decisions in the future.
Let me follow up on that. Some Chinese scholars said the rise of China’s power was so obvious that China could not lay low and hide it as [it did] during Deng Xiaoping’s time. That is the argument why China has to be more assertive. What’s your comment on that?
Well, I think people who take that view have to ask themselves, has China been better off? And I would say that before you dropped the Deng Xiaoping policy, you did not scare other people and you were very attractive. It was good for your soft power. Once you start being a wolf warrior and asserting yourself, you scare people and you lose some of your soft power. So I think the evidence is in the behaviour that you’ve seen.
What would be your suggestions or recommendations for China to expand its soft power and to become more attractive on the global stage?
I think participating in things which you might call global public goods. Such as I’ve mentioned on climate change or dealing with pandemics and so forth. When you’re associated with producing things that are good for others as well as good for yourself, you become more attractive and it also reduces the degree of tension with other countries.
So I think in a sense increasing your participation in things that produce global public goods is probably the best way to increase soft power. It’s good for China. It’s good for others.
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