Category: In the News

On June 23rd, 2023, Gaston Sigur Professor David Shambaugh authored an article for China-US Focus titled “A ‘Thaw’ in Frigid U.S.-China Relations: But for How Long?”.

A “Thaw” in Frigid U.S.-China Relations: But for How Long?

Originally published in China-US Focus | 23 June 2023

American Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a two-day official visit to Beijing on June 18-19, in an effort to reopen attenuated channels of communication between the two governments and to stabilize the fragile relationship that has sunk to its lowest point in decades. Both the Chinese and American governments have independently come to realize that the bilateral frictions have reached a very serious point. Recent naval encounters in the Taiwan Strait and air encounters over the South China Sea between the two militaries—in which Chinese ships and fighter planes were accused of acting in “dangerous and unprofessional” ways—were further reminders of how dangerous the relationship has actually become.

Secretary Blinken’s visit was the first by the U.S. Secretary of State to Beijing in five years. His visit had been postponed following the January-February “balloon incident,” when a Chinese reconnaissance balloon overflew sensitive military sites in the United States before the U.S. Air Force shot it down just off the Virginia coast. Thereafter ensued a four-plus month attenuation in high-level communications between the two sides (primarily because the Chinese side refused to talk). Thus, in Beijing, Blinken emphasized that simply restoring such in-person, high-level, and official communications was the first of three goals of his visit. The other two goals were to candidly exchange views on areas of disagreement between the two sides and, thirdly, to explore potential areas of bilateral cooperation. Far more was achieved on the second goal, with little apparently on the third one.

Upon his departure, the State Department said that Secretary Blinken had “underscored the importance of responsibly managing the competition between the United States and the PRC through open channels of communication to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.”

The theme of “responsibly managing competition” is not a new one from the Biden administration. Indeed, it has been the single overarching theme in the way that the American side defines the relationship. However, the Chinese side has never endorsed this framing and definition of the relationship and has repeatedly rejected it (the two sides have argued over this American description of the relationship going back to the initial rocky encounter in Alaska). In fact, this time, none other than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (with whom Blinken had a 34-minute meeting in the Great Hall of the People) explicitly told him: “Major country competition does not represent the trend of the times.” But Xi also said that “China respects the interests of the United States and will not challenge or replace the United States,” while adding: “Similarly, the United States must also respect China and not harm China’s legitimate rights and interests.”

Xi also told Blinken that both China and the world seek a “stable” U.S.-China relationship and that “the vast expanse of the Earth is big enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.” Xi went on to tell Blinken what the Chinese side expects from the United States: “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.” Xi also claimed: The inclusion of “peaceful coexistence” is relatively new terminology for the Chinese and it harkens back to language used by the former Soviet Union during the Cold War). Xi did not repeat his often-used depiction of the United States as trying to “contain, encircle, and suppress” China, but he did have customary tough words concerning the Taiwan issue, warning and reiterating that Taiwan is the “core of China’s core interests.”

If President Xi was more oblique and balanced in his brief interactions with Secretary Blinken, his discussions with State Councilor Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Qin Gang were much more lengthy and difficult. Blinken and Wang had five hours of discussions while Qin and Blinken had seven hours together. Taken together with the Xi-Blinken meeting, the Secretary of State had more than twelve total hours of discussions with his counterparts in Beijing. The U.S. side claimed afterwards that Secretary Blinken was accorded due respect in all of his meetings, although one U.S. official characterized these exchanges as “sharp.” Officially, the U.S. side described these talks as “candid, substantive, and constructive” (just by being candid and substantive, it can be concluded that they were constructive).

Taiwan occupied (by far) the greatest amount of their time (one-quarter of the total time according to U.S. officials). Blinken repeated that there had been no change to America’s longstanding “One China Policy,” but the Chinese side pointed out a number of American actions they see as provocative and inconsistent with the four-decade old policy. Indeed, the issue of Taiwan has never been more volatile and potentially dangerous than at present. State Councilor Wang Yi (China’s top diplomat) reportedly told Blinken that the Taiwan issue was one in which “China has no room for compromise and will not back down.”

One dimension of this instability in the relationship is the real potential for an accidental collision between American and Chinese military ships or planes (of which there have been several recent close-calls). The U.S. side believes that it is therefore of utmost urgency that direct military-to-military communications be restored (which were broken off by the Chinese side following the balloon incident). But, following his meetings, Secretary Blinken noted there was “no progress to report” on this front.

Wang Yi also took the United States to task for having a “wrong perception of China,” and “hyping the China threat theory,” which he claimed was the “root cause” of the two country’s problems. Wang and Foreign Minister Qin Gang also demanded that the U.S. stop attempting to “suppress” China’s technological development through a combination of export controls, corporate sanctions, controls on U.S. outbound investment, and domestic laws that subsidize American industries. For his part, Blinken went out of his way to tell his counterparts that the U.S. does not seek to “decouple” the two economies—but only to “de-risk” and “diversify” in certain narrow commercial sectors and technologies directly affecting U.S. national security. The Chinese side rejected this distinction.

The two sides also discussed the war in Ukraine, the China-Russia relationship (with Blinken again warning China not to undertake direct military assistance to Russia for use against Ukraine), the China-Iran relationship (including Chinese assistance to Iranian drones and other military systems used by Russian forces against Ukraine), and North Korea’s continuing missile launches, nuclear weapons program, and other provocations—all issues on which there was apparently no agreement. Chinese violations of human rights, internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, restrictions of rights in Hong Kong, investigations of and pressure on American companies in China, and detentions and exit-bans of American citizens in China were also raised by Secretary Blinken. No Chinese concessions were reported on any of these issues (although the detention/exit ban issue may see some progress in coming months). Also discussed was the contentious issue of Chinese trafficking of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances directly to the United States (and via Mexico), which has become the leading cause of death to American citizens. Climate change was also discussed, and there may be a resumption of senior exchanges in this area.

Thus, the agenda of Secretary Blinken’s discussions in Beijing were lengthy and complex. While “profound differences” emerged, both sides agreed on the importance of “advancing dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, and high-level interactions” (according to the official Chinese readout). Both sides concluded by agreeing that progress had been made in “stabilizing the relationship,” and they would continue such interactions. We can thus expect the exchange of ministerial (cabinet) level exchanges in the coming weeks and months.

Overall, while no concrete agreements were announced and apparently no differences were substantively narrowed between the two sides, the simple fact that senior officials engaged in such extended and candid discussions is definite progress in what remains a troubled and very volatile relationship.

On April 26th, 2023, Gaston Sigur Professor David Shambaugh was profiled in an article for GW Today titled “Global Society is David Shambaugh’s Classroom”.

Global Society is David Shambaugh’s Classroom

Originally published in GW Today | 26 April 2023

In the spring of 1974, David Shambaugh, B.A. ’77, boarded a train in Hong Kong bound for the border of mainland China.

A few days earlier, a British traveler had filled Shambaugh’s ears with stories of “Red China” and what it was like inside the country. Shambaugh, who was traveling the world while on a gap year from his undergraduate studies, wanted to see for himself.

As much as he could, anyway.

Despite a limited opening in the early 1970s highlighted by President Richard Nixon’s dramatic visit in 1972, the United States and China had not yet agreed to normalize relations—something they wouldn’t do until 1979. Shambaugh could only look across the border he was not yet allowed to cross and saw what he describes as a sea of barbed wire fences and rice patties—and mystery.

“[China] intrigued me because the Cultural Revolution was going on, and here was the biggest and most populous country on the planet, but foreigners in general and Americans in particular weren’t allowed to go there,” Shambaugh said. “That became a puzzle for me.”

That intrigue has burned for five decades, while he has become internationally recognized for his scholarly work involving contemporary China and international relations of Asia.

Shambaugh, the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science and International Affairs and the founding director of the Elliott School’s China Policy Program at George Washington University, has been selected for many honorary awards and appointments. He has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Hinrich Foundation, the British Academy and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has been a visiting scholar or professor at universities in Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan. He has delivered lectures all over the world.

In addition, Shambaugh has served on the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Advisory Board of the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), East-West Center Fellowship Board and other professional bodies. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and member of its board of studies and has been a participant in many public policy and scholarly organizations. His expertise is much sought after as he serves on numerous editorial boards and has been a consultant to governments, research institutions, foundations, universities, corporations, banks and investment funds.

Most recently, he was awarded two prestigious fellowships for the 2023-24 academic year. He will spend September through January as a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. (He was previously a fellow from the Wilson Center from 2002 to 2003 and served as director of its Asia program from 1987 to 1988.) From February until June he will move to the west coast, where he has been appointed as a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. During both fellowships, Shambaugh, a prolific and award-winning author, will work on his next book project titled “Disillusionment & Disengagement: How China Lost America.”

“The Hoover Institution is delighted to have appointed Professor David Shambaugh as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow during the 2023-2024 academic year,” said Hoover Institution Director and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “David is one of our nation’s leading scholars of China and U.S.-China relations, and his presence will contribute much to our community of scholars.”

His work has earned praise from some of the world’s most prominent leaders and organizations of international affairs, and GW has been a big part of his legacy.

The early years

After returning from his in 1974 from his trip around the world, Shambaugh felt inspired to focus his studies on Asia, and he wanted to be closer to politics and policy. Washington, D.C., made the most sense, so he applied to several local universities. While he got into all of them, he thought GW had the best Asia studies program, so he transferred in for his junior year from the University of New Mexico to study at the then School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA).

At the time he enrolled, GW was home to the Institute of Sino-Soviet Studies (ISSS), which was one of the leading U.S. institutes for the study of the communist world. He was intrigued not just by China, but communism as a political system. He studied under well-known faculty members. One of those was Gaston Sigur, the former director of ISSS and noted expert on Asia whose namesake is on the chair Shambaugh now holds—which he describes as quite an honor. Sigur is also memorialized in the university’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies. While at GW, he also met his wife of now 40 years Ingrid Larsen, B.A. ’76, in a Chinese class.

After graduation in 1977 Shambaugh was selected for an internship in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research for a summer, which led to him being hired as a full-time analyst. There he first covered China, and then Indochina. That job propelled him to another opportunity to work for the National Security Council’s Asia Bureau at the White House during the Carter administration. This was during the immediate run-up to normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, which he said was a fascinating and unique opportunity.

In fact, Shambaugh was on the South Lawn when China’s Vice Premier Deng Xiapong came to the White House in January 1979 to commemorate normalization, and he personally met the Chinese leader three times during his visit.

“For a young person coming out of GW, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity had I not gotten the internship in the State Department in the first place,” Shambaugh said. “GW really was instrumental in launching me not just in Asian studies, but also into the policy world.”

He went on to earn his master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) before enrolling at the University of Michigan’s Ph.D. program in political science. There he studied under Michel Oksenberg, with whom Shambaugh had worked under at the National Security Council.

Shambaugh studied and lived in China three times once Americans were allowed to do so: during the summers of 1980 and 1983 at Nankai University in Tianjin and Fudan University in Shanghai, and then for two full academic years between 1983 and 1985 at Beijing University. Shambaugh was the first foreigner allowed to study international relations at a Chinese university. He spent two years at Beijing University researching his doctoral dissertation, taking classes and playing on the university’s basketball team, which remains a great thrill in his life.

“We went 56-5 over two years, won two city championships and went to the national tournament twice (the Chinese equivalent of “March Madness”),” Shambaugh recalled. “I am still in touch with many of my teammates, and this was one of my best experiences getting to know Chinese people.”

Coming back

After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan’s Department of Political Science, and a one year stint as Director of the Asia Program at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in 1988 Shambaugh accepted an appointment at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and its Department of Political Studies.

He said he very much enjoyed living in London, exploring England and the European continent. “I developed professional relationships across Europe that I maintain to this day,” he said. Not only was he thriving professionally—he was also appointed editor of the prestigious journal “The China Quarterly” during this time—but his two sons were born there, and it was going to take quite an opportunity to pry him out of London. Then one came calling.

There was an opening at the time for the directorship of the Sigur Center of Asian Studies at GW. Then Elliott School Dean Harry Harding, who held the post from 1995 until 2005, solicited Shambaugh’s application. After being selected by the search committee in GW’s Political Science Department and the Elliott School, for the 1997-98 academic year Shambaugh and his family moved back to the Washington area, where they have been ever since. He had returned home to GW.

“Had it been another university that had invited me to come back to the United States, I may not have done it,” he said. “But this was my alma mater, and the chance to really continue to build the Asian Studies program that Gaston Sigur and my mentors had established. That was just too hard an opportunity to decline.”

For 26 years, GW and the academic community have benefited from his three-pronged approach to academia. First and foremost, there is teaching. “I love the classroom, and I believe it is a very important public good to train students of the next generations and stimulating young people to study China and Asia,” Shambaugh said.

Second, research also drives him . His particular areas of research and publishing have been in Chinese domestic politics, China’s foreign relations, modern Chinese intellectual history, China’s military and security and the international politics of Asia. He has authored significant books and countless articles on all of these topics.

And third, there is public education. He feels it is a scholar’s responsibility and obligation to share their knowledge with the world around them. “I believe the public is also my classroom,” Shambaugh said. “I think the more educated our country is about international affairs, the more informed they are and the better our nation’s engagement with the world will be.”

As China has risen to become a major power in world affairs, demand for Shambaugh’s expertise has grown concomitantly. His expertise is solicited in every corner of the globe. He has lectured across the world so many times Dulles International Airport is a second home. He gives about 30 guest lectures a year, inside and outside the United States, and he has extensively shared his knowledge through countless op-eds, over 200 published articles and 35 books.

He has adopted this outward-looking approach with the China Policy Program, which he founded in 1998, which serves as an outreach program to the Washington, D.C., policy community, as well as China specialists around the world, the media and the public.

Shambaugh has found it very rewarding to watch and be a part of GW’s growth. That includes the Elliott School, which (at the time when it was SPIA) occupied a little townhouse on H Street that it shared with the criminology department when he first arrived as a student in 1974. Now, it is housed in a beautiful, state-of-the-art building on E Street across from the State Department. It is home to more than 2,800 current undergraduate and graduate students, quite the uptick from when he first arrived at Foggy Bottom. Over time, a regional studies center has been established for virtually every area of the world. It has taken hard work, he says, to build the Elliott School into a leading and truly comprehensive professional school of international affairs.

That includes growth in the Asian Studies program, which Shambaugh has experienced as both an undergraduate and now a chaired faculty member.

“We have an internationally renowned faculty offering multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Northeast, Southeast and South Asia,” Shambaugh said. “Our curriculum is also policy-focused, and our graduates gain employment in the U.S. and foreign governments, in consulting firms and NGOs, in business, journalism and other professions. GW prepared me well for a successful career in the field, and since then I and my faculty colleagues have trained new generations of Asianists.”

It is needed, he said, because today’s world needs the best and brightest to solve challenging issues in that key region of the world.

Today’s world

While being a scholar, contributing to the discourse on U.S. foreign policy is also important to him. He is frequently called upon to brief high-level administration officials. And right now, U.S.-China relations are quite tense. Military conflict between the two superpowers is not unimaginable, he says.

He describes experiencing the U.S. and China relationship since 1979 as a roller coaster. In the 1980s, he says there was a tremendous amount of hope, promise and enthusiasm between the two countries. Those positive strides ended temporarily with the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, but gradually resumed in the mid-1990s and lasted a decade-plus.

He first noticed changing attitudes of the Chinese toward Americans when he was living in Beijing as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2009-10. After several decades of enthusiasm, positivity and dramatic growth in different dimensions of the relationship and participating in academic, student, NGO and economic exchanges, the relationship had become fraught. There has been a real seachange in American thinking about China, and my next book project will explore the reasons for it,” Shambaugh said.

He says China, which had become a much better global participant and global citizen, has more recently moved in a more assertive and concerning direction. China is working, he says, against the West and the liberal international order in favor creating a more diffuse but illiberal order.

“At minimum, they are competitors, at a maximum they are an adversary,” Shambaugh said.

Taiwan is a real potential flashpoint. He believes the American public should educate themselves on the history of the Taiwan issue and how it pertains to U.S.-China relations. Tensions over Taiwan’s status are rising, as China has vowed to unify the island with the mainland, using force if necessary. There is a growing fear that the U.S. and China could actually go to war over Taiwan, as Shambaugh asserts.

He wants to make it clear that current Sino-American tensions are between the governments, ruling parties and militaries. He says the Chinese people are “wonderful,” as he has experienced in his many trips to the country and six years of living there. He also says there has been a lot of good rapport between Americans and the Chinese over the decades.

This is why it as imperative as ever to continue sharing his knowledge with the world while teaching Chinese studies and East Asian studies to students, he said. He does his best to prepare students in the nuances of international affairs in Asia, and he incorporates his lived experiences and scholarly findings into lectures to provide students with substantive knowledge.

“Maybe I’m an old school professor, but I believe it’s incumbent upon us to actually substantively educate students. The classroom is for knowledge transmission. But I also try give them a set of real professional skills—each one of my assignments is geared to training a different skillset, such analytical writing, primary source research, teamwork, forecasting and other practices that they will encounter in the work place,” Shambaugh said.

In his 26 years on the faculty Shambaugh has contributed a great deal of knowledge and expertise to his students in Asian studies at GW, and he expects to continue for another 5 to 10 more years. He has lived out the university’s commitment to creating a better world.

On November 30th, 2022, Gaston Sigur Professor David Shambaugh, authored an article for Foreign Affairs titled “China’s Underestimated Leader: The Legacy of Jiang Zemin“.

China’s Underestimated Leader: The Legacy of Jiang Zemin

Originally published on Foreign Affairs | 30 November 2022

Authored by David Shambaugh, GWU

When he was thrust into the limelight as China’s paramount leader in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Jiang Zemin was dismissed by many analysts as a likely short-lived transitional leader. At the time of his sudden elevation, despite having been Shanghai’s party secretary and former mayor and having already served as a member of the ruling Politburo for two years, Jiang was a relatively obscure figure, even within China. He had almost no senior political patrons of any import, no real ties to the main party factions, no relations with the military, and no geographic base other than Shanghai. Jiang was personally selected by Deng Xiaoping on the recommendation of other party elders, as he was a good compromise candidate in the aftermath of the purge of party leader Zhao Ziyang and the brutal crackdown at Tiananmen.

Yet Jiang, who died on November 30 at age 96, proved to have remarkable staying power. He remained at the helm for a full 15 years until finally relinquishing his last position, chair of the Central Military Commission, in 2004, having given up the other important positions of general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Even after he was forced to retire, Jiang continued to wield considerable clout behind the scenes for another decade, influencing elite politics and policy through most of the reign of his successor, Hu Jintao.

Fatefully, Jiang also approved the promotion of Xi Jinping to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2007, clearing the path for Xi’s rise. Although it cannot be said that Xi was one of Jiang’s protégés, he had been on Jiang’s radar screen at least since the first decade of this century. Jiang and his wife often vacationed in the scenic city of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, whose party secretary at the time was Xi. And Jiang had come to tout the “Zhejiang model,” Xi’s approach to private-sector-driven economic development. In his final years, Jiang said nothing publicly about Xi’s role in contemporary Chinese politics. Yet one can only imagine that he watched Xi with discomfort. When it came to both Xi’s policies and his leadership style, China’s current leader has turned out to be the very antithesis of Jiang.

FINDING HIS FOOTING

Early on in his tenure, given that he was a largely unknown quantity, Jiang earned the dismissive nickname “the flowerpot”—for being ornamental but serving little practical function. The initial foreign impressions of Jiang were that he was a classic apparatchik, a dull bureaucrat lacking in intelligence and personality. But as time passed and Jiang consolidated power at home and earned respect abroad, it became apparent that he was the very opposite of these descriptors. He displayed a buoyant and lively personality; he was gregarious and even egotistical. He was well educated, too, a cosmopolitan and cultured intellectual with broad knowledge of many fields and foreign cultures. By no means a bureaucratic robot, Jiang had his own informed ideas about policy. He understood the intricacies of scientific and industrial modernization and had mastered the art of forging bureaucratic coalitions and balancing opposing factions. He had a keen sense of the equilibrium between control and toleration in politics, the economy, and society.

Jiang was born into a well-to-do family in Yangzhou, a charming city in central China near the Yangtze River that had a rich cultural and commercial heritage dating back to imperial China. In secondary school, he was exposed to a variety of literatures, philosophies, histories, foreign cultures and languages, sciences, and music. He was an accomplished player of the erhu (an ancient Chinese string instrument) and a proficient pianist. He dabbled in the violin and loved to sing. His repertoire ranged from Elvis Presley love songs to Italian opera. (When the tenor Luciano Pavarotti visited Beijing in 2001, Jiang joined him on stage in singing “O Sole Mio.”)

Jiang’s Yangzhou middle school education was deeply influenced by its Western (mainly American) curriculum. It was then that he began to learn English, mainly by repeating speeches such as the Gettysburg Address, which he would later recite verbatim with pleasure for visiting Americans. Jiang came to refer to this as the “bourgeois” stage of his education. Like many intellectuals during the period of Nationalist rule, Jiang believed that only Western science could modernize China. His generation was deeply influenced by the liberal outlook of the May Fourth Movement of the 1920s, China’s first mass nationalist movement, which also touted science and democracy as the prescription for modernizing China.

Jiang studied electrical engineering at the prestigious National Central University in Nanjing, which merged with Shanghai Jiao Tong University while he was there, and graduated in 1947. All his classes, textbooks, and assignments were taught in English, thus further grounding Jiang in the language, and he supplemented his coursework by reading English literature and watching American films. “I received a lot of education in capitalism and Western culture,” he later reflected. Jiang’s English was by no means fluent, but it was good enough to carry on rudimentary conversations throughout his life. Surprisingly, his American educational background did not cost him politically during Mao Zedong’s many anti-American and anti-intellectual campaigns. A key factor protecting him was that his uncle, who raised Jiang, was a Communist Party martyr. Moreover, Jiang himself had embraced the communist cause early, becoming a pro-communist activist during his university days and joining the party in 1946.

After the establishment of the new communist state, Jiang began his long career in China’s heavy industrial sector—being assigned in rapid succession to main industrial planning body in Shanghai, then to the First Ministry of Machine Building in Beijing, and then to the gargantuan Changchun Auto Works in northeastern Jilin Province. In 1955, Jiang traveled to the Soviet Union as one of 700 Chinese sent for training in the Soviet system of heavy industry. He spent two years at the Stalin Auto Works outside Moscow, seeing up close how mass production lines operated and how the state-planned economy worked. He also learned to speak fluent Russian and read Russian literature, and he reveled in singing Russian songs at vodka-fueled drinking sessions with Soviet experts. Jiang personified the period of Sino-Soviet solidarity.

After returning to China, Jiang was reassigned to the sprawling Changchun vehicle production complex. Thus began three decades of working his way up through China’s industrial planning apparatus. Jiang specialized in electronics and served in the country’s machine-building ministries, which were the heart of its military-industrial complex. Like most other cadres, Jiang was sent to a so-called May Seventh Cadre School for two years of manual labor during the Cultural Revolution, but in 1971, he was fortuitously sent abroad to serve as an industrial liaison officer in China’s embassy in Romania.

Throughout, Jiang’s career was in industrial economics, not politics. It was only in the mid-1980s that he held his first administrative position in the party, serving as a party secretary in the Ministry of Electronics in 1984. From there, he was appointed mayor of Shanghai in 1985 and then party secretary of that city two years later. Jiang adroitly managed to disperse the large-scale protests of May 1989, which had spread from Beijing to Shanghai and dozens of other cities across China, and he closed down the liberal World Economic Herald. These acts brought him to the attention of Deng and other senior leaders in Beijing, who were then wrestling with how to end the massive protests in Tiananmen Square. Following the recommendations of party elders, Deng decided that Jiang was the right man to replace Zhao, the disgraced reformist leader who was purged on the eve of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

CHINA’S FIRST REAL POLITICIAN

During his early years in office, Jiang ruled in Deng’s shadow, even though Deng had relinquished his formal authority. But Jiang gradually began to exercise his own agency, build a power base, and shape policy. It was a surprising development to those who had written Jiang off as a weak and unimaginative creature of the bureaucracy.

How did Jiang end up becoming China’s longest-serving leader since Mao? He astutely turned his background as a bureaucrat into a political advantage. China may be a one-party dictatorship, but it still has different constituencies—geographic, factional, institutional, patronage based, and bureaucratic. Jiang overcame his initial weaknesses by cultivating various interest groups in the party, government, military, and internal security services bureaucracies. In each case, he adopted their respective institutional preferences and made them his own—effectively co-opting them. He then showered them with resources and promoted their upper ranks.

The secret to success in any political system is to get constituents to believe that you understand their needs, share their priorities, and will advocate for them—and then to shower them with resources. In this sense, it can be said that Jiang was China’s first real politician, as distinct from the Leninist apparatchiks who only implement instructions and policies from above. It was this quality that Jiang drew on to overcome a nonexistent relationship with the People’s Liberation Army, for example. During his first year in office, Jiang visited every one of China’s seven military regions and all four of the PLA’s general departments—telling the brass what they wanted to hear, promoting their officers, and lavishing the military with increased budgets and resources. It was an astute strategy, and it allowed Jiang to not only remain in power but also accomplish a great deal.

During his tenure, Jiang racked up a number of notable successes: overcoming the international condemnation and isolation following the Tiananmen Square massacre, broadening China’s foreign relations, presiding over the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, restoring the country’s political stability, overseeing the longest stretch of sustained high-level economic growth rates in the country’s history, raising living standards, setting the PLA on the path to modernization, and restarting a series of stealthy but significant political reforms (including the “Three Represents,” an initiative to recruit China’s corporate elite and business entrepreneurs into the party). Beginning in 1992, Jiang was the first to encourage China’s state-owned enterprises to “go out” into the world. He coined the concept “socialist market economy” the same year, and in 2000, he launched the “Develop the West” initiative (a plan to economically develop the country’s isolated western provinces of Tibet, Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang). He also took a keen interest in technology and innovation, launching the “Thousand Talents Program” in 2008 to attract overseas know-how to China.

A MAN OF THE WORLD

Jiang clearly enjoyed foreign policy, and he invested his time and energy in it. He took particular delight in bilateral exchanges with visiting foreign leaders, during which his extroverted persona was often on display before the cameras. He reveled in hobnobbing and taking photos with other world leaders at multilateral forums. Jiang often went off message on such occasions, ignoring official talking points and speaking extemporaneously—after which his aides would often slip a version of the prepared text to their foreign interlocutors so as to set the record straight. Jiang, who cackled when he laughed, was unusually gregarious for a Chinese leader, most of whom are tightly scripted. He also had an unfortunate penchant for combing his hair in public.

One of Jiang’s signature foreign policy accomplishments was to repair ties with Washington following China’s post-Tiananmen isolation. In 1996 and 1997, he and U.S. President Bill Clinton exchanged successful state visits. Jiang’s other big success concerned relations with Moscow. It was early in his term, in 1991, that the Soviet Union imploded. The event traumatized the Chinese Communist Party, especially since it came in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests and fall of communist states in eastern Europe. Jiang quickly traded state visits with Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, and initiated a sweeping series of bilateral agreements with Moscow between 1992 and 1997. The fluency in Russian and familiarity with Russians that he acquired in the 1950s served him well.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Jiang oversaw a systematic analysis of the causes of Soviet collapse and lessons to be drawn for China. Overseen by Jiang’s right-hand man, Zeng Qinghong, this painstaking research project resulted not in a consensus but in two diametrically opposed views of what went wrong in the Soviet Union—and therefore what path China should follow. One school of thought held that the Soviet Union’s final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was entirely at fault for the collapse of the system, and that the Soviet Communist Party should never have moved to liberalize the system and society and separate the party from the armed forces. China, this conservative camp concluded, had to resist the urge to reform and instead tighten up the existing system. The other school of thought had a very different take: that the Soviet Union collapsed because of decades of institutional sclerosis that had begun under Stalin, and that the problem was not that Gorbachev had undertaken reforms but that they had come so late that the system couldn’t absorb them. If the Chinese Communist Party was to avoid the same fate, the more liberal school concluded, China’s political, economic, and social systems had to reform and open up in a carefully managed way.

It was this second view that Jiang himself subscribed to and that ultimately prevailed during his time in power. Thus the party undertook a wide variety of institutional reforms. It became more responsive to public opinion, loosened its control over civil society, tolerated a relatively open media and intellectual freedoms, permitted feedback mechanisms within the party, and became more transparent in the making of government policies.

Despite these reforms, Jiang’s domestic record was far from an unalloyed triumph. True, he well outperformed the original expectations for his rule and left a legacy of impressive transformation in everything from the military to higher education to rural industry. Yet it was also on his watch that social inequalities deepened, with the country’s Gini coefficient rising from .35 when Jiang took over in 1989 to .45 in 2002 when he stepped down from his position as party leader. Corruption proliferated, and crime increased markedly. Jiang also had his repressive side. It became particularly apparent in a series of campaigns, carried out under the slogan “strike hard,” against a range of crimes throughout the 1990s. Amnesty International documented almost 20,000 executions during the decade. Jiang is even more closely associated with the crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners—a quasi-religious spiritual movement that emphasizes meditation and breathing exercises. He also launched a far-reaching campaign to indoctrinate China’s youth through the Patriotic Education Campaign.

On balance, however, Jiang’s rule was very successful. He turned out to be no flowerpot. Viewed in retrospect, after a decade of Xi’s dictatorial rule, the Jiang era looks remarkably open and China’s global reputation far more positive. Outsiders don’t know what Jiang really thought about Xi and his rule, although rumors circulated near the end of his life that he was not at all pleased. The few times that the retired Jiang appeared alongside Xi on official occasions, there was no apparent warmth between the two leaders. After all, they had diametrically opposed understandings of the Soviet Union’s demise and the lessons to be drawn for China and the party. The two leaders’ differing styles of rule lie in their diametrically opposed understanding of the causes of Soviet collapse. Both set out to strengthen the Communist Party and avoid a Soviet-style implosion—but Jiang sought a far more open and flexible party, while Xi has made it into a robotic machine under one-man dictatorship.

Professor David Shambaugh, Director of the Elliott School’s China Policy Program, was a speaker at an international conference on “Xi Jinping’s China: What Can We Expect from the 20th Party Congress,” held in the European Parliament in Brussels.

On September 22nd, 2022, Associate Director of the Sigur Center and Director of the Rising Powers Initiative, Professor Deepa Ollapally, authored an article for the East Asia Forum titled “India goes its own way on global geopolitics“. 

India goes its own way on global geopolitics

Originally published on East Asia Forum | 22 September 2022

Authored by Deepa Ollapally, GWU

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coincided with a debate over whether to call US–China tensions ‘a new Cold War’ and a ‘no limits’ friendship between Russia and China. As the United States raced to place sanctions on Moscow, many in the Global South found themselves caught in the crosshairs of a realignment against Russia.

Among the non-committed, India is the largest democracy to strike its own path.

Russia has been one of India’s most steadfast diplomatic and defence partners and a weakened Russia would negate India’s preference for a multipolar global order in which it is an independent and influential pole. Washington’s tendency to group China and Russia as an ‘authoritarian axis’ that threatens the global order is not something to which India subscribes. India sees Russia as a close friend and China as an adversary, while the United States is hostile to both countries.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the contradiction between India and the United States is playing out openly. India and China have been more aligned on UN votes, with India abstaining on 11 UN votes to condemn Russia, withstanding intense pressure from its closest Western partners as well as unflattering international media and public opinion.

India could not be persuaded to join the US-led economic sanctions against Russia as it is generally against unilateral sanctions levied outside the United Nations. New Delhi’s decision to accept Russia’s offer of deeply discounted oil is not entirely surprising, though Western officials and commentators have accused India of taking ‘sweet deals’ from an otherwise diplomatically isolated Russia and indirectly funding Putin’s war machine.

The West’s pressure on India went from pure money to values by characterising the conflict as between authoritarianism and democracy. In a much-watched interaction between visiting British Foreign Minster Liz Truss and Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Truss took a swipe at India’s neutral stance, stating that ‘it’s vitally important for freedom and democracy in Europe, that we challenge Putin, and we ensure that he loses in Ukraine’.

India’s strategic ties with the United States and its embrace of the Quad once suggested an increasing acceptance of the US-dominated liberal order and a weakening commitment to a multipolar world. India and China’s growing adversarial relations also pointed to the limits of their cooperation on global governance and reform.

But Ukraine shows that India’s desire for multipolarity remains. India continues to be a dissatisfied member of the liberal global order despite having made gains through that order. At the June 2022 Bratislava Forum, Jaishankar argued that ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems aren’t Europe’s problems’.

India is the only major power to have membership in organisations that are generally seen by the West as competitive, if not adversarial. Along with BRICS, it is part of the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Quad and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

This wide-ranging membership exemplifies India’s decision to represent and protect its foreign policymaking autonomy and pursue greater global power-sharing. The Russia–China statement — issued after the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics — recognises Indian autonomy and prioritises the relations between the three big powers within the BRICS. In a telling final paragraph, it stated that Russia and China ‘intend to develop cooperation within the ‘Russia–India–China’ format’.

India’s decision to participate in the weeklong military drill hosted by Russia in September 2022 did not sit well with its Quad partners. The United States expressed its displeasure over India taking part in the drills, stating it has concerns about any country ‘exercising with Russia while Russia wages an unprovoked, brutal war against Ukraine’. But US Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre added that ‘every participating country will make its own decisions’, suggesting that the United States would not interfere.

Japan strongly objected to the drills in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan, calling them ‘unacceptable’. In deference to Japan’s sensitivities, India elected to stay away from the maritime component of the Vostok exercises and did not send its warships.

The balancing act between Russia and the West seems to be paying off. There was a flurry of high-level visitors to New Delhi in March and April 2022, including the prime ministers of Japan and the United Kingdom, foreign ministers of China and Russia and a virtual summit with Australia’s Prime Minister. But India’s foreign policy decisions are testing these partnerships and expectations.

There are political minefields ahead for India and its partners. NATO–Russia tensions will surely rise when Sweden and Finland’s requests for membership are taken up. An intensification of the Russia–Ukraine war might force India to choose between its Quad partners and Russia.

India’s earlier intention to achieve multipolarity through the BRICS will be even less tenable if Russia–China relations become ironclad. The notion of a more distributed power system will collide against the reality that closer ties with the United States may appear a better option for India.

At the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine war, India worried that China would gain an enfeebled and dependent Russia as a junior partner. New Delhi stood to lose Russia as a strong and reliable geopolitical partner. Economically, the sanctions on Russia are setting off a process of de-dollarisation that benefits China. The Ukraine conflict could deliver advantages to China that it could not have otherwise secured.

Indian policymakers are betting that Russia will not want to put all its eggs in one basket and that Russia will continue to respect India’s independence. A weakened Russia will still have veto power at the UN Security Council where India has historically been a beneficiary.

India is betting that the level of convergence with the Quad members on China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific is strong enough for them to tolerate dissonance on other grounds. It is counting on its friends to realise that pressure to take sides is unlikely to produce results and may backfire.

India has consolidated its strategic autonomy without economic or strategic costs. Its Quad partners appear willing to tolerate differences — after all, there is no ‘Indo-Pacific’ without India.

New Delhi has been able to set the terms of global engagement in the current geopolitical constellation. But depending on the outcome of the Ukraine war, India’s conception of the type of global order that guards its strategic autonomy may have to be reluctantly refined.

On August 4th, 2022, Associate Director of the Sigur Center and Director of the Rising Powers Initiative, Professor Deepa Ollapally, presented to Congressional staffers for an event titled “Sri Lanka Crisis: Implications for the Indo-Pacific and US Interests in the Region” with the US-Asia Institute. Watch the full recording below!