Will Brehm  0:56
Elizabeth Economy, welcome to FreshEd.

Elizabeth Economy  0:58
Thanks so much, Will. Great to be here.

Will Brehm  1:00
Can you tell me the story of Professor Li Chenjian?

Elizabeth Economy  1:03
Sure. Chenjian Li, or CJ, as he likes to go by, is I think, one of many, many Chinese scientists who was trained in part in China and then came to the United States to receive his PhD. He rose very quickly through the ranks of the US higher educational system. He had a number of impressive positions. He was for a while at Cornell, then ended up at Mount Sinai in New York City where he managed a significant lab. Very popular professor. And all the time, he also continued to maintain his ties with the Chinese community. He served as a sort of representative for Chinese Peking University and sort of the Chinese alumni community in New York City, and really just a wonderful and generous man. In 2013, as part of the sort of 1,000 Talents program,  -which is basically China’s way of attracting scientific talent to China, China doesn’t have an open immigration policy the way that many countries do so it doesn’t have a natural way of getting international scientific talent to the country -he went back. And in general, I’d say that the program has been mostly successful in attracting Chinese scientists back to China. So, many Chinese scientists who were trained in the United States, or the UK, or elsewhere decide to stay in those countries. But China has- through the attraction of supporting these scientists with very large labs, and sort of great opportunities, and housing, and guaranteed education for their children -has managed to bring a number back. So, CJ went back. But he went back for a slightly different reason than many. He went back because he was also interested in promoting educational reform in China. And so, with the support of the Presidents of Peking University, he helped to establish, really, this innovative program at Yuanpei College within the university where he introduced students to everything from John Stuart Mill to movies that revealed sort of freedom of the press in the United States. And so, it was a values education -sort of a Western liberal arts education. I think that’s the way I would put it. It’s not something that’s traditionally focused on in Chinese universities. The idea of sort of a broad-based introduction to the humanities, and the social sciences, and the arts. And I think that’s what he really was trying to bring to China.

Will Brehm  3:32
And how did it go over?

Elizabeth Economy  3:33
Initially, it went over reasonably well. There was a lot of excitement among the students. Some faculty were very enticed by the program, a number of universities’ best faculty joined him. It was an experiment. And so, this was 2013, which, and the date is important because this was still the early stages of the Xi Jinping period. So, there was a little bit of that leftover enthusiasm, I’d say, from the late 2000’s when China really seemed to be opening up politically, especially on the internet. In any case, 2018 rolls around, things became more difficult, I think up through that period. But when 2018 rolled around, or 2017 when Xi Jinping abandoned the two-term limit on the presidency, CJ published a piece that basically criticized intellectuals in China for not standing up and pushing back against this type of action. And he sort of said they had no spine, where is their sense of moral courage. And a campaign soon emerged against him, and he was stripped of all of his sort of official positions within the university. He was able to retain his lab and his professorship but came back to the United States, and stayed in the US but decided he would go back and continue to work with his students and his lab. And he has done that ever since then. But I think it was devastating for him on a personal level, given the hope and enthusiasm he had to see that completely obliterated over the course of five years as China began to clamp down really and to restrict Western ideas and liberal influences within its educational system.

Will Brehm  5:23
And so, what does this anecdote tell you about Xi Jinping’s mode of governing China today?

Elizabeth Economy  5:30
I think there’s no mystery at this point about the direction in which Xi Jinping has moved China domestically, which is to say, really becoming much more authoritarian, much more repressive, much less interested in, Western ideas flowing. I think that was -one of the things about Deng Xiaoping, when he initiated the period of reform and opening, was that he welcomed ideas from outside. He thought that China had a lot to learn from the international community. And I think for Xi Jinping, he seeks to restrict those ideas. You know, foreign ideas and foreign capital from coming into the country. And just to offer one other example. I mean, aside from the restrictions on the internet, which I think everybody appreciates now -China passed a law in 2017 that limited the role of foreign non-governmental organizations in China, taking them from more than 7,000 down to about 400. And these are organizations that work with their Chinese counterparts on issues like poverty alleviation, and health care, migrant education, environmental protection. And it really has constricted and constrained the space for civil society engagement between China and the outside world. So, I think what happened to CJ is part and parcel of a much tighter political environment domestically, and much less engagement and openness to ideas from the outside.

Will Brehm  6:55
And in your book, you say that China’s foreign policy, in many ways, mirrors or is based on this domestic governance model that you’ve just explained. So, how do we start making sense of China’s foreign policy today?

Elizabeth Economy  7:13
I think its domestic governance model, so how China expresses that on the global stage, I think there are a number of ways. Let me just point to two. One, you could look at an initiative like the Belts and Road Initiative, which China announced in 2013 as basically this grand-scale infrastructure project that has evolved and morphed. There’s a digital infrastructure element to it, a Health Silk Road, I think everybody knows about it by now. But it is a grand-scale enterprise. But if you look at how it has evolved in other countries, it is basically the export of the China model. It is rapid infrastructure-led growth that produces a lot of debt. And so that happened to China as well. It was internal to China. These countries owe a lot of their debt to China because it’s lending the money with all the attendant externalities, right? Environmental pollution and degradation, labor issues surround these Belts and Road projects just as they did when China went through this very rapid period of infrastructure growth. Issues around governance, the lack of transparency, lack of rule of law. So, that’s one way that you can see China’s exporting its model, say primarily to emerging economies.

I think one other big element is sort of the export of restrictions on freedom of speech. And you know, traditionally, China had redlines primarily around sovereignty issues: Taiwan, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Xizang. Basically, you knew that if you started to tread into these areas, right, you could end up in some kind of trouble with China. You need to be careful about what you said. What we’ve seen over the past few years is these red lines are proliferating. And so, Australia is facing a boycott of many of its top exports to China because it called for an investigation into the origins of COVID. You have three Wall Street Journal reporters expelled from China because the paper published an opinion piece by somebody not even affiliated with the Wall Street Journal, that used the title, “The Sick Man of Asia”. So, you start to see -Beijing City discussed passing a law that would criminalize criticism of traditional Chinese medicine. I think after a big case in the United States around Hong Kong, where the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” and precipitated a number of Chinese sanctions against the NBA. CCTV said something very interesting, which was that issues related to sovereignty and social stability do not fall within the purview of free speech. And I think that’s really critical, right? So, here, China is punishing someone who’s using a US platform, Twitter, that’s not even available to the average Chinese citizen for something he said about Hong Kong. But beyond that, the Chinese government is now saying that anything that touches on social stability, anything that China considers to be potentially challenging to its social stability can result in this kind of sanction. And I think that’s very troubling. That really is the sort of externalizing of its repression. So, I think that’s another way in which the model is being reflected in the way that China approaches its foreign policy.

Will Brehm  10:33
And is it having an impact in these other countries? Like the examples that you gave of the NBA and the Houston Rockets. Did that have a material impact on the NBA when the Houston Rockets General Manager made that tweet?

Elizabeth Economy  10:47
Well, I think it had a couple of impacts, actually. I think, initially, the impact was, the NBA responded by apologizing. And you know, several of the team members said, “Hey, we love China. This is his personal opinion. The owner of the Brooklyn Nets, Joe Tsai, who’s one of the co-founders of Alibaba, came out and said, “Listen, you can’t talk about Taiwan, Hong Kong. You have to recognize these are really sensitive issues”. There’s a lot of sorts of backpedaling and concern. And then, it’s like a flip of a switch. And I think people stood back and realized that what China was trying to control, free speech in the United States. That is one of our fundamental rights, and simply not acceptable. And so, you had an enormous backlash. First, I would say, against to some extent, the NBA’s equivocating around it. And then the head of the NBA, Adam Silver came out and said, “Listen, we stand for free speech. And we are not going to have Daryl Morey retract his statements and we stand behind him.” And then, I think it was like a wake-up call for people. And they really began to look at other times when China was trying to exert this kind of control over free speech and push back. It happened in a video game instance. And so now I think people are much more attuned to this, and I think much more prone to push back. Hollywood is under a spotlight in United States because it traditionally has been willing to accommodate China on a number of issues like this. So, I think it’s one of those instances where China probably overplayed its hand, and it stirred the pot. And now everybody focuses on this in a way that they really hadn’t before.

Will Brehm  12:38
That’s quite interesting. I was also quite fascinated in your book, where you talked about the World Health Organization (WHO), and how China really advanced the idea of traditional Chinese medicine as being a good remedy to COVID-19. And the WHO sounds like they’ve actually adopted that or accepted it at some level within their organization.

Elizabeth Economy  12:58
So, the World Health Organization -you’re right. So, that is another way China has been successful. I would say very successful but again, here too, is another example where once people became alert to the idea that China was using international institutions to advance narrower Chinese priorities around things like internet governance, and human rights, and in the case that you’re raising sort of, in the World Health Organization, there’s been more pushback against that. And certainly, the Belts and Road, China’s really pushed the Belts and Road within the UN. But in the case of the traditional Chinese medicine, I think the objection that people had to the World Health Organization sort of adopting the traditional Chinese medicine was that it did it without subjecting -so, basically, it said that traditional Chinese medicine is a legitimate way for doctors globally to evaluate people’s illnesses, so as a diagnostic tool, actually. What scientists globally were concerned about -what they expressed to the World Health Organization- was that traditional Chinese medicine didn’t have to undergo the same rigorous testing that Western medicine had to go through to receive the same kind of categorization. And so, how did that happen? And I think there was a sense that China somehow played the game and managed to influence the system. I’m not sure that the World Health Organization has come out and said that traditional Chinese medicine can address the challenges of COVID-19 but certainly we know that it was reluctant, at least publicly, to be critical of China in the early stages of the pandemic. And mistakenly so, I would say.

Will Brehm  14:39
And in organizations like the World Health Organization, but others as well, globally, some of these big multilateral agencies, how does China exert its influence? Is it simply money? Is it about funding organizations that have historically had a difficult time raising funding from the global community? Or are they also in addition exerting influence in other ways?

Elizabeth Economy  15:02
So, one of the interesting things that I found in my research is that, for example, in the World Health Organization, China is not a particularly significant donor to the World Health Organization. The United States far outpaces it not only in terms of its actual contributions but in terms of the whole philanthropic element, right? The private donations. China doesn’t even rank on the list in that area. Instead, I would say that many countries, including the United States, have often viewed the United Nations and multilateral institutions as a kind of second-tier place for operating globally, right? Certainly, the UN Security Council is a focal point but UN institutions and agencies, that’s not really where many of the more powerful countries have put a lot of their resources, aside from financial resources. But China has used the UN. China has seen the United Nations as an important space for it in part because it argues it didn’t have the opportunity to set the rules of the game earlier, in the post-World War Two era. The UN is a place where not only does it sit in the UN Security Council, but it has operated as the sort of de facto head of the G 77, the emerging economy. So, it plays an important role. I’d say the way that it has exerted influence is first by getting its officials into leadership positions. When I was writing the book, at that point China held 4 out of 15 of the top positions in the major UN agencies and programs. Unheard of. No other country even comes close. Right? That’s one important way.

And we’ve seen -and I provide some examples- how China can use those positions for its own benefit. For blocking the head of the World Uyghur Congress from testifying in a UN forum. I mean, literally blocking, pulling him out of the hallway of the UN and physically removing him from that. Or, as a very petty example, the International Civil Aviation Organization blocking people who tweet from their feed that Taiwan should be a member of the organization. I mean, that is kind of ridiculous. A very petty use of their power because the head of their organization was a Chinese official. And then the Belts and Road Initiative. They had something like 25 or 26 MOUs or joint programs with different parts of the United Nations that support in some way the Belts and Road Initiative. And I think part of it is, it can seem helpful, and it can seem benign, but the truth is that when China doesn’t get its way, then you see that it’s not so benign, and it’s not so helpful. And one example that I provide is that in 2019, when the bill to reauthorize the UN mission to Afghanistan was under discussion, China threatened to veto the bill if it didn’t include language in support of China’s Belts and Road. Which, what is China’s Belts and Road doing in there anyway? And so, the United States and some other countries pushed back and eventually, after two threats in a period of nine months, China backed down. But that’s the kind of use of these international institutions for China’s narrow self-interest that I think is troubling.

Will Brehm  18:31
And China is becoming more and more assertive, it seems, outwardly. I mean, it’s becoming a rather common topic, at least in my world. More and more people are talking about the assertiveness of China. The other institution, I mean, it’s not only China working in existing institutions and exerting its influence through them. It’s also creating new global international institutions. And the one I’m thinking of in particular, is the Asian International and Investment Bank (AIIB). What is the AIIB and why is it so important, in your opinion?

Elizabeth Economy  19:06
The AIIB, as you suggest, is a Chinese initiative. In 2014, Xi Jinping proposed it, and many countries were very excited by it. China is the largest bilateral source of development of funding, and infrastructure funding, certainly. So, the West have long called on China to be, “a responsible stakeholder”, to set up institutions or participate in pre-existing institutions in a way that would bolster them and certainly would be commensurate with China’s position as the world’s second largest economy. So, when China stood up the AIIB, kind of, as a complement to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, I think most countries viewed it as a positive sign. The United States was concerned that China would somehow use it for its own purposes, or that the way that the AIIB would operate would be like its own development banks- China-Export Import Bank, China Development Bank, which are not known for best practices in terms of their governance. We talked earlier about the environmental issues, social issues, lack of transparency, all of those are present with China’s major banks. But AIIB actually became something different. And it does operate very close to, if not at, world class standards in terms of its governance. But what it has been is very small. And so, I think one of the interesting things that’s emerged is that China has not funded the AIIB near the same level that it’s funded China Development Bank or China Export-Import (EXIM) Bank. And other countries participate, of course, in AIIB, which they don’t in the other two Chinese banks. But when you look at the impact of the AIIB truly, in the world of development finances, it’s been marginal. And so, it’s there, and it stands as a positive example, I think, overall, of China’s ability to play within existing sort of international norms. But in point of fact, China does not use it the way that it uses the other banks, which don’t operate.

Will Brehm  21:21
This podcast, of course, is very much about education. So, I would be remiss not to ask about the role that education plays in China’s foreign policy. And what, in a sense, is China doing globally when it comes to using education for its soft power in a way?

Elizabeth Economy  21:39
So, I think, probably, there are two ways in which China is engaging globally in education. I mean, certainly, it’s engaged traditionally by sending its students out to other countries to be educated. In the United States you have between 350,000-400,000 Chinese students. So, we’ve been an enormous magnet in the US for many of China’s best and brightest, traditionally. I think the way that China’s engaging now as a power in its own right, however, first, it’s providing a lot of scholarships to students to come to study in China. It can be for students, it could be for journalists, it could be for officials from other countries to come and learn the China model. That’s a big new initiative of Xi Jinping, that China has a development model that others can learn from. Some of these programs can be several years of funding, some can be for a week training course. So, it’s difficult. You can see China’s providing 80,000 scholarships for students from Africa. Sometimes it’s very difficult to understand exactly what that education entails. And so, you don’t really know what it means. But they’re certainly out there doing a lot of bringing students in, although COVID has certainly constrained that. That’s one way.

The other way that I think many people are familiar with, is Confucius Institutes. And this was a pre-Xi Jinping initiative dated back to about 2004. And the idea was basically that China would support Chinese language training and cultural exchange, provide cultural programming for universities, in some cases for primary and high schools. And sometimes, in rare cases, they’re standalone Confucius Institutes. Initially, I think there was a lot of excitement about Confucius Institutes, and certainly in the United States, for many universities and colleges that either didn’t have Chinese language programs, or had sort of very nascent, small ones. They’re expensive to teach, especially if you don’t have a lot of students. These were a godsend because, you know, it’s kind of wholesale, right? China provided the curriculum, it provided the teachers, it just set everything up for you -one-stop-shop. But gradually, some professors, notably a professor at the University of Chicago began to question the governance around these Confucius Institutes. The fact that the contracts with universities were closed and secret, that was a condition that the Chinese government put on them. The fact that the Chinese government basically picked the teachers and the curriculum, I think, was a source of consternation for many people. I think back to when I studied newspaper Chinese in graduate school. You could read anything, but could you imagine a Chinese language teacher from Beijing, from mainland China, teaching a course on newspaper Chinese that would talk about protests in China, or talk about Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea? Probably not, right? Or even would reference Tiananmen openly.

So, I think those kinds of issues began to surface and you had a lot of concern in the United States, within Congress, certainly calling for universities to close their Confucius Institutes. And I think the fact that these Confucius Institutes were established with governance norms that were outside traditional US university norms. You would never allow another country to choose the teachers and the curriculum, right? I think that began to wrangle. And so, I think -not that it started in the United States. Other countries, Canada, Sweden, many other countries globally began to become concerned. There was an additional concern about Chinese influence emanating from these Confucius Institutes. You know, trying to ensure that the Dalai Lama never spoke at a university. How were the heads of these Confucius Institutes engaging with the Chinese students on campus? Were they rallying them around certain causes? So, I think those concerns also arose. I found fewer examples of that than I think one might imagine from the attention that the media would pay. But just because I didn’t find them doesn’t mean they weren’t there. So, I think that in the end, what I found was, China had pledged to have 1,000 Confucius Institutes by 2020. It has slightly more than half of that. And I think the reason for that is the rollback in many countries of these Confucius Institutes. And it’s kind of just another example of I think, where Xi Jinping announces something big -although he didn’t announce this one, but he certainly encouraged it- and it doesn’t quite materialize in the way that you might think.

Will Brehm  26:14
And it causes some consternation or conflict among different communities either at local universities or within different international organizations as you’ve explained previously. It seems like the assertiveness of China is growing, and there’s all these different sectors and angles that it’s happening. And at some points, it sort of bubbles up into a real sort of conflict in a sense, and then things have to be walked back. Do you see, looking into the future, is a political conflict inevitable? Like the international system that has particular values, and this Chinese model that you see growing that has different values and norms. I mean, are we coming to a conclusion where there’s just going to have to be a big conflict between the two? Or will these sorts of systems coexist simultaneously in the world?

Elizabeth Economy  27:05
So, I think whether they come to a big conflict probably depends on how aggressively China pushes. There’s an article published in Foreign Affairs with the title, something about basically, China just wants to make the world safe for autocracy. But I think what people -and it’s a clever way of looking at it. And it’s actually a way that some scholars in the United States and probably also UK and elsewhere view this, which is, China just wants to make the world safe for itself. That somehow, this is a bounded enterprise. I think the problem is that as China makes it safe for autocracy, it actually makes it unsafe for democracy. And I think the examples -the Daryl Morey example, the externalizing of restrictions on freedom of speech- are a really good case in point, right? It’s not enough for China to control free speech within China. It’s not even enough for China to support some of the Belts and Road countries with the tools to do real time online censorship, which it’s doing, right? So, it’s bolstering the capabilities of other authoritarian countries. It’s also trying to control the speech of people outside the country. And so, I think to the extent that China continues to push in this direction, you are going to have a clash of models. To the extent that it tries to push its values through the United Nations on human rights, on things like internet governance, which it’s trying to do to develop a sort of state-centered internet, where the state will have like an off switch, right, where it can control sort of every device within the country. So, you and I we’re talking about these things. The US government could say I don’t really like what Liz Economy is saying to Will here. Boom! Off you go. So, China can do that within China, but other countries don’t have that. But that’s another example where China has a project, New IP, that it’s pushing in the United Nations. So, I think there is probably already underway, a clash of values. And what we have to hope is that that clash of values never turns into kinetic conflict, right? That it doesn’t somehow transform into military conflict, and it remains in the political space, which is challenging enough.

Will Brehm  29:15
Well Elizabeth Economy thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today.

Elizabeth Economy  29:19
Thanks so much Will.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Project/Publications

The World According to China

The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State

By All Means Necessary: HOw China’s Resource Quest is Changing the World

The Game-Changer-Coping with China’s Foreign Policy Revolution

Mentioned Resources

Li Chenjian

Becoming Strong: The New Chinese Foreign Policy

What is China’s Thousand Talents Plan ? 

China’s Overseas NGO Law and the Future of International Civil Society 

Belts and Road Initiative

Toward a Health Silk Road: China’s Proposal for Global Health Cooperation

“China is the Real Sick Man of Asia” – Wall Street Journal Article

Address at the WHO Congress on Traditional Medicine

COVID-19, China, the WHO, and the Limits of International Health Diplomacy

The Group of G77 at the UN

Asian International Investment Bank (AIIM)

China Export Import Bank

Confucius Institutes Around the World

The Internationalisation of China’s Higher Education: SOft power with ‘Chinese Characteristics’

Making the World Safe for Autocracy: Jessica Chen Weiss on What Beijing Wants 

New Internet Protocol: Redesigning the Internet with Chinese Characteristics 

Related Resources

Chinese Foreign Policy Database

China in a Post-Pandemic World: Health Silk Road

WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine

Examining China’s Influence in the WHO: A Conversation with Jeremy Youde

Effects of Confucius Institutes on China’s Higher Education Exports

China’s International Higher Education Policies 2010-2019

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com