Some Post-Election Thoughts

By Jerome A. Cohen

The next two-plus months will be politically fascinating, in terms of both domestic politics and US foreign policy. The Biden people have an enormous challenge before them in planning and staffing a comprehensive new government and reconciling conflicting pressures within the Democratic Party regarding personnel choices as well as policies.

It will be even more interesting to watch the immediate maneuvers within the Republican Party elite and to consider their implications for Republican leadership in the next few years and the emerging rivalries for 2024 presidential candidacy.

How uncomfortable Trump must be to face post-January 20 legal problems! Will he follow the Nixon precedent and resign before his term ends in order to allow Pence to succeed him and then pardon him for all federal offenses? No such sleight of hand can readily eliminate the threat of serious state prosecutions. And Trump is undoubtedly thinking of running again in 2024.

Pence is now in an awkward position. His contrasting behavior with Trump’s has made him look conventionally respectable and a possibly serious 2024 candidate himself. But how should he conduct himself in the next weeks if Trump continues his objectionable behavior? Will Pence look too similar to Gerald Ford if he agrees with the pardon ploy? At least Ford knew that Nixon would not run against him in the 1976 election. If Trump’s health holds up and he is not convicted of state or federal crimes, Trump may well run again. Moreover, a host of other Republicans will now emerge as possible 2024 contenders, trying to build on the huge Republican turnout of this past election. And will the likes of Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and other non-Trumpists within the party do anything other than react with ineffectual gestures? 

Despite all these domestic preoccupations, foreign policy issues will need immediate attention. We will have much to chew over very soon, with considerable attention increasingly centering on the monumental January 5 run-off elections for both Georgia senators. Because control of the Senate is at stake, the outcome will be important for both domestic and foreign policy issues, and huge resources will be brought to bear.

Professor Yu Ying-shih on the Roots of Chinese Totalitarianism

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is an interesting interview (and the original interview text in French) between French China expert Ursula Gauthier and the great historian of China, Professor Yu Ying-shih of Princeton. I appreciate the beautiful translation of Michael S. Duke of an interview that originally was conducted in Chinese and English.

Reading it inspired many thoughts, including one about the preoccupying American presidential election: “The egotistical monarch who does not care for his subjects loses their support and finishes by losing the famous ‘tianming’, or Mandate of Heaven.” We await the fate of President Trump and note the warning that Prof. Yu explicitly gives to China’s current dictator, Xi Jinping.

I was glad to see Prof. Yu’s confirmation of the Confucian-Legalist “durable system synthesis” and the impacts that other contending philosophies had upon the evolving traditional Chinese theories of governance. Sixty years ago, Joseph Levenson’s great lectures at UC Berkeley introduced my wife and me to the concept of “syncretism.” Yu’s clarification of the relationship between the Chinese Classics and Confucianism is also enlightening to the non-specialist.

In addition, I benefited from Prof. Yu’s discussion of the Professor John K. Fairbank-led model of traditional China’s regional “tribute system”. Although Yu does not directly address the recent efforts to modify or reject that influential pattern imposed on hoary East Asian facts, his portrayal does add welcome detail, analysis and nuance to the Fairbank model, which I still regard as a useful insight into contemporary China’s relations with its East Asian neighbors.

Especially gratifying is Yu’s dismissal as “ridiculous” of the frequent claim by Xi Jinping that the Chinese have traditionally been a peaceful people, that China had never attacked other people and that China’s history is free of the crime of colonialism.

I do wonder, however, about Prof. Yu’s conclusion that It is not in imperial history that we must search for the roots of contemporary China’s totalitarianism but in the influence of the Soviet Union. One hypothesis need not exclude the other. He believes that the harshness of the autocratic traditional Chinese monarchy was “tempered by a government mainly of a moral and cultural elite” while today “we have a dictatorial system reinforced by arbitrary and despotic practices”. I suspect that the differences are not quite so stark and that today, just as in Russia, so too in China the propensity toward totalitarianism is sustained by inherited traditions, enhanced by the repressive potential of contemporary technology.

What Now? A Conversation on the Future of US-China Relations

By Jerome A. Cohen

I recently joined Scott Kennedy, Rui Zhong, Robert Daly, Sophie Richardson, Yangyang Cheng, Tong Yi, Andrew J. Nathan, Pamela Kyle Crossley, and Alex Wang for a ChinaFile conversation on the future of US-China Relations. I discuss the Trump administration’s dangerous China policy and offer my own ideas on how to improve relations. By adopting “The Four C’s: Cooperation, Competition, Criticism, and Containment,” I believe that Washington and Beijing could improve relations and avoid a further worsening of the situation. You can read the article here.

The Reemergence of the Phrase "Communist China"

By Jerome A. Cohen

I was recently asked about China Daily’s use of quotation marks around “communist China” in this piece, which is much more worth reading and thinking about than most of the articles that CD puts out. The article discusses limitations on Chinese journalists in the US, notably calling the US administration a “cabal of wackadoodles” and criticizing the severance of ties between the US and China.

The Trump people’s resurrection of “Communist China” (I am accustomed to capitalization of Communist when linked to China) as the term for identifying the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rings many bells with the old cadre of American China-watchers and is a contemporary attempt to help Americans and other people see the differences between the Party and the people in China. “Communist China” was an early, transitional term that served another function – to distinguish Mao’s regime from that of Chiang Kai-shek’s “Nationalist China” sheltering on Taiwan. It was sometimes considered an upgrade of the earlier, more politically emotive term “Red China” that overlapped with “Communist China” in American policy parlance in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. For example, the Harvard-MIT group of China specialists that sent a memorandum to President-elect Nixon via Henry Kissinger in November 1968 used the term “Communist China”.

I remember how startled the journalist Lawrence Spivak, who ran Meet the Press, was when, in an April 1971 TV interview with John Fairbank and me, I admonished him for constantly using “Red China” at that late date and urged him to clean up his language and recognize that the Communist government was indeed the government of mainland China. I have always liked to refer to it as the PRC, which accords it its self-described name and yet has the ring of a Communist regime. I don’t object to the use of Communist China today, during Xi Jinping’s Party-obsessed era, as I didn’t object to it during Mao’s era, because it is a useful reminder of the distinctive regime that controls the Chinese people. That, of course, is why Pompeo and company are using it today. The term has genuine factual connotations and also serves a delegitimizing function in describing a dictatorial system. 

Trump and U.S. policy towards China

By Jerome A. Cohen

Trump’s remarks on having “second thoughts” about the U.S.-China trade war remind me of the old saw: “How do I know what I think til I hear what I say?” Of course, it is easy to joke aboutthis literally incredible person.

Yet we all know what disasters he is inflicting and are frightened at the significant possibility that he might be re-elected. I thought the American people would repudiate George W. Bush after his first four years and was stunned by Trump’s election. Similar leadership problems exist in other major countries. Politics is too serious to be left to national leaders anywhere.

But we need to spend more time analyzing Trump’s thoughts, such as they are. Are they rooted in his experiences? His canny plotting for financial gain? His fear of criminal prosecution? His desire to leave a lasting mark on world politics? His many prejudices? His lack of relevant knowledge? His social life? His insatiable narcissism? His inability to tolerate many advisors? Is he declining further mentally?

It’s this last question that troubles an increasing number of jaded American observers. If Trump is reelected, what steps might be taken to guard against a second term’s further decline? Reagan had some able advisors. We would not want the group currently around Trump to be acting in his name, even if they could agree on a China policy for one day, if not the next.

More important than Trump or any single leader is whether the US is being mobilized to counter China in every way, to what extent and with what likely consequences. Xi Jinping undoubtedly realizes the situation. I wish he would respond by removing some of the obvious causes of our concerns instead of expanding the charges in our indictment. One way or the other I’m sure he is preparing for the worst, as the US Government is gradually doing, which, of course, may increase the prospects for unhappy outcomes. Trump is only the most immediate potential spark in what would be more than a prairie fire.

Of course, it is possible that we can find international stability by reverting to the Cold War pattern of “Two scorpions in a bottle”, but that was always an unpleasant and uncertain way to live. 

Donald Trump's telephone call with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen

China plainly cannot be happy with this direct telephone contact between Taiwan’s President Tsai and President-elect Trump. Of course, Trump is not yet president, so the contact can be regarded as unofficial. Yet it suggests the possibility that the Trump administration may to some extent alter the long-standing policy of the U.S. Government of not maintaining official contact with the Taiwan government.

Photo credit: Reuters, ABC News

Pressures have been building during the Obama era to abandon the strict US policy of not permitting the president and vice president of Taiwan to do more than transit the U.S. Indeed, I have advocated allowing them free access to every place in America except Washington, D.C., especially since the current rule restricts my freedoms of speech, information and association unnecessarily and undesirably. A similar rule has prevented the highest American officials from visiting Taiwan, again an inappropriate restriction, especially when the security of Taiwan will soon become a major issue in Sino-American relations once again.

Of course, administrations often change course in light of events. In April 2001 I recall watching George W. Bush, as part of what appeared to be a pugnacious stance toward China, declare on TV at the outset of his administration that he would do ”whatever it takes” to defend Taiwan. Once 9/11 occurred, his administration moved much closer to the People’s Republic and began to avoid provocative statements.