Strategic Stalemate: Ryan Hass on How Beijing Sees America — and Trump

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
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What does China want? It's the question that never seems to go away. It feels at times like it's the question underneath nearly every other question in the discourse on China and every year somebody takes another serious run at it. My guest today, Ryan Hass, has just undertaken one of the better efforts in recent memory an essay in the new issue of China Leadership Monitor called China's Great Power Vision Comes into Focus, which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade when Beijing finally laid its cards on the table, a vision for an international political order stripped of what some would call that order's original liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the global majority.
Ryan then asks whether China is actually willing to pay for it.
He's also just written a shorter piece for Brookings where he works that couldn't be more timely what would Xi Jinping do in Washington for a state visit later this month. The piece is called Why Beijing Isn't Taking the Bait with Trump.
President Trump has given Beijing an awful lot of what it has wanted from an American president for a long time now, 75 years, but Xi Jinping has responded with kind of a poker face. Ryan explains why. Ryan Hass is director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He's co-host of the excellent, excellent Beijing Brief Podcast from 2013 to 2017 during President Obama's second term. He was director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia on the National Security Council. He's someone I've come to rely on for exactly the kind of analysis these two pieces represent. Sensitive to, but unsentimental about Beijing, sensitive to, yet also unsentimental about Washington, and really grounded in what Chinese strategists are actually saying, rather than what we like to imagine they're saying. He's been on the show many, many times before, and it's always a pleasure and an inspiration. Ryan, welcome back to Sinica and good evening to you.

**Ryan Hass** (3:08)
Well, thank you, Kaiser. It's really a pleasure and a privilege for me to be with you.

**Kaiser Kuo** (3:11)
So, Ryan, let's jump right in and let's start with the framing. What does China want has been asked so often that it's almost become a genre unto itself, and I have heard answers to it that seem plausible enough, and others that sound completely unhinged or are based, as far as I can tell, just on mere projection.
Before we get into your answer, what do you make of what's been suggested by major voices in the discourse focusing on the US to date? Some of the answers, to me, don't seem that far off. What's out there?

**Ryan Hass** (3:45)
Well, I think that there's a range of views in Washington about this question, what does China want? I think some of them, as you suggested, are ideological in their orientation. Some of them are rooted in a view that only one country can lead. So if China rises, it must therefore displace the United States and assume the roles and responsibilities that the United States has held for 75 years.
I'm arguing something different. And to be honest, Kaiser, this has sort of been a long torture journey. When I was a Foreign Service Officer in the embassy in Beijing in 2008 to 2012, one of the things that I was asked to explore was exactly this question. And so back then, I would go to the Policy Planning Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ask Liu Yucheng, and I would go to the universities and ask Wang Jise and Yanshui Tong and go to Kicker and talk to Dawei and Yuan Peng and all these folks. And back then, there was sort of this question in Washington about whether there's some secret strategy, you know, locked in a vault deep in Zhongnanhai that the Chinese are meticulously following to assert their dominance on the world stage. And the answer I came away with back then is, it's not there.