The Texas Paradox: How the Most Anti-China State Is Building America's China Capacity

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from my nearly empty, soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I believe this is my penultimate taping here. I've got one more show to tape next week, and then I'm gone, so this is the house is gone.
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Here's a question that doesn't get asked nearly often enough in Washington. Whatever the United States decides it wants from its relationship with China, to compete with it, to manage or even contain it, to strike deals with China, or some shifting combination of the above, does it actually have the people to do any of that well? The institutions, the language capacity, the human infrastructure, we talk endlessly about strategy toward China, about leverage and competition and red lines. We talk much less about whether there is a deep enough bench of Americans who can actually read the room, who can read the documents in the original, who can understand the strategic logic of Beijing on its own terms and do the long, un-glamorous, difficult work of dealing with a country, whether you are cooperating with it or facing off against it.
The summit in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, whatever you make of its constructive strategic stability framing, was a reminder of the stakes. Heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon, but somebody has to operationalize it, and that somebody is rarely the person who is actually at the podium. So today, I want to look at the capacity question, where America's ability to deal with China actually comes from, who's building it, and what it means that the answer right now runs through, of all places, Texas.
To take on that question today, I'm joined by two Texans who, from very different directions, are trying to answer it with a yes, or trying to make a yes possible at least. David Firestein is the inaugural president and CEO of the George HW. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, based in Houston. He was a career US diplomat from 1992 to 2010, serving across four administrations with a primary focus on China. Five years at the US. Embassy in Beijing, four in Moscow. He has interpreted Mandarin for top-level US and Chinese officials. He's the author of three books on China, including two China-published bestsellers. And he was, in the mid-1990s, the first foreigner ever to have a regular column in a People's Republic of China newspaper. Before the Bush China Foundation, he founded UT Austin's China Public Policy Center and taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where he still serves on the Dean's Advisory Council. He's one of the very few Americans concurrently affiliated with both a Republican and a Democratic presidential legacy institution. David, welcome to Sinica. Great to see you.

**David Firestein** (3:42)
Thank you so much, Kaiser. It's truly a pleasure and an honor to be with you.

**Kaiser Kuo** (3:46)
The honor is entirely mine.
Also joining us today is Eddie Conger. He is the founder, superintendent, and CEO of International Leadership of Texas, IL Texas, which serves 26,000 K-12 students across 26 campuses in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and College Station regions and is the largest K-12 Chinese language program in the United States. Eddie is a Texas A&M grad, a retired US. Marine Corps major with 20 years of active service, including a posting in Okinawa. After retiring from the Corps in 2001, he started his second career as a fifth-grade math teacher in Dallas Independent School District, ISD, and went on to lead Thomas Jefferson High School, where in four years he drove the graduation rate from 52% to 81%.
He founded IL Texas in 2012 In January, the Bush China Foundation gave IL Texas its first ever K-12 award, the George HW. Bush Award for Educational Excellence in U.S.-China Relations, joining a list of previous recipients that includes, oh, you know, people like Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter. Eddie, congrats on all that and welcome to Sinica.

**Eddie Conger** (5:01)
Thank you very much. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here, sir.