The CNN commentator said China’s economy and geopolitical strategy make it different from the U.S.’s rivalry with the Soviet Union
As he delivered the marquee public event of the UC San Diego Forum on U.S.-China Relations, thousands of miles away from the corridors of power in Washington, Fareed Zakaria didn’t shy away from talking about China in a way that ran counter to conventional thinking.
His talk, which served as this year’s Susan Shirk Lecture on U.S.-China Relations, clashed with mainstream sensibilities with regards to foreign policy: China isn’t the threat that many in the U.S. think it is.
Zakaria, who hosts CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” addressed an audience that included such august names as Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China. Stephen Hadley, who was deputy national security advisor under Condoleezza Rice, also engaged in a follow-up discussion with Zakaria after the talk.
Over the subsequent days, many other high-ranking government officials, policy experts and scholars participated in the China Forum, which has been hosted annually since 2019 by the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS).
Zakaria’s talk set the tone by putting the bilateral relationship in a global context.
China exports products, not ideology
On the surface, the rivalry between the world’s two largest economies might seem like a rehash of the 20th century’s Cold War, but Zakaria argued that the situation today is quite different.
Perhaps the most important distinguishing feature between then and now is the changed economic landscape. He said that China’s economy accounts for around 20% of the global gross domestic product, and it is the largest trading partner with the majority of countries in the world. This contrasts with the Soviet Union, which at its peak commanded around 7% of the world’s GDP, he said.
As a result, the U.S. must avoid alienating its allies by escalating tensions with China, since many of them have strong economic ties with the latter.
To illustrate this, Zakaria mentioned conversations he recently had with top officials in Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.
“We are in a very happy place with the United States. We have found the Biden administration extraordinarily productive,” he recalled them saying. But he said they added, “You don’t buy oil from us anymore. Our single biggest customer is China.”
Beyond the economic situation, Zakaria said that China doesn’t pose an ideological threat to the U.S. in the same way that the Soviet Union once did.
The Soviet Union’s self-proclaimed goal was to plant the seeds for communist revolutions around the world, which caused the U.S. to be on high alert. But he said that today’s China is more concerned with “rejuvenating” itself, something which does not require exporting its economic and social doctrines.
However, he said that politicians in the federal government — under pressure from voters — have drawn too much on the mistaken parallels with the Cold War, and as a result they have sometimes acted too hawkishly, raising tensions with China.
“The danger is not that we actively plan to enter a cold war with China,” he said, “but that we stumble into one because the political dynamic within Washington, within the country, makes it impossible to go in any other direction.”
He suggested that a better direction is for the U.S. to adopt a similar policy toward China as it did to Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II: letting their economies prosper, just as long as they avoided competing with the U.S.’s status as a superpower.
“Zakaria presented an important alternative perspective on U.S. policies toward China, which counterbalances the reflexively anti-China sentiment across both parties in Washington today,” said Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center. “China is not the boogeyman, and the U.S. is not in terminal decline.”
To learn more about the China Forum and its impact on U.S.-China policy, visit its website.
To view photos from the event, readers may tap on the album below (on mobile) or hover their cursor over the album (on a computer).
