Asia Rising — No. 1, May 2015
A Monthly Letter from ASPI President Kevin Rudd
It’s now just over three months since I joined the Asia Society Policy Institute as its inaugural President. The Asia Society is an extraordinary institution. Its history goes back nearly 60 years to when its founder, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, envisaged an association which was to anticipate the 21st century being the Asian Century. Rockefeller was a remarkable man. To have conceived this back in the mid-1950s required an uncommon vision for the future.
Last year the Asia Society Trustees decided to build on Rockefeller’s vision by establishing the Asia Society Policy Institute — the Society’s first think tank. This is entirely consistent with Rockefeller’s view of the world. Over the last 60 years, the Asia Society has developed an enviable reputation across the United States and Asia as a platform for the introduction of Asian culture, civilization, and arts to a U.S. and wider Western audience. It has been remarkably successful in building cultural bridges with most countries in Asia as a result. By adding a think tank, the trustees are completing Rockefeller’s original vision.
In my first three months, I have been consulting extensively within the United States and across various countries in Asia, including China, India, Singapore, and Malaysia. The idea was to craft a think/do tank that is not simply a replication of the other fine institutions across the United States, or for that matter across Asia. Instead, this new organization will work with the governments of Asia and the United States on common, practical problem-solving related to challenges which confront individual countries or the region as a whole. Our starting point will always be to understand what the policy position of a given country happens to be, and why that position is held, rather than seeing that country as simply an object of American policy advocacy. We do not see ourselves as a policy advisory arm of the U.S. government or any government in Asia. Our vision is to be an effective policy bridge among the countries of the region, and more broadly between the region and the United States.
Therefore, in framing the policy projects in which ASPI will become engaged in the years ahead, I’ve been very mindful of where ASPI can add value over and above what other institutions provide. Over the coming months, we will progressively announce a series of policy initiatives in areas including:
- Regional geopolitics
- Regional economic development, including trade and investment
- Climate change, energy security, and sustainable development
- Social policy challenges, including those driven by demography, gender, and public health
- Common civilizational and interfaith values which can help underpin our global age
Each initiative will be driven a policy task force, with myself as chairman, and with co-chairs drawn from Asia and the United States. These task forces will be small in composition, high in quality, and utterly focused on producing policy solutions to apparently intractable problems confronting the wider region within a practicable timeframe. We are, by design, not interested in abstract intellectual discussion for its own sake. We are very much in the “applied” business of dealing with real policy challenges of the day.
Furthermore, I would emphasize that we do not see Asia as monopolized by one country or another. We see the region as composed, in all its diversity, of five main subregions: Northeast, Southeast, South, Central, and (consistent with the U.N. definition of “Asia”) West, including what is normally referred to as the Middle East. We intend to launch policy initiatives relevant to each of the subregions of Asia, or else initiatives which encompass Asia as a whole.
U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping
During my first three months as President of ASPI, apart from planning policy initiatives for the year ahead, I’ve also been completing, releasing, and advocating my summary report U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping. This is a major exercise to which I devoted 2014 as a Senior Fellow of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. The essential question I sought to address was whether we can build a common strategic narrative between China and the United States that is capable of preserving long-term peace and stability, creating a platform for long-term economic prosperity as well as environmental sustainability, and fostering sufficient commonality of purpose in the reform of the regional and international order.
These are complex needs. But I see little point in producing reports which list a familiar catalogue of problems in the U.S.-China relationship without attempting to craft a policy way through. The report, therefore, is overwhelmingly positive in tone — and deliberately so.
The report analyzes seven basic questions:
- Whether the Chinese economic model is sustainable for the long-term future;
- Whether Xi Jinping is a Chinese leader with whom the United States can do business on the fundamental strategic challenges facing the relationship;
- What are the deepest-level Chinese strategic perceptions of U.S. policy toward China, beyond the normal expressions of polite diplomacy;
- What constitutes the deepest-level American strategic perceptions of China’s aspirations in the region and the world (again, beyond the normal diplomatic courtesies);
- What are the possibilities of crisis, conflict, or even war between China and the United States in the decade ahead;
- What are China’s emerging aspirations for the future of the Asia-Pacific region as well as the broader, global rules-based order; and finally,
- Given all the above, whether a common strategic framework is possible between these two vastly different countries.
You can read a full copy of the summary report at www.asiasociety.org/uschina21. My general conclusion is that a common strategic narrative is possible between China and the United States, despite the differences between them, and depending on the level of political will which both leaderships can summon. I describe this common strategic framework as “constructive realism, common purpose.” What do I mean by this?
- “Realist,” in the sense that both sides need to begin with a completely frank assessment of where deep strategic differences exist between the two countries (e.g., territorial claims in the East and South China Seas, arms sales to Taiwan) which cannot be resolved in the foreseeable future but which need to be managed so as not to destroy the entire relationship;
- “Constructive,” in the sense of identifying 21 distinct bilateral, regional, and global policy initiatives, which, although inherently difficult, are nonetheless resolvable within the decade ahead, and therefore also conducive to building, step by step, strategic trust between the two; and
- “Common purpose,” in the sense that both China and the United States can draw upon the political capital, diplomatic ballast, and hopefully growing levels of strategic trust from the cooperative projects listed above in order to deal with the more fundamental “realist” disagreements which are irresolvable at present.
Furthermore, I argue that it is necessary for the United States and China to focus on common challenges which the global and regional rules-based orders face — including terrorism, climate change, global pandemics, and global cybersecurity. These I identify as threats to any concept of regional or global order per se. I also argue that these are more significant in themselves as threats to “order” than are the individual differences which currently dominate the discourse between China and the United States over what sort of order the two countries want for the future. In other words, I argue that a “common purpose” on the part of both China and the United States should be their unifying interest in enhancing the existing regional and global rules-based orders against those forces which are hell-bent on destroying order altogether.
Over the last several weeks, I have had the privilege of launching the report at the John F. Kennedy Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, at the C.V. Starr Lecture in New York with the Foreign Policy Association and the Asia Society Policy Institute, and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an event presided over by former U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. The report has received reasonable coverage so far in the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, the Globalist, and the Huffington Post. I’ve also spent time launching the project both in Beijing and Shanghai. I’ve been surprised by the relatively positive response the report has received in China. Xinhua has published the report in full, and it has been the subject of extensive reportage across multiple Chinese media platforms.
I hope the report has been able to achieve sufficient positive traction in Washington and Beijing, so as to provide some help in shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship. All roads point at this stage to the September summit between President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama in Washington. This will be a state visit, and therefore of deep substantive and symbolic significant in the future trajectory of the relationship. I will continue to work hard on how the collective efforts of ASPI and the Asia Society can advance the ideas in the report to benefit this most important of relationships.
In my next letter, I will outline the launch of another major policy initiative. In the meantime, I look forward to working with Josette Sheeran, President and CEO of the Asia Society, to build the capacity of this new think/do tank to support the common public policy challenges which confront the countries of Asia and the United States.
With kind regards,
Kevin Rudd
President, Asia Society Policy Institute