Mending Fences With Chinese Characteristics

In an op-ed in the New York Times China correspondent Ian Johnson proposes some small steps for beginning to heal the rift in Chinese-American relations:

One, the Biden administration should offer to restart the Peace Corps and Fulbright scholarship programs in China, two key ways that Americans have learned about the country over the past decades. The Trump administration canceled both as part of an effort to isolate China. All that accomplished instead was to hurt America’s ability to train a new generation of scholars and analysts.

Two, in exchange for this, the U.S. government should stop vilifying China’s Confucius Institutes as sinister propaganda machines. These are largely cultural centers and much like educational outposts from other countries trying to push a good image of themselves. American universities should prevent Confucius Institutes from offering accredited courses — no university should allow a foreign government to set its curriculum — but the centers should be able to function off campus, much like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or British Councils do.

Three, the Biden administration should allow back into the United States some of the scores of Chinese journalists expelled by the Trump administration last year — provided that Beijing also agrees to welcome again accredited journalists from American news organizations and commits to not harassing them.

The Trump administration’s measures gutted America’s ability to understand China. China, by contrast, still has many reporters and diplomats, and tens of thousands of students in the United States.

Four, the U.S. government should lift restrictions on visas for Chinese Communist Party members wanting to travel to the United States. The policy was crafted to protect Americans from the C.C.P.’s supposedly malign influence. But the party counts some 90 million members, the majority of whom are civil servants doing normal jobs, not followers of some evil cult that needs to be kept at bay.

Finally, China should be invited to reopen its consulate in Houston, which the Trump team closed last year in retaliation for alleged espionage. In return, the Chinese government would allow the United States to reopen its consulate in Chengdu, which Beijing had closed in retaliation.

I don’t object to any of those measures in principle. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Historically, the U. S. has been terrible at tying its actions to corresponding actions by other parties. That’s understandable. Everything we do has a constituency whose livelihood depends at least in part on it and they speak louder than anybody else. I think there are a number of things we should be doing he leaves unmentioned as we try to mend fences. We should do a thorough, eyes wide open, unstinting examination of Chinese espionage in the U. S. and the role of visiting scholars and the Confucius Institutes in it for example.

I also think that Mr. Johnson underestimates American knowledge of China. The United States has more native speakers of Mandarin than any country other than China or Thailand. We understand China just fine. We just don’t pay attention to what we know or act on it which are U. S. political problems only tangentially related to China and not unique in our relations with other countries.