Yuan Peng, "Political Gamesmanship and American Chaos"

CN West interview with Yuan Peng, “Political Gamesmanship and American Chaos,”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Yuan Peng (b. 1967) is Research Professor and President of the China Institutes of Contemporary Relations 中国现代国际关系研究院 in Beijing, and a well-respected scholar of international affairs, the United States, and Sino-American relations.  He has published extensively in Chinese (some 25 essays are available on his Aisixiang page) and in English.[2]  Yuan is fluent in English, and has had stints as a Visiting Scholar both at the Brookings Institute and at the Atlantic Council.  His is an important voice explaining the United States and Sino-American relations to the Chinese elite.

This interview, published online on June 2, 2020, offers a broad condemnation of Trump’s America, beginning with the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25, and then extending to the political gamesmanship behind America’s dismal performance in fighting the coronavirus pandemic, and finally to problems in Sino-American relations and the competition between the Chinese and American “models.”  The point of the interview is to paint a picture of a dysfunctional America whose time has passed—Trump is portrayed as the final nail in the coffin, but not the root cause of American decline—and to depict China in a more positive light.

What struck me on reading this essay for the first time is that it reads less like a State Council White Paper and more like an editorial in the New York Times or any other slightly left-of-center American publication.  His references and arguments are almost completely American, and with the exception of the use of the word “contradiction” where we would say “problem,” even Yuan’s language seems little different from American norms.  True, Yuan bashes the Democrats more than the Times would as part of his critique of American party politics, but most of the piece reads not like a smear based on low-hanging fruit (classic White Paper tactics) but rather like a sober commentary on a sad situation.  The debacle of Trump’s America has redeemed, to some extent, Chinese media commentary. 

The difference, of course, is that the editorial in the Times would be addressing an American audience and American leaders, and hence speaking truth to power.  Yuan offers a full-throated condemnation of American racism, but neither he nor the “journalist” who interviewed him mentions racism in China, or the situation in Xinjiang.  Because they can’t.  Chinese media commentary will only be fully “redeemed” when it can turn its critical eye inward as well as outward.  (For an example of Yuan in a more scholarly mode, see his longer text on the coronavirus pandemic, in which Yuan “speaks truth to power” in the only way available to Chinese establishment intellectuals, offering arguments that fill out the slogans of their leaders).          

My thanks to Julian Gewirtz for sharing Yuan’s interview with me.
 
Translation
 
“I can’t breathe” is a true portrayal of American ethnic minorities struggling under racial discrimination”
 
Question:  A few days ago, the 46 year-old African-American George Floyd lost consciousness as a white policemen kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than seven minutes, even as Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe.”  Large-scale protest activities subsequently broke out in many places in the United States.  How do you view what is happening?
 
Yuan:  In the United States, incidents of the use of police violence in law enforcement are very common.  There are two reasons explaining the scale of the protests this time.   First, video footage of the incident spread online, hitting the most sensitive nerve of the most vulnerable groups.  Floyd’s repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe” right before he died became a true portrait of America’s racial minorities’ struggle to breathe in the haze of racial discrimination and prejudice.  Second, more than 100,000 people have died in the United States during the pandemic, and protestors are venting the pain and suffering they experienced through their actions.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo noted that this wave of protest is inseparable from popular dissatisfaction with the government’s poor handling of the pandemic.
 
But the deeper reason behind these protests is America’s deeply rooted history of racism.  From the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement, the problem of African-Americans remained America’s most pointed racial issue, as well as its most important political issue.  After the Civil Rights movement, it seemed that the problem of African-Americans’ political rights had been resolved, but the problem of their unequal position in society was not, and all kinds of discrimination continued to exist.  With the Obama victory in 2008, the first election of an African-American as president, African-Americans were elated.  But there were limits to what Obama could do to solve problems of racism, which left most Americans somewhat disappointed.  Trump’s rise to power was seen as the victory of the “blue collar whites,” but instead of solving racial issues, he intensified such conflicts by attempting to do away with Obamacare and building a wall on the US-Mexico border.  
 
During the pandemic, the death rate for African-Americans has been clearly higher than for whites, just as the death rate for poor people was glaringly higher than for rich people.  The fact that there were no large-scale protests during the pandemic was not because people were not angry, and when an African-American man died under the knee of a white policemen, the pent-up frustration exploded.  Even if Trump has tried to play it down and portray it as a local incident and to blame it on Minnesota’s Democratic governor, the impact has already spread throughout the United States. 
 
Domestic political factors are the main culprit explaining US ineffectiveness in the fight against the pandemic
 
Question:  Coronavirus-related deaths in the United States recently surpassed 100,000, and confirmed cases exceed 1,700,000, both numbers greatly surpassing those of other countries. As the world’s most advanced scientific country, with advanced medical technology and comprehensive medical facilities, how do you explain such an outcome in their efforts to curb the disease?
 
Yuan:  In the face of the great test of the coronavirus, Trump’s America “not only failed to lead the world response to the crisis, but also let down its own people.”  More than 100,000 Americans have died from the virus, which is a shocking wave of mortality.  The tragedy is greater than that of 9-11, and the number of deaths exceeds the sum of the deaths from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Even more troubling is that so far, the crisis has shown no signs of easing.
 
There are many issues to address on the topic of the weak American response to the virus.  The epidemic hit in an election year, and both parties clearly sought to link the epidemic to the election.  As for Trump, since he came to power, America’s economy has been the best of that of developed countries, with unemployment falling and the stock market setting new records, all of which came to be his biggest argument for reelection.  If he had called for serious measures to fight the epidemic,  there would have been an impact on the economy and on Wall Street, neither of which the Trump administration wanted to see, so at the beginning of the epidemic he hesitated between saving the people and saving Wall Street, and even put Wall Street first for awhile. 

Later on, the pandemic got far worse then he had imagined, which forced him to impose more effective measures.  But these measures either lacked sufficient scientific basis or were applied too haphazardly, and were not at all what one would expect from a great power.  Even worse was that he could not direct the activities of the states, and the Democrats were also playing politics.  Both parties put the election first, and the life and safety of the people second.  Domestic political factors were thus the main culprit leading to US ineffectiveness in the fight against the pandemic.  At present it is hard to predict the impact the pandemic will have on the presidential election.  But if it leads to economic recession, a decline in the stock market, and an increase in unemployment, it will certainly hurt Trump.  So Trump’s insistence on returning to work and opening the economy, even when the pandemic is still not under control, is in fact also because of the election.
 
"America First" puts global governance at risk
 
Question:  From "cutting funding" to threatening withdrawal, the Trump administration has, from the beginning of the pandemic, taken repeated action against the World Health Organization and has denounced other countries over and over.  How do you view this?
 
Yuan:  In pursuit of its slogan of  “America First,” the Trump government practices unilateralism, looks down on multilateralism, pursues selfishness, and diminishes its global responsibilities, and has already withdrawn from UNESCO, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, etc.  The announcement that they were withdrawing from the WHO once again highlighted the administration’s extreme selfishness, but no one is surprised.  Still, there is an obvious political calculation in this instance of “retreat:”  it won’t work to simply blame China for America’s weak response to the pandemic.  The scapegoating will only work if the attack extends to the WHO as well. 
 
The spread of the virus, this “formless enemy,” throughout the world should serve as a particular wake-up call for the countries of the world:  to bring order to the inner logic of globalization and its developmental direction, we must acknowledge yet again the extreme importance of global government.  But to date, the outcome has been precisely the opposite.  Some countries, led by the United States, do not actively promote stronger global governance, but instead blame globalization for going too far and penetrating too deep; they don’t call on international cooperation to solve problems such as shortages of medical supplies, but instead narrowly push “decoupling” and “repatriation;” they don’t painstakingly strengthen the capacity of international organizations, but instead attack the WHO when it’s down, cutting funding, withdrawing, putting global governance at risk.  Such behavior can only further US international decline, as it is unacceptable to many Western countries including Germany and France, because many European countries are staunch defenders of multilateralism.
 
American China strategy has undergone a basic transformation in recent years, as America has clearly defined China as its chief strategic competitor, and is mobilizing the power of the “entire government” to carry out a comprehensive containment of China.  Yet the fundamental change of the US strategy towards China is not only to cope with the power shift occasioned by China’s rise, but is particularly aimed at containing the huge challenge of China’s development model to Western-style liberal democracy.  The bitterness of some American politicians is precisely because of the Chinese system’s challenge to the American system, and the manifest differences in the two countries’ responses to the pandemic have led some American politicians to condemn the Chinese system.  
 
Links among five major social contradictions, and how they are embodied in the political struggles of the two parties
 
Question:  How should see the current domestic political situation in the US?  What deeper contradictions in American society are behind this situation?
 
Yuan:  Over the past twenty years, and especially in the last five years, America has changed to the extent that not only do foreigners no longer recognize it, but even Americans themselves no longer know it.  For example, the famous American political scientist Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952), who in the past trumpeted the “end of history,” now continually repeats that America has entered a period of institutional “decline.”  The root of the problem is that deep structural problems have emerged in American society, and we can see them as concentrated in five social contradictions.
 
The first is the racial contradiction.  In the past, the crux of the issue was between blacks and whites, an issue that remains at the forefront, but it extends as well to the relationship between whites and Latinos, whites and Africans, whites and Asians, as well as contradictions among minority groups.  In the past few years, because the population growth rate among minority groups has surpassed that of the white population, traditional American white people have increasingly seen this as a great challenge.  In the 2004 book Who Are We? by the American conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), the author argued that “American exceptionalism” was facing various “challenges:”  Mexican immigration and the Latino-ization of America would shrink the core values and culture of the United States, which would eventually become a "country with two languages, two cultures and two peoples."  If such ethnic contradictions are not resolved, the spirit of America—an immigrant country—must necessarily wither.
 
The second is class contradictions.  The “Occupy Wall Street” slogan of “99% versus 1%” is the true picture of the intensification of class conflict in the United States.  Many Americans worry that they are living in an era where social mobility is on the decline.  According to the most recent research by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty (b. 1979), the "absolute mobility" of American society, that is, the probability that the next generation will have a higher income than that their parents, has declined from 90%, a level of near certainty, to 50%--a coin toss.  The gap in life expectations between rich and poor has increased.  Almost everywhere in America, the road to betterment for black children is even steeper.  Fewer and fewer Americans believe the old sayings about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and getting rich or becoming an official, and stories in American textbooks about American social mobility no longer ring true.
 
Third are generational contradictions.  We also see profound contradictions between people of different ages because of different interests, different experiences of growing up, and different life goals.  Young people want college tuition to be decreased, middle-aged people need to work, and elderly American worry about their health care.  Young people like Sanders, old people like Biden, and the middle-aged, particularly the blue collar middle-aged, lean toward Trump.
 
Fourth are regional contradictions.  The Sun Belt, the Rust Belt, and the Snow Belt have gradually grown apart.  The East and the West Coast both embrace globalization, while in between it’s “America First.”  Of America’s fifty states, roughly forty of them consistently support either the Republicans or the Democrats.  The result of presidential elections is decided by eight or nine swing states, while the “red states” and the “blue states” circle the wagons and solidify their mutual antagonism.  This is the clearest expression of the extremism of American politics.
 
Fifth are gender contradictions.  As expressed in the relations between men and women, American women have suffered long-term, systemic, broad-based, institutionalized discrimination, a public and hidden sexism that is simply shocking. 
 
These five social contradictions do not develop in parallel, but are interlinked in complex ways.  In politics, the contradictions are most manifest in the unhealthy competition between the two parties and in the lack of coordination between the federal and state governments, which has led to a polarization of American politics “that is worse than at any time since the Civil War.”  Timothy Heath, a scholar at the Rand Institute, has written that “On many issues the two parties are incapable of reaching a consensus, and in each party, one third of elected officials believes that the other party is a threat to the country’s future.”  Steven Walt, Professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, argues that at present the two parties “treat one another as enemies,” and the country is “super-polarized.”  The fact that many measures recommended during the present pandemic could not be carried out is greatly related to this polarization, and no one seems to be able to solve the problem. 
 
That “when America gets sick, other countries take medicine” will not help America solve its problems
 
Question:  An American media critic noted that:  “In the past, America brought the story of hope, but in the last 30 years, the story of America has fallen into difficulty.”  What do you think of this?
 
Yuan:  More and more social elites in America are concerned about political polarization and unhealthy political competition, and are proposing reform.  But this all has to do with the redistribution of social resources, the reform of the electoral system, and conflicting interest groups, etc., so it is not going to be easy.  In this context, a part of the elite hopes to move the contradiction outside of the United States, to set up an enemy so that the two parties can tone down their antagonism.  But the strategy of “when America falls ill, other countries take the medicine” will clearly not solve America’s own problems.

Looking back over American history, after the War of Independence, the American Founding Fathers established the basic institutional framework of the United States through drafting and revising the constitution.  After the Civil War, they carried out the reforms of the Progressive Movement, accomplishing the initial rise of the United States, and after World War I, the US established its status as a world power.  At the end of the economic crisis from 1929 to 1933, Roosevelt’s New Deal established a new model of welfare capitalism, and over the course of WWII, the US achieved the transformation from great power to Western hegemon.  Over the course of the half-century long Cold War, it continually strengthened its military-industrial complex, and finally won the Cold War.  America’s emergence as a great power and its transformation into a superpower relied both on occasional foreign wars, and on periodic institutional reforms.
 
After the Cold War, America changed from being “one of two poles” to being “the superpower,” and with the arrival of the age of globalization and digitization, America’s internal and external environments experienced many revolutionary changes, to which America should have responded with deep reforms.  These needed reforms, however, were either papered over by the prosperity of the Clinton era, or lost in George W.  Bush’s anti-terrorism, and never occurred, meaning that all sorts of contradictions simply kept accumulating.  Finally, the young Obama, calling for reforms, was pushed onto the stage of history by the Americans.  But Obama’s reforms remained abstract, without an institutional basis, and all he accomplished were reforms at a technical level, while deeper reforms remained undone. 

Against this background, America welcomed Trump, who promised to destroy the old world and build the new.  Trump does indeed offer “reform,” but he is upending the existing US system in a subversive way, disrupting US relations with the world, and disrupting traditional values.  Laozi said that one must “govern a large country as one cooks a small fish.”  Trump is “flipping pancakes.”  On the surface, America appears to have a prosperous economy, a thriving stock market, and a falling unemployment rate.  But this is not the result of structural reform, and is instead propped up by the old capital of American hegemony, and the result may well be the end of the dream.
 
No fundamental changes have taken place in the US economic structure, electoral system, or social structure. For the United States to achieve a real transformation, it must also experience a certain period of hardship in order to address, internally, the deep polarization of the two party political system, and, externally, the processes of globalization and informatization, instead of running away. 
 
Notes
 
[1] “中国现代国际关系研究院院长袁鹏：政治博弈下的美国乱象,”published online at http://news.cnwest.com/tianxia/a/2020/06/02/18804445.html  on June 2, 2020.

​[2] Translator’s note:  For a representative example, see Peng, Yuan, “Sino-American relations: new changes and new challenges,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2007-03-01, Vol.61 (1), p.98-113.  Peng’s university website lists other publications.