Global Affairs Expert Webinar: The China Challenge
Rush Doshi, the C.V. Starr senior fellow for Asia studies and director of the China Strategy Initiative at CFR, leads the conversation on the China challenge.
These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation.
Speaker
Rush Doshi
C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asia Studies and Director of the China Strategy Initiative
Council on Foreign Relations
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2025 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share these resources with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We’re delighted to have Rush Doshi with us today to discuss the China challenge. Dr. Doshi is the C.V. Starr senior fellow for Asia studies and director of CFR’s China Strategy Initiative, a new cross-cutting initiative here at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves as an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Before joining CFR. Dr. Doshi was the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council. He also served as a fellow at the Brookings Institution and Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. He is the author of The Long Game, China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, which was published by Oxford University Press, and is an expert on China’s foreign policy, U.S. strategy toward China, cross-strait issues, and Indo-Pacific security. So, Rush, thank you for being with us today.
I thought we could begin with you giving us an overview of China’s grand strategy and the current state of U.S.-China relations.
DOSHI: Sure. Thank you very much. And grateful to all of you for joining. I’m joining you right now from my office at Georgetown University where I teach a course on Chinese grand strategy, which is a subject I’ve researched for a very long time, and I had a chance to personally experience when I served in government. So I thought I might begin with a little bit about China’s intentions, ambitions, strategy, and then from there move a bit more to U.S. policy, which I imagine many of you will have questions about in the Q&A.
So to set the baseline, you know, what exactly is a grand strategy? You know, why do we even ask if China has one? A grand strategy is a state’s theory of how it can achieve security. But what makes grand strategy grand, what makes it unlike other, you know, efforts that a state can undertake, is that it’s coordinated across multiple means of statecraft—military, economic, political, technological. That kind of coordination is very hard. So when a state is able to do that, it allows them to punch above their weight. So obviously then if China, a state that’s already a heavyweight, has a grand strategy, it’s really consequential.
You know, my basic view is that when we ask ourselves where China’s strategy lives, the answer really is that it lives in the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party is the key institution to understand how China works. And we don’t have an analogous institution to that in the United States or in Europe. It’s kind of a unique Chinese communist phenomenon to have the party run everything. You also had parties lead other communist dictatorships, but the Chinese Communist Party is unique in its resilience.
The party was formed really from the ferment of the Qing Dynasty’s decline. So before the rise of the China we know today, there was a Qing dynastic tradition in China that sort of ran the country. And in that dynasty there was a decline that had been occurring for almost a century before the dynasty finally collapsed. And many of the leading Chinese Communist Party members experienced that decline and were concerned about it, and they wanted to make China wealthier and stronger. And in that period then, we see the party really come to fruition.
Nationalism is, in many ways, what sets the direction of Chinese grand strategy. And that’s really the purpose of the Chinese Communist Party too. It’s to rejuvenate China. They believe that from the loss of the Opium Wars in the early part of the nineteenth century all the way to the present day—well, really all the way until 1949—China was essentially humiliated by a series of European great-power aggressions, as well as by Japanese incursions. And it was in that period of weakness that nationalism forms. And the goal of nationalism, again, is to rejuvenate China. So, the Chinese Communist Party forms in that environment with the goal of making China great again, if we could use that phrase.
But that’s not the whole story, right? That might be their goal, but how are they going to achieve it? The Chinese Communist Party isn’t just a nationalist institution. It’s also what we would call a Leninist institution. So let me take a second to just tell you a bit about why that’s important. You know, Leninism is a political theory. It’s a theory of how to achieve power, centralized power. The basis of Leninism is that you have a small vanguard group, an elite, steward a revolution, right? That’s the point. A small group of people are the vanguard. They lead a revolutionary effort.
Now, in Lenin’s case, in the Soviet Union, the purpose was to create kind of a communist state. In China, Leninism was closely tied to the idea of national rejuvenation. So you see nationalist ends tied with Leninist means. Leninism is all about centralization. It’s all about how one small group controls all the levers of power to accomplish really important aims. So that’s the party. China is focused on national rejuvenation. The Chinese Communist Party is their vehicle to achieve it. It does it with a Leninist approach to governing the country. So if it has a strategy, it stands to reason it’ll also be found in this very centralized institution.
So how would we know if China has a strategy? Well, first you can look at what they write. You can look at the texts, the documents the Chinese Communist Party puts out. That’s going to give you a sense of just how exactly they’re thinking about the world. And remember, in that system, those documents aren’t just expressive. They’re also meant to steer the ship of state, to provide guidance to key cadres on what exactly they should be doing. The second question you have to ask yourself is, do they have the capability to do this?
If you’re going to do a grand strategy, you’re going to need to be able to integrate multiple instruments of statecraft under the auspices of the leadership. And that’s going to require national security institutions that can do two things—coordinate lots and lots of different instruments and overcome areas of resistance, social pressure, vested interests within the broader society, in service of that vision. And then finally, we got to see behavior. Was the conduct in China largely consistent with the texts that we see? So, that’s how you know whether or not China has a strategy, and why we kind of want to approach that question in a very rigorous way, because this is a very critical question.
Then the question is, on that foundation, what exactly is the grand strategy that China has? So let me offer this as I get now into the content. You know, grand strategies don’t change very easily, right? There’s a few reasons why. Often people’s beliefs don’t change very quickly and often organizations don’t change quickly either. So when China changed its grand strategy, it often did that in response to huge, unexpected shocks that force people to think differently about the world. So grand strategy changes slowly, and then very, very sharply. Let me take you back to the 1980s.
Back in the 1980s, China was essentially a quasi-ally of the United States. We were both focused on the threat of the Soviet Union. We shared our very best military technology with China. We operated a facility with China to monitor the Soviet nuclear program in the northwest part of the country. We had a close relationship. In fact, even today some of China’s torpedo systems, some of its helicopters, some of its aircraft carrier program, it all dates back to things that we shared in the 1980s. That’s obviously not where we are now. What happened? What changed?
There was a traumatic trifecta that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s of events that changed the way the Chinese Communist Party thought about the world. And there were three events. The first was the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which reminded China of the ideological threat. The second was essentially the Gulf War, which, you know, devastated an Iraqi army that was considered to be pretty sophisticated by many countries around the world. It was completely destroyed. That suggested to China that, wow, they were really behind the United States militarily. And then third, there was the ideological threat married with the loss of the glue that kept the U.S. and China together. That is, the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialist states throughout—or, communist states—throughout the world.
That trifecta led Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader at the time, to basically assess that now the United States was the main adversary for China. And they were very closely focused, Deng Xiaoping and the rest of the Chinese Communist Party, on the question of American power and threat. And they had perceived that American power was very, very significant, and that the threat posed by the United States was much, much higher. But they also knew that China needed the United States to develop and couldn’t afford to alienate it. And so they put those two impulses together into a grand strategy called tāoguāng yǎnghuì (韬光养晦), or hiding capabilities and biding time.
And that strategy, as I put it conceptually, is about blunting American power non-assertively. You know, blunting recognizes that America has certain advantages, military, political, and economic. Blunting is about undermining those advantages in ways that give more space to China but don’t trigger the anxieties of the United States. So what do we see China do? Militarily, it decides to pursue a military posture focused on what we call asymmetric missions, using mines and missiles and submarines to keep the U.S. at bay. Economically, it decides to pursue access to the World Trade Organization and most-favored-nation status, not just to develop itself, but because it knew that once it had that access it’d be much, much harder for the U.S. to use economic tools against China. Again, this is blunting American economic power.
And then politically, it saw within Asia the rise of new regional institutions that America was, in many ways, leading. It was afraid these could become an Asian NATO, so it joined those and blunted them, again, to make sure they wouldn’t become threatening to China. And this blunting strategy, which was integrated—like any good grand strategy—across military, economic, and political means, and, like any Chinese grand strategy, was basically encapsulated in Chinese Communist Party texts, continues for almost all the way until 2008. You know, almost basically for twenty years. But in 2008 things changed. There’s a new event, a new shock, that alters the way China looks at the world.
And that shock is the global financial crisis—the big global financial crisis that undermines the foundations of America’s economic model and the way that it looks around the world. This moment also hurt China, but what it led China to conclude was that the United States was weakening. You see, I mentioned earlier that China focuses a lot on perceptions of American power. They have phrases that they use in key Chinese Communist Party texts to capture that. Those phrases are multipolarity, or duō jí huà (多极化), or the international balance of forces, guójì lìliàngduìbǐ (国际力量对比). They’re always asking, you know, are those trends moving in our favor?
And they couldn’t say yes for most of the 1990s and 2000s, but finally, with the 2008 global financial crisis, they could say emphatically: Yes. The world was becoming more multipolar. International balance of forces was becoming more balanced. To quote President Hu Jintao, China’s leader at the time, America was weakening, China was rising. With that change in the perception of American power relative to China, China could be more aggressive. And we see them go from a blunting strategy to what I call a building strategy. And the purpose of building is laying the foundation for order in Asia.
Militarily, that meant going from that asymmetric approach focused on mines and missiles and submarines, all useful for keeping people out of your region but not useful for taking territory or islands or holding the water, well, they change—they change it up. They go from that approach to now what I call a building approach militarily. That means building aircraft carriers, lots and lots of surface vessels, building a Marine Corps, building an amphibious landing vessel, acquiring the capability to now project power—not just keep others out, but go out yourself.
Second, economically, we see China move from basically trying to tie America down in the World Trade Organization and the most—with most-favored-nation status in particular, so we couldn’t use economic tools against them, to now beginning to use economic tools of their own against others, including their own neighbors, including Japan, when they were unhappy with the conduct of those neighbors. This is now going from economic defensiveness, from blunting, to economic building—building the foundations of economic leverage over others. And then finally, politically. We see China move from trying to join and sabotage Western-led institutions to now building its own new institutions, its own banks. We’re trying to get new security institutions going in Asia that it can lead. All of a sudden, again, it’s not afraid of order—it wants to build order itself in Asia as a leading state.
That all brings us to the present. And this is where I’ll end. China’s strategy was blunting when it was weaker. It was building when it got stronger, but focused largely on Asia. Today, China’s grand strategy is increasingly global. China has a phrase, great changes unseen in a century, that we see President Xi Jinping start using a lot in 2017. It’s in all of his major speeches. It’s in most major documents. What does great changes unseen in a century even mean? Well, go back to history at the beginning. I talked a little bit about how China was in decline. And when China was in decline, one of the leading Chinese statesmen at that time, in the 1870s and 1880s, he had a statement that he basically put forward to capture that sense of decline. That China was experiencing great changes unseen in 3,000 years.
His theory was that for 3,000 years, China was dominant, and all of a sudden now for the first time in 3,000 years, it was being brutalized. If that phrase was a sign of Chinese decline, then this phrase, Xi Jinping’s phrase, is a sign of China’s ascent. Yes, these great changes also pose risks to China, but the opportunity is greater than the risk. And the biggest of the great changes unseen in a century is the decline of the West, or, as President Xi puts it, the East is rising and the West is falling. In fact, just a few weeks back, I think, there was a major essay put forward in a major Chinese intelligence community-connected journal called The End of the West. They have been suggesting now for some time, but especially since 2017, that basically America’s in terminal decline, and now is China’s time.
And with that, it’s the opportunity for China to go global. Militarily, that means no longer just focusing on Asia but looking for military bases overseas. When I was at the White House, my first week on the job I was pushing back on the spread of Chinese military bases to places like Argentina. So global military. And a military that’s not just global, but also capable of rivaling the United States, with capabilities unlike any that most other countries can field, even that the U.S. can field. In many places, China is ahead militarily. We can talk more about where. Economically, it meant dominating the supply chains upon which the world relies, making the world dependent on China, but China less dependent on the world. President Xi has a phrase for that. He calls it dual circulation.
Technologically, it meant winning the fourth industrial revolution. Very quickly, the idea here is that history proceeds through a series of industrial revolutions. The first one was steam power. Britain won that. The second was electrification. The third was mass manufacturing. So think, from Thomas Edison to Henry Ford, that’s the second and third industrial revolution. America wins that, and with it the First and Second World Wars, becoming a superpower, and the Cold War.
Now we’re here at the fourth industrial revolution—biotechnology, AI, smart manufacturing, robotics, and many other fields. And China for the last decade straight has been trying to dominate those industries, and increasingly it is succeeding. And finally, politically, global expansion means resetting the baseline of the international system so you don’t think liberal democracy is the default setting. You think the default setting might be autocracy, even. The world is safe for autocracy then.
That is where we are today. This expansionary phase began with Brexit, which they thought meant the decline of the West, the rise of populism. With President Trump’s election, which they saw as a sign America was turning away from the order that it built. You may disagree, but that’s how they read it. And then, of course, the COVID pandemic, which they thought America handled poorly. Again, you can disagree, because it was American vaccines that saved the world, but for some period of time America was handling the pandemic poorly relative to China, when it came to casualties from the pandemic itself. And all that together gave them greater confidence.
During the Biden administration they continued to believe America was in decline, although they became a little more skeptical about how quickly that would occur. And now today, as I mentioned, they are very confident that we are walking away from our biggest strengths. And that’s why there are essays being penned by top Chinese intelligence officials saying the West is basically over. So, I think I’ll stop there. Let me just offer two quick last thoughts.
Everything I’ve offered to you is a subject of a book I’ve written. So if you’re not totally sold, you can read the book. It’s called The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. It surveys over five million words, a big database, of Chinese texts I built myself over time, over many years. It’s all about Chinese primary source research, but it’s also about testing that research against China’s behavior. And the second thing I’ll just say at the end here is that, you know, things are changing, things are evolving. And so I’d like to spend some of that time with you answering your questions, yes, but also hopefully we can get into Q&A a little bit about what we’re seeing today in the U.S.-China relationship, and the policy side as well.
And with that, back to you, Irina.
FASKIANOS: Rush, thank you very much. So we have hands already up and questions written.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So we have a first raised hand from Robert Keohane, great to have you on, at Princeton University.
Q: Thank you. Thank you very much. Rush, it’s good to see you. And can you hear me?
FASKIANOS: We can.
DOSHI: Yes. Yes, Professor. Thank you.
Q: And I think The Long Game is a very good book. I recommend it.
I want to ask you about China’s current leadership’s attitudes. That is, their leadership now projects a great deal of confidence. Does the leadership at all worry about overconfidence on their own part?
DOSHI: Thank you, professor. And I should just say for the audience that Professor Keohane was my senior thesis advisor when I was an undergraduate. And I learned the art of social science and critical thinking from him. And it’s something that I continue to think about all the time when I do my research and when I teach my classes. So thank you, Professor.
Yes, I think it’s an important question. I think that even if China’s Communist Party leadership thought that, you know, their overconfidence was misplaced, it’s always hard for them to admit it because there’s a political incentive to buy into the system that China that—to buy into the rhetoric that China is always winning. So when we parse their texts we have to do so carefully, because we know that there’s also this very real incentive for leaders to say things are going great all the time, and that if they weren’t, well, then why is the Chinese Communist Party still in power, in a sense? And so there is a risk that there is overconfidence.
I would say that they were a bit chastened after certain moments where it looked like their power was less effective in accomplishing the outcomes that they cared about. One example would be they were chastened after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine struggled a bit. They realized that the Russian military, with its various pathologies and corruption that led it to perform poorly initially, that some of those problems probably existed in China too. And so they did set about immediately trying to remedy those problems, including by pursuing anti-corruption in the military.
Another area where they saw some overconfidence was they thought that, you know, they were in a better position perhaps than they were to weather Western sanctions. They looked at what happened to Russia and they thought that was quite frightening. And they didn’t feel themselves to be prepared properly. So, again, what they did is they put in place a series of policies designed to reduce China’s exposure, where they could, to Western sanctions activity. So often we’ll see these areas of tactical reassessment, where they realize they may have been overconfident, and then there is tactical calibration.
But at the strategic level, I do genuinely believe that they feel that this is going to be China’s century. They feel that they’re winning the competition on technology and economics. They feel that the military capability that they’ve built up overmatches the West within Asia, and in certain senses is superior globally. There are capabilities China has that the U.S. can’t field. And there are more and more of those. They recognize that they have weaknesses. And they’re not looking for a Cold War or an imminent confrontation.
This is how I’d end the question, the fact that they don’t desire to challenge the United States openly right now, but generally hope to use this period of President Trump to buy more time to consolidate their further development and their rise, suggests a leadership that is confident but also sensible in taking on excessive risk. Now, many people criticize President Xi. They say he’s taken on way more risk than he should have, that he has overreached. And there may be some truth to that, but the best measure of overreach in part is going to be the results. And right now, they feel the results speak for themselves.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Amy Stambach, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: Is China’s grand strategy similar to the Trump administration’s whole-of-government approach?
DOSHI: Well, thanks. It’s a really fantastic question. And I have to say that they’re not similar at all, in part because one of the key questions for being able to have a grand strategy is whether there is a capability within the state to do coordination across multiple instruments and to overcome social forces that might oppose the pursuit of national security interests over parochial interests, right? There might be all kinds of companies that don’t like having to do things that might be in the national interest, and oftentimes it’s easier for autocracies to overcome that phenomenon than it is for democracies. Not always and not exclusively, but often.
In China’s case we have to remember the Chinese Communist Party sits above the state and penetrates every level of the state, every major executive, every major university professor, every major member of the elite, every politician, everybody is part of the Chinese Communist Party. And so when guidance comes to those individuals, it comes through the party. And often personnel decisions are made through the party as well. Whether you are promoted or not depends in part on your ability to comply with the party’s requirements. We can talk much more about that.
But what that creates is a system that is better suited for centralization. That means it can rapidly make terrible decisions, like the Great Leap Forward, or it could rapidly make good decisions, like to invest in industrial policy for electric vehicles which now has led China to having the world’s most competitive, formidable electric vehicle sector capable, according to Elon Musk, of putting every other car company in the world out of business. That, too, is a product of centralization.
Contrast that with the United States. Right now, it’s hard to say that the U.S. government’s own policy is properly coordinated across all departments and agencies. The National Security Council, in which I served, used to have some thirty-or-so staffers focused on broader Asia issues. Right now it might be down to just five or six. And the purpose of that body is to help, again, coordinate the different agencies. In China they have another coordinating mechanism. It’s called the leading small groups or the commissions. They are largely now held by the party. And they coordinate policy across all ministries. When they call a meeting, everybody shows up and does what they’re told. That’s not exactly how it works in the Trump administration.
And then beyond that, look at how the Trump administration is thinking a little bit about science and technology, right? We’re seeing cuts to science and technology, cuts to education, an immigration policy which probably will reduce the amount of high-skilled labor and high-skilled expertise we can bring into the country. That is the exact opposite of what China is doing right now, where they have a new visa category to bring in high-skilled talent.
So if you really were coordinating all of your instruments of statecraft, you would be doing things differently, right? You’d be trying to build industrial capacity, increase science and technology funding, bring in more high talent. You’d be focusing on reforming the very broken defense industrial base that we have so it can actually build things again. You would be focusing on standing up new manufacturing facilities, maybe with your allies and partners investing. None of that is happening.
And partly it’s because, again, we don’t have the institution to coordinate, we don’t have that capability. And in our system, you know, if you want to fix something like the defense industrial base and the defense company disagrees, they can have a lot of purchase in Congress to make that harder. There’s many, many more examples of this, but I know there are other questions. So let me just stop there and just leave it at that discrepancy. Thank you.
FASKIANOS: We have a lot of questions. Next question I’m going to take from Rongzhen Wang, who is a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Q: Thank you, Professor Doshi, for your great speech and your insightful remarks. My name is Rongzhen Wang . I’m a senior, a major in political science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I only have two questions today.
So first one is, do you see China’s current activism in multilateral institutions and regional initiatives as evidence of limited defensive goals or as a part of a broader ambition to challenge the United States’ international standing? And the second one, is that from a fundamental level, do you think United States actually have a grand strategy to counter China? Or will it require a systematic level of a Cold War from—like a Cold War magnitude, like the Soviet Union, to finally generate enough bipartisan consent to create such grand strategy? Thank you.
DOSHI: Great questions. On the first one, China’s participation in international institutions, this is a subject that I’ve studied for a long time, and continue to study. And got to, again, experience when I was working at the White House. I think that this question is very important. And I look at China’s participation international institutions, I think of it as largely strategic participation, or strategic liberalism, or an effort to engage institutions in ways that is not always fully sincere but desires to gain benefits for those institutions, sometimes outside the very mandate of those institutions.
So let me tell you what I mean by that. You know, China initially joined institutions like ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and APEC—which are, you know, nominally bodies meant to coordinate discussion on security and economic issues respectively. But those bodies, you know, weren’t very good at doing that. They weren’t properly institutionalized. Some people called them a talk shop. China saw participation in those institutions largely about reassuring its neighbors that it had benign intentions, at a time when there were many, many concerns within Asia, in the 1990s, about China’s military ambitions. And so really, the participation in those institutions had a kind of secondary benefit for China, which was even though the formal processes didn’t work it allowed China to project itself as a more responsible participant in Asian order. And people then built theories about how it was—these institutions were affecting China, which I think may have been a little bit overstated on some of the mechanisms.
Then you look at global institutions to contrast them with regional ones. China is very involved. It was previously leading five of fifteen or fourteen UN special agencies. A lot of the time, it was using that ability to reshape some of the norms behind these global institutions in ways consistent with China’s political preferences, to steer resources, contracts, and other things to China itself. But also to push back on themes that might have been undermining the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. There were efforts to put Xi Jinping’s political phrases, global governance concept, global civilization concept, et cetera, global development concept—initiative, I’m sorry, initiative—all in these institutions. And there were also efforts in these global institutions to basically sideline countries that China doesn’t always agree with. So you’d see efforts, for example, to prevent India from joining initially organizations like the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), another organization China started, until Russia intervened. So often this was a kind of exclusive multilateralism that China was pursuing, in my part—in my view, to secure benefits for itself and to kind of create order that was consistent with Chinese preferences.
I think your second question was really about whether the U.S. has a grand strategy on China. My answer is really that it doesn’t. That, you know, we often think grand strategy is a product of the executive branch, but in a democracy I think it also lives in the legislative branch. That sort of makes sense because it’s the most democratic branch of government. But the Congress is where you’re going to create the institutions to be able to compete. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Congress got together and created a whole new host of national security institutions to deal with the problem of terrorism. Nothing like that has ever happened on the China challenge.
I don’t think competing with China is a Cold War question. I don’t think that the U.S. can contain China. I think often—and I’ve written an article on this—people underestimate China’s capabilities. They underestimate the sheer significance and magnitude of its manufacturing, technological, and military capabilities. And in many ways, the question for America isn’t, can you put together a strategy to contain China? It’s, can you put together a strategy to balance China? Because China is so significant the only way to manage its rise is to balance it, basically, with American allies and partners.
If you look at the statistics, China is 30 percent more GDP per capita—sorry—30 percent more purchasing power adjusted to GDP than the United States. It has twice the manufacturing capability of the United States. It produces twice as many cars—or, three times as many cars, twice as much energy—you know, all the key inputs of the next industrial revolution, whether that’s solar panels or, you know, electric vehicles, or the batteries for them, or critical minerals, or even old-fashioned stuff like pharmaceutical ingredients for antibiotics. Ninety percent of that is produced in China. And so the scale of China is so significant that I think you would need unified approach with allies and partners to kind of balance it. Not, again, contain it. It’s more about working out terms of coexistence together that foster a kind of sustainable equilibrium.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Shirley Ann Jackson, president emerita of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Q: Hi. Thank you. Since you introduced me, I’ll just go to my two-part question. Great remarks. Thank you.
One, can you speak a little bit about how the China Belt and Road Initiative plays into this whole scene you’re talking about, and their projection particularly from a military point of view? The second is, you had said earlier in your remarks that you would go back to where you thought they maybe had an advantage in that regard, in terms of outpacing us or being in a better place. Could you talk a little bit more to those two points?
DOSHI: Absolutely. And thank you for both those questions. You know, going back to my initial remarks, which were just meant to provide a baseline for us to have a better sense of how China’s ambitions have evolved and its capabilities evolved, you know, in this building phase, the second phase of Chinese grand strategy which began with the global financial crisis, we saw leaders like President Hu Jintao put forward a phrase. The Deng Xiaoping year was about hiding capabilities in biding time, or tāoguāng yǎnghuì. The Hu Jintao corollary to the Deng doctrine was essentially jījí yǒu suǒ zuòwéi (积极有所作为), or actively accomplish something. And he said that these were in a dialectical relationship, a type of dialectic, in his language, that was basically a spectrum. That on the spectrum, on one end was hiding capabilities and biding time, not assertiveness, and the other was actively accomplishing something, assertiveness.
Now, here’s where I bring it to your question. In the speech where he announces this in 2009, which is the ninth ambassadorial conference of the Chinese Communist Party. They bring all the key ambassadors together, the foreign policy establishment. It’s a great place to adjust foreign policy strategy. In that speech, he mentions the need for China to go out and build infrastructure around Asia—around the world, but especially Asia—to create complementarity with China. This would create goodwill, but it would also increase connectivity with China, perhaps even asymmetric interdependence, which Professor Keohane and others have written about. You know, this idea that by building these linkages other countries might be dependent more on China than China was on them.
And President Hu talks about all this as early as 2009. Now fast forward several years, and beginning in 2013 and 2014 we see the rise of the Belt and Road Initiative under President Xi Jinping. But the logic is much earlier. And this global phase of expansion, that global—that Belt and Road Initiative is still happening all around the world. But one thing I should just say is that in 2017-2018 the Belt and Road Initiative began encountering setbacks. Many of the projects, like Western development projects back in the day, began encountering challenges with, you know, big dam projects would fall behind, big rail projects, something would go off the rails, no pun intended. And so what we’ve seen is Belt and Road move away from these massive projects to finer projects, smaller projects, what President Xi called finer brush strokes, including vocational education.
But now to get to the question on the global ambition, the military aspect of this, some major Belt and Road projects persisted no matter what. In many cases, those projects are about building dual use facilities. And I personally encounter this. You know, we saw China trying to build military bases, sometimes using infrastructure projects, all the way from Latin America to the Mediterranean to the Middle East to Southeast Asia and to the Pacific Islands. And so Belt and Road can be a vehicle for being able to sponsor the kind of infrastructure development that later can provide for a—what we call a dual-use facility. And that sort of answers the Belt and Road question.
The last question you had was about China’s advantages. And I’ll just say you know, China’s ambitions are to basically dominate the next industrial revolution and benefit from that, not only in terms of prosperity but also technological competence and, on that foundation, power. And so what we see is that China as a manufacturing country—and I don’t think we—I don’t think—people who focus on international security do not think enough about international political economy or national security’s economic foundations, including the material foundations—the hard material foundations, like manufacturing. But right now, China is the world’s dominant manufacturer. And its lead is only growing.
Like I said earlier, China is twice American manufacturing. I’ll just go through a few of these statistics again, very quickly. And I’ll add on a few more. Twice American manufacturing. Twice American power generation. On track to be four times American power generation, with a hundred nuclear plants under construction and 1,000 small modular reactors considered, in addition to a massive solar build out that puts every other country to shame. And not to mention the coal consumption is 40 percent higher than the rest of the world combined. On top of that energy production, like I said, three times American car production. But then look at the advanced cars that they’re building, electric vehicles. They are so cheap and so sophisticated. They are dominating markets around the world in such a way that today Toyota, General Motors, Ford, American and allied car companies will not be able to compete in developing markets absent significant innovation.
You go to, you know, robotics. Right now, China is installing seven times as many industrial robots annually as the United States. Its manufacturing ecosystem is not relying heavily on labor. It’s increasingly relying on automation. And artificial intelligence is going to enhance the productivity of that already low labor, capital-heavy investment footprint. All of that is going to create—it’s already creating greater advantage in manufacturing. And so right now, China is the world’s dominant manufacturer. And that means two or three different things—three different things.
First, it means that the world depends on China for essentials. Again, for medicine to rare earth magnets, without which our industry is shut down, as President Trump has found out. Second, innovation often comes from the dominance of manufacturing because it comes from the factory floor. When you have a robust industrial ecosystem vertically integrated in many of these sectors, there are benefits—spillover benefits to innovation that can come from that. Even America was a manufacturing power before it was a science and technology power. China is walking that same path. And the idea that autocrats can’t innovate, I think, is probably a little bit misguided.
And then finally, you also see that manufacturing has implications in wartime. And, God forbid there’ll be a conflict between the United States and China, China is building military capability unlike any the world has seen. It is building missiles on of serial production that dwarf the arsenal of the West. Is going to build sixty-five major surface combatants in the next four years, which will actually mean that its navy will be 60—will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. Navy by 2030. So, you know, that’s just—this is a continental power historically now with the world’s largest, and increasingly most sophisticated, naval capabilities. They built 400 fourth generation aircraft in the last four years alone. Those are extremely advanced aircraft. Those are statistics that are very, very powerful. So, China’s advantages right now come from, in part, its ability to centralize and its ability to dominate manufacturing.
I will end with this. Its strengths and weaknesses flow from the same wells. So in the same way that this has allowed them to scale up in an incredible fashion very quickly, it also means that they are very wasteful with their capital. It also means they make bad decisions sometimes, and they double down on those bad decisions. They can move quickly, but they can also move quickly in the wrong direction with fewer mechanisms to correct.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Rush, since you mentioned their naval capability, and since you served in the Reserves—I neglected to mention that you were an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve—I want to go next to Steve Shinkel at the Naval War College: Can you comment on how you see events playing out in the South China Sea with the Philippines as a U.S. ally? And do we have good options to counter this, or will the West have to de facto accept the PRC’s control in the region?
DOSHI: Yeah. And this is why I like the frame of grand strategy as a way of thinking about these broader political questions, because it lets us focus on military, economics, and politics altogether, and technology, right? All of these things matter in competition. And so in the South China Sea, you know, the military story is that China has significant presence in the region. And the Philippines doesn’t have much naval capability. So it relies a lot on the security umbrella of the United States to kind of deter China from doing more and more aggressive things to the Philippine possessions there.
As many of you may know, again, we are a treaty ally of the Philippines. So there is a risk that if some conflict emerges between China and the Philippines, we are pulled into it. Often, we see China take very dangerous steps with these ships. Some of them have resulted in the loss of limbs for Philippine sailors, which gets very close to triggering alliance commitments. Just a few weeks ago a Philippine sailor was dangerously—seriously injured by a Chinese water cannon.
So, what can the U.S. do? One of the things that the Philippines can count on, though, despite the fact that it can’t project power as well as China can, is that the same blunting technologies that China used to keep America out of the region can also be applied by the Philippines to keep China at bay too. So by investing in antiship cruise missiles with longer ranges and faster speeds and larger warheads and more autonomy in their final stages, it’s possible for the Philippines to gradually begin to deter China. The problem is, China does—the Philippines doesn’t have that capability right now. But in time, they could acquire it.
If many of the claimants in the South China Sea had what we call these pointy capabilities. Antiship cruise missiles, one-way attack UAVs, or, you know, drones, essentially, undersea submersibles that could also be used to put pressure on Chinese positions, all of that might create more of an equilibrium in the region. Otherwise, China is going to steamroll all these claimants, given its sheer power, absent significant U.S. support and political pressure on China.
This is where economics comes in as well. China is also concerned about the possibility that a major clash could result in significant sanctions. If America is—if American sailors are injured in that clash, it might mean that we suddenly cut off access to certain technology that China depends on, and we cut off access certain—you know, to capital markets. There’s all kinds of things the U.S. has in its economic toolkit that also help create, in the background, conditions of stability. But they’re not purely in the military domain.
So overall, I would say that the situation in the South China Sea is challenging, and getting more challenging, given China’s sheer military capability. But the trends in warfare and the reality of America’s economic gravity do exert some of the stabilizing influence in the short term. The solution, in my opinion, over the medium term is to try to deescalate crises, try to manage competition, try to reassure China that the U.S. and its partners in the region don’t have revisionist ambitions. We’re not going to claim more islands or construct things on them. And try to find a way to freeze a status quo. And that’s where the political element of grand strategy comes in. China does not want to be seen as the provocateur in the region. And so working on ensuring that the U.S. and its allies look like the responsible parties creates another political factor for stability. And all three of those together can help buy the U.S. more time.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Anne-Amélie Campant, who is a Schwarzman scholar.
Q: Hi, can you hear me?
FASKIANOS: Yes.
DOSHI: Yes.
Q: Perfect. It’s very nice to meet you. Rush Doshi. My name is Anne-Amélie Campant. I’m a Schwarzman scholar. So currently based in Beijing.
And the first quick question that I wanted to ask you is about U.S.-Europe ties that have become more and more strained under Trump. And do you think that Beijing sees Europe as a strategic opportunity as a result of this? And how should Washington respond to this potential shift? And my second question is regarding national grid expansion, particularly with the East Data West Computing initiative China positions itself strongly for the AI race, and the U.S. does struggle with grid capacity. And so what gaps do you see in U.S. strategy for building the infrastructure that we need for AI? And are there lessons to draw from China’s approach? Thank you very much.
DOSHI: Thank you. Two excellent questions.
The second question on grid capacity, I remember. The first question, Irina, if you could just help me again?
FASKIANOS: It was on the Europe—
DOSHI: Oh, right. Thank you. Yeah.
FASKIANOS: So is this an opening for Europe.
DOSHI: Got it. So that’s a great question. And what I’d start by saying is that, if—you know, I’ve given statistics to the earlier question that we received about China’s advantages, that show just how China out scales the U.S. But the reality is that America has allies and partners whose capacity, when pooled with the United States, can sort of overmatch China’s, right? So if you add the United States, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and then throw in India—you don’t have to, but let’s throw in India for now just for the sake of argument. Together that group, which is all feeling the pressure from China’s industrial capacity and has real anxieties about a world where China is the dominant actor—which is the world we may be going into, not today, but, you know, decades down—a decade or two from now—if you combine that group of countries, that group is 50 percent larger than China’s manufacturing capability, dramatically outscales China in science and technology.
Right now, China has more top-cited academic publications than the United States. It has more active patents than the United States on an annual basis. If you put all those countries together, it vastly outstrips what China can muster in science and technology. Then you take the markets. Put these countries together, this is much of global demand. If you can organize that global demand, you could say, well, we’re going to sell to each other. We’re going to put higher barriers if China wants to sell it. That doesn’t mean we’re saying China can’t sell to us, we’re just saying we want to give an advantage to people we advantage to people within our kind of allied ecosystem, club, or cartel, if you will. Kind of a throwback to earlier years of post-Cold—of Cold War trading arrangements. And so that basically means a French company might survive today by selling to the United States when it might otherwise die if China had that market share instead.
So these kinds of methods can keep the allied bloc in the game. But as your question correctly identifies, there really isn’t much of an ally bloc without Europe. There’s a tendency right now to dismiss Europe as a museum, as not really relevant in strategic competition. But nothing could be further from the truth. American financial power rests in large part on the acquiescence of Europe. That’s why the dollar is where it is. America’s industrial capacity, if we ever want to rejuvenate it, we’re going to have to bring people who really remember how to build things to America, to invest in the United States, and transfer tacit knowledge to American workers. And that’s going to be Europeans, Japanese, and Koreans. But definitely Europeans who, as a bloc, Europe is the world’s second largest manufacturer. Europe has a larger share of GDP in manufacturing. Europe’s labor force in manufacturing is three times the U.S. labor force.
So this brings me to your question. China can do math too. I’ve just done some math. China can also count. And they know that Europe is very critical to American ambitions. And so there has always been a desire to weaken the ties between the U.S. and Europe. In 2000—I’m sorry—in 2021 when the Biden administration came into office on the back of the Trump administration, the EU and China had a massive investment agreement called CAI (Comprehensive Agreement on Investment). But that investment agreement exploded when the U.S. and Europe put sanctions on China for its genocide in Xinjiang. And the Chinese responded essentially by sanctioning European parliamentarians, who at that point were so offended they could not proceed with the investment agreement. But had it not been for that moment, we might have had an investment agreement between Europe and China that was historic.
Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine again made things harder. The Russians were getting support—are getting support, lethal and non-lethal, from China. And nobody’s been able to stop it. The Europeans know that the Russian military capacity being directed against Europe is built in China and made in China. And so that has made things harder. But, as I mentioned earlier, there is this tendency to believe in China that perhaps the West is ending, or perhaps the West is splitting. And this article that was put out by Xiàndài Guójì Guānxì (现代国际关系), the Contemporary International Relations, the think tank of the Ministry of State Security, they have this journal.
It says, the West is ending because President Trump has highlighted the differences in values between the U.S. and Europe in ways that are driving the two sides apart. Their theory, ironically, for materialists, who care a lot about things like hard power and manufacturing, is ideological. They’re saying what’s pushing the U.S. and Europe apart in large part of the difference in ideas, in addition to some other issues. So we’ll see. I think that they do see an opportunity, but, again, they prefer—rather, they privilege their relationship with Russia over their effort to develop ties with Europe, because they know Russia is the only great power that will ever stand with them if things come to a head.
On the question of data and AI and sort of the grid infrastructure, you know, you’re right. China’s electricity production is going to be so significant in twenty years—not even twenty, probably ten—that it’ll rival U.S. production on a per capita basis. Energy in China is going to get cheaper and cheaper, especially because, you know, a hundred nuclear reactors are going to do that. So I do think that the lesson for the United States isn’t just going to be in, like, new grid architecture. It’s going to be in pursuing, yes, renewable energy and nuclear energy to find a way to increase American capacity. Yes, we’re blessed by natural gas, but if we want to scale up in an enduring and affordable way over the long term it’s going to be some of these greener technologies that China is using right now to build its own electrical capacity.
Now, one last point here. China does have energy advantages in the competition for compute. But America has the chips. There are no ways right now that China can build chips as capable as the American chips, as long as they don’t—two things have to obtain. First, they’ve got to either be able to get semiconductor manufacturing equipment as good as ours, or, second, they’ve got to leapfrog the way we make chips today. Which could happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. If those conditions hold, then the U.S. has an overwhelming advantage in compute. So for us, the one area of the competition in AI that we have completely locked down is that we have more computing power. And if we decide to export these chips to China, as President Trump has suggested, we will lose that advantage.
So to the earlier questions about whether America has a grand strategy, if you had a grand strategy and part of that strategy assumed that you needed AI to power American renewal, you would not export the one area of AI competition in which you have singular advantage to a rival who has advantage in every other area of the AI competition. Ergo, perhaps we do not have a grand strategy. What we have is effective lobbying by semiconductor manufacturing and design companies.
FASKIANOS: Great.
Let’s go next to Susan Briziarelli, who is the assistant global—provost of global affairs at Adelphi University. She has several students running questions and has also raised her hand, so I think we could let you ask one of them. If you could can accept the unmute—there we go.
Q: Yes. My name is Peter Munoz. I’m from Adelphi University at Manhattan, New York.
And I want to ask, what can the Western world do to, in a way, rival China’s economy, or, you know, protect itself from, you know, its provocative behavior?
DOSHI: Thanks for the great question. I think that—this is something I’ve been writing a lot more about. There’s a domestic answer and an international answer. On the domestic side, America has to reinvest in its own industrial capacity and its science and technology ecosystem. The foundations for American power, including its military power, lie on what was developed over a century—more than 150 years of American industrial acceleration, growth, leadership, and investment.
All the way from American innovation with the early European forms of steam engines, the British steam engines, through the era of Thomas Edison, to the present. So right now the real formidable nature of China is that it’s not just copying America. It’s not relying on cheap labor costs. It is innovating. It’s innovating on high-value goods. And it’s, you know, electric vehicles we see innovation. Solar panels we see incremental innovation. In quantum communications we see innovation. So America has to invest in its innovation. And it has to invest in industrial policy as well, where the state can partner with the market to create outcomes that will otherwise not be sustainable under conditions of Chinese competition.
A good example is rare earth magnets. American industry grinds to a halt without this ancient, 1980s-era technology that GM used to dominate. But in the 1990s, GM did a funny thing. It sold the main rare earth magnets manufacturer to a consortium led by a family tied to—led to—family members of Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader, as well as Archibald Cox’s son. He was the prosecutor from Watergate. An American and Chinese consortium bought this great company that made all these critical magnets and sold it to China. The capital equipment moved to China. The computers moved to China. The process knowledge moved to China. And we lost that capability. To get it back, we’re going to have to invest a lot. We’re going to act a little bit like China did. We’re going to have to get our allies to help us. So that’s the domestic story.
The foreign story is what I call allied scale. China out scales the United States. And the rise and fall of great powers, in part not entirely, is a story of scale. One of the reasons that the U.S. prevailed—well, the UK was the first, right? They had the steam engine. They rose to the top. Once other countries of similar size and scale were able—of greater scale were able to adopt those techniques, they were able to overtake the UK. And even the British wrote about how the U.S., if they were able to adopt these industrial techniques, would actually overtake the United Kingdom one day. Which is exactly what happened. When World War II occurred, Japan and Germany were conscious of American scale.
Yamamoto, the man who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, said he could run wild for six months, but then industrial capability of America would dominate him. Adolf Hitler talked about America being a state of unimaginable productive capacities. And, again, that scale built the American century. Today, it’s China that has the scale, which, for all the reasons I mentioned, is quite daunting, then the only path to rivaling that scale is for the U.S. to build scale with allies and partners in a concerted way, to build new institutions with allies and partners. And to do this not in a handshake way that President Trump is doing with a wink and a nod to the Japanese or the Koreans, but in a way that is more enduring. We have to institutionalize American alliances to create the ability to rival Chinese scale.
What this means in practice? Very quickly. You could imagine Japan and Korea helping build American ships, Taiwan helping build American semiconductor plants, the United States sending its very best military equipment to its allies and partners, and everybody coming together to build a wall or a tariff gate around each other so that China can’t sell into our market and take the demand that we want to have our own companies be able to access. We want to pool that demand. And so those kinds of tools and techniques are not crazy. They’re achievable. And they can be done in a way that it’s consistent with trading and benefiting from China. In fact, I think it’s a good idea to welcome investment from China, with certain safeguards, and to find ways to coexist with China peacefully. But that’s also going to require increasing the capability of this allied bloc.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Luisa Blanco, who is a professor of public policy and economics at Pepperdine University: On one hand, the China challenge might give Latin American countries leverage to negotiate with the United States. But on the other hand, there’s the possibility for China to become more influential in that region and make it harder for the U.S. to work with Latin American countries. What are your thoughts on this?
DOSHI: It’s a great question. And if Professor Keohane is still with us, I’ll go back to his concept of asymmetric interdependence. Which is that increasingly there is that dynamic developing where China has significant leverage over Latin American economies because of the nature of the trade ties between—and the investment ties between China and those countries. So you look at a lot of Latin American countries—Peru, Ecuador—they’re exporting significant amounts of their commodities to China. And you even look at Argentina. You know, Argentina, Milei began, as you know, concerned and skeptical of China, but once the economic reality of his dependence on China was more clear he sort of changed course.
So I do think that China is achieving leverage through the economic and investment ties it’s building. It’s also achieving leverage politically. You know, there has been an effort for the last fifteen years by Chinese companies to purchase Latin American media and sort of repurpose it. Often you’ll find major newspapers derive a large amount of revenue from, like, advertisements that come from Chinese companies, or from investment by Chinese conglomerates. That has a narrative impact on the way in which these countries think about politics.
There’s also the direct elite capture phenomenon, where Chinese companies will, you know, pay off certain elected officials in countries. You know, Ecuador had this huge dam project with China. It was a massive failure. The dam has lots and lots of cracks. It’s really problematic. They have to keep releasing water from the dam so it doesn’t break. And that water comes down in floods that kill farmers. That dam project is, in part, the product of corruption all the way up to the leaders of Ecuador who basically benefited from money from the Chinese builders. And so that creates additional forms of linkage.
Now I’m not saying America never practiced this kind of statecraft in the past, but it doesn’t do that as much, really, in the present. And that gives China some advantages. But at the same time, you know, there’s some backlash to some of that activity in Latin America. And that creates other openings for the United States. Let me end with one last point. People talk about President Trump adopting a spheres of influence approach to the world, coming home to the Western Hemisphere, letting Russia have Europe, letting China have Asia. That approach—you see just how impossible that approach is when you better understand the scale of China’s global economic involvements, including in America’s own backyard.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Yi-Hsun Lee, who’s at the University of Warwick.
Q: Hello. Could you hear me?
FASKIANOS: Yes.
DOSHI: Yes, yes.
Q: Hello, Rush, Irina. I’m Yi-Hsun Lee from University of Warwick.
And my question would like to ask about Trump’s strategy. That we know that before in your speech it sounds like United States have to cooperate with European countries to maximize their resource to counter China. But in Trump’s logic, it seems like he’s thinking like he have to use the public-facing strategy for European country to counter Russia, and then the United States could concentrate their resources, no matter military or technology, to focus on East Asia.
And also, in your speech you mentioned that in the industrial revolution, the 4.1 competition, that United States have to win this competition, and the U.S. advantage is the semiconductor manufacturing. So they would like to protect Taiwan and protect the semiconductor companies there. Do you think that Trump’s strategy, this strategy to—public-facing for Russia and concentrate their resources to East Asia is reasonable or effective? Thank you.
DOSHI: Thanks very much for the question. And I know we’re coming up on time and I want to get more questions in, so I’ll be very brief. I think it makes sense to ask Europe to do more to defend itself against Russia because Europe has the industrial capability, and can have the defense capability, and certainly has the resources to be able to do that successfully. And China does require a lot of focus from the United States. The problem right now with this approach is I’m not sure the U.S. is really focusing that much on Taiwan either.
And we’re going to see very soon whether America will or won’t when the new National Defense Strategy comes out. So if your theory is that America is doing this to focus on China, then we should see in the National Defense Strategy some focus on China. But if instead, as is rumored, the National Defense Strategy says we should focus on the Western Hemisphere, then the prioritization we’re undertaking in Europe, the best explanation for that prioritization is not, in fact, to focus on China. The best explanation may, in fact, be that we just don’t want to do it anymore.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
There’s a question from—let’s see. I’m going to take a quick question from Ian. Where did it go? Ian Horn, who’s a graduate student at Montclair State University: Could you talk a bit more on what China is doing to socialize the globe towards autocracy? Is this more a byproduct of military and economic efforts or a conscious mission?
DOSHI: Yeah. This is a great question. And what I would say is that China has focused really on exporting some of the technology for surveillance, you know, in integration with that with artificial intelligence, facial recognition, cameras. It has a full stack of kind of police state technology that it’s been exporting around the world. And that has actually had impact in places like Myanmar and places like Africa, like Botswana and other countries, where—you know, where there’s a desire by the elite to be able to guard against the risk of possible social protest. So this is one way in which technology exports and the standards behind them kind of allow for a change in the norms that undergird the current system. Technology basically leading the way in which countries think about these issues.
A second factor is that China has been exporting, you know, police—essentially police training, police presence around the world, security services, to help train countries so that not their militaries, their security services can do a better job policing domestically. So there’s sort of a set of exports for authoritarian regimes that China has developed which are having real impact. And that, combined with constantly putting in place international bodies, you know, the idea that development is a human right and that other human rights come after development, these kinds of normative claims, combined with this technology and combined with the success of China’s own modernization, creates a kind of pressure on the validity, the salability, the kind of implementability of liberal democratic systems around the world.
And I think that’s why you’re seeing kind of a long-standing democratic winter. And you see those same pressures. They’re not entirely about China. There’s other pressures on democracy. But China is one of those forces that’s putting pressure on liberal democracy.
FASKIANOS: Thank you, Rush. And there’s so many questions. We obviously can’t get to them because we are at time, but I want to take the last, like, thirty seconds for you to spotlight the China Strategic Initiative at CFR and what you’re doing, because I think is a resource for this group. So if you could just say a few words, and we’ll—
DOSHI: Sure. Very quickly—yeah, happy to do that. Thank you, Irina, for the opportunity.
So our initiative has four big parts. One is the mass acquisition, digitization, and translation of Chinese texts at scale, and making them more available to the public. That’s the method of my own academic research, but we want to basically democratize that toolkit. The federal government used to do this until 2013, doesn’t do it anymore. So we’re stepping into the void. And we hope that you’ll take advantage of that tool. We have a number of efforts on policy matters too, focused on everything from how to fix our defense industrial base, to how to diversify our supply chains, to how to secure our networks against critical infrastructure cyberattack. All of those we welcome participation and partnership. We have a team of people working on those questions.
We have a number of conferences around the country that we host on these issues, all focused on the idea of American renewal given this challenge. And we’re always thinking globally, what is China doing around the world? How is the world reacting to China? People who have expertise in those—in different parts of the world can think about those questions and help us put together the picture. CFR is a membership organization with 5,000 members, and so, you know, we’re always looking to partner with people as a membership organization to help improve their understanding of China and change the elite discussion of China to catch up with where the facts are already taking us.
This is a formidable contest, formidable competitor. But unless America takes its own renewal seriously and its partnerships abroad seriously, it doesn’t have much chance of doing a good job competing. And that’s where we enter the debate. So hopefully we can partner with many of you. And if you’re interested, reach out to our team. And we’ll look forward to working with you.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Rush Doshi, it’s great to have you heading up the China Strategic Initiative. And thank you for spending this hour with us. And thanks to all of you for your questions. I, again, apologize that we couldn’t get to them all. We did our best. So we’ll just have to invite you back for round two, Rush.
So the next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, October 15, at 1:00 p.m. (EDT). Sarah Kreps, who is at Cornell University, will lead a conversation on AI and geopolitics. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. And of course, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. And education.CFR.org for free expert-informed teaching and learning resources. And, of course, the China Strategic Initiative is highlighted on our homepage at CFR.org, so you can go there to get more information about Rush’s effort.
So, again, thank you to Rush. Thank you to all of you. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
DOSHI: Thanks to all of you for joining.
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