Jonathan Czin joined the Brookings Institution as the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies on September 30, 2024, following a distinguished career in government. Czin was a member of the Senior Analytic Service at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was one of the intelligence community’s top China experts. From 2021 to 2023, Czin was director for China at the White House National Security Council, where he staffed President Joe Biden and coordinated policy on China throughout the United States government. He also served as advisor for Asia-Pacific Security Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and overseas at a CIA field station in Southeast Asia. In a conversation with Brookings Senior Fellow Ryan Hass, the two discussed Czin’s path to studying China, his prognosis of the U.S.-China relationship, and developments inside China today.
Ryan Hass:
What is your personal background?
Jonathan Czin:
I grew up in New Jersey with a view of the Manhattan skyline—and 9/11 happened a week into my freshman year at Haverford College. It had quite an effect on me. I had already showed up on campus with a keen interest in U.S. politics and policy, but 9/11—as for so many others in my generation—opened my eyes to the wider world of international relations, the study of which I then pursued through college and then graduate school. I had a strong academic bent, but in the days, months, and years after 9/11 I was eager to find a way to serve my country—and joining the CIA as an analyst seemed like just the right way to harness my bookishness for public service. I think I made the right call. I was lucky to have a truly wonderful career at CIA, where I not only honed my craft as a China analyst but also had extraordinary opportunities to serve in the White House, the Pentagon, and overseas. As the child of immigrants, I was especially grateful for the opportunity to serve in this unique American institution.
Ryan Hass:
How did you get involved in studying China?
Jonathan Czin:
As I pursued my study of international relations, I became increasingly interested in the dynamics among the great powers—which one should remember was hardly a fashionable topic when I was a student at the height of the Global War on Terror and the Iraq War. While studying at Oxford, I took a course on the Cold War that included a section on the Sino-Soviet rift of the 1950s—which I’ll confess I’d not previously even heard about at that point, but I was utterly intrigued. That’s when I got hooked on studying China. After that, I decided to go to Yale for graduate school in large part because it had stellar faculty members focused both on great power politics and on China. I also made the rather naïve decision at the time to start studying Chinese—a life choice that has the salutary effect of keeping one humble. I have been studying China ever since, and no matter how much I have learned about China in the ensuing years, I am always keenly aware of how much I still do not know. One of my colleagues once said that studying China—and especially its opaquer facets that impinge on our national security—is akin to being an astronomer, as we are required to assess forces that we often cannot measure or assess firsthand. I think that’s quite right—I’ve been studying Chinese politics and policymaking my whole career, yet I seriously doubt I’ll be invited to participate in a Politburo study session anytime soon. Nonetheless, I continue to find the analytical challenge invigorating precisely because it is a little daunting.
Ryan Hass:
What is your diagnosis of the U.S.-China relationship today?
Jonathan Czin:
In my view, the relationship is currently at a high-water mark in this relatively new era of overt competition—but I think it will prove ephemeral.
On the positive side of the ledger, the administration has made surprising headway on counternarcotics cooperation with Beijing, which had been moribund for several years and still remains circumscribed, and similarly has succeeded in resuscitating channels of communication with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that had been dormant. Even as the administration has secured these gains, it has not yielded on its competitive policies toward Beijing—which I think demonstrates that the administration is effectively using diplomacy to muffle the potentially escalatory effects of those policies.
However, these inchoate areas of progress are highly perishable and do not represent a deeper shift in the trajectory of the relationship. In my view, Beijing has made these conciliatory gestures toward Washington over the past year for its own parochial interests; Beijing was looking at a challenging political calendar that included both Taiwan’s election in January and, perhaps more worryingly for Beijing, an impending election in the United States. Indeed, this cooperation should be seen as part of Beijing’s efforts to compete with the United States.
The key analytic question is how long this tactical thaw will last. My preliminary assessment is that Beijing will want to avoid actions that directly antagonize Washington until after our transition is complete and it feels like it has a better handle on the cast of dramatis personae in the new administration, even as Beijing continues to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and pressures our allies and partners in the region. Beijing likely judges that these engagements do little to advance Beijing’s own interests beyond mollifying Washington—and therefore, Beijing has little to lose by turning them off again. At some point, Beijing will find it convenient to turn off these areas of cooperation and communication to register its ire with Washington.
Taking a step back, my pessimism about the longer-term trajectory is anchored in my own conception of the relationship as a low-amplitude sine curve—it goes up and down with a certain degree of regularity, but from my vantage, the highs are never as high as many optimists hope, and conversely, the troughs are not as deep and perilous as many fear. To put it more succinctly—the highs are low, and the lows are high. And the fact that we are at a relative high point now suggests that we will soon be rounding the corner into another downturn come the new year. What goes up will come down.
Ryan Hass:
How does policy decisionmaking work in China now?
Jonathan Czin:
I think it is useful to take a big step back here and compare the modus operandi of the leadership under Xi with that of his seldom mentioned—and very forgettable—predecessor Hu Jintao.
The so-called Hu era was defined by a nominal focus on so-called “collective leadership,” which instead of fostering deliberative collective decisionmaking, in fact allowed top officials to engage in the kind of political empire-building that erupted into public view with the 2012 Bo Xilai scandal. At the top, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) decisionmaking was characterized by drift, malaise, and lowest common denominator decisions. In foreign policy, this dynamic intermittently allowed an overeager and increasingly capable PLA to undertake aggressive actions that seemed at odds with Hu’s obeisance to former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that China should “hide its capabilities and bide its time.” Many U.S. policymakers yearned for a top leader who could ensure that the uncoordinated activities of China’s sprawling and growing national security apparatus would not pursue such provocative activities that would jeopardize the bilateral relationship—such as when the PLA test flew a J-20 stealth fighter in the middle of then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ visit to Beijing.
When Xi took the reins, he certainly fixed these problems by centralizing control in his own hands—and the painful irony for the United States was that this concentration of power allowed Xi to pursue a more disciplined, better-calibrated, and more proactive foreign policy than his predecessor—which I think the United States found difficult to manage or counteract, at least initially.
If we look at the evolution of policymaking during Xi’s tenure, the 20th Party Congress in 2022 was a key moment for Xi: as he has at many key moments during his rule, Xi had an opening at the Party Congress to reshape the politics landscape at the top, and he used a crowbar to pry every advantage he could from that moment. The extent to which Xi cleaned house at the top was almost gratuitous, especially when one considers that Xi had long ago relegated rump members of the so-called “Communist Youth League faction”—such as former Premier Li Keqiang—to irrelevance. He got rid of these leaders when he could have just as easily ignored them, as he had done for much of his previous term.
Instead, he stacked the Politburo Standing Committee with officials who—with the exception of Wang Huning—first crossed paths with Xi decades ago. I think the initial impulse of many outside observers was to dismiss Xi’s cronies as mere “yes men” who would merely implement Xi’s orders. That assessment’s veracity probably varies by individual, but I also would hypothesize that these members of Xi’s inner circle overall are better positioned than their predecessors to be more candid with Xi and steer Xi away from bad decisions because of their longstanding relationships with him.
Think about it from Xi’s perspective: when I look around the room during a Politburo Standing Committee meeting, I only see men—and they are all men—whom I have known for decades and therefore trust. I don’t see even marginalized figures like Li Keqiang who at some point in time could have been a contender for the throne. If I were Xi, I think that view of the room would make me more comfortable soliciting input and maybe even thinking out loud with some of my old associates.
And these top officials in Xi’s inner circle, they know how the boss thinks, how he operates, in a way that few others do. I would be shocked to learn of any cinematic moments of top officials “speaking truth to power” occurring behind the scenes, but I suspect there is more room for back and forth—at least at the more rarefied strata of the system—than there would have been in the past few years. The net result is that the so-called “feedback loop” in Chinese policymaking may have some signs of ossification, but I do not think it’s broken—at least not yet. I think last month’s Politburo meeting in which the leadership finally signaled a willingness to consider more robust stimulus measures suggests that he and his team are not impervious to facts and data—even if there is some delay in getting the message through.
I think of that Politburo meeting’s outcome as a miniaturized version of the more dramatic and consequential U-turn that Xi made on his signature “zero-COVID” policy—which, notably, occurred after he had stacked the new leadership with his old associates. Both policy changes demonstrate the extent of Xi’s power: he can undertake major policy reversals with little to no discernible political fallout. I increasingly think that in his third term, Xi may well be at the height of his power.
Ryan Hass:
What issues—if any—do you think keep Xi up at night?
Jonathan Czin:
We—the United States—keep Xi up at night. The confluence of the U.S. election and Taiwan’s election in the same year probably has only accentuated Beijing’s anxiety—and its concomitant caution with Washington. My operating premise is that an anxious China is a restrained China—and I think that dynamic has animated Beijing’s more conciliatory approach to the relationship since the two presidents met last year in San Francisco.
Looking ahead, policymakers in Beijing really do not know how intensely the next administration—regardless of who wins—will pursue competition with Beijing, and what domains or issues will be most salient. Will it be Taiwan? Will Beijing experience a second trade war? Will it face even more onerous technology restrictions? Will it be all of the above? Beijing craves nothing more than predictability, and therefore this uncertainty is highly anxiety-producing for them.
It is worth highlighting here that—even with the intensified focus on China here in Washington over the past seven years or so—Washington is still just not as preoccupied with Beijing as Beijing is with us. The main reason for that asymmetry is that Beijing sees the United States as both incredibly dangerous and unpredictable—especially in our election season. For PRC officials, the United States is the first, second, and third top foreign policy issue. In my view, this is one of the defining asymmetries of the relationship between Washington and Beijing.
Beijing’s anxiety has some basis in reality. Despite Beijing’s considerable capacity and advances in important aspects of the competition—especially in the technology domain—the United States not only remains ahead of China in key areas, but also has the ability to do real damage to China’s intertwined technological and economic ambitions. Xi knows this—and that’s why he is treading lightly with the United States, or at least less heavily than he could, for the moment. Beijing wants to avoid actions that directly antagonize the incoming administration—and thereby lock it into a more confrontational policy that would multiply Xi’s problems in the coming four years.
Commentary
Meet Fellow Jonathan Czin, former CIA China expert
October 18, 2024