By Yue Ma
Background of the Interviewee: Dr. Kenneth Lieberthal served in the White House as the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Asia of the National Security Council during President Clinton’s administration. He currently holds positions as William Davidson Professor of Business Administration, Professor of Political Science, Distinguished Fellow and Director for China of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.
Yue: Based on your achievements, it is not exaggerating to say that you are one of the most successful persons in your area. Many people would be interested in how you started your career. Could you please tell us a little bit about it, starting with how you got interested in China?
Lieberthal: I became interested in China by accident! I was interested in Soviet Union. I majored in Soviet Studies in college. After graduating from college, I went to Columbia University for PhD. The reason why I went to Columbia was that they had the best program in Soviet studies. First week I was there, I sat down with my advisor to go over my program. He told me that I had already studied everything that they could teach and suggested me to do something else, you know, just waved me off. I took a course on Chinese politics. It looked like it might be interesting. I was totally fascinated with it. Then, I started my career in China… As most good things in life, this is completely by accident. I’m very lucky. What is by now a pretty long career, I’ve never gotten tired of what I’m doing. That’s a good decision to be in.
Yue: We know that during your term as the Senior Director for Asia of the National Security Council (NSC), you had the opportunity to handle many important issues, witness many historical moments and deal with both American and Chinese leaders. Could you share with us something about your experience working in the White House?
Lieberthal: First of all, my task as the senior Director of Asia on the NSC was to serve President Clinton. That is different from serving the State Department or the Ministry of Defense. The NSC is the president’s own staff of advisors in the White House. Every communication to or from President Clinton regarding Asia will go through me and through my staff at work for me. Every activity that he had regarding Asia, I was in charge of doing the staff support work for it. And because my responsibility was to make sure the president was well-prepared for anything that happens in Asia, I had to spend all of my time understanding not only what is happening, but what will happen. As a staff supporter for the president, I had to make sure that the president should never be caught by surprise. In order to do that, I had to first make sure that I am never caught by surprise.
Yue: Have you ever been caught by surprise?
Lieberthal: I am caught by surprise EVERYDAY! (laugh…) The one time I was caught by surprise… we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. It came three weeks after Premiere Zhu Rongji came to Washington for the negotiations about China’s entry into the WTO. The preparation for Zhu’s visit was one of the most difficult, most intense issues I was involved in. For several months before Premiere Zhu came, I worked without a break. In the aftermath of that visit, I had to catch up with other things that got piled up. Friday night, I had my first night off in three months. My wife and I decided to go to the Kennedy Center for a concert. Just after 7 o’clock our time, Situation Room called, that our plane just bombed Chinese embassy in Belgrade, 3 people died... I turned to my wife and said: “Well… forget about Kennedy Center...” This was unbelievable… It just started another difficult period. Normally when the president deals with other leaders, the staff can communicate with each other before time. Just as I had to make sure that President Clinton is not caught by surprise. President Jiang’s staff had to make sure that he is not surprised. Premier Zhu’s staff had to make sure that he is not caught by surprise, and so on. So the staffs communicated ahead of time, we exchange information with each other, and make sure we had a basic understanding of what the other guy is going to be concerned about. If I did my work well, I can brief Clinton on what he can say, and on what the other leader will say. Staffs don’t want the top leaders to get together and things start to go wrong. You really want to prepare the top leaders in a way that this meeting will be productive. Obviously, there were no preparations prior to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Then, as you can tell, all kinds of things started to go wrong… After the bombing, the Chinese military immediately reported to the Chinese government that this was a “purposeful attack” by the US. They put together their case that Americans were intended to kill the particular people that were killed. The case was brought to the Standing Committee of the Politburo (of the Communist Party of China). They immediately concluded that US has done this on purpose. Once they reached that conclusion, they cannot back down. This is what I believe. Once we presented the evidence to them that it was a huge mistake, and we explained how it occurred and why, even those who were convinced could not simply say that that was wrong had to gradually make their criticism less aggressive, as what you could see in the later stage. On our side, President Clinton was in Oklahoma inspecting a natural disaster. I called Sandy [Berger], and told him that we had to get the president to appear on TV and address the issue as soon as we can. Sandy told me that the earliest time that we can get the president on TV would be 2 hours later. And he also told me to write up what we wanted the president to say. That’s what I did, sat down, wrote out what he needed to say, and sent it over. President Clinton gave the speech during the press conference that afternoon. But since everything happened in a sudden, no one was prepared for it. Everybody in the press conference was expecting the president to talk about the natural disaster in Oklahoma. The president didn’t wear suit and tie in the news conference. Many of the reporters didn’t even know about the incident in Belgrade and weren’t ready to ask about it. Their attention was still in the natural disaster… All these were taken by the Chinese as an immense offense. They thought that the informality of the news conference was a signal that we did not care. They took our apology as an insult. Something that they didn’t notice was that Clinton was out inspecting a disaster, and before talking about the tragedy that cost American lives, he started the conference by addressing the accident in Belgrade that resulted in the loss of Chinese lives.
Yue: As many people are aware of, there was a huge improvement in the China policy in the second term of Clinton’s administration. I am sure that this was at least partially due to your contributions. Could you comment a little bit on President Clinton’s China policy during his two terms?
Lieberthal: Clinton came to the White House mainly concerned with domestic policy. That is partially because of the election culture in the US previous to September 11. You never get elected because of your foreign policy. People only care about your domestic policy. He also came into office after George Bush senior, whose term had been harmed greatly by the Ti-anmen incident and his soft-handed China policy. Because of all these, Clinton knew little about China, and regarded it as no political benefit to have a good relationship with China. Around 1995, he became increasingly aware that it is important for America to find a new basis for relationship. That this country [China] is becoming increasingly important to be involved with. Tony Lake was the National Security Advisor, he saw the initiative on this. The president then began to look for ways to build bridges to China. He had some meetings with Jiang Zemin in APEC and other circumstances. By the time I came to office, President Clinton was already well convinced to find a way to build good relations with China. What I did, was to help him to do so.
Yue: Could you also give some comments on President Bush’s China policy?
Lieberthal: It is very different, in the sense that, I think—one, China by the year 2000 had decided that it was China’s vital interest to maintain a good relationship with the US. Therefore to some extent, it has been easier for President Bush, because the Chinese had been determined to have good relations.
[Second], President Bush had the advantage of being a right-wing republican. The strongest criticisms that pretty much every president received on his China policy came from the right-wing republicans. Since Bush himself is a right-wing republican, he wouldn’t get as much pressure as, say president Clinton, got over his China policy.
Another thing is that, after September 11, both the US and China have noticed that we may disagree on particular issues, but we both agree that terrorism is a common threat. Right after the September 11 attack, President Jiang expressed China’s criticism toward the terrorists and support to our anti-terrorist actions, which President Bush greatly appreciated.
Yue: I remember once you told me that when you were in college, American students were still not allowed to study in China. Today, of course the situation is totally different. We observe a huge number of Chinese students studying in the US and a considerable number of American students studying in China. What are your feelings on the increasing trend of education exchanges between the two countries?
Lieberthal: I think it’s all to the good. First of all, we live in an increasingly, globally, inter-dependent world. To me, it is enormously important not only to learn about other cultures and people, but to learn about yourself through the eyes of other cultures and people. You can learn a lot about your own by seeing the reactions of other people. Contact on a personal level breaks down stereotypes. It’s hard to think of others as caricatures if you know a lot about them. The real tragedy in the world these days, tend to stem from caricature, looking other people not as people, but as “super-nationalists”, “Muslim fanatics”… I have always felt that foreign studies is important as part of college studies.
Yue: We don’t know if you’ve noticed, the major obstacle for Chinese students to study in the United States is the difficulty of obtaining the US visa. Many of them, especially undergraduates have been rejected to study in America. And the situation has been worse since Sept.11. As we can see, this really had a big impact on the number of Chinese students in the US. Many of them are choosing Britain or Canada instead, where they can obtain the visa easier. What is your view on this issue?
Lieberthal: The issue stems clearly from American reaction to 9/11. The reaction in terms of visa policy is far too rigid, and far too simplistic. We of course have legitimate security concerns. China has security concerns, too. But I think that there was a system set up very quickly without a great deal of thought, that has now became quite firmly implemented. It does not serve American interest well at all. It is easy to make the case that America not only has benefited, but continue to benefit, overwhelmingly, by being a place that other talents want to come, to study and to visit. It’s an enormous strength of the US. The details and applications of visa are unbalanced to an enormous harm to the US. But it is not likely for the US government to change it in the foreseeable future.
Yue: As we can observe from the registrations for your classes, many American young people are now interested in China. Like many of them, you also started as a young student interested in China. They are now having perhaps the same dreams that once you had. Of course, not all of them will achieve the level that you did. But at least a few of them might become your future colleagues. What would you like to say to these young students based on your own experiences?
Lieberthal: I think that what happens in china in the next decades will be important… What happens, especially between US and China, can end up enriching us all, not just money-wise, or impoverishing us all. And frankly, I envy you guys. I completed my PhD thesis before any American could travel to China. We could only learn about China from books and propagandas. What is going on now is enviable. But the stakes are very high. The opportunities are enormous, challenges are huge.
Yue: Finally, would you like to say anything to the young people in China?
Lieberthal: If you go back, read the history of China since Qing Chao Muo Nian (late Qing Dynasty), you will find that the young generation are always the ones striving for change. But by the time the young generation became old, they became like as conservative as the previous generations. This phenomenon was shown on the people who led China too, including Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. However, we can notice that this is no longer the case since the second and third generations of Chinese leaders, who at their older age, switched their view toward a more reform-oriented one. I think China is dynamic, and is taking a couple of decades to address what most countries would take to address for centuries. The current young generation in china has the opportunity to impact not only China, but global relations, which I think is a huge responsibility, also hugely exciting.
Ma Yue is currently the International Credit Risk Analyst at
Exporters International, Inc., in New York City.
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Lieberthal spoke at the at the second annual Barnett-Oksenberg Lecture on Sino-American Relations, organized by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
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