Ryan Hass on the Biden administration's China direction
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back former National Security Council China director Ryan Hass, who offers his perspective on the likely direction that the incoming Biden administration will take when it comes to managing the American relationship with China — the most difficult and most consequential of bilateral relationships. Thoughtful and measured as always, Ryan makes a good case for why the Biden team is not, in fact, boxed in by Trump’s antagonism toward China, and will chart a path that will diverge substantially from the one taken during four years of Trump without retreading the path taken during the Obama presidency.
1:56: The structural issues at the heart of U.S.-China tensions
6:59: Can the American political center hold?
12:10: What can be deduced from Biden’s personnel choices
28:34: How the Biden election has changed Beijing’s political calculus
38:36: Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and a Biden administration
Recommendations:
Ryan: Anything written by John le Carré.
Kaiser: Ed Yong, a writer for The Atlantic, especially his recent piece How science beat the virus.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SUPChina. |
| 0:14.9 | Subscribe to SubChina's daily access newsletter and keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different |
| 0:21.5 | news sources or check out all the original writing on our website at supChina.com, including |
| 0:27.0 | reported stories, editorials, and regular columns, as well as our growing library of videos |
| 0:32.4 | and, of course, podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its |
| 0:36.9 | ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim people in China's Xinjiang region, to China's ambitious effort to eliminate poverty. |
| 0:46.1 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 0:52.4 | I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you as I have for the past |
| 0:54.7 | a lot. Now, 40 weeks from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Jeremy Goldcorn is leading |
| 1:00.3 | a band of desperadoes in a daring heist of a Pfizer truck laden with vaccines and is unable to |
| 1:05.5 | join, but he sends his regards. We have had all of us, I think, we've had way too many Zoom seminars and panel |
| 1:13.7 | discussions this year, but there was one which I was really glad to have watched, a talk put on |
| 1:18.2 | by Brown University's Watson Institute, which featured one of the people in the world of China |
| 1:23.0 | policy I hold in the highest esteem, and whose perspectives are always deeply informed, |
| 1:29.0 | eminently sensible, and unwaveringly principled. |
| 1:32.6 | Ryan Hasse is Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute, |
| 1:37.7 | senior director at the senior advisor at the Skokroft Group, and senior advisor at |
| 1:42.5 | McLarty Associates. |
| 1:43.9 | Ryan was formerly China Director at the National Security Council during the Second |
| 1:48.0 | Obama Administration, and we're delighted to have him back on Seneca. |
| 1:52.0 | Welcome back, Ryan. |
| 1:53.1 | Great to see you, man. |
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