This is the second part of a series leading up to the publication of Fateful Decisions. You can read the first installment here.

In the last forty years, China has reemerged as a tremendous geopolitical, economic, and technological power on the world stage. But the easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and influence are over, argue Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar and China Program Director Jean Oi in a new article published by The Washington Quarterly.

In this piece, drawing on the findings and insights of contributors to their forthcoming edited volume Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, available May 2020), Fingar and Oi outline the daunting array of difficult challenges China now faces and explain why its future depends on the policy choices its leaders make in what will be seen as a watershed moment.

An excerpt from their article is available below. For the full version, visit The Washington Quarterly and download the PDF.
 

From, “China’s Challenges: Now it Gets Much Harder”

Some years ago, one of us had a running partner who wanted a bigger challenge than the dozens of marathons he had completed. When asked to describe his first 50-mile race, he replied, “The first 30 miles weren’t bad, but after that it got really hard.” China is approaching the metaphorical 30-mile mark in its developmental marathon. The challenges it encountered and managed effectively during the past 40 years were not easy, but they pale in comparison to those looming on the horizon. The way ahead will be more difficult, less predictable, and highly contingent on the content and efficacy of complex policy choices. The easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and power are over.

We begin with this cautionary note because so much of the new narrative about China’s rise posits capabilities and evolutionary trajectories that we find implausible. That China has done well in the past does not assure that it will do equally well (or better) in the future. That the Leninist party-state system adopted in the 1950s has proven sufficiently agile to manage the easier phases of modernization does not assure that it will be equally adept at meeting the more difficult challenges of a country being transformed by past successes and demographic change. The number, magnitude, and complexity of these challenges do not foreordain that China will stagnate, fail, or fall apart, but they do raise serious questions about the putative inevitability of China’s continued rise and displacement of the United States. China’s future is neither inevitable nor immutable; its further evolution will be shaped by internal economic and social developments, the international system, and above all, the policy choices of party leaders facing a daunting array of difficult challenges.

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We refer to China’s current approach as “back to the future” because it seeks to resuscitate institutions, methods, and rationales adopted in the 1950s and shelved during the period of reform and rapid modernization. We do not know why party leaders decided that it is in their — and thus China’s — interest to curtail or reverse policies that facilitated sustained growth and rapid improvement of living standards and China’s international image, but speculate that they hope doing so will buy time before incurring the risks (and for the elite, the costs) of fundamental reform.

Beijing has announced a number of very ambitious goals such as moving into the ranks of highly-developed countries by the centenary of the PRC in 2049, achieving global preeminence in key technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, providing urban social benefits to most citizens, and building a number of green megacities. The likelihood of achieving all of the proclaimed goals is nil, but China will make substantial progress on some of them. It is impossible to predict which will succeed, which will fail, and which will flounder, but we can anticipate a mix of all three outcomes. Whatever the precise mix, it is likely to produce a China that is less prosperous and less powerful than predicted by the predominant narrative about where China is headed. Whether China’s leaders will risk tackling the difficult reforms that remain or continue to embrace key and thus far counterproductive structures and methods from the past remains to be seen.  Whether the party-state system is able to maintain acceptable levels of growth and public satisfaction under the new conditions is also uncertain. The only certainty is that China can no longer ride the wave that helped along its economic growth and resultant capabilities for at least ten reasons.

Read the full text of this article via The Washington Quarterly.

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released today.

The Great Wall of China is one of Asia’s most photographed and visited landmarks. Built over thousands of years and winding through a total of 13,170 miles, this wide-reaching network of defenses was constructed as a barrier against China’s northern neighbors. But within the digital landscape of China is a much less conspicuous yet far more pervasive set of fortifications: the Great Firewall. China’s state-operated internet is carefully controlled, heavily censored, and designed to keep its own citizens away from information that might damage the power and perception of the Communist Party.

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In Robert’s assessment, the Great Firewall is an example of censorship via what she terms “friction.” Rather than centering on fear, this type of censorship acts as a tax on information, creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away and requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access to it. Censorship thus “works through distraction and diversion. It nudges — but does not force — most users away from unsavory material.”

This framing of censorship, Robert says, helps explain why, even though China’s Great Firewall is porous and can be circumvented, the number of people who “jump the wall” using a virtual private network (VPN) remains relatively low. People are not necessarily afraid of legal or political consequences of using a VPN, but rather the process of doing so is deemed too bothersome or offers too little value for the effort in most people’s day-to-day lives.

This friction-driven censorship is, therefore, effective on two levels: it keeps the majority of citizens away from sensitive material by making it too labor-intensive for them to access, and it naturally filters for outlier individuals the government has an interest in monitoring. According to Robert’s data, VPN users are overwhelmingly 35-year-old and younger, tend to be college degree holders, have fluency in English, have traveled or studied outside of China, and are interested in international politics — precisely the kinds of cohorts the Communist Party would benefit from managing more closely.

However, these digital demographics shift dramatically to include much broader groups of people during crises and following abrupt interruptions to citizen’s daily lives. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, and nationally representative surveys, Roberts shows how the number of VPN  downloads spiked during the devastating Tianjin chemical explosion in 2015 as people scrambled to find information on the disaster. VPN downloads also increased after the shutdown of Instagram on September 29, 2014, following protests in Hong Kong. The Chinese government barred access to the platform to contain posts about the protests, but Roberts says that it was the sudden loss of access to the social media platform’s draw of entertainment that pulled many more “everyday” citizens over the firewall than would be typical. Once over, these new users quickly moved from accessing pictures of pop stars to exploring banned websites and censored information in more political spaces.

This is one of the important takeaways Roberts sees in her work. “This porous nature of censorship . . . means that there’s an Achilles heel of friction, which is that during crises, or sudden, more visible [moments of] censorship, people are willing to seek out that type of information and that can undermine some of these other strategies.”

With the Great Firewall only a few decades old, the full effects of its friction-based barricades remain to be seen, but Roberts is certain that in the coming years, the control of access to and accuracy of online information will have important effects not only on modern China but the future digital world as a whole.

You can learn more about Margaret Robert’s work in her book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall.

This is part six of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

I came here as a 17-year-old kid, and I've ventured off many times, but I always come back. Stanford has been central to every aspect of my life. It's where I live. It's where I met my wife, it's where my kids were born. It's my employment, and my entertainment (I have Stanford season tickets to basketball and football). I see performances at the Bing Center and I'm also the Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. I'm deeply intertwined and connected to this place in all kinds of ways.

And it’s for a reason. Yes, I've been offered deanships. I've been offered endowed professorships and other jobs in government that I turned down. Who knows, maybe I'll go do another government job sometime in the future. But I know that Stanford will always be my base, and FSI is a core part of that base.

It will be my base because I enjoy and appreciate being in a place that values science. We don't argue whether two plus two equals four. We are all committed to that cause. That is a good base for me as I venture out into other domains, and policy arenas and places where that's not always the case. I like the fact that I can come back to a place where data, evidence, the scientific method matters all the time, every day of the week.

But the central reason I decided to sign up for another five-year term as director at FSI is because I want to learn. I'm not done learning. It's always been my working hypothesis that leading a diverse place like FSI gives me a wonderful way to diversify my intellectual and policy interests, much more so than if I was solely a professor in political science teaching courses about US-Russia relations. And people respond to my emails. They may not respond to my emails if I wasn’t the director of FSI. I'm joking, of course. But when I say, "Hey, I want to learn more about high tech in China," I usually hear back. It’s a great privilege to be a part of an intellectual community that I want to learn from.

And I don't just mean the faculty here, by the way. I don't have to teach anymore because of my other administrative responsibilities. I always teach at least one course a year because teaching is one of those spaces, especially a seminar, where I'm learning all the time. I almost never teach the same course more than two years in a row. We have some of the smartest students on the planet, wouldn't you want to interact with them to learn? I most certainly learn from them.

Lastly, at this stage in my life, the balance of what I do has shifted in ways that calls on me to be a translator, as being somebody that can find ideas, understand, read, research and then try to communicate those insights to the outside world. Be it in Washington meeting with senior officials, or on television where I'm reaching millions, or Twitter where I'm reaching hundreds of thousands.

I see my role as being somebody who can be a bridge between theory and practice. FSI is committed to that cause. It’s therefore a great platform for me to try to continue to do that with the years, and hopefully decades, I have ahead of me here as a professor at Stanford.

Read part one in this series, Showing Up at Stanford, or return to the Meet the Director page.

This is part five of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

The students we teach today in our two undergraduate honors programs and Master’s in International Policy program will go on to shape policy throughout their careers, in countries across the globe. We’ve already produced real superstars. These students have gone on to become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall, Fulbright and Schwarzman Scholars and serve at the highest levels of government and industry.

Over the last five years we have completely transformed the master’s program. More people applied for the 40 spots than ever before, and we have incredible candidates. The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies looks and functions like a school, but it’s actually not a school. While we partner with the school of Humanities and Sciences to offer a Master’s degree, we have taken a leadership position with it, and I believe it’s now the best program out there for studying international policy.

There is already a tremendous need for policy professionals in all sectors of the workforce, not just government jobs, and because of our in-house expertise we are uniquely positioned to train the next generation of policy leaders – through our master’s and honors programs, the dozens of courses taught by FSI faculty each year, and the opportunities for mentored student research and internships in international policy that we offer.

Our master’s students are already enjoying a beautiful new academic space and lounge in Encina Hall. One of my next goals is to ensure every new student in the master’s program is guaranteed two years of financial aid. This is a place where students, both undergraduate and graduate, can find a way to connect to a broad range of global opportunities, while in school and well beyond through our growing alumni network.

Read part six in this series, Stanford in My Future or return to the Meet the Director page.

This is part four of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

FSI isn’t the world’s largest policy think tank but we offer a generous home, not just to our community but to some of the foremost experts on international affairs in the world today. I don’t think people realize just how big, and how much intellectual firepower we have. There are over 50 tenured faculty here, 150 researchers, and about $50 million in annual revenue, and all those numbers continue to grow.

My friends in D.C. should know that FSI is a premier policy institute comparable to any of the biggest think tanks in Washington, but we’re actually much more diverse in terms of the topics we tackle – we have people working on global health, cyber policy, food security and the environment, in addition to regional focuses, democracy development and rule of law, and many others. And actively training the policy makers of the future is a core part of our mission.

Of course, when it comes to policy impact it’s about implementation. It's not good enough to have an idea about policy. You've got to find somebody in the policy world that might be interested in listening to you. Then they have to try to implement it in what we recognize is a very complex policy environment.

In the next five years, as I move forward, we’ll pursue a diversified strategy for how we push our ideas into the policy world. There are multiple modalities for doing that. Sometimes it means being on TV, sometime it means joining the government. When FSI people join the government, they take all their intellectual ideas with them when they show up at the Pentagon, or the White House or the State Department.

But in between those two extremes, one being very ephemeral and one being much more concrete, there are all kinds of different ways of trying to shape the policy environment. I want to make sure that we're focused on policy makers, but also societal attitudes more broadly. I think it needs to be both, and we will not achieve progress on our policy goals if we don't have a multi-pronged approach.

There is a benefit to studying policy here at Stanford – it affords us a unique perspective because of the distance from D.C., and allows us to take a longer view on current world affairs. We’re now building the bridges to ensure our research will flow naturally to policy professionals wherever they are in the world.

Read part five in this series, Impact Through Education, or return to the Meet the Director page.

This is part three of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

At our core we are a research institute. I never lose sight of that and am always looking to expand our interdisciplinary research. FSI is home to eight centers and a growing number of specialized research programs and initiatives. Since starting as director five years ago, we’ve kicked off initiatives focused on European security as well as Asia, the Middle East and cyber security. We’ve developed research strengths in these regions where we didn’t have them before. And a regional orientation for research will continue to be relevant as the world around us continues to reshape itself.

The rising importance of China certainly calls for our attention. We have a lot of depth on China here at FSI and at the university, but we need more, particularly around the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. I’d like to see us offer more courses on U.S.-China relations and the Chinese economy. These are complicated subjects and the data we have on them are not great. What’s more, they touch on a whole set of topics related to U.S.-China competition in high-tech, including the race to artificial intelligence and the development of cyber weapons.

Of course, my plans are only worth as much as the people we are able to attract. Our research centers each require academic leadership, and making sure we're hiring new people or attracting people from the university to lead the centers is crucial to the future of FSI. That's the highest priority. Thankfully we’re off to a terrific start. We’ve hired an incredibly diverse group of new scholars recently, and their expertise and perspectives are invaluable. I’m thinking of Francis Fukuyama, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Oriana Skylar Mastro and many others.

You really can't do anything at a place like FSI without talented people. You can have all the great ideas you want. If you don't have the warm bodies to actually do them, it doesn't matter. If you don't create the permissive conditions for academics to do the work that they want to do, you can't tell them what to do. That's how my job today is different than my job as the US ambassador.

When I was the ambassador, most people would listen to me and would do what I'd say, because everybody knew I was the boss. They would open the door for me when I would come down into the office. They would all say, "Mr. Ambassador." That's not the way it works at the university. Instead of saying, "Here's my vision, now you guys go do it," you've got to create the vision from what people want to do already. Getting that right is the highest priority for the next five years, especially as we develop leadership for the future.

I’m proud of launching a new research center recently, the Cyber Policy Center. This center brings together the various programs and people throughout the university working on what I think are the core challenges for security, development and governance of our time. The fourth floor of Encina Hall has been transformed to integrate their work here, which will be instrumental in creating the necessary bridges between D.C. and Silicon Valley, and the technology and policy arenas.

Another new initiative that I’m proud of, on global populism, is demonstrating the growth of social polarization around the globe, including right here in America. This trend makes public policy discussions privileged opinion and demotes data and evidence. We need to fight back on that. Policy decisions made with data behind it are better than ones that are made with just intuition or opinion behind it.

Especially in periods of polarization it's incumbent upon places like FSI to be committed to getting their scientific research into the public policy domains. That all said, it's not enough just to do your research and wait for the President of the United States to give you a call to ask you about your research.

We have to be creative, nimble and innovative about how we get our ideas, based on data, evidence and research into the public policy domain. And it’s a two-way street. The public and those in the policy world need to be more willing to listen to data and accept policy reforms based on data.

Read part four in this series, Making a Policy Impact, or return to the Meet the Director page.

This is part two of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

When a student connects with us, they realize right away what a dynamic environment it is here in Encina Hall. There is so much happening and you see it as you go from floor to floor. You can attend an event on cybersecurity in the morning, a lunchtime seminar on Russia’s economy, and an evening talk about Middle East politics. There is an invigorating energy moving throughout each floor.

Encina Hall is an energizing space where we convene events for student and faculty, but also welcome the broader community. People will line up around the building an hour ahead of an event just to make sure they get a good seat. We are proud to be the hosts for such a broad and diverse community, and are able to offer one of the most beautiful and historic event spaces on campus. We’ve welcomed some incredible guests recently, including Hillary Clinton, Mateo Renzi, Susan Rice and Ash Carter, to name a few, not to mention the events featuring our own experts.

And we just completed a newly constructed courtyard where we can gather the community in a special outdoor and idyllic setting. We’re glad you’re here, even if you’re standing in the back or watching the livestream of an event in the overflow rooms. It’s humbling to see all the people who are drawn to the intellectual momentum here.

Read part three in this series, Research Is At Our Core, or return to the Meet the Director page.

This is part one of six in which Director Michael McFaul talks about his vision for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the accomplishments he's most proud of so far, and why he keeps returning to the Farm.

I showed up at Stanford as a 17-year-old kid animated by this idea that if we didn't figure out a way to get along with the Soviet Union, we might blow up the planet.

My freshman year I took first-year Russian. I also took PolySci 35, How Nationals Deal with Each Other, taught by Steven Krasner, who incidentally taught that course last fall to my son.

But I felt like I didn’t belong at Stanford at the time. My SAT scores weren’t great and I didn’t have straight A’s in high school. I was fortunate to be taken in by world-renowned scholars, like Alexander George, Alexander Dallin, and Jan Triska.

They were experts in their fields but also using their research to make the world a safer place. Dallin sought to understand the Soviets better. George focused on crisis management and how to manage the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. And Triska was an expert on communist Eastern Europe.

They nurtured me, and demonstrated a deep commitment to teaching, and mentoring undergraduates, but also applying their knowledge to the outside world. That’s what we continue to do with the undergraduates who sign up for one of FSI’s many programs today, whether it’s an internship, grant, or research position.

Undergraduates should know there is a smorgasbord of interesting ideas, programs, research centers, and faculty here that they may not encounter in their day-to-day classes. We are sitting right at the center of campus, in Encina Hall, and yet I meet too many undergraduates that don’t discover FSI and all we have to offer until their senior year.

Students benefit from thinking about their education not only as the regular coursework that they do for their major. There's so much learning that takes place outside of that convention. There are so many learning and research opportunities at FSI, but you have to engage with it. You have to find it and connect with it. Then we’ll show you how to apply your knowledge to make a difference in the world.

Read part two in this series, Our Intellectual Momentum, or return to the Meet the Director page.