Isaac Stone Fish, on ‘America Second’
Isaac Stone Fish, on ‘America Second’
The full transcript of his podcast interview.
In this accompanying post, I have a podcast with Isaac Stone Fish about his new book, America Second. Here, via Otter.ai with light touch-ups, is the complete transcript of our discussion. The time markers are cued to the podcast recording. I have not gone through to clean up all the transcription glitches, but you can listen to the original recording here.
4/8 6:35PM EDT
James Fallows 00:01
Isaac Stone Fish, thank you so much for talking with me today. And thanks very much for your book, America Second, which I think deserves a serious reading and discussion at this moment of both continuity and change in US China relations.
For those who have not yet read the book, what's the precis of the point you're making?
Isaac Stone Fish 00:26
The book looks at Beijing's influence the United States and how to push back without being McCarthyist or racist.
And the book argues that, for decades through a subtle and sophisticated process, Beijing has changed the way that Hollywood works; has changed the revolving door in DC between the foreign policy community and businesses; has had a really large impact on universities. It also reminds people that for so long, it was stated US policy to strengthen China, which means strengthening the Communist Party. And finally, the book explains how things don't have to be how they are, and how you can push back against Beijing, and keep your business and morals mostly intact.
James Fallows 01:11
And we'll get to that last point, which I think is very important at this moment, when there's so many sources of inflammation between the US and China, and so many ways that could potentially go in much more destructive directions.
You mentioned in giving the overview on your book, the way things have changed. Could you describe for us, as you do in the book, the main dynamics on the Chinese side, on the US side, on the business side, in the governmental side, that have led to the situation you're describing?
Isaac Stone Fish 01:41
I see it as starting, to break it down, into three or four periods.
There's 72 to 89, from the Nixon trip to the fall of the Soviet Union and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, when the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Let's work together to counter the Soviet Union,
Then Soviet Union falls, Beijing massacres unarmed students in Tiananmen Square. And so it's difficult to convince American people to continue business as usual.
Mid 90s, early mid 90s: the political and business community-- and again simplifying here -- come up with the idea that business will liberate that trade will bring democracy to China. It’s a great justification for our ‘end of history’ period about being on the right side of history
That goes on till the spy plane incident in April 2001, where the US and the Bush administration realized, hey, maybe this is not a government we can work with. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the US China relationship, 9/11 happens. Jiang Zemin becomes one of the first if not the first leader to call Bush offer his support, especially for cracking down on what he deems terrorist separatists in Xinjiang.
And the relationship gets mostly ignored until around 2005, when Bob Zoellick gives a speech about China being a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the global system. And the idea that we have to shoehorn China into the system that we built dominates policy until roughly 2016, or even 2018, where we have this new madness that we can talk more about.
James Fallows 03:22
So in the new madness during the Trump era, with Peter Navarro, whom we both encountered over the years, and others, you had both a completely unsophisticated and a more erudite evolution of a sense of the US had to be tougher on China. There was an argument and reflection about whether people had gotten China wrong, whether it was naive 25 years earlier, to try to foster China's development, whether people had been gulled, whether there were things that people need to need to reconsider. How do you view the ‘getting China wrong’ question?
Isaac Stone Fish 04:03
I think it's so easy with hindsight to point fingers and pick out mistakes, and I do a lot of that in the book.
But I want to say that it's very seductive to be among the environment you're in and think, ‘Oh, we can do well, by doing good. We can change China. And we can liberalize China and make money doing so in the process.’
So I understand the arguments that people made at the time. I think it's so hard to know. And perhaps when the archives of Zhongnanhai [the Chinese command center] finally get opened, we'll see how close or how far China ever came to democracy from the outside. It seems like basically everything we did to self censor ourselves, in order that we could strengthen the reformers in China was a total failure. Perhaps we'll find that it was more successful than we thought. I would be surprised if that happens.
I think the broad point is that the answer as is so often, is in the middle. We have a limited ability to change constrain contain China, it would be nearly impossible to overthrow the party. But I also very much don't subscribe to the idea that, you know, they're an immovable force, this eternal civilization that can't be changed from the outside.
James Fallows 05:26
And just to push on this point for a moment, I started going to China, I would imagine around the time you were born, this was back in....
Isaac Stone Fish 05:37
,..1745, right? I'm quite old…
James Fallows 05:40
You wear it well. But back then it was all bicycles, etc, In the mid 1980s.
And I'm trying to think about whether over that next 15 years of opening--including Tiananmen in that time--whether people on the US side actually said China was going to democratize. As opposed to China liberalizing and becoming easier rather than harder to deal with, and being better inside the tent than outside the tent.
I think that my argument from that time onwards is it's better for the world. If you think a richer China is a problem -- a poor China is even a worse problem. How do you think about whether people were actually saying, “yes, it's going to be a democracy?”
Isaac Stone Fish 06:30
The Secretary of State's confirmation hearing [this is Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of State, at his hearings in 1993], he said that we're going to continue our policy of democratizing China. Plenty of people in Congress talked about bringing democracy to China on both sides of the aisle.
The question that I struggle with throughout the book is, how much do you fault people for their intentions? And how much do you fault people for their actions? One of the people I interviewed for the book, Stapleton Roy, who was an ambassador to China, in the 90s, said – and I'm paraphrasing here -- no one actually believed in the policy. It was used to sell the policy as opposed to govern the policy, so to speak. And I’ve talked with other people from that period who disagree with that sentiment.
Some people I'm sure believed. Some people I'm sure didn't believe. But there was, and there still is this evangelical strain of us policymaking -- about bringing light to darkness. And I think in a lot of places, it's gotten us in trouble. And I think the resilience, often accidental, of how the party has responded is they've been able to put off any sort of reckoning between the US and China, that old chestnut about hiding your brilliance in till the third decade of the 21st century.
James Fallows 07:48
And to ask this question again in the bluntest form, would the US and the world have been better off now, if China had been excluded over the last 25 or 30 years? As opposed to the now-complex process of trying to include them?
Isaac Stone Fish 08:09
it's a great question. I'm glad you're pushing me on it. And I'm glad you're asking it bluntly. And I'm trying to think to see what's the right answer.
So let me answer in the easier way: the world would be better off if China were a democracy, the world would be better off if China were a weaker state.
A lot of Chinese people would be worse off. But I would argue that the global commons would be better off, we'd be better off, if the United States had set better guardrails around Taiwan, around IP than they did in the heady days when we couldn't imagine China being what it was today.
But as Nixon said, in his pivotal Foreign Affairs essay, we can't keep China outside the, he called it the League of Nations to nurse their grievances. [Stone Fish later clarified that the Nixon quote was actually “family of nations” and “nurture its fantasies.”] And there, it feels too colossally unfair to allow China to remain in its self imposed isolation after 76. And so I'm glad there has been limited engagement.
But I do feel like for too often, United States institutions and individuals give up more than they get. So I guess to answer your blunt question: No, I don't think the world will be better off having cut China completely out of the global system. I do think however, it should have been a far more managed and far more restricted process.
James Fallows 09:41
Here's a similarly blunt query inspired by your blunt title of America Second. A way to oversimplify your argument would be that a number of American forces have essentially sold out. You’re talking about governmental officials and universities and entertainment companies and corporations and all the rest. Is that too crude a statement of what you're saying?
Isaac Stone Fish 10:07
No, I think that's accurate. And I tried to spend a lot of time in the book talking about my own sins and my own hypocrisy, because I don't believe in the that sort of let he who without what's the biblical quote, you know, he without sin casting the first stone.
I've made a lot of mistakes that I criticize others for making. And the frustrating thing for me, and perhaps for a lot of people coming up in DC, is that the foreign policy elite will pretend that they can do a lot of consulting and not have that bleed into their opinions. [They think] that they, unlike lawyers, or doctors, or financial service professionals, or government employees, or journalists can have the compartmentalization necessary to do it. And I certainly can't do it.
I'm a consultant. Now I run a consulting business, it changes the way that I think about these things. And I think the, the gall of saying, ‘No, I have a sophisticated enough understanding of the world that I can perfectly compartmentalize,’ I find very striking for the years that I lived in DC.
James Fallows 11:20
In the realm of public officials, you mentioned almost everybody who's been prominent on the US side, in the last generation Plus, I'll get to in a moment, one where I disagree with your assessment, but let me start with somebody who's probably the most prominent public official in your book. That is Henry Kissinger. Tell us the precis of your argument, and a teaser of the evidence you have about why Henry Kissinger's role, in your view, has been so problematic.
Isaac Stone Fish 11:51
So from 1982, the year Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates to the present, Kissinger has been a businessman masquerading as a statesman.
There's nothing wrong with going into business. There's nothing wrong with leaving government and deciding to start a business. The issue is when you pretend that you're not a businessperson—you pretend you're a speaker, a journalist, a writer, you pretend that you're acting without constraints when you have these huge amounts of constraints on the work that you're doing.
For so long Kissinger has amplified positive voices about China and suppressed negative ones, which is a classic United Front and party friendship tool. He dampened criticism of China within most administrations, from the Reagan administration to the present. He was the reason why Newt Gingrich reduced his support for Taiwan. He was reportedly the reason why Trump broke with decades of precedent to become the first president since Ronald Reagan to not meet with the Dalai Lama. And he was doing it while making hundreds of millions of dollars helping us companies work in China, and with at least several known instances, helping the Chinese Communist Party's companies, state owned enterprises, companies with deep links to the party, make more money in China and elsewhere.
I have been stunned by the cone of silence surrounding Kissinger. And I have been stunned by the reluctance of so many people who had publicly criticized Kissinger in the past to do so again in the future. And I'll share with you a quote with someone whose name I would love to mention, but won't as he told it to me off the record. He is a prominent foreign policy commentator who had criticized Kissinger in the past, so I talked to him about it. He was very generous, explaining what had happened. I said, Great. Can I use that on the record? And he said, No, I'm just getting invited back to dinners.
James Fallows 14:06
To spell that out, Henry Kissinger is now, what?, nearing age 100 Why does he have this power? We often talk about why people in the Republican Party are in such fear of Donald Trump, and you can make the argument they're afraid of being primaried, etc. Why are people in the foreign policy world now in fear of Henry Kissinger?
Isaac Stone Fish 14:29
Kissinger is one of the most brilliant and arguably one of the most vindictive Americans of the 20th and 21st century, and he is excelled at suppressing criticism of him. I mean, this is a guy who used to call the New York Times offering to edit his own obituary.
He is so image conscious and some of his archives are open and there's these fascinating dripping with poison letters that he would write to his ideological enemies. And there used to be this reputation of Kissinger as someone who was the Great Deceiver, and it sort of fell off, and it hasn't really translated into the work that he's done in the China field.
There are all these quotes about, you know, Bush meeting with Gorbachev, I think it was, and saying: ‘Oh, I heard that you met with Kissinger. But I'm not going to believe what he said, because it's, of course, Henry Kissinger.’ He had this reputation for being a liar from some of the men who worked with him the closest, and that hasn't really translated into where he is today.
I think the other thing that Kissinger was very brilliant at is reputation laundering. And some of the people in the China space who are incredibly respected today, sit at the Henry Kissinger Chair of this or that institution, Robert Daly runs the Kissinger Institute at the Wilson Center. Hal Brands, who I think is a very smart foreign policy thinker, I believe, is the Henry Kissinger professor at Johns Hopkins University, Aaron Friedberg, who's a brilliant scholar, whose views I tend to agree with pretty wholeheartedly on China, was the inaugural Henry Kissinger scholar, I believe it was at the Library of Congress. So people will see these things and they'll think, Ah, okay, Kissinger must have these other views, because his name is at all these institutions. Very smart strategy.
James Fallows 16:35
Kissinger is sort of the central figure in the way you argue that governmental influence has been has been bought off. Is there anybody you think of as the antithesis to that? Somebody who represents a steady, independent view of China policy, who has some prominence in the foreign policy world?
Isaac Stone Fish 17:06
Sadly, my two best examples are Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Because from a consulting and mercenary perspective, they I think, were the two best ex-presidents of the last 50 or 60 years.
Nixon went on a secret trip to China after Tiananmen Square, and he brought a policy aide, Kissinger went on a secret trip to China after Tiananmen Square, he brought Hank Greenberg and Judith Hope, who were both basically clients of his. So Kissinger travels with his business associates and helps them make money. And Nixon travels with someone who can help him make good policy suggestions. [George W.] Bush really resisted the lure of so many other members of the Bush family to do a lot of high profile consulting with companies seeking to do business in China. And for all of the many faults of Nixon and Bush's presidency, I really do commend them for staying on the sidelines when it comes to the consulting business with China.
James Fallows 18:17
We'll set aside for another time other aspects of the George W. Bush record. But of course, there's another president, who you mentioned in your book, and who I once worked for long ago when he was in the White House, Jimmy Carter. It seems to me that you unfairly put him in the category of people who are swayed by business interests in China. Generally, Carter's post presidential record has been exemplary for not cashing in, in a way so so tell me your case about Carter.
Isaac Stone Fish 18:52
So Carter, I certainly agree Carter has not done it for the money. I think that's a very important distinction. And it does, right, raise the question, how much you criticize people for their intentionality? And how much for their impact?
You've written several books, Jim, you understand the, the idea that you finish your book, and then six months pass in which you pray, nothing happens in the world. And the last time I checked on Carter, and he, I believe, had said absolutely nothing on Xinjiang. So here's the Human Rights President of the United States, who when he gets a chance to speak about China publicly, does so in a mostly praiseworthy term does not bring up the atrocities in Xinjiang, does not bring up other issues with China's human rights record and your speaks about China being ahead of us in every way or every single way of some quote like that.
I have to double check so I'm not misquoting him. And I think the Carter Center did phenomenal work in China. When you could do phenomenal human rights work in China. You know, when they were pushing for village elections, I thought that was incredibly important and impactful. And I think had Carter pulled out at some point under Xi Jinping, three years ago, five years ago, I feel like his record would be much better. But he or the people making the decision at the Carter Center, I thought that they could still push. And they in doing so made some, I would say fairly large ethical sacrifices in the work that they're doing.
In the book I hold universities and organizations like the Carter Center to a higher standard than I do businesses. And perhaps that's not fair. You know, we expect businesses to compromise ethically, we expect that politicians but we do feel like universities think tanks, nonprofits should be held to a higher intellectual standard. And so the Carter Center not speaking up and spreading positive information, Chinese propaganda, I find to be more problematic than when say a company like Disney doesn't.
James Fallows 21:03
Talking about Disney, one of the things that's fascinating in your book is the distinction between the movie industry, which you have many details of how it has been cowed by the idea of a Chinese market. And TV, which you say has been much, much more outspoken on all the issues you're talking about. Explain the difference and the cause for it. The reason for it.
Isaac Stone Fish 21:25
1997 was Annus Horribilis for China in Hollywood. Three movies – Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, Red Corner -- came out that had portrayals of China and Tibet that the party decided to find offensive. And so the party, reeling from a scandal with the Clinton White House and a bribe to try to get Clinton reelected, decided to take another tack, they realize they can't just give money to US institutions that they want to support it. They have to be a lot more sophisticated than that.
So they banned Hollywood studios, made it clear to Hollywood studios that they were in the doghouse slowly told them why and allowed them to send their leaders to China to apologize and to see how they could get back into the Chinese market. There's this really fascinating episode of the CEO of Disney at the time going to meeting with the Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. And in Zhu Rongji’s speeches, he talks about the incident. So Eisner goes and gets into the meeting room, an Zhu says, Hey, it's great to see you. You're Frank Wells, right? There's the president of Disney.
This is someone who's so accustomed to being the center of attention, and Zhu just immediately puts him in his place. So Eisner apologizes, and Disney over the next several years and several decades works to show the party that it's happy to work for its interests. The first thing they did was they released the Chinese propaganda film in the United States. And they've done dozens of other things over the years that show how they're willing to work in concert with the Chinese Communist Party.
TV never had a 1997. TV never had an incident like that. TV had Rupert Murdoch's very failed attempt to bring his television station to China, TV tends to travel less well. Talk Shows, new shows, comedies, doesn't work in international markets, not just China doesn't work as well in a lot of other international markets. And then somehow -- and this is something I'd love someone to really dive into -- I just feel like television in this aspect made a lot more ethical choices. And I don't know why. But I'd be very curious to understand that television and music for that matter. Music is another industry that doesn't travel as well as film, that it's a smaller music market than film market. But something else happened that I feel like needs a more sophisticated writer than myself to really untangle.
James Fallows 24:17
When reading your book I was thinking about both the universality and the parochialism of TV. I've met people in China as I'm sure you have who say they learned their English from Ally McBeal or Baywatch or whatever. You have these things which are global hits. But also there is, as you very well point out the kind of local parochialism of TV. Back several generations ago, Johnny Carson was world famous, or nationally famous in the US, as the Tonight Show host. And there was some story in The New Yorker about how he was in the crowd at Wimbledon, and nobody recognized him because, you know, people in England didn't see the same shows.
A final question on movies. Is there any corrective or hope? Or is the sort of portrait you give of the movie industry, being just too afraid of the Chinese government is that more or less a one way street?
Isaac Stone Fish 25:14
I've been very impressed to see Hollywood diversity campaigns at the Oscars, as a way to push for more black actors, a push for representation. What I think people haven't understood yet, but should, is just how racist it is to show only one side of people. I'm Jewish, and if every Jewish character in a film was a doctor, or a lawyer or a successful businessman, and you had character saying things like, ‘God, I'm so glad I have a Jewish lawyer, now my problems are going to be solved.’ There would be a such a massive outcry. And you can just imagine that you just were the humans. That's not a human portrayal. And that's what you have with Chinese characters in movies today in Hollywood. And so the idea is not oh, we need to get back to say Breakfast at Tiffany's which has this cartoonishly atrocious portrayal of the Japanese actor
James Fallows 26:12
Mickey Rooney, right?
Isaac Stone Fish 26:16
I've always confused Mickey Rooney, Andy Rooney. It's one of them. It's that China's an intensely complex place, and Chinese people like humans the world over. There's good, there's bad, there's moral complexities that make them interesting, as you know, as all humans and so portrayals have been so one sided for the last decade. And I think Hollywood needs to understand that that's problematic from a racial perspective. And they need to bring some diversity in their portrayal of Chinese people.
James Fallows 26:51
It's been a decade now, since I last lived in China. I was traveling there until three years ago, but I haven't been there at all in three years. When I was living there was through just the time when Xi Jinping was coming in. I was impressed by and even wrote about the crudeness and clownishness of most Chinese propaganda techniques. So I have been tempted to sort of dismiss these soft-power efforts as self-defeating. Is that a naive view on my side?
Isaac Stone Fish 27:38
I've been surprised at how successful a lot of propaganda ideas are, and they're always so much more effective, when they come from the likes of Henry Kissinger, or Hollywood -- than when they come from the Global Times or China Daily. [These are two of the state-run English language newspapers.]
There's a lot of conversations now about fighting disinformation and misinformation. And I think, in some cases, that's applicable with Chinese propaganda. But I think a lot of times it misses the boat.
People will ask me, why did you write this book? And I'll think back to coming to the States around the same time that you did from living in Beijing, and hearing so many Americans talk about China—not in the way that Chinese people did, but the way that the Communist Party officials would. ‘China has 5000 years of history,’ ‘China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty,’ expressions like that. They're not misinformation or disinformation, really. They're just propaganda. Set phrases from the party meant to change the way that you think and talk about China.
I think a lot about the phrase ‘all lives matter.’ So 15 years ago, if you said, ‘all lives matter,’ it would be entirely uncontroversial. You'd be showing yourself to be a humanist. Great. If you say it now, you're making a very pointed political statement. you're aligning yourself with certain folks on the right, you're pushing back against black lives matter. You're saying something that is very controversial.
And I feel the same thing about ‘China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.’ You're aligning yourself with the party, whether you know it or not. There's so many different ways to convey that idea, without repeating the same phrase of the party. It's similar with the phrase ‘people to people diplomacy. People ask me, well, don't you want more people to people diplomacy, and I'll say, Well, that's the United Front concept. It’s meant to pair party officials, or people sanctioned by the party, with unsuspecting Americans. I would love to see and talk to more Chinese people. I wish I could go back to China. I wish more Americans can go. But that's not people to people diplomacy.
James Fallows 29:43
On the ‘5000 years of history’: I don't know if you went to the Shanghai Expo in 2010. I burst out laughing at the Turkish exhibition whose opening plaque, in English, said: ‘Through its six thousand years of history…’ They knew what they were they were doing.
Let me ask you about something that is the center of world news right now, which is the disaster in Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities going on there. China appears has welded itself to Russia in the international lineup. How should we interpret what the Chinese government is doing in this time of atrocity?
Isaac Stone Fish 30:27
I think Beijing wants to have it both ways. I think they want the war to go on for as long as possible, because I think they feel that Europe distracted and the United States distracted and from their perspective, ideally involved in the war, will make it more likely for them to increase their adventurism in Asia, and possibly even sees Taiwan militarily in the near term. I think they also don't want people to think that they're that close with Russia, partially because it's embarrassing, partially because Beijing under the party doesn't believe in alliances, partially because it doesn't it advantage themselves to do so. So I think they're trying to communicate both of these things at once, which is that we don't support Russia. It's just that the wars United States fault and Europe's fault, and we're just merely stating the obvious reality that NATO is to blame. But we are globalists, we support globalization, open borders, non-interference in other countries affairs, I think,
James Fallows 31:34
Is China doing itself any damage by seeming to choose Putin over Zelensky?
Isaac Stone Fish 31:43
I hope so. I hope it is doing itself damage.
I think China and Russia are radically different countries. Russia is a far right regime. China is a far left regime. There are so many differences in the two nations.
That said, I do find it heartening that people are associating them together. I believe the talk of an alliance is overblown, but I do think it's in some ways positive because people are viewing Russia negatively. And I think a lot of what's happening inside China deserves to be viewed negatively. I also feel on the one hand in 2021, we traded roughly 25 times more with China than we did with Russia. On the other hand, it's getting people to start wondering, oh, if China seizes Taiwan, if China attacks and seizes islands in the South Sea, will we have to pull out of China? And if so how do we start thinking about that now?
James Fallows 32:37
A subject we could talk about for hours, but concisely: do you think the Ukrainian disaster has made it more, or less, likely that the PRC would invade Taiwan?
Isaac Stone Fish 32:51
Gosh, I'd say it doesn't change the likelihood. I think it changes the likelihood that people will predict it and can understand that it is probably looming, but I don't think it's pushed Beijing in one direction or another.
I think the decision to invade is Xi Jinping’s decision. Whether or not Beijing will win, the biggest predictor of that is does the US get involved. And that's Biden or whoever replaces him decision. So one of the reasons I've been so heartened by the relatively restrained US response [in Ukraine] is that it doesn't signal to China, ‘hey, we're fighting a two-front war.’ I think it's in some ways similar to getting out of Afghanistan. Yes, it was a chaotic withdrawal. But we're doing this to focus more on Asia. And Beijing, you understand that means you.
James Fallows 33:44
And one follow up on this. I spent some time reporting among the PLA and their defense university, etc, when I was in China. It struck me then, that the PLA officials had a healthy awareness of how relatively weak they were compared to the US. For instance, the fact that PLA now contains not a single combat veteran, versus the US, which is always at war, and therefore we have all these combat veterans.
Do you think the PLA still has some healthy caution? Or has it gotten the big head?
Isaac Stone Fish 34:19
Gosh, that's a great question. I really don't know. I think that regardless of the caution, the PLA is the armed wing of the party. And the point of the PLA is the party's attack dog, so to speak. And so there could be a lot of reluctance to invade Taiwan. I hope there's a lot of reluctance but I can't imagine them dissenting in a huge mass. I mean, again, who knows, but I think they will do what the party says.
James Fallows 34:55
One last question for you, which gets us to where your book ends up
Your book has, as you've also expressed here, a very cautionary and hard-edged argument about a big mistake that the US is making. You’ve also had a lot of experience in China, a lot of connections with Chinese culture and Chinese people, and love for what it is like there. I think a lot of us share those feelings. When my wife and I were living there, we would say every day: It’s always more interesting than horrible. There are horrific things going on. But the texture and the variety and the vibrancy and the individualism of Chinese people stays with I think anybody who has spent any serious time there.
How does the US thread the needle or avoid the overreaction of anti-Asian hate crimes and anti-Chinese backlash and all the other things which – well, which Donald Trump, to choose an example, seem to personify. What is the way people can understand a hard-edged policy like yours, while avoiding all the human and cultural damage it could do?
Isaac Stone Fish 36:08
For ethical and strategic reasons, it's so important that this be done in a way that's non-discriminatory. It's non-discriminatory towards Chinese and Chinese Americans. And there was a, there was an anarchist movement in the 1910s and 20s, with Emma Goldman, where they tried to assassinate a government leader, and failed. And regardless of whether or not he had died, there was a general understanding inside the movement that this pushed things back decades.
I really need people to understand, both for very clear, ethical reasons and very clear strategic reasons: If you're frustrated with Beijing's influence the United States, if you're frustrated with China, the Chinese Communist Party, if you're frustrated with COVID, or job loss or anything, and you take it out on a Chinese person, you are doing Beijing a huge favor. People really need to understand that.
There's plenty of very clear ethical reasons why not to do that. But people really need to understand that, you know, that could change the course of history, if there's a massacre of Chinese in this country would not only be a really awful, awful atrocity, it would make it far more difficult for US policymakers to be quote unquote, tough on China. And so I do feel like you can make both sides of the argument at once.
James Fallows 37:48
And what is the positive way that a politician a president, an aspirant, a leader, can make the case about what the US should be doing in regards to China?
Isaac Stone Fish 38:00
Try to talk about Beijing and the party, as opposed to ‘China.’
There's been this long debate, ‘Oh, are they communist? Are they not communist,’ which I feel misses the point. They're very, very explicit in Chinese how they are communists. They are very, very clear. They always talk about the Communist Party. I think we can take their word for it and talk about the Communist Party. And here in the United States our issues are with the Communist Party, and not Chinese and Chinese people.
I think another piece is diversifying the debate in the United States. I think for too long, it's been folks who look like me and look like you [white men] who are the China whisperers and Beijing hands. Kissinger and Albright and Paulson. I mean, it's basically old white men with a sprinkling of older white women. And for ethical and strategic reasons, we need to have more diversity in the China space in the United States. I think it's wonderful to see the diversity of viewpoints in the Asian American community, on China issues. And I think people assume: ‘Oh, someone's Chinese American or someone's Japanese Americans. So they must be kinder or more dovish, when it comes to China. And I have found that absolutely not to be the case. I feel like there's no racial linkages that I can see between what someone thinks about China and where their family is from. I think that's also incredibly important.
James Fallows 39:26
Isaac Stone Fish, thank you so much for talking with us today. Thanks for writing this book. I really hope everybody will read it. You can tell there are areas where I'm fully in agreement. There are areas where I have questions or disagreements, and I think that everybody will have some. But it's a tremendously clarifying and useful and important argument and interesting to read and full of things I didn't know before. So thank you very much, and I look forward to talking you to you in real life, too.
Isaac Stone Fish 39:58
Thank you, Jim. Great to chat.