Everything that I have ever done professionally has been approached and viewed through the lens of one of two disciplines.  Eventually, I learned to combine the two.

The first was the discipline of cultural anthropology. A twelfth-grade class in 20^th c. religious thought led me to major in Asian Comparative Religion at Princeton which led me (after a year of traveling overland from Europe to Taiwan via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal) to a joint MA/PhD program at the University of California at Berkeley.  Two and a half years living at 10,500’ in the village of Tengyi in the Manang Valley north of Annapurna (pictured below), taught me how to see the world through the eyes of people with different circumstances and values.

The other was the discipline of diplomacy.  I joined the U.S. Foreign Service in the spring of 1988, a little more than two years after getting my degree.  (I should mention at this point that I made very good use of the intervening time by moving to New York to court Grace, by marrying Grace, and by renovating our first house in Brooklyn.) Having cleared the various assessment hurdles of the Foreign Service test and having been given an offer to join, it wasn’t a hard decision.  My clearest career idea upon receiving my doctorate was that I did not want to stay in academics.  And my only interview in the corporate world – with SmithKline (now Glaxo) – could have made for an amusing episode of The Office.  So I took the offer. Having come in initially through the State Department, I asked for a lateral transfer into the U.S. Department of Commerce branch of the Foreign Service, because my sense was that — for the two places I really wanted to be posted, China and Japan – a lot of the Embassy action was on the business side.  I wasn’t wrong. Anyway, the point I want to make here is that the anthropological viewpoint worked well with the diplomatic viewpoint to help me see issues in three dimensions and, with that better field of vision, helped me resolve some the issues at the heart of the U.S.-Japan Auto Talks and other knotty diplomatic challenges.  I don’t think I ever told business clients, and rarely told Embassy colleagues, that I was trained as a cultural anthropologist.  I definitely never contemplated for a moment putting PhD on my business cards. But I used the anthropological perspective every day during my time in the Foreign Service.

With this as personal introduction, I’ll share here the three roadmaps – ‘pathmaps,’ more accurately – which have been most helpful in guiding me through both the magnificent panoramas and the minefields of modern U.S.-China relations.  In coming weeks, I will give each of these works its own dedicated post.  Today will simply list the three with brief thumbnail intros and identify the common thread I have found most useful.

1

Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century

By Orville Schell and John Delury

Random House (2013)

Given to me for Christmas in 2013 by James Gibney — former Foreign Service colleague in Tokyo, editor extraordinaire, and godfather to my younger son – Wealth and Power brings to life a simple but profound insight.  Through the life stories of eleven completely different individuals — in some cases, mortal enemies – Schell and Delury show how all eleven hew to a single goal, China’s rejuvenation through the acquisition of wealth and power.  The early 19^th c. scholar Wei Yuan and the activist Feng Guifen proposed completely different courses of action; the Empress Dowager Cixi, the “new citizen” Liang Qichao and the reformer Sun Yaat-sen all saw radically different pathways to modernization, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong led opposing sides of a decades-long civil war, and Zhu Rongji (whom I met as Mayor of Shanghia on several occasions during my first posting there) and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiabo had entirely different conceptions of the moral duty of a citizen in modern China.  Nonetheless, despite differing in their ideas of the best means to reach the goal, they all shared an absolutely identical understanding of the most urgent goal in their lives – helping China acquire enough wealth and power to regain its traditional standing as a world colossus.  (This goal, incidentally, continues to be inculcated in the education of every school child in China today).

2

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

By Bruno Maçães

Hurst Publishers (2019)

This book is included not because it is one of the best books about China.  Far from it.  John Pomfret’s The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom and countless other books would make that cut in front of Maçães.  The reason for Belt and Road’s inclusion here is that Maçães does something few too scholars and commentators on China bother to do.  He puts himself into the minds and mindset  of the Chinese government planners who are charting China’s future.  This is what an anthropologist does and the insight it provides helps minimize misunderstanding and creates more space for successful diplomatic outcomes.

Maçães is himself a former Portuguese diplomat with extensive experience in Hong Kong and China.  To give just a sense of his approach, Maçães argues that Western theories of international relations entirely miss the basic conception at the heart of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  In Maçães’ view, that conception “follows Taoist logic: the single concept first divides in two — land and sea — then in several — the corridors and coutnries — then in many — the specific projects and privileged locations” in the BRI enterprise.

3

The U.S. and China in the 21^st Century: Sub-National Sino-American Relations

Course Number IMPA 608 in the School of Liberal & Professional Studies (FY 2019 & 20)

International Masters of Public Administration, Fox Leadership International

Instructor: Terry Cooke   Co-Instructor: Liyiran (Shelly) Xia

This is the course I taught at Penn for two years before COVID-19 hit and the course was furloughed.  I hasten to point out that I am adding it here because of the input from students, rather than because of my syllabus.  The course is designed in two parts: the first seven weeks involves readings, lectures and classroom discussion structured on the basis of my syllabus; the second seven weeks, the most valuable part of the course, is a knowledge co-creation exercise based on original research, much of it in Chinese, which the students conduct and present.  It is through this knowledge co-creation exercise and through insights provided by the students and Co-Instructor Shelly Xia that I have been able to articulate the framework which informs the Ambitions portion of the TEA Collaborative project (T = Technology, E = Energy/Environment, A = Ambitions).  The Ambitions portion seeks to understand and systematically present the MacroDevelopment vision which Chinese government planners have been elaborating and adjusting since the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 (and have been communicating clearly in their Five Year Plans).  It is an effort to apply the joint lens of anthropology and diplomacy to better understand the motivation and to better delineate the opportunities and challenges associated with China’s MacroDev trajectory.  We use three time periods (and, in the last time, period two different geographies) to organize this undertaking:

1949 – 1978:               Version 1.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model

1982 – 2009:               Version 2.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model

2012 – Current:           Version 3.0 of the PRC MacroDev Model
A) Domestic Release
B) International Release (Belt & Road Initiative

Note: the years not covered above were years of opaque, internal deliberation
within the Chinese Communist Party leadership

The Common Thread

I hope the point is obvious.  The common thread here is being able to understand the world as seen through the eyes of your counterpart.  As in business, you don’t always know whether your counterpart will prove to be protagonist or antagonist, friend or foe.  In order to negotiate the best possible deal, however, it is always vital to understand as well as possible that counterpart’s motivations, core values and thought processes.  Whether the climate of U.S.-China relations is chilly or warm, I choose to stand firmly on that ground.