Strategic Stalemate: Ryan Hass on How Beijing Sees America — and Trump

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from my home in Beijing.

Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at cinecapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there, and yes, they start to add up, but this one is very worthwhile. In addition to Seneca, you also get great content from partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project, and you get Jay Carter's This Week in China's History, so please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more. What does China want? It's the question that never seems to go away.

It feels at times like it's the question underneath nearly every other question in the discourse on China, and every year somebody takes another serious run at it. My guest today, Ryan Haas, has just undertaken one of the better efforts in recent memory, an essay in the new issue of China Leadership Monitor called China's Great Power Vision comes into focus, which argues that the 2020s may be remembered as the decade when Beijing finally laid its cards on the table, a vision for an international political order stripped of what some would call that order's original liberal core and rebuilt around sovereign equality and the global majority. Ryan then asks whether China is actually willing to pay for it. He's also just written a shorter piece for Brookings where he works that couldn't be more timely what with Xi Jinping do in Washington for a state visit later this month.

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