How the US and China Cooperate (and Compete) on Climate, Covid, and More

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Deborah Seligsohn joined the US embassy in Beijing in Nineteen-Ninety-One. At that time, few people could imagine how quickly China's economy was about to transform.

Deborah specialized in Energy and Environmental policy and as China's economy grew before her eyes, she realized something. It wasn't just industrial production and per capita energy usage that was affecting China's environment, it was also the changing culture and values held by everyday people.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: An environment is a luxury good where people want more of it the richer they get and China has gotten richer. Everybody is more concerned about the environment now than they were 10 or 20 years ago.

DAN RICHARDS: Deborah is now an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University where she focuses on the relationship between business interests and environmental issues in China. She sat down with Watson's director, Ed Steinfeld, as part of our ongoing series on contemporary China. They talked about the different ways US and Chinese businesses view environmental issues and how international cooperation and competition will be essential to addressing global climate change.

They also look at another truly global issue, the pandemic, later on in the episode. They started, though, with the environment and how views around it have changed in China in the last few decades. Here's [INAUDIBLE]

ED STEINFELD: Deborah Seligsohn, thanks so much for joining us today on Trending Globally. It's so great to have you.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Thanks so much.

ED STEINFELD: And my own recollection, living in Beijing in the early 90s, was that people just accepted that there was going to be a film of coal dust on your clothes when you hung them up to dry outside but also when the pollution was bad, people just describe it as fog, [CHINESE], rather than pollution. When you first started in China, what was the sense of environmental issues, both in the State Department, with respect to China, but also just among the Chinese you're interacting with.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: So the way we split up the job, we did have a separate environment science and technology section, which I was not in. I was in the economic section, I was covering energy. So I think that was useful for me in terms of my own development because you can't really talk about climate change and pollution without taking the resource and energy issues seriously.

So understanding the actual need for energy and what the trade offs are people are thinking about, and what industry is thinking about, and consumers are thinking about is really important. If you just act as if it's just a problem to get rid of, you're not going to solve the problem because you need to think about the genuine needs that people have for their comfort, for their economic development, et cetera.

I mean, and this has fed all the way up into my dissertation was thinking about the companies and what their interests are and their behavior, right? And so by starting working on the resource questions, I spent a lot of time with the companies. And so then you get a much better understanding of their behavior, their interests, the way they are and aren't government entities, and all of that and, especially, when you're thinking about China, that's incredibly useful, right?

ED STEINFELD: You're on the environmental side. Tell me how you feel attitudes in China-- among different constituencies-- have evolved in recent decades surrounding the environment and climate. And I think for many Americans, maybe the perception is, well, in the past, the Chinese-- broadly defined-- didn't care about the environment.

And then today, I guess there's an assumption that, OK, to the extent the Chinese-- again, broadly defined-- care about the environment, it is much easier to deal with those problems in China because it's authoritarian and the government just decides and the society does. So I think those characterizations are crude, if not totally wrong, but how would you describe the changes?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: So I think it is the case that people spend a lot more time thinking about everything, from wanting clean air and clean water, to wanting to enjoy national parks, right? I mean, the Chinese are huge fans of going on vacations to beautiful areas, right? And that's just something that no one could have even conceived of in the early nineteen-nineties. I think there's just been a taste for more cleaner environment that's grown over the decades and has really changed people's thinking. And then the other piece of that is that Chinese government officials and especially central government officials are now extremely upper middle class.

I mean, the top officials are extremely wealthy but ordinary officials are as upper middle class as you and me, right? And so what they want in terms of a clean environment is the same as what we want and of course they're all pretty well traveled now, internationally, and that was what I started to see in the late 90s, was people would go to Europe or the US and they would say, oh, these are really nice clean cities and we need nice clean cities like that.

ED STEINFELD: How does that translate to climate change concerns, or does it translate? I could see how that would relate to clean air, clean water, but what about climate?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Well two things. One is that I think that's why the original framing where all the international funders were funding co benefit studies that were like, if you clean up your climate issues, you will also get these air pollution benefits, was backwards and by about Twenty-Ten, when the Chinese kind of took over from the Westerners and were funding their own things, they were always framing the co benefits the other way. That if we deal with these air pollution problems, we will get these climate co benefits.

But the other thing is that you have all these businesses, you have all these provinces, you have all these departments, you have so many different groups that are pushing and pulling against each other. It's bureaucratic politics but it is politics, right? But I do think one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party has as opposed to most elected politicians is that they do tend to have a longer term time horizon.

So because they are planning to stay in power so they're not just thinking about two years from now, they are concerned about what China is going to be like in five 10, 15, 20 years from now. And so the impacts of climate, I think they take them seriously, and the number of climate skeptics within China has always been much lower than in the United States.

People respect science and so I think that's been a big deal. One of the huge changes that happened in the early two thousands was that the science on what climate would do at the local level, like national or regional level, became much better. And so prior to the early two thousands, you really couldn't say, Oh, this region is going to be badly hit and this region isn't going to be so badly hit and there were a whole bunch of perfectly reputable studies suggesting that at mid latitudes, climate change might not be that bad. That most of the impacts we're going to be in the far north, far south kinds of things like that. That changed in the early two thousands and the science got better right around the same time.

I remember the Chinese presenting all this data on increased lightning strikes, which is really a thing with climate change, and they had tons more data than I've ever seen anywhere else. So impacts really matter but I also think from very early in the two thousands, the Chinese started to see business opportunities from climate mitigation, wind, solar, carbon capture and storage.

ED STEINFELD: I was going to get to that. I too feel that, and I've learned a lot from your writings on this front, but in my own experiences, I felt, at least in recent years, that it's not just the Chinese government but a lot of Chinese businesses and Chinese citizens frame environmental remediation and addressing climate change also in terms of being on the cutting edge of technology and being kind of at the cutting edge of advanced business but also offering a way to transition from old, dying industries.

And the point isn't that this is all done smoothly but there's just a tenor in China that seems somewhat more forward thinking and optimistic, although your writings have pointed out this may bear some similarities to the kind of framings we see in the US in the Green New Deal or in the Build Back Better program that the Biden campaign pushed.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Right, and I think in the US it's new, as opposed to in China, you see it starting in-- certainly by post Two Thousand and Five that these ideas in the US start to see sort of coming in the academic writing around Twenty-Fifteen and then you get Build Back Better and Green New Deal and this conception that there is a better way to run the economy that's going to be good for everybody and it's going to create all these new jobs and we're going to rebuild the infrastructure. But in China, that's been around for a long, long time.

In Twenty-Twelve, I actually took Al Gore's course on how to give his slide show in Beijing. So it was like 300 people in a ballroom with Al Gore and he went through like every slide and the logic behind it and all this. Pretty much the entire audience except for me were local Chinese. The pushback was, OK, OK, we get the problem, let's talk about the solutions and Gore's original, if you ever watched an inconvenient truth, is all about the problems. There's nothing about solutions.

And he had sort of tacked on, at the end, a few slides about wind and solar and they just wanted it to be the complete opposite. Like, three slides at the beginning on the problem and now let's talk about the solutions but let's talk about the entire menu of solutions. We want to talk about nuclear, we want to talk about carbon capture and storage, we want to talk about energy efficiency, and we want to do that in detail because a huge amount of China's more short term gains we're going to be on the efficiency side. And let's talk about the business opportunities and people were very respectful but they were also a little bit exasperated.

ED STEINFELD: Let's say in the coming years both the United States and China orient their industries and industrial structure toward producing for climate remediation and let's say both countries do big pushes for more efficient home heating and more efficient power grids, all the kinds of technology changes we like, what are the implications for US-China competition for addressing global climate change?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: So I think competition is the key to addressing climate change. I mean, I think what we need to do is, within the Paris framework, is set standards for what we want and then have companies compete to produce clean energy at the lowest price point. So I actually see competition as a central part of the future of climate mitigation, in that sense.

ED STEINFELD: What about competition, though, over the standards themselves? And I'm thinking about, particularly, in the cyber domain. So if internet of things and all different modes of data collection and storage and structuring and AI, the kinds of technologies that I think will be important for achieving efficiency in industry and power generation. If those standards become a source of conflict, or they are a source of conflict in the US and China, what does the world do about that?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: I would say, first of all, a couple of things. One is I think the importance of that stuff to energy systems in general, in mitigation, is way overstated. That straightforward hardware is much more important than-- I mean, some of that stuff can matter but a lot of it is locally fine tuned, and the professor I work with at Xinghua figure out some way to reprogram the operating systems of power plants to save 3% of energy, which is a lot when you're thinking about Chinese power plants. So that kind of IT stuff does matter but it's going to be very specific.

And when I talk about standards, I'm talking about emission standards. I'm not talking about exact technology standards, which I don't see any reason why those are going to be global, in that sense. I'm not sure that's the most important issue. The issue in the past has been this race to the bottom types of issues, that companies go searching the world for the cheapest, most polluting--

ED STEINFELD: And I think there's frequently accusations from the American side that Chinese producers, regardless of how high tech they are maybe domestically, that they will sell low end products to low end markets.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Well, right. It seems like this constant refrain is, what do we do about the Belt and Road? And the answer is to talk to all those countries and help them develop higher standards. The Chinese would infinitely prefer to sell a coal fired power plant with scrubbers because that's going to be a more expensive power plant.

But I do think Chinese producers have-- I mean, they reduced the cost of scrubbers by 10 times when they started building them for their own power plants. Now I realize this is pollution, not climate change, but those kinds of changes, when Chinese companies get into the business, they start mass producing things and they can drive the price down.

So I think once China has these standards, and that's where Xi Jinping's Twenty-Sixty carbon neutrality goal becomes so important.

ED STEINFELD: What do you make of that goal? Does it give you cause for optimism or despair, what do we make of that goal?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Oh, it gives me cause for great optimism that will either be met or not met when I see the actual five year plan goals announced in a couple of weeks. I want to see what the actual targets are in this next five year plan. But the thing about a Twenty-Sixty goal, once you have a neutrality goal, you have a strong incentive to ensure that you peak earlier and lower than you might otherwise do because the less you go up, the easier it is to come down again.

ED STEINFELD: As long as you mean it about that goal.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: But the Chinese have never not meant a single one of these goals. They always meet or come close to every energy and environment goal they've ever announced so I don't really understand why that particular form of skepticism is such a constant in the US dialogue. It's like, yes, Chinese catch people violating, then they get in trouble, then they change their ways of monitoring and then those people stop violating. I mean, I find that whole line of argument confusing.

ED STEINFELD: Yeah, I think some of the skepticism, though, ties into current behaviors by the Chinese government, whether it's in Hong Kong or Xinjiang and what's often viewed as some kind of change, it's some kind of going back on old promises. What do you make of that kind of criticism, where the looping in of all of this contemporary behavior into our perspectives about China's performance over the long run with respect to climate, or we will get to COVID in just a moment.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: I guess I don't understand what we thought the promise was they didn't keep. I mean, I thought the Chinese made sure they put an awful lot of wiggle room into the basic law because they planned to crack down at some point in the future.

ED STEINFELD: The basic law for Hong Kong.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Yeah. I always thought that was a relatively likely outcome. And I mean, Chinese human rights violations, in their minority areas, have just ranged from bad to egregious over the entire history of the People's Republic. So I mean, things are really bad and that should be criticized. I don't see that as having anything to do with whether they're serious about air pollution or not. That has to do with their own perceptions of their security, which I think are misperceived but has been a pretty longstanding problem.

ED STEINFELD: I think where the concerns about recent Chinese government behavior seem to come into play more is in discussions about public health and COVID, in other words. How can we-- whoever we are-- but outside of China, how can we cooperate with this government when it covered up a nascent pandemic and it's still not cooperating with international agencies and sharing information? There's that line of reasoning and is that a valid line of reasoning, what do we make of that?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: I'm pretty skeptical of it. I think the cover up of COVID was about three weeks in January. If you compare that to the SARS cover up, which went on for months--

ED STEINFELD: In Two Thousand and Three, or late Two Thousand and Two, even.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Right. So if we compare China's behavior during COVID to what happened during SARS, they've been way more cooperative, way more out front. It does appear, most likely, that they had a local government cover up in the middle of January. So you have something going on in December, I mean, my own sense of it, and I could be wrong, is you had people who thought it was a new disease and people who didn't think it was a new disease, and it was China so it got sort of political.

But I think there was a real argument going on about what was going on. But by the end of December, they clearly felt they had something going on and they published it on some local government website. So they didn't do what they were supposed to do, which is report it up to the National CDC and then reported to the WHO but they also weren't really hiding it if they're publishing it on their local government website, right?

So they published it on the local government website, WHO spots it, calls the National CDC, calls down to the local CDC and says, what's going on here? And by January 3, you have George Gao, the head of the China CDC, calling the head of the US CDC to talk about the situation.

So I think they were trying to be fairly upfront with what was going on. And they report a bunch of cases, at that point they're still saying they're not sure if there's human to human transmission. I think they probably weren't sure. Then a couple of different things happened. So one is the US writes to the Chinese on January 6 offering assistance, basically offering assistance in determining the genome and sequencing.

Anybody who knows anything about the science in China for the last 20 years knows that the Chinese did not need any help in sequencing the genome. What they could have used help with is figuring out therapies and, of course, they, along with everybody else, wanted to get going on the vaccine although by publishing the genome so early, they helped everybody.

Apparently, the Moderna vaccine was actually developed five days after the genome was published. There's this period then from about the 10th to sometime around the 20th of January where they stop reporting cases and I can't tell if it's a local or a central cover up where it's happening. It is happening concurrently with People's Congress so that seems like it's part of the source of the problem, is stuff going on in Hubei but it's a little bit unclear to me.

And then on the 21st of January, Xi Jinping speaks about it. Everybody acknowledges it. So the period where they were covering things up was actually pretty small.

ED STEINFELD: Would it have mattered, Deb, had the US CDC had more personnel on the ground in China? I mean your work documents very clearly that, in the period after SARS, just in terms of sheer personnel, the amount of US China collaboration just deepened rapidly and there were a lot of US CDC personnel on the ground in China representing the US but also coming in through WHO and other global agencies. And that, in your account, you document this. Those numbers went down quite a little bit toward the end of the Obama administration and certainly in the Trump administration.

So does an American presence on the ground matter? And if so, how?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Yes, I think it mattered for us. I don't think it would have changed the trajectory of things in China during that period. I mean, first of all, I think the epidemic, certainly in Wuhan, had gotten bad before they really understood what it was. And as we've seen, that's not hard to do. So I don't know that it would have changed the trajectory in any way in terms of what happened in Wuhan.

But I think it would have meant that we better understood how bad it was earlier and that we were at deep risk. I mean, just the fact that nobody seemed to be looking at how many flights from Wuhan went straight to New York and Milan every day just is crazy. One of the things that hit me on some seminar I watched where Dr. Fauci and Sanjay Gupta from CNN and George Gao we're all on the same seminar, Sanjay Gupta pointed out that the number of international flights worldwide between SARS and COVID had doubled.

So people were just moving around the world twice as fast as they had been moving 17 years ago. If we had CDC people there, the biggest thing that would have happened is they would have better understood what was going on with this disease and how serious it was and that would have been better conveyed. Also, there was information that was in that second WHO team, the one that went in February, that was reported by The New York Times and Vox and other publications but as far as I can tell, didn't seem to enter into any government or health knowledge about the role of these fever hospitals in China and the importance of getting people out of their families if they were infected.

ED STEINFELD: And isolating them early.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Which the Koreans did, right? South Korea did that but we didn't do it. And so I think there was a lot of local knowledge. The other thing, of course, is we did this very weird thing where we evacuated the consulate from Wuhan before we evacuated the Americans.

So first of all, even in just in terms of normal eyes and ears on the ground, not CDC people but just US government personnel, we didn't have anybody there that could tell us what was going on, who knew how to write a State Department cable. Now in terms of when the drawdown happened, in the Obama administration, there wasn't much of a draw down except there had been already a decision to close the global AIDS program in China, which totally made sense. The Chinese have done a great job on HIV/AIDS.

So that had been decided but all of the people that were relevant to this, to emerging infections, they were all there through the end of the Obama administration. And that drawdown didn't start to happen until the Trump administration and I don't even think it was a policy decision in the sense of, oh, we don't want people in China.

It was that the Trump administration kept doing these staffing freezes for all of HHS and they kept cutting CDC's budget and so CDC just had to pull back people. And I think this is still an issue we have to focus on because the next disease may not come from China, it may come from somewhere else. I mean, when we think about Zika and MERS and all these different diseases, they didn't all arise in China, they arise all over the place. And CDC was pulling people out everywhere because they didn't have enough money and they didn't have enough staff.

And so I hope that's something that the Biden administration is looking at kind of early on. I know they already announced that they were restarting a pandemics unit within the White House because that was the other thing Obama started and then Trump eliminated was an actual unit of people to be tracking this all the time. So hopefully, they'll also remember you don't just need coordination at the center, you need a lot of staff on the ground.

ED STEINFELD: I just want to close, Deb, by asking you a very general question. When both you and I were living in China in the late 80s or early 90s, in some ways, maybe in retrospect, it was easier for a lot of people to think about the US-China relationship because the US was strong and wealthy and advanced and China-- by many Chinese own description-- was poor and needed to learn and there was-- I don't mean to be condescending or crude about this-- but there was somewhat of a feeling of big brother, little brother.

And today is so much different in the sense that China is so much wealthier and so much stronger and so much as a society. So much more self-confident. Maybe even has some hubris. Americans have gone down that path as well. And the United States, I think for many Americans, we feel we're not governed well and things aren't working well and we're in decline. And it's very much changed, that balance.

And I wonder whether that kind of shift in perceptions is a healthy one? Does that make for, ultimately, a better relationship between these two countries and peoples, maybe more equality, or does it just lead to ending and, unfortunately, maybe deepening kinds of conflict. Or have I just drawn some kind of crazy false dichotomy?

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: No, that's an interesting question. I mean, this brings me all the way back to when I was in college and people were really into the book by the beloved Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One, Lessons for America, and what I remember is Henry Rosovsky, who was the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and an economist of Japan, lecturing in our intro class and saying, you know, what America needs is not to become more like Japan. America needs to become more like America and we just need to play to our own strengths and stop worrying about whether Japan is doing this or that better.

And the same answer, I think, is true for China and I can just feel Henry Rosovsky saying that to us right now, right? And I think, in the end, Ezra Vogel would agree too. And so I think our pessimism is our problem and I don't think there's any good reason for it. I mean, the other thing is, no, I don't think that autocracy is a better solution than democracy.

I think democracy is great and gives us all kinds of wonderful advantages like the ability to throw the rascals out, which is something that you can't do in an autocracy and it gives us human rights and ability to say whatever we want and all these other great things. Doesn't have a whole lot to do with whether you're successful in public health, may not have a whole lot to do with whether you're successful on the environment, but we can be successful on those things by doing our things our way better.

And to me that's why I love that Build Back Better phrase even though it sounds a little bit silly because that's all we need to do. We need to play to our strengths and I do think if we could do that, we will get along with China a lot better than if we view ourselves as weak and failing. And so I'm not saying there are never any problems but we have good evidence that there aren't always problems where we think there are.

And so I do think if we could treat each other as peers in these areas and recognize that the Chinese no longer feel like they want to be [? student ?] in terms of everything from environment to public health to aviation to whatever, we will get along better and we will do that better if we could feel more confident about ourselves because I see no reason why we can't continue to be a great nation.

ED STEINFELD: Deborah Seligsohn, thanks so much for joining us today on Trending Globally and thanks for giving us lots of cause for hope and certainly making us think.

DEBORAH SELIGSOHN: Thanks so much.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Alina Coleman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. You could subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. And if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find us.

You can learn more about training Globally and Watson's other podcasts on our website. We'll put a link in the show notes. We'll be back next week with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.