U.S.-China Crisis Management and Crisis Prevention, with Michael Swaine

This week on Sinica, I chat with Michael Swaine, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for the last couple of years, prior to which he spent nearly two decades as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he led extensive work on Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations more broadly. He was also a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he developed a reputation for rigorous research on Asian security and crisis management. We focus on his recent report, “Avoiding the Abyss: An Urgent Need for Sino-U.S. Crisis Management,” which offers both a framework for understanding the forces driving U.S.-China crises and a roadmap to prevent or manage these crises effectively. He drew on his many decades of experience working on the security dimension of the bilateral relationship, including his participation in many Track II dialogues and simulations of crisis scenarios over the years.

4:51 – Defining "crisis" and "crisis prevention" 

10:13 – The possibility of a crisis in the South China Sea

12:31 – Lessons from past crises  

20:08 – The problematic moralistic stances and tit-for-tat escalation produced by yǒulǐ, yǒulì, yǒu jié 有理, 有利, 有节

27:37 – U.S. concern over the credibility of its alliance commitments 

34:50 – The problem of perception 

38:16 – Examples of how each side is sometimes unable to see how its own actions are perceived by the other 

41:20 – The dangers of failing to understand and making assumptions about the China’s historical memory 

45:42 – Problems of signaling and how best to solve them 

51:17 – Mike’s suggestions for a crisis toolkit and his proposal of a civilian-led two-tier dialogue structure 

58:41 – Track II dialogues 

1:02:47 – The importance of educating leaders up and down the system on crisis management 

1:06:08 – The structural issues of the decision-making systems in China and the U.S.

Recommendations:

Michael: Art critic Brian Sewell’s The Reviews That Caused the Rumpus; Robert Suettinger’s The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer  

Kaiser: The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian 

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