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中美關係究竟哪裏出了問題

(2023-06-05 00:07:47) 下一個

中美關係究竟哪裏出了問題?

托馬斯·弗裏德曼 2023年4月18日
DAMIR SAGOLJ/REUTERS
台灣台北——我剛剛結束了自新冠疫情以來的首次中國之行。重回北京讓我想起了自己作為媒體人的首要原則:耳聽為虛,眼見為實。美中關係的惡化程度如此嚴重、速度如此之快,雙方的接觸點變得如此之少(美國駐華記者所剩無幾,雙方領導人也幾乎不再交流),以至於我們現在隻能以管中窺豹的方式觀察彼此。這樣下去不會有好結果。
台灣總統蔡英文最近訪美,導致中國在台灣沿海舉行實彈演習並再次發出警告,台灣走向正式獨立的任何舉動都將破壞台海和平與穩定,而這隻是對當下局勢緊張到何種程度的最新提醒。任何一方哪怕是最微不足道的失誤都可能引發美中戰爭,那會讓烏克蘭問題看起來不過是一場鄰裏紛爭。
對我來說,這就是回到北京,用比管中窺豹更大的視角觀察中國會有所助益的原因之一。參加中國高層發展論壇——這是北京邀請中外商業領袖、中國高級官員、退休外交官以及少數中西方記者參加的重要年度聚會——讓我想起了一些古老的真知灼見,也令我大開眼界,看到了一些關於究竟是什麽在侵蝕美中關係的新現實。
提示:最新的狀況與信任——以及信任缺失——在國際關係中扮演越來越重要的角色有很大關係,現在美中向彼此出售的許多商品和服務都是數字化的,因此具有雙重用途,即它們既可以是武器,也可以是工具。而就在美中互信變得比以往任何時候都重要之際,這種信任也比以往任何時候都稀缺。這是非常糟糕的趨勢。

在更為私人的層麵上,回到北京也讓我發現,在過去30年的報道訪問中,我結識並喜歡上了那裏的許多人——但請不要把這話傳到華盛頓。民主黨和共和黨如今仿佛正在較勁,看誰的對華姿態更為強硬。說實話,美中兩國如今都把對方過於妖魔化,以至於輕易就能忘記作為人民,我們有多少共同點。除了美國,我想不出還有哪個大國在埋頭苦幹精神和資本主義的天性上比得了中國。

回到中國,也讓我再次感受到自上世紀70年代改革開放以來——甚至是自2019年新冠疫情暴發以來——中國建立的巨大影響力和國力。中國的共產黨政府對社會的控製比以往任何時候都要牢固,這要歸功於警察國家監控和數字追蹤係統:麵部識別攝像頭無處不在。中共粉碎了對其統治或對習近平主席的任何挑戰。現在,一名來訪的外國專欄作家要想讓任何人——不管是高級官員還是星巴克的咖啡師——公開發表評論都難於登天。十年前還不是這樣的。
近年來,北京已經變成一座更加宜居的城市。
近年來,北京已經變成一座更加宜居的城市。 MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
話雖如此,我們也不能被錯覺蒙蔽:中共的統治根基也是中國人民勤儉節約的結果,這使得黨和國家得以建造世界一流的基礎設施和公共財產,讓中國中下層民眾的生活不斷改善。
北京和上海已尤其變得相當宜居,空氣汙染基本消除,還多了大量適合步行的綠色空間。正如我在時報的同事柏凱斯(Keith Bradsher)在2021年所報道,上海最近新建了55個公園,全市公園總數達到406個,而且計劃再建近600個。
作為少數幾個在中國大陸經曆近三年嚴格“新冠清零”政策的美國記者,柏凱斯還告訴我,中國目前約有900個城鎮通了高鐵,即便是前往相當偏遠的地區也十分便宜、輕鬆和舒適。而在過去23年,美國隻修了一條類似高速鐵路的線路——連接華盛頓特區和波士頓之間的阿西樂快線,沿途設有15個站點。想想吧:900比15。
我在這裏不是想證明高鐵比自由更好。之所以提這些是為了說明,當你身處北京才能明白,中國的穩定不隻靠警察國家愈發無孔不入的監視,也是因為政府在穩步提高生活水平。這個政權既要掌握絕對控製,也在孜孜不倦地進行國家建設。
今時今日,對於一個從紐約肯尼迪機場飛抵北京首都機場的美國人來說,這種體驗就像從擁擠的公交總站飛入迪士尼的明日世界。想到過去八年我們在那個名叫唐納德·特朗普的冒牌國家建設者身上浪費了那麽多時間,我就心酸不已。
中國的高鐵連結數百座城市,幫助政府贏得了人民的支持。
中國的高鐵連結數百座城市,幫助政府贏得了人民的支持。 HUANG ZONGZHI/XINHUA, VIA GETTY IMAGES
到北京的第一天,我與一位年輕的中國女大學生進行了一番交談。她的第一個問題就提到了我寫過的一本書:“弗裏德曼先生,世界還是平的嗎?”
我向她解釋了為什麽我認為按照自己的定義,世界比以往任何時候都更平——因為互聯及數字化的穩步發展,與以往相比,更多地方的更多人得以用更少的成本在更多事情上競爭、聯結與合作。在北京的時候,我驚訝地發現中國知識階層的連通性似乎超出以往,他們也更擅長繞過數字防火牆。
 
我可以看出那位女士對我的說法並不完全信服,所以我們轉向了其他話題。然後她告訴我:“我剛用過ChatGPT。”
我說,“你都在北京用上了ChatGPT,還來問我世界還是不是平的?”
事實上,在北京流傳的一個說法是,許多中國人都開始利用ChatGPT給基層黨組織寫思想匯報,這樣他們就不必在這上麵浪費時間了。
不過很有意思的是,就在你開始擔憂肯尼迪機場的狀況,以及近年來關於中國將在人工智能競賽中將我們淘汰的那些傳言時,OpenAI這個來自美國的團隊推出了世界領先的自然語言處理工具,讓用戶能使用每一種主要語言——包括漢語——進行擬人對話,提出任何問題,並獲得深刻的見解。
 中國在麵部識別技術和健康記錄這兩個人工智能領域上領先一步,這是因為對於政府為機器學習算法構建龐大數據集以尋找模式的能力,這裏幾乎不存在任何隱私方麵的限製。
但像ChatGPT這樣的生成式人工智能可以讓所有人——無論是貧困農民還是大學教授——用自己的語言就任何主題發問。這對中國來說可能是個問題,因為它必然會在國產生成式人工智能中設置許多禁區,對中國公民可以問什麽和計算機能答什麽進行限製。如果不能隨心所欲發問(比如1989年6月4日的天安門發生了什麽),如果人工智能係統一直要厘清對何事、何處、何人展開審查,它的效率就不會高。
 
“ChatGPT促使一些人發問,美國是否會像上世紀90年代那樣再次崛起,”中國政治學者陳定定對我和柏凱斯表示。
出於這種種原因,討論美中權力關係轉變已成為兩國精英階層的流行消遣。比如在社交媒體上,許多中國人都看到了3月23日國會山聽證會的部分內容,國會議員對TikTok首席執行官周受資進行了質詢(其實更像是斥責、滔滔不絕的訓話和不停的打斷),稱TikTok視頻損害了美國兒童的心理健康。
胡錫進是中國最受歡迎的博主之一,在微博上擁有2500萬粉絲,他向我解釋了這場聽證會在中國人看來是多麽嚴重的冒犯。它在中國互聯網上引來了大量冷嘲熱諷。
(盡管如此,YouTube自2009年以來一直被中國封禁,所以被熱門的應用程序嚇壞的不隻是我們。幹脆做個交易:如果中國允許YouTube進入,我們也接受TikTok。)
“我能理解你們的心情:一個世紀以來你們都是世界第一,現在中國正在崛起,具備了成為世界第一的潛力,你們肯定很難接受,”胡錫進對我說。但“你們不應該阻止中國的發展。你們是沒辦法遏製中國的。我們很聰明,也很勤勉。我們在非常努力地工作。我們還有14億人口。”
他還說,在特朗普擔任總統前,“我們從未想過中美關係會變得如此糟糕。現在我們漸漸接受了現實,大部分中國人也認為沒有好轉的可能了。我們認為兩國關係會越來越糟,隻能希望不會爆發戰爭了。”
THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
正是因為這樣的交談反複出現,我才開始向美國、中國以及台灣的投資人、分析人士和官員們提出了一個困擾我許久的問題:美國和中國到底在爭什麽?
聽到我這樣問,很多人都陷入遲疑。事實上,很多人都給出了“我也不確定,但我隻知道都是他們的錯”之類的回答。
 
我很確定,在華盛頓也會得到同樣的答案。
我這次來中國最大的收獲就是揭開了這一問題,以及它為何會難倒這麽多人的真相。這是因為真正的答案往往比通常幾個字的回答(比如“台灣”或“專製與民主的對抗”)要深刻複雜得多。
請讓我試著剝繭抽絲。導致美中關係惡化的原因由來已久、顯而易見,這是一個老牌強國(我們)與新興強國(中國)之間的傳統大國競爭,但其中也有許多新的轉變,是常人並不總能察覺的。
由來已久、顯而易見之處在於,中美正在競相獲取最大的經濟和軍事影響力,以最有利於自身經濟和政治體製的方式塑造21世紀的規則。其中一項存在爭議的規則就是中國主張台灣屬於“一個中國”,美國承認但不支持。
由於該“規則”仍存爭議,我們也將繼續武裝台灣,以阻止中國奪取該島嶼,摧毀它的民主製度,並以此作為統治東亞其他地區的起點;而中國則將繼續推動統一——無論以何種方式。
但其中一個轉變在於,這場標準大國競爭的主角是兩個經濟像DNA分子鏈一樣絞在一起的國家。因此,無論中國還是美國都從未遇到過像對方一樣的對手。
 
美國知道如何對付經濟和軍事實力與自己不相上下的納粹德國,但美國與後者的經濟聯係並沒那麽密不可分。美國知道如何對付軍事實力不相上下但經濟遠遠落後於自己的蘇聯,而兩國在經濟上完全沒有聯係。
中國亦是如此。幾千年來,中國自認地處世界中心(因此才有“中國”之稱),四麵受山巒、沙漠和海洋的保護,周圍的國家往往臣服於它,同時,它又無比重視自身文化的賡續。直到19世紀,中國開始不斷遭受更強大的外國勢力的蹂躪:英國、法國、俄羅斯和日本。
但在現代,中國和美國一樣從未遇到一個經濟軍事實力相當,同時還通過貿易及投資徹底融合在一起的對手。
有多密不可分呢?最受美國人歡迎的設備是主要在中國組裝的iPhone,而直到最近,美國是中國留學生最青睞的留學目的地,如今在美留學生規模已達30萬人。這就導致一些詭異的情況出現,比如就在2022年兩國年度雙邊貿易額創下新高後不久,其中一國就將另一國的情報氣球擊落。
另一個新的轉變,同時也是說不清我們到底在爭什麽的原因,與信任及信任缺失這個難以捉摸的問題為何突然在國際事務中變得更加重要有關。
這是我們新技術生態係統的衍生問題,在這個係統中,供我們使用和交易的設備越來越多地由微芯片和軟件驅動,並通過雲上及高速互聯網的數據中心連接。當越來越多的產品或服務開始數字化和互聯化,越來越多的事物也具備了“雙重用途”。也就是說,那些技術可以很輕易就從民用工具變成軍事武器,反之亦然。
在冷戰時期,要辨認作為武器的戰鬥機和作為工具的電話是比較容易的。但從裝載GPS的手機到你的汽車、烤麵包機和最愛用的應用程序,當我們把感知、數字化、互聯、處理、學習、分享和行動的能力賦予越來越多事物時,它們就具備了雙重用途,是武器還是工具取決於誰控製了運行它們的軟件,誰掌握了它們衍生的數據。
如今,自動駕駛汽車和自動武器之間隻差了幾行代碼。而且,正如我們在烏克蘭所見,老奶奶可以用智能手機給孫輩打電話,也可以呼叫烏克蘭火箭炮部隊,將她後院一輛俄羅斯坦克的GPS坐標告訴他們。
這也導致更多事物出現奇怪的新變化。我想到了美國軍方一些部門禁止在政府的智能手機和電腦上使用TikTok。禁用一款以分享舞蹈動作而聞名的應用程序,這絕對是五角大樓曆史上頭一遭。但對於TikTok高沉迷性算法具備雙重用途的擔憂是真切的,這種算法可能會被中國情報部門用來積累我國年輕人的數據(該公司稱有超過1.5億美國人下載了這款應用),擾亂他們的思想,傳播虛假信息,或收集有朝一日可能用於脅迫的信息。
而這樣的新變化還在繼續。中國在1978年至1979年前後開始與世界進行貿易,那之後大約30年間,中國對美國主要出售的是我稱之為“淺層”的商品,也就是鞋襪襯衫和太陽能電池板等等。
而美國和西方出售給中國的更多是我所謂的“深層商品”,它們能夠深入係統並具有雙重用途,比如軟件、微芯片、帶寬、智能手機和機器人。中國不得不購買我們的深層商品,因為此前它自己生產不了多少這類產品。
隻要中國向我們出售的大部分東西是淺層商品,我們就不會太在意它的政治體製,尤其是因為有段時間,中國似乎正在緩慢而穩步地與世界融合,開放度和透明度每年都能稍微增加一點。因此,我們順理成章地拋開了對其政治體製陰暗麵的部分擔憂。
但在大約八年前,我們的國門被一位中國推銷員敲開了。他說:“你們好,我的名字叫華為,我的5G電話設備比你們的都要好。我開始在全球各地安裝它,也想給美國裝上。”
美國對這位華為推銷員以及其他正在崛起的中國高科技企業的回應基本是這樣的:“當中國企業隻賣給我們淺層商品時,我們不關心你們的政治體製是威權主義、自由主義還是素食主義;我們隻是在購買你們的淺層商品。但當你們想賣給我們‘深層商品’,可以深入我們的家庭、臥室、工業、聊天機器人和城市基礎設施的雙重用途商品,那我們的信任還不夠。因此,我們將禁用華為,轉而從愛立信和諾基亞這些我們信任的北歐企業購買更昂貴的5G通信係統。”
中國向全世界出口的“深層商品”越來越多,這在一定程度上要歸功於電信公司華為。
中國向全世界出口的“深層商品”越來越多,這在一定程度上要歸功於電信公司華為。 QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG
信任在國際關係和商貿中愈發重要的另一個原因在於:隨著越來越多的產品和服務實現數字化和電氣化,微芯片取代石油成為了一切的動力來源。就像原油為19世紀和20世紀的經濟提供動力一樣,21世紀經濟發展的驅動力是微芯片。
時至今日,能造出速度最快、功能最強、運行最節能微芯片的國家,就能造出最厲害的人工智能計算機,並在經濟和軍事上占據主導地位。
但問題在於:由於製造高級邏輯芯片原理已經極其複雜——人的頭發厚度約為9萬納米,而全球最先進高級芯片的大規模生產商目前可以造出3納米晶體管——沒有哪個國家或企業能獨占整個供應鏈。你得用上來自全球各地的尖端產品,而這條供應鏈是如此緊密地交織在一起,以至於各家企業都必須給予彼此極大信任。
這個道理就在中國眼皮子底下。台灣積體電路製造公司——也就是眾所周知的台積電——是全球最先進的芯片製造商,它就在台灣海峽的對岸。
離開北京後,我來到台灣,在位於首府台北以南90分鍾車程的新竹科學園台積電總部與該公司的高管共度了一個下午。當我問他們是什麽秘訣讓台積電能造出全球90%的最先進邏輯芯片,而說同一種語言、共享同一段近代文化史的中國卻毫無建樹時,他們的答案很簡單:“信任。”
台積電是一家半導體代工廠,這意味著它采用了蘋果、高通、英偉達和AMD等全球最先進計算機企業的設計,再將設計轉化為執行各種處理功能的芯片。在此過程中,台積電向客戶做出了兩大莊嚴承諾:台積電絕不會自行設計競品芯片,也絕不會向客戶分享其他客戶的設計。
“我們的業務是為許多實力強大的客戶服務,”台積電業務發展高級副總裁張曉強告訴我。“我們承諾不與他們中的任何一家競爭,並且在我們內部,為客戶A服務的員工絕不會將其信息泄露給客戶C。”
但通過與如此多值得信賴的夥伴合作,台積電也利用對方越來越複雜的設計取得了進步——而進步越大,也就愈加能夠為客戶駕馭先進的設計。台積電不僅要與客戶實現緊密無間的合作,也要與大約1000家本土和全球關鍵供應商保持同樣的關係。
“我們的客戶標準很高,”張曉強還說。“每家都有獨特要求。”各家都會“告訴我們想要怎樣做,然後我們再一起規劃設計台積電的生產過程”。隨著芯片製造的原理越來越尖端,“客戶給我們的投資也越來越多,這樣一來,他們也必須跟我們合作更密切,以確保獲得盡可能多的計算能力。他們必須給我們信任。”
中國也有一家芯片代工廠,那就是部分國資的中芯國際。但結果呢?由於沒有一家全球芯片設計公司敢把最先進的設計交給中芯國際,導致它至少落後台積電十年。
正是由於這些原因,美中關係的惡化並不止於在台灣問題上日益尖銳的分歧。這種惡化根源於這樣一個事實,即當信任及信任缺失在國際事務和商業中占據了更大權重,中國改變了自身方向。正當半導體這一21世紀最關鍵技術的生產需要前所未有的信任,越來越多的設備和服務具備了深層性質和雙重用途之時,中國卻讓自己成了一個不太受到信賴的夥伴。
中國為何會失去我們的信任?
中國在毛澤東時代的孤立和內亂隨著他在1976年去世而終結,繼任者鄧小平徹底逆轉了毛主義。他加強了中國的集體領導製,對最高領導人的任期做出限製,並將以經濟為綱的實用主義置於共產主義意識形態之上,同時采取韜光養晦的做法。
在上世紀80年代、90年代和21世紀初,鄧小平及其繼任者與美國建立了牢固的經濟和教育聯係,推動中國加入世界貿易組織,前提條件是中國要逐步廢除為國有產業提供資金的重商主義政策,同時逐漸接納更多外資及外資所有權,就像世界向中國出口敞開大門一樣。
但在2012年習近平接任中國最高領導人之後,中國向世界的開放、領導層的集體決策方式,以及急於走上半資本主義道路而導致的黨和軍隊內部腐敗失控——這種腐敗已經到了危及中共執政合法性的程度——似乎引起了他的警覺
因此,習近平將權力集中到自己手中,打破了不同政府部門和經濟部門的領導人各自為政的情況,將黨的權威重新施加於商業、學界和社會的每個角落,並布下監控的天羅地網。總而言之,這扭轉了中國看似穩步實現更多開放——甚至在新聞自由上也有所改善——的進程。
習近平也完全不再像鄧小平那樣大膽激發民營部門的活力,而是集中力量打造國家級帶頭企業,以主導從人工智能到量子計算再到航空航天的21世紀所有關鍵行業,並在這些企業的管理層和職工隊伍中融入黨的領導。等到美國貿易官員說“嘿,你們該履行入世承諾,限製各行業的國資規模”時,中國的回應基本上是,“我們憑什麽遵循你們對規則的解讀?我們現在已經足夠強大,可以自行解讀規則了。我們太大了,而你們反應太遲了。”
另外,在許多問題上,中國都難以洗清責任。比如新冠病毒起源,對香港民主自由和新疆維吾爾穆斯林少數民族的鎮壓,在南中國海的主張上咄咄逼人,對台灣愈發張牙舞爪,拉攏普京(雖然他對烏克蘭慘無人道),以及習近平讓自己成為終身主席的做法、嚴厲對待中國的科技企業家、對言論更加嚴格的限製,還有偶爾綁架一名知名商人——所有這些最終隻能證明一個非常重要的事實:那就是在這個由軟件、互聯和微芯片所驅動,屬於深層雙重用途產品的世界裏,在信任和共識的重要性堪稱前所未有的時刻,自上世紀70年代後期以來中國與西方建立起的所有信任都消失殆盡了。
在此期間,對西方國家——尤其是美國——來說,這個我們正在向它出售或購買各種雙重用途數字設備、應用的崛起大國是專製的,這一點開始變得愈發不容忽視。
當香港人民試圖捍衛民主自由,中國政府選擇鎮壓。
當香港人民試圖捍衛民主自由,中國政府選擇鎮壓。 VINCENT YU/ASSOCIATED PRESS
北京則認為,隨著中國在華為5G等深層商品上成為美國更強大的全球競爭對手,美國根本無力招架,才決定利用對先進半導體製造,以及對美國及其盟友的其他高科技出口的控製來確保中國始終無法趕超自己。於是,北京提出了“雙循環”的新戰略。它說:我們將依靠國家主導的投資,盡可能在國內生產一切,從而獨立於世界。我們還將依靠自身強大的製造實力,讓全世界都依賴我們的出口。
中國官員還指出,許多美國政客——以特朗普為首,但許多國會議員也一樣——似乎突然發現,可以順水推舟地將美國中產階級的經濟困境歸咎於中國對美國的出口,而非教育欠缺、職業道德不足、自動化或是2008年金融精英的掠奪。在北京看來,中國不僅成了美國最愛用來嚇唬人的妖魔鬼怪,而在將一切問題推給中國的狂熱情緒中,國會議員還開始更加肆無忌憚地支持台灣獨立。
一名政府高官告訴我,去年11月習近平在巴厘島峰會上對拜登總統的表態實際上就是:隻要我還是國家主席,中國就不能失去台灣。如果你逼我,就會有戰爭。你不會明白這對中國人民有多麽重要。你這是在玩火。
盡管如此,我還是發現,中國官員如今在某種程度上也明白了一件事,那就是由於他們近年來在我列舉的所有問題上都采取了咄咄逼人的行動,導致他們恰巧在錯誤的時間把全世界和本土的創新者都嚇跑了。
我之所以這麽說,是因為見到了中國高級官員是多麽不厭其煩地向他們今天遇到的每一位外國領導人和到訪的西方企業高管表示,中國是“開放的”,中國渴望獲得外資。現實情況是,中國必須接納更多外國直接投資,因為國內各省迫切需要資金來彌補地方政府在疫情防控中的支出,同時,許多地方已經無地可賣,出售土地是為了幫助國有工廠籌集資金。
我也不認為阿裏巴巴創始人、某種程度上可以謂之“中國喬布斯”的馬雲幾周前登上官媒是偶然事件,他在2020年突然從公眾視野中消失。馬雲消失的原因是與國家監管機構發生分歧,後者認為他的勢力過於龐大和獨立。他的失蹤在中國創業界引發軒然大波,打擊了投資增長。
我當然願意生活在一個中國人民與全世界各國人民共同繁榮發展的世界。畢竟,這個國家的人口占到全球人口的六分之一以上。我不認同中美兩國注定要打仗的說法。我相信,我們相互競爭是必然,相互合作是必然,找到二者之間的平衡也是必然。否則,我們都將在21世紀麵臨極其糟糕的前景。
但我不得不說,美國人和中國人有一點跟以色列人和巴勒斯坦人很相似:他們都非常擅長觸動對方最深的不安全感。
現在的中共確信美國想要搞垮它,一些美國政客對此也不再羞於暗示。因此,隻要能不讓美國人如願,北京寧願與普京這個戰犯同床共枕。
美國人則在擔心,在通過利用由美國規則塑造的全球市場發家後,共產主義中國將憑借新獲得的市場力量單方麵改變這些規則,目的是僅利於其自身。因此,我們決定,將我們相對於北京逐漸減弱的力量集中於確保中國在微芯片上永遠落後我們十年。
我不知道如何才能扭轉這些趨勢,但我想,我知道什麽是必要之舉。
如果美國外交政策的目標並非推翻中共政權,那就得澄清這一點,因為我發現在北京,對此持不同看法的人從來沒有現在這樣多。
順帶一提,在當今這個融合世界,認為中國經濟崩潰而美國依然能繁榮的想法根本是天方夜譚。考慮到中國市場的規模,認為歐洲人會在這件事上一直支持我們大概也是異想天開。看看法國總統上周在北京點頭哈腰的樣子吧。
至於中國,它大可以裝作近年來從來沒有過180度大轉彎的樣子。但沒有人會相信。除非它能明白,建立和維持信任是當前所有國家或企業所能擁有的最重要的競爭優勢,否則在這個超互聯、數字化、深層次、雙用途、由半導體驅動的世界,中國將永遠無法充分發揮其潛能。而北京在建立和維持信任這方麵正在失敗。
在為美國偉大政治家喬治·舒爾茨所著的精彩傳記中,菲利普·陶布曼引用了舒爾茨對待外交事業與人生的一條基本原則:“信任才是王道。”
這話如今更是無比在理,而中國也從未像現在這樣需要接受這一真理。

托馬斯·L·弗裏德曼(Thomas L. Friedman)是外交事務方麵的專欄作者。他1981年加入時報,曾三次獲得普利策獎。他著有七本書,包括贏得國家圖書獎的《從貝魯特到耶路撒冷》(From Beirut to Jerusalem)。歡迎在TwitterFacebook上關注他。

America, China and a Crisis of Trust

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/opinion/china-america-relationship.html?_ga=2.95848537.492841364.1685941503-1104406257.1683519853

TAIPEI, Taiwan — I just returned from visiting China for the first time since Covid struck. Being back in Beijing was a reminder of my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know. Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly, and have so reduced our points of contact — very few American reporters are left in China, and our leaders are barely talking — that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come from this.

The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast and to warn anew that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are incompatible with any move by Taiwan toward formal independence — was just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is. The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.

That’s one of the many reasons I found it helpful to be back in Beijing and to be able to observe China again through a larger aperture than a pinhole. Attending the China Development Forum — Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists — reminded me of some powerful old truths and exposed me to some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.

Hint: The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool. Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

 

More personally, being back in Beijing was also a reminder of how many people I’ve come to know and like there over three decades of reporting visits — but please don’t tell anyone in Washington that I said that. There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China. Truth be told, both countries have so demonized the other of late that it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

Being back was also a reminder of the formidable weight and strength of what China has built since opening to the world in the 1970s, and even since Covid hit in 2019. China’s Communist Party government has a stronger grip than ever on its society, thanks to its police state surveillance and digital tracking systems: Facial recognition cameras are everywhere. The party crushes any challenge to its rule or to President Xi Jinping. These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

 
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A photograph of a skyline at sunset. A busy road runs through the middle of the image. Commuters walk on a bridge over the road.

Beijing has become an increasingly livable city in recent years.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

That said, one should have no illusions: The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces. As my Times colleague Keith Bradsher reported in 2021, Shanghai had recently built 55 new parks, bringing its total to 406, and had plans for nearly 600 more.

 

Bradsher, one of the handful of American reporters who lived in mainland China through nearly three years of stringent “zero Covid” policies, also pointed out to me that some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable. In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.

I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. I say this to explain that being in Beijing reminds you that China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland. It makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation builder named Donald Trump.

 
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China has connected hundreds of cities via high-speed rail, helping the government earn support from the people.Credit...Huang Zongzhi/Xinhua, via Getty Images

On my first day in Beijing, I had a conversation with a young Chinese woman, a college student. Her first question, alluding to a book I wrote, was: “Mr. Friedman, is the world still flat?”

 

I explained why I thought it was flatter than ever by my definition — that because of steady advances in connectivity and digitization, more people can compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money from more places than ever. During my time in Beijing, I was struck at how educated Chinese people seem to be more connected, and able to get around digital firewalls, than before.

I could see the woman wasn’t totally convinced by my explanation, so we moved on to other subjects. And then she dropped this: “I just used ChatGPT.”

I said, “You used ChatGPT from Beijing, and you’re asking me if the world is still flat?”

Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.

It’s funny, though — just when you start to worry about the state of J.F.K. Airport, and all the stories in recent years that China was going to bury us in the race to A.I., an American team, OpenAI, comes up with the world’s leading natural language processing tool, which enables any user to have humanlike conversations, ask any question and get deep insights in every major language, including Mandarin.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

 

But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I. systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to censor, it will be less productive.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,” Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Bradsher.

It’s for all of these reasons that weighing the shifting power relationship between America and China has become such a popular pastime among elites in both of our countries. For instance, through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23rd hearing on Capitol Hill where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging American children’s mental health.

Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, with almost 25 million followers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, explained to me just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It was widely and derisively commented about online in China.

(All that said, YouTube has been banned from China since 2009, so we’re not the only ones frightened by popular apps. I say we trade: We’ll accept TikTok if Beijing will let in YouTube.)

 

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

 
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Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

It was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

 

I’m pretty sure I’d get the same answer in Washington.

The best part of this trip was uncovering the real answer to that question and why it stumps so many people. It’s because the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists that are not always visible to the naked eye.

The old and obvious aspect is that China and America are jostling to acquire the most economic and military clout to shape the rules of the 21st century in ways most advantageous to their respective economic and political systems. And one of those disputed rules, which America has acknowledged but not endorsed, is China’s claim to Taiwan as part of “One China.”

Because that “rule” remains in dispute, we will continue to arm Taiwan to deter Beijing from seizing the island, crushing its democracy and using it as a jumping off point to dominate the rest of East Asia, and China will keep pushing for reunification — one way or another.

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

 

America knew how to deal with Nazi Germany, an economic and military peer, but a country with which we were not deeply economically intertwined. America knew how to deal with the Soviet Union, a military peer but nowhere near our economic peer, and a country with which we were not economically intertwined at all.

Ditto China. For several thousand years China saw itself as situated in the middle of the world — hence it referred to itself as Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom — protected by mountains, deserts and seas on all sides, and often dominating states around it, while fiercely preserving its own culture. That was until the 19th century, when it began to be repeatedly ravaged by stronger foreign powers: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.

But in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

How intertwined? Americans’ favorite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until recently the favored foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them today — is America. That makes for some weird scenes, like watching one country shoot down another country’s intelligence balloon just after the two countries in 2022 set a record in annual bilateral trade.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

 

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet. When so many more products or services became digitized and connected, so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. And, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

This, too, leads to more weird twists. I am thinking of how a number of U.S. armed forces branches have banned TikTok from government-issued smartphones and computers. This is surely the first time that the Pentagon has banned an app that is known mostly for sharing dance moves. But there is a real fear that TikTok’s highly addictive algorithm is dual use and could be repurposed by the Chinese intelligence service to amass data on our youth — more than 150 million Americans have downloaded the app, the company says — to scramble their brains, spread disinformation or collect information that could one day be used for blackmail.

And the twists just keep on coming. For the first 30 or so years after Beijing opened up to trading with the world, starting around 1978-79, China largely sold America what I call “shallow” goods — shoes, socks, shirts and solar panels.

 

Meanwhile, America and the West tended to sell China what I call “deep goods” — goods that went deep into their systems and were dual use — namely software, microchips, bandwidth, smartphones and robots. China had to buy our deep goods because, until relatively recently, it could not make many itself.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

But then, about eight years ago, we got a knock on our door and there was a Chinese salesman. He said: “Hi, my name is Mr. Huawei and I make 5G telephone equipment better than anything you have. I’m starting to install it all over the world, and I’d like to wire America.”

What America essentially told this Huawei salesman, as well as other rising Chinese high-tech firms, was this: “When Chinese companies were just selling us shallow goods, we didn’t care if your political system was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian; we were just buying your shallow goods. But when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

 
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China is exporting more and more “deep goods” to the rest of the world, in part thanks to the telecom company Huawei.Credit...Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

The role of trust in international relations and commerce took one more great leap for another reason: As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

 

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

But here’s the rub: Because the physics of making advanced logic chips has become so complex — a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers thick and the world’s best mass producer of advanced chips in the world is now making three-nanometer transistors — no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

China doesn’t need to look far for that lesson. It is on display right across the Straits of Taiwan, at the world’s greatest chip-making company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

After I left Beijing, I came to Taiwan, where I spent an afternoon with the leaders of TSMC at their headquarters in Hsinchu Science Park, a 90-minute drive south of Taipei, the capital. When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

 

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions. In doing so, TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

“Our customers are very demanding,” added Zhang. “Their products each have unique requirements.” They each “tell us what they want to do, and together we figure out how TSMC will design the process to make it.” As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

 

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

Why did China lose our trust?

After the period of China’s isolation and internal turmoil under Mao Zedong ended with his death in 1976, a successor, Deng Xiaoping, made a 180-degree turn away from Maoism. Deng established a much more collective leadership for China and term limits for the top leaders, and he put pragmatism — whatever would drive economic growth — above Communist ideology, while hiding China’s growing strength.

In the era of Deng and his successors — in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s — Beijing forged strong economic and educational ties with the United States, which ushered China into the World Trade Organization, on the condition that China gradually phase out its mercantilist practice of funding state-owned industries and that it gradually open itself to more foreign investment and ownership, much as the world opened itself to China’s exports.

But after Xi Jinping took over as China’s paramount leader in 2012, he seemed to be alarmed at how China’s openness toward the world, its consensus approach to leadership and its rush down a semi-capitalist path had led to runaway corruption inside both the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, to a degree that was hurting the party’s legitimacy.

So Xi centralized power into his own hands, crushed all the fiefs that had been created by different leaders of different government agencies and sectors of the economy, re-injected the authority of the Communist Party into every corner of business, academia and society and deployed pervasive surveillance technologies. All together, this reversed what seemed like China’s steady march toward more openness — and even a somewhat freer press.

 

Xi also basically shifted away from Deng’s unabashed unleashing of the private sector, focusing instead on building national economic champions that could dominate all the key industries of the 21st century — from A.I. to quantum computing to aerospace — and making sure Communist Party cells were in their management and in their work forces. And when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

As that happened, it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

 
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As the people of Hong Kong tried to defend their democratic freedoms, the Chinese government cracked down.Credit...Vincent Yu/Associated Press

Beijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror. So Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

 

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States. As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

A senior administration official told me that Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I say that because of how often senior Chinese officials tell every foreign leader and visiting Western business executive they meet today that China is “open” and eager for foreign investment. The reality is, it has to be more open to foreign direct investment because China’s provinces desperately need capital to compensate for all the money each local government spent controlling Covid and because many of them are running out of land to sell for state-owned factories to raise money.

I also don’t think it was an accident of timing that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and sort of the Steve Jobs of China, suddenly reappeared a few weeks ago in state-controlled media after having suddenly disappeared from public view in 2020. Ma had vanished after a disagreement with state regulators, who thought he was getting too big and independent. His disappearance sent shock waves through China’s start-up community and curbed investments.

 

Ihave no problem saying that I would like to live in a world where the Chinese people are thriving, alongside all others. After all, we are talking about more than one out of six people on the planet. I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

 

And by the way, in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy. And the notion that the Europeans will always be with us in such an endeavor, given the size of China’s market, may also be fanciful. Note French President Emmanuel Macron’s bowing and scraping in Beijing last week.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

Never has that been truer than today, and never has China been more in need of embracing that truth.

 

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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

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