風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
Friedman 特朗普應學尼克鬆 與中國合作
我從中國之行中學到最多的是什麽
Thomas L. Friedman 觀點專欄作家 2024 年 12 月 24 日
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/opinion/us-china-relationship.html?
在上海的一個主題公園裏，一個人一邊開著一輛裝飾著自由女神像和美國國旗的碰碰車，一邊在講手機。
Thomas L. Friedman 作者：Thomas L. Friedman @tomfriedman • Facebook
本月，當選總統唐納德·特朗普邀請習近平主席到華盛頓參加就職典禮，引起了很多人的驚訝和竊笑。當然，外國領導人不會參加我們的就職典禮，但我認為特朗普的想法其實很好。我剛從中國之行回來，我可以告訴你，如果我今天要描繪我們兩國的關係，那將是兩頭大象通過一根稻草互相看著對方。
那可不好。因為突然之間，美國和中國除了貿易和台灣問題之外，還有更多話題要談——而且誰是 21 世紀無可爭議的重量級冠軍。
當今世界麵臨三大劃時代挑戰：失控的人工智能、氣候變化和崩潰國家蔓延的混亂。美國和中國是世界人工智能超級大國。它們是世界兩大碳排放國。它們擁有世界兩大海軍力量，能夠在全球範圍內投射力量。換句話說，在世界變得超級融合的時代，美國和中國是唯一能夠共同帶來希望來管理超級智能、超級風暴和失敗國家中擁有超級權力的憤怒小團體——更不用說超級病毒了。
這就是為什麽我們需要一份更新版的《上海公報》，這份文件為理查德·尼克鬆 1972 年訪華並與毛澤東會麵時製定了中美關係正常化的參數。不幸的是，現在我們正在走向非正常化。我們兩國在各個層麵的距離越來越遠。在我訪問北京和上海的三十年裏，我從未有過這次旅行的感覺——好像我是中國唯一的美國人。
當然我不是，但你通常會在上海火車站或北京酒店大堂聽到的美國口音卻明顯消失了。中國家長說，許多家庭不再希望孩子去美國上學，因為他們擔心這變得很危險——他們在美國時可能會被聯邦調查局跟蹤，他們回國後，他們自己的政府可能會懷疑他們。現在在中國的美國學生也麵臨同樣的情況。一位在中國與外國學生打交道的教授告訴我，一些美國人不想再去國外學習，部分原因是他們不喜歡與中國本科生競爭，部分原因是如今在中國學習或工作可能會引起未來潛在美國雇主的安全疑慮。
的確，在中美新冷戰的討論之下，根據美國駐北京大使館的數據，仍有超過 27 萬名中國學生在美國學習，但現在在中國學習的美國大學生隻有 1,100 人左右。這一數字比十年前的 15,000 人左右有所下降，但比 2022 年（新冠疫情高峰後不久）的幾百人有所增加。如果這種趨勢繼續下去，下一代會說中文的美國學者和外交官將從何而來，同樣，了解美國的中國人又將從何而來？
“我們必須與中國競爭——因為它是我們在全球軍事、技術和經濟實力方麵最強大的對手——但複雜的現實是，我們也需要在氣候變化、芬太尼和其他問題上與中國合作，以創造一個更加穩定的世界，”美國駐華大使尼古拉斯·伯恩斯在北京告訴我。因此，“我們需要一群會說普通話並與中國年輕人建立友誼的美國年輕人。我們必須為兩國人民創造交流的空間。他們是兩國關係的壓艙石。我們過去有五百萬遊客來往，而今天卻隻有這個數字的一??小部分。”
伯恩斯的觀點至關重要。隨著中國取代俄羅斯成為美國的主要全球競爭對手，中美關係更傾向於直接對抗而不是競爭與合作之間的平衡，正是商界、遊客和學生緩和了中美之間日益加劇的緊張關係。隨著這種壓艙石逐漸縮小，兩國關係現在越來越多地被定義為赤裸裸的對抗，幾乎沒有合作的空間。
特朗普選擇了大衛·珀杜 (David Perdue) 擔任駐華大使，他曾於 2015 年至 2021 年擔任佐治亞州參議員。珀杜是個能幹的人，在進入參議院之前曾在東亞做生意。但在 2024 年 9 月《華盛頓觀察家報》的一篇文章中，他這樣寫到中國共產黨：“通過我在中國和該地區的所有活動，有一件事變得非常清楚：中共堅定地相信
其應有的命運是重新奪回其作為世界秩序霸主的曆史地位——並讓世界皈依馬克思主義。”
嗯。我不會爭論霸權主義，但“讓世界皈依馬克思主義”？在他上任之前，我希望珀杜能得到簡報，了解當今中國的馬斯克主義者——想要成為埃隆·馬斯克的年輕人——比馬克思主義者多得多。中國人試圖在我們的遊戲中打敗我們，資本主義，而不是讓我們皈依馬克思主義。
是的，中國共產黨現在在中國的控製力與 1980 年代末以來的任何時候一樣嚴格。但它隻是名義上的共產主義。它所提倡的意識形態是國家主導資本主義和野蠻牛仔資本主義的結合，其中數十家私營和國有企業在一係列高科技行業中進行優勝劣汰，以壯大中國的中產階級。
盡管在中國，特朗普經常被描繪成一個批評中國的人和“關稅狂”，但令我震驚的是，我采訪的許多中國經濟專家都表示，中國更願意與特朗普打交道，而不是與民主黨打交道。正如清華大學中國與世界經濟研究中心主任、《中國的世界觀》一書的作者李稻葵向我指出的那樣：“許多中國人覺得他們了解特朗普。他們把他看作鄧小平。中國人之所以與特朗普產生共鳴，是因為他認為經濟就是一切。”
鄧小平是一位以務實、善於交易和做交易而聞名的中國領導人，他強行向世界開放了中國經濟，他提出了一條非常非馬克思主義的座右銘，即中國應該拋棄共產主義的中央計劃，選擇任何能創造增長的方法——或者用他那句名言來說：“不管黑貓白貓，能抓老鼠就是好貓。”
所有這些都不能排除美國和中國之間的大國戰略競爭——從網絡黑客到監視對方的飛機和海軍艦艇。無論中國在這些領域對我們做了什麽，我希望我們也在對他們做同樣的事情。但像美國和中國這樣的兩個大國——每年仍有近 6000 億美元的雙向貿易額（美國從中國進口約 4300 億美元，出口近 1500 億美元）——也有共同的利益去做其他事情。這讓我想起了為什麽特朗普試圖打破常規並邀請習近平來華盛頓是正確的。
本月我在上海時，我的同事、《紐約時報》北京分社社長基思·布拉德舍爾建議我們去錦江飯店參觀，1972 年 2 月 27 日晚上，尼克鬆和周恩來總理在那裏簽署了《上海公報》，指導中美關係的恢複。在這份公報中，美國承認中國隻有一個——這是在台灣問題上對北京作出的讓步——但堅稱任何解決台灣未來的辦法都必須是和平的，雙方還製定了經濟和人民關係的目標。簽署公報的大廳裏掛滿了尼克鬆和周恩來熱情慶祝新關係的褪色照片。今天看到這些照片，我不禁想：“這真的發生了嗎？”
新的上海公報有助於管理兩國和世界麵臨的新現實。首先，美國和中國的科技公司正在競相開發通用人工智能；他們的公司更專注於加強工業生產和監控，而我們的公司則專注於從編寫電影劇本到設計新藥等廣泛的用途。即使通用人工智能——一種有意識的機器——還需要五到七年的時間，北京和華盛頓也需要合作製定一套規則，我們都將用它來管理人工智能，世界其他國家也必須遵守。
那就是在所有人工智能係統中嵌入算法，以確保該係統不會被壞人用於破壞性目的，也不會自行摧毀建造它的人類。
在一個鮮為人知的事件中，拜登總統和習近平在最近的秘魯峰會上達成一項聲明，聲明“兩國領導人確認有必要保持人類對使用核武器決定的控製”，邁出了建立這種製度的第一步。這意味著任何發射核武器的決定都不能由人工智能機器人單獨做出。必須有一個人在循環中。
美國官員告訴我，這 17 個字花了幾個月的時間才談判出來。在為人工智能的使用設置護欄方麵，它們絕不會是最後一個。
在應對氣候變化方麵，世界最大碳排放國中國和第二大碳排放國美國需要就一係列戰略達成一致，到 2050 年實現世界淨零碳排放，以減少氣候變化帶來的毀滅性健康、經濟和極端天氣挑戰，這些挑戰將給失敗國家帶來越來越多的混亂。
正如我在這次旅行中試圖向我的中國對話者解釋的那樣：你們認為我們是彼此的敵人。我們可能是，但我們是
我們現在也有了共同的敵人，就像 1972 年一樣。隻不過這一次不是俄羅斯，而是混亂。越來越多的民族國家正在分崩離析，陷入混亂，大量人口流失，移民爭先恐後地湧入秩序區。
陷入混亂的不僅是中東的利比亞、也門、蘇丹、黎巴嫩、敘利亞和索馬裏；中國在全球南方的一些最好的朋友，如委內瑞拉、津巴布韋和緬甸，也陷入了混亂。中國向“一帶一路”倡議提供了數十億美元的貸款，而不少參與國也陷入了困境，其中包括斯裏蘭卡、阿根廷、肯尼亞、馬來西亞、巴基斯坦、黑山和坦桑尼亞。北京現在開始要求他們歸還貸款，並限製了新的貸款。但這隻會讓其中一些國家的危機更加嚴重。
隻有美國和中國與國際貨幣基金組織合作。和世界銀行將擁有資源、權力和影響力來遏製這種混亂局麵，這就是為什麽我反複向我的中國對話者提出??挑戰：你們為什麽要和弗拉基米爾·普京領導下的俄羅斯和伊朗這樣的失敗者混在一起？你們怎麽能在哈馬斯和以色列之間保持中立？
中國從一個貧窮的孤立國家發展成為一個工業大國，中產階級正在崛起，而這個世界的遊戲規則——貿易和地緣政治——主要是由美國在二戰後為所有人的利益和穩定而製定的。
認為中國可以在一個由普京這樣的殺人犯價值觀塑造的世界中茁壯成長，普京是混亂的代理人，或者由原教旨主義的伊朗塑造，伊朗是混亂的另一個推動者，也是下一個可能分裂的國家，或者由全球南方國家塑造，或者由中國塑造，這種想法是瘋狂的。
如果我是特朗普，我會探索“尼克鬆訪華”的舉措——美國和中國之間的和解，完全孤立俄羅斯和伊朗。這就是結束烏克蘭戰爭、縮小伊朗在中東的影響力並緩解與北京的緊張關係的方法。特朗普的不可預測性足以讓他嚐試這樣做。
無論如何，如果要有一個穩定的21世紀，中國和美國就必須共同努力。如果競爭和合作完全讓位於對抗，那麽我們雙方都將麵臨一個混亂的21世紀。
What I Learned Most From My Trip to China
Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist Dec. 24, 2024
There were a lot of raised eyebrows and quiet chuckles this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s idea was actually a good one. Having just returned from a trip to China, I can tell you that if I were drawing a picture of relations between our two countries today, it would be two elephants looking at each other through a straw.
That is not good. Because suddenly the U.S. and China have a lot more to talk about than just trade and Taiwan — and who’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century.
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set out parameters for normalizing U.S.-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
Of course I wasn’t, but the American accents you would usually hear at a big Shanghai train station or Beijing hotel lobby were notably absent. Chinese parents say that many families no longer want their kids to go to the U.S. for schooling, because they fear it’s becoming dangerous — the F.B.I. might follow them while they are in America, and their own government might suspect them when they return home. The same is now true for U.S. students in China. A professor in China who works with foreign students told me that some Americans don’t want to study there anymore for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t relish competing against superintense Chinese undergraduates and in part because, these days, having studied or worked in China can raise security suspicions with future potential U.S. employers.
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
“We must compete with China — as it is our strongest rival for global military, technology and economic power — but the complicated reality is we also need to work with China on climate change, fentanyl and other issues to create a more stable world,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told me in Beijing. Therefore, “we need a cohort of young Americans who speak Mandarin and have friendships with young Chinese. We have to create room for people from both countries to connect. They are the ballast in the relationship. We used to have five million tourists going back and forth, and today it’s a fraction of that.”
Burns’s point is critical. It was the business communities, tourists and students who softened the steadily sharpening elbows between China and America as China overtook Russia as America’s chief global rival and the U.S.-China relationship tilted more toward outright confrontation than a balance between competition and collaboration. As that ballast steadily shrinks, the relationship is now increasingly being defined by just raw confrontation, leaving little room for collaboration.
For his ambassador to China, Trump has picked David Perdue, who was a senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. Perdue is a competent guy who did business in East Asia before going to the Senate. But in a September 2024 essay in The Washington Examiner, he wrote of the Chinese Communist Party, “Through all my activity in China and the region, one thing became painfully clear: The C.C.P. firmly believes its rightful destiny is to reclaim its historical position as the hegemon of the world order — and convert the world to Marxism.”
Hmmm. I would not dispute the hegemon stuff, but “convert the world to Marxism”? Before he takes up his post, I hope Perdue will get briefed to understand that China today has a lot more Muskists — young people who want to be like Elon Musk — than Marxists. The Chinese are trying to beat us at our game, capitalism, not convert us to Marxism.
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is as tightly in control in China now as at any other time since the late 1980s. But it is communist in name only. The ideology it promotes is a combination of state-directed capitalism and wild cowboy capitalism, where scores of private and state-owned companies slug it out in survival-of-the-fittest contests across a range of high-tech industries to grow China’s middle class.
Even though Trump is often depicted in China as a China basher and “Tariff man,” I was struck by how many Chinese economic experts I spoke to suggested that China preferred dealing with him over Democrats. As David Daokui Li, the director of the Center for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University and the author of “China’s World View,” pointed out to me: “Many people in China feel they understand Trump. They see him as Deng Xiaoping. Chinese relate to Trump because he thinks that economics is everything.”
Deng was the famously pragmatic, transactional, deal-making Chinese leader who forced open the Chinese economy to the world with the very un-Marxist motto about how China should leave behind Communist central planning and just opt for whatever works to create growth — or as he famously put it: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
None of this precludes great-power strategic competition between the U.S. and China — from cyberhacking to shadowing each other’s aircraft and naval ships. Whatever China is doing to us in those realms, I hope we are doing to them. But two great powers like the U.S. and China — which still rack up almost $600 billion in two-way trade annually (the U.S. imports about $430 billion from China and exports close to $150 billion) — also have a mutual self-interest to do other things. That brings me back to why it was right for Trump to try to break the mold and invite Xi to Washington.
When I was in Shanghai this month, my colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief, suggested we visit the Jin Jiang Hotel, where, on the evening of Feb. 27, 1972, Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, guiding the renewal of U.S.-China relations. In it, the U.S. acknowledged the view that there was one China — which was a concession to Beijing on the Taiwan issue — but asserted that any resolution of Taiwan’s future had to be peaceful, and the two sides also set out their goals for economic and people-to-people relations. The hall where that signing took place was adorned with faded photographs of Nixon and Zhou warmly toasting their new relationship. Looking at them today, I could only wonder: “Did that really happen?”
A new Shanghai Communiqué could help govern the new realities that both countries and the world face. The first is that U.S. and Chinese tech firms are racing toward artificial general intelligence; theirs is more focused on enhancing industrial production and surveillance and ours on a broad array of uses, from writing movie scripts to designing new drugs. Even if artificial general intelligence — a sentient machine — is five or seven years away, Beijing and Washington need to be collaborating on a set of rules that we will both use to govern A.I. and that the rest of the world must follow.
That would be to embed into all A.I. systems algorithms that ensure that the system cannot be used for destructive purposes by bad actors and cannot go off on its own to destroy the humans who built it.
In a little-noticed event, President Biden and Xi took the first steps toward building such a regime when they agreed at their recent Peru summit on a declaration stating that “the two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” That means no decision to fire a nuclear weapon can be made by an A.I. bot alone. There always has to be a human in the loop.
U.S. officials told me that those 17 words took months to negotiate. They must not be the last when it comes to erecting guardrails around the use of A.I.
On managing climate change, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the U.S., the second largest, need to agree on a set of strategies to get the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — to reduce the ruinous health, economic and extreme weather challenges wrought by climate change, which are going to create increasing disorder in failing states.
As I tried to explain to my Chinese interlocutors on this trip: You think we are each other’s enemy. We might be, but we also now have a big common enemy, just as we did in 1972. Only this time it is not Russia. It’s disorder. More and more nation-states are falling apart — into disorder — and hemorrhaging their people as migrants scrambling to get to zones of order.
It’s not only Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Somalia in the Middle East racked by disorder; it’s also some of China’s best friends in the global south, like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And more than a few participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative to which China has lent billions are struggling — including Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Montenegro and Tanzania. Beijing is now starting to demand its money back from them and has throttled down new lending. But that is just making the crises worse in some of these countries.
Only the U.S. and China working together with the I.M.F. and World Bank will have the resources, power and influence to stem some of this disorder, which is why I repeatedly challenged my Chinese interlocutors: Why are you hanging around with losers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran? How could you be neutral between Hamas and Israel?
China went from an impoverished isolated country to an industrial giant with a rising middle class in a world in which the rules of the game — on trade and geopolitics — were largely set by the United States after World War II for the benefit and stability of all.
The idea that China can thrive in a world shaped by the values of a murderous thief like Putin, who is an agent of disorder, or by fundamentalist Iran, another promoter of disorder and the next country likely to fracture, or by the global south — or by China alone — is crazy.
If I were Trump, I’d explore a “Nixon goes to China” move — a rapprochement between the U.S. and China that totally isolates Russia and Iran. That’s how you end the Ukraine war, shrink Iran’s influence in the Middle East and defuse tensions with Beijing in one move. Trump is unpredictable enough to try it.
Either way, China and America are compelled to work together if there is going to be a stable 21st century. If competition and collaboration give way entirely to confrontation, a disorderly 21st century awaits us both.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion 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
