US-China Relations Updates

【April 29】Every week, reporters from the American News website POLITICO share interviews with global intellectuals, politicians, figures of power, or celebrities. This week, POLITICO China affairs reporter Phelim Kine spoke with U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns about the challenges faced by the highest-ranking diplomat of the Biden administration in Beijing. Burns stated that in his view, China today is far more powerful than the Soviet Union was back in the day.

What similarities or differences do you see between the old-style authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and the authoritarianism under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party?

When I think about the power of the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, it is completely different from the power and strength that China displays on the world stage today. That’s why I think that comparisons made between the old Cold War and the current great power competition with China can sometimes be helpful for thinking through comparisons, but they’re not accurate.

The Soviet Union was a huge power. It had a nuclear arsenal, and at the military level, the Soviet Union had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany facing off against Americans in the Fulda Gap and the northern plain of Germany. But the power of the People’s Republic of China is infinitely greater than the power that the Soviet Union had. And it’s based on China’s extraordinary economic power , its scientific and technological research base, its innovation capabilities, and its ambitions to become the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific. I do think that the challenges coming from China are more complex, more deeply rooted, and pose greater tests to our future.