Professor Nicholas Burns gives the Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture, "Lessons from the Front Lines of the U.S.-China Relationship," at the Fairbank Center for China, Harvard University, April 30, 2025.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is a great pleasure and honor for me to deliver the 2025 Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Charles Neuhauser was a dedicated public servant of the United States, serving for four decades as a senior intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. He observed and studied China at a time when it was not possible for Americans to travel and live there. He spent a year at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution. I am grateful for the presence of his brother Paul today. As the purpose of this lecture series is to maintain bridges between the academy and the government, I am particularly honored to give this year’s lecture.
I am also pleased to begin my association with the Fairbank Center with this lecture. Having just spent the better part of the last four years preparing to move to China and then serving there as the U.S. Ambassador at a particularly challenging time, I am looking forward very much to be part of this impressive group of academic leaders whose mission is to understand that extraordinary country and its people
With that in mind, I would like to thank Center Director, Professor Mark Wu, Executive Director Dorinda Elliott, the other Harvard Professors affiliated with the Center and the talented staff for welcoming me today as a new faculty member of the Center. As I intend to keep China and U.S.-China relations a major focus of my research and teaching here at Harvard, my association with this center is a privilege that I deeply appreciate.
Having returned from Beijing just three months ago, perhaps it is not surprising that I can’t get China—its deep history, its people and its current challenging relationship with our government—I can’t get it out of my head.
I began my diplomatic career in the U.S. Foreign Service forty-five years ago and ultimately served in six different countries as well as for long stints in Washington. I worked on complicated issues—the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the 1980s, the U.S.-Soviet relationship at the end of the Cold War, our effort to expand NATO after 9/11, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and India. I wrangled with Russian diplomats on multiple continents. I thought I had seen just about everything in global politics, until I went to China as the U.S. Ambassador.
I had worked with the Chinese for many years, first traveling there with Secretary of State George Shultz in 1998 and President George H.W. Bush in 1989. I returned frequently as State Department Spokesperson, including for the Hong Kong Handover in 1997 and later as Under Secretary of State and as a Harvard Professor. I had never lived in China before, however, until my wife, Libby, and I moved to Beijing to take on my new duties there.
The basic mission of any Ambassador has not changed since ancient times. First, it is to represent the perspectives and policies of one’s government to the host government and to be the primary point of communication between them. In my case, to be the primary advocate for American interests in a very challenging, difficult and often disputatious relationship with the government in Beijing.
The second role of an Ambassador is equally important, in many ways. It is to be the Ambassador to the people of the host nation, in my case the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens.
We lived in the same U.S. Ambassador’s residence next to Ritan Park in Beijing’s oldest diplomatic enclave where legendary diplomats David K.E. Bruce and George H.W. Bush resided as America’s first representatives after we resumed diplomatic relations a half century ago. In fact, I named the residence for President Bush given he was the only American Ambassador to China since the 1840s who rose to the Presidency.
I hit the road often by high speed rail whenever the travel time was under five hours and by plane to more distant provinces. I ended up visiting twenty-six of China’s thirty-four provinces and autonomous and administrative regions. I was not permitted by the Chinese authorities to visit Tibet, unfortunately, and I chose not to visit Xinjiang so as not to be part of a Potemkin-type visit they would have insisted upon.
Looking back, I think it was the most difficult job I’ve ever had in government.
And it was also, in many ways, the most worthwhile.
More than a few people have asked me recently what I thought I accomplished during my time as Ambassador. I give the same answer each time I am asked that question. Government is a team sport. I can’t claim credit alone for any accomplishment.
But “we” can. The “we” is, of course, the team led by President Biden who I was honored to serve. It included the cabinet officers with whom I worked very closely—Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Jake and I,by the way, just started as Professors at the Kennedy School together on April 1.
And the “we” includes most especially the men and women of U.S. Mission China in our embassy in Beijing and Consulates General in Shenyang, Wuhan, Shanghai and Guangzhou. It was a privilege to lead them. They are from forty-eight U.S. government agencies. All of them are career officers from the U.S. Foreign Service, the Civil Service and the military whose professional vocation is to serve our country, often under difficult and even dangerous circumstances.
I could not have accomplished a single thing in China without these smart, resourceful and dedicated public servants.
I wanted especially to mention them today—my great team— because our career services and the agencies of our government are under assault from an extraordinarily cynical, misguided and damaging effort to take a sledgehammer to the Executive Branch and tear down major parts of it.
Nothing close to it has ever happened before in the history of our country. And it is being led by people who seem to take delight in laying off thousands of dedicated public servants in a single week. They don’t seem to understand the necessity of the United States having a strong, capable, experienced and nonpartisan public service to defend our country and advance its many interests in an uncertain and dangerous world.
I hope and expect that future American leaders with a much greater sense of the value of public servants will work to recreate many of these institutions—the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia to name just a few-- that have been so cavalierly decimated in recent months.
Great damage has been done to America’s global power and credibility. As a result, China is taking advantage of this unilateral U.S. retreat from the world.
My purpose in this lecture is not to proclaim what I accomplished but to give you a sense of what I saw and observed in China, what I learned and have taken away as my lessons from the unique and unforgettable experience of representing the American people in the People’s Republic of China.
When I returned home to Cambridge in January, the Economist magazine asked me to write a brief article on the fundamental lessons I learned while serving as Ambassador in China. I thought about that for several weeks. Here are four of the most important lessons or takeaways that informed my experience there.
The first lesson I learned every day on the job in Beijing will not surprise you. China is now and will continue to be well into the next decade our strongest and potentially most dangerous global competitor.
We are, in many ways, structural rivals as the two leading economies, two strongest militaries, two countries with the greatest global reach and two with completely opposite views on human rights and human freedom.
In my experience, that competition for power and influence is being waged across four broad fronts.
The U.S. and China are bitter rivals for military power in the vast Indo-Pacific stretching from the Arabian Sea and Subcontinent to the countries of North and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. The U.S. has been the main guarantor of commercial shipping and stability in this region since the close of World War Two eighty years ago this year.
Our five treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia, our security partnerships with India, New Zealand, Singapore and others make our country the single most important force for peace in what is now indisputably the most vital region of the world.
China is challenging this U.S.-led order with the dramatic expansion of the power of the People’s Liberation Army and the unprecedented and nontransparent build-up of its nuclear weapons force. China’s territorial claims against Japan in the Senkaku Islands of the East China Sea, against five other claimants in the Spratly and Paracel islands of the South China Sea and its long Himalayan border dispute with India are without legal merit in each case and are deeply destabilizing in the region.
China is challenging the U.S. in technology, now center stage in the competition over the civilian and military applications of A.I, quantum computing, biotechnology and other areas.
China has been the major disruptive force in global trade for well over two decades. China is our third largest trade partner and the U.S. is China’s largest export market. China is also producing two to three times domestic demand in EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels and other products and dumping them on the rest of the world. This is a major and unsustainable threat to global trade. In past years, Presidents Biden and Trump have both raised tariffs on China in response as have many other countries.
The most dangerous phase in this long running trade battle is now upon us—deeply unwise triple digit tariffs that, if sustained, will drive trade down precipitously and dangerously and risk an effective decoupling of these two mammoth economies. Given the central importance of the U.S. and China to the world’s economy, there must be movement for a trade agreement in the weeks and months ahead. To do otherwise would be harmful to both countries and to global markets. My hunch is that logic and self-interest will get them there by the autumn.
China is also one of the world’s major violators of the human rights of its own people. Our differences in this realm are deep and profound over Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, religious rights and other areas. Let me mention just one person being held unjustly for the last decade. His name is Ekpar Asat. He is a young Uygher entrepeneur imprisoned wrongly on trumped up charges for nine long years now by the Chinese authorities. His sister Rayhan is here today. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is her brother’s most effective and tireless advocate. We hope and pray for Ekpar’s early release from prison. I join those who demand that China release him.
This competitive relationship—over military and technology power and trade and human rights—dominated our bilateral relationship during my time as Ambassador. Both countries aspire to be the number one power in the region and in the world. I learned this fundamental first lesson every day I served in China—competition is the defining and overwhelming element in our relationship. I spent far more time on these issues than any others as will, I am confident, my successors.
My second lesson learned in China is closely related to the first and can be summarized in four simple words: Be Nice to Allies.
The U.S. has a major advantage over China in the power balance between us. We have treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe—countries that share our interests and values and who often have the same challenges as we do with an increasingly aggressive Chinese leadership. China, on the other hand, has no true allies in the world. This is a significant difference-maker in our contest for power with Beijing. If we measure the military, technological, economic and soft power of China versus America, it is relatively close although I believe the U.S. is still the stronger country.
If, on the other hand, we measure China on one side versus the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia and the NATO countries on the other, there is no contest. The U.S. alliance is the far greater and more influential force in global politics and economics.
We relied on this alliance network during my time in Beijing to oppose China’s attempt to intimidate Taiwan, to oppose its illegitimate territorial claims against the Philippines, to oppose its massive material support for Russia in its assault on Ukraine, and to oppose in the UN Human Rights Council China’s violations of the rights of the Uygher population in Xinjiang.
This is a critical lesson for the U.S. If we disparage our allies publicly, raise stratospherically high tariffs against them or even, inexplicably, question Canadian or Danish sovereignty as President Trump has done so recklessly, we will depreciate our leadership position in the democratic world and weaken our ability to counter China’s worse impulses. The allies might then be much less active in supporting us in our competition with Beijing.
As a former Ambassador to China and to NATO and Greece, I’ve learned that being nice to allies, listening to them, working in tandem with them, respecting them multiplies our power and influence in an increasingly multipolar world order.
My third lesson may surprise you or even sound like a contradiction of the first two. While China is our strongest competitor, it is also a partner of the U.S. on many important global issues.
That is one reason why I found managing this relationship on a daily basis to be so challenging and sometimes even confounding. But that is the reality. At its most fundamental level, our most powerful competitor, China, is also a country with which we must work to maintain a stable and peaceful world.
In my mind, the two halves of the relationship—competition and cooperation—are not equal. In fact, when I left Beijing and returned to Harvard, I calculated that I probably spent about eighty percent of my time on the competitive front with the government in Beijing and about twenty percent in cooperation with it. That seems to me to be about the right ratio. After all, we Americans are competing with the Chinese leadership over issues that are of existential importance to our future—military power and political influence in the world, the sanctity of borders and the rule of law, the vital issues of human rights and the ultimate challenge of preventing a war and continuing a peace, however difficult, between us.
The U.S. has some interests in the world that can only be met by working with China. Climate Change, where China and the U.S. are the two largest emitters of carbon, is one. The global fight against narcotics trafficking is another. The majority of the precursor chemicals that make up the synthetic opioid Fentanyl, the leading cause of death of Americans aged 18 to 49, come from the Chinese black market. A third example, despite our continued argument over China’s refusal to provide the origin data of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan five years ago, we realize that both our countries will need to work together to respond to epidemics and global pandemics in the years ahead.
Keeping our two societies connected to each other is another important common interest for the U.S. and China. Two-way tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry in both countries--$30 billion in the U.S. alone pre-pandemic. Tens of thousands of Chinese and American businesses produced last year a $642 billion two-way trade relationship. Approximately one million Americans depend on trade with China for their employment.
This Harvard audience will appreciate the role that students and academic exchanges play in this relationship. Chinese students are the largest foreign undergraduate population in U.S. colleges and universities. There are currently 277,000 Chinese students in our universities.
I disagree with those who want to close our doors to Chinese students. That would be a major mistake, in my judgment. The millions of Chinese students who have come to America during the last four decades comprise a large and influential group in China who have a real understanding of our culture, including the democratic rights at the heart of our nation.
Many Chinese students stay on in the U.S. to work as software engineers and scientists in our top companies. Some ultimately become American citizens in our immigrant society. Chinese students also give their American counterparts the best possible education in the history and culture of China itself. I have often thought that the courses I teach at the Kennedy and Business Schools on the global balance of power and negotiations would be far poorer, if not impossible to teach effectively, without Chinese students in our classrooms.
I thus favor the presence of Chinese students in our universities, including, of course, here at Harvard.
Our greater problem now is not Chinese students in America but the dramatic decline in the number of American students in Chinese universities. As recently as a decade ago, there were about 15,000 American students in China. When the Chinese government imposed the rigid Zero Covid lockdowns on the Chinese people beginning in 2020, the great majority of American students left, leaving only 350 American students in China in 2022 during my first full year there.
American students are beginning to return slowly to China. There are now 1105 American students in China. How do I know that exact number? Last autumn, I asked my team to count the American student population. We called every Chinese university to determine how many American students were enrolled in their country. We thought the number was 1104 until I visited Guizhou University in early December. When meeting with the University President, I noted we believed there was not a single American studying on its sprawling campus. He quickly replied, “Actually, we do have one American student who is right in the next room waiting to meet with you.
Out came a young, 19-year old named Jared who was the sole American on campus, living with Chinese students in his dorm, speaking very impressive and fluid Mandarin. I asked, “Jared, how did you get here?” He told me that a Chinese immigrant friend in his California high school convinced him that Guizhou and its university were the center of the world. As he had a life-long interest in China, he enrolled. Jared is an impressive young man. We need more Americans like him in China.
I think these bridges—education, business, tourism—are important to keep the U.S.-China relationship grounded, particularly as the two governments continue to tangle over the many issues that separate us. I say this because a decoupling of the relationship between the people of the two countries would plunge the overall relationship further downward and increase the risk of even more hostile relations in the future.
It is very important, to Harvard and other American universities, as well as the wider country that more young Americans learn Chinese Mandarin and have a deep familiarity with China. My U.S. Mission team was filled with American public servants in their 30s and 40s who all had a first experience in China as students and are true China Hands. I worry that future American Ambassadors a decade or two hence will not have the deep bench that I benefited from during these last few years.
We spent considerable time in our Mission building the societal and cultural bridges that might help to increase the linkages between the two societies.
Education is the strongest bridge we have.
Classical music is another bridge that visits in recent years by the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater and Winton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra helped to reinforce.
Sports, particularly basketball, is a big bridge. My conversations with the great Yao Ming gave me a much greater appreciation for how many millions of young Chinese are fervent fans of the NBA. As a lifelong Celtics fan, I never grew tired of seeing young guys wearing Jason Tatum green jerseys as Libby and I walked in Ritan or Chaoyang Park in Beijing. I convinced Tony Blinken that we should attend a Shanghai Sharks basketball game last spring and it made a very positive impact on Chinese social media.
I did wage one lonely battle in which I must confess I did not emerge victorious. You may know that literally millions of Chinese of all ages, men and women, sport on the streets of China’s cities and towns New York Yankees hats. It is nothing short of a major cultural and stylistic phenomenon. I am convinced that nearly all of the Chinese making this fashion mistake have no idea they are thus supporting the Evil Empire here in the U.S. And by ”Evil Empire”, I don’t mean China but the New York Yankees.
In my careful study of this important cultural trend, I believe LA Dodgers hats rank number two on Chinese streets. That’s okay for us Red Sox fans because the great Mookie Betts, whom we should never have traded, is a Dodger.
My response was to wear my Red Sox hat in public whenever possible—on visits to the Great Wall, on the Bund in Shanghai, the streets of Xiamen and Chengdu and even when I was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Alas, I cannot claim much growth in Red Sox Nation China but I will not give up and will bring my cherished and battered Sox hat on all future visits to China.
Let me add one last point on the necessity of engaging with China when our national interest dictates it.
Our two Presidents agreed at each of their three summit meetings to support these important connections between our societies.
Unfortunately, the Chinese government’s response illuminated for me their basic lack of confidence and fear of full connections between our peoples.
Beijing mounted an OIympic-sized censorship effort to squash the free exchange of information between our countries. This was predictable. It is well known the government does not want the Chinese people to know inconvenient facts about their own history. When Secretary Tony Blinken gave his first major speech on U.S.-China relations, the vast army of China’s ever vigilant censors took it off Weiboa and WeChat in about two hours. We played a cat and mouse game and put it back on with a different title. It was censored again. This happened nearly every day of my tenure in China—the censoring by Beijing of our public announcements, statements, speeches, fact sheets.
I called it “The Battle of Ideas”—our fight to describe American history, culture, politics and our values fully and accurately to the Chinese population. Our struggle to resist the gross mischaracterization of our country by China’s propaganda machine. Our determination to talk about Tianamen in June 1989 and particularly the fate of the many citizens—Chinese and foreign—who are innocent victims of China’s police state. It is a battle worth fighting and I hope the Trump Administration will pick up where we left off on January 20.
I want to mention one additional part of that battle that deserves public illumination. As we executed our public diplomacy strategy in China, we planned in 2024 more than one hundred events designed simply to bring Chinese and American citizens together from seminars on women’s history, to concerts by American musical groups to speakers on literature and cultural subjects.
By the summer of 2024, it became clear that China’s powerful security agencies were doing everything they could to intimidate Chinese citizens from attending these programs. In one case, they even shut off the electricity in a concert hall to cancel a concert by a visiting Native American musical group.
I made my objections clear to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and reminded them that their own leadership had said they supported such people-to-people connections. I presented a list to a very senior Chinese diplomat of 98 different occasions in 2024 alone when the security services blocked our public diplomacy efforts, providing the date and place where each had occurred.
He came back to me about a month later. “We’ve studied your list carefully”, he assured me. “And we have determined that you are wrong in every single instance. None of this ever happened”.
Now, I did not expect an enthusiastic response to my list. But, it was revealing, and also chilling, that a great power, in classic Orwellian terms, denied what we both knew to be true. It was following that conversation when I reflected that the gulf between our two political cultures and governments is so vast that we sometimes cannot agree on basic facts, even in private discussions, much less narrow the wide gulf between us.
I found that engaging China cooperatively was worth the effort on the issues I have described but its government did not make it easy.
My final lesson is simple—despite the difficult, challenging differences that separate us, the United States and China must find a way to live in peace. There is no other choice in a world where both of us possess vast numbers of nuclear weapons, growing capacities in space, sophisticated cyber capabilities and, increasingly, where we are vying for supremacy in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
I am also realistic about the future course of U.S.-China relations. I went to China with hawkish views and returned to the U.S. even more hawkish than when I arrived. I saw up close the true nature of its authoritarian government and its ambition to undercut the U.S. at nearly every turn. In some ways, we are engaged in a 21st century version of JFK’s “long, twilight struggle” with China.
Nevertheless, a breakdown in relations and particularly the absence of senior-level channels between the governments, would be a risk neither of us should take.
In this sense, the most worrisome days of my tenure in Beijing followed China’s complete overreaction to the visit to Taiwan in August 2022 of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and during the strange and mysterious Balloon Crisis of February 2023. In the wake of both events, the government of China effectively stopped communicating with the U.S. government for several months. We took the position that it is precisely during such crises that the two governments must keep communication lines open.
My nightmare scenario—what I most worried about during my Ambassadorship- was an accident between our navies or air forces which operate in close juxtaposition in the South and East China Seas and Taiwan Strait in international waters. Such accidents have occurred in the past. Senior leaders need to be in quick communication to lower the temperature between us and to separate the parties. The goal—avoid a true and more lethal crisis between our two powerful militaries.
With this issue in mind, President Biden convinced President Xi at their final meeting in Lima, Peru last November 15 that we should have regular contacts and meetings between our most senior military leaders to ensure stability between us.
In addition, they agreed on the following statement on A.I and nuclear weapons: “The two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” That is a necessary start to what must now be an intense discussion between our countries on how to maintain stability at a time of accelerating technological change.
The Lima meeting was successful in building these important safeguards into our often highly charged and unstable relationship.
Our agreement with China for functioning, workable diplomatic channels paid off in two other cases.
First, after three years of effort, we were able to secure the release of four American citizens this past autumn held unjustly by the Chinese authorities. I had visited three of the U.S prisoners three times each in the bleak, dispiriting and forbidding prisons in which they had been held, one American for 17 years, one for 12 years, one for 8 years and one for 4 years. When they were transferred to U.S. custody at Beijing Airport, I embraced them, handed them their passports, told them they were free men at last and put them onto flights to the U.S. to be reunited with their families for Thanksgiving. That was a great and memorable day.
Earlier in the autumn, I traveled on a very hot, humid day to southern Hunan Province where the PLA had permitted the U.S. military to dig out a site where an American P-40 Warhawk pilot had crashed and disappeared in August 1944.
The U.S. continues to search for hundreds of Americans missing in action in China from World War Two, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War and Vietnam. I was grateful to Beijing authorities and the local village leaders to help us find what we suspected were the remains of a fallen American soldier from eight decades ago.
This remarkable work is carried out by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. I felt so proud that day of the U.S military and its determination to bring all the missing home. And I was proud that, through diplomacy with the Chinese authorities, we can still produce positive results for the people of both countries.
These were two rare instances with our prisoners and fallen solider when I felt we had fulfilled our obligation to American citizens caught up in this titanic battle for power between our two governments.
Let me close with this final thought. China is the most powerful adversary we have in the world today. It may well be the most powerful we have ever faced in American history. We have an obligation to our country and to future generations to get this relationship right.
I can see no alternative but to continue to wage an intense competition with the Chinese government on all the fronts I discussed today.
But we must also engage the Chinese leadership on the difficult issues that separate us.
I have often thought that diplomacy resembles an Olympic race around an oval track. I held the baton for the U.S. on the ground in China these last few years. Now that he has been confirmed by the Senate, I am handing that baton to former Senator David Perdue, President Trump’s nominee to succeed me as Ambassador. I wish him well and will be supportive in any way that I can. All of us need he and President Trump to be successful in America’s many challenges with China.
Ultimately, we must compete with the government in China while living in peace with the Chinese people.
No other objective is worthy of our abiding commitment both to advance democracy and human freedom in the world but also to avoid a conflict that would have no precedent in modern history.
That is our future challenge. To meet it, our leaders must learn to manage the open competition between us more effectively while avoiding a war that must never be fought.
This is the only rational course for the American and Chinese governments and their people as we compete in the global arena in the years ahead.
Thank you for inviting me to speak today at the Fairbank Center.
