EWI in Track-2 Diplomacy: 9th U.S.-China High-Level Political Party Leaders Dialogue
For the ninth time since 2010, the EastWest Institute is organizing meetings between delegations of U.S. Democratic Party and Republican Party leaders and Communist Party of China (CPC) senior officials. Also taking part this year are U.S. business leaders. David Firestein,EWI’s Senior Vice President for the Strategic Trust-Building Initiative and Track 2 Diplomacy, discusses the significance of the meetings ahead of this year’s U.S.-China High-Level Political Party Leaders Dialogue (P2P) on November 14 in Washington, D.C.
What was the idea behind the first P2P and what were the initial challenges?
P2P came out of a trip that EWI made to China in 2008, about a year after EWI launched its China program. We asked our Chinese counterparts what we, as an organization, could do in the service of U.S.-China relations that hadn’t already been done by others. Our senior Communist Party of China (CPC) interlocutors said that the one area in U.S.-China relations that had not been fully developed was the linkage between the principal political parties of the two countries: the CPC, the Democratic and Republican Parties of the United States. At the time, the CPC, as a party, had relations or dealings with just about every major political party in the world but for the two U.S. major parties. And with that suggestion, EWI set about the work of establishing the first-ever dialogue between these the major parties.
The process was not without its difficulties — mainly, political sensitivities on the U.S. side about the notion of dealing with the Communist Party of China. And we came to understand that whatever we were going to do would need to be done on a bipartisan basis, so that neither U.S. party would be able to criticize the other for engaging with China’s ruling party. With some diligence and perserverance, and with the involvement of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), we assembled the first bipartisan U.S. delegation to what came to be known as the “U.S.-China High-Level Political Party Leaders Dialogue” — or “P2P,” for short — in early 2010. That delegation was led by prominent Democrat and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former George W. Bush Administration ambassador to the United Nations Rich Williamson. And on that visit, we had the honor of meeting then-Chinese Vice President and Politburo Standing Committee member Xi Jinping, among other senior leaders.
What are some of P2P’s achievements over the years in terms of U.S.-China relationship since the first meeting? Do officials from the two countries have easier access to each other? Are there any concrete bilateral cooperations at the country level that resulted from P2P?
P2P fills a unique niche in U.S.-China engagement; with P2P, EWI is doing something that had never been done and that isn’t being done by anyone else. In a sense, EWI, along with our Chinese partners, have a monopoly on the market with respect to the construct of a U.S.-China political party — and more generally, high-evel political — dialogue. So that’s one significant achievement in itself. Building on this point, I would add that EWI has orchestrated the highest-level joint (and, in fact only) DNC/RNC visits to China in history; the only interactions ever between the CPC and the chairs of the DNC and RNC (separately); and one of the relatively few, if not the only, joint visit to China by Cabinet-level officials of both the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations, among other milestones. And in China, we’ve met with Xi Jinping, current Vice President Li Yuanchao, Politiburo Standing Committee member and anti-corruption “czar” Wang Qishan, and numerous other top Chinese officials, including in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. We have also created a platform for important and timely track 1.5 and track 1 (official) interactions between major foreign policy figures on both sides around such issues as North Korea; and P2P has been a platform for some of the deepest and most detailed discussions of Chinese foreign policy decision-making that have ever occurred between Chinese and U.S. counterparts. Finally, through P2P, CPC leaders came to meet with several of the “finalists,” in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, in the 2016 race for the U.S. presidency.
How has P2P, as an event, evolved over the years? Are there more or less challenges in organizing the event?
The formal P2P process now has a history of nearly seven years. The most significant evolution of the process occurred in 2013, when we reached out to the Democratic and Republican Parties and invited sitting DNC and RNC officers to take part in the dialogue for the first time. Whereas in earlier convenings, we had featured prominent Democratic and Republican former statesmen, governors and legislators, as well as former DNC and RNC chairs, now we were also involving sitting DNC and RNC leaders and that added a new element to the talks; it was at this point that we could say we had created a true dialogue channel between the parties themselves. That was no mean feat, in my view; and when you really think about it, P2P might very well be the only formal dialogue mechanism that brings together sitting DNC and RNC officials into the same room and the same conversation — to say nothing of the CPC. So we were very proud of moving the P2P process in this direction and the representatives of the two U.S. party committees consistently characterized the process as being tremendously valuable in terms of increasing their understanding of the politics of a country that, arguably, is America’s most consequential bilateral partner.
The EastWest Institute also organizes other annual U.S.-China events. How do these events complement or overlap each other? How have these separate events shaped, in any way, the relationship between the two countries?
EWI’s three U.S.-China track 2 (and track 1.5) dialogues focus on different areas and issue sets and, in this regard, tend to complement each other. P2P looks at politics and domestic governance, as I’ve mentioned. The U.S.-China Sanya Initiative (“Sanya”) brings together former U.S. and Chinese 4-star generals (including, on the U.S. side, former members of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example) to discuss military issues of mutual interest, with special emphasis on U.S.-China mil-mil issues and East Asian regional security issues. And the U.S.-China High-Level Security Dialogue (HLSD), which began in 2007, annually brings a distinguished group of U.S. former officials, military officers, think tank analysts and business leaders to China for a week to meet with Chinese counterparts from the Party, the government, the military, the think tank world and academia, and the business world to examine security issues of mutual interest to the United States and China.
Collectively, these dialogues have contributed to a deeper and broader understanding between significant U.S. and Chinese personages and between the two countries and, we believe, increased trust among the participants and between the countries. As the United States transitions from one presidency to the next, the need for this type of exchange remains substantial and we look forward to the work and opportunities ahead.
