The following are excerpts from a speech given by Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. at the Metropolitan Club of Washington, DC on May 5, 2022. Ambassador Freeman (傅立民, born March 2, 1943) is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He has a list of honors and accomplishments longer than most of our arms but most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for President Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War. Ambassador Freedom frequently writes and speaks on the importance of Sino-American relationships. Please visit his website where many of his speeches are posted.
The main point of this speech is that lately, China has been out performing the US in trade, manufacturing, education, infrastructure and on many technological fronts. “Four decades ago, an ailing China got its groove back by doing things that parallel what we must now do. We have a lot more going for us than the Chinese. We need to stop making excuses and get to work. Katharine Tai, the U.S. special trade representative, is quoted as saying, we need “to turn the page on the old playbook.” Whatever China does, she argues, “we need to start doing things on our side [such as] the reshoring and the rebuilding of our manufacturing base.” But it isn’t going to happen if we preserve the strange combination of hubris, denial, and complacency we currently exhibit.
The key to outcompeting China is to fix our system so that it once again yields better outcomes and greater prosperity than China’s. To do that, we must make a determined effort to address the weaknesses that now impair our performance. We need to:
- Repair our broken political system.
- Return to pay-as-you-go government.
- Revamp our physical and human infrastructure.
- Raise standards in our educational system.
- Resume the identification and adoption of foreign best practices.
- Reopen ourselves to foreigners and their ideas through immigration reform.
- Reinvest in scientific research and development.
- Re-enforce antitrust policies to reduce market concentration and restore competitiveness to our markets.
- Reform our tax structure to support national rather than vested interests and to reward domestic investment rather than outsourcing.
- Recover our modesty and redouble our efforts to set an example to the world.
“Our weaknesses are structural. If we can’t address them structurally, we are going to fall behind”, claims Ambassador Freeman.