It was a challenging tour of duty.
Ambassador Nicholas Burns makes his return this week to teaching at Harvard Kennedy School after being tapped in 2021 to serve as the U.S. representative to China. Though U.S.-China relations historically are complicated, Burns’ tenure in Beijing came at a particularly difficult time.
Both countries were grappling with the pandemic, and while the U.S. economy slowly recovered, China’s faltered under its Zero COVID policy. The Biden administration imposed new, tougher sanctions on China over its human rights violations and limited exports of critical technology like semiconductors.
In this edited conversation, Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, spoke to the Gazette about his experience and about what gives the U.S. a strategic advantage over China.
Relations between China and the U.S. were particularly strained during your time as U.S. ambassador. What compelled you to leave Harvard take on something this difficult?
I had been in the career Foreign Service for 27 years and then came to Harvard for 13 years. So public service was the main mission of my career, and it’s something that I found great value in and enjoyed.
When President Biden called me just after the 2020 election to ask me to go, how could I say no? First of all, I deeply believe in public service. Second, the U.S.-China relationship is one of the most important, if not the most important, relationship we have, and highly problematic, challenging, competitive, disputatious.
I felt it was a unique opportunity to get back into government, to go back into what Teddy Roosevelt called “the arena of public service.” I had been urging all of my students for many years to go into that arena, and I felt if I’m being asked, I’ve got to go, too. I’m very grateful for the opportunity. It was, in many ways, the most difficult job I’ve ever had, and in many ways, the most worthwhile, as well.
What made it worthwhile?
It’s a consequential relationship for both countries. China is our most important competitor in the world. It’s the second-largest economy; it’s the second-strongest military power next to us; it’s our strongest adversary and competitor in the world. A lot is riding on how we manage that relationship for the decades ahead.
In addition to the military and technology and trade competitions, we have competing ideas and opposite ideas about human freedom, about democracy, about human rights, and the ability of people to speak out. The lack of freedoms in China and increasingly repressive and fearful environment made the agenda between us extraordinarily difficult and contested.
How challenging was it to communicate U.S. policy and values to the Chinese people? Are they aware they have less freedom than others around the world?
They’re very much aware that they don’t have access to free information unless you have a virtual private network (VPN), which most Chinese don’t have.
They’re in a phase of Chinese history where a highly educated public does not have a complete view of its own history, and they’re not aware of dissenting views that might contradict and criticize Chinese Communist practices. That’s a major hill to climb if you’re a government like ours that is trying to both manage a difficult and competitive relationship with the government and have a relationship between our society and 1.4 billion Chinese.
So, we spent a lot of time trying to relate and connect with the Chinese people. The Chinese government puts enormous resources into its vast propaganda network to distort our history, to distort what our president or secretary of state was saying or doing, or what I was saying or doing, and we faced a high degree of censorship on Chinese social media. We were trying to get free and fair and factual information into the Chinese bloodstream, and the communist authorities were trying to keep it out.
I had a chance to visit many universities, to speak with many professors and many students. After a couple of minutes, people are frank. It was not that everybody agreed with us. Sometimes in those sessions with students or faculty, I would face a lot of criticism, but I thought that was fair. I came from a university environment here at Harvard. I’m used to the classroom. You want students to speak up, and I certainly felt that students in China had a right to speak up, and sometimes they were very grateful for the opportunity to talk to an American and were very admiring of many parts of the culture. Sometimes they were very critical. But just having the dialogue, I thought, was a step forward and having connection.
What was the most rewarding or the most difficult part of the job?
The most difficult was dealing with the Chinese authorities on issues where we have entirely opposite views, sometimes a different interpretation of the facts, sometimes a different set of facts. That made it hard to negotiate.
We brought speakers; we brought American artists, musicians, sports figures to China to show the Chinese people this side of American culture.
In 2024, my last full year there, on 98 separate occasions, the Chinese authorities interfered with those public diplomacy people-to-people efforts. They actually turned off the electricity in a hall where an American musical group was going to perform. They would actively warn Chinese students not to come to seminars or writers’ workshops.
So that set of problems — not agreeing on the same facts, having wildly different interpretation of facts, active measures taken by the Chinese government to disrupt normal programs that any two countries would want to have with each other — that was the most frustrating part of the job.
The most rewarding was to stand by the flag again, to be back in government, to represent the United States as ambassador in this extraordinarily important country to us and to work alongside the men and women of Mission China. That was the best part of the job, being part of that team, being the leader of that team, working alongside them, and being proud of what they represent for our country.
Is diplomacy any different today from when you first joined the State Department in 1980?
There’s an aspect of diplomacy that remains unchanged. Especially in a difficult relationship like the U.S. and China, you want to make sure that each capital has a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of the other’s position on issues and of their motivations, good or bad. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is communications technology, and the news cycle now is 24 hours a day. It comes from a million different sources. There’s much more transparency. There’s a greater obligation, certainly in the United States and democratic countries, to be open with their publics and to describe exactly what we’re doing and not to hide as many things as were hidden in the past. That’s something that we should be very good at.
That’s why I think it’s been a major mistake to try to deconstruct the federal workforce over the last couple of months, to abolish USAID, a great organization doing necessary and very important things for the American people around the world, and to take away Radio Free Europe/Liberty Radio, Radio Free Asia. Millions of people listen to those in authoritarian countries. It’s information that tells the truth about our society and about events that are happening in the world. I’m really concerned that we’re giving China an enormous propaganda advantage here, because we’re creating a vacuum.
“NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades.”
You once served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. At HKS, you were faculty chair of the Project on the Transatlantic Relationship. Where is that relationship today?
One of the key lessons I learned in a long diplomatic career is: Be nice to your allies and be faithful to them because they’re multipliers of American power and influence in the world. I certainly saw that at NATO on Sept. 11, 2001, when I was a very new ambassador.
The Canadian ambassador, David Wright, came to me hours after the attack, and said, “We should invoke Article Five of the NATO Treaty.” And within 24 hours, the Europeans and Canadians came to our defense.
They are the best allies we could hope to have. They share our values, and they share our interests. My job in China was made easier by the fact that the NATO countries were acting with us to try to constrain and limit what the Chinese could do in their very aggressive expansion of their own power.
NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades. Putin is trying to divide Europe. There’s no question that Russia, if it gets away with its crimes in Ukraine, if it’s a lenient peace agreement that favors Russian interests, then that will simply encourage Putin to be aggressive against Ukraine again, against Moldova, against the Baltic countries (now members of NATO), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
So, there are enormous stakes for the United States in being tough-minded with Russia. Everyone wants the war to end, and I agree that it should end. Let’s try to end the war but negotiate it in a way that makes it far more likely that Putin will be constrained and limited in the future and not emboldened.
How does our relationship with European and East Asian allies affect U.S.-China relations?
China has no real allies in the world. We have over 30 treaty allies in Europe and five treaty allies in the Indo Pacific. This is what gives the United States strategic advantage over China that will play out over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years. It will be one of the most important stories in American history if we are able to retain our strength and protect our democracy and protect democracy around the world, because we deter Chinese aggression.
It would be a mistake of historic proportions to forsake our Indo-Pacific allies and NATO and give up the leadership role that we’ve had. I don’t think the American people will support doing that, and certainly, I don’t think most of our elected politicians in Congress would support it.
“Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.“
How does it feel to be back at Harvard?
I’m really grateful to return to Harvard. I loved teaching at the Kennedy School. We have a first-rate faculty; we have outstanding students from over 90 countries all around the world. I learned so much from them when I was a professor here, and I’m really pleased to come back.
I’m going to reconstitute the Future of Diplomacy Project to make sure that we’re bringing diplomacy into our studies about global affairs. I’m going to teach a joint course next year with Professor Jim Sebenius of Harvard Business School on negotiations and diplomacy.
It’s one of the greatest institutions I’ve been involved with, and it’s doing great good in the world. Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.
It’s certainly understandable if students here and elsewhere would feel that a public service career is no longer available to them. Our job is to encourage students, to understand that at the municipal level, at the state level, at the national level, and at the global level, we need good people to go into public service. That is not going to change. The pendulum in the United States, at some point, will swing back to honor public service as we have always done in our history.
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