After a 34 years foreign service career, Nicholas Platt served for twelve years at the helm of the Asia Society before becoming President Emeritus on July 1. 2004. Trained in Chinese (Mandarin) at the State Department Language School 1962-63, he began his career in Asia as a China Analyst at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong from 1964-68. In 1972 he accompanied President Nixon on the historic trip to Beijing that signaled the resumption of relations between the United States and China. He was one of the first members of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing when the United States established a mission there in 1973. He served in Canada and Japan and as U.S. Ambassador to Zambia (1982-1984), the Philippines (1987-1991) and Pakistan (1991-1992). Educated at Harvard College and Johns Hopkins SAIS, he is a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Friends of China Heritage Fund Limited, Chair of the US-China Education Trust Advisory Board, and on the Christie’s American Advisory Board. Since 2011, he has been the Senior Advisor on China programs for the Philadelphia Orchestra. His memoir China Boys was published in March 2010.
I am delighted to be back at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and am deeply honored to accept this award for contributions to China Studies. In choosing me, the Academy is including a diplomatic practitioner and private sector manager among honorees from the academic world. This is welcome recognition that those who actually work day to day managing a relationship can contribute alongside of those who study and analyze it from above.
I had attended the World Forum on China Studies for five times. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has long been a valuable guide and resource in my personal pursuit of China Studies. I have sought the advice of Academy leaders starting with Zhang Zhongli and Yin Jizuo. The Academy staff under Li Yihai has also been exceptionally helpful, translating my memoir “China Boys” and facilitating its publication in China.
Having first traveled to China with President Nixon in 1972 and worked with Dr. Henry Kissinger to set up our first diplomatic offices back in 1973, I have a long view of the arc of our relationship. Most of my work for the past twenty five years has concentrated on the people to people relationships that have come to form the foundation of US-China ties. Over the years, these relations, once tiny and barely existent, have become so huge that they have assumed major strategic significance. Trade, investment, travel, sports, culture, science and education have become regular agenda items in high level strategic consultations between our governments. But while the governments set the tone and legal framework, the day to day management of these ties is for the most part in the hands of private institutions or organizations below the state level.
Practitioners who work on the management of day to day today relations often have a different perspective from analysts in the media and academe who study and provide comment from above. I am one of those. Over the decades I have worked closely with cultural organizations who have dealt with each other for decades, and developed the tactical trust to persevere in times of strategic mistrust between governments.
Policy shifts on both sides now threaten our interdependence. Looming conflict and suspicion cloud our trade and investment. China says that US policy is designed to hold the country back, and prevent it from assuming its rightful place as a major power. We accuse China of stealing our technology, and limiting our companies’ access its economy.
I am frequently asked whether this relationship, which has changed and moved the world for almost 50 years, can survive these pressures. I firmly believe that it can. Is conflict inevitable? I believe it is not. China is too big to contain, the relationship too complex to decouple. We have spent decades together, both competing and cooperating, while dealing with serious crises along the way. I align myself with those scholars and experts in the United States who signed a recent public letter warning against treating China as an adversary.
We have no choice but to press ahead, with the focus on practical solutions rather than ideological pronouncements. We must address vigorously those issues that divide us––market access, the huge trade imbalance, exchange rates, intellectual property and strategic rivalry worldwide. Our goal should be to free the Chinese and American peoples to follow their own mutual interests, enabling the two societies, in Dr. Kissinger's word, to co evolve.
