Friedman 特朗普应学尼克松 与中国合作
我从中国之行中学到最多的是什么
Thomas L. Friedman 观点专栏作家 2024 年 12 月 24 日
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/opinion/us-china-relationship.html?
在上海的一个主题公园里，一个人一边开着一辆装饰着自由女神像和美国国旗的碰碰车，一边在讲手机。
Thomas L. Friedman 作者：Thomas L. Friedman @tomfriedman • Facebook
本月，当选总统唐纳德·特朗普邀请习近平主席到华盛顿参加就职典礼，引起了很多人的惊讶和窃笑。当然，外国领导人不会参加我们的就职典礼，但我认为特朗普的想法其实很好。我刚从中国之行回来，我可以告诉你，如果我今天要描绘我们两国的关系，那将是两头大象通过一根稻草互相看着对方。
那可不好。因为突然之间，美国和中国除了贸易和台湾问题之外，还有更多话题要谈——而且谁是 21 世纪无可争议的重量级冠军。
当今世界面临三大划时代挑战：失控的人工智能、气候变化和崩溃国家蔓延的混乱。美国和中国是世界人工智能超级大国。它们是世界两大碳排放国。它们拥有世界两大海军力量，能够在全球范围内投射力量。换句话说，在世界变得超级融合的时代，美国和中国是唯一能够共同带来希望来管理超级智能、超级风暴和失败国家中拥有超级权力的愤怒小团体——更不用说超级病毒了。
这就是为什么我们需要一份更新版的《上海公报》，这份文件为理查德·尼克松 1972 年访华并与毛泽东会面时制定了中美关系正常化的参数。不幸的是，现在我们正在走向非正常化。我们两国在各个层面的距离越来越远。在我访问北京和上海的三十年里，我从未有过这次旅行的感觉——好像我是中国唯一的美国人。
当然我不是，但你通常会在上海火车站或北京酒店大堂听到的美国口音却明显消失了。中国家长说，许多家庭不再希望孩子去美国上学，因为他们担心这变得很危险——他们在美国时可能会被联邦调查局跟踪，他们回国后，他们自己的政府可能会怀疑他们。现在在中国的美国学生也面临同样的情况。一位在中国与外国学生打交道的教授告诉我，一些美国人不想再去国外学习，部分原因是他们不喜欢与中国本科生竞争，部分原因是如今在中国学习或工作可能会引起未来潜在美国雇主的安全疑虑。
的确，在中美新冷战的讨论之下，根据美国驻北京大使馆的数据，仍有超过 27 万名中国学生在美国学习，但现在在中国学习的美国大学生只有 1,100 人左右。这一数字比十年前的 15,000 人左右有所下降，但比 2022 年（新冠疫情高峰后不久）的几百人有所增加。如果这种趋势继续下去，下一代会说中文的美国学者和外交官将从何而来，同样，了解美国的中国人又将从何而来？
“我们必须与中国竞争——因为它是我们在全球军事、技术和经济实力方面最强大的对手——但复杂的现实是，我们也需要在气候变化、芬太尼和其他问题上与中国合作，以创造一个更加稳定的世界，”美国驻华大使尼古拉斯·伯恩斯在北京告诉我。因此，“我们需要一群会说普通话并与中国年轻人建立友谊的美国年轻人。我们必须为两国人民创造交流的空间。他们是两国关系的压舱石。我们过去有五百万游客来往，而今天却只有这个数字的一??小部分。”
伯恩斯的观点至关重要。随着中国取代俄罗斯成为美国的主要全球竞争对手，中美关系更倾向于直接对抗而不是竞争与合作之间的平衡，正是商界、游客和学生缓和了中美之间日益加剧的紧张关系。随着这种压舱石逐渐缩小，两国关系现在越来越多地被定义为赤裸裸的对抗，几乎没有合作的空间。
特朗普选择了大卫·珀杜 (David Perdue) 担任驻华大使，他曾于 2015 年至 2021 年担任佐治亚州参议员。珀杜是个能干的人，在进入参议院之前曾在东亚做生意。但在 2024 年 9 月《华盛顿观察家报》的一篇文章中，他这样写到中国共产党：“通过我在中国和该地区的所有活动，有一件事变得非常清楚：中共坚定地相信
其应有的命运是重新夺回其作为世界秩序霸主的历史地位——并让世界皈依马克思主义。”
嗯。我不会争论霸权主义，但“让世界皈依马克思主义”？在他上任之前，我希望珀杜能得到简报，了解当今中国的马斯克主义者——想要成为埃隆·马斯克的年轻人——比马克思主义者多得多。中国人试图在我们的游戏中打败我们，资本主义，而不是让我们皈依马克思主义。
是的，中国共产党现在在中国的控制力与 1980 年代末以来的任何时候一样严格。但它只是名义上的共产主义。它所提倡的意识形态是国家主导资本主义和野蛮牛仔资本主义的结合，其中数十家私营和国有企业在一系列高科技行业中进行优胜劣汰，以壮大中国的中产阶级。
尽管在中国，特朗普经常被描绘成一个批评中国的人和“关税狂”，但令我震惊的是，我采访的许多中国经济专家都表示，中国更愿意与特朗普打交道，而不是与民主党打交道。正如清华大学中国与世界经济研究中心主任、《中国的世界观》一书的作者李稻葵向我指出的那样：“许多中国人觉得他们了解特朗普。他们把他看作邓小平。中国人之所以与特朗普产生共鸣，是因为他认为经济就是一切。”
邓小平是一位以务实、善于交易和做交易而闻名的中国领导人，他强行向世界开放了中国经济，他提出了一条非常非马克思主义的座右铭，即中国应该抛弃共产主义的中央计划，选择任何能创造增长的方法——或者用他那句名言来说：“不管黑猫白猫，能抓老鼠就是好猫。”
所有这些都不能排除美国和中国之间的大国战略竞争——从网络黑客到监视对方的飞机和海军舰艇。无论中国在这些领域对我们做了什么，我希望我们也在对他们做同样的事情。但像美国和中国这样的两个大国——每年仍有近 6000 亿美元的双向贸易额（美国从中国进口约 4300 亿美元，出口近 1500 亿美元）——也有共同的利益去做其他事情。这让我想起了为什么特朗普试图打破常规并邀请习近平来华盛顿是正确的。
本月我在上海时，我的同事、《纽约时报》北京分社社长基思·布拉德舍尔建议我们去锦江饭店参观，1972 年 2 月 27 日晚上，尼克松和周恩来总理在那里签署了《上海公报》，指导中美关系的恢复。在这份公报中，美国承认中国只有一个——这是在台湾问题上对北京作出的让步——但坚称任何解决台湾未来的办法都必须是和平的，双方还制定了经济和人民关系的目标。签署公报的大厅里挂满了尼克松和周恩来热情庆祝新关系的褪色照片。今天看到这些照片，我不禁想：“这真的发生了吗？”
新的上海公报有助于管理两国和世界面临的新现实。首先，美国和中国的科技公司正在竞相开发通用人工智能；他们的公司更专注于加强工业生产和监控，而我们的公司则专注于从编写电影剧本到设计新药等广泛的用途。即使通用人工智能——一种有意识的机器——还需要五到七年的时间，北京和华盛顿也需要合作制定一套规则，我们都将用它来管理人工智能，世界其他国家也必须遵守。
那就是在所有人工智能系统中嵌入算法，以确保该系统不会被坏人用于破坏性目的，也不会自行摧毁建造它的人类。
在一个鲜为人知的事件中，拜登总统和习近平在最近的秘鲁峰会上达成一项声明，声明“两国领导人确认有必要保持人类对使用核武器决定的控制”，迈出了建立这种制度的第一步。这意味着任何发射核武器的决定都不能由人工智能机器人单独做出。必须有一个人在循环中。
美国官员告诉我，这 17 个字花了几个月的时间才谈判出来。在为人工智能的使用设置护栏方面，它们绝不会是最后一个。
在应对气候变化方面，世界最大碳排放国中国和第二大碳排放国美国需要就一系列战略达成一致，到 2050 年实现世界净零碳排放，以减少气候变化带来的毁灭性健康、经济和极端天气挑战，这些挑战将给失败国家带来越来越多的混乱。
正如我在这次旅行中试图向我的中国对话者解释的那样：你们认为我们是彼此的敌人。我们可能是，但我们是
我们现在也有了共同的敌人，就像 1972 年一样。只不过这一次不是俄罗斯，而是混乱。越来越多的民族国家正在分崩离析，陷入混乱，大量人口流失，移民争先恐后地涌入秩序区。
陷入混乱的不仅是中东的利比亚、也门、苏丹、黎巴嫩、叙利亚和索马里；中国在全球南方的一些最好的朋友，如委内瑞拉、津巴布韦和缅甸，也陷入了混乱。中国向“一带一路”倡议提供了数十亿美元的贷款，而不少参与国也陷入了困境，其中包括斯里兰卡、阿根廷、肯尼亚、马来西亚、巴基斯坦、黑山和坦桑尼亚。北京现在开始要求他们归还贷款，并限制了新的贷款。但这只会让其中一些国家的危机更加严重。
只有美国和中国与国际货币基金组织合作。和世界银行将拥有资源、权力和影响力来遏制这种混乱局面，这就是为什么我反复向我的中国对话者提出??挑战：你们为什么要和弗拉基米尔·普京领导下的俄罗斯和伊朗这样的失败者混在一起？你们怎么能在哈马斯和以色列之间保持中立？
中国从一个贫穷的孤立国家发展成为一个工业大国，中产阶级正在崛起，而这个世界的游戏规则——贸易和地缘政治——主要是由美国在二战后为所有人的利益和稳定而制定的。
认为中国可以在一个由普京这样的杀人犯价值观塑造的世界中茁壮成长，普京是混乱的代理人，或者由原教旨主义的伊朗塑造，伊朗是混乱的另一个推动者，也是下一个可能分裂的国家，或者由全球南方国家塑造，或者由中国塑造，这种想法是疯狂的。
如果我是特朗普，我会探索“尼克松访华”的举措——美国和中国之间的和解，完全孤立俄罗斯和伊朗。这就是结束乌克兰战争、缩小伊朗在中东的影响力并缓解与北京的紧张关系的方法。特朗普的不可预测性足以让他尝试这样做。
无论如何，如果要有一个稳定的21世纪，中国和美国就必须共同努力。如果竞争和合作完全让位于对抗，那么我们双方都将面临一个混乱的21世纪。
What I Learned Most From My Trip to China
Thomas L. Friedman Opinion Columnist Dec. 24, 2024
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set out parameters for normalizing U.S.-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
“We must compete with China — as it is our strongest rival for global military, technology and economic power — but the complicated reality is we also need to work with China on climate change, fentanyl and other issues to create a more stable world,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told me in Beijing. Therefore, “we need a cohort of young Americans who speak Mandarin and have friendships with young Chinese. We have to create room for people from both countries to connect. They are the ballast in the relationship. We used to have five million tourists going back and forth, and today it’s a fraction of that.”
Burns’s point is critical. It was the business communities, tourists and students who softened the steadily sharpening elbows between China and America as China overtook Russia as America’s chief global rival and the U.S.-China relationship tilted more toward outright confrontation than a balance between competition and collaboration. As that ballast steadily shrinks, the relationship is now increasingly being defined by just raw confrontation, leaving little room for collaboration.
For his ambassador to China, Trump has picked David Perdue, who was a senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. Perdue is a competent guy who did business in East Asia before going to the Senate. But in a September 2024 essay in The Washington Examiner, he wrote of the Chinese Communist Party, “Through all my activity in China and the region, one thing became painfully clear: The C.C.P. firmly believes its rightful destiny is to reclaim its historical position as the hegemon of the world order — and convert the world to Marxism.”
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is as tightly in control in China now as at any other time since the late 1980s. But it is communist in name only. The ideology it promotes is a combination of state-directed capitalism and wild cowboy capitalism, where scores of private and state-owned companies slug it out in survival-of-the-fittest contests across a range of high-tech industries to grow China’s middle class.
Deng was the famously pragmatic, transactional, deal-making Chinese leader who forced open the Chinese economy to the world with the very un-Marxist motto about how China should leave behind Communist central planning and just opt for whatever works to create growth — or as he famously put it: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
When I was in Shanghai this month, my colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief, suggested we visit the Jin Jiang Hotel, where, on the evening of Feb. 27, 1972, Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, guiding the renewal of U.S.-China relations. In it, the U.S. acknowledged the view that there was one China — which was a concession to Beijing on the Taiwan issue — but asserted that any resolution of Taiwan’s future had to be peaceful, and the two sides also set out their goals for economic and people-to-people relations. The hall where that signing took place was adorned with faded photographs of Nixon and Zhou warmly toasting their new relationship. Looking at them today, I could only wonder: “Did that really happen?”
A new Shanghai Communiqué could help govern the new realities that both countries and the world face. The first is that U.S. and Chinese tech firms are racing toward artificial general intelligence; theirs is more focused on enhancing industrial production and surveillance and ours on a broad array of uses, from writing movie scripts to designing new drugs. Even if artificial general intelligence — a sentient machine — is five or seven years away, Beijing and Washington need to be collaborating on a set of rules that we will both use to govern A.I. and that the rest of the world must follow.
That would be to embed into all A.I. systems algorithms that ensure that the system cannot be used for destructive purposes by bad actors and cannot go off on its own to destroy the humans who built it.
In a little-noticed event, President Biden and Xi took the first steps toward building such a regime when they agreed at their recent Peru summit on a declaration stating that “the two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” That means no decision to fire a nuclear weapon can be made by an A.I. bot alone. There always has to be a human in the loop.
On managing climate change, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the U.S., the second largest, need to agree on a set of strategies to get the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — to reduce the ruinous health, economic and extreme weather challenges wrought by climate change, which are going to create increasing disorder in failing states.
As I tried to explain to my Chinese interlocutors on this trip: You think we are each other’s enemy. We might be, but we also now have a big common enemy, just as we did in 1972. Only this time it is not Russia. It’s disorder. More and more nation-states are falling apart — into disorder — and hemorrhaging their people as migrants scrambling to get to zones of order.
It’s not only Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Somalia in the Middle East racked by disorder; it’s also some of China’s best friends in the global south, like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And more than a few participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative to which China has lent billions are struggling — including Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Montenegro and Tanzania. Beijing is now starting to demand its money back from them and has throttled down new lending. But that is just making the crises worse in some of these countries.
Only the U.S. and China working together with the I.M.F. and World Bank will have the resources, power and influence to stem some of this disorder, which is why I repeatedly challenged my Chinese interlocutors: Why are you hanging around with losers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran? How could you be neutral between Hamas and Israel?
The idea that China can thrive in a world shaped by the values of a murderous thief like Putin, who is an agent of disorder, or by fundamentalist Iran, another promoter of disorder and the next country likely to fracture, or by the global south — or by China alone — is crazy.
If I were Trump, I’d explore a “Nixon goes to China” move — a rapprochement between the U.S. and China that totally isolates Russia and Iran. That’s how you end the Ukraine war, shrink Iran’s influence in the Middle East and defuse tensions with Beijing in one move. Trump is unpredictable enough to try it.
Either way, China and America are compelled to work together if there is going to be a stable 21st century. If competition and collaboration give way entirely to confrontation, a disorderly 21st century awaits us both.
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