How Would You Spend (the Next) $300 Million on U.S.-China Relations?

Orville Schell:

When Stephen A. Schwarzman announced his new $300 million program aimed at sending foreign scholars to Tsinghua University in Beijing the way Rhodes Scholarship, set up by the businessman and statesman Cecil Rhodes in 1902 began sending American scholars to Oxford, he limned an interesting new piece of the U.S.-China puzzle. With the United States and Chinese Governments responsible for working out the myriad intractable problems that beset our bilateral relations, and with the U.S. government broke and as well as broken and thus seemingly incapable of taking on any sort of meaningful forward-looking new initiatives—even to save its own reputation, much less the country from further erosion —it is increasingly obvious that if any remedy is to be found for the fraught relationship between the two countries, help will have to come from some non-governmental quarter. And, it is here that the Schwarzman Scholars, for which Schwarzman himself has contributed $100 million and is in the process of inveigling another $200 million from other corporate and private donors, presents an interesting alternative scenario for bi-lateral remedy. While this one program will in itself certainly have a salutary effect on our relations - especially by helping to beat back the profound state of ignorance about China that is ever aloft in America, perhaps more importantly, it points a way forward for others to occupy different pieces of the non-governmental real estate to fortify interchange and understanding between the two countries. While the Schwarzman Scholars program is somewhat generic in the sense that it welcomes comers from all fields, one could well imagine similar other efforts consecrated to fields such as science and climate change; culture and performance; diplomacy and disarmament; public health and pandemics, etc.

But there is one obvious lacuna here: while civil society has grown in China, it still exists in something of a legal limbo, and thus deprives a truly scaled-up non-governmental initiative from North America and Europe of strong enough civil society partners (other than GONGO, government organized non-governmental organizations) with which to team-up in China. Indeed, one could even imagine a Schwarzman-like initiative that focused on philanthropy and civil society itself.

So, while this new Schwartzman initiative may itself end up having a significant long-term effect on U.S.-China relations, for me its far grander import is that it sets something of a model that brings governmental scale resources to bear on the problem and which, if matched on the Chinese side by a like-minded effort from China’s new billionaires, could set off a very positive movement that might become as competitive as an arms-race, but it would be a welcome race to the top of the pyramid of virtue, not the bottom.