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As Special Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger, Winston Lord traveled with him on his secret 1971 trip to China and then with President Richard M. Nixon the following year. He sat in on some of the most crucial meetings that led to China’s opening to the West, and brought the United States and China closer together, including every meeting that Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford and Dr. Kissinger held with Chairman Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. He later served as Ambassador to China. Mr. Lord, 82, now lives in New York with his wife, the novelist Bette Bao Lord. What follows are lightly edited excerpts of our Q. and A. last week.

Q: Just over a week ago, a group of 100 leading foreign policy experts and former government officials released a statement calling for greater cooperation between the U.S. and China to deal with what has become a global health crisis  — the emergence of Covid-19.  Clearly, there has not been much cooperation but instead animus between the two countries. Why were you one of the signatories of this open letter?

A: We were concerned and outraged by some of China’s actions following the outbreak of the coronavirus. But we thought it is in our national and global interest to save lives and prevent future catastrophes. At that time, the cross-Pacific invective and lack of cooperation were at their peak. The situation has eased somewhat. And so we wanted to encourage the two countries to come together in this critical period.

Q: Let’s start with China. How has Beijing handled the outbreak of the coronavirus and what has become a global health crisis, a pandemic?

A: Well, China covered it up when it first emerged in Wuhan. There’s the outrageous treatment of Chinese doctors, people who were trying to warn about the dangers. And there was a lack of cooperation with the U.S. Also, the propaganda they’ve released has tried to put the blame for this health crisis on other countries. They even circulated rumors that the virus started in the U.S. So in drafting this open letter, we had to hold our nose because of what China has been doing recently. They’ve continued to issue suspicious statistics on the numbers of cases and continued vicious invectives against the U.S.

Q: And how has the Trump administration handled things?

A:  Let me be blunt. I believe President Trump and his toadies and enablers have been killing and ruining the lives of countless Americans. Whatever the Trump administration has done well has come too late and been forced on him by health experts. There has been the continual downplaying of the seriousness of the issue; a refusal to call for a national lockdown; playing states off against one another for medical supplies; blaming China, the media, the World Health Organization and the Obama administration for various things. The daily White House press conferences are doing much more harm than good. It’s a daily reality TV show and campaign rally, filled with outright lies. We should let the doctors explain how to manage and get us out of the crisis. The U.S. has the best health care system in the world, and yet we now have the largest number of Covid-19 cases, and the largest number of deaths. And we had two months’ warning!

Q: The hostilities between Washington and Beijing predate Covid-19. Can you step back and put these recent disputes into context?

A: Yes, before the virus, U.S.-China relations were at the worst juncture since the opening to China that I was involved in in the early 1970s, when I traveled to China with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. A rising power and an existing power are going to face challenges. But I would put the overwhelming balance of the blame for the deteriorating relations between the two countries on China and President Xi Jinping. He stepped up repression at home and provocation abroad. China has been rolling back reforms and interfering in other societies. I’m not saying we didn’t make mistakes. But the core problem came out of Beijing. The Obama administration began to recognize this, and so there was a pivot to emphasize Asia. You can argue that China started to be more assertive from the 2008 financial crisis. The real turn came under Xi. That’s why the Obama administration came up with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the patrols in the South China Sea, going after cybertheft and expanding our presence in the region. The U.S. was shifting to Asia and balancing China. So let’s be clear, the problems with China pre-date Trump.

Q: We’ve seen the U.S. take a much stronger position toward China, including prosecuting and blocking Huawei, the F.B.I. on the hunt for spies, cyber investigations. This has been rather striking. The mood in Washington is remarkably hostile towards China. Is the administration doing the right thing?

A: The Trump administration has made some good moves, but its overall approach is fatally flawed. It was correct to label China a strategic competitor. It was correct to respond to unacceptable interference in our society, through spying, cybertheft, pressuring Chinese students here, covert influence in various institutions and grossly unbalanced media access . China has been more aggressive in the South and East China Seas, and the administration has responded with more patrols. Chinese economic practices have been mercantilist, and some technologies pose security problems. The administration has responded, though not in the most effective ways. China has been criminal in Xinjiang and on human rights generally. There has been stronger support for Taiwan, which China is squeezing. With regard to what the administration has done, that’s the positive news.

Q: What is the negative news?

A:  Despite what I’ve just said, the administration is messing up the China challenge.  There’s the danger of descending into all-out confrontation. We also have to be wary of encouraging anti Chinese-American sentiment in this country. Most fundamentally, the Trump administration is subverting the three key pillars of our relationship, our democratic strength, our allies and our global institutions. We should pursue smart competition. We should treat the China challenge as a wake-up call, a Sputnik moment. China has huge problems. We have huge assets. But Trump is squandering them.

Q: What more can you say about these key pillars?

A: First, we need to get our own act together. Let’s make ourselves competitive in education, improve our infrastructure and focus on advanced and innovative technologies. We also need to project that we have a well-functioning democratic society. Second, we should be working with our friends and allies. Instead, Trump has exchanged love letters with Xi, Putin and Kim, while he picks fights with our friends and allies. We have friends around the world. China has few real friends. We should be forging a united front, for example, on economic issues, where we can have leverage with China. Third is multilateral institutions. We ought to be showing leadership, instead of abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Also, the Iran deal: We were controlling its nuclear program, and now it’s moving ahead again. And on the abandoned climate change agreement: Trump is rolling back regulations. We should be working with the Chinese in these areas. So while the administration has made some good steps with regard to China, those positives are dwarfed by the mistakes.

Q: The pendulum has swung so sharply against China in recent years that people have begun to ask how we got here and to question whether there were failed U.S. policies that brought us to this stage. What went wrong in the relationship?

A: There are people who even say we should have never engaged with China. But what was the alternative? Do you declare China an enemy? Try to contain it? That was impossible. You can argue that we were slow to respond in some areas, but the idea we shouldn’t have engaged is foolish.

Q: During the Clinton administration, a decision was made to delink human rights concerns from the economic relationship with China. This cleared the path for China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001. Since then, the country has made enormous economic strides. American companies have outsourced manufacturing to China. And Beijing, emboldened, has used its clout to punish trading partners for policies it does not like; and pressure public and private actors to remain silent on human rights issues.  You were at the center of some of those debates. Some say it is time to reconnect human rights and economics with respect to China policy. Where do you stand?

A:  There’s a lot to unpack there, and I will try to be brief. The thrust of your question is sound, given China’s egregious use of its economic clout and the impulse to respond. Under President Clinton we had two stages on this. In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, we did indeed try the link. I negotiated a deal with Senator George Mitchell and Rep. Nancy Pelosi that conditioned Most Favored Nation status on improvements in human rights. The conditions were meaningful but sufficiently modest that Beijing might be willing to meet them. I was hailed as a hero. We made modest progress that year, but the business community and economic agencies undercut us, and the Chinese stiffened. So when MFN came up for renewal, we delinked and pursued human rights in other ways rather than crippling all trade or pretending the Chinese had made significant progress. There were calls for me to be fired. Today a renewed linkage across the board would be even less feasible. Xi, more repressive even than his predecessors, would never budge, and the cutoff of economic ties would cost much bigger losses for American businesses and jobs. I am, instead, for targeted use of linkage and sanctions for especially severe human rights abuses. For example, I support the steps taken against companies and individuals with respect to the Xinjiang gulags. Similarly, we should not trade in products that help Beijing crush its citizens. Our tech companies should ask themselves whether they want to aid Chinese government surveillance. These are just some examples of a select rather than an ineffective meat hammer approach. Meanwhile, we should press human rights vigorously on other fronts, such as continually raising it in public and private forums, increasing funding for organizations like the NED, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, and deploying technology to leap over the Great Firewall of Chinese censorship and fake news. The sad reality is that none of this is going to do very much. We must nevertheless persist, to reflect our values and support reformers and brave dissidents within China. 

 Q: What exactly was your role at the time? And who called for your firing?

A: I was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs. The President and Secretary of State Warren Christopher appointed me as point man to negotiate a deal with Congress. The mood there was bellicose, calling for immediate cut off of trade or heavy conditions, even beyond human rights. I was called a hero because I negotiated such a restrained package in face of these pressures, one that might actually succeed with Beijing. There were firing calls in the media, for example in Newsweek, usually with anonymous sources, from economic agency officials and Congress people, as well as think tank personnel. I don’t want to exaggerate; it was not an avalanche, and I was never close to being fired.

Q: Looking back over these decades, what’s your assessment of the China engagement strategy, which has been carried out by successive administrations?

A: The Republican and Democratic administrations, from the opening with Nixon in the ’70s down to the Obama administration, essentially followed the same path: opening and engagement with China. It was always hedged with military preparedness and our allies. They hoped it would lead to a loosening of political controls inside China and make Beijing a responsible stakeholder in the global system. We thought it was in the national interest, and the world’s interest, to engage and to cooperate whenever and wherever we could and to push back where China was out of bounds.

Q: Are you disappointed?

A: We’re all disappointed. They have become increasingly repressive under Xi. Their record is not all negative. On the international system, when it suits their interest, they will find ways to be helpful. For example, climate change, Iran, U.N. peacekeeping and anti-piracy. But they are undermining the global system in areas like the rule of law, human rights, the W.T.O. and sanctions.

Q: What’s the first thing we need to do to fix the relationship?

A: To really improve U.S.-China relations, we would need to get rid of both Xi and Trump.

Q: What happened? Did China really change? Were things working and then something changed about their path, their policies or direction? Some analysts say Beijing’s policies didn’t fundamentally change, while others say that under Xi Jinping there’s been a dramatic shift toward nationalism. How do you see it?

A: It’s a terrific question. I don’t have a firm answer. They’ve had thousands of years of greatness. China is, of course, the Middle Kingdom. They also suffered through a century of humiliation. I figured they’d want to ascend; they’d want to be a regional and eventually a global power. I was never sure of how soon or long it would take for them to desire to be a world power. I believed they might seek to reform rather than upend the international system, which they’ve benefited from. I thought they might follow Deng Xiaoping’s policy of lying low and bide their time, until they were stronger. I was not naive about the challenge that was coming at some point. 2008 was a wake-up call. Beijing felt we got the world into this crisis through Western ineptitude. They gained confidence, even hubris. They did better in the short run. Now they should assert themselves. Nationalism took hold. It was time to rise, and under Xi, to export the “China Model” to the world. Many elites in China also felt that former President Jiang Zemin and former President Hu Jintao were not strong enough. They weren’t asserting China’s power. Xi sensed that many people held that view. So he has used every lever to get more personal power and to expand the Communist Party’s role everywhere. 

Q: So if that’s really where we are, what are the solutions? How do we fix things? How do the world’s two superpowers get along?

A: As long as we have Trump and Xi, it will be tough. It will be tough no matter who we have in the White House to deal with Xi.  The crisis that predates the virus is really China’s fault. But now Trump is also the problem. It’s puzzling how he can say he loves Xi. It’s disconcerting to hear how much he loves dictators. But let me be clear, we should not treat this as an inevitable conflict, as a Thucydides Trap moment. We should work with China where we can, even as we push back. Our main emphasis, though, has to be what we do as a country. We don’t want to be hysterical. We have to get our act together. Again, we should consider this our wake-up call, our Sputnik moment, and not treat it as a zero-sum game. We should compete with confidence.

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