Engaging Citizens in U.S.-China Discourse – An Interview with Jason Togut
“One of the great things about Track II is that you’re not tied to your president or political leaders. You can make creative suggestions in your own capacity as a private citizen. So you have more flexibility to talk about difficult issues and creative solutions.”
Jason Togut is a program assistant at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. At the National Committee, he provides support to several Track II dialogues between the United States and China, as well as various other public programs and initiatives. Previously, Mr. Togut worked as a research assistant at the Naval War College and at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. At the Naval War College, he researched Hong Kong’s political trajectory, and at the Watson Institute, he studied the dynamic China-Israel relationship. He spent the summer of 2019 interning at the U.S. Consulate General Shanghai, and the summer of 2018 studying Chinese at National Taiwan University and interning at Geber Brand Consulting. Mr. Togut graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in May 2020, earning a B.A. in international relations and East Asian studies. He has professional proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. In his free time, he enjoys running, traveling, and playing basketball.
The National Committee on United States-China Relations, founded in 1966 by a coalition of scholars, civic, religious, and business leaders, is a non-profit organization in the United States dedicated to enhancing mutual understanding and cooperation between the United States and China. Jason Togut joined the National Committee after graduating from Brown University in 2020. He shares with us his experiences, his work on Track II dialogues at the National Committee, and his thoughts on China-U.S. relations.
How did you become interested in China and China-U.S. relations?
My interest started when I was in elementary school. I grew up in New York City, and I was always surrounded by a lot of people who spoke Mandarin and a very vibrant overseas Chinese community in Flushing as well as New York City’s Chinatown. I was really interested in the Chinese language, specifically in traditional Chinese characters. I thought they were very intricate and different from anything that I’d ever come across. So I started listening, speaking, and writing characters, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to start studying Chinese when I was 14. I studied it throughout high school and had the opportunity to study at Brown with some great professors.
I got interested in U.S.-China relations through the Chinese language and an appreciation for Chinese culture and history. That was a segway into China on the world stage – it is an incredibly important player. China’s rise has taken the world by storm over the past 40 years, and the United States has to find ways to work with China.
Why are you interested in traditional characters?
It’s as old as it gets. From 文言文 all the way to 楷书, you can draw a direct line from traditional characters to pictographs. You can’t see the picture in all the traditional characters, but you can see the picture in more traditional characters than simplified ones. The way the characters were put together just made a lot of sense to me. I can’t handwrite traditional Chinese very well, but I enjoy reading them a lot. Being able to read traditional characters also gave me access to two large Chinese media markets in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
What motivated you to work at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations?
The National Committee has been helping to foster constructive relations and engagement with China since 1966. It has been around since before the establishment of official relations between China and the United States – it was around 13 years before. One of my bosses, Vice President Jan Berris, has been involved in U.S.-China relations for over half a century. She has been at the National Committee helping delegations, organizing events, and really helping to keep people-to-people ties strong between the U.S. and China.
Towards the end of my Brown career, I became really interested in Track II dialogues and constructive dialogues between non-official actors. I participated in the 2019 Strait Talk as a U.S. delegate, and I learned a lot about conflict resolution and was very interested. [So] I looked at the National Committee, which, at that time, had five or six functioning Track II dialogues between the U.S. and China – more than any other organization that I knew. It was producing consensus documents and actually getting people to come to the table to discuss and agree to do things and to convince governments to make policy changes. Fortunately, now I’m working on six Track II dialogues, so it’s a really interesting role.
What is a Track II dialogue?
The best way to explain Track II, I find, is to juxtapose it to Track I.Track I is when governments meet government-to-government, [for example,] when Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, or when Biden and Xi have a call as they did last night (Nov 15, 2021, EST). Usually, the people who are talking are constrained by their own national policy, so they’re only allowed to say certain things based on certain policy objectives – they have to try to convince the other side of something. That’s really what diplomacy is – convincing the other side to try and adopt a new policy while maintaining your own interests.
Track II is [for] people who are not affiliated with the government. It’s a lot of people in business, academia, or retired government officials who really have the ears of policymakers in Washington and Beijing and can come to the table and discuss these really critical issues, but at the same time, are not constrained by their governments. One of the great things about Track II is that you’re not tied to your president or political leaders. You can make creative suggestions in your own capacity as a private citizen. So you have more flexibility to talk about difficult issues and creative solutions.
At the National Committee, we have a dialogue on the rule of law and human rights, where we have practitioners on both sides talking about the really sensitive issues in U.S.-China relations – Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan – in real depth. They are really trying to come to an understanding on all sorts of issues – critical technology, health, thorny economic issues. It allows you to have these difficult and meaningful discussions. We try to come to some kind of a consensus and publish these documents that we write if it’s in the interest of both sides. Hopefully, we can influence governments to change policy.
What are some of the challenges or interesting stories about your work with Track II dialogue?
A lot of Track II dialogue is traditionally about building trust and building rapport. And I’ve had to do that entirely on Zoom, because U.S. dialogue delegations have not been going to China since 2019, and Chinese delegations have not come here [due to travel restrictions]. So every interaction that I’ve had at a Track II setting has been on Zoom. Sometimes they require interpretation, which can be very difficult on Zoom. If any of you have seen Zoom interpretation, sometimes, there are a lot of technical glitches.
These [virtual] dialogues are more formal. There are a lot more formal presentations and a little bit less room for just talking outside of the dialogue. Delegations aren’t getting lunch and dinner together, and they’re not going out for a drink after. They’re not socializing. Now, our dialogues happen over two nights for about three hours each night, as opposed to two or three days of pretty full days before the pandemic.
The Zoom format definitely has some pros. For one, it is very low-cost. If you have a good internet connection and good audio, you can join the meeting. It’s better to talk than not to talk, even if it’s on Zoom and even if we’re talking for much less time than we did before.
How does the deterioration of China-U.S. relations in the past few years affect the prospects of Track II dialogue?
We have to be realistic about what Track II can and cannot do. Both governments are constrained, and the reality of the political situation does mean that Beijing and Washington aren’t listening to the consensus documents as much as they used to. Ten to fifteen years ago, government officials were much more interested in these consensus documents. Now, I think they’re reading them, but I don’t think they’re as influential as they once were. But, I think in terms of exchanging information and connecting experts on both sides, Track II does have a lot of value. And I’m hopeful that Track II will go back to in-person because I think that dynamic is really important.
Track II dialogue was started 30-40 years ago in areas where governments weren’t working, and there was a real protracted conflict. So social actors on both sides of the conflict realized that talking was really important. India and Pakistan officially don’t recognize that each other has nuclear weapons, but there have been Track II dialogues where government officials have gotten together in a semi-official capacity and said, “Hey, we recognize that there are nuclear weapons.” We can’t talk in an official capacity, but in an unofficial capacity, we can try to work something out like Israel and Palestine with the Oslo Accords in 1993. That whole peace process happened because of a Track II dialogue. So it can work and have real significant international impacts.
How do you see the future of China-U.S. relations?
A lot of what I studied in college is quite pessimistic for the future of China-U.S. relations. I read Graham Allison’s book Destined for War, which talked about the theory of rising power challenging the established one, and in 12 out of 16 of those circumstances in history, they’ve gone to war. And people like John Mearsheimer would say, “China is destined to pursue regional hegemony, and eventually, that’ll come in contact with the United States.”
I think there are many points of contention between the U.S. and China, and my hope is that we can carve out areas for cooperation. There are many areas where the U.S. and China have common concerns and shared ideals, particularly on global health, climate, as well as preserving the international financial system. Hopefully, we can work to separate those issues from the more contentious issues in the relationship. People on both sides of the Pacific recognize that the cost of a conflict between the U.S. and China would be unthinkable. It would just be potentially the worst war in human history. Both peoples want to work and do everything that they can to prevent that from happening because they recognize what that would mean.
A lot of people think that Taiwan and the South China Sea are significant flashpoints. They might be right, but I hope that we have the confidence-building measures and crisis management in place to avoid such a reality from arising. If we can continue to talk – if the two leaders continue to speak virtually and hopefully have a real in-person summit at some point, they can send the right signals.
Interviewer: Danny Xu
Editors: Danny Xu, Emily (Jingyi) Zhang, Heidi Yuan
Photo: Courtesy of Jason Togut and the Internet
