Darwin’s Lock: America, China and the Shared Future of Nations.

You moved from competitive aerobatic flying and becoming one of the youngest senior and foreign editors at to living in Beijing in the early 2000s, and later into high-level strategic advisory work in China and at Kissinger Associates. Looking back, what prompted that shift? How has that experience shaped your understanding of what it means to “see clearly” at a time when competing narratives increasingly define global affairs?

I loved my career as a journalist – the war zones, the meetings with heads of state, the power of writing for millions of readers. But the “hands off” nature of the work did not fit me in the end. I was reporting on a world that was changing with incredible, accelerating speed. I did not want to be on the sidelines. I wanted to something. And my personality craved depth.

I had a desire to satisfy a curiosity about how giant historic forces felt when they moved. I wanted to know what was likely to break and what was likely to be built. I had seen this engine of creative destruction at work while covering Silicon Valley as a journalist. I knew that pressure was coming for the world at large.

As foreign editor of Time I had visited China and I had a sense of a potential gathering force there. I wanted to be close to it. And I was interested in the deep question of war and peace, of how tragedy in international relations could be avoided. I wondered: Could I make a difference in US-China relations? So, I decided to devote myself to this problem for a few years.

When I moved to China in 2002, my friends largely thought I was nuts. I walked away from a good career and a comfortable life to spend eight hours a day studying Chinese, living in the smog of developing Beijing and trying to navigate a culture I did not understand in the least.

I did not have a lot of prospects or resources. To supplement the few hours of Chinese class I could afford every day, my “night school” was riding around Beijing by taxi at night talking with the drivers as we went from one Starbucks to another. (Little did I know I would join the board of directors of Starbucks a few years later.) I loved the experience from the first day.

Before I moved from New York to Beijing, a friend gave me some advice: “It’s important to be bilingual, but it is more important to be bicultural.”Even now, after 25 years in China, I still find this is a great spur to action.

Chinese culture taught me very quickly to see differently. And then doing business in China is also a merciless education. Commercial life in China is an instant hit of the sweaty, struggling intensity of a mercilessly competitive and innovative economy. The profound work ethic of the Chinese people is breathtaking, as is the innovation and the speed. To feel these struggles and triumphs up close, alongside friends, is a great education.

After I’d been in China a few years, Henry Kissinger – who had known a great uncle of mine – hired me to run his China business. Henry then asked me to become vice-chairman and co-CEO of his whole firm, which of course I accepted.

I think it’s safe to say no Westerner in all of Chinese history had the sort of access and exposure to the gears of Chinese power that Kissinger had. It was an amazing education. Not only did the two of us spend hours with top Chinese figures; it was also that Henry wanted to understand what he was seeing and hearing, so those intense meetings were paired with days of discussion and debate. It was an honour to be a part of his China life, and to learn from a master how one could be both passionately patriotic about America and also open-minded and curious about China.

My nearly 20 years with Henry also deepened my feeling of responsibility. Was it inevitable that the US and China would be enemies? In his book , Henry ended by explaining that my idea of “coevolution” was the only way forward. My latest book, takes that idea of coevolution and spells it out in detail. I explain that the choice between the US and China isn’t who wins or loses, but something even more severe: between coevolution and coextinction.

In 2004 you coined the “Beijing Consensus” as an alternative to the Washington Consensus. In your new book, , you argue that the US and China are locked in a relationship of “coevolution”, with the stark choice being “coevolution or coextinction”. How has your thinking evolved over the past two decades, and why do you see coevolution, rather than competition or decoupling, as the most useful framework for understanding the future of US-China relations?

When I wrote the Beijing Consensus in 2004, it was a deeply heterodox idea. “There’s only one way to develop an economy” was the general view of economists. Certainly, my own education had been firmly informed by this “Washington Consensus” confidence. What I saw in China made me question that certainty. The weight of Chinese culture and ideas was something I could really feel, from the first moment I stepped off the plane in Beijing.

The country had thousands of years of political theory and history that wouldn’t be shrugged off by new ideas. Life ran as much based on relationships as it did rules. The link between the state and market was completely different than in the West. So, I started to ask if different paths to different kinds of modernity might be possible and even necessary.

As I travelled [in] China, saw where money was made and lost, it became sharply obvious that a different logic was at work. Not one that rejected the ideas of Western economics, but that demanded a different approach.

I developed the idea of coevolution out of some work I was doing on complexity theory for my 2008 book . At that time, I came to see that Darwin’s logic was perhaps the most powerful in all of science: that a simple test – are you fit or not – decides survival. And that pressure either kills something or forces it to evolve. Then I found the idea not just of evolution but of coevolution: that species can work together to become more fit over time.

Well, it was super clear to me that our world was entering a period of really revolutionary change, really an “age of the unthinkable” as I called it. This process would force a fitness test on everything. It would stress-test our politics, our economics, our security and even maybe the Enlightenment values that had organised Western society for hundreds of years.

Many people like to see the world of global affairs as an “I live and you die” sort of battle on every front. But science has shown us that is not the case. If life were only merciless competition, we’d all still be living in caves and banging each other on the head. Much human progress has come from mutually beneficial cooperation. It’s why cities work or nations thrive. The demand to be fit in a really stressful time is so extreme that species will do whatever it takes to survive. So the question is, how might we achieve this for the US and China?

China’s rise has reshaped global power structures in ways few predicted two decades ago, yet Western media and policy circles often struggle to tell nuanced stories about China, oscillating between hype and fear. Based on your experience, what are the biggest blind spots in how China’s rise is understood and covered in the West? How can journalists, policymakers and business leaders tell more accurate, multidimensional stories about China’s trajectory?

Westerners need to make a real effort to see China for what it really is, with no prejudgment, and this takes effort and modesty. Kissinger used to say: “If your mental model about something is wrong, every decision you make will be wrong.”It’s a good point. So much of the problem for Westerners is just an inability to accept Asia as it is: filled with smart, ambitious, driven figures with a rich cultural, scientific and spiritual tradition that is no better or worse than the West, just different. That is the right framework.

I recall people in Washington confidently telling me in 2023 that China was a decade away from developing large language models. Wrong framework, wrong conclusion.

One common error is to zoom in on a single aspect of Chinese life – the political structure, the real estate market, questions about the younger generation – and to tell a whole story of China from a few data points. China is so complex you can tell any story you want about it if you pick and choose your facts. The Western “experts” running around yelling about how Leninist China is cannot explain the biotech revolution or the Shenzhen nightclub scene or the emerging philosophical debate about consciousness of AI using a Daoist framework.

Doak Barnett or John King Fairbank or Ezra Vogel approached China as foreign scholars. Their writing holds up even decades later. They teach that humility is maybe the most important part of curiosity. And that understanding China is not just an intellectual game.

You have to feel China. You cannot know it from a book. I fear too many well-intentioned “experts” on China do not always have that feeling.

It’s probably also of some use to try to give up the inclination to use Western terms to label Chinese situations. That rush to label Chinese using Western political terms has always made me feel a bit uncomfortable.

There is a limit to how far Western ideas can take you in the Chinese context. It’s like trying to describe a basketball game using football terminology. I guess it’s as if Chinese analysts were warning that Trump is a “Hanfeizist”. ( is a third century BC collection of essays about theories of state power.) If this is done in the spirit of opening a discussion about comparative political evolution, that is maybe of some use. But if it’s done to flatten debate and judgment? To distort something complex by simplifying it? Well, it’s not really intellectually honest or wise. For American policymakers it’s dangerous.

The mood in both Washington and Beijing has darkened considerably in recent years. Some argue that the world is entering a new Cold War. Do you agree with that characterisation? Are we entering a fundamentally new era in US-China relations, or is this another phase in a longer cycle of adjustment?

It’s popular to say we’ve entered a new Cold War. But what we face is, as I argue in the book, much more dangerous. The Cold War pitted two ideologically divergent nations against each other in an era of careful nuclear balance. There was a great discrepancy between the abilities of each nation. Our age is much more complex. And more perilous as a result.

China is not the USSR in any sense – not politically, technologically, culturally or historically. The weapons systems of our age are far more dangerous – faster, harder to control, more widespread. And we’re also living in a world that has been globalising for 40 years now, so that has left behind a network of connections that has its own evolutionary logic.

It means danger can spread super quickly. You are what you are connected to, and in our age we are all connected to each other, like it or not. I think one leap we need to make is to stop calling our age the “post-Cold War” era. No one called the Enlightenment the “post-Dark Ages”. We’ve entered a new period. I have called it the “Age of Network Power”, but no matter what you want to call it, the new logic of power is that we are all defined by what we are connected to – and that web around us is, fuelled by data and AI and zero-latency connectivity – changing at unprecedented speed.

I think we’ve entered a new phase of US-China ties. Both nations have the ability to substantially hurt the other. That is new, and it introduces a new phase of deterrence, but also of danger. We are very early in the power phase transition this is causing, in moving from one stable equilibrium to another.

It’s unclear what that next balance point will look like – and we know from science that it is the transitions between equilibria that are the moments of greatest uncertainty, risk and possibility. My point in is that we can move to a new equilibrium of what biologists call “reciprocal helpfulness” in which each nation can become more fit and together influence our changing world.

Think of whatever particular fear might have been haunting you lately – an AI disaster, a biological risk or an economic crisis – in each case imagine a world where the US and China are working together, constantly, to manage these and other risks while also finding productive interconnection. There is no inherent reason this is not possible; it’s just a matter of finding a safe path to get there.

I think arms racing and accidents, racism and misunderstanding, these will all be a part of US-China relations for years to come. Our problem then is how to design a realistic, safe strategy to coevolve, and that is what the book tries to outline.

Many in Washington now view interdependence with China as a strategic vulnerability rather than a source of stability. Has the original case for engagement failed? Why should policymakers embrace a framework of coevolution when both countries increasingly define the relationship in terms of security, technological rivalry and strategic competition? Where does healthy interdependence become dangerous dependency?

Today the US and China have what biologists call “obligate mutualism” – each depends critically on the other. You can try to pretend that this is not the case, that somehow you could just wall off the two nations and each is strong enough to exist in isolation, but that would demand possibly catastrophic adjustments.

China depends on the US for markets, for compute, for education, for financial market discipline and for a list of other elements essential to development. And the US depends on China not only for critical minerals or pharmaceuticals or masses of imported goods, but also for talent (look at who staff most of the essential US AI research labs and companies). It’s not like this interdependence was architected by anyone; it was a result of evolutionary pressures in the global economy.

China and the US both have benefited from this. And one of the lessons of nature is that when you try to unwind a system of obligate mutualism, you usually kill the participants.

But it’s not only that internal dynamic. It’s also the fact that our world is rocking with dangerous crises. The US and China are like two guys wrestling in a house that is on fire. They are fighting the wrong enemy. This lets us see that “interdependence” is not a weakness; it’s the most effective response to new evolutionary pressure.

The fundamental question of evolution is this: can you solve problems faster than they threaten to kill you? This is as true for cells in your body as it was for Greek city-states confronted with Persian attacks in ancient Western history. It’s our question too. And the US and China can best be regarded as problem-solving machines. They are engineered to address the dangers and opportunities that their citizens each face.

The result of 40 years of globalisation is that the US and China each have distinct skills that the other cannot replicate any time soon. Interdependence is important not only as a stabilising force, but because it means each nation is bringing the best ideas and skills to problems of global stability that threaten both countries.

What is the biggest misconception Americans have about China today? And what is the biggest misconception Chinese people have about the United States?

Americans have no sense of how hard-working, creative and energetic the Chinese people are, of how much they are willing to sacrifice for prosperity and stability. And they assume China wants to “beat” America and be number one in the world. I’m not sure that is correct.

Chinese people often misjudge America by only looking at the headlines. What makes America honestly amazing is the power of self-organisation. No nation on earth is as good as the US at bringing diverse groups of people – I mean not only nationally diverse, but also men and women – into productive alignment. There’s a lot that is worrisome about the US situation now, but the ability of America to fuse a sense of personal freedom with a feeling for group ambition is a wonder.

If Washington and Beijing are destined to compete, where do you still see meaningful scope for cooperation? Is there one area where cooperation is not just desirable, but unavoidable?

I think you have to reframe this. It’s a mistake to think of competition and cooperation as binary choices. Our world is full of examples of places where both occur at the same time. It’s no accident that the place where this kind of “coopertition” is most common is Silicon Valley, where firms are extremely comfortable competing and cooperating at the same time. What’s really going on here is information exchange, an understanding that knowing and doing more makes each company more fit for what is ahead. The same is true for the US and China.

It is clear the US and China have a shared interest in limiting nuclear proliferation, in stopping the spread of dangerous weapons, in global financial stability and environmental progress – and a long list of similar issues. But the key is changing how we think about our work in these areas. If the overall relationship is seen in zero-sum terms, then any cooperation becomes impossible. The right choice is to accept the shared destiny of America and China and to then use that fused “coopertition” to develop an approach to the dangers and opportunities of our age.

Taiwan remains widely regarded as the most dangerous flashpoint in the relationship. How do you assess the risks over the next decade, and what concerns you most?

First, we should remember that it’s rarely the most obvious flashpoints that lead to war. Crises can spin out of control no matter where they start. Today there are too many potential hotspots for the US and China and not enough effort to manage them.

Chinese history should reassure us that some safe path can be found. Sometimes in international relations there are issues where you want to speed up the situation, while in others you want to slow it down. It’s important to know the difference.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a new arena of strategic competition. You have said that you “cannot understand the intensity of innovation in China unless you’re there”. What are Western policymakers and executives still getting wrong about China’s AI ecosystem, and what is the biggest blind spot in America’s current AI and China strategy?

What we’re seeing in China today is what I think we can safely call a “full stack fork” in the AI ecosystem. I mean that the whole Chinese AI system – from the way large language models (LLMs) are designed to how chips are used to how systems are deployed, and even in areas like the philosophy of AI-human relations or safety – all of this is shifting into an approach that suits China’s needs and abilities.

Chinese companies have proved themselves to be excellent fast-followers and even fine-tuners in LLM development. To be sure, Westerners completely missed this for the most part. It baffles many serious US AI figures. But I think the split between the two ecosystems is more fundamental and more important. And that is what is really invisible to most Americans.

Another aspect is that success for a nation in the AI future may be less about the strength of the models or the technology, but rather about the ability of a society to absorb the shock of these systems. Chinese society has many “shock absorbers” that may be of use.

The idea of some Americans that it is possible to “strangle” Chinese AI development is misguided. It also misses the fact that Chinese AI systems are now taking paths that US systems will not take. We can see this in areas like the way Chinese are approaching energy efficiency or safety, for example. And in terms of architecture, Chinese sensor-based AI systems and world models may have some real advantages over US ones.

Even the philosophical questions about AI consciousness or human-machine ties take on different aspects when you examine them with, say, a Daoist lens.

Americans like to see AI as a race with China. But it has few characteristics of a race: it’s hard to say what the rules are. There is no clear finish line. It’s not obvious what it means to win.

A coevolutionary framework would encourage interdependence of the AI systems in the US and China, but regard this more as two nations each building gardens in the same ecosystem. Each is different; each designed for national conditions that are distinctive.

But sharing the same larger context and possibly even finding ways to share information to be fitted. This is about cultivation, and careful cultivation, not racing.

Your earlier books, and , argued that leaders fail because they do not understand complexity, networks and the way connection itself transforms the objects it links. Are today’s leaders any better at grasping those forces, or are we still repeating the same mistakes in new forms?

I wish I could say I see complex thinking at work in politics today, but it’s pretty rare. We have to find a way to get leaders to think in biological terms, to understand the ability of systems to evolve and change – and to accept that we live in a complex world, not a complicated one.

When we say “complicated” we mean like a jet engine, something made of lots of parts but fundamentally predictable. A “complex” system is more like a forest – also filled with lots of pieces, but interacting in ways that are hard sometimes to predict or manage.

When you accept that the world is biological in nature, it means you need to pay a lot of attention to the places where resilience could break down. But it also means you really need to find ways to encourage and trust in the self-organisation of the system.

If you could advise President Trump and President Xi on one concrete step each to reduce the risk of conflict, what would those be?

The first leap is accepting a coevolutionary framework. Rather than trying to replace the “obligate mutualism” that ties the US and China today, the right question is “What can each nation do to help both become fit for the world ahead?”Once you get out of an “I live/you die” view, there is a long list of practical things that can be done.

The two should agree to help stop global nuclear weapons proliferation. They should work to establish treaties for space and cyber and AI weapons systems. They should reinvigorate global institutions such as the WTO or the UN. And they should also – and we have an effort trying to start this – use AI tools to help manage the relationship to avoid crises.

But the single most important concrete step is to accept the shared fate of the US and China, and then institutionalise that in deep working groups on the many problems of our age. This should be a historic, important time for diplomacy.

Looking ahead to 2030, paint us two contrasting scenarios: one in which coevolution works, and one in which it fails. What are the key turning points that determine which path the relationship takes?

Imagine in 2030 a world in which the US and China have jointly agreed to work on the major problems of our world – AI safety, global warming, economic stability, nuclear proliferation or the dozens of wars around the planet now.

Consider the possibility of the best minds from each nation asking “how can we solve this problem together” and taking the attitude of being on the same side of the table on these issues of global destiny. At the same time, competition between the countries in science or commerce or finance is intense, but grounded in rules that make for really fair competition.

The path to coextinction is one in which there is no cooperation on these issues. The planet continues to bake, species are destroyed, arms racing tips into conflict, nations struggle against economic uncertainty and face wild domestic political pressures, and racism and nationalism begin to define how each nation sees the other.

The key turning point? I don’t think there’s one. That old line about health, that “the best time to take care of your health was 20 years ago, the next best time is now” applies here. Now is the best time to reframe relations and build a safe system so coevolution can begin. Every passing day means lost opportunity.