Speaker:Robert Lee Suettinger, Former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, National Intelligence Counsel

Discussant: Arunabh Ghosh, Professor of History, Harvard University

Over the past year, Robert Suettinger has spent much time monitoring domestic politics in the People’s Republic of China, much as he did as an apprentice political-military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency fifty years ago. He notes that there seems to be even less agreement now than at the end of Mao Zedong’s life about what’s really going on. Depending on who one reads, listens to, or watches, and in what language, he argues, some see an economic behemoth with a trillion-dollar trade surplus, a modern navy bigger than ours and global aspirations, all under the firm control of Xi Jinping. Chinese diaspora observers see a tottering tyranny, its economy crumbling, ordinary people sullen and rebellious, and Xi under challenge by a resurgent reformist movement.

Which is it and where is China going? Based on his study of Hu Yaobang’s life and elite politics in Beijing, Suettinger suggests a weakened Xi Jinping might be facing a situation similar to that of Hua Guofeng in 1980-81.  

Robert Lee Suettinger is a historian of contemporary elite politics in the People’s Republic of China. He recently completed a biography of Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), General Secretary and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party of China, published by Harvard University Press, under a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Suettinger was a Senior Advisor and Consultant at the Stimson Center, Analytic Director at CENTRA Technology Inc., a Senior Policy Analyst at RAND and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He retired from US government service in 1998, after nearly 24 years in the intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracies. 

He joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, and spent his entire career in the analysis of Asian affairs. After several years as an analyst and manager in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, he was assigned as Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.  Subsequently, he served for five years as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia on the National Intelligence Council.

Beginning in March 1994, Suettinger was Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, where he assisted National Security Advisors Anthony Lake and Samuel R. Berger in the development of American policy toward East Asia.  He returned to the NIC as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in October 1997. Suettinger holds an M.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.  He served in the U.S. Army in the then Republic of Vietnam in 1969-70.