EDITOR’S note:

FEW Western politicians know China as well as Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister who spent time in the 1980s in Beijing as a diplomat.

Since he retired from politics in 2013, he has channeled much of his energies into a new academic endeavor. He is now a Senior Fellow with Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he leads a major research on alternative futures for Sino-US relations.

Mr. Rudd recently spoke to Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao about how China and the US can build trust and avoid misperceptions, and what the two countries can do to prevent a possible “drift” of arguably one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world.

Q: What are your aims as part of the US-China research project you are leading at Harvard?

A: Let me tell you what I am trying to do. All I’m trying to do is, number one, take seriously Xi Jinping’s call for “A New Type of Great Power Relationship.” And I put my mind in the last 12 months to what we can do to build a concrete conceptual proposal and operational proposal which works for both China and the United States.

What I mean by “works” is : sufficiently embracing Chinese values and interests, and American values and interests, to provide a common path for the future.

The alternative is to have no such common concept or narrative for the future. If that’s the case, I always fear that [the two nations] begin to engage in what I describe as a strategic “drift.” That is, inertia becomes drift, which becomes often a current in the wrong direction.

So what happens in international relations often is that countries can often think the worst of each other. As a consequence, relationships begin to drift. However, if the countries have a common narrative about what future they want for each other, or what future they want together, they tend instead, through their political leadership, to row against the tide and head in a different direction.

That, I believe, is what Xi Jinping is trying to do with his concept of “A New Type of Great Power Relationship”, rather than simply drift into long-term crises or conflicts with the United States, to construct a different political reality.

Q: What can be done to address the deficit of trust between China and the US?

A: How do you overcome a trust deficit? What’s the answer for that? You can either do one of two things.

The first is, you can issue a statement today saying from tomorrow morning, at 9 o’clock, we are going to trust each other. And that is nonsense.

Alternatively, what you can do is say: here are a number of areas which are important for both of us, where we can build trust step by step over time.

And the concept I would articulate for doing that is to feel the stones to cross the river. That is, it all looks difficult to start with, but if you feel the first stone — which might be practical cooperation in the area of bilateral investment; you feel the second stone — it might be to begin to develop very basic confidence and security-building measures; the third stone — is that you might have a bilateral declaration on climate change; suddenly, what you find is that trust tends to build on trust, just as distrust tends to build on distrust.

So the concept I’ve articulated is that you build strategic trust over time, in what I describe as the constructive areas of the relationship.

And again words are important. There are real differences between China and America. However, there are areas where they can not just cooperate, but they can constructively work with each other.

The third point is that if you look at each item of joint construction, then it becomes a stone, and as you cross the river, you’ll feel more of the stones. That is how you build trust over time. That’s my view.

Q: What do you think of the room for misperception between the US and China?

A: It is real. My view is that in the China-US relationship, if you have a glass of water, and hold it up, I would say one third of the glass would be made up of real, objective differences between the two countries.

One third of the glass, I think, is made up of genuine misperceptions of each other’s intentions and actions. And the other third of the glass is made up of areas in which you can already commence, undertake and develop further constructive cooperation with each other.

So what’s my mission in life?

How do you encourage the third part of the glass to become stronger and stronger?

How do you reduce the second part of the glass, which is based on misperceptions?

And how do you prevent the first part of the glass from getting out of control?

That’s the conceptual framework, and, I think, useful.

If you don’t have a conceptual framework which recognizes all those three realities, what happens is that individual diplomats or political participants in the relationship will emphasize just one part of the realities. They will emphasize just the objective differences and say the rest doesn’t exist. Or you have someone else who is so misguided as to think that the entire relationship is exclusively governed by misperceptions. I think that’s nonsense, because there are real and objective differences. Just as there are those who say they are only going to concentrate on the constructive elements and forget about the realist problems, which exist.

So my argument is: we need an integrated framework of what I describe as constructive realism, which builds strategic trust over time.

And if you’ve got strategic trust, which is made up of goodwill based on areas of multiple engagements and common problem-solving, creating real areas of agreements over time — bilaterally, regionally, globally — and at the same time you start to reduce the misperceptions, then you start to develop the political capital and the diplomatic capital to deal with the most fundamental and underlying realistic differences.

That’s why a conceptual framework is quite important. Otherwise, you just snatch one part of the reality and forget about everything else.

So you need a conceptual framework which embraces all these dimensions simultaneously, and a political agreement at the top which can drive the full agenda forward, not just parts of it.

That’s why on balance I’m optimistic about this relationship. The easiest thing to do about the China-US relationship is to be a professional pessimist, and I just regard that as intellectually lazy, and probably personally lazy.

Q: There is a saying that in Asia-Pacific region, the economy depends on China while the security issues depend on the US. Do you think this dual structure is sustainable?

A: First of all I dispute the premise; I don’t think that’s the reality. If you look at the pattern of economic activity across Asia, it is diverse, it is intra-regional, and China is enormously significant, but not exclusively significant.

Similarly, in terms of military realities within the region, it is not simply the American equation which is dominant. There are a whole range of other military players in the region as well, including China, Japan, Vietnam and other countries.

So my point is this: given that complexity, the most intelligent thing we can do in the region is to begin to develop, over time, a concept of regional community. And that’s why I’d like to see developed over time, the elementary parts of an Asia-Pacific Community.

Which is, you begin with the most elementary forms of cooperation in security, basic confidence and security-building measures.

How do you avoid incidents at sea being escalated? How do you expand, for example, and create the political capital to bring together, at present, conflicting concepts of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), so that we benefit all the economies equally across the region?

These are the sorts of things which come out of the development of an inclusive regional institution. The problem in East Asia at the moment is that we don’t have such an institution. We have APEC on the economies, and we have very weak institutions dealing with the security policy architecture. And our model for the future should be ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), because there is an institution which began with very humble beginnings, involving a number of non-Communist states by and large in Southeast Asia, confronting a bunch of Communist states in Indo-china.

What we have 40 years later, 10 countries with vastly different political systems, but who since 1975 have not really ever had conflict with each other, and generated extraordinary economic growth, and with the genuine sense of community.

So therefore, if we evolve the Asia-Pacific Community, we should grow it out of the common experiences of ASEAN. And that’s why I believe in the principle of ASEAN centrality to the evolution of the Asia-Pacific Community.

Q: What kind of international regimes or organizations are needed to ensure deepened cooperation among the Asia-Pacific Community?

A: The foundation stone of the APC, or the Asia Pacific Community, already exists. It’s the East Asian Summit.

It has all 18 countries around the table, three from Northeast Asia, 10 from Southeast Asia, Australia, India, New Zealand, plus the US, plus Russia. Everyone’s there. Secondly, it has an open agenda. Thirdly, we just need the diplomatic imagination to evolve it into a much more robust direction.