Nicholas Burns discusses U.S.-China relations and the energy transition in a talk at MIT
Burns: “We cannot afford to be number two in military power ten years from now”
On Feb. 10, former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns gave a talk at MIT about the current state of U.S.-China relations and the importance of advancing the energy transition for both countries. The event, organized by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), received over 200 attendees. In his talk, Burns discussed major areas of competition between the U.S. and China and how the two countries can cooperate in areas such as clean energy and climate change.
From 2021 to 2025, Burns served as the U.S. Ambassador to China. As ambassador, Burns oversaw 48 U.S. government agencies at the U.S. Mission in China, including the Beijing embassy and four consulates. Throughout his career in diplomacy, Burns served six presidents and nine secretaries of state. Currently, Burns is an international relations professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and a faculty affiliate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Burns began the talk by underscoring that the U.S. and China are the world’s top two global powers due to both countries’ position as leaders in the global economy, military, and technology. “These are the only two countries that affect everybody else in the international system,” Burns said.
Before further discussing the two countries’ diplomatic relationship, Burns also took a moment to praise China’s higher education system. From his visits to major Chinese universities, Burns was impressed by the “seriousness of purpose,” the quality of students and faculty, and the merit-based structure. One aspect that stood out to Burns in particular was the country’s emphasis on technology in higher education. He cited a 2025 Economist article that found that 36% of undergraduate entrants in China declared engineering, whereas only 5% of undergraduates in the U.S. receive an engineering degree.
Burns then transitioned to discussing the current political relationship between the U.S. and China, which he described as “highly competitive” and “adversarial.” He broke down the relationship into four areas: military, technology, trade, and human rights.
Using his hands to draw an imaginary map of the Indo-Pacific, Burns stated that the U.S. and China are competing for military power in a region which he called “the power map of the world.” He pointed out that the Indo-Pacific includes four of the five largest economies of the world by GDP (the U.S., China, Japan, India) and, in his opinion, the four strongest militaries globally.
Burns cited China’s major advancements in military technology as a contributor to military competition, specifically the increase in aircraft carriers and improvement in ballistic missiles that now have greater geographical reach. “We cannot afford to be number two in military power ten years from now,” Burns said. “That’s not going to be in the interest of the United States, because we are on [the] Indo-Pacific.”
Besides military power, technology is another critical area of competition. Burns stated that a country’s technological progress comes not only from being the “first mover,” but also from being the “first adapter.”
“The Chinese are very skilled in terms of industrial process and often adapting quickly,” Burns said. He used the AI company DeepSeek as an example, as its model was not only the first to arrive in the market, but was also novel for its lower cost compared to other models like ChatGPT. Burns connected a country’s technological strength with military power, stating that one factor in shaping war, such as the Russo-Ukrainian War, is the “technologies in the battlefield.”
On trade, Burns described the $750 billion two-way trade relationship between the U.S. and China as “a difficult relationship to manage.” Burns first cited intellectual property theft as a key problem, drawing from his experience working with American CEOs and companies. “The Chinese state uses its power to help Chinese companies rip off the intellectual property of foreign competitors,” he said.
Burns also noted the practice of “forced technology transfer,” where non-Chinese companies must have a Chinese joint venture partner to enter the Chinese market, as “predatory.”
“They want you to share your most sophisticated technology with them, or they’ll sink you in that market or eject you from the market,” Burns said. He further noted that while this violates the World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations, the WTO is “kind of moribund.”
Burns addressed the outright trade war between the U.S. and China as another challenging aspect of trade relations. Noting that tariffs once reached 145% and 125% from the U.S. on China and China on the U.S. respectively in 2025, he expressed concern about the intensity. “Those level tariffs, had they been sustained, would have meant zero trade between the two countries.” Burns characterized the current situation as a “standstill,” citing China’s policy on export controls in rare earth metals as key in forcing Trump back to negotiations.
Burns also specified China’s focus on a 5% annual GDP growth as a “pernicious aspect” of the trade dilemma. He described the “Chinese playbook” — where China pushes out manufactured products below the cost of production to squash competitors and grab domestic market share in Japan, North America, and Europe in a practice called “dumping”— as effective, noting that China now makes up 33% of global manufacturing. Burns contextualized the high tariffs on Chinese clean energy technology as responsive to this practice, noting that a host of other countries including India, Turkey, South Africa, and the European Union all raised tariffs; in addition, the Biden administration’s heavy tariffs that included “100% tariff on Chinese EV, 50% on lithium batteries, and 25% on solar panels.”
Burns discussed values as the last major area of competition between the U.S. and China, specifically beliefs in civil liberties and human rights as a key difference between the two countries. He illustrated his point by using Jimmy Lai, the founder of the Apple Daily newspaper, as an example. On Feb. 9, Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison for national security concerns. Burns considered Lai’s conviction to be unjust. “What was his crime? He ran a newspaper and a news service in China from the 1980s all the way through to the big demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019 and he has spent the last five years in solitary confinement.” Burns noted the support of Trump, Prime Minister Takaichi of Japan, and European Union leaders for his release as symbolic in nature, and reiterated his hope for Lai’s humanitarian parole. “That’s a symbol of this huge difference between our two governments about the type of societies we want to have and the type of rights that we want individuals to have,” he said.
While Burns maintains that the U.S. and China are competitors, he emphasized the need to manage competition between the U.S. and China such that escalation does not occur. He also stressed that while dialogue between military leaders is necessary, Chinese military officials have historically not been cooperative. He referred to the 2001 Hainan Island incident, where an American intelligence aircraft and Chinese fighter jet collided over the South China Sea, leading to the detainment of the surviving American crew, as an example of hazardous communication difficulties. He recalled that it took Secretary of State Colin Powell “three days even to get his Chinese interlocutor on the phone, so we’ve got to normalize this kind of communication and engagement.”
Although the U.S.-China relationship may sound “pretty harrowing,” Burns argued that the two agree on some issues, highlighting climate change and AI as areas of important areas of collaboration between the two countries moving forward. Burns noted that the U.S. and China are the two largest global emitters, and that both countries historically took climate issues seriously in negotiations such as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Burns emphasized that while the two countries dealt with climate issues differently — China’s intense focus on renewable tech like solar energy and lithium-ion batteries in contrast with the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act providing $369 billion in tax incentives and programs for a greener economy — the two countries could learn from each others’ strengths. “We need to strengthen our own industrial and scientific basis, tech basis on cars that now has now gone wayside in the current administration,” Burns said. “We did believe that the Chinese need to do more on methane, on nitrous oxide, and certainly the burning of coal.”
Burns also appreciated the strong consensus between the U.S. and China on AI and nuclear safety. Burns quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping, stating, “Human beings should be in control of nuclear weapons, not AI systems.” He found this statement to be hopeful, given that there has been competition and mistrust in both areas between the two countries. “We’re entering a really, in many ways, hopeful part of human history,” Burns said. “You want women and men with a conscience, with a heart, with a brain thinking about the welfare of eight billion people to make these decisions.”
Burns acknowledges that many issues between the U.S. and China have yet to be solved, but he remains optimistic about the coexistence of competition and peace. He pointed out the diversity in the audience, as many were foreign nationals. “The faith of everybody in this room and all of the countries is linked together by these huge transnational challenges,” Burns said. “So we’ve got to learn to compete and yet live in peace with each other in the process.”