A great trip

"I think the visit went very well," Bader said, two days after Xi wound up his weeklong trip to the US and the United Nations.

Bader believed Xi had clearly thought and studied a lot before the trip. "He knew what was on the minds of Americans. If you look at his speeches in Seattle, and his appearance at the joint press conference, The Wall Street Journal interview, he addressed all of the issues that were concerns to Americans," Bader said, describing the tone of Xi's speeches as "very constructive, very positive, and not confrontational, not aggressive".

Of the list of concrete achievements on the trip, Bader pointed to the agreements on cybersecurity and climate change as the most significant.

"I think it was a good trip, particularly since the expectation was fairly negative before the trip," he said. In Bader's view, this relationship is always going to be complicated and difficult, with two dramatically different countries, different cultures, different histories, different philosophies and different political systems.

"People's expectations should be realistic about the relationship," he said. "They shouldn't act as if we woke up one day and suddenly discovered that this country doesn't agree with us on everything.

"It's not new, and we should be a little more realistic about the relationship," said Bader, the founding director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.

Encountering China

Unlike many China hands in the US, Bader, 70, majored in American and European history as an undergraduate at Yale University in the mid-1960s. He later received his master's and PhD at Columbia University, also in European history.

But after joining the US Foreign Service in 1975, Bader, who speaks French, was posted to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a place now called Katanga province. He described the place as "completely cut off from the world, no communication, no cables and no nothing".

Not happy at all working there, Bader was looking for his next assignment. A letter for him by his boss in Zaire to the State Department finally reached Richard Holbrooke, then assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Bader became a staff assistant to Holbrooke in 1977.

"It was a pure chance. I had no background on Asia," Bader said.

Though he didn't major in China studies, Bader said that as a graduate student he was interested in Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1971 and 1972.

"The China relationship seems like both a very exciting one and a historically important one, and one that would be good to be associated with," Bader recalled.

Bader felt lucky. Working for Holbrooke had been a great learning experience for him. He described Holbrooke as "one of the greatest diplomats of our nation".

"Seeing his personal style, reading all about Asia and about countries I had never been involved with was the main experience in that job," he said.

It was a time just before China and the US established their diplomatic tie on Jan 1, 1979. Bader said the main job at the State Department was to understand what was happening internally inside China, the path to normalization of relations and what was driving China's foreign policy.

The feeling then was that China was looked upon as unknown, difficult to know, hostile to the Soviet Union and a potential informal ally. China's perception of the world was still a mystery to America, according to Bader.

"It was perceived as a tremendous opportunity for American foreign policy," said Bader, still a junior officer in the late 1970s.

Inside the State Department, a China Working Group had been set up to address all the changes in establishing diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China and to sever ties with Taiwan.

Despite the fresh talk regarding Taiwan's upcoming election, Bader believes what has happened in cross-Strait relations in the last 35 years is largely a success story. The two economies between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan have become completely interdependent; investment ties and people-to-people ties are enormous.

"You know the 400-some flights per week was inconceivable 20 years ago," said Bader, who studied the Chinese language in Taiwan in the 1970s.