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Yascha Mounk on China and Western Liberalism

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Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.

Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo coming to you this week from Beijing, where I will be throughout September. If you are around, drop me a note and say hi.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

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I’ve developed a really keen interest in trying to understand the perspectives of smart people, especially public intellectuals, who have reach and influence and who are only recently starting to really grapple with understanding China and all that it means.

I know that this show often features academics, diplomats, analysts, or journalists who are all people deeply steeped in China and who have areas of real China expertise. But I find it just as valuable sometimes to talk with people from non-China backgrounds, observant, analytical people who’ve been focused on other things and are just now kind of turning their attention to China.

It serves as a kind of reality check and often a very good way to get a sense of the state of the discourse viewed from the outside, outside of the fractious world of China specialists. That’s why I invite people like Anne-Marie Slaughter or Adam Tooze onto the show. I find that people like this can often point things out to me that I’d simply not otherwise have noticed.

So today I am really delighted to welcome Yascha Mounk to the show.

Yascha is a political scientist, writer, and yes, public intellectual who has written really extensively about democracy, pluralism, and the challenges facing liberal societies in the 21st century.

He’s the founder of Persuasion, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where I’ve read a lot of him, and of course the host of the Good Fight podcast, which I’ve listened to a lot.

With as much avidity as I have read his writing, I had the pleasure of meeting him very briefly in Shanghai earlier this year when he did me the tremendous honor of attending a little talk I gave. It feels especially fitting to reconnect here because Yascha has just published a two-part essay, a little series on China, one cataloging what he sees as its remarkable strengths, the other what he fears may be its deep weaknesses.

For liberals in the West, and cards on the table, neither I nor I think it’s safe to say my guest today really shies away from that label as a Western liberal, China poses a dilemma that is as psychological, really, as it is political.

Some, I think, have tried earnestly to learn from what they see China as having done right. Others have looked on with envy, chiefly at its,

apparent abundance.

I say that with deliberate word choice. And some are frustrated by the well-intentioned regulatory safeguards that can prevent us from building in our own societies. And so they look at China with a certain sort of starry-eyed aspect. Still, others have really responded with very deep skepticism.

Sometimes it’s healthy. It’s usually healthy. Sometimes it’s merely reflexive. Many have resorted to self-soothing to cope, while some even self-identified liberals have succumbed to full-blown moral panic or joined the course of warmongering.

So, in short, China’s rise forces liberals to reckon with questions about values, governance, and pluralism. It’s not always pretty, but it does strike at the core of our own political identity.

And Yascha, in his inimitable way, has jumped into that thicket. Yascha Mounk, welcome to Sinica.

“Thank you so much, Kaiser. It’s a real pleasure to be on.”

Yascha:

Great, great, great. So, let me first give you just the tiniest bit of a ribbing for indulging in that conversations-with-cab-drivers cliché.

“I know, I know.”

Yeah, it’s a bit Tom Friedman, right?

“It is. But in my defense, I don’t speak the language very well, and I’m very conscious of speaking to an audience, the median member of which is going to know a lot more about China than I do and probably speak a lot better Chinese than I do.”

But I do think that if you’re in a place and have a lot of conversations with people, you can learn something about that place, particularly if you’re not just speaking with the help of interpreters.

And as you pointed out, I’m just really at the beginning of trying to learn about China. I was able to be in China for a while in June. And frankly, one reason why I take as many cabs as I can is that it’s the best language lesson.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you’re taking language classes, which I was, you’ll always speak with a teacher with a pretty standard accent.”

Right, right.

Whereas if you’re taking cabs, then you’re going to get the accent of whichever part of the country they’re from. And that’s actually going to improve your comprehension skills a lot more than sitting in a classroom.

Yascha: So when I’m in Shanghai, I try to take as many cabs as possible. I have to talk to the cab drivers about something. And so sometimes I end up learning something that I put in the very few essays I’ve written about China in my life.

But I’m aware of it. I’m aware of a pitfall. I’m aware of a cliché.

“You know, I have to also say, I mean, I find it’s actually useful. I talk to them all the time as well.”

Yascha: I mean, what else are you going to do? You’re stuck in a closed space with somebody for at least half an hour when you’re going pretty much anywhere in any of the big cities in China. So no reason not to talk to them.

And by the way, the same is true in the United States.

I mean, I think part of a sort of talking-to-cab-driver cliché comes from the idea that:

• Here I am, a white Westerner who doesn’t really know the country.
• I turn up and I speak to free cab drivers.
• I think I’ve perfectly understood it.

And certainly, if you go into it with that attitude, you’re going to get things very badly wrong. But I always learn from talking to cab drivers in the States as well.

I mean, I was in Washington, D.C. about a month ago and spoke to an Ethiopian-American cab driver, a guy who grew up in Ethiopia and moved to the United States when he was about 30 years old, who doesn’t like Trump and was telling me about what he dislikes about Trump.

And then he was saying,

“But, you know, I’m glad they sent him a National Guard because D.C. is really unsafe. And I feel like finally somebody is doing something about that.”

I don’t personally agree with that cab driver, but that gave me an interesting point of information about how some people are thinking about this.

Kaiser: Sure, sure. Absolutely.

No, no. I mean, I was really just kidding, but I didn’t expect I want to get into it quite so deep.

But no, I think you’ve raised some very, very good points. And, yeah, I definitely enjoy my conversations with Uber drivers and whatnot whenever I’m in the States as well.

So your essays, including what I read about your 21 observations on China from your brief earlier visit, are quite textured. I think they’re really quite nuanced and very personal. I really enjoyed reading them.

So tell me about the process for you-sort of coming to the decision to come and spend months actually living in China. Was there some point of epiphany or a sudden realization that you really, really needed to try and get your head around China? Or was there maybe an article you read, a conversation you had, whether in Germany or in the States, that led you to this pretty radical decision?

Yascha: “That’s a good question. I don’t think there was a moment of epiphany, but, you know, I’m somebody who writes relatively broadly about the world.” Yascha: One of my key interests is the future of political systems and whether democracy or some other regime form is going to dominate the 21st century. But I’m also somebody who tries to stay abreast of the news and to understand what’s going on in the world more broadly.

And I realized that perhaps the most important subject that I don’t know that much about, along with artificial intelligence, which I’m also trying to learn more about, is China. My aspiration is not to become a China specialist. There are many excellent China specialists, and that’s not the path I’ve chosen in my life. And I think it’s probably too late to compete with anybody in that line of work.

But my purpose is to know as much about China as a well-educated Western, quote-unquote, public intellectual, as you put it, or political commentator, would about, say, Spain. I’m not an expert in Spain, but as somebody who grew up in Europe, I can understand some Spanish. I have a basic sense of the history of Spain. I’ve spent some time there. You know, I have a feel for the place.

Far from the feel that an expert would have for it, but enough that I kind of have a sense of what the country is like. And I realized that, like most people who spend their time writing columns for newspapers and magazines, etc., I didn’t really have that for China. Even for China, it’s obviously an incredibly important and influential place.

And so my goal really was to get to the kind of level of cultural, linguistic, and political fluency with China that I have of places like Spain, which is both modest because, as I’m saying, it’s not trying to get to the level of specialist, and quite ambitious because, frankly, learning enough Chinese that you actually can understand something and can have a conversation is, as many of your listeners know, not an easy challenge.

Oh, not easy at all. You and Adam should compare notes sometimes.

And so you’re both taking on this Herculean task of learning this very, very difficult language. You both already speak German and English. And so they couldn’t be two more different languages, though. I mean, Chinese and then the Germanic languages. Oh, my God.

But yeah, good luck to you. How’s that going so far? How’s the language learning?

It’s going gradually. I think the beginning is easier than you think because the grammar turns out to be so easy and so pleasingly modular and logical, right? I mean, to put something in the plural, you just add men. And to put something in the future, you just add way. And, you know, you feel like you’re really progressing.

And then I think you get to the beginning of this long plateau when you say, “All right, I’ve learned a bunch of grammar and some words, but I’m having trouble speaking. And I’m really having trouble understanding and comprehending whether it’s real life people you encounter or media.” And then it sort of-that’s the stage where I think you’re tempted to give up. And I think I’m sort of trying to move along that plateau.

And it certainly helps to spend time in the country. And so by the end of my last day in Shanghai, you know, I was able to talk to people in cafes or cab drivers or friends of friends that I encountered. Certainly not with any great degree of fluency, but I’m probably at the level of HSK for B2 or something, something along those lines.

Not bad, not bad.

And then give us some sort of time parameters. When did you get there and when did you leave? How long did you spend there?

Oh, so I really haven’t spent very long in the country yet. This is my third trip in about as many years.

• The first time was at the tail end of the pandemic on a, whatever it is, a 72-hour transit visa or a 104-hour transit visa, whatever it is.
• Then the next time I came, because I was invited to speak at a conference at Fudan, and I was in the middle of terms, I was only able to be there for about five days.
• And now, you know, in the summer, I was able, as a German passport holder, to come into the country for some language study for about three weeks.

Okay, okay. So I had it all up. It’s still just about a month, right? So not too shabby.

It’s about a month, yeah. So it’s, I mean, very limited, I’m aware.

So you wrote a pair of these essays. You described China’s strengths, as I said, you know, its infrastructure, its technocratic drive, cultural unity, all that stuff. And alongside its, you know, well-known weaknesses, you know, disenchantment these days among young people, demographics, a deficit in soft power.

When you look at these two lists, is there something that surprised you in the course of your visits?

I mean, because, I mean, this is no criticism of you. With my lack of outsider perspective, maybe it’s because of me. I mean, nothing on either of these lists would, I would have thought, been all that surprising, even as somebody who’s never really been to China. As long as they were, you know, paying some modicum of attention to the news, reading social media and whatnot. I mean, there wasn’t anything that jumped out at me as like, “wow, I hadn’t thought of this as a particular strength,” or “I hadn’t thought of this as a particular weakness.” So I’m more curious about what it was that might have surprised you.

Yeah, I mean, I think that probably the strengths are more obvious than the weaknesses. I’m not sure that the strengths that I list are all that surprising. I do think that there’s an absence of a certain kind of weakness, which perhaps itself is a strength that is surprising.

I mean, the most obvious of this is that, you know, obviously China isn’t an authoritarian country and people who criticize particular political figures or a government in particular ways can very easily find themselves in hot water. But I do think that the, and that’s very real, but I do think that there’s a kind of Western imaginary of China, which resembles, you know, Moscow in 1953, or perhaps in 1980, in which people are extremely scared to talk about politics, in which ordinary people would be very worried about voicing any kind of criticism of a government.

And to return to the cliché we discussed at the beginning of the conversation, you know, that’s one area in which talk with ordinary people is really helpful, because it turns out that ordinary people, I think, have a lot of pride in how the country has developed. I certainly don’t get the sense that most Chinese are hankering for some kind of Western-style democracy. But they’re also pretty open about the things that they think are corrupt or don’t work very well, or about the difficult circumstances of their own life.

And so I think that there is an ability for people to feel like they have their say. And perhaps with a system and smart ways to pick up on where the discontent is, which is one of the strengths of a system that is not very visible from the outside.

You know, the other thing is what I wrote under the heading of High Modernism. Now, I’m a reader and a lover of James Scott, the great Yale University, late Yale University anthropologist, Seeing Like a State, right? Seeing Like a State who pointed out the ways in which these attempts from the center to control and to improve certain schemes, to improve the human conditions, he says in the subtitle of the book, have failed, right? But these attempts from a very centralized vantage point to rationalize the world in such a way that it’s supposed to improve things.

And Scott is very persuasive about the fact that that often goes wrong. And of course, it has often gone wrong in Chinese history as well. But I think there’s also strengths to a certain form of High Modernism that it’s easy to overlook.

Now, part of that is obvious, like infrastructure, right? The inability of the United States to build high-speed rail from San Francisco to LA compared to, you know, the incredible growth of infrastructure and high-speed rail in China.

But part of that is to push towards a kind of form of culture and linguistic unity, right? So I’m really struck by the fact that China really never had a lingua franca. I mean, it had a written language that was shared. But of course, most people, as in most parts of the world, were illiterate. And then most people in modern-day China could in the past not have communicated with each other because the difanghua, the local dialects or the local languages, were just too far apart from each other.

Right, right, right. And, you know, through one of the most extreme exercises of high modernism in the contemporary world, China is changing that, right? Basically, any Chinese person under the age of 30 now does have a lingua franca with each other.

And as long as that policy is kept up for the next three decades, a huge majority of Chinese people, the first time in the history of a country, are going to be able, without much effort, to communicate with each other in Putonghua. And that, you know, that, for example, I think is a genuine strength of a country that is quite remarkable.

It comes with downsides and disadvantages, of course, that may not quite be obvious to outsiders. Not unique to China, of course. I mean, Italy went through this, of course, and so did France, and really, so did England. I mean, there have been these projects of imposing of sort of national lingua franca.

What I really liked in your framing in those essays was how you talked about sort of this intimate entanglement of strengths and weaknesses, the way these higher modernist ambitions that you talk about produce, you know, both high-speed rail and overproduction.

• How this insane work ethic produces real dynamism, real economic growth, but also burnout.

I really liked that framing. I thought that was an excellent thing, and I think I’m going to borrow it and use it.

Thank you.

Please do. Yeah, I mean, I borrow it from Isaiah Berlin, and it’s something that I think is important about the world in general.

And, you know, I see people who love the friend because he’s so spontaneous and fun and always makes you commit to an evening, and suddenly it’s 1 a.m. and you’ve had the best time. And then they get really angry at that same friend because sometimes they’ll stand you up or they’ll turn up late or they’ll be unreliable. And, you know, those two character traits are related. It’s very hard to have the one without the other.

And so my personal principle is that you have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your friends and take them for what they are. And if you think weaknesses outweigh them, you don’t have to be friends with them. But to hope that this person is going to stay as fun as they are and also always be reliable is just a losing endeavor.

And the same is true with countries. I love Italy, which is a wonderful place, and a lot of what’s wonderful about it is how humane it is and how people prioritize, hang out with each other and human connection. But the corruption of Italy is related to that. It’s because the bureaucrat is going to say, “but this is my friend. I’m just going to stamp this paper,” who cares about the rule that you end up with those parts of a culture as well.

And so I think that’s a way to analyze any country. And it is, of course, a way to analyze China.

And, you know, to name one example that you briefly evoked, it is impressive how hard working the country is, how rapidly it’s transformed itself economically, how driven a lot of a country remains today, what kind of level of service you can expect in all aspects of your life. And, of course, it is also the 996 work culture, the extreme meritocratic competition, the fact that the English exam on the Gaokao is now about as hard as the SAT is for native speakers in the United States.

So that produces, you know, burnouts and people supposedly wanting to lie flat. I haven’t seen as much of that in my personal conversations while I’ve been in the country. Or the desire to have a putong shanghuo, right, the desire to have an ordinary life, a common man’s life, to opt out of, you know, the corporate rat race and perhaps just have a safe state-sponsored job in a third or fourth-tier city rather than trying desperately to make it in Beijing and Shanghai.

So, once again, yes, the strengths of the system and the weaknesses are related to each other.

You talk about that mutual envy between the rich and the poor in China, just an anecdote from a conversation that you had. But I thought that was really, really interesting.

And, you know, you mentioned Isaiah Berlin, and he’s been sort of a touchstone for some of my ideas that I do want to get into with you because I’m really curious to see what you think of them. But, yeah, it’s actually related.

And when you talked about how the Italian might prioritize one thing or another, I do want to talk about the way that values are prioritized in China versus in certain Western liberal democracies that we’re familiar with. And we’ll get into that in a bit.

But I want to touch on some of these other weaknesses that you identify, you know, these cracks in China’s rise. To what extent do you think that they are fundamental and structural versus maybe circumstantial and potentially fixable?

It’s a big question, but…

Yeah, I think that is a very big question. I mean, look, I think part of this actually is just the cost of success that any society is going to have.

I mean, I’m struck by the extent to which some of what young, well-educated Chinese people tell me runs very parallel to what my students might say at Johns Hopkins. They have high expectations because the parents probably already had pretty good jobs, most of them. Their parents may have been very poor and come from rural areas, et cetera.

But many of them who are in their early 20s now, you know, they have parents who kind of made it, right? You know, they worked really hard to get into a good university and now expect to have a good career. And then they look at the cost of a lifestyle that they, in some ways, take for granted from the parents’ generation. And they say,

“My God, you know, buying an apartment in Beijing and Shanghai is so expensive. I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to make that. You know, the expectations on me if I want to get married for the kind of material security I can provide for my spouse is so high. I’m not sure that even there’s an aspiration that I have.”

And, you know, whereas our parents probably had it much tougher in terms of how they grew up and the limitations of opportunities when they were young, there’s also all of the space because everything was developing so rapidly. And so you could go and have these crazy careers. And, you know, now I look at the jobs I’m offered and, you know, it’s working incredibly hard for slow progression in some big company and not really having a life.

And is that really worth it? Right, right, right. Is the deal actually one that I should take?

And that doesn’t sound so similar to somebody who’s complaining that, you know, yeah, they can get a pretty decent job out of college if they’re lucky and they work hard. But it’s going to be a very slow climb up for corporate hierarchy or ladder in New York or Boston or L.A.

And the cost of housing there is incredibly expensive. And, you know, the boomers mess it up for us. I mean, it’s not quite the same story, but it has more resonance than you might think.

Yeah, yeah. And I’m really glad you bring that up because it’s something that a lot of people overlook just when they do point to these problems. I mean, often they are mirrored exactly.

I mean, that brings me to a question that I have about one of the common criticisms. And it’s one that it’s not a criticism. It’s one of the sort of features of life that’s empirical, which is, of course, the demographic decline, the collapse, you could even say. I mean, it’s probably going to be more severe than even U.N. projections.

But, you know, I mean, there’s some people who would say that this alone is going to constrain China’s long-term ambitions. But I’m really curious about this.

So do you see, for example, China’s demographic future as comparable in some way to the falling birth rates in liberal democracies? I mean, is it a symmetrical kind of challenge? Is that one like the sort of rat race or the not having a better life than your parents had? Is it comparable in that sense?

So I think the problem of depopulation is global at this point. It doesn’t exist in all parts of the world. There’s still countries in sub-Saharan Africa that are very poor, that have very high birth rates. But it is present in virtually all parts of the world.

I mean, strikingly, countries like India and Mexico, which many people often still think of as high fertility countries, have now fallen below replacement rate.

• The Islamic Republic of Iran, despite its theology, is at, I believe, 1.6 children per woman.
• So way below the replacement rate, the 2.2.

And of course, I had breakfast this morning with a senior French politician who was very worried about the low birth rate in France. France actually used to be one of the European countries that did comparatively well.

And then there’s places like Italy and Spain and other countries in southern Europe, which have a particularly low birth rate for the West. So this is a global problem with the exception of very, very poor parts of the world.

Having said that, I do think that the problem in East Asia in general, and perhaps in China specifically, is more profound. One reason for that is the one-child policy, which has set up a cultural norm of having very few children to an extent that doesn’t quite exist in other areas of East Asia.

And one part seems to be cultural. I mean, I have to say that I was quite struck talking to people, both to individuals who were reflecting on their own lives and to sociologists and researchers who had access to very interesting studies, how low a priority love is for people in China and how low a priority marriage is at the same time.

You go to a place like India, the priority of love is very low, you know, less than one in 10 marriages in India are so-called love marriages, most of them continue to be arranged. But nearly every young Indian person wants to get married. It’s just they have a different idea of what marriage entails. It might not be the Western idea of romantic love.

I’m quite struck in China by the fact that for many young people, they think that just as the idea of a corporate career is a kind of false promise that is being pushed on them, that they mistrust, the idea of falling in love is one that is overhyped in hugely romantic TV shows that still are quite popular.

Their abortive attempts at finding some love like that in their life often go badly wrong for any number of reasons. And then many of them seem to have come to the conclusion that “this is just a lie that society is pushing on us as well.”

And then when you ask them, well, but don’t you hope to have a life partner and get married? They say, no, you know, the expectations to get married are too high and the demands of life are already so many.

That’s just another set of obligations and another set of risk that I would be inviting into my life.

And I remember asking a couple of people in some amount of surprise, well, isn’t that a part of the point of a life partner that they lose their job, you can help them out. And if you lose your job, they help you out.

And so even in a pretty kind of instrumental point of view, that could actually be something useful. And the answer to that is, oh, but how do I know that if I lost my job, they would ever look after me? You know, they might just be straight out the door. And I was struck by that as a response, I have to say.

Right. So I do think that there’s something about a skepticism about romantic love coupled with a destruction of the expectation that you must get married and the traditional means of arranging marriages that still persist in a place like India. Coupled perhaps with a certain lack of social trust and a lack of trust that somebody who chooses your life partner actually would have your back. That may help to explain why China’s birth rates are lower even than that of some other countries with very low birth rates.

Right. I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here because I think it’s too good to resist. But a friend of mine who I think I should introduce you to next time you’re in Shanghai. She’s a Chinese-American woman who worked in television in Beijing for a long time. She went, she moved to Shanghai, had a drink with her some months ago, back in the spring, I think. And she actually was at that talk that you attended. She is a screenwriter. She’s actually a showrunner for a new sitcom, an American-style sitcom.

I think one of the striking things, so to interrupt you, Kaiser, is that the expert team in Shanghai is so small. But at the end of my two weeks there, I went to a dinner in honor of somebody’s birthday, which had 12 people, and I already knew 10 of them. And I’m 99% sure I know who you’re talking about.

Okay, great, right. Well, I’m going to have Joan, so we’re having her on the show. And I think her fantastic explanation of this sort of destruction of love, as you were talking about, is, you know, a function of the one-child policy itself, right? That you have these single children, the men are coddled and entitled and believe that they have, you know, they’re so used to being treated like princes that anything less than that sort of royal treatment is just, you know, beneath them.

And the women are all taught that, you know, this is, unfortunately, a man’s world. You need to be 10 times better to get just as far. And so, of course, they’re not going to settle for these little entitled, little sniveling shits, right? And so, yeah, I think it’s great. And it’s set up so well for, I mean, it has such comedic potential and at the same time, it’s so damn tragic.

But, and I hope that, you know, Joan succeeds in her mission to bring the sitcom over the high-level sitcom to China, because I have to say that I struggle to find Chinese watching material that keeps me sufficiently engaged. So I very much look forward to the premiere of her show and I will binge all of it, if it’s as good as I’m hoping it will be.

Yeah, well, I hope she’s listening and she’s a listener. So she’ll, she’ll, and I actually had a really long, very interesting chat with her boyfriend at a party in Beijing the other day. So he’s up here, a Danish journalist.

But anyway, let’s talk about soft power, which is another thing that you highlight, you know, the relative weakness of Chinese soft power compared to Japan, to Korea. Do you think that this is a temporary lag, something systemic maybe?

I mean, I have my own theories about this, multiple factors. I mean, I do want to hear what you have to say, but I’m just going to see this, of course, you know, what you naturally point to:

• censorship
• top-down over centralized control of culture production

These are all very natural and, and I think those are part of it, but I think a big factor might just simply be that China isn’t anywhere close to where Japan was in terms of per capita GDP, let’s say as a percentage of, say, American GDP, when its soft power really manifested itself in the U.S.

So, I mean, I remember sometime in the 1980s, suddenly I knew the names of all the Akira Kurosawa films and I knew, you know, all the names of the sushi fish and, and, and, you know, Japanese culture was everywhere. And it was around the time that Japan had about 75% of contemporary China, American GDP, per capita.

And, you know, weirdly the same thing happened when Korea rounded the corner of the 70% threshold and suddenly, you know, these K-dramas and K-pop were everywhere. I, I mean, maybe, maybe it’s too Marxist of a theory, but maybe it’s one of these superstructural things that comes from a more economic foundation. What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, let’s start with the bare fact of it, which is just that, you know, I think most people in the United States or in Europe would struggle to name a living Chinese person. I don’t mean Chinese origin person, but somebody who actually was born and raised in China, you know, who is not:

- Yao Ming

Right. Exactly. I mean, you know, Xi Jinping, Yao Ming, Ai Weiwei. I mean, you can name a few famous people in the West and that’s about it. I mean, I’m not sure that you get beyond five people who have a name recognition of more than 25%. I mean, it’s really quite striking. Probably the same for South Korea right now. I don’t think a lot of people know their names.

Even if they know the names of bands and outside of fandoms, they probably don’t know the individuals in BTS. I happen to know all their names because my daughter has festooned our house in posters of them. But that’s already a difference, right? I’m not sure I take the point, but it’s not clear to me that perhaps your daughter knows some Chinese bands given that she’s growing up. But the equivalent in the States, something like that, might not know those names either.

Now, China obviously has a cuisine which is very popular worldwide because it’s a wonderful set of cuisines. It has, of course, Chinese origin people who are incredibly successful in the diaspora and who are often good ambassadors for Chinese culture and other ways as well. It of course has an incredibly rich history that people are aware of, even if they might not know it deeply, but they know of Confucius and they know that there’s a deep tradition of Chinese philosophy. And that’s something to respect.

But when you look at contemporary products of Chinese culture, the list gets very thin. You have TikTok as a technological medium, but most of what people consume on TikTok in the West is Western content, not really Chinese content. You have some animes now or some movies that are very successful in China and a few other places in the world, but not really much beyond that. And so I think that’s just quite a striking fact.

And God help us. We have La Boo Boo now. Oh my God. Yes. And that, I mean, that is… and perhaps that speaks to what you were talking about, that one of the explanations is that if you still have quite low GDP per capita, despite the enormous progress that China has made, your products are going to be geared towards a market that is quite different from that of the average consumer in North America or Western Europe in particular.

It is interesting that when I ask people about the nature of Chinese television, and for example, whether they would enjoy something like a sitcom, a lot of the people I spoke to said:

“No, we want something that’s escapist. Anything that’s not escapist is not going to please a Chinese audience.”

And that certainly comes not from the people struggling to go up the corporate ladder in Beijing and Shanghai, but comes from the delivery workers and the factory workers, and many people in the country who have just quite tough lives.

So perhaps as the society continues to move up the income ladder and people start to have more leisure, they will also be interested, for example, in consuming television shows and movies which might then speak in a more natural way to people in North America and Western Europe.

Certainly, the Soviet Union, despite censorship just as strong as it is in China, was able to produce at least some cultural products that actually had appeal outside of the Soviet world as well.

So I don’t know that I have an answer to that, but I am just struck by this. I would say that I have very low confidence about which direction this is going to go.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in 20 or 25 years, there are all of these Chinese cultural products that suddenly are incredibly popular in the United States, in France, or elsewhere in the Western world.

But by the same token, I don’t think I have enough of a firm grasp of the reasons for that relative weakness of soft power that I would be astonished if that turns out not to be the case.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you don’t have a fixed theory on this, but I want your reaction to a couple of other possible things.

One is when you talk about North America and Western Europe as sort of targets and we often talk about soft power as it relates to us in the West, we completely ignore Chinese soft power in the global South, which is not inconsiderable.

So if you go to:

• Vietnam
• All over Southeast Asia

the same sort of escapist fantasy, costume dramas, things like that, are actually quite popular in much of Southeast Asia. They are growing in popularity in parts of South Asia, especially Pakistan, of course. And, and even in some places with sort of traditional political hostilities to the People’s Republic. So that’s one thing.

The other is this: I often wonder when we’re talking about soft power, how much of the lack of an effort to export cultural products could have something to do with the huge domestic market itself. There is an aesthetic divergence. So what are you going to do?

• Are you going to design something that’s going to have universal and thus limited domestic appeal?
• Or are you going to try to design something that you can sell in the language that you speak in the aesthetic that you’re familiar with for an enormous market? The one that maybe has somewhat softened consumption lately but still exists?

Those are a couple of theories of mine to throw in there.

It would be interesting to look more deeply at the origins of Hollywood’s dominance of the world. Obviously, what the United States shares with China is a huge internal market, so you could imagine that perhaps early on Hollywood really was just producing for the American market.

What it didn’t share is total global hegemony. The United States, especially in the post-war period, has been unparalleled really in history.

Just to say one more thing: it could be that early on the U.S. mostly produced for its own market. But later on, perhaps once there was a cinema in every small town in America, people started to want to produce much more for other countries because that’s how they could continue to increase profits and increase reach. Perhaps there’s a theory like that.

On the other hand, you might. The theory is called Marxism.

Well, on the other hand, American culture is in certain ways built to be universal because it’s an immigrant society. That’s true, too.

From the beginning, Hollywood had to appeal to people who had just arrived in the country, who had arrived 10 or 20 years ago. So perhaps the amount of adaptation needed to make an American movie understandable to somebody outside of the United States was much lower versus, of course, China being a very old society and a society that continues to have a lot of internal migration, but quite few immigrants from the outside.

Perhaps when you produce a movie for the Chinese market, because it doesn’t have this thing that’s quite specific about the United States and a few other countries shaped by an immigrant society, it just makes it harder.

The trade-off you’re describing-between serving the specific cultural taste of the Chinese market or a broader set of viewers-you’re not faced with that in America.

Given the nature of Chinese culture, I think it’s the difference between American and British culture. Humor plays a huge role in Britain because it’s an island whose inhabitants have been there for centuries. You can rely on the assumption that you’re going to get the same cultural references and that a small inflection in your voice will successfully communicate that you’re being ironic rather than serious.

American humor can’t rely on that, or at least historically couldn’t, because there were always about 10 people in the audience who just arrived seven years ago and might have learned English but didn’t understand those subtleties of expression.

So American humor is quite different and more universal than British humor.

Right. So instead it was slipping on a banana peel and falling, or hitting someone in the face with a pie instead. It’s a…

Yeah.

I take your point, and I think it’s a very interesting theory about the sort of multi-ethnic nature of America. But I think there’s also something even more basic, which is that America invented and pioneered a lot of these mediums, and they got to decide the norms and forms. There was a certain path dependency after that.

Anyway, we can go on about that for a long time.

But related to this, because it is about the ability to attract, you can trust America’s pretty substantial, although fading, network of friends compared to China’s thin circle of allies.

I wonder whether China will be able to overcome this through:

- economic statecraft
- Belt and Road Initiative
- mineral deals
- infrastructure projects like Bilgeo stadium and highways

I wonder if their challenges are actually more cultural and historical in their foundations and maybe those grievances are stickier than what a few deals will actually do.

Honestly, I wonder how resilient American alliances are, especially after Trump 2.0.

What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, look, I think one of America’s biggest strengths is its deep system of alliances around the world. I mean, America is not just surrounded by friends.

In the case of Mexico and Canada, it is allied with virtually all of the countries across one of its major oceans, the Atlantic. It has allies in far-off places like India, for example.

And of course-all these things that you’re describing are very questionable right now. I mean, you’ve just talked about Mexico, Canada, and Europe.

And I think, no, of course, and one of the tragedies of the Trump administration is that they don’t understand the strength that has given the country. And it comes from a fundamentally zero-sum worldview.

You know, Trump thinks, and he’s been explicit about that since the days of The Art of the Deal, that in any deal, there’s a winner and a loser. And just like at a poker table, famously, if you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s probably you.

You know, if the other person with whom you just struck a deal isn’t squirming and isn’t angry and isn’t ranting at you, then probably they think they’re winning, which must mean that you are actually losing.

And since America’s allies around the world have historically valued the partnership of America, Trump has concluded that America must be the sucker and he needs to redress that.

And that is deeply destructive of the biggest strength that America has.

Absolutely. That’s my concern.

Now, it is interesting, I think, that when you look at a map, China is surrounded by countries with which it, for the most part, has historically had very complicated relationships.

And we just had the remarkable summit in which you saw Xi Jinping alongside Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. So obviously, some forms of cooperation are possible between those countries, but, you know, India and China continue to have territorial disputes and are quite deeply hostile to each other in a number of respects.

Even when China and Russia were both ruled by communist parties, whose histories are deeply linked and intertwined, China and the Soviet Union repeatedly came to very serious conflicts, both because of territorial disagreements and because of competing geostrategic interests and other reasons.

China obviously has historically a very traumatic relationship with Japan because of Japanese imperialism and Japanese occupation of parts of China’s territory, a complicated relationship with Vietnam. You can go on.

I do think that this is a problem that China’s leadership is going to have to solve.

Now, one way to do that is through the Belt and Road Initiative and other ways to actually invest in neighboring countries and countries that lie further afield and show them that you’re able to help them have very good development.

But the temptation then is both to use those initiatives to:

• Serve short-term profits for China
• Use the leverage of those projects to impose some forms of political control on those countries

And I think in that respect, both China’s inflexibility in terms of repayment and other things have led to some amount of rebellion in those countries.

The attempt at using wolf warrior diplomacy to actually assert China’s interests has quickly made those countries wake up to some of the dangers implicit in this as well.

And I will say one more thing, which is that some anti-Americanism may be reasonable and some anti-Americanism is irrational, rooted in the fact that people are always going to hate the top dog and always going to be resentful about the top dog because:

• The top dog makes it feel small
• The top dog makes it feel dependent

And you think that China is replicating this now?

I think it’s just structural that the more China rises, the more it’s going to, in the best case, deal with some forms of irrational fear of China, just because people are always going to have resentment against the local or the regional hegemon.

And the more China tries to use its influence over countries, thanks to things like Belt and Road and in a quite explicit way, the more that structural driver of fear of China is going to be complemented with an additional, perhaps more rational fear of the ways in which it undermines local sovereignty and so on.

Again, there’s a sort of implicit psychology in national relations that I think we all intuitively recognize.

And then that’s one of the features of it-ganging up on the big guy. That’s a feature of all factional politics.

I want to pause here for a second before moving on to our next topic and ask you just a pretty simple question, which is, you know, how have your views on English or German language media coverage of China changed?

If they have changed at all from before you started taking a keen interest in China and the present.

In other words, do you find you view media coverage of China differently before and since? Well, you know, there’s this great line about the media that you trust the media and you think it does a pretty good job of representing things until in any way the media reports on an institution that you know pretty well or some question, you know, pretty well, perhaps some story involving you. And then suddenly you realize that it gets a lot of important things wrong.

But of course, the temptation is to go back and assume that the moment you read about something you know less about, it must be pretty accurate and pretty right. And I guess I would say that before I started to learn more about China, I assumed that the coverage would have all kinds of biases and all kinds of simplifications.

But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you which, I could have instincts about that or say,

“Oh, this smells like a cliché or it smells like a sort of thing that an editor at home would ask a foreign correspondent to write up,”

even if a foreign correspondent perhaps is a little bit skeptical of a story. But I didn’t really know. And now I feel like my assessment of how accurate the coverage is hasn’t really changed that much. But I have some more confidence in saying:

• This feels like a cliché that just is good for clicks back home.
• This is the thing that actually seems on track or seems insightful.

But I’m also aware that I still have serious uncertainty about how much I understand the country myself, of course.

Yeah, I mean, and I want to ask you about how you sort of sit with your own sort of epistemic uncertainty when it comes to China.

I mean, for example, you talked about the importance of factionalism and how that lurks beneath the surface in the party, despite its facade of unanimity. The factionalism I raised is just because this is one of the things, one of the framings for our understanding of elite politics that I’m actually not sure on. I honestly don’t know.

I mean, I’ve heard the arguments on both sides:

• Should we understand elite politics in terms of factions?
• Is that useful?

Or I’ve heard arguments, pretty persuasive ones, against as well. So I honestly, this is one of those many issues on which I just don’t know where to come down. And so, you know, I’ve gotten very used to just being able to just look someone straight in the face and say,

“I simply don’t know.”

I think you’re very aware of your role as a relative newcomer to this and to the complexity of it. I mean, in a very admirable way, I like that you don’t overclaim as many people in the field do. So how do you- I think you have a good instinct to avoid that temptation. That’s maybe something that I feel like everyone should try to cultivate, a kind of epistemic humility.

Well, I think, you know, by the way, one of the things I love about writing a lot on Substack is that it gives you the freedom of form to play with that. I mean, the reason why my first essay about the topic is called “23 Observations About China” is that I didn’t feel like I had, you know, I went to China for five days and here’s my definitive take on it, right? But I did feel like I’d learned a lot of things.

And, you know, when people asked me over a drink,

“Hey, what did you see in China?”

I thought I had interesting things to say and I wanted to be able to share them with my readers. And I think having this kind of form where you can just have 23 disjointed observations that don’t claim to aspire to an internal coherence is one way of doing that.

So I think you can sort of be relatively certain about specific things while being quite explicit about the fact that it’s really hard to know how that adds up into an overall picture. And that’s probably the way to do that without being really boring, just answering every question of,

“Well, I don’t know.”

Now, on the question of factionalism specifically, I guess I would distinguish between what we know from political science about factionalism in autocracies more broadly, which surely applies in China as well, to what we know right now about the role of various factions.

And, you know, it turns out that democracies have deep factions and they’re quite open and they’re able to organize very openly and often they call political parties for those other forms of political factions as well. And how to manage those is one of the deep questions that the founders asked themselves in Federalist 10 and other major writings, right?

In autocratic regimes, factions often are hidden because there is no open party politics in most of them. You know, the scope to disagree with the political leadership is much more restricted. But often people have patronage networks and they are still competing over the top positions in the state and they’re competing over the rents that they might be able to extract from having political power.

And so that is always a feature of autocratic political regimes. It has very obviously been a big feature in the relatively recent history of China. I mean, I think the question is, sort of at the moment, to what extent has one person actually been able to monopolize power in the hands in such a way that factions are not a particularly important factor in what determines the policy that the CCP will pass in its next party Congress?

And to what extent, under the surface, in ways that are very difficult for ordinary Chinese or for journalists to see, those factional systems have actually survived and determined a lot of what’s happening in ways we can’t really track. And I certainly don’t have an answer to that specific question, but I think I can set it up from general knowledge and political science in such a way that this is a life question that we have to answer.

I will say one more thing, which I think is interesting.

You know, when I spend some time in India, that’s a place in which I feel it’s very easy to get to know the elite. Because the elite is fully English-speaking for historical reasons, because they’re very open to talking to visitors, because, of course, they’re not afraid of being seen talking to you or what they might say to you or something like that.

It’s often harder to get a sense of the country as a whole, in part because there the cultural gulf is often wider and because it has very big regional, religious, linguistic, and so on.

I feel like in China, well, obviously, there’s a huge amount of regional linguistic diversity and ethnic and some amount of religious diversity, which I don’t want to underplay.

I would say it’s the other way around, right? I mean, I certainly don’t feel like I have a good model of what makes a top official tick, in part because it’s much harder to have extended conversations with them.

But I think it is relatively easier to get a feel for the pulse of Chinese popular culture or even for the lives of a lot of ordinary Chinese people. And so when I’m thinking about what I know-that I have limited knowledge about all of these things-but I think I have a little bit more confidence when I’m able to say something interesting, perhaps surprising to Western audiences about the life and the outlook of a lot of ordinary Chinese people than I do about the inside baseball of what really is happening behind those boards.

I would even go further than that and suggest that, you know, in China, there is a certain kind of a more evenly distributed, more uniform political culture-a culture that transcends regional differences and linguistic differences.

I mean, you can sort of know something about Chinese elites, or at least that is, I mean, you’re not going to have to abandon your assumptions when you go across a provincial border.

Yeah, no, the regional differences in politics are, of course, limited in part because people are moved around a lot by the party at a top level and so on, right?

Well, Yascha, I think it’s really interesting that, you know, there’s sort of a second order effect here when it comes to patron-client relations in China. Because, you know, the Chinese bureaucracy is ages old, and they’ve had a lot of experience in trying to bust that up.

There have been, you know, long-held practices about not allowing officials in provinces to build those networks by moving them around quickly, you know, three years. And then the organization department does the same thing in China. It sort of takes proactive measures to prevent the creation of these sort of patron-client networks.

But, yeah, there’s only that they have to do that, it all suggests their tenacity, right? So, maybe, yeah.

Again, I’m just, this is, I only sort of pluck this as one example of that epistemic humility. And you’ll find that, you know, you’re experiencing it now as a relative novice. Years from now, you will still throw your hands up at some, “I have no idea.” So, yeah, get ready for that.

I want to turn now to the real reason I wanted you to come on, and that is really to talk with you about the way that liberalism, that Western liberals have, you know, had to come to terms with China.

I mean, of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way liberals are struggling to, you know, sustain confidence in their tradition when faced with an illiberal, but at least by some important measures, undeniably successful illiberal state, right? You know, China, right?

Do you see what we’re in right now as any kind of a crisis of liberal faith? I suppose you probably do, but the real question is, does China play a role in that? And if so, how much of what?

So, I do think that the example of China disproves some comfortable assumptions that liberals have had, and that I, as a philosophical liberal, would like to hold on to if it went for the fact that empirics seems to prove otherwise. For example, though, there was a belief that it’s not going to be possible to make significant scientific progress on important areas of frontier research outside of a democracy, because you need the culture of free inquiry, the culture of free speech in order to be able to accomplish that.

And I think China shows that you can create a system that certainly doesn’t have free speech about politics, that certainly is very constrained in the political rights that people have, but that seems to allow for enough robust discussion, certainly of scientific matters, to create a kind of scientific public sphere that does allow significant advances, whether it’s in solar technology and battery technology and EVs and a whole set of other areas we could go on to list.

So, I think some of that has clearly turned out to be overstated, and perhaps that helps to undermine the faith in liberalism.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure that China is at the heart of the crisis of Western liberalism today, for two reasons.

The first is that most of that crisis comes from the internal contradictions of liberalism itself. You know, it’s not like the United States is working fantastically at the moment, but people are looking at China and saying,

“Oh my God, China is such an incredible place, that even though things are going swimmingly here, perhaps we have the wrong system.”

The problem is that the citizens within liberal countries like the United States and France and Germany, etc., are increasingly unhappy with their governments and perhaps unhappy with their system of government, that they feel like they’re not really being listened to, that they feel like their countries are not delivering for them.

And that is leading to, I think, a primarily domestic crisis of those liberal institutions. The fact that China is doing pretty well might sort of be like an added factor in this, but I don’t think that primarily is what drives it.

The last thing I will say, which I think is a limit of a Chinese model, is that to have a true competitor to liberalism, you have to have a system which can be replicated in other places.

And the problem with a Chinese model is that it works pretty well in practice in a number of ways - some advantages, some disadvantages we can debate - but clearly very impressive performance over the last 30 or 40 years.

It’s a mess in theory.

And what I mean by the fact that it’s a mess in theory is that it would be extremely hard to implement the Chinese model anywhere else, particularly in any place that doesn’t have a longstanding communist political party and a very longstanding tradition of meritocratic bureaucracy and high state capacity.

So, you know, if you ask people in Zimbabwe or in Nigeria, would you rather live in a place that’s run like China? They might say yes, because it obviously has significant advantages over the much poorer, much more corrupt, much more troubled forms of public administration that you currently have in Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

If you ask people there,

“We from a political elite in Zimbabwe are offering you a deal where we’re going to start to behave like the Chinese Communist Party. Do you want to go along with us? Do you trust that deal?”

They’re going to say hell no. Because they’ll say,

“You might import all of the bad things of that model, but how on earth can we trust that you’re going to import the good things of that model? Are you going to be as competent as a Chinese bureaucrat? Are you going to be as meritocratic as that? Are you actually going to lead to this rapid development?”

Probably not. So we don’t want that.

To be fair, China is very aware of its particularism, right? I mean, that’s why with Chinese characteristics gets appended to everything, right? Yeah, and I think that’s, you know, I hope that that remains the case. But it’s one of the somewhat reassuring things.

But I don’t think the Chinese political leadership wants to impose its model on every other country that they’re allied with. But it does limit the extent to which China’s success poses a threat to the liberal paradigm because it’s not in competition with it the way that the Soviet Union was.

Implicit in what you say here is that liberalism itself is kind of a proselytizing religion, right? It has this need. I mean, it believes very strongly in its own universality, right? It’s, you know, fairly rigid in that way.

But I’ve always, I’ve long believed that Western liberalism has had a changing relationship to particularism and especially to sort of relativism.

I think that in the 60s and 70s, especially sort of watching countries come out of a colonial experience that they were, you know, that liberals were deeply philosophically opposed to, they were ready to accept that values in those places were very much shaped by historical circumstances, by culture. And they might be valid, even if they diverged from our own liberal values. But today, liberalism just seems more, well, frankly, dogmatic, more universalistic. Do you agree with that? And if so, do you think that this shift has happened? Why? I mean, why has this happened? And how does China’s successor or challenge fit into that story?

Yeah, I think the story may be a little bit more complicated than that, because I would say there’s two dimensions here.

One dimension is the extent to which Western liberals believe that there are certain values which are universally valid. And on that, I actually think that a lot of people, certainly a lot of the students I teach, have come to be less confident about that.

In the 1950s and 1960s, people would have said:

“Of course, it’s very important for individuals to be self-determining. Of course, it’s very important for individuals to be able to have basic political liberties. Of course, it’s very important for women to be free to make choices about themselves.”

Whereas now, I think a lot of the students I have would say:

• “We are just Eurocentric.”
• “This is just Western values.”
• “If in Afghanistan, they want to allow the Taliban to tell women that they’re not allowed to go out of the house unless they’re fully veiled, then who are we to judge?”

So I think there’s a kind of form of moral relativism that has entered the discourse, perhaps from the 1960s, and that’s grown stronger. But actually, I think it’s much more present in the minds of the average American today than it would have been 50 years ago.

Now, on the other hand, I think that there is a set of questions in high politics about the extent to which we’re willing to live with compromise. The extent to which we need to recognize the limitations of our own ability to impose our values in other countries.

There, the unipolar moment after the fall of the Soviet Union certainly created the huge temptation to be overly sanguine-to think:

“We can go into Iraq and we’re going to turn it into a blooming democracy and that will be a model for the Middle East, and everything suddenly will become much better. We can do that in all these different countries in the world. And obviously, in 50 years, most countries in the world will be democracies and that’ll be wonderful.”

And there, I would say that in the Cold War, people had the recognition that there’s a big geopolitical, strategic adversary, which made that hard. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a moment of hubris where a lot of politicians in the United States and beyond were much too sanguine about the ability to do that. And then the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other military interventions have somewhat revitalized relativism.

Yes. Now, I actually think we should have a mix of those two.

“Well, so do I.” “So do I.” “Right.”

So I think that we should-I’m a philosophical liberal-and I do think that every individual in the world should have some rights of self-determination, and that when those rights are curtailed, that is something that is sad to me, something I care about. And in so far as I have agency to improve that, I would.

I mean, if I could flip a button to make sure that women in Afghanistan are able to leave the house while wearing a burqa, and able to access a primary education, and able to do all of those things, I absolutely would.

I don’t think some notion of cultural self-determination should override the rights of those women to go to school if they so choose, which currently they don’t have. I think it’s a confusion to think the Taliban get to choose that because it’s a different culture. No.

What about those women who want to go to school? Why does a government they did not elect, they did not select, get to choose for them but they won’t get an education?

I think that that is absolutely a tragedy and absolutely something that would be good if it wasn’t the case.

Now, I also think that we should be very aware of how incredibly difficult it is to influence the world. And therefore, by and large, that should not be our ambition.

I don’t think the ambition of the United States should be to somehow change the political regime in China because I don’t think that we know how to do that. And if we did and we tried, then for good reasons of nationalism rooted in Chinese history, that’d probably be a huge backlash anyway.

So let’s not pretend that we know how to do things that we don’t know how to do. Let’s not be naïve about the kind of role we can play in the world. Let’s understand that international relations can quickly turn very dangerous and toxic if people fear that we’re going around the world in a moral crusade trying to remake it.

In those ways, I think liberalism has been chastened, and it’s a good thing that it’s been chastened. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be cultural relativists. We shouldn’t.

“Right, right.” I mean, like you, I’m sort of looking for a third way. We don’t have that magic switch.

I guess part of what I would do is I would sort of classify the Afghanistan to the world, you know, Taliban regimes, as outliers, and look at instead at sort of the larger community of nations where there are actually quite a number of shared values, but that simply get prioritized quite differently.

You know, where, for example, certain states will prioritize the civil and political rights that you say, you know, the self-determination, the individual self-determination, but others will prioritize economic rights.

That isn’t to say that they completely devalue the other. I mean, Americans care very much about economic rights. Maybe they don’t enshrine them to the extent that they do civil and political rights.

So I’ve actually, you know, I’m very uncomfortable with universalism, but also recognize a lot of the dangers in, you know, this sort of thinking that your students just described where, you know, they are okay with women in Purdah and in Afghanistan and not allowed to seek even primary education.

So I’ve been developing this idea that I call priority pluralism. And I guess I’ll send you this essay that I wrote on this before, you know, other people may have heard me riff on this before.

But I think that, like your quote of Isaiah Berlin, you, we can’t have all good things in all people. Right.

Or, and I think there’s, there’s trade-offs and just like your Italians who, you know, can be extraordinarily chummy and friendly, but also that comes with corruption. I think that there’s, you know, you cannot maximize all values simultaneously.

So different cultures will develop kind of different elasticities. They’re willing to trade down three points of civil and political liberty for one point of increased administrative efficiency or of economic well-being.

Right. So, I mean, that’s just sort of, I’m sure that you’ve had a lot of conversations with people in China. I’m sure that many of your Western liberal friends have also pushed back on sort of the rosier parts of this two-part picture that you paint.

And I’m curious what kind of criticisms you’ve gotten from people whose opinions you really value, on the other side, you know, you too critical or too rosy. I don’t want to go on to bang on too long about my own ideas here, but.

Well, you know, I think in the West, what’s hard to explain is a point that feels quite basic once you’ve spent even relatively limited time in China, which is the coexistence of a genuine, repressive, sophisticated system of censorship and surveillance with a feeling that people have at least in real life of relative ease of criticizing aspects of a system in which they live.

You know, I think a lot of people in a place like the United States think that either you have complete freedom of speech or there’s the secret police listening to everything you say.

• And you complain once about the bus being late and, you know, off to the gulag with you.

And so I do find that sometimes even quite politically sophisticated people to whom I try to explain how that system of surveillance and censorship can coexist with a very big directness and outspokenness that is part of, I think, Chinese culture, actually.

They can start to think that I’m trying to make excuses for the regime or something like that. I think that can be hard to explain. I’m sure you’ve had that experience.

Yeah, I’m imagining a conversation between you and, and Anne Applebaum, for example. I don’t know what that does like.

But I speak to Anne often and I think she’d be perfectly happy to take that point. But yes, I think that is an area that is hard to explain.

I do think that, you know, with some Chinese interlocutors and with some expats in China who kind of perhaps can fall into a certain kind of self-loathing adoration of China, right? A certain kind of, “Oh, everything is better here and everything in the West sucks” and partially perhaps we’re not fully aware of the relatively different class positions in the two societies, et cetera.

You know, there can also be a bristling at any criticism. There can be a kind of like:

“Look at the amazing things that this country has achieved in a very short period of time,”

which is certainly true. You know, everything else will sort itself out and any problem is just temporary and it’s going to resolve itself.

And if you are worried or concerned about aspects of the society, that’s just because your kind of Western imperialist coming in here thinking wrongly, you know, better.

And I think that’s also unhelpful. I mean, more broadly, I would say that cultures thrive and it’s very hard to get that balance right. I think in the United States, sometimes we are on, we fall down on the wrong, on the other side of that balance when they have a proud sense of their strengths and also an honest sense of our weaknesses.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, perpetuating a culture where both of those things are true is very, very hard. I think over the last year, sometimes in the United States, we’ve been too tempted to devalue elements of our political system or of our culture that actually work pretty well and are pretty important.

I think perhaps in China, the risk is, for understandable reasons of historical pride and hurt, that anything that’s a criticism can be shut out pretty quickly.

I certainly hope I don’t fall into the category of those self-loathing foreigners who hate now.

I don’t think so. No, no. I know that I don’t. But what I do worry about right now is that the frame that even some of my smartest friends tend to take to China is one that looks more for the reasons why China will fail rather than looking, you know, starting a new one and then looking for the reasons why it has enjoyed the success that it has.

I think that there’s a certain amount of what I, you know, described as sort of self-soothing and copium in that. And I do worry about that. And I think that there’s a reckoning coming with it.

Let me, let me, I mean, this is, I could go on for hours and I hope we do have the chance to talk about this over a drink at some point, but over, over the past decade, let me change gears here and ask you about this because, you know, your focus is on the problems of our own liberal societies.

But over the past decade, we’ve seen efforts, especially in the U.S. - I think it’s less common elsewhere - but to try to reduce domestic polarization by building China up as some sort of common enemy.

I mean, this was done in a kind of just crazily on the nose way by Rahm Emanuel, you know, the former Congressman, Chicago mayor, Obama chief of staff. He was recently, of course, Biden’s ambassador to Japan. And he wrote this recent op-ed in the Times where he basically says:

“Let’s, the enemy is not us. It’s them. It’s China.”

Right.

Do you think that strategy works? And, you know, at what cost?

What dangers do you see in rallying liberal democracies around a foreign adversary as sort of a cure for polarization?

As much as I fret over polarization, this cannot be the answer to me.

Well, you know, the good thing about America is that it’s such a vast country that in some ways, like China, it tends to be inward looking. And, you know, I’m not sure the strategy is going to succeed for a very simple reason:

• It’s much more tempting to hate the person who’s your neighbor or down the street, who has views about things that directly touch on your life, but you disagree with.

• Even if some of those disagreements are themselves quite small or minor or petty or silly, than it is to be really, really activated by a government or a country that is very far away and about which most Americans know very little.

So, I mean, I think that I have moral compunctions about that kind of strategy because the first imperative in the 21st century is going to have to be to avoid World War III and to avoid a major war.

And, for obvious reasons of international relations, one of the two countries that might go to war with each other in the 21st century is the United States and China.

The world has to have a huge priority as somebody who has universal political values. I care about the well-being of people around the world. And that must mean I care about the well-being of over, you know, 1.3 billion Chinese people.

I mean, if we want humanity to be doing well, we need to want 1.3 billion Chinese people to be doing well.

And it so happens that I now have friends and acquaintances there and there’s many things I like about the culture.

But even just in pure terms of trying to solve, you know, American political polarization and so on, I just don’t think that that is going to be a running strategy unless we’re really on the cusp of war or in the midst of a war.

Well, then they really are the enemy, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

But thank you.

We’re quite far away from that.

Yascha, maybe I’m projecting a little, reading, you know, in me into you a little too much, but I wonder, you know, because you talk about those sort of the moral costs or such a thing, but there are some moral costs of learning from illiberal regimes, from illiberal societies too.

I mean, but at the same time, I think that where you are wrestling with us, many of us are, we kind of see that there must be certain institutional innovations that we liberal democracies could borrow from China, technocratic, without compromising our values in some way.

Is it possible? I, I think that this is a project you’re engaged in if I’m, if I’m not wrong. Yeah.

I mean, I think, there’s certainly many things we can learn from China, you know, from

• good cuisine to,
• you know, I mean, I’m in Paris at the moment. And I have to say that the Paris cuisine, which I’ve always personally found to be quite disappointing, has been greatly enriched by the arrival of a few decent Chinese restaurants.

You know, I mean, to obviously things in technology and, frankly, the investment in research and the university system, you know, it’s much easier to get funding for ambitious forms of basic research in China nowadays than it is in the United States. That’s something that the United States has to fix.

I personally don’t think that there’s many elements of the, strictly speaking, political system that we can or need to emulate from China, partially because, you know, I do think that the Chinese political system has serious problems of its own, but partially because it would be very hard to sort of integrate or implement that in any coherent way because of the vast differences between those two systems for the same kinds of reasons in which it’s really hard to go to Iraq and impose democratic institutions that are going to work very easily.

So I know we have something more specific in mind, but I have to say that that’s not sort of the heart of what I’ve been thinking about.

Yascha, it’s been such an amazing pleasure to speak with you. I really wish we had had more time to talk when we were in Shanghai, and I do look forward to maybe seeing you somewhere else in the world and sitting down and having a good meal with you because you clearly do enjoy Chinese cuisine, and I’m a very good restaurant orderer, so I think I will dazzle and amaze you.

But first of all, I mean, thanks for taking so much time to talk with me about this, and I think there will be future conversations to be had. I look forward to them, and, you know, I have to come to Beijing, so I look forward to you dazzling me with your order when I get there. And then other things, you know, the music scene, everything about this.

So let’s move on to the section of the podcast that I call Recommendations, where I’d like to ask you just to talk about a book you’ve read, about a movie or a film, or anything else that you think my listeners might be interested in hearing about from you?

You know, perhaps in context, this is a little bit of a cop-out, but one of my favorite political novels is The Leopard, which is… Ah, De Lampedusa. Yeah, De Lampedusa. I love it. Yeah, I love that novel. I recently reread it. Beautiful movie.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful movie as well, by the way. There’s a horrible Netflix series they made a couple of months ago, which is really awful. It’s beautifully shot. I got to say, I mean, it’s such a terrible departure from the actual book, but the cinematography in it is stunning.

That you have to hear. I mean, you know, Sicily is a beautiful place.

Anyway, the point is that it is a beautiful personal story. It’s a romance. There’s many things going on in it, but fundamentally, it is asking the question of:

how you deal with historical change, how you accommodate yourself to historical change, how you shape historical change.

And even though that is a set of questions posed in this book at a very different historical junction, a very different culture, it resonates with the rapid development of China and the disorientation that that has brought into people’s lives.

And so I think that it’s a novel that will provide a nice dose of escapism for people who are thinking about China every day. And then perhaps in unexpected ways, might rhyme with questions they themselves have about the way that country is changing.

Absolutely. I mean, it is, it is, well, it’s a foundational text in American undergraduate political science. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but everyone I know who studied political science like I did in the 1980s is assigned that book at some point by somebody. And that’s sort of why we are all so familiar with it.

And it’s also just a rollicking good story. I mean, it’s got:

• love and marriage plots
• infidelities
• and, it’s still a wonderful…

And a smart, trusty dog.

Yeah. It’s got everything. Smart, trusty dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s got it all.

That’s a fantastic recommendation. And, you know, if for no other reason, do look at the Netflix show if you, after you’ve read the book. I mean, because it’s candy, it’s eye candy, especially because, you know, Monica Bellucci’s daughter is in it. She’s quite something.

If you’re speaking about eye candy and The Leopard, go watch the original movie by Visconti with Claudia Cardinale, you know, it has all the eye candy you need. Okay. Okay. I will do that. I have not actually seen it, but I did, I reread it just over the, I guess it was, yeah, this winter I reread The Leopard and it holds up well.

So in the spirit of our discussion today, talking about liberalism, I’m going to name check Adam Gopnik’s book, which he wrote actually, well, six years ago or so. It’s called A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, which is a fantastic defense of liberalism as a tradition of:

• tolerance
• gradual progress
• pluralism
• trying to end cruelty

which I thought was just a really, really good way to think about that. It’s a really good book. Yeah. It’s a super readable, very sensible book. And, you know, it sort of reconnects me with a tradition that I still proudly hew to in spite of the fact that it’s becoming like a religious faith and less of sort of an empirically viable, provable thing that I can see in the world around me.

But hey, what a pleasure again. Thank you so much, Yascha. Thank you, Kaiser. This is wonderful.

You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at SinicaPodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio, or email me at [email protected].

If you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show, don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison et cetera for East Asian Studies for supporting the show so generously this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Yascha Mounk.

Thanks for listening. See you next week. Take care. Bye.