Back to the 80s: For Trump, is China the New Japan? with Andy Liu
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So, not long ago, the well-known economist Michael Pettis, who teaches at Peking University, and actually was on this show a few years ago to talk about Beijing’s rock scene, a subject on which, alas, we have found ourselves in quite profound disagreement. Anyway, Michael Pettis wrote on Twitter, “If you want to understand the effects of trade intervention, it’s okay to ask economic historians, but never ask economists.”
Well, I’m taking his advice today, and I’m talking about trade intervention to a bona fide economic historian. I am delighted to welcome back Andrew B. Liu, Associate Professor of History at Villanova University in Philadelphia. Andrew specializes in modern China, East and South Asia, and the history of capitalism and political economy. His acclaimed book, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, published by Yale, offers a compelling analysis of, you know, the intertwined economic histories of these two nations through the very interesting lens of the tea industry.
Regular listeners might recall Andy’s previous appearance on Seneca, where we discussed his insightful essay in N Plus One magazine, titled “Lab Leak Theory and the Asiatic Form.” In that piece, he examined how these racialized stereotypes have really shaped American discourse on COVID-19 origins, contrasting the Oriental and Asiatic modes of thought.
Today, Andrew joins us to delve into his latest essay in N Plus One, called “Back to the 80s,” where he explores the resurgence of 1980s-style trade rhetoric in the U.S. and its implications for China’s economic strategy. Like all of his work, it’s both erudite and very accessible. So listeners are enjoined to hit pause and read that piece, link in the show notes, before we plunge ahead. But meanwhile, Andy Liu, welcome back to Seneca, man.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Kaiser. It’s funny to call me a bona fide economic historian. The field is mostly historians who wish they were economists and a few economists who wish they were historians, so it’s nice to hear Michael Pettis go the other way for once.
Yeah, for sure. You know, I mean, some of my favorite public intellectuals these days are economic historians. I mean, Adam Twos, right?
Right. You’re in good company. So, Andy, in your recent piece in N Plus One, “Back to the 80s,” I got to say, it feels incredibly timely given where we are today. I mean, just two weeks ago, Trump took office, and already tariffs, not surprisingly, dominate the conversation.
So, last week, just for people who’ve been living in a damn cave, he threatened tariffs on Colombian goods after, you know, a deportation dispute. Then, ostensibly over the fentanyl thing, he announced tariffs of a hefty 25% on both, you know, Mexico and Canada before quite abruptly putting them on pause for 30 days, you know, because Claudia Scheinbaum and Justin Trudeau just basically, you know, said, “Hey, let’s just tell him stuff that we’ve already done.”
And anyway, anyway. You want a fact check?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I digress here. But, you know, not so far, anyway, he hasn’t paused them for China. He put 10% tariffs on all Chinese goods on, still, you know, not the 60% he’d threatened on the campaign trail. But, you know, these are, of course, on top of tariffs he’d already imposed in the first term and, you know, which the Biden administration never saw its way to removing.
He’s also removed, apparently, the de minimis exception for parcel goods that are under $800 in value. And so we just saw this abrupt U.S. Postal Service stop all parcel shipments and then, you know, started them again. It’s just bizarre.
Right. Get used to the complete whiplash because this is a new era. But anyway, I mean, I’ve gone pretty far from what I wanted to ask you. For those who remember the 1980s when it was Japan and not China who was, you know, the great economic boogeyman in Washington, this all feels like deja vu.
And, Andy, that’s where your essay really starts. But you argue that we should think carefully not just about the parallels between now and that period, but also about the important differences, and we’ll definitely get there. But let’s start with parallels. What are the key ways in which the U.S.’s trade anxieties today echo those of the 80s?
I mean, it’s interesting that these same anxieties seem to be embodied in the very person of Trump. I mean, your piece quotes a story named Jennifer Miller, who argues that Japan actually provided the template for Trump’s views on China. So what are the implications of that?
And then, you know, we’ll get into where the comparison breaks down. But first, you know, polarities.
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean, when I set up to write the piece, you know, I was thinking about what is there to say at this point, you know, about Trump and China and all that. One thing I had known for a while, I’d be curious how much you or your audience knows about this.
But for a while now, I’ve been thinking about how much it echoed the 80s with Japan and how you could take these speeches from Japan, do like a Control-F word search for place with China, and it would basically come out, you know, verbatim, you know, better than AI, probably.
And I was also kind of surprised that a lot of people didn’t know this. So when I was trying to teach it or recommend something, there’s some stuff out there, but I actually kind of thought there’s a lot more that could be said about it.
So I started with the premise of this famous clip on YouTube where Oprah asks Trump, would you want to run for president? And he says no. And, you know, that blows undergrads’ minds. But also that clip is about Japan. He’s complaining about Japan dumping stuff—TV, steel, but primarily cars, right?
And, you know, I was born in 83, so I have a vague memory of this. I’m sure others have a stronger memory of how much this rise of a gigantic, menacing, or, you know, miraculous Japan was in the, you know, collective consciousness of the country of the United States and the world in the 80s into the 90s.
And so at the time, Trump, I mean, Japan had run a trade surplus with the U.S., starting in the 60s, but really in the 70s and 80s. And cars were, you know, this kind of big symbol, as they are today with EVs a little bit, right? I mean, these days it’s like a new commodity or a new sector every year, it seems like. But EVs is one of them.
Yeah, so a lot of the accusations are almost identical to the ones today about how Japan slash China cheats. The government intervenes too much into the economy, subsidizes industries in a way that American companies can’t keep up with. They dump their goods. They artificially lower the currency, and this is leading to bad jobs and deindustrialization and the end of U.S. manufacture.
And so when I was writing the piece, I was thinking about, you’re right, I was thinking mostly about the parallels, just to kind of draw out the comparison as much as possible. But as I was revising it and kind of finishing touches, I was also thinking, you know, in a lot of obvious ways, China is not Japan, and Japan is not China.
I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s, on the one hand, it’s a good exercise to think about those parallels. Just to give you a sense of, at the very least, you know, this is what historians can perhaps offer to the public sphere, is that to tell people to chill out a little bit. Like, this stuff is not brand new, right? It’s not, Trump isn’t unprecedented, at least, you know, literally Donald Trump himself said this stuff 40 years ago.
And on the other hand, I think it’s also useful to at least narrow down, if there is something new that’s happening, you know, like what is actually new versus what is pretty much a script that has been within the Trump playbook since the 80s.
And then if you want to go, like, big picture, a lot of the stuff about, you know, the rise and fall of economic powers, you could go, you know, 100 years back, 200 years back, however far you want to go. So there is a script, and whenever that script gets repeated, it’s useful to be able to kind of see, like, what’s going to happen.
But at the same time, of course, it helps to identify what’s new, what actually is new or distinctive about China versus Japan and 2025 versus 1985.
Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things I really appreciated about your piece was how you pointed out how the U.S.-Japan trade war back in the 80s wasn’t just about economic concerns. It was also, you know, very much a product of a particular geopolitical moment with Cold War imperatives definitely shaping U.S. policy in ways that they don’t really map neatly onto today’s U.S.-China tensions.
They do and they don’t. Anyway, let’s expand on that a little bit. How did Cold War geopolitics shape U.S.-Japan trade relations in ways that maybe don’t apply so much to China today? And how is China’s role in the global economy, you know, different from Japan’s back then? In many ways, I mean, even bigger is a percentage of global manufacturing and all that.
Yeah. And to be honest, my inspiration or my initial thought was kind of going the other direction, which is there’s all this talk of a new Cold War where China would be compared to the USSR, right? And a lot of people fought back against that. It’s not the USSR. They are, you know, U.S. and China are trade partners in a way that U.S. and USSR never were.
So we went through, I kind of went the other direction. But like you said, the analogy doesn’t quite fit with Japan either. And the main difference, of course, is geopolitics, where Japan was part of this alliance. In the piece I do a brief dive, I could, you know, definitely nerd out for longer about the rise of the Asia Pacific in the 50s and 60s and 70s.
But, you know, basically, starting in the 40s and 50s with, you know, McCarthyism here, but also, you know, China goes, the Communist Revolution leads to this debate about who lost China, you know, in D.C. that people have written about. And that leads to this kind of freak out where the United States is like, “All right, we’re going to arm South Korea against North Korea, fight the Korean War. We’re going to arm Taiwan against China.”
And the proxy for the United States, the anchor for all this will be Japan as a military base, but also as a sort of economic base that, you know, we’ve got to make capitalism work and show Asia that capitalism works. And Japan will create a sort of economically integrated Asia region, which sounds a lot like, you know, Japanese empire. Co-prosperity sphere. Exactly.
And a lot of people at the time and a lot of historians have kind of pointed out, kind of said the obvious part out loud with that: Didn’t we win? But anyway, like, and it wasn’t the goal of the United States to build Japan into a competitor that would take down its own industries, right?
There’s obviously agency to go around Taiwanese planners in Hong Kong and South Korea. They’re all doing their own thing, but they’re all kind of taking advantage of the situation. And obviously, Chinese actors as well, where intentionally, unintentionally, whatever, this United States security umbrella, where they basically pay for it to protect the military protection for Japan, especially, but also in South Korea and Taiwan.
Allows those countries to really focus on the economic growth, economic development aspect. But, you know, the turning point or the sort of pivot for the story is the Plaza Accords of 1985.
Yeah, we don’t want to, you know, the more I read about it, I’m not an expert on the Plaza Accords. Although you’re not, but I still think, you know, for our younger listeners who don’t remember that episode, maybe you can give a quick recap.
I mean, I think people maybe understand that in these accords that involve not just the United States and Japan, but also Great Britain and France and other countries as well. Basically, Japan was strong-armed into appreciating the yen, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like it was more of a collective effort to depreciate the U.S. dollar and help the other European economies. But also, Japan was kind of the target at the time. It takes place at the Plaza Hotel.
Right. But, you know, I remember I briefly gave a version of this talk at the AHA a few weeks ago at the same hotel where the Luigi thing happened. And, you know, the Plaza Hotel is five blocks from there. The Rockefeller Plaza is like five blocks. Like all these things in the 80s with regards to China and Japan and global trade are happening within like 10 blocks of Manhattan, these major events.
And, yeah, so there are a lot of these quote-unquote voluntary agreements. And they’re voluntary; I use all the quotation marks there because obviously Japan, businesses especially, if they had their way, they would not agree to revalue the yen and limit their exports.
But, you know, given the military arrangement, the geopolitical arrangement, I think the United States was able to convince Japan to put some protections or put some limitations on the exports of the TVs and steel and especially cars.
And those, so those are, they’re all those bilateral deals. And then the Plaza Accord is kind of the crystallization or the sort of most obvious sort of symbol of that effort to make Japan revalue the yen to help the United States export stuff to Japan, which doesn’t really happen.
And they also encourage Japan, you know, why don’t you, instead of exporting all your goods to the rest of the world, figure out ways to help Japanese consumers, Japanese households buy things. A lot of the characterization at the time was that Japan had this, you know, economic miracle model that relied upon a lot of exports, a lot of coordination through industrial policy, the ministry of international trade and industry.
Yeah, but also to press savings, right, that they made it hard for Japanese households to get credit and to buy houses with mortgages. So Japanese households were forced to save. They put their money in the government-owned banks, the postal service bank, and that postal service bank became the source of capital for Japan to pour into these industries and infrastructure and so on.
So, yeah, there was this thought process that, hey, you’re a rich country now, you should start buying your own goods instead of exporting them over here. And if you do that, naturally, the yen will rise, living standards will rise in Japan, labor costs will rise, and you will release some sort of balance where you’re not exporting everything and you actually are importing things. And that’s exactly what happened, right?
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t really work out that way. And I don’t think China has, or the United States has never reversed its trade deficit with the world, much less. So, and then in Japan, you know, under the recommendation, this command to increase consumption, I was at the Ministry of Finance.
They, through various means, basically, they unleashed a lot of credit on Japanese society for real estate developers and infrastructure projects, but also for consumers, for average people, like credit cards become, and this is true of like the United States as well, like the developed world. Credit card debt goes through the roof. Mortgages go through the roof. Lending goes through the roof.
And especially in 88, 89, I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but like land and housing prices double, triple, right? These like, they skyrocket and it basically becomes, you know, an economy with all this capital that had been kind of cycling through production and exports. And now a lot of those exports are cut off.
And so they’re just kind of building up their bottleneck. You know, it’s like, it’s like traffic in Philly, like one lane gets closed and then all the cars get stuck. So yeah, they just poured them into basically speculative real estate. This is the famous examples that I mentioned in the article of how, what is it? Like the Imperial Palace, right?
Right. It was worth as much as California. And then the famous or in the United States infamous business deals where Rockefeller Center was purchased by Mitsubishi and Sony purchased Columbia Pictures in Hollywood.
Yeah. And these aren’t necessarily like Japanese companies coveting American assets. They just have all this capital and they just got to like, they’d be like, yeah, sure, we’ll spend it, you know?
And so they’re exporting capital as much as they’re exporting goods at this point. But then, you know, the Japanese Bank of Japan, the finance ministry, they see what’s happening. This is obviously not a good sign.
And they raise interest rates, and this leads to a huge collapse by, I think, 1990, 1991. And this is the story of Japan of the lost decade, which is now, you know, in theory, like the fourth decade of being lost at this point.
Wow. And Japanese manufacturing is also sort of hollowed out at this point. There’s so much that goes offshore, you know, to countries in Southeast Asia and so forth.
Exactly. And the indirect consequence, my understanding is that this is one of the main causes that leads to the 97 Asian crisis, which is a lot of Japanese capital, loose capital, loose money being exported to like Southeast Asia, South Asia.
And I think primarily Southeast Asia, which at the time there was a lot of optimism. It’s kind of wild to read stuff before 97, where people were predicting Thailand and Indonesia would be the next Tigers, you know, like because it already happened in Japan.
It had already happened in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore to an extent. And so they’re like, this is just going to keep going and we’re going to go to Southeast Asia next, like the island Southeast Asia, not, you know.
And a lot of those projections kind of died in 97. So you argue in your piece that Beijing learned from Japan’s experience and has been really careful to avoid a similar fate. Can you walk us through some of the thinking in Beijing and what lessons has China drawn from Japan’s mistakes?
And how has that shaped its economic strategy just of recent years?
Yeah, I think, you know, Japan is one data point. In general, I think a lot of people have written about how under Xi Jinping, Beijing is cautious about finance, about speculative finance. I’m sure Japan is one data point, especially because I think in Asia, there’s a lot more talk about this stuff, about Japanification.
Sure. Being stuck in the middle-income trap or whatever it’s called. And there’s the economist, his name is Richard Koo, I believe, Koo, and Kyoto. And I think he’s, well, no, maybe he’s in Tokyo at one of these think tanks.
And he came up with this phrase to describe Japan’s dilemma of when debt basically paralyzes all productive investment. He calls it, what is it, balance sheet recession. And so there’s a fear, there’s a debate, still ongoing debate of China is really in this same predicament as Japan.
But I think, in general, indications are that Xi Jinping, especially in the last few years after the 08 crisis and after 2015, when the stock market kind of crashed and they had to put brakes on capital flight, that they were once looser with regards to finance and consumer credit and having a housing bubble, a housing boom, rising land prices, rising housing prices in the 2000s and 2010s.
But in the last few years has begun to clamp down on it. And I think that, I know we’ll talk about this, but I think that might be part of the, I don’t know if confusion is the right word, like the debate about how, whether or not China is serious about raising consumption for average Chinese people or not.
Are they really wed to this model of, you know, high savings, low consumption, deflation and all that stuff, or is it intentional? But I think by all indications, I think, I think Japan is one example.
And I think just closer to home, Japan, China’s own housing bubble that built up in the 2000s and 2010s. And then obviously kind of comes to an end with the three red lines policy where they kind of pull credit from the real estate developers, most famously Evergrande that collapses.
These are all for them indications that this has gone too far. This is not the real economy. These companies like Evergrande are worth X, Y, Z, but they’re in debt, you know, four times as much. And that’s just not productive, a productive use of, it’s like, it’s a taking time bomb, right?
And so like similar to Japan, they kind of set off the bomb themselves instead of waiting for it to explode on its own. So earlier you, you talked about how a lot of this happening today could be sort of cut and pasted from a language that was deployed in the 1980s.
And it strikes me that what a lot of Western economists and not a few Chinese economists as well are saying by way of advice to Xi Jinping to China is the same. It’s, you know, boost domestic consumption. You’re not a developing country anymore. Your households should be consuming more of this surfeit of goods that you’re putting out into the world. You should reduce the savings rate. You need to liberalize markets. Xi Jinping has apparently resisted this advice or at least has not acted on it in ways that the advice givers imagine that he ought to.
And instead, you know, he’s definitely articulated his own vision for what he thinks China’s economic future might be. I mean, it’s one that just, I mean, it isn’t just about avoiding Japan’s fate, but actually about building something quite distinct, I think. I know it’s a big question, but what I’m hoping to get at maybe is what does the Chinese economy he imagines actually look like?
I mean, maybe we can start with, you know, what he means when he talks about things like new quality productive forces. Can you unpack that a bit, Andy? Yeah, and so I think this was sort of the conclusion I was arriving at as I was trying to make sense of the last five, 10 years was that I think Beijing has always talked about doing a lot of things all at once. They’ve talked about raising consumption since the 2000s. They’ve always talked about raising industrial capacity.
And I think, so I don’t want to say this emphasis on new productive forces or whatever is brand new or unprecedented, right? This was made in China 2025, you know, 10 years ago as well. But I get the sense that, and this is just vibes more than evidence, that with the kind of disenchantment, disillusionment with finance, speculative finance, and another example is they basically, you know, when Ant is about to launch its IPO, consumer credit is a big part of Ant’s new project.
They, you know, they disappear Jack Ma, right, and there’s kind of this fear of, you know, a credit card bubble, consumer credit bubble in China. I think there is this idea that rather than unleashing money onto the Chinese public, which will lead to potentially another credit bubble, speculative finance bubble, speculative housing bubble around the country, they want to make sure the money is being used the right way into the so-called real economy.
And I think there’s, my guess is there’s, if there’s a sort of philosophical or theoretical bias here, it’s that there’s a real economy and there’s a not, and there’s a not real economy. Finance has its role in its place, but we don’t want to let it take over. I was reading about the housing bubble stuff. There’s a really good paper about it by a political scientist named Saul Wilson coming out in the journal, Apologist and Society, where, and there’s a line in 2016 or so where Xi Jinping says, houses are for living in, they’re not for speculating in, right?
And I think that kind of summarizes the attitude, which is why there is this emphasis on, let’s keep going with production, let’s keep going with industrial innovation. But I think that gets perceived by a lot of people as this sort of anti-finance perspective is kind of perceived by a lot of people as like anti-consumption. And like, let’s starve the people and let’s, you know, deprive the people of goods in order to fuel this export machine. And I’m sure that’s part of it.
I’m sure there are people in China who really are obsessed with exports. But it seems like for me and my, and I was talking to a friend about this over the weekend, discussing the article. He was suggesting another way to think about it is, exports are part of the picture, of course, but it’s really about this idea of we want to make sure China is an industrial powerhouse, that it maintains its lead in production.
I think what gets lost in a lot of this tariff stuff, especially from the U.S. for the outside world perspective, is that they kind of think about all this stuff at the level of like prices and the marketplace and, you know, subsidies. And, you know, Trump is a businessman. He’s in D.C. These are, he’s not a factory man. He’s not an industrial man.
And by all accounts, it seems like from people I’ve read who I think seem like they know what they’re talking about, China’s big lead with exports, a lot of it comes from not just manipulation of prices and currency. A lot of it is also just like they’re just better at producing things. And as we saw with COVID, right? And that’s also true of Japan in the 80s as well.
Like a lot of people said Japan got ahead with funny business, but, and there might be some funny business or things that U.S. businesses would never do. But by all accounts, like they were just better at making cars. They’re more efficient, more productive. It was hell for the workers because of, you know, if you get into like lean production in the Japanese Toyota system, it seems like hellish to be in those factories. They’re not unionized and all that.
But I think there was a large segment of the world that was like, we can learn something from Japan. We could do like calisthenics in the morning and have quality circles and all that kind of stuff, right? And so if you believe that there’s something about the material production process that is good in these export countries, then that there’s a tension, right, between that perspective versus the, you know, they only got ahead because they manipulated prices and currency perspective.
So I think a lot of the debate about, you know, why China has succeeded in the last 10, 20 years economically can be in the United States. It can be a little bit too much on the side of the markets and not enough thinking about. And I think in China, it’s actually much more about the production aspect and how do we make sure our supply chains are efficient and robust.
And increasingly, they’re indigenous, right, as, you know, they’ve known Trump is serious about this terrorist stuff for, what, six, seven years at this point? Yeah, sure, sure. So, right, by all accounts, they’ve been trying to indigenize or what’s the word? No, indigenize is right. De-risk their supply chains from, you know, America with, you know, Huawei branching out into doing things.
I forget, I forget the example, but, you know, they used to do one thing and now they’re doing more things. Like, they’re getting into chips more now, right? Sure, I mean, yeah, they’ve got their own chipmaker, you know, high silicon. Exactly, and they weren’t doing that, I think, you know, before Meng Wanzhou was, you know, arrested and before there was threats.
Yeah, they weren’t so all in on it as it were. Yeah, I mean, another thing that’s, I should mention, I have my own questions or doubts about this high-quality productive forces thing or just, like, the trend towards automation, which is that, you know, and this is true of China, but also, like, the U.S. and the world.
So, like, automation, there’s a lot of money to be made if you automate production processes, but it’s also, it’s capital intensive. It’s, by definition, excluding labor. And, by definition, like, reducing the amount of jobs that comes with those jobs, with those kinds of industries. So, you know, China has famously, like, a 20% youth unemployment rate right now, and that kind of compounds itself because, you know, they get older and older and they still don’t get jobs.
So, I’m not sure high-quality productive forces, high-tech is necessarily going to be a good thing for all of Chinese society, right? It could make a lot of money for the cutting-edge companies, but for the average Chinese person who just wants a job, you know, and this is true of, like, AI and all these things around the world. I worry that, you know, the more sophisticated these industries are at a technological level, it’s actually worse for workers, and it’s worse for just, like, the average middle-class person who just wants a job.
And that’s where maybe a political solution would be useful to kind of redistribute wealth somehow. But I don’t think automation is, I think it might be a panacea or it might be a great thing for a consumer, but for, like, for workers, for employees, for people who see this as something that will help all society, I think there’s a lot of questions about, you know, this trend towards automation as a panacea.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, China also has a demographic crisis, which, you know, at least in the long term, may soak up some of that problem in excess. Yeah, I thought about that timeline, you know, there’s, like, 20-year-olds without jobs, then there’s babies, you know, there’s not enough babies, so I don’t know how those timelines are going to…
They don’t sync up exactly, no, that’s why I said long-term. Yeah, so, I mean, I just thought it might be useful to point out, I think Beijing or China has a certain political economic vision that we should… You should discern, you know, different from how it’s being portrayed uncharitably by the rest of the world, but that vision itself is open to a lot of questions and criticisms.
No doubt, no doubt. Yeah, you know, you mentioned one of the slogans that I think is really telling houses are for living, and, you know, another is physicists should do physics, right? I mean, you’re absolutely right about Xi Jinping and I think the rest of the administration’s aversion to financialization, their belief in the real economy.
I don’t think they’re wrong there. I think that it makes sense when they look at where the graduates of top technical universities go in the United States. If they’re devising clever financial products on Wall Street, that’s probably not the best use of their physics PhDs. If they’re, you know, going on to just simply head some digital media company, probably not the best use.
And so, yeah, they do really want to channel the talent into what they regard as the real economy. And then there’s this, you know, this idea that by producing simply better, more attractive, higher quality goods, that is another way to juice consumption, right? I mean, and it’s, you know, it’s not that they’re just going to buy up all the Christmas ornaments that are being, you know, sold out of Zhejiang province.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the fact that there are companies in China that make goods for Chinese people and you can’t buy them overseas. And that kind of is an indication that they are not, they are not trying to serve the Chinese people of consumption, right? They have, I don’t know, it’s called dual circulation, like the export markets, the internal markets.
That’s right. And, you know, I guess it’s hard to tell, you know, it’s always hard to tell with official documents, but like they’ve been talking for 20 years about raising consumption. I guess the question is, do you believe them or not? How earnest are these efforts? There was talk last fall. I was just learning about this recently about this kind of trade-in program, right? Where they’re, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They’re white goods. They can, you know, take their shitty old, you know. Right. They’re helping them buy new refrigerators and all that. They’re fuel inefficient. They’re, you know. Right. So that’s kind of like credit, but it’s not credit. It’s like making sure you spend it on the thing itself. Exactly. It’s not speculative.
Yeah. So I think that that is a part of it. And, you know, I would say it’s also hard for, I mean, like I obviously, I think I have my biases, but that’s probably because I study Asian history of, you know, there’s a real economy and there’s finance and all that stuff.
But, you know, not every country can be China or Japan and be the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. There tends to be only a few places of the world that are really, really good at producing things. And the Americans, you know, like the American, there’s like a side ramp, like American students studying business and finance.
I totally can see the criticism that this is a waste of resources. I also am sympathetic to a lot of, you know, people who are like, think that this is the only route available. Like if you can’t really just start a world competitive auto factory from scratch, right? Like America kind of plays a certain role in the global economy these days.
We can criticize it, you know, and China kind of plays a role like the way that Japan used to play a role. And I think a lot of that perspective shapes, basically the role that your society plays in the global economy shapes what you think economics is, right?
And so that’s why I kind of think a lot of the American perspective is a lot about markets and finance and that aspect, much more so than about the production itself, you know, with all the Biden administration efforts to have a new industrial policy. It’s like a lot of us, I think a lot of people following that story was like, well, you know, this is maybe a step in the right direction, but this is a lot, it’s a lot easier to say this than to actually do it.
But if I’m staring down the prospect of a de-globalized world where, you know, supply chains are absolutely fragmented where you just cannot count on it anymore. I mean, what are you going to want to specialize in? Are you still going to want to be the one that does, you know, finance? Or are you going to want to be the country that actually manufactures a lot of goods and has a lot of domestic supply chains? I think I know the answer.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And, you know, there’s lots of reasons to prefer this beyond economic. There’s environmental reasons. You want to probably de-link those robust, you know, supply chains next pandemic reasons you want to do this.
But, you know, at the same time, I don’t think China’s at the stage, certainly not at the stage right now where it could cut off all of its exports from the rest of the world. But another big difference with versus Japan is that China is pretty big and it does have a big domestic market, much bigger than Japan’s is.
So initially at first, when the stuff was really reserved to the coast, they actually did talk about themselves as a tiger, right? As a sort of small country that exports to the rest of the world. But I think things have changed in the last 10 or 20 years. So a friend was kind of like telling me to think about the difference between the 80s and the 2020s.
And I think it seems that, you know, Beijing or China, the central government, they’re trying to do both, right? They’re trying to keep the export industries going, but also transition to making a lot of stuff for Chinese people also and keep its technological edge in all these aspects.
That’s right. Andy, one of the more interesting aspects of your piece was that not only did you sort of hear echoes of the 1980s, but of the 1920s, I guess. Or even before, I mean, you know, hearkening back to Henry Ford and his ideas about, you know, integrated production, the kind of contrast between that and the kind of lean just-in-time systems pioneered, you know, by Japanese automakers.
So you note that when you look at a company like BYD, it has embraced a model that looks a whole lot more like Henry Ford’s, you know? So why do you think China is favoring this kind of industrial structure? What are the implications of this for global supply chains?
Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to this broader point of like, these are like economic history, there’s a lot of cycles that are, if not predictable, or not that surprising, I guess. And so the background is like Henry Ford is like the first, the Ford company is the first like affordable car company. Before that, cars were like basically boutique luxury goods for the rich.
And it wasn’t so much, it was economic strategy, but it was also just out of like physical necessity that he creates an integrated factory, famously called the River Rouge plant in the River Rouge in Michigan, where, you know, they start with making their own supplies, but then they start getting into smelting their own steel.
And, you know, like cutting down their own trees, buying the land for all the raw materials themselves. Basically, he goes, and he’s a bit of an eccentric, to say the least, character, and he even starts, you know, buying up land in Brazil to get the rubber himself, right?
But the thought process is like, and, you know, they’re super rich at this point, and so they have all these resources. So they’re like, you know, we want to control and maximize every aspect of the production process. We don’t want to rely on outside suppliers for the steel, for the, you know, like we want to control how good the steel is, so we’re going to make it ourselves.
So that’s one model of, and that was this dream, right, of industrial capitalism, industrial production, that in a world where there’s endless demand for your goods, then it probably would be efficient to make everything yourself because you can kind of scale up and control costs and, you know, not pay anybody, just pay for your own workers and supplies.
But there’s risks involved with that strategy, which is why it kind of disappears by the mid-20th century. And the risk is like, if you don’t have full demand, and you’re on the books for all this land, all these workers, all these facilities to be working at full capacity, but you’re not making as many cars, there aren’t enough cars to be sold out there, then you’re going to start losing money relative to your competitors.
The challenge to this, and, you know, it’s actually very eloquent, or easy to teach this to undergrads, you know, there’s the story of Ford, and then there’s the sort of Toyota. And it’s not that simple, but they’re kind of embodying these kind of different attempts at how to do industrial production.
And Toyota famously does this thing called, instead of mass production, it’s called lean production, or just-in-time production, which I think a lot of people heard about during the pandemic, just-in-time supply chains. Thought process being, and this is also born out of necessity, Toyota is poor after World War II, they can’t afford to buy a bajillion tons of steel, so they just use the small amount of steel that they do have, and try to make the cars that they can, and then immediately buy up more raw materials without having to stockpile everything.
So this allows them to be lean and agile, and if the market is bad one day, they won’t make as many cars. If the market picks up one day, they’ll make a lot more cars, but they won’t be stuck with the risk of a big vertically integrated industry. All this is to say, though, is that I think, historically, we see when new technologies emerge, like truly new technologies, like the EV technologies, right, then it does make a lot of sense, almost out of necessity, that these pioneers will try to get an advantage through vertical integration.
So from my understanding, I’m not at all, I don’t understand cars at all, but my understanding is, the thing with BYD is they kind of came up with a kind of, so first off, they specialize in batteries. They’re not car makers, first and foremost, they’re like flashlight battery makers or smartphone battery makers.
And then they pioneered a kind of battery for EVs that is like better, bigger and better, or cheaper and more effective than the existing models. And so that is their competitive advantage in the marketplace for now. My prediction is that this isn’t going to last forever, right, that as with all these kind of industries, at the first, the leader has monopoly profits, so they’re the only ones with this stuff.
But then other people catch up, as we saw with AI, you know, last week. And once stuff catches up, then maybe the lean model is the smarter model, right? You want to hedge against the risks of a saturated market by not going all in. But I put that all there is to say that it depends on the timeline of how you understand China. Or China is a combination of multiple timelines, right?
It’s like, in terms of the East Asian miracle timeline, it’s kind of coming to an end, thinking about the next stage. In terms of the vertical integration versus lean production timeline, the new industry, like I think a lot of China is lean industry. It is kind of connected to global supply chains for goods that are not that profitable, but are, you know, just in time.
Yeah, there are exceptions. I mean, the big companies, BYD is one of them. And I think, you know, Huawei is another. Right. Yeah, because they want to control the supply chains. These are things that not everyone can make, you know? And so for logistical and economic purposes, it makes sense to integrate things.
But if the technology becomes more dispersed and really, you know, what is your competitive edge? Is it the technology or is it your logistical nimbleness? And if it’s the latter, then you might want to, you might start to see more kind of disintegrated production. And so, yeah, it’s kind of weird.
Like the, there’s a metaphor from a famous economic history book, Giovanni Arigi, who talks about capitalism with a lot of pendulums swinging back and forth. So it feels like the pendulum has swung a little bit from vertical to lean back to vertical a little bit. But, you know, it kind of depends on what you’re looking at, the national economy, the particular industry.
And it’s another way to kind of think about how, hopefully, I think it can help us kind of try to figure out what’s going on in terms of what’s old versus what’s new in China. Right. Yeah. I mean, and I think, you know, we, you could argue that, that companies like BID are sort of ahead of the short-term curve of this swing back into vertical integration where they do have conspicuous advantages at the moment.
But, you know, as you, as you say, things change. It wouldn’t, yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if, I think this battery is called the blade. Right. And it wouldn’t surprise me if, you know, someone else comes up with their own version of the blade. And, you know, innovation is not an accident. This is because people are pouring all their money into R&D all the time.
Right. So let’s shift gears a little and talk about Michael Pettis with whom we began this show. I mean, he’s incredibly influential. The book that he co-authored with Matthew Klein, Trade Wars, Our Class Wars, has been really, really widely read in Washington. It’s sort of, you know, the Bible for a lot of people who are now, you know, rethinking our relationship with major trading countries, especially China.
He’s what you might call a balance of payments determinist. It’s not my coinage. I heard somebody at a dinner not long ago describe him that way. I guess my character of that, you know, something that I’ve actually heard argued on this show to my astonishment is, you know, China’s excessive savings by some mysterious but irresistible force led in the 2000s to finance bros creating, you know, mortgage-backed securities, subprime lending, ninja loans, credit default swaps, and of course, the Great Recession.
But there’s a growing chorus of economists pushing back against this view. You got, you know, famous guys like Paul Krogman and Brad Setser, people who are, you know, I think well-known in China watching circles like Glenn Look, others too. But I don’t want to make this a referendum on Pettis. I mean, he’s not here to defend his ideas. But let’s talk about his framework a bit.
Maybe you could offer a good faith representation of his basic ideas, where you think he actually gets things right and where you think maybe some of the criticisms are more valid. Yeah. And I think it also might be useful to point out it’s relevant because there’s been reporting that his ideas are being read by both the Biden but also the Trump administration.
So people are, I think there’s a kind of association out there between the terrorists and Pettis, which he hasn’t entirely disowned as far as I can see. I think his story is that both the United States and the Chinese governments, and the book is more sophisticated than this, of course, but what typically comes out is about China and the U.S. in particular.
U.S. is a deficit country where the government has kind of, in a world of increasing inequality in the United States, they’ve kind of compensated for falling wages and stuff in the United States by easy credit. Credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student debt, all that stuff. And what has helped facilitate that is the cycle where they’re getting these dollars back.
The Treasury, China is providing credit by purchasing Treasury bills. And how is China providing the credit to the United States? It’s because China has this model of suppressing domestic consumption to keep the currency down. And by exploiting its workforce, I think the best example they have that’s certainly worth talking about is the hukou system and sort of allowing companies to access cheap labor without paying for social welfare and health services in China.
But also like other methods where they, the big China, I think, buys up all the U.S. dollars and issues of renminbi and exchange because they don’t want too many U.S. dollars floating around in China. And so they have this huge surplus of U.S. dollars from the trade surplus, trade export surplus to the United States. They take those dollars and they, you know, send those dollars back to the United States and that provides cheap credit for the U.S. banks to issue, you know, 1%, 2% interest, you know, mortgages and loans, et cetera.
So it’s a big cycle where Chinese companies make money, U.S. companies make money, but Chinese workers and consumers, U.S. workers and consumers don’t make money. Or, you know, we have widening inequality in both societies, which is empirically true. So I think that what’s interesting is, you know, I didn’t have time to like read the whole thing, but I kind of revisited the book this week and thinking about how it’s being instrumentalized by politicians and officials.
And I think maybe one point of critique, and this was kind of getting at, this kind of touches on what you were just saying before, with regards to, um, China’s response for the O8 financial crisis is that the analysis can be read either as one of like responsibility and agency of particular groups and governments, or it could be read as like a bigger structural problem.
And if you’re going to talk about structure, then the question of agency and responsibility, it kind of matters less. It’s more about what are the incentives of the system? What are the limitations on the system?
Uh, one way to think about this, um, Matt, you know, again, a friend was kind of pointing the side off. I wrote the piece. So I have to kind of credit them, uh, for kind of this idea, but you know, at first it was Japan and then it was China. And then, you know, now it’s increasingly other developing industrializing countries around the world. They’re the ones who are exporting things to the U.S. and even at the United States has slightly decreased its imports from China in the last few years, its overall imports are still rising.
So at some point, is it, is it a Japan problem? Is it a China problem? Or is it like a U.S. problem? Uh, but then, you know, I don’t know. And that’s kind of a rhetorical question. I don’t want to make it a U.S. problem. I think it’s more about a structural problem where the United States has a very strong currency, the universal reserve currency. It has all the buying power in the world.
And if you are a poor country and you want to get richer, you probably want to industrialize. And the way to industrialize is to sell goods overseas for U.S. dollars around the world. And so there’s all these incentives in the world for industrializing countries to sell to the rich countries. And in the rich countries, there’s incentive, especially for the, you know, the political and the business classes to, um, have a strong dollar so they can buy stuff from the rest of the world.
So for U.S. buyers and consumers, it’s a strong U.S. dollar is good. You know, you can travel the world and buy stuff, or you can buy imported stuff at a pretty good price. It’s not good because your own industries can’t really compete against cheaper goods from the rest of the world. You can’t export. And you also, even domestically, like your own homemade goods are not competitive with imported goods from China.
And so there’s a very dorky analogy, but my friend was saying, if you think about the silver policies and the Ming Qing period, where, you know, like basically if you had silver, you’d be stupid not to sell it to China because it was so valuable in China today. If you are an industrializing country, you’d be stupid not to try to sell it for U.S. dollars and sell it to Americans.
And so it’s not an agency issue. It’s more of a structural issue. And it’s the kind of thing where if you think about if China tomorrow, stopped exporting to the U.S., putting aside all the physical logistical issues, like, you know, Vietnam would try to sell things to the U.S. Mexico would try to sell things to the United States. Cause we’re already seeing that happening. Right.
And so, and I think, you know, Pettis and Klein, their analysis is a structural framework or can be read structurally. And I think that’s probably a more useful way to think about it, but it obviously gets instrumentalized into it’s cheating us. They’re cheating us. They’re dumping. And yeah, I’d be curious, you know, what they would say in response to that.
Um, it oftentimes just does, it does become a China specific story. Right. I mean, there is that implicit argument in his work. You know, and I think it, it’s echoed a lot of mainstream economic thinking that there’s this normative idea that China must, should be, you know, has to move toward, you know, this more consumption driven economy, but you know, what if China simply doesn’t see that as the optimal path?
And they clearly don’t. I mean, they not that they don’t want to increase consumption, but they do not want to remake themselves in the image of a U.S. style consumer economy, you know, where consumption is the main driver. I mean, they clearly believe that manufacturing is still going to play.
And I, you know, made a documentary with this fantastic director named David Bornstein on Nova. And we basically argue this. We say that, look, you know, if there’s anything that’s really behind China’s miraculous innovative push in recent years, it’s that they never did stop manufacturing. They still had that, you know, fingertip feel. They had that process knowledge. Dan Wong is interviewed quite a bit in that documentary.
And, you know, that’s his argument, which I really very much buy. So I don’t know. Yeah. And, you know, I think, I don’t know, did you, I think you talked to Isabella Weber a few years ago, right? But I reviewed her book and that was something that was kind of jumped out where there were definitely people in China who were drinking the neoclassical, neoliberal Kool-Aid, right?
And so many Chinese economists. Well, I mean, there’s people in China still teach this stuff in like their business schools, their econ departments. But for whoever, you know, for however decisions are made in Beijing and the central government, it seems like they are not that convinced about just that things float, you know, and they don’t think things float. They think things are material and are real and are based on production in real places.
Yeah. Isabella’s book is fantastic. I mean, and there are ideas in there that make their way into your paper, you know, like establishing the new before letting go of the old. You know, I don’t know if you have that in your paper. I can’t remember in your.
Yeah. Yeah. I actually got that from the Wall Street Journal reporting, um, like Liling Wei, you know, has kind of covered this angle to death and obviously there’s, you know, a little bit of disagreement, but I think she’s, I think her reporting on it is really interesting because she’s getting into these, these, uh, no, she’s very critical of the government, but I think she’s kind of getting these interesting insights into how these conversations are taking place.
And what are these conversations like, um, with regards to, um, you know, there’s there, one of the, I think recently she talked about how someone asked Xi Jinping about, you know, his deflation, like how do we stop deflation? And Xi Jinping says something like, don’t people like it when prices are cheap? You know, and that kind of ended the conversation there.
Um, and it, which might, you know, it’s obviously kind of a critical piece, but I think we get into this, you get a little bit of insight into how these officials are talking about it. And it’s not, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no consensus and it’s certainly not a consensus in favor of the like pro-consumption kind of thing that, um, people are pushing.
I mean, another thing I was thinking as, and I put it a little bit in the piece was there’s, um, a kind of a well-known economist in the eighties and nineties, Alice Amstead, who’s kind of South Korea and Japan more than China. But she wrote these articles that, um, I only kind of recently discovered kind of criticizing this idea of taking the so-called Western Fordist model of industrialization and trying to analyze East Asia with it.
And she was kind of saying there’s a difference between late industrializing countries and, you know, the British Empire of the United States first, which is to say, you know, part of Fordism was you need to make things affordable and people can buy it because that’s your home market. A late industrializer, they don’t have to worry so much about domestic markets at first because they can always export things and that can still help places like South Korea.
And I think at the very least, I think it helps explain why people of the sort of Keynesian American economic school might think China doesn’t fit their models, I guess, is a nice way to put it. Um, I, so I was, that’s something I was kind of thinking about as I was writing the piece because it sounded like, it sounded like these discussions, the eighties and nineties were similar to what’s happening and with the sort of arguments about China these days.
Yeah. No, I mean, I heard the echoes very loudly. I mean, and for a long time, I think not that your piece isn’t full of original thinking, but you know, the similarities, the moral panic about Japan, I remember it well. I mean, you mentioned in your piece, you know, the tragic murder of Vincent Chin, for example. Right.
Yeah. But, you know, so I guess, I guess all of this raises the big question, uh, for the U.S. So if, if China does stick to its current course, you know, rejects Western style economic liberalization, sticks to a model that prioritizes, you know, industrial policy, state investment, export competitiveness. I mean, they want to move away from all of this, of course, but you know, they’re, they’re going to have to establish the new before they break the old and the old will be around for a while.
But what does that mean for U.S. trade policy? I mean, are tariffs really the right tool at this point? Are they just a blunt instrument that’s just going to be, you know, doing more harm than good? I mean, it’s going to be deeply inflationary. It’s going to, I mean, Christ. Ah, anyway, I, I, I don’t know what your thoughts are on that.
Yeah. I mean, there’s that moment, I think that the Wall Street Journal has, I got from the Wall Street Journal, but I quit putting the piece and it was just, it was just like an aha moment where we got Trump to talk about how he viewed Japan as interchangeable with China and interchangeable with any other country. And, but he like, in Trump’s own words, they’re all the same.
And at that point he’s kind of like saying the quiet part out loud, you know, as Cressy the clown would say, right. So he’s kind of putting, making the subtext clear, which is that, you know, I think for him, tariffs are just like plan A and plan B and plan C for every international, even domestic problem. But as a result, my takeaway was also like not to take any of what Trump says seriously, which, you know, maybe people have been, this has been a debate for 10 years now in this country. Right.
But you know, this weekend, I’m not trying to like brag about this, but I really was telling people, like, I don’t think these Mexico or Canada tariffs are going to last like the Columbia tariffs. These are all, and I was surprised how quickly they got resolved, right. Within 24 hours, they were retracted.
You know, it’s a game of chicken, like Trump, it will hurt Americans, but you know, I think maybe what gets overlooked, it would also hurt Mexico and Columbia. And they have all the incentive in the world also to get to the bargaining table. So maybe Trump actually knows what he’s doing, but I don’t think there’s serious economic policies.
I think Trump thinks of tariffs as punitive tools more than economic tools. I mean, he gives lip service to like rebuilding American manufacturing, but until we actually see him go through the actual motions of what that would require, like rebalancing, to use a, I guess a Chinese debate term, rebalancing the economy towards a middle-class and robust economic industrial base.
I think of tariffs as just like, that’s his negotiation tactic. He’s a businessman from Queens in Manhattan, right. And that’s what that, that’s, that more than fact, like building a factory is what his specialty is. So my take on that is, yeah, no, I mean, he said it, I mean, he actually said his favorite word is tariffs. He loves the word tariffs.
And again, it’s just, for him, it’s about, you know, you ask for a hundred and you settle for 50, you know. And so the China question is different though, because in all the reporting, I think are in kind of the landscape of the place that Trump has tariffed up over the last week. China has known this was going to happen, right, for six, seven years because, and by all indications, they’ve been preparing for this.
And so I was just bringing a report last night that China has not backed off, right. They have responded with their own set of tariffs, but those set of tariffs are intentionally like also kind of ineffective, also not a big deal. So on both sides, there’s a kind of a performance going on where they’re trying to show strength to the other side.
But I think deep down in substance, you know, like Trump as a business person, isn’t stupid enough to fully destroy the American economy. Right. And so I don’t know what’s going to happen. It seems like China, through all these other measures of diversifying who they trade with, of indigenizing the supply chain, et cetera, are somewhat prepared for Trump.
And they’re also prepared to like negotiate with them and all that stuff. So I don’t know. I actually kind of, I don’t want to be famous last words here, but it doesn’t seem as dire or as Christous or like, you know, unprecedented as it was in the first Trump administration, just in terms of the U.S.-China part, right.
Yeah. Yeah. I tend to agree.
Yeah. And I just kind of think that a lot of that can be attributed to just China itself, the Beijing and companies in China kind of knowing what to expect this time around. Exactly. I mean, it’s baked in already.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and again, he’s going to have a conversation with Xi Jinping after he finishes expelling all the Palestinians from Gaza and taking over Gaza, apparently.
I mean, that’s, yeah, we’ll see what happens, but it’s…
And after, you know, he creates a sovereign wealth fund to buy TikTok and after he seizes the Panama Canal and Greenland.
Right. Greenland is the 51st state, you know.
All right. Andy, this has been a fascinating conversation. As always, it is a huge pleasure to have you on Sinica.
Listeners, I highly recommend checking out Andy’s latest piece in N Plus One. It’s called Back to the 80s. It’s a fantastic read. It brings much needed historical perspective to today’s trade debates. So thank you so much for making the time.
Andy, let’s move on now to our two closing segments, paying it forward and then recommendations. So paying it forward. Who’s a younger scholar? I mean, you’re already pretty young. You just told me you were born in ‘83. My God, you’re so young. But even younger than you, who’s doing work in our field that you really admire and think deserves our attention.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t… So I’ve never met this person, but the kind of most interesting thing I’ve read about all this stuff the last year was in Rest of the World.
Oh, I love Rest of the World.
Yeah. Rest of World, right? That website. And Violet Zhou, I think is her name.
She’s so great. Oh my God.
Right. This piece on Foxconn in India. And that’s kind of her beat. And I was reading, I’m just kind of checking up on it last night. And I guess Foxconn in India is actually kind of slowing to maybe being shut down soon. So maybe that is another data point in what’s going on in the global supply chain. But yeah, I think her beat is, or her reporting is very good.
And that was one of the best articles I read in the last, and I think a lot of people did not, you know, I think it went under the radar for whatever reason, but I thought it was fascinating because I think the Foxconn is going to-
Her reporting is fantastic.
The TSMC piece through Intel P there.
And so I do think, yeah, I don’t want to be, I’m not a tech bro at all, right? But I do kind of feel like if you study the China space, quote unquote, and care about economic history, I think just like cars in the 20th century, I think just kind of looking at high tech is useful. It’s like a thing you can’t ignore.
So I do kind of look at the tech stuff. If we could squeeze on one more really quickly, I have a friend named Dong Iga, or Iga Dong is a sociologist at SUNY Buffalo, who did some field work in Zhengzhou’s Foxconn factory. So, and I know she’s like, I’ve been interviewed by very well before.
So, you know, she works on labor and gender and Foxconn and all that stuff in China. So that beat in terms of like Foxconn and just like the labor conditions there, I think are useful to think about to kind of make this tech war thing more real, more grounded in reality and human lives and that stuff.
Those are great recommendations. Thanks. I wonder if I met her. I was in SUNY Buffalo in October for that New York conference on Asian studies.
Yeah.
But I mean, I guess it was September. I did meet a few very interesting young scholars there.
Yeah. I guess their football season wasn’t over yet. So.
Yeah. Recommendations. Let’s get a recommendation for you. Well, let me first get a quick plug for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies, which has been generous in supporting the Sinica podcast again this year.
So thanks guys. And I’ll see you soon.
All right. Recommendations. Andy, what do you have for us?
Yeah. I don’t have any, I don’t watch movies or watch TV anymore. I honestly, I think this might be useful for a lot of your listeners. I want to recommend a recipe author. Hedy, Hedy Louis McKinnon, I think is her name. I have also never met her, but she writes sometimes for the New York Times, but she writes, she has a sub stack.
She writes, she’s actually, my understanding is she’s Cantonese Australian, Belize in Brooklyn, like everyone. And so she has recipes all over the internet and they are kind of modern takes on Cantonese cooking, but it’s very accessible and it’s very, it’s vegan, which I’m not a vegan, but I don’t eat meat.
So I think a lot of her recipes are very useful and they’re very usable. And you can tell, like I’m a dad of small children. So I’m looking for, so she has like, you know, different ways of doing like the egg tomato dish, you know, over and over, like making a staple in my family.
Exactly. A sort of crispy, chow mein dish. Like she has a very, like how to do it in your own house, but in a healthy way, not in a Chinese restaurant, like super oily, salty way. And she incorporates like really useful, like kind of pan-Asian ingredients, like rice vinegar and miso that could, you know, it could be in Japanese food, it could be in Chinese food.
So it’s, I don’t know what the word is like, it’s like pan-Asian modern. It’s useful. I, so I, I just, I check out her recipes a lot. So like Chinese, Asian cooking listeners might want to check out her stuff.
Yeah. I mean, you had me until vegan, but I’ll, it’s very, it’s very pro-vegetable. Let’s just say that.
Yeah. I’m pro-vegetable. I don’t have to be anti-meat to be pro-vegetable. You can, you can add some pork at the end.
Yeah. I mean, I believe in, you know, in win-win, right.
All right. Those are great. That’s a fantastic recommendation. I often recommend, you know, cooking related stuff. So I’ll definitely check that one out.
I’ve got two. One is just a substack that launched in fall last year from the Carter Center’s U.S. China Perception Monitor. It’s just, you know, uscnpm.substack.com.
Yeah. Another substack. I got, I’ve been doing a lot of those recently. But it’s great. I mean, you know, the Carter Center has just been doing God’s work for a very long time and they’ve run a number of excellent, excellent essays on there.
And they do a lot of, you know, they run a lot of their own research. Check it out. I also want to recommend an essay at the Transnational Institute website. That’s tni.org called The New Frontline, the U.S.-China Battle for Control of Global Networks.
It’s coauthored by four individuals of whom I’m only acquainted with one. The authors are Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, who I know I met at a conference, Steve Rolf, and Seth Schindler. It’s a good big picture think about, you know, some of the fundamental changes we’ve seen in perhaps, you know, have not reflected on well enough.
And it introduces, you know, some very useful ideas related to what we’ve been talking about today and Andy. So it’s like, you know, we’re in a period of state capitalist geopolitics, what with everyone embracing industrial policy. I mean, I’m just going to read the deck from the piece, which captures it pretty well.
Although I’m not sure about saying we’re in a second cold war. I’m not in full agreement with that yet, but here it is. Current geopolitical competition has deepened into a second cold war between the U.S. and China, but this is no longer a fight over territory, but rather control of global networks with increased state-led attempts to control semiconductor supply chains and via electric vehicle production to digital platforms, transport infrastructure, and financial payment systems.
How can the global South and social movements navigate this new geopolitical terrain?
So, uh, I hope, hopefully that gives you a sense of what the piece is about. And it’s, it’s very good. It’s, it’s, you know, good, meaty, long piece with big ideas. Just the kind of thing I love.
Andy, thanks again, man. That was just great.
Oh yeah. That was awesome. Thanks so much, Kaiser.
You’ve been listening to the Sinica podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.sinicapodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio. Or email me at sinicapod at gmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out and don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This really helps people discover the show.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to Andrew Liu of Villanova University for making the time today and for sharing his deep insights into what’s going on. Thank you very much for listening, and we will see you next week. Take care. Bye.