Adam Tooze is Chinamaxxing!

Summary

Sinica Podcast — Detailed Episode Summary
Episode: “Adam Tooze is Chinamaxxing!”
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: Adam Tooze
Date: April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this richly layered episode, economic historian Adam Tooze joins Kaiser Kuo in Beijing to discuss his latest insights from the China Development Forum, China’s ongoing green energy revolution, the evolving nature of Chinese governance and planning, and the shifting global order in light of both technological change and geopolitical disruption. Their conversation traverses language learning, policy, social transformation, and global comparisons, always centering on what Tooze calls the "reckoning" the rest of the world must face about the reality and permanence of China’s rise.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Adam Tooze’s Personal China Journey: Language, Learning, and Understanding

• Language Progress: Tooze describes his progress in Chinese (now at HSK3), and the unique, regressive-yet-soothing experience of relearning how to read (04:04, 05:54).
  • "It's a regressing experience. I mean, it takes me back to the childhood memories of learning to read English, and I find it very soothing. I like to do it before bedtime." (05:54, Adam Tooze)
• Transformation Through Language: The act of learning Chinese is opening up more nuanced understandings, especially when interpreting political or academic texts (07:16).
  • He notes the HSK curriculum’s "utterly deprived of any kind of politics" content, which leads him to create his own political terminology packs (08:03).
• Changes Since Last Visit: Tooze has gained a deeper appreciation for the scale of China’s renewable energy buildout and the complexities of so-called "oversupply" (08:43).

2. China's Green Tech and Industrial Policy

• The Scale and Nature of Green Expansion: The massive buildout in renewables is largely non-centrally planned, "helter skelter", and the world would do better to cooperate with China’s industrial glut than resist it (09:18).
  • "The obvious solution is for a cooperative intergovernmental resolution of China's oversupply problem, rather than slapping them on the wrist and insisting on a competitive level playing field." (10:32, Tooze)
• The “Glut Shaming” Concept: Kaiser coins and Tooze welcomes the idea of moving beyond “glut shaming” for China’s green tech exports (10:35).
• Five Year Plan Nomenclature and Significance: The shift from “jihua” (plan) to “guihua” (guideline/blueprint) marks a real change in governance style, focusing now on long-term technological breakthroughs (11:30–16:01).
  • "Plans matter. China still runs on plans. They don't tell you everything, but they do tell you a great deal about how the leadership is diagnosing the problems." (12:58, Kaiser)

3. Social Change, Welfare, and Urban Life

• Realities of Everyday Life: Urban life improvements in cities like Beijing—air quality, public spaces, infrastructure—signal a tangible rise in living standards even as macro numbers lag (20:13–21:30).
  • "There's this minutia of improving everyday life, which, cumulatively, is incredibly impressive when you see it." (21:21, Tooze)
• Redefining the Governance Model: Tooze argues that claims China ignores welfare are misplaced; the “beautiful China” vision is integral to the regime’s legitimacy (19:50, 20:01).
  • He notes enduring social gradients but expects that "will be softened by a readjustment in the social equation.” (23:08)
• Public Mobility and Autos: Improvements in urban mobility options (public transport, bike shares, high-speed rail) reduce car-centrism (21:50–22:13).

4. The West’s Cognitive Reckoning with China

• Western Adjustment: There's a "great reckoning" underway as Western intellectual and policy communities confront China’s durable, system-defining ascent (24:44).
  • "China is not a passing anomaly… It’s something much more consequential, probably much more enduring." (24:44, Kaiser)
• “Chinamaxxing”: In both elite policy spaces and popular culture, there's a new fascination with authentic Chinese everyday life and technological marvels (25:06–25:44).
• Implications for Global Power Structures: Western NGOs and think tanks now reposition themselves as intermediaries for a China-centric global system (26:09, Tooze).
• The Party as “Secret Sauce”: Tooze insists that understanding the role of the Communist Party—its mobilizational and disciplinary capacities—is central to comprehending how China achieves such transformation (28:07–33:42).
  • "We need to talk about the party... that is the anchoring institution here, right? It's the secret sauce..." (28:10, Tooze)

5. China’s Climate Impact and Global Centrality

• Decisive Force in Climate: China—the “big green state”—is now the central actor in determining the world’s climate trajectory, outpacing Western efforts in implementation (33:53).
  • "China is the decisive force in the climate equation." (33:53, Tooze)
• Authoritarian Environmentalism: The debate over whether effective green development requires China's particular brand of political centralization (30:44–31:44).

6. Global Value Chains, Automation, and the Global South

• Industrial Policy in the Global South: China's manufacturing glut in EVs, solar, and batteries may be threatening global North industry but enables transformative development in Africa and the developing world (47:16–50:15).
  • "Cheap Chinese plastic goods enable urban lifestyles... that were just not thinkable until recently." (48:17, Tooze)
• Automation and Demographics: Automation’s impact is double-edged: it addresses demographic shifts in China but may forestall the "flying geese" pattern of low-value manufacturing migration to poorer countries (47:17–56:09).
• Case Study – Indonesia: Chinese industrial investment in Indonesia exemplifies how resource-rich countries can leverage ties to China for development, but also risk becoming sacrifice zones (57:07–58:51).

7. Europe, the US, and the “Age of Rupture”

• Transatlantic Rupture: Europe is torn between its anxiety over Chinese overcapacity and geostrategic discomfort with China’s ambiguous role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict (41:26–44:22). German industrial champions, however, are “leaning in” to the Chinese market rather than retreating (43:28).
  • "China is the Super League. China is where you have to succeed." (44:22, quoting German car executives via Tooze)
• US Strategic Exhaustion: American inability to effectively engage with China, punctuated by the embarrassing cancellation of a long-planned Beijing summit, signals a crisis of "bandwidth" and "coherence." (70:03)
  • "This is the big leagues. You can't go to a meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing in the state that America's in." (70:03, Tooze)
• Rupture vs. Fraying: Tooze prefers the “shatter field” metaphor—today’s world order is not so much breaking as dysfunctionally, unevenly renegotiating in the face of lost moral and political coherence (62:08, 62:51).

8. Comparative Political Economy: Party Discipline vs. Western Institutions

• Mobilization vs. Embeddedness: How does the CPC achieve both knowledge of and influence over society, compared to independent institutions like central banks in the West? (28:07–30:02)
• China’s "Beautiful China" Agenda: Environmentalism and quality-of-life improvements are essential to regime ideology and mass legitimacy—“petit bourgeois environmentalism” is central to Xi Jinping’s legacy (33:04–33:23).

9. Adam Tooze’s Upcoming Book and Its Argument

• Scope and Thesis: The forthcoming book is a half-century history of the climate crisis, tracking the pivot from a Western-centric problem to one defined by Asian (especially Chinese) actions and solutions (76:11–78:23).
  • "It’s a book that... is now a half-century history of the emergence of the climate problem as what I insist is, or was, the central problem of progressive politics after the end of the Cold War for the west..." (76:11, Tooze)
• Surprises: The ongoing significance of the "Second World" (former socialist bloc) in global development—China’s success is not simply capitalist but springs from a unique developmentalist paradigm (78:50–80:59).

10. Book and Recommendation Shout-outs (Paying It Forward)

• Tim Sahay (Polycrisis Blog): “So sharp, so comprehensive, so brilliant.” (81:36–82:24, Tooze)
• Wang Hui (“The End of the Revolution”): Central figure in Chinese intellectual life; accessible bridge for Western readers interested in the evolution of modern Chinese thought (82:33–83:46).
• Chinese TV Series “Shenming Shu” (“Tree of Life”): Celebrated for its nuanced portrayal of development vs. environment and its humane depictions of minorities (83:58–85:56, Kaiser).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Learning Chinese and its Significance:

  "When you do actually suddenly realize that you can really read a street sign or have understood what somebody said. So that's beginning to happen... The context opens up a bit."
  (04:30, Adam Tooze)

• On Green Tech “Glut Shame”:

  "Better to think constructively about ways of absorbing that capacity rather than what I've come to call glut shaming."
  (10:32, Kaiser)

• On the Five Year Plan Terminology Shift:

  "They no longer called it the Five Year Plan Jihua. They changed the name to Guihua. And that's significant..."
  (11:30, Kaiser)

• On the Western Reckoning with China:

  "China is not a passing anomaly... It's something much more consequential, probably much more enduring."
  (24:44, Kaiser)

• On the Role of the Party:

  "We need to talk about the party. That is the anchoring institution here... it's the secret sauce."
  (28:10, Tooze)

• On Xi Jinping’s Environmental Vision:

  "Xi Jinping's personal vision of the future is this... China beautiful, lush, clear waters, lush mountains... Invaluable assets, I think is the official translation."
  (33:04–33:10, Tooze)

• On Europe’s Automotive Strategy:

  "China is the Super League. China is where you have to succeed."
  (44:22, quoting German executives via Tooze)

• On China and the Global South:

  "There is so much room for growth, so much undeveloped effective demand in Sub Saharan Africa, literally hundreds of millions of people without basic purchasing power because development has not happened..."
  (47:37–47:54, Tooze)

• On the US Political Moment:

  "It's totally embarrassing, like, because they, yeah, because they just, they can't, you know, this is, this is, this is the big leagues. You can't go to a meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing in the state that America's in."
  (70:03, Tooze)

• On the Climate Book’s Argument:

  "Asia is also the source of all the solutions. And so this displacing of a problem that was conceived originally as a truly classic global governance problem as conceived by Europeans to the issue where our fate collectively is really in the hands of Asia, and specifically in the hands of China is what this book describes."
  (78:00–78:23, Tooze)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:42] — Language learning & its impact on understanding China
• [09:18] — Dynamics of China’s renewable energy build-out
• [11:30] — The shift from “jihua” to “guihua” in planning
• [15:56] — Emphasis on technology and “scitech” in the Five Year Plan
• [20:13] — Urban improvements and living standards in Beijing
• [24:44] — The Western “reckoning” regarding China’s rise
• [28:10] — Communist Party’s unique role in driving development
• [33:53] — China as the central force in global climate solutions
• [41:26] — Europe's “neuralgias” over China: EVs and Russia
• [47:16] — China's automation and the "post-flying geese" global economy
• [57:07] — Deep dive: Indonesia as a resource-processing hub for China
• [61:02] — Europe/US “rupture” and the fraying of the old global order
• [76:11] — Adam Tooze previews his forthcoming book on the climate crisis
• [81:36] — Paying it Forward: Tim Sahay and Wang Hui recommendations
• [83:58] — Chinese TV series “Shenming Shu” recommendation with social themes

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains a tone that is both intellectually rigorous and accessible, marked by Adam Tooze’s reflective, sometimes self-deprecating style and Kaiser Kuo’s incisive, probing, yet affable hosting. Both speakers are deeply engaged with the material and with each other—frequently sharing personal experiences, offering critiques of prevailing narratives, and weaving in wit and irony, especially when reflecting on the state of Western politics.

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For Further Exploration (“Paying It Forward” Section)

• Tim Sahay — Polycrisis blog and Twitter/BlueSky at @that70sbachchan
• Wang Hui — "The End of the Revolution" (translated by Rebecca Karl)
• Shenming Shu (Born to Be Alive/Tree of Life) — Chinese TV series on iQiyi/YouTube

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of China’s domestic transformations, global economic shifts, and the geopolitics of climate and technology.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we 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 for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Goel, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing. 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. The Sinica Podcast is and will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the podcast and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I'm still looking for new institutional support. The lines are open. You can reach [e-mail] and listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] seriously help out. I know there are a lot of substacks out there and they start to add up, but I think this one delivers serious value for your hard earned dollar. So please do subscribe. Help me to continue to bring you these conversations. Last summer, the last time I caught up with Adam Tooze, it was in the Mountain idol of Shaxi in Yunnan Province, where he had dropped in after spending time in China for summer Davos and other meetings. We talked then about the feel of China on the ground, the lingering aftershocks of the post zero Covid period, the stubborn drag of the property downturn, the question of whether Beijing was really rethinking its macro playbook and the way China's extraordinary dominance in green tech was scrambling some of the West's favorite categories over capacity chief among them. We also talked about Europe's increasingly fraught relationship with China and about what it means to think seriously about China in a world defined less by any single crisis than by the collision of many. Well, Adam is back in China and in Beijing for the recently concluded China Development Forum, and I am delighted to welcome him both back to Beijing and to Seneca. Adam Tooze is an economic historian at Columbia, where he directs the European Institute. He's the author of several indispensable books, the Force behind the Must Read Chartbook Newsletter, and the co host of the podcast Ones and Twos. He has just finished the manuscript of a new book on the energy transition in which naturally, China figures very centrally and, you know, unavoidably so. Right. Adam, welcome back to Beijing. Welcome back to Sinica.

[C]

Man. Great to be here.

[B]

Adam, let me start with something a little lighter. Since we last spoke in Shashi. How's your Chinese coming? I know you're still diligently taking lessons. You're telling me.

[D]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[C]

I'm grinding my way through the Confucius

[D]

Institute HSK3 curriculum, so don't put me on the spot here. But I'm, yeah, most of the way through HSK3.

[C]

So the difference between being here last summer and this time around is palpable in terms of the number of Chinese characters I recognize, you know, individual phrases and being able to actually understand.

[D]

I was really worried about it.

[C]

I thought maybe, you know, it is

[D]

such a steep and large mountain to climb and obviously I, you know, one of very many who've made this trek.

[C]

I'm very conscious, you know, conscious of this.

[D]

But.

[C]

But it's great when you do actually suddenly realize that you can really read a street sign or have understood what somebody said. So that's beginning to happen. It's in the nature of the language. You like, piece it together so you recognize character here, character there, and all of a sudden the context opens up a bit.

[D]

So this time in the summer, I'm

[C]

kind of looking forward to coming back and tracking the progress some more.

[B]

One of my favorite literary devices I've ever seen for the acquisition of Chinese is in Peter Hessler's book Rivertown, where he jogs every day and he runs by this sign with quite a number. And it's sort of like Wheel of Fortune where one character gets filled in each time he runs by.

[D]

Yeah, it's that kind of experience. Yeah.

[B]

Well, I ask Partly out of sympathy and partly because I'm genuinely curious what trying to work your way through the Chinese language has actually, how it's changed things for you, has it opened anything up? What has it actually complicated, what kinds of misunderstandings it may have cured you of, if any, or maybe it's plunged you even more deeply into these misunderstandings. I mean, I guess that would lead to a broader question. If you want to talk about language first, but then, since last we spoke, how has your own understanding of China changed? What feels clearer now and what have you had to revise and what resists easy comprehension still?

[D]

So other language level, I mean, business

[C]

of learning Chinese, you know, it's fundamentally unlike learning another Western language because most fundamentally you're learning to read again. And so I find that a really profoundly. It's a regressing experience. I mean, it takes me back to the childhood memories of learning to read English, and I find it very soothing. I like to do it before bedtime. It's a very deep experience of learning. And the fact that I'm going through this and putting myself through this, just as AI is breaking on the scene and transforming everything we think about in terms of knowing things, I've really become to appreciate, you know, the art of memory, the art of putting things, laying things down inside your body and your brain in a quite physical way. It's been a journey and I really look forward to my lessons every week. And literally doing vocab, it is changing. I mean, people joke about this and I've been taken to task for it, apparently recently, like, as a foreigner trying to engage with China, it's easy to engage in kind of linguistic over determinism, like, you know, you see some small character change and then you become, you know, all high on the fact that you've finally understood ranges of reference in certain characters. And it's, you know, it's easy to see fame and the most famous one is the, you know, the crisis term Kennedy made popular.

[D]

But it's genuinely the case now that

[C]

when I'm reading Chinese history or Chinese political science, and they do that thing of putting the Chinese term generally bad pinion, without necessary emphasis markings in the text, I actually can begin to decipher what underlying characters that refers to. And once you can do that, you actually do have a deeper understanding of the term that's being deployed. That is a really worthwhile thing for me now. And I then I try to diligently go away and make myself little quizlet kind of packs of political terminology, because one of the things you don't know about HSK3 and HSK until you do it is that the Confucius Institute may have this fearsome reputation as like outposts of, you know, zealous CCP ideology, but in fact it's a curriculum that's utterly deprived of any kind of politics. It's totally depoliticised.

[B]

Yeah. It steers deliberately clear of anything. Yeah.

[C]

It's all about health and relationships and work and women telling other women not to flirt with their husbands and complaining about the fact they don't have enough time with their children and you know, people getting ill and scolding each other in rather direct and I'm told quite Chinese terms about getting too fat and needing to take exercise.

[D]

Anyway, it's so I crave the politics to come to the bigger point. What have I felt?

[C]

What have I felt?

[D]

I've learned well in finishing this climate

[C]

book, which I really did, I sent before I came away. It was my promise to myself that I would not come to Hong Kong and China without finishing it.

[D]

I have. I ended up really coming to grips

[C]

with the scale of the Chinese renewable energy build out in the last couple of years. Not as though I haven't been digging that for a while now, but really looking into it deeply and appreciating the scale of the imbalance.

[D]

So I'm still a critic of, you

[C]

know, the idea of oversupply when it comes to things like batteries or solar panels, it's grotesque. It's a matter of organizing effective demand, but really wrestling with the, the kind of crazy helter skelter dynamics of Chinese corporate expansion when the signals are set in a certain direction.

[D]

Wallace isn't Jeremy Wallace has written about

[C]

this as well recently as a good piece.

[D]

I think he overstates it for effect,

[C]

but this idea that the energy transition is going to take the form of a kind of mad chaotic dash that has come to appeal to me more than I think it once did because I use it to highlight the tragedy that the, you know, this huge world changing expansion is happening without other countries opening up their markets, at least before the most recent Iran crisis to absorb this historic opportunity that is provided by China's solar battery wind turbine EV expansion.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So that point becomes sharper. The more you appreciate how helter skelter not centrally planned this expansion is, the more you realize that in a sense the obvious solution to make the best of this situation is for a cooperative intergovernmental resolution of China's oversupply problem rather than slapping them on the wrist and insisting on a competitive level playing field, which I think is a lost cause at this point, certainly as far as batteries and solar are concerned, better to think constructively about ways of absorbing that

[B]

capacity rather than what I've come to call glut shaming.

[C]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's a great.

[B]

It's yours. To borrow, you mentioned just now that you had been taken to task for over interpretation of. You're referring to something that I actually mentioned to you on Twitter. Now, to his great credit, the individual who took you to task over it promptly deleted the tweet when I pushed back. But he had Talked about the 15th Five Year Plan and your observation on the Ones and Twos podcast. And I think it's a very important one that beginning In I think 2006 with the 11th Five Year Plan, they no longer called it the Five Year Plan Jihua. They changed the name to Guihua. And that's significant because it was intended to signal a move away from, you know, sort of Stalinist style, top down central planning and more toward allowing market forces, you know, providing guidelines simply. And that's what it really means, what Guihua means, this sort of guidelines or a blueprint or something.

[D]

It can even mean law, can't it? Or regulation.

[C]

And whereas the former term refers quite explicitly to numbers, to spreadsheets, to statistics.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And that seems, and this is one of the things I love about Chinese, you know, in my amateurish way is you just, you chase down the characters. And with modern electronic dictionaries, it's so easy to do. I, I usually yable a lot on, on the computer and, and what's the, what's the pleco as everyone uses on their phone?

[D]

And the beauty is, you know, in

[C]

each two character combination, it's like Lego or dominoes, you can kind of chase down all the other associations that go with that. Even in the simplified world, the modern Chinese, this isn't even to get into the depth of reference you have in classical Chinese, but it is a bit

[B]

like playing with Greek and Latin roots.

[D]

And it's on the one hand deceptive

[C]

and you can take it too far and you end up in the kind of crazy world of like Heideggerian etymologies or whatever. But on the other hand you can also actually sort of suss out where these meanings are coming from. And that did strike me as a,

[D]

I hadn't understood that. And it's, it's significant to me that

[C]

in English we've just gone on translating it as Five Year Plan, whereas they

[B]

have that's the thing is, I mean, if you, if you look at the English language, the official English translations, they stuck with it. They've stuck with it, right? I mean, continuity over accuracy, I suppose, in this case. And I figured they would assume the people who really needed to know knew.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So let's talk about the 15th Five Year Plan. The broad outline was already quite visible by the time the fourth plenum. Not a whole lot has changed since then. What came out of the two sessions maybe felt more like confirmation and operationalization than some dramatic departure. Still, plans matter. China still runs on plans. They don't tell you everything, but they do tell you a great deal about how the leadership is diagnosing the problems that China faces and prioritizing its future. So when you read this plan and as you've discussed it, and I presume that at the China Development Forum over the last few days, that was a major topic of discussion, what strikes you about it? What does it tell you about how Beijing understands the next five years and about the trade offs it's prepared to make?

[D]

Well, one of the things I learned

[C]

about the plans as well, doing the pod for ones and twos, was also that now the plans are understood not just as five year races to the finish, but as consecutive change tenure horizons.

[D]

In the earlier versions they had these

[C]

insane moments because they are taken sufficiently seriously such that in the last six months of a plan, a little bit like with a corporate budget, you know, provincial authorities will either like spend down what they get to spend down or cut down or shut down whatever it was they were supposed to shut down so as to meet the target. And there has now been an effort to smooth this by means of horizon planning over a 10 year period. So there is a lot of continuity between the 14th and the fifth. The 15th, yeah. And the area that was, you know, most deep concern to me was is the environmental, the green energy space. And there is, there is some tinkering

[D]

there with the numbers.

[C]

All of the Western experts have been swarming over this. They, they readjusted their claims for the extent of the reduction in carbon intensity over the preceding period so as to permit themselves a more modest target going forward. But we're talking like fractional adjustments and

[D]

those targets for reducing carbon intensity are quite tough to meet.

[C]

And so everyone, I think broadly speaking, assumes that everything's going to be decided by the pace of the renewables build out, which has just been epic and will make this problem go away. If they do it at end the full scale, they're planning to do it. So that sort of tinkering is one element that has attracted attention. There is relentless focus as before, on what they call scitech. So this domain of new Chinese industrial policy that goes all the way back to the early 2000s, which is not in continuity with earlier phases of five year planning which were much kind of accepted the technological grid and then worked within it, Chinese planning now is very much kind of futurological technological forecasting. We need to make breakthroughs on fusion or something like that. Fusion gets a lot of attention, huge play in this.

[D]

So it is, it's very cutting edge, some sort of brain interface, digital technologies

[C]

up there as well. So this is China decidedly moving into a kind of new world in which China is defining the future.

[D]

But another major point of emphasis is the human side, right?

[C]

This is one of the points of emphasis of this new plan is the emphasis on everything from education and training through to life expectancy. You know, the we'll hit 80 this time, right?

[D]

Jarring and like. And you say that and I mean it's apparently that, that that number is

[C]

very modest because, because you know, you really would expect a more rapid improvement. And China has been doing very well in terms of life expectancy relative to income. You know, it's neck and neck with the United States at this point with a much lower level of per capita income.

[D]

But there's also a broader understanding and

[C]

this is the macroeconomist question, like, you know, how far is this a plan that moves away from the radical emphasis on investment towards a broader understanding of the economy?

[D]

There's all the rhetoric and there's all

[C]

the questions which are so familiar now over many years it's like, well, how far will they actually translate this into substantial uplift in household consumption? The kind of rural subsidy pension idea they introduced is trivial in size. It's really no one could, you know, find at the development forum, no one could find a positive word to say about it. But at the development forum, speech after speech after speech and they really, it is just a series of statements. There's no Q and A or back and forth was underlining one or other aspect of the plan. And that goes for the western corporates that were there as well. I mean basically the European and US firms and CEO after CEO stood up

[D]

and affirmed their unwavering loyalty to the Objectives of the 15 Five Year Plan

[C]

and their complete alignment between whatever their corporate goals are. And this ranges from Apple to Otis to Warburg Pincus to Fortescue the iron ore miner to Anglo American. The big Mining company, the copper abb, the German carmakers, all the usual suspects were there. And man are they signed onto the Five Year Plan. In the current environment, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a beacon of techno industrial rationalism in an otherwise fairly insane moment.

[B]

Rural pensions weren't the only thing that they rolled out in terms of addressing this rebalancing issue, this intention to move away from the old triumvirate of export led growth and investment and property. So the 15 five year plan talks about domestic demand, about raising living standards like you said, these, these human pieces of it, like life expectancy and education and so forth, but also, you know, strengthening the social floor as you've just said. When you read it, do you see, how do you feel, do you see a genuine willingness to shift the model in a serious way? Or is this mostly an effort to stabilize and soften imbalances while preserving the basic development logic that's gotten China this far?

[D]

I mean, my read of the Xi

[C]

Jinping era, which we are what, halfway

[D]

through, we'll see like that, we'll see has always been that this element of welfare, they obviously, they shy away from

[C]

any rhetoric which sounds at all welfarist, but shared prosperity, common prosperity, high quality development phrase they use, but also high

[D]

quality development in general has been an absolutely essential element of the Xi agenda. And so the lack of macroeconomic progress on this score shouldn't necessarily lead one

[C]

to the conclusion they don't mean it or they're not serious about it.

[D]

I think their conception of a beautiful China, a good Chinese life, the Chinese

[C]

miracle or dream, emphatically includes all round comprehensive improvement in the standard of living, broadly defined.

[D]

And in a city like Beijing you see just how far they've come, right? I mean it's truly dramatic in terms

[C]

of everything most obviously from air pollution to inner city improvements like these beautiful. We Ching and I went for a walk last night along this in, you know, inner city canal and you were telling me that 10 years ago it was a sewer and now it's an extremely attractive urban space with a beautiful

[D]

stretch of water and wonderfully, functionally, intelligently

[C]

landscaped places for Chinese families to do what Chinese families do on a hot summer's day, which is sit out and there's benches and ample sitting equipment, equipment,

[D]

you know, places for people to sit.

[C]

They're not worried about homeless people in camping there because there aren't any homeless people who are going to encamp there.

[D]

So there's loads of great flat surfaces at the right level, which in New

[C]

York wouldn't be there because they'd be worried about people sleeping on them.

[D]

Right. So there's all these elements of functional life. I was reading because I got very

[C]

into the quietness of Chinese, you know, cities nowadays because of the EV thing.

[D]

They also, in fact reload quite a lot of the tarmac to reduce tire noise. Because once you with it, once you've

[C]

got an ev, the only thing that actually makes a sound are the car tires.

[B]

Right.

[D]

So there's this kind of minutia of improving everyday life, which, which cumulatively is incredibly impressive when you, when you see

[C]

it around, around the place.

[D]

These are highly functional places to live. Does that show up in the macroeconomic numbers? No, it doesn't.

[C]

Right.

[B]

We were talking about this the other

[D]

night, but it might also be one of the reasons why you don't necessarily want to buy, you know, go out and buy a car because there's so many other options of urban mobility in a, in a, in a city like

[C]

Beijing or Chengdu or Shanghai.

[B]

Right, that's exactly right. I mean, it's something I've been harping on for a while. I had a conversation with a business reporter for one of the wire services who brought that up. He says, you know, the likelihood that you're going to buy a car in a city with excellent public transportation, with electric two wheelers, with all these bike rentals available absolutely everywhere, it's going to suppress your propensity to buy an automobile.

[D]

And if you want to go to Shanghai, you're definitely not getting on the interstate. You're either, you're taking the high speed railway and then you arrive on the end of the high speed railway, which is unfailingly punctual. It's not cheap cheap, but it gets you there. Clearly better value than an airplane. And then at the other end, you've got every conceivable public transportation option and a whole menu of different types of Uber rides. And like, why would you, why would you have a, I mean, you know, and Shashi folks had family cars, they had beautiful, you know, great big Audis and things because they were doing these long road trips. But it was a lifestyle choice. Right, right. It was very much a kind of, hey, let's have a family outing. So, yeah, it's those, you know, when you look at the five year plan and go, are they going to finally make the break with the investment driven model? There's an element of everyday life in China which suggests that at some fundamental level, we're not talking about high Stalinism here. Right. These aren't people living in hovels while you build, you know, steel plants. Right.

[C]

That is not, that's not the situation. The class gradient is absolutely real and I was super struck by it in the summer and continue to be struck by it. Right. There is a, there is a huge gradient between the lifestyle of the rich, famous and just plain affluent and ordinary working class Chinese. But that's, I think, is no doubt that will be softened by a readjustment in the, in the social equation.

[D]

But to say the regime doesn't care

[C]

about welfare, I think somehow misses the point.

[B]

I would agree with you. Yeah, absolutely. Adam, listening to you over the last year or two and reading your work as I do, I've often felt like one of the things that you're grappling with something explicitly that I'm also grappling with is the extent to which China's rise has kind of forced a cognitive and ideological adjustment in the rest of the world, especially in the Atlantic world. That, in a sense is very close to what I've tried to get at with this notion of a great reckoning. Very much inspired by conversations we had last summer, this slow, painful recognition that China is not a passing anomaly. I mean, it's not a temporary distortion in a basically western centered story. It's something much more consequential, probably much more enduring. So let me just ask you directly, do you think that this kind of a reckoning has actually advanced in recent months? Do you see evidence that there's real movement in how political, intellectual or policy elites understand what China now is and what it represents? Or do you think most people are still, in one way or another, resisting the full implications?

[C]

I mean, you and I are absolutely on the same wavelength here. And the conversation, I mean, I'll just play the compliment straight back to conversations with you have been absolutely formative for this, this increasing, deepening realization on my part as well.

[D]

You know, the most evident level is the phenomenon of China maxing. Right. Like, you know, the world that I

[C]

live in in New York is one

[D]

of people, you know, not with their

[C]

policy think tank hats on, but with their everyday social media hats on, fully,

[D]

you know, increasingly enthusiastically embracing the latest, incredible piece of day to day, everyday kind of reality from China.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And the, you know, and this ranges from, and it's a very strange combination, the sort of the authenticity of working

[C]

class Chinese life as presented in the social media, like, you know, dudes with their Beijing bikini or, you know, folks really digging into some hot pot or something.

[D]

On the one hand, and on the

[C]

other hand, the just dazzling progress of EVs and robotics and, you know, the latest gadgetry out of China and the latest insane drone display.

[B]

Right.

[D]

So it's, it's kind of, you know, it's both, it's the full, it's the full spectrum.

[B]

Yeah. It's happening at more than one level. Right.

[D]

It's happening at more than one level in, in policy terms, it's in the

[C]

green space where you just see the dawning realization that, you know, the game's up for the vast majority of key technologies. And so it's now a question of how one appropriately handles those and handles this imbalance and where it's going to impact and where it's going to impact most constructively. And I have friends in the think tank community who are effectively positioning themselves to piggyback on a world that they essentially assume will be China centric. And the role then of Western NGOs will be to advise people in more or less complicated bilateral relations with China as to how to get the best deal. Like that's literally a kind of an emerging role for Western think tanks.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And there have been these dizzying moments, you know, at Davos and now with the Iran war, where I think a lot of people found themselves on the one hand, following the insane news out of the Gulf, and on the other hand, you know, anxiously trawling for the latest draft version of the 15th Five

[D]

Year Plan as being discussed at the twin sessions, you know, those Chinese political

[C]

meetings which we used to just easily dismiss as rubber stamp, you know, you know, the phrases.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Suddenly acquired. Well, they may be rubber stamp or not, but. But we certainly need to know what it is they're going to stamp. They're really consequential, hugely consequential. And like weighing these up against each other. It was very impressive at the China Development Forum. You know, you'd have the kind of, well, there's global turbulence.

[C]

Well, we're not going to talk about

[D]

why or for what reason or previous by whom. And then on the other hand, there's the forward looking outlook of the 15th Five Year Plan. And it was the same, you know, back and forth.

[B]

Yeah, the split screen of this is just pretty incredible.

[D]

And you know, as a historian, utterly, utterly mind blowing, like I am, you know, somebody profoundly shaped by the European

[C]

moment of the late 80s and 90s.

[D]

And for us to be here, this is actually what I ended up saying to the Development Forum. They gave a rather unusual talk, by the standards of the forum, is that there Is a, you know, we need to talk about the party. We need, we need to talk because that is the anchoring institution here, right? It's the secret sauce in, you know,

[C]

if my panel was on how, you know, financial innovation leads to high quality development and there's a whole bunch of, you know, great friends and colleagues working in the, what's called the critical macro finance space, which examines precisely this question of how various types of credit intervention policy in around the world do and do not lead to green energy transitions.

[D]

And in one, you know, extreme corner

[C]

solution there is China, which they name the, this is Daniela Garbaut and Benjamin Brown and they, they call this the big green state. We should link in the, in the

[D]

show notes, an important piece and it's a fascinating and important intervention which places

[C]

China in comparative terms. But the one thing they are not

[D]

willing to say is what it is

[C]

that gives China the capacity both to have a regime deeply embedded in the social structure, profoundly knowledgeable about the currents and movements of society and able to fully mobilize them and to a degree

[D]

able to discipline those flows. And if you had in a single

[C]

formula to describe what the logic after all, of Communist Party politics has been all the way back to Lenin and

[D]

people thinking about this, it's always been that duality, how do we simultaneously mobilize

[C]

and stay in touch and on the other hand preserve our autonomy and independence so as to be able to act on society, act on history, to exercise discipline over the society which we grow out of. So it's a question of a kind of extended self disciplining process.

[D]

Right?

[C]

And of course Western democracies, constitutional systems

[D]

have mechanisms for achieving that kind of

[C]

combination of embeddedness and discipline. You know, independent central banks or those kind of institutions in the west, deeply networked with finance and yet independent of finance to a degree. Likewise with politics. Obviously the CPC does this on a scale that's a completely different order and with a much greater efficacy. Anyway, I kind of think the west

[D]

is dancing around, dancing around there. So you can see that my Chinese audience were of course course wildly applauding and the CEOs from Nameless European corporations were visibly pained because this is the

[C]

one thing they don't want to say out loud. It's all very well to agree with the Chinese government. It's quite another to agree with the cpc, right?

[B]

Even within the China green energy transition, the environmental folks in academia, there's a long standing debate over environmental authoritarianism, but it ends up being really kind of rarefied in academic. It's like, you know, where do you come down on James Scott essentially, rather than do you think the Chinese Communist Party as a mobilizing institution is doing the right thing? Are they necessary? Is that level of planning and is that level of institutional structure necessary to drive the kinds of changes that our markets seems unable to do? Yeah, so it's. Yeah.

[D]

And I don't think there's any question if you look at a city like

[C]

this and the trajectory they were counterfactually on from the 80s onwards and where they've ended up, sure, that only a truly collective whole society, power mechanism, but

[D]

also a meaning making mechanism, a motivational

[C]

mechanism, could have achieved the scale of the changes that we've seen here.

[D]

It's, you know, you can see this

[C]

just like PM2.5, the famous measure of particles in the air. You know, Nixon introduces the legislation in the early 70s. It takes the Americans roughly twice as long to achieve the same reduction in air pollution as it's taken in China. By the mid 2010s, American observers are just having to accept the fact that all of the particular eight emissions standards in China are setting a higher bar. There isn't a single power plant in America that could meet those standards already by 2016, 2017. Now are they uniformly enforced in every single case in a giant country or of 1.4 billion people? Clearly not. Is the corruption. Of course there is, as you would expect in any complex political economy. But just look at the daily reality of cities like this.

[D]

And you have to acknowledge they steered

[C]

away from what was an absolute catastrophe in the making.

[D]

And they did that not just through the means of the party, but this is central to the agenda of the party. This isn't some concession they made to other people or some ideology that was foisted on from the West. Like it or not, Xi Jinping, and it's specifically connected to Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping's personal vision of the future is this.

[C]

I like to say it's kind of like a petty bourgeois environmentalism. China beautiful, like, you know, lush, you

[D]

know, clear waters, lush mountains.

[C]

These are precious assets, is this phrase

[D]

they repeat over and over again.

[C]

Invaluable assets, I think is the official translation.

[D]

And you know, they, it is, it is a, it will be one of the cliches of the Xi Jinping era when we look back on it. This kind of environmentalism will be one

[C]

of the cliches of this, of this era.

[D]

In the same way as in Germany,

[C]

the, the Green Party has exercised this kind of pervasive cultural influence.

[D]

Something similar has gone on here. And it is specifically identified with the

[C]

last 12 to 13 years of his governance. And you gotta. You gotta bite on that. You gotta bite down hard on that.

[B]

I do.

[D]

My view. Yeah, we have to reckon with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, it's, there's no. There are a lot of, you know,

[D]

liberal ways of kind of attempting to wriggle your way out of this fact. But at this point, and of course,

[C]

it's globally true, China is the decisive force in the climate equation.

[B]

There goes to saying the thing again, saying the thing that other people won't say. And I mean, you know, you are somebody who now occupies a pretty visible place in the broader public discourse on China. Like, you're not. You're not a traditional quote, unquote, China watcher. I've always had a problem with that phrase. But you're somebody who nonetheless has become a really important voice in how educated publics think about China and political economy. I'm curious what patterns you've come across that you notice in that discourse itself, and what narratives about China maybe were once ubiquitous, that have subsided, that are persistent, that are especially pernicious. What misperceptions or bad habits of thought keep cropping up no matter how much evidence accumulates against them? I mean, this is one of the things I prize about talking to you, is that you're a smart guy who watches this from sort of outside my little world, which can be very, you know, frankly, very incestuous.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, I also feel shy about. But you see the patterns I'll show rather than tell, if you like, in the sense that, you know, I don't.

[C]

I haven't. I haven't paid my dues. Right. I haven't. I'm not somebody who is only just learning, you know, baby Chinese, for heaven's sake, like.

[D]

And so I don't feel. I'll just describe it more as a

[C]

kind of surprise, like a kind of

[D]

mystification I have when I bump into people who clearly know better than me. Right. Who are much deeper in the weeds and have spent their entire careers tracking various aspects. And there's a bit of me which

[C]

doesn't quite get why their point of view has the kind of logic that it does.

[D]

And there's certainly a particular type of

[C]

jaundiced American perspective on China that just is going to cling to skepticism till its dying breath.

[D]

Like it's just not going to give up on the.

[C]

Yes, but qualification spent all these years watching measure them by what they do rather than they you know, they say these kind of.

[D]

And I'm sure they're well merited in many individual cases. But as you say, if you come to this story from not in the trenches. If you come to this story and you just look at the battlefield and you're not in the trench perspective and you kind of. It's in a. Look what they've done rather than what they say. Well, indeed, this is the green energy story. Indeed. Look at what they've done. Look at what we said and what we did. Look at what they said and they did the. Well, do we even get off? You know, like, I think we should probably just hush because. Because they are turning an absolutely gigantic oil tanker which is not steaming slowly but, you know, hurtling in the wrong direction. And they. We think they. China may have peaked. Right. It's a reasonable. We may literally these last 18 to 20, 18 months, 2 years, be living through the peaking of CO2 emissions in China and with that global peaking, because everyone else is going to come down

[C]

and the Chinese will take this down faster.

[D]

I was looking the other day at heavy industry. Like the big worry is always but. But coal, but coal, but coal. Look at all the coal. Look at all the coal power stations they built. Look at how much coal they dig. Totally true. History of humanity divides into three phases

[C]

as far as coal is concerned.

[D]

Before coal, classic coal and China coal and China coal is bigger than anything anyone's ever done before. But then look at Chinese coal industry in detail and what you see is that employment peaked around 2015, or rather repeat so it was peaked 1990. Then there was a massive crashing cut. No shock therapy, sure, but just smashing the iron rice ball. Huge cuts, then a new peak and then from 15 they shut down more coal capacity and steel producing capacity than America has in operation in China between

[C]

2015 and the early 2000s.

[D]

And there's no question that all of the classic coal mining areas like Shashi are going to be shut down and there's 830,000 jobs there. And does that mean China's not going to use coal anymore? No, because Inner Mongolia is a robotized insanity of.

[C]

I've not seen it with my own

[D]

eyes, seen the pictures. They. In shashi, it takes 80, I'm sure they're dudes. 83 dudes to mine a million tons of coal a year.

[B]

Wow.

[D]

So you can supply a billion tons of coal for China with about a workforce of 85,000 people. So whereas they've got, you know, a couple of million currently still working in coal. But A lot of those are in very dangerous old fashioned pits which no one in their right mind would want to work in. And so the question is, how do they ease them out? They're going to ease them out. And can the Chinese do just transitions? Again, look at what they do, not what they say. Between 2015 and 2020 we think China spent about $50 billion on restructuring formerly industrial zones in China. They have a policy, it's almost like Europe and it's not gold plated like Europe where the Germans will spend 40 billion over 25 years on 40,000 jobs. That's not China. But do they see the problem of structural adjustment? Have they got some of the best think tanks in the world at Tsinghua and whatever working on the future of the Chinese golden? You betcha. Do they do ecotourism? Yes. Will they turn former open caste minds into Great Lakes and have canoeing on them? Yes. This is not America. It is far more like Europe in that respect. They will see an opportunity for some kind of industrial restructuring and they'll take it quite quickly. Like the big art zone in Beijing. Imagine how long that would have laid derelict and ruined in the Bronx in

[C]

the United States, not here.

[B]

You're talking about 798.

[D]

It turns over quite quickly, becomes really high value art house, real estate. And do the Chinese like a little bit of post industrial chic? Yes, they absolutely do. So this sense of like China is being akin to 1990s sports, post Soviet or Donbass or somewhere like that is a real. So what I've seen anyway is a

[C]

complete misunderstanding of how this is likely to play out.

[B]

Right, right, right. You mentioned Europe. Let me shift now there and borrow a formulation from you. You recently put it that there are two sources of. I think the word you used was neuralgia of European neuralgia around China that have been especially acute. One is the sheer scale of the trade imbalance and the fear felt most sharply in Europe's automotive sector that China's industrial overcapacity, especially in electric vehicles and the broader clean tech supply chain, poses a direct challenge to one of the continent's most important industrial pillars. The other is China's so called pro Russian neutrality, as some people cleverly put it, over Ukraine, which has remained a deep and maybe irreducible source of mistrust. So how do you see these two anxieties interacting right now? Are they reinforcing one another into a more generally adversarial European posture toward China? And the irony of course is that's happening at a moment where the worst transatlantic rupture in memory has now taken place. This would seem a meaningful moment for China to nudge Europe toward strategic autonomy, something it's always wanted.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I have a fantasy

[C]

I'm going to opine about in op

[D]

ed that China says, right, no more critical supplies for either Russia or the United States. You Americans can't conduct their missile war on Iran without Chinese rare earths. All Xi has to say is, ceasefire talks now, all of you. And of course it's not going to happen. But if Beijing wanted to muscle this, it could. And it would, of course, in the US if they did that, it would

[C]

provoke all hell from the neocons. But China has, this, has leverage now, which is completely unprecedented. Yeah.

[D]

When we last spoke, I think we were still very much under the influence

[C]

of, of the late Biden, say, era, where these two things came very tightly together. Right. The Biden people were green. They were fronting up against Russia, they were fronting up against China. And for European neocons, which includes also large parts of the German Green Party, who are very influential in the arithmetic of all of this, that's perfect. That's the meal they want to go to. That's the full book. That's the full buffet. They fully, they line up. And as you were saying, Trump blows that up. And so when we last spoke was shortly after, I think, the humiliating European kowtow to, to, you know, to, to, to, to Trump over Daddy. Yeah, Daddy and all of that. Mark Ruto is going on doing his frankly surreal act. I don't. You will have seen him, you know, opining on NATO.

[D]

But the mood in general in Europe,

[C]

I think, has shifted.

[D]

Not on Ukraine, which remains a fundamental

[C]

problem, though you do now have the odd European politician saying, we need peace, we've got to get there. What's our plan? But the Ukrainians, after all underreported, have turned the tide militarily from where we were at last year. But where there's been real progress is the EV story, and it hinges critically on the European players themselves. Because there was a scenario in which basically the Europeans just cut and run, like the Americans, and they're not doing that. And crucially, the German players aren't. And we saw that at the China Development Forum.

[B]

They're really leaning in now.

[C]

They're leaning in.

[D]

They know this. They. The phrase they use, typically German, is

[C]

this is the Champions League. And if, like in soccer, so that's the pinnacle European championship for soccer. And it's, it's hard to explain to Americans because of the weird structure. But it's as though you crammed together the NBA, the NFL, the put all

[D]

of those things, put the NBA playoffs

[C]

and the super bowl together in a single event and at the Olympics. That's how important this is. And you had German car executives saying, china is that China is the super league. China is where you have to succeed. And crucially, this depends of course, on the brand. But vw, which is Europe's contender for biggest car, goes head to head with Toyota. Sure, VW have this Cupra brand which is very sexy, electric. They're not sold in the US American

[D]

market isn't distinguished, discriminating enough. But really fancy Chinese style, super sexy.

[C]

They look like a cross between like a Lamborghini and a Porsche and a

[D]

Ferrari, but they're SUVs. They want to sell those in Europe really badly.

[C]

But they make them in China.

[D]

And the Europeans know and when they

[C]

did their subsidy test, they actually investigated VW as well as byd and they know they're heavily subsidized by local Chinese provincial authorities and they may have some national subsidy as well.

[D]

And VW has taken the lead in

[C]

negotiating a deal with Brussels over access for its own China made vehicles in the European market.

[D]

And this to my mind is the

[C]

some would say Trojan horse, other would say model template for the sort of deals that might be possible for a byd, for instance.

[D]

And it consists in a combination of a minimum price so they have to promise not to undercut the local competition. So BYD is just like there's a market where there's a minimum price, price floors like where we don't have to fight youth and nail. There's somewhere we can sell our cars that we can make for €7,000 for 15,000. Oh my God. And then of course to stop that,

[C]

there's a quota, in other words, you can only sell so many.

[D]

And then there's some sort of FDI

[C]

technology transfer kind of deal which comes into play as well. And in Europe there is now an emerging supply chain of batteries and battery supply.

[D]

All of this the Biden people are trying to build too.

[C]

And Trump is comprehensive, he's sabotaging. And the American industry has retreated with huge write downs.

[B]

See, it ain't so.

[D]

So I think there's, there are signs

[C]

of movement and it's going to be the European players themselves that recognize the importance of the Chinese market, that open the door to the others.

[B]

That's, that's one of the more encouraging things I've heard recently. Let's pivot from Europe to China in the global South, I mean people have been calling this current moment, we're in a second China shock. I'm not always sure the phrase clarifies as much as it obscures, but in much of the developed world, China's extraordinary manufacturing prowess, especially in EVs, as we've been saying, batteries, solar, all these other clean tech sectors is experienced as a threat of course to industrial employment, to strategic autonomy, to the whole viability of sectors that have long been seen as nationally or regionally foundational. But that same Chinese productivity and that Chinese capacity may look very different from the vantage point of the Global South. But I wonder how it's actually playing out because one of the things that I worry about is the end of the flying geese model, that China is not shedding low tech, low value ad industries to countries of the global south. That China with its extensive automation and it's continuing to ramp up automation is never going to allow these developing countries to tread the same path that it has tread to do low end manufacturing, export led growth.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

So I think let's just come back

[C]

to the Chinese robots and automation in a minute because I think that's a whole nother trend and I agree it's very dramatic and its potential implications first and foremost for China itself, I think that's the crucial thing. China is going to shock itself right, with productivity.

[D]

But if we go to the other

[C]

side of the equation, I think your

[D]

point's very well taken. The thing about so much of the Global south is there is so much room for growth, so much undeveloped effective demand in Sub Saharan Africa, literally hundreds of millions of people without basic purchasing

[C]

power because development has not happened and development hasn't happened because basic infrastructure is not in place.

[D]

That you know, this sort of sci fi story in which they were going to be industrial success stories.

[C]

But for the fact that China came

[D]

along is much less real than the fact that cheap Chinese cell phone infrastructure has actually enabled African economies to develop

[C]

in ways that were just not thinkable until recently.

[D]

Cheap Chinese plastic goods enable urban lifestyles

[C]

to be lived in a more sanitary way than was possible 10 years ago because the purchasing point is so low.

[D]

And structurally infrastructure, you know, is being

[C]

built now specifically in the renewable energy space which has the potential to reach some of the most miserably poor agrarian communities in the world over the next 10 years.

[D]

And it's very interesting.

[C]

So the World bank, the African Development bank have a program they call something like Future 300 and it's about bringing micro grids to 300 million people, the 600 million people in Africa without electricity.

[B]

Right. So half of them, half of them

[D]

will be electricity by micro grids, which solar and wind. Solar like a soccer field less than a soccer field of cheap solar panels,

[C]

a, an inverter station and a battery. And you can provide a community of about 300 households with cheap, totally. I mean really abundantly cheap, reasonably reliable, basic electricity and everything else follows.

[D]

All good things follow from that. Now would you ideally have those solar

[C]

panels and the batteries and the inverters manufactured in Accra or Addis or whatever?

[D]

Well, maybe, yes. But in the first instance the key

[B]

thing, you gotta bring them in 300

[D]

households with power, right. So their kids can, you know, people

[C]

can charge phones, people can have lighting at night. People can maybe use more, less polluting forms of cooking. Those are the breakthroughs which this enables.

[D]

And at the other end, like the one belt, one road thing is kicking

[C]

back off again like the day last year are record breaking actually. Yeah, they're some of the largest lending and it's big chunks largely around energy and resources.

[D]

New focus is not the old, you

[C]

know, because a lot of the earlier lending, the really big numbers were going to very small group of places. Now we're seeing more Central Asia and Nigeria. Huge, huge, huge gas based regional development hub in Nigeria, $25 billion down, you

[D]

know, and there isn't anyone else in the world, just to put this clearly, no one else in the world is even remotely considering that level of investment in Nigeria for anything, full stop. No one. Dangote who built the refinery, the refinery

[C]

was built by a Chinese engineering firm. They're the same people who are going to do the gas complex.

[D]

And there's no American firm that could do this same way as Brazil if it has to wire up like the wind farms in the north with the load centers in the south. This is a problem with Chinese characteristics. The only people that can do that kind of high voltage transmission is the Chinese state grid and its engineers. No one else in the world can do it. Not the Germans, not the French, not the Swiss, not the Americans at all. Right. America can barely build like 50, 60 gigawatts of power a year. China can do that in less than a month. So like there's just this huge disparity now in terms of if you're big, you're a sizable developing country, you just physically don't have a viable alternative partner. So even India for instance, it's really dramatic. Renewable energy build out now is entirely dependent on Chinese know how Chinese Inputs. And the Chinese are smart, so they're finding local players. They collaborate with them, they provide maybe the cells. The Chinese, the Indians build the modules. The whole thing is badged Indian to qualify for Indian subsidies. Same with batteries, same with wind turbines. And this to my mind is, you know, of course you could say you'd rather have these jobs going to Indians than sure. But in the first instance it's about actually providing everyone with electricity of a clean variety. So yeah, it's now robots and automation. Like, do you think China has a model for this? My sense is they have not. Like on AI, on robotics, I see where the logic goes. Those factories are amazing, but there's hundreds of millions of people that need employment and like I don't quite see the plan there.

[B]

It's funny, I was listening to the Daily this morning. Keith Bradshaw was on and he was talking specifically about this. I mean the show was about how China has managed to become tariff proof, but it was mostly about automation. And the way he sort of talks about it is that this is a way to address the demographic decline that, you know, for years now there have been worker shortages and so automation sort of fills in this gap nicely and that.

[D]

Right, Yeah, I don't mean a lot of respect. I mean he's a top guy.

[B]

Yeah, he really is.

[D]

But I never really bought the demographic story, okay? Now my problem is the demographic story doesn't add up because if you look at the Chinese labor force, the problem

[C]

is not that they don't have enough people of working age. The problem is that the skill level of a very large number of the Chinese workforce is too high.

[D]

No, it's not. Oh no, no, no, no it's not, no, no. The mid level is really low. So if you look at the averages

[C]

for China, they're at like sub Mexican levels.

[B]

Oh really?

[D]

Because the vast bulk of the Chinese

[C]

population is still in provincial small towns

[D]

and rural areas and not anywhere near

[C]

the glittering, fabulous, amazing world class universities in that we've all heard of.

[D]

And so there's a kind of, you know, there's an uber elite of couple

[C]

of 10 million people who are, you know, earning west, absolutely top salaries and hyper competitive. There are, there is a stratum of,

[D]

and these may be the people that

[C]

fit your model, more of overqualified people who are taking degrees across a whole bunch of jobs.

[B]

Because we've seen, you know, post secondary enrollment go from what, 11% in 2001 to over 60%.

[D]

This is, this is one of the

[C]

great social transformations of humanity that's ever happened along with the urbanization. Right.

[D]

This is nothing but a good thing.

[B]

But how do you, temporary elite overproduction,

[D]

how do you, how do you employ those people is a real issue. But then you've got hundreds of millions of people who never make it out of really shitty public schools. I mean, you know, China has a bunch of really shitty public schools where you know, they try and teach English but no one for miles and miles and miles has ever met an English speaking person who actually speaks it.

[C]

Right.

[D]

So you can't teach it. And these are dead end, dead end schools and dead end communities that aren't producing. So they have a very elaborate discourse about these left behind communities in China.

[C]

Right.

[D]

It's not like this is just something that China inflicts on the West. This is a problem that China grapples with continuously. And that's where the potential for, you know, there's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of training for the hundreds

[C]

of millions of workers which are currently

[D]

under skilled would be my, would be my view.

[C]

And part of the problem with the robots is that, and the mechanization generally is that they like in, like in Mexico, they challenge employment at that level. That's really where the worry would be. And the AI is coming for a lot of the white collar jobs. And nevertheless there is a just a fervid embrace of AI and robotics of a type that's well, you know, it's extraordinary.

[B]

I think it really is. I mean it's driven from the top, but it's also very, very much grassroots phenomenon. I mean, I think that there's just something in the sort of sociocultural matrix here that Chinese people love that technology. I mean they just, they want to stick, they're eating it up. Getting back to the sort of post flying geese problem for the developing world, when I floated this idea, there are some people who are maybe wildly optimistic who say, well, look what China is building now. They're so keen on moving up the value chain right now that they're exporting capital goods. They're going to be exporting those same robots to places where they're needed. They're going to be, you know, exporting really cheap, high quality, affordable machine tools. Is that what you're seeing? Do you think that that's.

[D]

Well, I mean, and I think like

[C]

countries like Vietnam would be like a real really good instance of this because again, you know that American discourse says, oh well, all that's happening here is

[D]

Chinese are cheating Americans by pipelining their stuff through Vietnam entirely, ignoring the agency of the Vietnamese in between, who of course look at this and being like, you know, extremely motivated, very smart, very well organized society kind of goes, oh, we've got lots to learn here. And they promptly import a huge amount of Chinese tech and set themselves to becoming manufacturers in their own right. Plus Chinese. The Vietnamese government has highly ambitious renewable energy projections because otherwise imported energy or coal, and that ain't great. So those kind of spillover effects are extremely real, I think. I mean it's always case by case by case by case. Like Indonesia for instance, is a totally

[C]

different story from India or Pakistan in terms of its incorporation into supply in Chinese supply chains.

[D]

If you look at these interesting databases

[C]

of green industrial investment, which my friends at Hopkins at the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab did there and had quite a splash with last year, it's like $250 billion over the last couple of years.

[D]

If you actually look into their data.

[C]

By far and away the largest case is Indonesia. And what's happened there is the Chinese, along with deep partnership with the Indonesian elites and Indonesian businesses, have built these gigantic industrial export zones where they're basically mining nickel and other raw materials, processing them on the spot and then shipping them to China.

[D]

So essentially Indonesia becomes like an offshore

[C]

island archipelago, annex to South China's industrial complex.

[B]

Right.

[D]

And you know, these are sacrifice zones.

[C]

Like, you know, large parts, they're not, they're not large.

[D]

Indonesia is huge. Right, but these islands where these zones

[C]

are, are being sacrificed.

[D]

But those are the key ingredients for

[C]

the Catl battery chain, for instance, or for the aluminium body parts on, on the Chinese EVs.

[D]

But that incorporates Indonesia in a way

[C]

which is very different from just mere assembly. They are, you know, these are, These are multi.

[D]

10 billion dollar Chinese corporate investments.

[C]

Huge transfer of technology to site. And it's up to the Indonesians then of course to exercise leverage and to extract as much as they possibly can.

[D]

The whole thing was triggered by the Indonesian decision.

[C]

They wouldn't export raw ore anymore, they would only export manufacture. You know, they'd only exhaust processed, right? And so this is where I think, you know, the Brazils, the Indonesias, which

[D]

clearly have leverage over China, are the

[C]

places where we'll see this model work better. And those then, you know, in an

[D]

ideal world will become the template for

[C]

other people to say, well look, this was the deal you did for Indonesia. Why can't we have this in Tanzania, why can't we have this in Ethiopia? We'd like that kind of a template of a deal.

[B]

Places that also have bauxite mines.

[C]

Exactly. And huge populations of people that would be, you know, would eagerly join this

[D]

and who would overwhelmingly produced for domestic markets which are, you know, vastly underdeveloped.

[C]

So this is where my liberalism kicks back in. And if Africa gets going, we aren't

[D]

going to need to worry about global

[C]

demand for a while. Like it'll be.

[D]

It's another China.

[B]

That's right.

[D]

It has huge capacity and a really

[B]

pretty demographic profile right now.

[D]

It's.

[C]

And this is why the Chinese are there, right? That's right.

[D]

They, everyone else is whatever, like asleep at the wheel.

[C]

And then they'll somehow subsequently wake up

[D]

and go, oh my God, you're in. Like we just doing. We're just following the numbers.

[C]

Like it's so transparent, the strategies, where

[D]

are the resources, where are the people, where are the huge gaps where you could actually add value really, really easily.

[B]

Right, right.

[D]

Or easily.

[C]

Like adding value to many of these economies is anything but easy.

[D]

But there's a huge opportunity there.

[B]

I want to head back to Europe for a moment here. I mean, the moment that we're living in right now. After Mark Carney's remarkable Davos speech, he spoke of this age of rupture. I'm curious how that framing lands with you. Does it in your mind capture something real and fundamental about the present conjuncture, about the breakdown of the old assumptions, old supply relationships, old security guarantees, old stories about how the global economy is supposed to work? Or do you worry that rupture overstates the novelty of the moment and that what we're actually seeing is not so much a clean break as a brutal, uneven renegotiation of an order that has already started a fray. I mean, I remember after the first Trump administration, I didn't think that Humpty Dumpty could get put back together again. But then as soon as the full scale invasion began, the weekend afterward produced this sort of perfect condominium between. I mean, the transatlantic union was back, right?

[D]

I would say even earlier.

[C]

I think it happened like as far as China is concerned, you would have thought Alaska, the first clash would have been the Europeans would stand back.

[D]

No, they went all in together on the Xinjiang sanctions immediately. These were the first sanctions of that type that Europe had imposed since 89. And the Europeans are right in there right away.

[C]

All of those NATO meetings through 2122.

[D]

But I agree, Ukraine is really, when

[C]

it totally gels, get cemented. And even in the current moment, I would say, you know, the horror of the Iran war is that the Europeans

[D]

have not effectively distanced themselves from it. It's only the Spanish again who've just said the obvious, which is that this is illegal and no one should in their right mind should have any party of it. And it makes no sense, as the Europeans, the Brits and everyone else did, to say, oh, to the Iranians, you know, you really shouldn't retaliate. It's almost word for word, like the sort of lectures they were giving to

[C]

Hamas and its support.

[B]

So that's the same reason why I've called into question whether rupture really is the right.

[D]

And Carney himself, right, you know, he's a canny player. So to my mind then that all that does though is widen the feel of rupture. So all that means is it just kind of, it just expands the shatter field of just moral political bankruptcy. In other words, they're all screwed. Like the Europeans may in some senses are clearly not as, as deranged as America. Deranged, really in the sense that Washington

[C]

right now cannot give you a straight

[D]

answer to the question of why they did it.

[B]

Right.

[D]

Like that, that level of like cognitive dissonance, like psych, not really able to account for your own actions coherently. And the Europeans just kind of hum and ha and go along with it like that is, that is itself a

[C]

sign of a kind of rupture.

[D]

So it's not, it isn't the calm,

[C]

cool, calm and collected Mark Carney standing on the edge saying, hey, we need to, to do something about this. The rupture is more internal. The othering that Trump permits. Right. Is kind of deceptive because Europe needs to take a long hard look in the mirror.

[B]

I mean, in a way, we saw foretaste of this with Venezuela. The American attack and the rendition of Nicolas Maduro seemed to me the sort of an event that ought to have generated far more conceptual discomfort than it actually did. I mean, at a moment when the United States and its allies continue to speak in the language of sovereignty, territorial integrity, rules and order, most consistently, of course, with respect to Ukraine, here was this spectacular assertion of just raw power of law, of the jungle. It sits rather awkwardly with that whole vocabulary. So I mean that with the one, two punch of Venezuela, Iran, I mean, I have to wonder it prefigured, I think, the reactions that we've seen since the non reaction. But I want to bring this back to China. As you think about China from Beijing, what do you imagine Chinese policymakers are seeing in this moment? You've seen a lot of that. This was ultimately all about China. Take I think most of us who are at all serious about looking at China have pooh, pooh that idea for good reason.

[D]

But yes, I mean, how could anyone.

[C]

China is running a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus right now.

[D]

Does anyone imagine that they would find

[C]

it hard to buy oil?

[B]

Right, right.

[D]

I mean, it is insane. There's some, there's maybe some teapot refineries, you know, that kind of love the cheap Iranian stuff, but really supply is this supply side reform. If they have to shut down the Chinese economy is not the worst off for it. Right, right. The, the idea that they're somehow, that you could critically. No, the Americans have to do sanctions again.

[C]

They have to blockade China to stop it.

[D]

Because otherwise it's the most potent, dollar heavy player in any market for anything worldwide. You just look at the way commodity markets respond to the Chinese buyers moving

[B]

the, they sneeze and the world, the

[D]

whole world rushes because like, who wouldn't want to be first through the door to sell to the Chinese, for heaven's sake? They are the big elephant in the room.

[C]

Right?

[D]

So no, the casualties are Pakistan.

[C]

The casualties are, you know, the much

[D]

more, much more fragile economies or the

[C]

ones with low growth prospects and dicky

[D]

political economy like Thailand or whatever, but not, not, I mean, sake, not China. So that makes, I mean, in the current situation, it cannot be ruled out that they are just simply crazy in Washington. The other line I've heard is that you have to deal with the Middle east first so that you can then focus on China.

[B]

Of course, we've heard that forever though.

[D]

Makes no sense. We know what Elbridge Colby's position was on this and why he was so

[C]

hard to get the confirmation. And he's thought as hard about this as any American hawk has and that wasn't his view. Don't know why he's still in government. Should have resigned. If he had any kind of honorable self respect, he would be out like, you know, and that would, you know, contribute to upholding his sort of integrity. No, it's, it can't be, can it, it can't be about China. Doesn't make even, even these people.

[B]

So more importantly, how does Beijing see things right now?

[D]

I honestly.

[B]

What does it look like out their windows right now? I mean, is this danger, is this distraction, is it vindication?

[D]

I mean, for surely they, you know, I might have, you know, one might

[C]

have fantasies of like, I mean, to

[D]

my mind, like the, on the back of an envelope you can draw up a five point plan for Chinese hegemony at this Moment, right. It's easy as pie. They, they offer to provide financial assistance to anyone that's in, you know, payments, trouble. They share the safety of their own flag in the Straits of Hormuz. They pitch into a global oil stabilization pool. They launch a global green energy initiative, sans pare. And actually say, look, here's the future. And most of the Gulf would sign on because they actually want the green tech. And then they actually say, right, enough's enough. In the interest of global stability, all

[C]

Chinese exports of anything relevant to both zones of war will cease henceforth until you negotiate.

[D]

That would be the moment everything would turn.

[B]

And from your lips, the Xi Jinping.

[D]

But I mean, they are clearly not going to do this, right? That's not their plan. Why would they. That puts them in harm's way. No, the thing to do is just wait this out because they are safe as houses and America is.

[C]

You know, it's just the usual cliche. America is tanking its own credibility.

[D]

I mean, just. Even if you are some kind of crazy Chinese hawk, and you are. Have you got your eye on Taiwan? Look at all the interceptors the Americans are firing off. Why would you interrupt them while they're burning their entire irreplaceable arsenal? They can't even make more than 600 patriots a year, for heaven's sake.

[B]

You know, like, saw some report, a probably not very credible source talking about how China can now build a sub $100,000 hypersonic delivery vehicle.

[D]

Yeah, exactly. So. And you know, our average cost for those interceptors is a couple of million apiece. And the super high high altitude ones?

[C]

The 16 million.

[D]

Yeah, the Karman Line ones. And you know, the amazing thing is, is two years ago, we had no idea any of this worked. Like no one had ever tested any of this stuff in anger, Right.

[B]

Lebanon, in Israel.

[D]

Yeah, until the. Until no one had ever tested. Exactly. In the Iran war, nobody tested the,

[C]

the extra atmospheric interceptors ever.

[D]

Now we know it works, but we also know the economics are terrible. Yeah, yeah. So. And who has the. Who who's in the strong suit position in terms of just mass manifestation manufacturing these things, it's just self evident, right? So you discover a new zone of war, you discover you have the technology

[C]

in the Israeli and American case, and

[D]

then you realize, oh God. You know, a scooter with wings is going to require a. No, even just flying the F15 is

[C]

apparently $25,000 an hour.

[D]

Right. So the, the Shahed drone costs as much as one hour of an airtime. Of airtime for A really fancy. Whatever it is, five generation. So it's. So, yeah, yeah. China isn't an asymmetric. China is a peer competitor.

[B]

Right. Asymmetric player, but it has the asymmetric advantage still.

[D]

Just huge low cost. And anyway. Yeah, so I would have thought the Chinese.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So they're sitting pretty right now watching this out.

[B]

Well, obviously they're not going to intercede in any meaningful way. Against all this backdrop, Trump has decided to postpone the summit that had originally been planned for Beijing next week, as we tape. I mean, does this feel to you more consequential than just a scheduling adjustment? I mean, it seems to speak to a broader problem of American bandwidth, of strategic coherence. Maybe.

[D]

Come now, you're being polite. Yeah, it's like hugely embarrassing.

[B]

Right, right, right.

[D]

It's, it's totally embarrassing, like, because they, yeah, because they just, they can't, you know, this is, this is, this is the big leagues. You can't go to a meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing in the state that America's in.

[C]

So. So, no, I think it's, it's, it's absolutely.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

It's a sign just of the disintegrating, coherence. I mean, you say bandwidth. Yes. I mean, they, they are, you know,

[D]

they used to have.

[C]

What's that phrase they use?

[D]

Flooding the zone.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And like, they are. They flooded their own.

[D]

They flooded their own zone. Like, I. No one knows really, Right. What they thought they were doing in Iran, but they must have had some bonkers idea that it would be like Venezuela or something. And the way Trump talks in these press conferences, people were circulating the transcript about, whoops, we killed the leadership, and then we killed the next layer of leadership. And we don't really actually have anyone to talk to because we keep killing the people. I mean, it's utterly grotesque and surreal. It's an absolute clown show and horrifying also, because. And this was something that was quite difficult. Had a very memorable moment with a

[C]

Chinese journalist from State TV who is, you know, widely traveled in the west and has done a lot of time all over and had been in London during the worst phase of the Gaza

[D]

war and was clearly the sort of

[C]

Chinese journalist who at some level is deeply sympathetic to Western democratic politics and the protest culture and was clearly very moved by the public. You know, in London, the engagement around Gaza was huge on both sides.

[D]

And she asked me then, good faith,

[C]

like, so, you know, what, what are the protests like in the US right now? Like, what's, what's going on and. And I had to stop her and say, no, you don't understand. The horror is. The true horror, from the point of view of anyone that's interested in Democratic politics and statecraft, is there is nothing going on in the United States, not

[D]

in Congress, barely, really in the media.

[C]

If you read the New York Times, you'd think, like, this was an open question as to whether this was a good or a bad war, like, the

[D]

basic functioning of which is deeply integral

[C]

to modern democratic politics all the way back to the 18th century. Right.

[D]

That war is this sort of moment

[C]

of a kind of reality of a moment of truth where a polity comes

[D]

together and makes a decision, like it

[C]

or not like it.

[D]

But in any case, this is a key issue around which everything from revolution to civil war, all of those are legitimate responses, given the weight of the

[C]

issue that's at stake.

[D]

Right. That basic logic that even motivated people like Baudrillard, who were trying to think through how in a hyper, you know, mediatized world, those logics would be subverted. The horrifying thing in the United States is that logic isn't working. It isn't that somehow social media is

[C]

disrupting the normal loop between democratic politics and war making.

[D]

There just doesn't seem to be a loop between Democratic politics and war making

[C]

in the US Right now.

[D]

So. So the effect is that the social media is literally as though we're just

[C]

watching a game on, you know, one of those twitch or whatever they're called.

[D]

Like, you know, he made that move. They made that move. What's Trump going to decide to do? He's our president. We are the citizens of the country.

[B]

Which is why this alienation, why. Why this. This utter sense of detachment from it. What do you think accounts for that? As opposed to just a few years ago when we saw campuses erupt in support of the Gazans, both sides of

[D]

the Israelis and the Gazans. There's no one waving an Israeli flag on Columbia campus right now saying, this is an existential struggle that we need to stand up for. Which is the claim, after all, that on behalf of Israel's security, we need to inflict this crushing. That's a politics. I get it.

[B]

On neither side.

[D]

Not my politics. But, like, it's a politics.

[B]

Is it simply fatigue, numbness?

[D]

It is. I don't have a good theory. All I'm a. And it was so shocking because, you know, people need to understand when you're talking to, like, this mass of Chinese journalists, they're incredibly engaged. Like, they work for state media outlets. For the most part. But these are people who know the world, have been out in the world, have strong views, are often emotionally identified with Western politics and Western democracy.

[C]

They watch it like, you know, the

[D]

sports fans of Manchester United in Beijing or whatever, they are deeply committed to Western democracy as, as global citizens. And this interview stopped dead. She put the mic down. It was. Sorry I moved like that. It is horrifying. Yeah, I was like, barely able to contain myself on campus the week before I came away because the sun came out like in Beijing right now. It's beautiful. You know, spring day, all the kids are out sunbathing, enjoying the weather. And as you say, where were we last year when there was a war which wasn't even our war, right? And this is being waged in the name of the United States and its citizens. And I couldn't really. It was. When you try, I don't know about the Chinese leadership, but trying to explain this to, you know, this huge group of Chinese internationally minded journalists was, was real and they, they, you could see the penny drop and they kind of went, oh. Oh, Jesus. Really?

[C]

That can't be. No, that can't be true.

[D]

You're really. Is that what it's like, seeing it reflected in their faces of like, no, hang on.

[C]

That's not the America I know.

[D]

Like, how can that be? Like, what. No, it was, it was very, very shocking.

[B]

So, Adam, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about the book you've just sent off to your publisher. You've been working on this big project on the energy transition, and as you've already suggested, China sits very, very near the center of that story. So first, when can we expect to see the book? And second, can you give us just a small preview, just a single insight and argument, maybe even just a surprise from the book that we haven't really touched on today, but that you think is especially important for understanding the world that we're now entering.

[D]

So, yeah, it turned out it wasn't

[C]

my plan, but it turned out to be another massive book. So it's with my editors right now and it's kind of in their hands a little bit on how we progress, hopefully by the end of the year. It's very much of the moment, so for me, the sooner the better.

[D]

It's a book that became kind of

[C]

more monumental than I intended it to be because it really is now a half century history of the emergence of the climate problem as what I insist is, or was the central problem of progressive politics after the end of The Cold War for the west, emphatically seen as by the west for the west on behalf of the world.

[D]

It was the last big global problem

[C]

that the west was going to solve because it was our responsibility. And the discourse from the global south, of course backhandedly confirmed that since Eurocentric Western centric kind of world, because of course they would look at emissions and say, well yes, you did it to us.

[D]

And the way in which that problem, which you know, was quite important to

[C]

the organization of global politics in the 90s, 2000s and through to the climate treaty of Paris in 2015, morphed over the course of that same period into one that is, I would argue, more radically China centered than any other global problem. China is.

[D]

Asia in general experienced the shock of

[C]

climate change across more people. Africa will feel it more intensely. But those bits of Africa are not very densely populated. But large parts of Asia will feel it very directly. And anyone who spent any time in Asia in the summers recently will know it's intolerably hot across large parts of the space. Asia is also however, the main driver of the problem. This is an Asia on Asia problem. Increasingly legacy emissions of course much higher in the west. But America will be responsible for less than 10% of global emissions over the coming century. Like the trouble problem is driven by and this is the truly miracle to have emerged in the. Well really over a period of time, but with huge force in the last recently is three or four years.

[D]

Asia is also the source of all the solutions. And so this displacing of a problem that was conceived originally as a truly

[C]

classic global governance problem as conceived by Europeans to the issue where our fate collectively is really in the hands of Asia and specifically in the hands of China is what this book describes. So it's.

[D]

It really, it has had a kind.

[C]

It's quite a weight and that I

[D]

perhaps didn't anticipate because it's. It's the end of my series of

[C]

books about Western centrality. Right. It's the cornerstone of that project. I will go back. My next book will be about the anniversary of 1929. But you know, the books which started with Deluge really end with this.

[D]

Something surprising. One of the surprising things actually just

[C]

concerns the significance of what used to be called the second world for thinking global history in the late 20th century and the way in which 1989, the Chinese 89, which must not be spoken about and the Soviet collapse in 89 which anchors all of Western self conception thereafter, scramble our actual understanding of what's coming next and so one of the ways of reading this is it. That's a book about the climate problem which de centers a story of Western capitalism and puts in its place a story of global development, which is what I see, you know, the legacy of the Soviet Union. And critically, China's development is really demonstrating. Right. China, of course, has many elements which are clearly capitalist, but they are framed within a project and a political economy that can't really be reduced to that. And as we all know, there are lots of capitalisms all over the world which don't generate this. Don't generate this utterly transformative urbanization and modernization. So the thing we need to explain is not China becoming capitalist, but why capitalism and China produce development. And development is the thing which blows the carbon budget up, because that's where all the heavy stuff is. It isn't making cheap goods for global export as part of global capitalism that turns China into a carbon monster.

[B]

It's pouring all that concrete.

[C]

It's a project of urbanization and the remaking of China as a nation that does. And that is the ongoing project and that's the one that the CPC continues to manage and drive. And as we started talking about everything from the, you know, the, the air pollution levels to the urban. The urban. The regenerated urban space and the post industrial spaces. So that's, that's kind of the. Rather than one of those climate and capitalism books, it's a climate and global development book which centers the. Centers the Asian and the communist. Post communist, neo, whatever we're going to call it, that entire, that entire complex of issues.

[B]

The old Second World.

[D]

The old.

[C]

The old Second World, yeah.

[B]

Well, I am not surprised. That book sounds absolutely fascinating and I will insist that you send me a galley since one's available, so that we can talk. Yeah, we will talk.

[C]

I'd love to do that.

[B]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. So, Adam, let me. I've kept you long enough. I know you've got a busy night ahead. Let us move on now to the section of the podcast that I call Paying It Forward, where I ask you to name check somebody in your field, somebody who you work with, whose work deserves more of my listenership's attention.

[C]

So in terms of thinking about global development and so on, one of my comrades in arms is in New York for many years now has been Tim Sahay, who you can find as one of the writers of the Polycrisis blog from Phenomenal World, and on Twitter as the utterly indispensable 70s Bach Chan. So that 70s B A C H, C H A N. Left wing Indian actor of the. Of the seventies. And Tim's voice is just so sharp, so comprehensive, so brilliant, truly. He will enrich your life as a somebody to follow.

[D]

I've been reading.

[C]

So we're, you know, let's keep it

[B]

on the Chinese recommendations.

[C]

Let's keep it on the China tip. We've been talking about this as well.

[D]

I have the privilege later this week

[C]

of doing an event with the great historian and thinker Wang Hui. Yeah, and Tsinghua.

[B]

So you gotta get me in there, Adam.

[D]

I've been doing my homework and because this is.

[B]

That's some heavy homework.

[D]

He is. He is a mind to be reckoned with.

[C]

Great central figure of what became known as the Chinese New Left. Also, however, a intellectual historian of the emergence of.

[D]

I mean, he rather confusingly causes the rise of modern Chinese thought, which actually goes back to the Song Dynasty, it turns out. But I've been reading some of his

[C]

more accessible writing that I'm currently reading. The End of the Revolution, which was by Wang Hui, translated by Rebecca Carl. So the End of the Revolution. That's a really fascinating read on. On how to conceive of Chinese history

[D]

in a way that I find this,

[C]

by contrast with his work on. On ancient China or medieval China is.

[D]

Is.

[C]

Is very accessible for anyone that's steeped in a kind of Western leftist canon.

[B]

Well, more of us are so steeped than we are in. In song Neo Confucianism, which exactly made it impossible for me to read that section.

[C]

So anyway, yeah, Wang Hui is. Is my bedtime reading right now.

[B]

Oh, fantastic. Yeah, No, I really hope to be able to go attend your talk on Thursday.

[D]

Yeah, I will send an email right away.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Before I fly off to Barcelona, my recommendation for the week is a show called Shenming Shu or Born to Be Alive. It literally means the Tree of Life. It's available on YouTube or iQiyi, if you are in China. I mean, if you are looking for a series with real sweep and ambition. It's set on the Qinghai Plateau and it's set across a couple of decades. I think it begins in the early 90s. They periodized it very, very well. It's about a team of people who are working on antelope poaching on the Tibetan plateau and on illegal mining. But it's also very much about loss, about memory, about the kind of enduring tension between development and environmentalism, which is a theme that, of course, we've been talking about a bit.

[D]

So typical of modern China.

[B]

Right, Yeah.

[D]

I mean this is a discourse that

[C]

you could encounter in the, in everything.

[D]

I mean, anywhere in the Sierra Club

[C]

or in like the, you know, Green Party, like this is, it's incredibly contemporary.

[D]

And

[B]

so the, the male lead is Hu Ge. He's a very popular actor. He's fantastic in this. And then Yang Zi is the female lead. They're both very, very good. It's beautifully shot, it's quite well acted. It's, it's really. They've upped their game considerably that just the studios that are putting out new television shows, they're, they've really improved. I'm either having deja vu or I've actually recommended this show before recently and I forgot but it was the thing that came to mind. My wife's been watching it and I'm now going to start the series again from the beginning properly so that I really catch the whole thing. But I was also really impressed at how well they portrayed the Tibetan characters. And there's none of the usual sort of condescension. They're very humanely drawn. Adam, thank you, man. It's a pleasure as always. Yeah.

[C]

To the next time.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully it won't be too long. I'm really eager to read the book. 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 [e-mail] where there's a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how I can do the show better. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show again this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Adam Tun. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.