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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:53]
B
Welcome to this special live recording of the Seneca Podcast here at the Salzburg Global Seminar. Hello, Salzburg. Oh, hell yeah. I am Kaiser Guay and I am delighted to be joined here by Rana Mitter. You know, the truth of it is, though, any one of you here in the audience could easily have been plucked up here to, you know, so I could subject you to my ruthless line of questioning and you would have acquitted yourself soundlessly, really, really well. But the unfortunate victim is Rana Mitter, who you all know as St. Lee, Chair in US Asian Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, formerly, of course, professor of History at Oxford University and author of, among other works, forgotten Ally. That's the American name. The British name is the really utterly bland China's War with Japan. We Americans have a way of hyping everything up to make it more exciting. And China's good War in the American title is China's Awesome War. Both books I have spoken about with him before on Seneca. Radha, it is just so wonderful to see you here in beautiful Salzburg and to have you back on the Seneca podcast.
- [02:03]
C
And Kaiser, it's always a huge pleasure to be in your tender and somehow expert hands and any other parts of the anatomy that you choose to exercise tonight.
- [02:12]
B
Ah, excellent. Okay, well, we have actually been tasked tonight we actually have an assignment. We are to talk about this question of whether and to what extent China is a revisionist power. So let's start there. Before I get to the questions, I really want to dig into you with which are questions about how China's leadership understands this historical moment, its challenges, as well as the opportunities that it presents. Because after all, we all know that crisis in Chinese is, I think that these two sets of questions are actually very much related. So let's focus first on the question of China, its ambitions, its intentions and its limits when it comes to reshaping the world as it used to be. Part of my intro, absolutely.
- [03:01]
C
So one of the things that I think has become one of the hottest questions in geopolitics, and certainly here at the Salzburg Global Seminar we've been spending quite a lot of today kicking it around is, is how far does China want to change the world? And how far is actually happy just living in it and making sure that the bits and pieces actually fit together quite well. And I'm sorry to have the tick of an academic here, Kaiser, but I'm gonna go straight into referring to, actually a really important, really interesting academic article that came out a few years ago and which is well worth referencing. And that's by my colleague, actually, wonderful scholar at Harvard University, Alastair Ian Johnston, one of the really interesting thinkers on China's international relations.
- [03:41]
B
Couldn't agree more.
- [03:42]
C
And he has written a piece, you probably know this one, actually, Kaiser, about different aspects of order that China's interested in. They're about now. Now I'm going to betray myself because I can't remember off the top of my head exactly how many orders there are. I think There are either seven orders.
- [03:59]
B
Six or seven?
- [04:00]
C
Yeah, I think either seven or 11. And I don't think. I'm just thinking. I may just be thinking of soda, having said that. But his point is that asking the question of, is China a revisionist power? Does it want to change world order? Is not actually subtle enough a question. You have to say, well, look, does China want to change the international order, let's say at the United Nations? And the answer is, to some extent, yes. At least the stated intention is that the order set up in 1945 with the five permanent members of the Security Council, UK and France among them, may or may not fit what is appropriate for the 2000 and twenties. On the other hand, aspects of global order, such as the World Trade Order China got into WTO back in 2001, that's been suiting China in many ways pretty well. There's no particular desire, I think, to turn that upside down. And then, of course, new areas and ones in which you're particularly expert, Kaiser, which is the virtual world, the question of the cyber world and how that's going to be ordered and regulated. Well, China has a lot of interest in how that's going to be ordered, but then, of course, so does the rest of the world. So orders rather than order, I think, is the way that I'd answer your question.
- [05:06]
B
Three so far. That's three. Okay.
- [05:08]
C
Right. We'll see if during the course of the rest of the podcast we get through the other four.
- [05:12]
B
No, I think that it's really important to emphasize the plural. And also, you know, that of course, rules based or otherwise, it is in order that has been largely created by and we had a little bit of a discussion this morning about what to call it. Kerry Brown calls it the Enlightenment west, the Euro American west, whatever you want to call it. But you know, it is not in order of China's creating, to be sure. And so, you know, when we talk about whether it is a status quo or revisionist power, that is something we also need to keep in mind. It is not necessarily looking to overturn the entirety of the apple cart, I think. And it's not just Alastair, Ian Johnson's excellent piece, but a Rand study From, I believe 2018 also looked at this and decided that China was sort of a selectively, opportunistically revisionist power. We actually hear a lot of metaphors for how China acts with respect to the global order. But perhaps because I am based in the States and we are incapable of any type of metaphor except for sports metaphors, one that I hear a lot is that here we are playing a friendly game of rugby, but the Chinese team shows up in American style NFL shoulder pads and they hit a whole lot harder. It's really sort of not a, a fair approach. And you know, there are many along these lines. They're playing completely different games. They're not being very sportsmanlike. They're playing to win rather than just, you know, to be good, you know, friendly chaps and to show up and play a sportsmanlike game. What do you make of that? And do you have any go to metaphors that you like in terms of how China, China's posture toward those orders.
- [06:47]
C
So you have mentioned sports metaphors, Kaiser. And I have to say that I'm not someone who has a huge, huge knowledge either of rugby or indeed football. Having moved recently to the United States, I've learned that apparently football is not soccer, as most the rest of the world thinks of it, but rather a game which, correct me if I'm wrong, there are some Americans here in the audience, proper ones in which it is almost never the case that a foot touches the ball. There appears. I mean, have I missed something here? I watched the whole of, I believe you people call it the Super Bowl.
- [07:19]
B
The super bowl, that's right.
- [07:20]
C
Yeah. There not a lot of football Contact going on.
- [07:23]
B
There was like a 54 yard field goal or something like that.
- [07:26]
C
Okay.
- [07:26]
B
I mean.
- [07:27]
C
Right, right.
- [07:28]
B
So I was watching a sport that was invented by the Department of Defense and it was, it's been rigged by, you know, the Biden administration so that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey will ensure the Kansas City.
- [07:40]
C
Which position does Taylor Swift play? She's quarterback or something? Yeah, she's okay. Okay. Anyway, so you can tell by now that sports metaphors are not probably going to be the most successful way in which I express what's going. Let me go with a. Instead, bearing in mind that we're talking about order and a fragile order and one that has a potential for, you know, basically falling apart quite quickly if the wrong pressure is applied. Are you familiar, Kaiser, are you familiar audience here actually with a game called Twister?
- [08:09]
B
I am, yeah.
- [08:10]
C
Okay. So you'll be aware that basically we.
- [08:12]
B
Played it at like, you know, middle school parties. This in lieu of making out. Right. It hasn't been.
- [08:18]
C
I wondered whether we were going to go there and Kaiser, you went there. What can I say?
- [08:23]
B
I go there. I always go there.
- [08:25]
C
Well, all I can say is that it's played quite often, actually, after a port in the Colleges of Oxford. That may or may not be true. We can explore that later. But for those who don't know, and even for those who do, Twister is a game in which basically you play on a mat and essentially you have to try after throwing various numbers on the dice to stay upright while twisting yourself around the other people who are playing the game.
- [08:48]
B
Left foot blue. Right foot yellow right.
- [08:50]
C
Yeah. Or left foot, South China Sea. Right foot, Southern Pacific Ocean. You know, the bottom half of the, of the end of your. Of your right hand toe. Possibly think somewhere on the Panama Canal. In other words, there is an arrangement and a delicacy about this particular game that as long as it's working fine, works fine. But you, you know, and I know that the danger of any game of Twister is that at the end, if you twist too far, you may bring the entire thing come down and let's just say people can get hurt if things go, go, go wrong. Now, I think this isn't exclusive to China, but actually the idea that essentially there's a lot more entanglement, a lot more entwinement and one that could possibly become crashing down. Well, to me that spells Twister is possibly the metaphor.
- [09:36]
B
I now see why you chose this metaphor. I mean, the entanglement business, that's great. Kudos.
- [09:41]
C
So we went from the Enlightenment to the entanglement in the space of five minutes. I think that's so.
- [09:46]
B
Okay. Now on to serious things, I think. I'm pretty sure. I mean, let me just take this old purple. The room agrees that China is not a sort of pan apple cart turning over revisionist power. It is selective. Yeah. Yes. Okay.
- [10:02]
C
Right.
- [10:03]
B
Very good. All right, so onto the other thing. We've settled at least one of the world's great problems. And. And then it's like five minutes.
- [10:09]
C
Let all 17 of them by the time we've done today.
- [10:12]
B
So bigger and deeper and more tortuous things. But one of the reasons that I've always found it pleasurable to speak with you is because you actually enjoy these sorts of topics. Not just about historical topics, but even historiographical topics, and more importantly, the way that historical narratives are enlisted, say, for political ends. You've offered some of the most, I think, thoughtful perspectives on the way that the telling of the story of, say, China's modern history, the Second World War, recently, has been something you focused on, is really. It's enlisted to buttress the party's legitimacy. So let's connect our conversation about revisionism with China's sense of where it is right now, historically. I often chide people in the Euro American world to resist teleological thinking, to finally, you know, sort of set aside that Whiggish thinking that crested maybe after 1989 with all that guff about, you know, end of history and last man. But it's worth remembering that no system of thought is probably more explicitly teleological than Marxism. Right. So, Rana, how at present, does the Chinese leadership understand this historical moment? And maybe we can start with that Marxist framework. In that Marxist framework.
- [11:27]
C
Sure. Well, one of the many phrases that Xi Jinping has used to describe himself, or at least it's used to describe him in a lot of the documentation that comes out from China is as a 21st century Marxist. And I think that both parts of that phrase, 21st century and Marxist, are important. I think the Marxist part is important because at some level there is a desire to try, and we all have this in a different way, to try and provide a framework, an explanation, a model for how the world actually works. And one thing I would say about the Euro American world, the liberal world, whatever you want to call it, we might even daringly call it the west sometimes, I suppose, even though it's a rather capacious term, is that it had an awful lot of narratives of teleologies, as you said, a sort of wiggishness I mean, that phrase always makes me think of kind of 18th century guys with sort of powdered hair. But, you know, fair enough about where the wigs.
- [12:31]
B
Not wigs.
- [12:32]
C
Well, Whigs sometimes wore wigs. Of course they did, but.
- [12:37]
B
With wigs.
- [12:38]
C
But we can get back to the question of hair and its uses at another time. But the idea that there was a forward direction of travel progression that we were all going on was something that was essentially a large part. Again, we mentioned the Enlightenment project, and certainly that tends to push that idea forward. In that sense, I think that it's fair to say that in the whatever world we call it now, the post, post Cold War world, I mean, no one seems to quite know where we are at the moment. And also a postmodern world, in other words, one where actually for some decades all major narratives of progress have been questioned, perhaps broken up, or at least they are, if you drink in the right kind of pubs, I would say. Then it becomes hard to say that actually we are in a world that has some sort of framework and definition. Now, for good or ill, China's ruling party ain't buying that they are not. Many, many things have been said about the Chinese Communist Party, but it's quite rare, if not perhaps unknown, to call them a postmodern party. Maybe there would be, but I'm going.
- [13:42]
B
To in just a bit, I hope. Are you.
- [13:44]
C
You're going there again, Kai? I'm going there again, yeah.
- [13:47]
B
I will.
- [13:47]
C
By which I mean at least some.
- [13:49]
B
My beer.
- [13:49]
C
Some sense of teleology, some sense of forward progression in some definition, has, I think, been a constant part of the Communist project, even though what that teleology is has changed over time. And there's a sense in which a central part of the Marxist proposition, which of course in some ways actually going back to the Enlightenment and its critics, is a Hegelian proposition. In other words, the idea that you have thesis, you have antithesis, you have a struggle between them, then some synthesis emerges, and then once again the process, the tension continues to emerge through history and that for Hegel, this is driven by the idea of a world spirit or Geist, and then for Marx it ends up being actually another defining characteristic, which is class. This is something that is part of the classical Marxist model. And much of that, if not all of it, was adapted and thought about by Chinese Marxist thinkers. Not just Mao, of course, but actually a whole variety of others who picked up and developed that thinking from the early 20th century onwards. Now, I think it's fair to say that while that dynamic continues to shape a great deal of the reason that Marxism remains important in contemporary Chinese thinking. The idea of class is no longer at the heart of that, if you want to be really kind of crude about it. And, you know, I know this is not a crude podcast, Kaiser, but forgive me one piece of generality here. Jiang Zemin, former general secretary and president, essentially abolished it back in the early 2000s when he put forward the policy of the Sangatai Biao, the three representations, which essentially said that that kind of classic class division was no longer the operative dynamic in China because the Communist.
- [15:38]
B
Party represents the most advanced forces of production, the most advanced cultural forces. And what was the third one? I can't remember.
- [15:45]
C
I'm sure it'll come to us in just a moment. It will, but there was another one.
- [15:49]
B
Anyone, audience? And the entirety of the Chinese nation. Right, Right.
- [15:54]
C
Well, the entirety of the Chinese nation. There you have it. That pretty much includes round of applause. What that did not exclude was the idea that there were struggles, that there were tensions. The Chinese term, of course, Mao Dun, it's a very long standing classical term that long predates Marxism, but actually hits that idea of contradiction and resolutional contradiction really nicely. And my goodness me, aren't there an awful lot of contradictions in the world that China, along with everyone else, is seeking to resolve? Fast economic growth versus green growth. The tensions, of course, between the emergence of a multipolar world and the possibility of a hegemonic power. Could it be the United States? Could it be China? Could it be Denmark? Probably not Denmark, but let's keep the options optional.
- [16:40]
B
There's still a Hegelianism to it, but there's not necessarily a but it's not.
- [16:44]
C
Class driven in that sense. So just sticking with Marxism. And I hope before we finish, we're going to talk about other thought systems in China which have something to offer in this. In this moment too, I think the idea of 21st century Marxism, and still a work in progress, I think, is the idea that Mao contradiction actually still has a great deal to say about the modern condition, maybe even the postmodern condition, but it's not driven through a lens of class. Now that's where I think that's coming from.
- [17:11]
B
Okay, so dialectical materialism still stands. There's another phrase that Xi Jinping uses quite often, and I'm wondering about what, you know about the origins of this phrase when it was first deployed. And that, of course, new era. It doesn't exactly feel wrong to me to assert that China has entered into something of a new era. And we will get into that. I told you I was going to talk about postmodernism. But first, when do we start seeing the party deploy this term new era? You know, when do we start seeing senior party officials talking about it and, you know, seeing it in documents? They've been talking, you know, about events not seen in 100 years since the 19th Party Congress in 2017. Is that right?
- [17:52]
C
Yeah. I mean, this particular phrase about the events and changes that have not been seen for 100 years starts to emerge exactly right in around 2017, which is, of course, the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It's also the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. That may or may not be, you know, coincidental to an event we won't hopefully see in another newness in all sorts of ways. And also, of course, five years through the. Well, the end of the first term of five years of Xi Jinping as General Secretary as well. So a whole variety of geopolitical things are happening at that moment that come together. But in terms of a new era, I think that although it could refer to many things, the one that perhaps is most relevant, not least to what this amazing distinguished crowd at Salzburg have been discussing over the last couple of days, is to do with global order. In other words, the idea that if perhaps for the last 25 years, 30 years, something like that, there has been a world in which the United States essentially sits as the point of definition, the point of differentiation for all the rest of the order, that in China's view, or at least in the point of view of many of those writings, the, you know, current political theory in China, that that moment is coming to an end. So that is one of the things that I think is new in the. In the minds of those putting forward this formulation about the current era. But I mean, Kazi, you've been examining this sort of thing at great length also. What's your sense of what is meant by this new era?
- [19:26]
B
This is my show. I'm asking you the questions, buddy.
- [19:31]
C
So I was hoping you might give me a clue.
- [19:33]
B
I will. We've talked about a couple of the significant milestones then, that compel Xi and company to treat this as a new era. There's another really important event in the history of the party, which is about the party's history. In November 2021, we see the only third resolution on party history to come out. Maybe before we talk about what the content of that resolution is, we can talk about the other two, one which actually predates the founding of the prc.
- [20:04]
C
Absolutely. So what these three resolutions, and bearing in mind they are very, very rare, they essentially happen once every few decades, at least in the current formulation. So in 1945, four years before the actual declaration of the People's Republic of China, you have a declaration on Party history which essentially solidifies, sanctifies almost you might say, the role of Mao Zedong and the establishment of the Party and the revolution that he leads. So it's a form of legitimation of the revolution which hasn't at that stage actually taken place. But everyone knows there's going to be this titanic civil war, which of course happens between 46 and 49, and then essentially the establishment of the new China, which is under the control of the ccp. And then, although there are plenty of reflections of different sorts through the Mao years on history, and I think of someone like Hu Jamu, who was, you know, a hardcore follower of the CCP and of Mao. He was essentially personal secretary to Mao. He was with him in Yan' an and, you know, went on the Long March, you know, very, very much a man with the yellow dust of the lowest soil on his blue serge trousers.
- [21:19]
B
Lovely phrase.
- [21:20]
C
Well, some of us have to do the laundry on these things. You know, it sticks with us. But also very much someone who saw history as a driving and central force to understanding the Communist Revolution and Marxist history, obviously, as part of that. So his own writings about the Chinese Communist Party and its history through the 50s and 60s also helped to cement that idea. But it's not till 1981 that you get the second formal resolution on the Party's history. And this is no coincidence in terms of the timing, because it is shortly, you know, what is going to be five years after the declaration of the end of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, this huge turmoil ridden overturning of China's society that comes from a revolt from within the Communist Party, but one that is led by the head of that party, essentially leading followers against the elites of his own organization.
- [22:20]
B
And only two years and change after the third plenum of the 11th Party Congress.
- [22:24]
C
Right, Yep. So, exactly. So. So all of these things come together. And Also, of course, 1981, the trial of the so called Gang of Four as well, in other words, the four revolutionary leaders, one of whom was Mao's widow, Chongqing, who were held to be to blame for what had happened during the Cultural Revolution. So all of that made it a moment at which the Party, after huge amounts of internal debate and dissent and anger, and, you know, letting out of many, many, many high emotions, came up with a resolution, which is an oddity because it's, in a sense, it's the closest thing that the CCP has ever put out to an apology for what has happened in the recent past. It's not a full throated or full scale apology. And it basically argues that Mao Zedong had essentially, obviously been as. Although in their view, a great leader who had founded the CCP had taken wrong turns during the Cultural Revolution. They left it a bit bland, but there was at least criticism there. And then of course, the Gang of Four and others were there.
- [23:23]
B
Is this, this persistent myth that that resolution contains the infamous or famous percentages, 30% good or 30, 70% good, 30% bad amount that actually is there? Neither, by the way, was the word malaise in Jimmy Carter's speech. That's not.
- [23:41]
C
But he did wear a brown sweater while giving the speech.
- [23:45]
B
He put his foot up on the other.
- [23:47]
C
Now, you noticed I very carefully did not mention the 7030 division because that, as you say, is not in fact in the resolution.
- [23:53]
B
No, it is not.
- [23:53]
C
But what it does is to put forward the official verdict on the Cultural Revolution, give a certain amount of very limited contrition with the idea that then the society could move forward. One other just mention of context at that time. That was also the era, of course, of Shangheng Wenxie, the scar literature, which was a brief flowering of a literary genre that allowed people to write about the traumas and horrors of that time. And then that genre also kind of was closed down, moved on as the moment of healing, moved on to other things. So 1981, for a long time marked essentially the end point, until 40 years later, 2021, November, when the third resolution is put forward. And that is the one that essentially not only looks back at 100 years since the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, said 1921-2021. So perhaps an appropriate moment for consideration, but also seeks above all, in this formulation, to cement the place of Xi Jinping as the revolutionary leader who sits in this kind of hierarchy of destiny along with figures, Mao Zedong, obviously, Deng Xiaoping, obviously in that pantheon too. Maybe not so much with his major predecessors, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, but then Xi Jinping essentially brought in as the next figure in a sort of historical inevitability. And again, that's where in a broad sense, the teleology you were talking about before Kaiser, the idea that there is a progression, that the party and the society move forward and that Xi Jinping is a sort of vehicle for that. That also sums up part of what that new era is supposed to be about and why it's so associated in the propaganda with him.
- [25:37]
B
So 1945 resolution, the 1981 resolution have obvious watershed qualities to them. Any fool looking at these, these years understands why it was that the Party would want to put a sort of punctuation mark there. 21, you know, is it just the nice round anniversary date of the 100th year since the founding of the Party? Is there more to it? Is there an obvious historical watershed that can be pointed to then I think.
- [26:06]
C
There'S an unobvious one, so I'll mention that if I may. And first of all, it seems to me not surprising that a century in 100 years, in that the Party would put forward a resolution bearing in mind that it's nearest cognate, the Soviet Communist Party managed to clock up at least in power, I guess, what, 74 years and then didn't quite make we beat you three quarters of a century. Exactly. And that's something on which as we know the CCP is immensely sensitive. You know, why did the Soviet system collapse? And how do we make sure that doesn't happen to no real man? According to the reports of Xi Jinping's, I have to say that patriarchal language is still clearly very strong inside the Party and all these sorts of things. It's something that actually many of the memoirs of some of the revolutionary women of the 40s and 50s, people like Kang Keqing, who of course amongst other things was married to Zhude, but had an important part in the revolution in her own right, made a certain amount of pretty acid comments about. So that's nothing new in that sense, talking about manliness as virtue. But going back to what's unobvious in terms of turning point, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, Kaiser, because I probably am, that this is a moment at which for the first time there is a formal embedding of something that Mao Zedong rejected. Because Mao was a child of the May 4 Revolution at its most radical. And that meant amongst other things, that China's traditions, the, the, the language and philosophy of Confucius and the kind of long standing pre modern philosophical and ethical traditions of China were something that Mao roundly rejected. And indeed the Cultural Revolution in part is the kind of ultimate rejection of that sort of a pre modern thinking which had underpinned the ethical basis of Chinese statecraft for such a long time. That is not the position of Xi Jinping. And that is not the position of the 2021 resolution, which in a very, to me interesting and rather odd way, spends a great deal of time saying what the Party is not. There's a lot of statements there that the Party is not purely a Marxist vehicle, is not purely the product of Chinese traditional thinking, not purely this, probably that. And it seems to me, and now I have to say this is now diving into the realms of fiction. But I, you know, I think it's plausible fiction. You can see a whole bunch of people sitting around the Dangxiao in the Party school writing this resolution. They're smoking a lot of cigarettes. This is quite a retro room. I think they're kind of drinking a lot of really kind of quite bad green tea and they're having massive arguments with each other about, look, how do we define this thing? You know, we've got this party, it's 100 years old, we've got to write something about the damn thing. And I think that that sense of Mardun, of contradiction between different strands, the strand of pre modern thinking, which they want to bring back, they want to rescue from Maoist rejection, but also saying, but we are a Marxist Party, we are a Leninist Party, we're not letting that tradition go. That is something quite central, it seems to me, to that resolution.
- [29:04]
B
Rana, I bless you. You have just offered me the perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you about next. So you have a piece forthcoming in the next issue of Foreign Affairs. It's the next issue, I believe, in which you. You reviewed Wang Hui's voluminous. Oh, that's actually only the first. What, third of the.
- [29:22]
C
Or quarter maybe? I mean, it's quarter.
- [29:24]
B
Third. Right. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this, but the quote unquote, New Left. I don't want to say ideologue. That sounds weird, but you know, a thinker, political thinker. I think Political Thinker at Shanghai University has. I've tried reading it. They actually asked me if I would blurb it and it kicked my ass. I couldn't really get through it and it was, wow, that was some hard reading. And hats off to you for actually doing it and writing about it and writing about it really, really well. But it talks about specifically. So ostensibly it's about this book which focuses only on late Qing intellectual life, but you turned it into a meditation on the Confucian Marxist synthesis, of which you see this as part of the project.
- [30:14]
C
So I think that's right. And one of the reasons I was prompted to do that. Actually, Kaiser and I say this briefly at the beginning is that it's now faded a little. But, you know, maybe three or four months ago there was a bit of a buzz around a TV show that was shown in China which wasn't. Yeah, you're laughing already. It wasn't universally popular, but it was definitely noticed. And this was the show noticed, ridiculed, I mean, produced by, I think, Hunan tv. And when Harry met. I mean, sorry, yeah, no, When Harry Met Potter, When Harry Met Sally, or When Marx met Confucius.
- [30:44]
B
And this was actually, I think, when Marx met Confucius.
- [30:47]
C
Right, absolutely.
- [30:48]
B
And I thought time travel shows were banned on Chinese television.
- [30:52]
C
Let's just say that the production values would pretty much match the script in, in certain ways. The, if you, if you watch it and you can see clips on, on, on YouTube and elsewhere, the beards that both Confucius and Marx have are really something to, to behold. But one of the. But the primary reason that it was put forward. Well, there's a couple of things. First one is that many people will know actually, who know modern Chinese literature, that actually the idea, it was from an original idea by Guo Ma Ro, you know, one of the significant figures.
- [31:19]
B
Again of the Mayfair, I have to say his name.
- [31:23]
C
I want to say. You guys aren't kin, are you Not Blood.
- [31:25]
B
No, I'm not. I'm not.
- [31:26]
C
Okay, well, never mind, you guys. I don't know, I could see he was a revolutionary romanticist and I can see that in you as well, Kaiser, I have to, I have to say. But so this was originally a short story written, I think in about 1925 by him on this. And, you know, it was an original idea but then taken up basically to illustrate one of the ways in which the, you know, propaganda enterprise around Xi Jinping has chosen to try and deal with exactly the problem we're talking about, which is, okay, so China is a Confucian society kinda, but it's also a Marxist society kinda. And how do we do this? And the answer is Die Arga Tiehe, the second recombination, which to me sounds like something from a biology lab, I have to say, like, you know, kind of, you know, DNA or something. Recombinants are one of those things that kind of get out of it.
- [32:12]
B
You seem to have DNA on the mind. Recently I watched on YouTube some speech that you had given where you had this CGAT thing where you're talking about the. Can you. I mean, just, just for shits and giggles, what was CGAT you know, there's cytosine and. Yes, adenine, Guanine and guanine. But. But you said.
- [32:29]
C
Yeah, I said that instead of the China DNA, this is also in Foreign Affairs. Foreign affairs is very tolerant of many of my thoughts on China, some of.
- [32:35]
B
Which we have to talk to Dan about that.
- [32:38]
C
So this was, this was. And I'm very grateful to them, I should say, on this, this public, public forum. And it's lovely to have a chance to actually kind of write to that audience. So I worked out that actually the DNA nucleotides have the same initials as the factors, which I think still are very, very central to shaping and making distinct the China of today. C for consumerism, G for globalization, A for authoritarianism, and T for technology. And rather like DNA, they're more than the sum of the parts. I mean, Kaiser, you are a pile of DLA molecules, but you're so much more than that to most of us as well. And China, of course, in terms of its DNA is that way, too. If you're very kindly, and you are very kind, Kaiser. Letting me very quickly get in a few plug references here. Let me just push one more in here as well, because that idea of what China is and how it sits in the world that's emerging is something that's also coming out in, in a new. I don't know if on this podcast I'm allowed to mention another. I won't say rival podcast, but Jane Perles of the New York Times and I have a new podcast coming out called Face off, which is, you know, referring to the question of the US China and their relationship. And it's out on Spotify on 2nd of April this year.
- [33:50]
B
That's the John Travolta John Woo movie.
- [33:53]
C
Well, at some point, basically, Jane and I change heads. That's only the video version, which you have to pay extra for, but the audio version is free. But we explore in some detail that question, not just of how some of these questions, of how, you know, the relationship and sometimes the confrontation between the US and China is shaped by ideology as well as by material factors. So we're interested in, you know, obviously, the question of how the economies of the two countries are fixed together. But we also have been talking, you know, one of Jane's great interviews is with the magnificent cellist Yo Yo Ma, who, you know, represents in some ways, the kind of cultural milieu in which shared environments exist that often just don't get talked about very much because you spend a lot of time obviously thinking about the more Confrontational side of side of things.
- [34:40]
B
Sounds fantastic. I want to. Looking forward to listening to that. And when does that come out?
- [34:44]
C
That's out on the 2nd of April.
- [34:45]
B
Oh, fantastic. Wonderful, wonderful. I'll listen to all. I'm doing my taxes.
- [34:51]
C
So a little. A little cello music in the background. Always good for that.
- [34:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. So let's get back to, you know, when Confucius met Marx, though it strikes, I think, anyone who's even glancingly familiar with other ideology that there are some areas of congruence, you know, harmony, for instance, arguably collective or communitarian value system, but also rather obvious areas of divergence. I mean, Confucianism is deeply hierarchical, not at all egalitarian, not like, you know, Chinese communism, which isn't at all, you know, hierarchical. No, I mean, but it's, you know, it's. It's patriarchal. Not at all like the Chinese Communist Party. No, it sees its ideals, you know, it locates them in a remote time, in the distant past, you know, and the time of, you know, the king when in the Duke of Zhou. Right. So what are the truly difficult to reconcile areas and how has the party really, you know, sought to reconcile them? I mean, China is infamously good at syncretism. Right. Is that the trick here?
- [36:01]
C
I think it is. I mean, the idea that you can basically take a variety of things and combine them at this and make them all valid at the same time. So I think that in this particular set of ideas, the Marxist Leninist part and the, you know, I'm going to use a broad term here, but Confucian part speak to different parts of China's contemporary condition. I'm going to call it the modern condition. You're going to probably call it a post modern condition in a moment. Think about what Confucianism or, you know, the system of thought that we've come to know as Confucianism, however we translate it emerges from Confucius own times, when essentially what we now think of as China, you know, prior to the modern state, is essentially a whole variety of kingdoms in conflict with each other. And at a time when there's immense amounts of violence, turbulence, no kind of fixed state system. Maybe not. Yeah, all that. Exactly. And the states, you know, coming together and falling apart, all of that, you want to put forward a way of thinking about how peace might be maintained and harmoniously be maintained. And it's often at times of extreme turbulence that ideas about how to bring the piece about become important. I mean, in a different context. Immanuel Kant, of course, could be thought of as being part of that, that, that development in the European context many, many centuries later. And today China, thankfully, is not at war. And we hope that none of us are going to be at war at any time in the, in, in the near future. But there's no doubt that internally within China, there are a whole variety of contradictions. There's turmoil, there's, you know, the potential for those sorts of Mao Duin, the contradictions that potentially could bring different parts of society up against each other. And that is something where the idea of an ethical system that stresses hierarchy but also mutual obligation, the idea that, you know, you're not allowed to, if you're the guy on top, simply tell everyone else what to do and you do it or shut up. I mean, there are of course, legalist and other systems of thought that are much more coercive and top down realist, some people might argue, but those are not the ones that are generally considered to be the most ethically virtuous in those terms. And yet, you know, Mao Zedong undertook the path that he took for a reason. He saw social injustice. You know, people like Ms. Zhao, the woman who took her own life, the young girl really, in a sense, who took her own life in Sichuan, in Chengdu, I think, because she was forced into marriage by her parents. He wrote extensively about these and other social evils. So the idea that simply keeping society harmonious and calm is not sufficient was also always a part of that revolutionary change. And if you think today about the idea that the party still thinks is tremendously important. The idea that social change is part of its mission, that it wants to essentially, you know, in its own terms, create, you know, the term might be common prosperity at some point or some kind of, you know, other changes in terms of wealth disparity, national disparities, all of these things, those militate much more towards a philosophical system or a political system that demands change as part of its mixture. So how you mix those two things becomes a very difficult question for Mao, in a sense, the answer was simpler. He was someone who actually revered revolutionary violence in his own right.
- [39:33]
B
He believed he was a cultural iconoclast. He simply repudiated as, as he came from that May 4th tradition.
- [39:38]
C
Absolutely. And if you think about, you know, I mean, you know, one of the most famous phrases that, you know, I've just realized that we've had a fantastic meal here at Salzburg an hour or so before we recorded this Kaiser. And it reminded me, revolution is not a dinner party. In other words, Mao was serious about the idea that the refined elegance, what he regarded as the Confucian world, had to be overturned. That is not the view, I think, of the leadership of today's Communist Party, who were terrified at the idea that actually people might start, you know, using revolutionary violence to change society. And yet the idea of social change in and of itself is not something that they seek to reject.
- [40:17]
B
There was a great intellectual historian whose works I still revere and I revisit from time to time, although they're almost as hard to read as Wang Hui. And I'm speaking, of course, of the late, great Joseph Levinson. And anytime I think about this effort to reconcile tradition with the objective reality of modernity, anytime I think of the. I like to think that Joseph Levinson is smiling down and looking at this new project of reconciliation and going, told you. I mean, he must have been. I think that Levinson's ideas, they really still just deeply inform so much of the way I approach modern China. I don't want to go into too much detail about it. It's a very complicated set of ideas. I think they're probably familiar to many people in this room. He thinks that there's one defining question, one great overarching challenge that has defined modern Chinese history for its intellectuals, and that is how do we attain national wealth and power in a way that reconciles what he calls history and value? Meum et verum, Right. What is mine, rather, what is bequeathed to me by history, by my tradition, and what is objectively true in the world when I look around, right. And he has all sorts. He writes about this beautifully. This is a part where his prose just really sings. It's interesting. We're in Salzburg and there was, of course, a wonderful volume that was written about him called the Mozartian Historian. Right. So it's really fitting that we should bring his name up while we're here. He, I think, would have, you know, seen exactly what's happening now and see how it sort of fits into that frame. And I think he might have said, maybe you disagree with me here, but I'm really curious that we have arrived at a point where at least many of the people in. In the party leadership have arrived at the end of modern Chinese history. Here's the promised post modern period that I'm talking about. You know, that China actually has attained wealth and power. Certainly when that document was written in 2021, coming after the V shaped recovery, after the COVID lockdown, and they were feeling their oats, they felt like they were on top of the world, that everyone else had really screwed the pooch and China was feeling so. And I think there's no coincidence that that's when that party pronouncement on history came out anyway, that they had also reconciled history and value somehow, that this crazy quilt amalgam of shall we, Confucian Marxism, Leninism with technocratic authoritarian characteristics, and of course Chinese characteristics, is something that is Chinese, that is mine and is true, and produces the Ying Dali of actual economic and comprehensive power development. So I would assert that there is a sizable number, maybe even a critical mass of intellectuals today who believe China is, if not there, then in sight of it. Which makes me wonder, in the Levinsonian framework, what is the next question? What is the question that will animate this new era that Xi Jinping has pronounced? What are your thoughts?
- [43:48]
C
So, I mean, first of all, Joseph Levinson, one of the towering founding figures of the post war field of American Studies of China, along with John King Fairbank and Mary Wright and a variety of others who really did pioneer work. And Levinson died too early. He died very tragically. Yeah, 1960s, exactly. But nonetheless left behind a tremendous legacy, not just of scholarly work, written work, but also, of course, students who would go on to shape that field. So I would say that in some ways we talked about Wang Hui and this monumental work that he's produced or been producing. You might say, I don't know that it's necessarily over yet. And in some ways Wang Hui, who reads very widely, I think, is very aware of Joseph Levinson and his work.
- [44:34]
B
Oh, okay, I didn't get that far. What does he say?
- [44:37]
C
But, well, here is a point of difference, I think. And again, those listening in, feel free to, you know, bombard Kaiser on the comments page with a critique of this too. But in Confucian China and its Modern Fate, you know, the kind of Levinson kind of trilogy there, the kind of key work. I think it's fair to say that Levinson's conclusion, and bearing in mind that's written back in the 50s and 60s, is that in the end the contradiction. He probably doesn't use that term actually. But you know, what is a sort of contradiction between China as a pre modern empire kind of state with fuzzy borders, but a very strong identity, is in the end not easily compatible or wholly compatible with what you mentioned there, which is the nation state that looks to create Fu Guoqiangbing, the strong nation and the rich army, almost. The idea is you have to choose one or the other.
- [45:27]
B
We usually associate that idea with Lucien Pai, though, right? This idea that.
- [45:31]
C
Well, that's a civilizational state as well. Of course.
- [45:33]
B
Right. Civilizational state. Masquerading or, you know, playing at failure. Nation state.
- [45:38]
C
But. But I don't think it's about masquerading or playing, because these are genuine identities. And this is the thing. When you read Wang Hui's work, he. I mean, again, I hope I'm not doing injustice to an immensely long and complex piece of thinking. And you've mentioned kind of the Foreign affairs piece where I try and unpick it a bit more, but I don't think he actually sees a contradiction there. He says that these things, it's almost. I mean, he doesn't use this phrase. This is now me making it up, but it's almost Schrodinger, that you can be empire and nation state in different ways at different times. Just one very quick example to get behind that metaphor. Let's take. Now, I want to get the right date right, 1689, which you remember. Well, I'm sure Kaiser. Yeah, you know, it was a hell of a year. Hell of a year. But one of the things that happened, as I'm sure, if you can still remember back that far after the night we had, that back in the early modern era, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which is essentially the first, or at least I think the first of what you might call the modern treaties signed by.
- [46:37]
B
Expanding Russian Empire, you know, they. Into Manchuria, they delineate the border.
- [46:42]
C
Absolutely. And bear in mind what I just said, that I didn't say by China, although you could say by China, but by the Qing state or the Qing entity, in other words, the Qing Empire, which of course at that point is expanding and also redefining itself in all sorts of ways. And as you know, another wonderful story, and Timothy Brook has put it, is a tag war, a great state that seeks to.
- [47:00]
B
If you have not read that book, it is fantastic.
- [47:04]
C
Even if you have read it, still fantastic.
- [47:06]
B
You're right. You're right, in fact, but it's just fantastic.
- [47:10]
C
So that, that. That Qing Empire, an empire which, to use the word, we must never ever use. I'm going to say, I'm going to go there. The T word, traditional empire, we don't mind that word, but nonetheless is also signing a very modern and not unequal, very equal treaty with another empire, but also one that has a very strong sense of statehood, which is the emerging Russian imperial state as well. And I think that will be one example. I think, if I remember right, actually, Wang Hui does cite that one, but I should double check that as an example of how modernity is visible in state practice long ahead of the time in the 19th century when it's basically even today in official Chinese historiography. Considered that 1839, you know, the beginning of the First Opium War, that's when the stretched out, that's the. That's the new era. In other words, that, you know, Western modernity in the form of violent invasion and occupation of China and the selling of opium and the smashing of the doors to bring in Western thought, you know, that's the moment when everything turns modern. Well, not necessarily. Actually, again, you know, it can be wave and particle. It can be traditional empire or pre modern empire and modern nation state. And these things can coexist in all sorts of ways. And I think that's one way, in a sense, taking a different line from what, half a century before Joseph Levinson would have put forward.
- [48:34]
B
No, he's just simply embodying the urge to resolve contradictions. Well, it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I can stick anyone into that. But I get you. The party, though Wang Hui may have familiarity with Levinson and has maybe thought about Levinson and maybe taken a very different tack, but what about the party leadership itself? I mean, they don't frame things up in that Levinsonian framework. They certainly are.
- [49:04]
C
Do you think that Wang Huning is sitting there with a whole pile of books by John King Fairbank and various other areas?
- [49:09]
B
You never know. I think he was actually. Yeah. I mean, there's a chance that I.
- [49:14]
C
By the way, should we just say one thing very clearly, because I think it's important to put in here Kaiser. My sense is that Wang Hui, who is a major intellectual, you know, based out of China but international, he is not someone who is embodying any particular view that has to do with the official Chinese Communist Party in this sense. You know, obviously he works and lives in China, but the book is very much about the pre modern era. And it's not, you know, propaganda in anyone's cause, Western Chinese or otherwise. So in some ways we want to separate that from what's happening up in the party school in terms of the official Chinese Party discourse.
- [49:47]
B
It's some really, really dry stuff about various schools of Neo Confucian thought. I mean, oh my God, I tried, I tried. I really did, but it was like I had nightmares of being haunted by Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming and Hoyt Tillman.
- [50:01]
C
The problem with you, Kaiser, is you're the kind of guy who thinks that party school means the University of Miami. Right.
- [50:09]
B
Guilty is charged. All right. That's why they rejected me. I, I was like, Winston kegger dude. All right, all right, I know. Well, actually, let me very quickly finish off that because I, I thought that maybe one of the candidate questions for what is the big animating question is how do we fit the civilization state into this, into this, you know, world that we live in of, of west alien nation states? And I still think it, I mean, I think that the way that, that Chinese identity spills out of that kind of finite container and when, when you stack it next to the other cops, there's stuff running over that gets squeezed and that's, I mean, you know, the way that, for example, the party state lays claim to those such as me, because I'm ethnically Chinese, because I speak the language, somehow I am, you know, somehow considered Chinese. And. Yeah, so I think that there's a lot of problems that get generated out of this. And we've seen, you know, nearly a month goes by where there isn't some instance where this manifestation of this tendency, whether it's, you know, exit bans or whether it's extraterritorial repression or. What was it called? Transnational repression, whatever. Yeah, so that was one of my candidates. But you know, maybe more broadly the question is what kind of a state, now that we are wealthy and powerful, are we going to be in this world? Right.
- [51:32]
C
So I think it's really important to think about what the next big question is. And I'm going to cite another writer and philosopher based out of China who's. A book by whom. There we are. A book by whom I found actually very inspiring in trying to formulate this question. Not Hume, but Hume indeed. Yes. They actually, you have to say that partly because of, you know, changes in what people consider politically acceptable. Recently the University of Edinburgh canceled the philosopher David Hume. They changed Le Bon David. Yeah, but I pointed out that maybe he wasn't actually cancelled, he was just exhumed. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all.
- [52:15]
B
Week, but having try the schnitzel.
- [52:19]
C
Having basically degraded Kaiser's podcast at a level beyond, below which it has never, never gone. Let me get to another philosopher. This is someone who I think has written one of the most interesting works of political philosophy in recent years relating to China, and that is the Fudan University philosopher Bai T. Oh, Bai Tung in his book Against Political Equality. Nice. Provocative title. Published actually by Princeton University Press.
- [52:43]
B
I'm sorry, against political what?
- [52:44]
C
Against Political equality. Who could be against political equality, One might ask oneself. You know, Pingdang, equality is one of the driving characteristics of every single modern state, whether it's a democracy, autocracy doesn't matter. Equality is an absolute shibboleth that has to be respected. So by choosing that title, that's quite the provocation. And actually the book is even more subtle than that because what it essentially argues is that to preserve liberal values, it's not always the case that democratic form is going to be the best way to actually preserve that. Now, you may agree or disagree with the premise. That's kind of what philosophers do. They put out slightly outrageous premises and let you debate them. It's great. But I think it speaks to the question of what the next big question is. In this way, Kaiser, in some ways, much of discussion, and we've had some of it actually here at Salzburg in the last few day or two, is, is there a democratic world and is it being opposed by the autocratic world? And will autocracies seek to promote themselves against democracies and so forth? Now, I think those arguments aren't without validity. In certain cases we can think of particular examples. But I think right now, the question of whether or not liberal values, in other words the right to have a civil society, the right to have a kind of wider public conversation where people can speak freely and so forth, is certainly under grave peril in China. I think very few people would argue that in the last 10 years China, even with its restrictions, has become more liberal rather than less. Everyone would say that in terms of social media and just possible, I think certainly mid 2010s, mid 2020s social media, public sphere, whatever it is, there's much less space to write and read than was the case a decade ago. But also the wider trend, which actually is not so relevant to China, but it is relevant to the question of where liberal values can or should be preserved is in plenty of other societies which procedurally are highly effective democracies. You know, there's lots of voting going on in Turkey and the Philippines, wherever it might be. But where liberal values are seriously under threat. And that is one of the things that I think potentially makes it more, makes it helpful to China's arguments if people choose to take them up when democracies essentially undermine their own premises by saying, yeah, we have lots of voting, but actually liberal civil society is not something that we care that much about, because it's much easier in that case for China to make an argument that in that case, actually the end result Looks very similar. It's just the method by which you use to get there is somewhat different. And the preservation of the liberal space in its own right, that is something that's much more under threat than the procedure of voting and democracy.
- [55:38]
B
I recently had a conversation about whether since, you know, we look at Orban and we look at Erdogan, whether since we established that there is such a thing as illiberal democracy, is there liberal autocracy? I can't remember what we resolved. We drank too much.
- [55:53]
C
But, well, I think the last. The last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patton, would always argue that for, you know, the five years he was in charge of the. Of the Crown Colony as governor, that he was in the very weird position of being in charge of a place that was not really at all democratic, but was immensely free and open in terms of all of its public discourse.
- [56:12]
B
I do remember offering up Singapore as a possible example, although I think that's probably a very, very debatable question. But let me ask you one thing. I know that I've asked you, put this to you before. I wanted to see whether your mind had changed in time or whether you thought of something clever to say. You always do. I. I still think it's really an important question. So how do you, as an historian, properly measure what I want to call the gravitational force of history when it comes to China? I've remarked many times that it's blindingly obvious that history very much matters, not only in how it's interpreted, but also in the force that it exerts, irrespective of what the explicit interpretation of it is. Right? It just. It matters. It changes the way socialization takes place. It infects our values, our way of thinking, our reflexes, right? All of us, I mean, even Americans who feel always so liberated from history are that way precisely because they've been shaped by a specific history. Now, my question is because it's also blindingly obvious that Chinese, and especially Chinese, have been able sometimes to completely escape the gravitational pull of history and reinvent themselves. I mean, almost in a miraculous and very admirable way. So these two things are. We're talking about resolving all sorts of contradictions tonight, right? So how do you. Do you have a rule of thumb? Do you. Do you. How do you.
- [57:37]
C
Do.
- [57:37]
B
Is it gut for you? Is it like pornography? You know it when you see it? And what is it for you?
- [57:43]
C
The words of the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, if I remember correctly, the one question, just to sort of drill into your question for a moment. Kaiser, before an Assad, when you say that you think that China has or the Chinese have been more able to liberate themselves or kind of push back against history than others, what are you thinking of there in particular?
- [58:03]
B
Well, specific instances that I've seen are more, you know, on an individual basis. I have met so many Chinese people who have never traveled abroad, but in their thinking, in their behavior, in their, I mean, I like the phrase habits of mind. They are liberated from historical force. Somehow they have, they have become moderns in our sense of it. And I mean it's something I feel like they have this ability to deal with acceleration, the G force that if we're on a train would have just knocked me on my ass. And they are standing there somehow and able to roll with it. And it's a truly admirable thing. But at the same time they are so freighted by history. This is my probably favorite go to when people say everyone always says China is a place of contradictions. What are some of the contra. And that's the one I always pull out of my butt. So what's, what's your.
- [59:00]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely see your point. So here, here's something that has occurred to me again. I'm going to throw lots of kind of dubious scales and facts into, into this podcast and people are welcome to write in and push back.
- [59:13]
B
Please don't.
- [59:14]
C
But it's too late, Kaiser. It's already been happening. If you think about what I think at the moment would be the top 10 economies in the world by GDP, all except one. Number two, China are essentially societies that since 1945, maybe 1947 in the case of India, have had a regular succession of political and social changes marked by general elections and a meliorist, to use a word I don't get to use very often, so I'll use it now. Meliorist sort of social change gradually better over time. India, of course, just to be absolutely complete on this, does have that pretty awful two years, 1975-77, where Mrs. Gandhi suspended democracy. But apart from that during that period. So now compare and contrast someone in China born in 1945 and there's still plenty of people in China who are of that, of that age and what they'll have gone through, you know, early childhood in the first years of the revolution, they'll have seen, you know, the five aunties, they'll have seen the anti rightist campaign. Then they will 21 when the Cultural Revolution breaks out 21 when the Cultural Revolution breaks out so, you know, they're in. Maybe if they're in Beijing, they're in Tiananmen Square. Maybe they have a good time doing Chuan Lian on the trains. Maybe they're having their brains beaten out on a pavement by their fellow students or, you know, being sent down to the countryside, as happened to one or two quite famous people. I believe in things. And then, you know, a few, a few years later, maybe we're talking about people getting into their late 20s, early 30s, reform era, their Shanghai, you know, becoming entrepreneurs. They're kind of taking. Seizing these opportunities. Maybe they're reading, you know, some of these exciting things like Dou Shu and these magazines that are bringing forward all these great thinkers from the outside world. They may be watching Heshang, one of the greatest TV shows ever made, still available on YouTube, not available in China River Elegy. And then 1989, you know, again, demonstrations, killings, you know, turning around, freezing. And then weirdly enough, two or three years after that, an unfreezing. I mean, I think we would all hear, as people who know China say, that the late 90s to early 2000s is actually a remarkably open time in China.
- [61:27]
B
Absolutely.
- [61:27]
C
Considering Tiananmen Square happened just a few years before. Right. And then, you know, the freezing again. So my point being in this case, that you don't know if you are an ordinary but reasonably engaged Chinese citizen, what's going to happen this year, next year, five years time, you may have a good steady job, you may be a zillionaire, you may be in jail, you may be a zillionaire who's in jail. There's quite a lot of them actually, to be, to be fair. In other words, I think it changes in some ways sociological horizons, because as simple as putting money into a pension scheme, if you're in Germany, we're in Austria at the moment. But if you're Austria and Germany, putting money into a pension scheme in 1938 maybe turns out to be not such a great idea, but doing it from 1946 onwards has a continuity to it. Similarly, Social Security in the us, British National Health, whatever, you have all these things that you make a bet on how the future is going to look in 10, 20, 50 years time. The fact that some of that's going wrong now is one of the reasons why Western societies are being undermined. But that expectation has been relatively short term and relatively quite rare in China. And yet China has built the world's second biggest economy off the back of that. On sociological expectations, event horizons and precepts that are remarkably dissonant with every single other one of those top 10 economies in the world today. That's right. I think that's, you know, that's worth contemplating.
- [63:00]
B
Rana, I love that unprompted, you did one of these things, this sort of mental exercise I'm constantly doing, which is sort of construct these hypothetical biographies that are very much anchored in events and seeing what we can learn from that. I think it's a fantastic way to do it. Actually, just on the show, the first sort of post China Project episode, Jeremy was asking me what some of my, my favorite moves are, what I would identify as, you know, the things to tell somebody about so that they can have a shot at understanding how the Chinese see the world. And mine was that. Except that it was moved forward in time. It was to somebody who was graduating high school. So graduating junior high, say in December of 1970 happens to be right there in December. And how 40 years later they were only thinking of retiring and what the per capita GDP was in their first job. It was $175 to what it was on that brink of retirement and what that does to your head. And it's a very different story because what happens to meat when you freeze and rethought that's not a good idea. Right. So your guy that there or your woman is not in the same shape as this person who's only been frozen once and then unthawed. And so they're still quite tasty and edible.
- [64:26]
C
Yeah. I will freely admit that particular metaphor had not occurred to me, Kaiser, but.
- [64:30]
B
I hope it never does. Anyway, wow, what a fun time talking with you, Rana, as always. And as I fully expected, folks, we're going to go on to recommendations now, everyone's favorite segment of the thing. So I hope, Rana, you have a good recommendation for.
- [64:47]
C
Absolutely. I would like to recommend a fantastic novel. It's not her most recent, but it's one that I think is well worth reading by a young British writer called Eliza Clark. And the novel is called Boy Parts. And it is the story of essentially a young art school graduate, a young woman from the north of England who uses, let's say, photography, which is one of her skills in a whole variety of ways that get her into all sorts of trouble with the aforementioned boys and photographs of various things that they. They get up to. I won't say more than that now, but I'd have to say.
- [65:23]
B
So you're recommending a YA novel, basically?
- [65:25]
C
I definitely not. I'm recommending a piece of important literature that Happens to combine immensely, you know, very, very sharp, ironic humor, very kind of northern British sort with perhaps what you might call a sort of pungent eroticism. Is that a phrase that we can use in your face?
- [65:43]
B
I don't like to think of my eroticism as having, like, olfactory properties. But, but thank you. Thank you.
- [65:50]
C
Well, we'll go as sensory as you like. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. Well worth reading.
- [65:55]
B
Fantastic. God, I'm so boring compared to you. I'm going to recommend a book by a writer named Story named Anthony Kaldelis. It's called Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood. And it's about basically the Byzantine resurgence in the 10th century. And I have this, I experience this profound anxiety when I recognize in myself like a gigantic hole in my historical knowledge. And so one of them is early modern. I got obsessed, I think people, listeners know, for a while with the 30 years war. Now I realize, oh my God, I know jack about, you know, Byzantium basically after the 4th century. And I said, you know, so yeah, for a thousand years. And then suddenly, you know, the Turks are storming.
- [66:43]
C
I still think by this stage, you know more than the rest of us, actually, guys.
- [66:45]
B
Anyway, it's a very good book. It's fascinating, detailed. It's an historian's history. But I read him because I saw somebody had reviewed a forthcoming sort of comprehensive history of Byzantium and I thought, I'm going to check this guy out and just got really hooked on this book. So it's, it's really good. It's called, yeah, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood. Well, I want to ask everyone to give a very, very warm round of applause to Ra M. You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced by, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through substack@cineca.substack.com where there's a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email me@cinekapodmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out or what. I could be doing better. And don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude. Gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year and for educating my daughter. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.
- [68:15]
C
Sam.