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Audible.Com wondery priority pluralism rethinking universal values in US China relations by Kaiser Guo I got an email from Robert Daly the other day. Robert, who heads the Kissinger Institute at the Wilson center in D.C. is someone for whom I have boundless admiration. He's sharp, measured, well read, has excellent Chinese, and is above all else, genuinely wise. As I've said of him before when I had him on the Sinica podcast, he embodies all the precepts I look for in a good analyst of China. Chief among those is empathy. Robert's well developed empathy is coupled, as it should be, with an excellent moral compass. As complementary as these two qualities usually are, they will occasionally give rise to contradiction, especially when it comes to thinking about contemporary China. Empathy, and especially cognitive empathy, inclines us toward factoring in context, giving weight to history's gravitational force, and working to understand how things look from the other side. While morality sensitizes us to injustice, the suffering of individuals, and the abrogation of basic rights, I suspect that just this type of contradiction prompted Robert to write to me. He had, he told me, just listened to my letter from Beijing and an account I published a month back, reflecting on my four week trip back to Beijing this summer. And while he had kind things to say, he raised an important as I listened, I was wondering about your views on relations between the personal and the political and how they are shaped by one's status as a foreigner or native, he wrote, and I quote him here with his permission. You are revolted by aspects of American politics and culture, a revulsion I share. But I take it that you are not offended in the same way by dynamics in China that you would probably admit are at least as concerning as those driving you from America's shores. You don't sound as if you feel implicated or insulted by China's failures as you are by America's. Is that right? Yes, that is right. I'd readily admit China's politics are at least as concerning on their face as those in the United States, and despite that, I am not implicated or insulted by them in the same way. Robert goes on, this makes sense to me at some levels, but at others I'm not sure it's defensible. It's a question for Chinese and Americans alike. At what point do oppressive politics or rampant consumerism or morally bankrupt culture at the public level make it impossible to take refuge in the things we love? Personally, it's a more than fair question, and one that I've thought about a lot. Does the allowance I make for an illiberality I'd never tolerate in America and that I attribute to an appreciation for China's history and the gravitational force that I believe it still exerts on China really just boil down to civil and political rights for me, but not for thee, a form of what Michael Gerson famously called the soft bigotry of low expectations? If this looks like a double standard, that's because it is. I very much hold the US and China to different standards, and I owe a candid explanation of why, which I'll offer in due course. First, back to Robert's email. I wrote him back almost immediately, saying the short answer is that I believe that the development of political norms, political culture, and the habits of mind that underpin them takes time and the right circumstances to take hold in a society. I hold American society and the American polity to higher standards because we've had that time. We've had nearly 250 years to acclimate to electoral politics, a free press, free expression. The thing I keep seeing in societies where there's serious democratic backsliding is an absence of time for liberal values and institutions to set in. There are very few exceptions to this. When I think about China and its utter historical absence of anything like an enduring public sphere, absence of any institutions of political restraint like rule of law or an independent judiciary or separation of powers, any tradition of political pluralism, I simply cut it slack. At the same time, I know that can't go on forever. I then went on to note in my brief reply to him that I'd like to write an essay on this very topic. You're listening to it now. I asked him whether he'd mind my attribution of the catalytic question. To him, I had as it happened. Been casting around for a good essay topic anyway, and his email was very timely. I fired that reply off quickly, and I've quoted it here without edits. There's a whole lot I would like to have added to my answer. I'll settle for putting it down here. The first thing I'd have added is that I simply feel much less hesitation in criticizing my own government and society than I do the government or society of another country. This may sound like begging the question in its original, nearly forgotten sense. The question, after all, asked why otherwise I'm more inclined to criticize my own country rather than China, and answering because I'm more inclined to criticize my own country rather than China does appear circular, but I mean here to emphasize that the US Is my country, not China. And when it comes to China, I am, to borrow Robert's language, very much shaped by my status as a foreigner. I may have devoted a good part of my life to trying to grasp the language, the history and and the politics of China, but I could spend the rest of my life working on China, and my knowledge of that country would still be dwarfed by what I know about the US and its history, or even the history of Europe. Somewhere in me is this moral intuition that in most circumstances we all should feel less compunction about criticizing our own countries than we might about criticizing another, with exceptions for situations of war or conspicuous atrocity. It's not something I've thought through well or tried before now to articulate, but the intuition is there, and I tend to heed it. It's the same intuition that compels me, say, to remind a group of Americans just starting a study abroad program in Beijing. Remember, we're guests in this country. It's cousin to my intuition that criticism loses its moral force when it issues from the mouth of a hypocrite, from the physician who has yet to heal himself from the soot black pot, or the guy with the plank in his eye. And what about my Chinese and specifically Han ethnicity? Many factors complicate my relationship with China. See my three part essay about my priors when it comes to that country. Chief among them are my upbringing in a family proud of its Chinese heritage, the 20 odd years I spent living in China, my deep personal ties to Chinese people, and my abiding fascination with the country's history. You'd be excused for assuming these all tipped the scale still further against criticism of China, but honestly, I would submit that they make me feel less hesitant criticizing China. I may not be a Chinese citizen. But part of me certainly feels Chinese, and I've put in my time, however irrational this might be, I feel like I have permission to be critical. I need no such permission to speak freely and critically about my own country or its government. There is virtually no cost to criticizing the United States, and that itself is undoubtedly a good reason to praise it, or at least to dampen criticism of it. I risk nothing, and certainly not my freedom, when I publicly decry the conspicuous corruption of two Supreme Court Justices or rail against the FBI for its racial profiling of Chinese and other Asian Americans. I can liken Donald Trump to any number of dictators, past and present. Or I can publish scathing indictments of American foreign policy, and it will never even cross my mind that I might get in any trouble, permission or no. There's no question at all that I am more circumspect in my criticisms of China or of the Chinese leadership. Some might assume that's out of timidity or fear, and I will own that I am not especially courageous, or for that matter, particularly stupid. Were I in Thomas More's shoes, I would have listened to the pleas of my family and signed King Henry VIII's Oath of Supremacy. None of this, though, gets to the heart of the disparity that prompted Robert to write the disparity between, on the one hand, my anguish over the state of American politics and my relatively gentle treatment of an unapologetically authoritarian one party state. The core of that disparity is my understanding of history and how that has shaped my own stance on age old questions of moral philosophy, giving rise to a system of political ethics that I've tried over the years to articulate and which I'll provisionally call priority pluralism. I've never been persuaded by either moral universalism or moral relativism, at least not in their robust forms. It's always struck me as obvious that in a given society, prevailing moral norms, their codification in law and their manifestation in practice are conditioned by the circumstances under which those norms develop. Those moral systems can differ significantly from one another and still be valid. But it's also been clear to me that they aren't all valid. There's still something that those sets of norms I would regard as valid all have in common, something that prevents me from slipping down the slope of total relativism, leaving me without a footing from which to condemn Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin or Putin, irrespective of the historical circumstances of their nations. Pol Pot was a monster. The US bombing of Cambodia and the country's colonial subjugation by France. The none of that exonerates Pol Pot, his regime, and the ghastly killing fields. Hitler certainly gets no pass because of the short sightedness of Versailles or the feckless policy that created the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. I've often seen this issue through the philosophical lens of moral absolutism or universalism versus ethical relativism, but it occurs to me that free will versus determinism is also very salient. If it bothers you that Xi Jinping isn't on the list of those beyond the pale, beyond my limits of empathy, undeserving of a lighter moral sentence due to extenuating circumstances, we can debate that. For now, I'll simply say that my moral intuition draws a very big distinction between even the very worst that Xi and his party have done and the appalling crimes of the others on the list. I'm not interested here in debating the definitions of genocide, but to my way of thinking, deliberate mass murder is an atrocity without equal. There are some core principles embraced by so overwhelming a majority of human beings that I'm not nearly ready to reject universalism. Entirely apart from a relatively small number of societies living in extremely challenging ecological conditions, human polities have converged on a nearly universal set of ends prosperity, stability, security, freedom, health, education, and equality, to name but a few. New ends will emerge occasionally. Few societies lamentably explicitly championed sustainability until relatively recently, for example, but different societies will prioritize these ends differently. Indeed, all societies shift their priorities over time because some of those common ends can prove incompatible or even contradictory. And pursuit of the one can set a society back in its pursuit of another. Freedom and equality, for instance, are notoriously difficult to reconcile if we accept, as I do, that abilities and advantages are distributed unequally among individuals. Unchecked freedom would allow those with advantages, however they came, to possess them, to exploit those advantages and exacerbate inequality. Historians like Will and Ariel Durant see in history enduring cycles, swings of the pendulum between intolerable inequality arising from a surfeit of freedom and, on the other extreme, the imposition of equality at freedom's expense. It's also the case that for some societies, history and circumstance have combined to make a given end relatively easy to attain the end of material abundance, say, in a temperate, vast, fertile land endowed with an abundance of natural resources, while for other societies, history and circumstance have conspired to throw up impossibly tall obstacles. Moreover, the relationship between and among all these ends is tangled and complex. It's not easy to know how they are nested, which are conditional on which, it turns out, to no one's surprise, I'm sure that my grand moral insight was hardly original. There are quite a number of philosophers who, like me, want to split the difference between universalism and relativism. Many of them landed long ago on something close to what I had more recently devised. Isaiah Berlin, for example, argued for what he called values pluralism. In much the same way, I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperament. I am not a relativist. I do not say I like my coffee with milk and you like it without. I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps. Each of us with his own values which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them. The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance by human character, is finite, let us say 74, or perhaps 122 or 26. But finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not am able to understand why he pursues it, or what it would be like in his circumstances for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding. David Wong, a philosopher at Duke University, has argued for a moderate relativism he calls plural relativism, which recognizes some moral absolutes, while trying to reconcile this with the obvious diversity of moral systems worldwide. In the introduction to his book Natural the Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, he my alternative to universalism and relativism agrees with one implication of relativism as it is usually defined, that there is no single true morality. However, it recognizes limits on what can count as a true morality. There is a plurality of true moralities, but that plurality does not include all moralities. Another appealing idea I've come across is Kwame Anthony Appiah's rooted cosmopolitanism, which, like these other approaches, is appreciative of diversity but within bounds of, or more precisely rooted to certain universal ethical principles. The cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment is in essence what he writes in Ethics in a world of the recognition that human beings are different and we can learn from each other's difference. According to Appiah, there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith or or kind. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. I'm only glancingly familiar with these ideas, most of which I've only recently come across. But for whatever reason, even once I became loosely aware of these other doubtlessly better fledged moral systems, I'm still inclined to try to puzzle out my own system first without reference to them. Once done, I'll be eager to compare my own idle musings with the work of these more serious thinkers, but even my cursory readings suggest that we're thinking along similar lines. Let me bring this back more concretely to China and why it's important that we reckon honestly with the underlying moral issues. If you happen to be a universalist of the maximalist sort of a moral absolutist for whom right and wrong present themselves in stark black and white without ambiguity, where what others might see as extenuating circumstance can simply be dismissed, I doubt anything I've written or will write is going to change your mind, and I commend you for even getting this far. But I don't think too many such people exist. Nor would I be likely to have a productive conversation with a full bore relativistic another species thankfully seldom found in nature. For the rest of us who aren't Manichean in our thinking but still draw the line somewhere, I think there's enough common ground to plow ahead. The overwhelming majority of Americans I know fall into this moral middle ground. That's why it so puzzles and frustrates me that in its official foreign policy our government, irrespective of which party is in power, tends to take the maximalist position on universal values. U.S. officials may equivocate in private or show occasional sympathies to relativist positions, and they certainly make plenty of exceptions in their conduct. There are too many examples to name here, but in official pronouncements it's extraordinarily rare to see the State Department or the White House, let alone Congress, recognize anything like value pluralism. This is especially the case when it comes to recent China policy. I recall a press conference in January 2023 when State Department spokesperson Ned Price sidestepped the question about an Indian police raid on the BBC office in New Delhi. After that broadcaster ran an unflattering documentary about Narendra Modi. Price only emphasized the shared democratic values and the strategic importance of the Indian partnership without addressing the raid or the value of press freedom. It's quite common to hear extenuating circumstances offered up in defense of India's failures to live up to universal values, and often those defenses are, by my lights, very much valid. But it's almost unheard of to do the same for China, to cite, say, China's own massive population or the unprecedented rapidity of its economic development and the relative recency of dire poverty, famine, political disunity, and chaos. Interestingly, the Chinese party state itself does not argue for robust relativism. Yes, it challenges the idea of universal values, at least the set of values the US and close Western allies advance. That it does so mainly by insisting that there are multiple valid paths that nations might take and that those paths and the moral systems that guide them are are historically contingent may sound at first like textbook relativism. After all, it's not advancing an alternative set of values it believes to be universal. Note the readiness to slap the with Chinese characteristics label on any thought system of its devising, and the hodgepodge, improvised syncretic nature of Xi Jinping Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for the new era. And of course, the very pragmatism for which Chinese leaders were still recently famous is itself a trait common among relativists. But take a closer look and there's still a sizable core of moral universalism in the party's worldview. For starters, this universalism is baked right into the party's ostensible ideology. It believes in the objective validity of Marxism and its inherently normative and irreducibly moral claim that the socialist mode of production is superior. Why is it superior? Because it's fairer and therefore more moral? Look at the 12 core socialist values that were, at least for a time, to be seen on posters and billboards all over China. We're not talking about a relativistic party. The view Beijing advances in the eternal debate between relativism and universalism, in other words, also tries to split the difference and lands on something not too far from what Berlin, Wang, and Appiah have proposed a core set of values that match fairly closely those of the liberal democracies but are prioritized in significantly different ways. It's worth occasionally re reading Chapter 2 of the 1982 Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which enumerates nearly all of the rights you'd find in the US Constitution, but also includes the obligations of Chinese citizens. The list of rights includes freedom of speech, the press, assembly association, procession and demonstration all packed into Article 35 freedom of religion, 36 arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention, 37 search and intrusion into a home, as well as many that aren't part of our Constitution, the right and obligation to work, 42 the rights to privacy in correspondence and the right to criticize policy. Article 43 enshrines the right to rest and to vacation. Article 48 promises that women will enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life political, economic, cultural, social and familial and even mandates equal pay for equal work. Obviously, in reality, nearly all of these fall far short of the ideal. Unsurprisingly, many not only in the west but in China itself, dismiss them as window dressing at best, or even naked doublespeak. I think of them charitably, as aspirational, as expressions of moral goals that are regrettably pushed down the list of priorities by the exigencies of the moment. China is, as is widely known, a signatory to the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but as a declaration it is non binding and was something the PRC inherited from the Republic of China when it took the UN seat in 1971. China is also a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but significantly, it has not ratified it in the United Nations. China's challenge to universal values as understood by the US Especially takes the form of pushing for the inclusion of economic rights alongside the others. It's a challenge from a values pluralism perspective. Unfortunately, the official American position has been that China's efforts to introduce economic rights into the discourse on human rights is intended only to dilute and disarm universal values, to redirect its criticisms away from China and toward the us. To bring this all back to Robert's question, this is an important part of my answer. I do believe China's prioritization of these values poverty, alleviation, basic economic security, social stability, education, healthcare even over civil and political rights makes sense from the perspective of China's leaders, given where China was less than 50 years ago and China's historical experience even in living memory. This is not to say that I would prioritize things identically. I probably wouldn't. But I'm not convinced, as many Americans seem to be, that were Beijing to prioritize civil and political rights, expression, religion, assembly and everything else would somehow fall into place and China would go on to peace, prosperity, stability, and human flourishing. I've seen many more examples of things going in the other direction. Prosperity, security, stability, and measures of flourishing like education are more likely to create the soil conditions where some of the other values can take firmer root. But to be sure, I can't say with any certainty whether China's successes in some of these priorities, say poverty alleviation, would have been impossible or more difficult without, say, the suppression of free speech. As I said, it's not easy to determine causal direction, to untangle the skein and determine which priorities are conditional on which or when the pursuit of one impedes or forecloses progress toward another. I imagine that some readers will be thinking, ah, but this is what the Communist Party wants you to think. They perpetuate this idea that without their strong and steady hand on the tiller, the ship of state will flounder and sink, resulting in untold misery. They scare you with the specter of chaos and whip up popular nationalism just to convince you that were the unwashed masses to have a say in policy, it would be far worse. They constantly evoke the so called century of humiliation and point to China's accomplishments only so they can remain in power. Maybe. But this is exactly what the political scientist Iza Ding calls authoritarian teleology, this assumption that everything the party does serves only the end of perpetuating its monopoly on power. It's an unfalsifiable claim, and I'm just incapable of the kind of cynicism required to buy it. What should all this mean for American policy? I would like to see in American foreign policy. I would like to see an American foreign policy that recognizes and respects national diversity in prioritization and that aims to create conditions where other nations, China in this case, are able to make their way down their lists to get the things we prioritize. A good approach might be to recognize and celebrate that common core of shared values and to encourage progress toward those priorities, not with threats and high handed condemnation, but with good faith efforts to collaborate in much the same way we did during the heyday of engagement. More on this below. It may seem like a stretch to wean the US Government off the brand of universal values we've so long espoused. Universal values discourse is an ambidextrous cudgel that can be wielded or weaponized by the right and the left alike. It makes us feel better about ourselves as we wield it. It will be hard to give up. We tend now to impute illegitimacy to any government whose leaders were not democratically elected. And it will be hard for many, if not most Americans to swallow the idea that legitimacy can be derived in any other way. But while priority pluralism has been mostly absent in our foreign policy, I would argue that there's a long tradition of it in our own domestic politics, a tradition of it that we can tap and repurpose for our thinking on foreign policy. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is a good example. After all, the many different religious faiths that our government is enjoined to respect are competing claims of moral truths, are they not? Respect for cultural diversity within America can easily translate into respect for cultural diversity, even when it comes to political values in our foreign policy. Moreover, as a society, we are coming to understand how much history has affected historically disadvantaged communities in America, especially black and native Indian populations, and how historical inequality has many contemporary manifestations in employment, education, housing, health outcomes, and more. Most significantly, we implicitly understand that there is a moral component to this too. We hold black America, for instance, to different standards when it comes to things like rap music, misogyny, homophobia, the exaltation of violence, etc. And this even extends to real world behavior. The white liberal reaction, for instance, to the George Floyd BLM protests. Intelligent white Americans would, I would hope, never turn to black Americans today and say slavery ended in 1865. Get over it. And yet we seem still willing to ignore the equally profound impact of history when it comes to other countries. And we don't seem to have any compunction of about rolling our eyes when Chinese speak of historical humiliations and saying get over it. Some suspect that people like me harbor the desire to change China. They're not wrong, at least in my case, though I'd put it differently. I would like to see China change, and I believe I may have some small role to play, if only through my efforts to expose listeners and readers to smart perspectives that may not toe the Washington line. I do firmly believe that American policy can and has already brought about change in China, directly and indirectly, and not always for the better. As far as I can tell, critics of the idea that US Policy can play a part in bringing about change in China come from two basic camps. The first sees the very desire to see such change as arrogant, patronizing, and self righteous. America, in this view, is addicted to proselytization. This is usually coupled with denunciations of American hypocrisy. The US Is the worst violator of its own rules based international order and routinely transgresses against the universal values it thrusts on others. America, in this view, should just mind its own business and get its own house in order to, rather than telling other people how to live I'm not without sympathy for this view, but I find it ultimately shortsighted and overly dismissive of genuine moral concerns expressed in good faith and the potential for positive influence that thoughtful engagement can bring. The second view is one I have much less sympathy for. It's one that grew out of the idea that engagement somehow failed, and that because China did not, after decades of extensive trade, cultural exchange, tourism, and scientific and technological cooperation become more like us, we can only conclude that China won't change. We were foolish to expect otherwise, and we should therefore stop trying to change China and simply confront it. I believe this to be wrong in pretty much every way. Engagement was not aimed at making China more more like us, but at entangling China in webs of mutually beneficial interdependencies that would help align our interests, reduce friction between the two nations, and convince China that the export of revolutionary ideology was not in its own interest. But even assuming that engagement was supposed to make China more like us, it would be hard for anyone to look at China in the 1970s and look at it today, even in Xi Jinping's time, and not conclude that China had become a lot more like us, a consumerist, technologically advanced, market driven society of relative material abundance that affords considerable personal freedom to individuals. It was none of those things before ever a two way street. Engagement was also clearly in the Chinese interest, and Chinese leaders proactively sought change. They dispatched and received delegations to learn about American jurisprudence, higher education, enterprise management, finance, economic policy, and much else. The notion that China is never going to change is frankly essentialist nonsense. Historical context is important, but at what point does it become simply an excuse for human rights violations or political repression? Ultimately, how long does a country's history continue to limit its ability to reprioritize values and turn at last to civil and political rights and to rule of law? The possibility of change, indeed its reality, is built into my idea of priority pluralism. But inertia is tough to overcome and will, in China's case, likely last for more than a generation. There was, as I said in my email reply to Robert, no precedent for a public sphere. But I might have added that there was nothing historically analogous before the 20th century to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment. I mentioned 250 years of American history as a kind of gestation period for the liberal values and institutions we now cherish and enjoy. But the historical roots of the modern liberal political culture run much deeper. Historians and political scientists could devote lifetimes to exploring the reasons why, the ideas that undergird, liberal democracy developed where they did in a handful of European countries and their colonial progeny, and not in China, the Islamic world, or anywhere else. Historically, Francis Fukuyama does an admirable job in his book the Origins of Political Order, and countless other scholars have attempted pieces at least of the explanation. Fukuyama attributes one vital institution of political restraint, rule of law, to the fact that secular and ecclesiastical authority existed in a state of tension never fully resolved. From the time of Constantine's conversion in the early 4th century, through the Investiture Controversy of the 11th and 12th century, and the long struggles between the Guelphs, who were partisans of the pope, and their emperor, supporting archrivals, the Ghibellines, through the first half of the 16th century. The contest between church and state continues in America in our own time. If inertia is our metaphor, even this western boulder, already rolling now for 16 centuries if not more, has been hard to nudge onto the desired path. China, it seems, has only begun to get its boulder rolling. A country's history is not the only thing that shapes its political culture, of course. China's long relative isolation, often exaggerated to be sure, but certainly isolated when compared to other major powers, probably contributed to the inertia of its values and to the way Chinese leaders have prioritized. But China's political culture has inarguably changed and will doubtless continue to change, especially through interaction with other states. Change can come gradually or suddenly. In China's case, if history is any guide, we should all prefer the former and do what we can about the maddeningly slow pace while steering well clear of the costly catalysts of sudden change whose price, if fully understood, the few would be eager to pay. I began this with Robert Daly's email to me, and I'll end with a quote that he sent me, something that he's been sharing with American lawmakers in D.C. who thankfully seek his input on China policy. It's a quote from the Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill, the Hawk's favorite hawk. As Robert puts those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenge comes from a foreign power, have not always been right. Those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances they may be right not only morally but but from a practical standpoint. How many wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will, religion and virtue alike lend their sanctions to meekness and humility, not only between men, but between nations. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands? How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing? Interesting word, Robert added. Temporizing.