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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with the China Project. Subscribe to Access from the China Project to get access access to not only our great newsletter the Daily Dispatch, but to all of the original writing on our website@thechinaproject.com we've got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post carbon footing. It's a feast of business, political and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Back before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I embarked on a series of podcasts that I was calling Thinking About Thinking About China. I wanted to do some shows that explored some of the deeper issues on how we look at China and bring in issues of moral philosophy, epistemology, historiography, psychology, and much else. My feeling has long been that we don't think deeply enough about how we approach China, how we think we know what we think we know about, the very questions that we ask about our priors, our blind spots, our sources of cognitive bias. After February 24, that got derailed a bit. I've always meant to get back to it and do some more shows that go beneath the surface, not just dealing superficially with the latest twists in the US China relationship or the breaking news. So when I cracked open Yasheng Huang's new book, the Rise and Fall of the East. I immediately realized that having him on the show to talk about that book would scratch this itch of mine that I have long had and allow me to get back into some of these deeper topics that I have set aside for too long. The Rise and Fall of the East. And you should know that east here is an acronym that stands for Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology. It's one of those lamentably rare books that ask the really big questions and that offers pretty bold, original ideas about how and why China is the way that it is. I have no doubt that it's going to engender quite a bit of controversy. There are going to be a lot of historians who are going to question some of the methods, but I'm also confident that it's going to be talked about and cited for many years to come. After all, it sets out among many things to identify the forces that formed the mind of contemporary China, the political culture, if you like, and the many features of Chinese politics that defy easy explanation. It also takes things all the way up to the present and offers its own prognosis for China under Xi Jinping. In some ways, it takes its place in the growing literature on authoritarian resilience, but to my mind, it does actually a lot more than just that. It also reaches quite far back into history. It tries to draw actual data from history to support its conclusions. I haven't come across a book with this level of ambition in quite some time. It's out on August 29th, so make sure to pick up a copy. Yasheng Huang is International Program professor in Chinese Economy and Business and professor of Global Economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. And he's just moved to D.C. to take up a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. I am not only excited to have him on the show to talk about this incredibly thought provoking book, but I am just as excited that he is going to be our keynote speaker at the upcoming Next China conference on November 2 in New York City. Yasheng, welcome back to Seneca. It has been a long time.
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C
Yeah, thank you, Kaiser. I think last time we talked the world was almost totally different from the world today.
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B
It sure was. And not for the worse. For sure. So in my introduction to you just now, I talked about some of the things that your book tries to do, but I think it would be better if people hear it directly from you. What would you say are the really big questions that your book sets out to answer?
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C
Yeah. Thank you so much, Kaiser, for hosting me on your podcast, I also very much agree with you that the writings and musings about China often are driven by current events.
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D
Right.
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C
And they don't go deep enough. And they are really good books and articles that go deep, but those are rare and far easier in between. So, at least in my book, I try to go beyond current events, but I don't leave current events. As you pointed out, I go all the way to the Xi Jinping era in terms of the claims that I made in my book. So east, the. The first letter is exam. Specifically, I refer to the civil service exam system that was established in the 6th century. The basic point of my book is that if you sort of look at the three other components of the yeast autocracy, stability and technology. And technology here is about technology, but also, you know, economic growth and things like that, you can kind of trace these three dynamics to the exam system.
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D
Right.
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C
And so that's the kind of causal framework that I proposed in my book. And there, you know, I agree with many social scientists and historians. Today's China is shaped by its past. What I don't do is defining the past as Confucianism, you know, values in those terms. I define the past in terms of mechanism, this kind of specific practice of cultivating human capital, of shaping the minds of the Chinese people. You just talked about esphonology, right. So there's kind of a particular way that we approach the world without questioning the that methodology.
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D
Right.
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C
And I trace that to the civil service exam system, known in Chinese as a curjury system.
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D
Right.
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C
So it is going beyond the people who do work on curjury system. They tend to look at the Gaokao system today, the higher education exam today, and the civil service exam system in the Chinese system today. Definitely those are the contemporary versions of the Koji. But I go a little bit, well, quite beyond that. So I talk about the norms and talk about the way that people approach the world around us, the way that people oppose the political system as a product of the Kuju system. In addition to these specific institutional and practices factors, manifestation.
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B
That's a fantastic overview. And we will get into each of these four elements of this acronym, east, of course, beginning and focusing on the Kudju system in just a bit. But before we do that, you have a really great framing device that you use that spans the whole book. These ideas of scale and scope, these are really the anchoring ideas. It makes sense for us to talk, I think, a bit about what these are to make sure that our listeners really grasp what you mean when you talk about scale versus scope, because I'll be using these in the conversation and I'm sure you will be too. So let's make sure that everyone understands what you mean by scale and scope and how these relate to homogeneity and heterogeneity, how they relate to authoritarianism and pluralism.
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C
Yeah, thank you, Kaiser, so much for bringing up this topic. And by the way, I'm now we'll come back to this, but my current book is about the scale and scope and apply that framework to democracies and autocracies. So that's my current book. Let's go back to this framework. So the one potential criticism is that, oh, I tackle four big topics, exam autocracy, instability, and technology. That's true, but I don't tackle these things randomly. I tie them up with a pretty tight framework, which is what I call scale and scope. That may not be the most catchy name that we can come up with, but that's the one that I use in my book. Basically, scale means homogeneity. Think about factories. You produce widgets, you produce nails, you produce automobile engines, you produce 1 million units of those, 100 millions of those, 1 billion units of those. Exactly the same thing. You can scale that.
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D
Right.
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C
And we can also use that to refer to government policy, right? Industrial policy, the organizational apparatus that the government has to organize economy, organize science, organized technology, the financial commitment the government provides to the economy, to technology.
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D
Right.
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C
$2 billion, $100 billion. Right. China now spends somewhere. I may not get it exactly right, but in terms of the R and Z expenditure, second only to the United States. So China, relative to its GDP is very high. So the scale is very big. Scope basically means differences and differences in opinions, differences in ethnicities, differences in ideologies, and differences in values. My overall claim is that for a country to succeed, you define success in political terms. Economic terms, to succeed, you need both and you need kind of the right balance between the two. If you are too much on the scale side, you succeed in some ways, but you fail in others. And I would argue the Imperial China scaled, but then at the expense of scope, and therefore they couldn't develop the economy. And then if you are excessive on the scope side, you also have problems.
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D
Right?
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C
So now we're witnessing this in the United States. People can't agree on climate change, people cannot agree on gun control, people cannot agree on the imperative to wear masks during the pandemic. And that's extremely damaging and detrimental to a Society's development. Right. So the failure of the United States to provide basic health and to strengthen its basic education. And that's because of lack of scale.
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D
Right.
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C
And that's not good either. We have plenty of scope, but if we don't have the necessary scale, a society can also have problems. So that's kind of the idea behind these two concepts. Exactly where you end up is a bit of a guesswork, but conceptually, I think it's straightforward. You need both. And the tension is that often they are in contradiction with each other. So some societies overachieve on scope. I will put India there. Some societies overachieve on scale. And I will put China today in that category.
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B
Very much so. Very much so. Just now, in talking about scale, you used the example of a factory that enjoys economies of scale, its ability to produce a lot of the same product, the widget or the car engine or what have you. You could, I suppose, extend that analogy and talk about scope in terms of different product lines in entirely different business areas, different business models. And yeah, I mean, again, one has to find the balance. There's another sort of analogy, perhaps not surprising. You are, after all, a professor at Sloan. That comes from the business world, from organizational economics, to be specific. You talk about M form and U form economies. This again, comes up a bit in your book. And maybe it'd be a good idea for us to just sort of unpack that a little bit. Now, what is an M form economy? Why is actually China an M form rather than a EU form economy as so many people imagine it to be?
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D
Yeah.
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C
Thank you, Kaiser. The idea originated from to China economists Ying Yiqian and Chenggan. They based their analysis on Williamson's great book on this topic on the M form economy and organization. And so to some extent, the U form is about scale.
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D
Right.
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C
Soviet Union had a new form economy, very detailed division of labor, while Republic produced zillion units of wishes, and then other republics don't produce any.
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D
Right.
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C
So it is a classic example of very detailed division of labor. So Soviet Union excelled in scale, and that's called new form economy. And the term comes from business historians. And Alpha Chandler is the other scholar who came up with this idea is that historically speaking, corporations evolve from U form to M form. So U form corporation has very, very specialized divisions. Finance department, marketing department, product development, R&D department.
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D
Right.
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C
And then they have these very detailed divisions all the way in their organization. So there's one R and D department, there's one finance department. What the business historians and Oliver Williamson observed is that in the early part of the 20th century, American corporations moved away from U form type to inform type unform. One way to think about it is duplication. So you have Group one, Group two group and Group one has Finance Department and Product Development Department. Group two also has a similar division.
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D
Right.
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C
So sometimes they are competing with each other. Often.
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D
Right.
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C
And the headquarters don't really get themselves involved in the detailed decision making. They kind of look out for strategies and overall development. And Chinese economy during the better part of the reform era, which I define in my book as 78 to 2018. We can come back to that later.
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B
Right.
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C
Basically, it operated under this unformed economy. So it moved from a kind of a central planning that you form to a N form economy.
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D
Right.
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C
And reaping the benefits of competition entrepreneurship. Because U form economy was not very good at encouraging competition. M form economy is very good at encouraging competition. To me, this is a very convincing explanation why China outperformed Soviet Union and Russia by a long shot.
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D
Right.
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C
Even though China operated under autocracy. So that's another element of my book, which is that Chenggang and Ying Yi are as good as they were when they wrote about the M form economy. They didn't really touch on the political aspect.
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D
Right.
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C
So, so, so you had a scope, the economic scope, but that economic scope operated under the political scale. So in my book, I provided narrations and explanations to argue that the M form economy succeeded not just because of itself, but also because they operated under appropriate political control by the center.
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B
Right. So that despite China's overbalancing in favor of scale over scope, it still had sufficient scope conditions to be able to be relatively successful through the end of the reform period. And that's really what you've argued. So the central argument of the first four sections of your book are really about again, how, despite this absence of so many of the scope conditions that prevailed in Europe and in its colonial offshoots, despite, or maybe actually to an extent because of the autocratic politics of both Imperial China and on the prc, it's been able to endure and even thrive. So it strikes me that reading this, you are tackling a lot of the same fundamental questions that Francis Fukuyama set out to answer in the Origins of Political Order, and maybe less so in the second volume of that two volume series, Political Order and Political Decay. There are definitely some areas of congruence between what you argue and what he did, although it's been some years, I have to say, since I read his book. But what I remember is that he's really talking about these institutions of political constraint, like the rule of law, checks and balances, strong parliaments, a peerage, and probably most importantly, just a separate universal church, a sort of source of natural law or whatever that's existed outside of secular authority. So when I was reading Fukuyama's book, the whole time, I believed that what he was really trying to get at was explaining China. Right. It felt like the whole book was really aimed at. Maybe it's my bias, but. So I saw definitely ideas of scope conditions that he talked about. He didn't call them that. This pluralistic habit of the Western mind and how this developed and how it never took hold in China because China developed such efficient bureaucracy. So early on, do you see your ideas as broadly compatible with his, or do you think you diverge in really important ways?
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C
Yeah. So I think, as you pointed out, there are areas of concurrence between my book and his work, recognizing the really remarkable institution that China, imperial China, created.
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D
Right.
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C
And I believe Fukuyama is among the first, I mean, maybe not the first scholars in the west that really credit China with political modernization.
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D
Right.
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C
I mean, the traditional prejudice is, oh, Chinese system was backward and primitive. Fungiyama really argued that China invented bureaucracy, invented impersonalization, invented bureaucratic routine. Basically, China. In my book, I said China invented Weberian system before Max Weber. On that, I totally agree with Francis Fukuyama. I think the one area I probably disagree with him is that maybe to be fair to him, he doesn't say that, but he sort of hinted that the political path China undertook and the political path the west undertook are in some ways equivalent with each other. And as you pointed out, he didn't use the scale and scope framework. One way to put it is that Imperial China excelled in scale. The west excel in scope. I think there I disagree in terms. Not. Not in terms of the observation, but in terms of the implications, I. I think China excelled in a scale, paid a price. And so, historically speaking. And so anybody who read the book, what. They also remember that China used to have plenty of scope.
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D
Right.
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C
You know, the. The Warring States period and this period, which I call Han Sui interregnum, sort of between 220 and 580. You know, for 360 years, China basically had a European kind of a system, a situation. I shouldn't say system, a European situation in which different kingdoms competed with each other and different ideas that thrived.
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D
Right.
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C
So the issue is. I think the issue is twofold. One is how come China evolved toward a different system after the Sui dynasty, after the 6th century, after the 7th century. And the other is, what are the implications? The implication is that China paid a dear price. And this is the T component of my framework. I was able to show that before Su Dynasty, China was actually quite inventive. And then after that, not overnight, but gradually, over a period of a few hundred years, it began to stagnate and deteriorated in terms of technological innovations.
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D
So.
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C
I would argue that China didn't balance the scale and scope right after the 6th century, and it's not equivalent with the West. It was Europe, it was England specifically, that came up with the Industrial revolution and came up with GDP growth and wonderful medicines that we have benefited, not China. Right. So it's hard to argue that those two situations are equivalent in terms of their economic implications, scientific implications.
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B
It's interesting. It's almost a sort of throwaway paragraph that probably anticipates this next book that you're writing. But you talk about how democracy sort of dialed in this good balance in that there are scale elements, that is, there are things that insists are uniform. To be in a democratic society, you have to believe in elections, in rule of law, in separation of power. So there are only a few things, but everything else, it's just whatever you want, whether it's gender or religion. I thought that was a fantastically interesting observation, and I hope that you expand on that in your next book. But let's go back into the E exams and the Kuzhu system, the civil service examination system. You deal quite a bit with imperial China from 221 BC really through the end of the Qing in 1912. And in particular, you single out three rulers, three emperors, Sui Wendi, who unified China in the 6th century. As you said, Sui is very, very important. I was joking with someone who said your book is very Sui generous.
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C
That was excellent.
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D
By the way.
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B
Zhu Yanzhang, of course, who's the founder of the Ming first, Wu Zetian, who reigned just a century after Sui Wen Di, Wu Zetian, who is of course the first and only female emperor of China. These three are all bound together, though, because of this amazing scaling tool.
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C
Right.
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B
This is what you call it. And I thought that was another thing that really stuck with me is the kudju system as scaling tool. So, I mean, I doubt that anyone listening is completely unfamiliar with the kudzu system, but your book goes into wonderful detail. What made it such a powerful scaling tool, and how did it develop into such a tool? How was Sui Wendi's innovation so different from. Because, you know, the civil service examination system in some form existed during the Han, you know, during Ha Wudi's time, they implemented something like that.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So what was so different?
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C
Yeah, Suanji and Sui Dynasty as a whole made it, I would say, that dramatically innovated on the prior practices. Exam as a system, as a practice, let me say, actually distinguish between practice and system. Exam as a practice was there, but a lot of it was ad hoc. During the hand dance day was ad hoc oral exam, it was not implemented on a large scale.
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D
Right.
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C
So it was kind of not regularly held. And a lot of it was like an interview, oral interview. And the curriculum was not terribly developed, pretty haphazard. So you can just imagine that when you have an exam system that didn't have a consistent set of questions and answers, that's not the kind of exam system that we usually associate with an exam system. A math test is consistent in terms of its questions and answers. Srivanti really made a difference and what he did. So in my book, I said he invented the Kurju system rather than crediting it to the previous dynasties. So he made it systematic and he made it open to many, many people.
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D
Right.
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C
By the way, let me just say that throughout the life of the Kuju system, it was only open to the male population, to the male gender, Right. It was never open to the female gender, but Sui made it more open. And also one thing that he changed was previously you take an exam, oral exam, after the recommendation, right. He kind of got rid of that.
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D
Right.
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C
So just imagine that, you know, we as professors write recommendation letters, but only for the people we know.
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D
Right.
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C
So that's going to be limiting to the people that, you know, if the system starts with a recommendation rather than an open ended exam system, he made it open ended, you know. You know, again, so when I talked about these things, some historians may say, oh no, no, no, it was not completely open ended. They were still recommended. That's all true. But. But the issue is really the balance, right? So the portion that is open ended relative to the portion that is based on recommendation increased dramatically during the Sui.
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B
Dynasty and even more so during the rule of Wu Zotian.
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C
Oh yeah, absolutely. So the three emperors that are profiled are really fascinating to some extent. They're misfits one way or the other. One was a woman. So the only female emperor in the history of China, Wu Zetian, by the way, some historians have argued that Wu Zetian was a proto feminist, a Buddhist by religion. Very, very strong willed woman, very brutal as well. She killed the daughter of the Empress an on her way to climb up the system. What she did was she opened up the exam system even more.
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D
Right.
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C
And she began to systematically cultivate the pipeline from lower socioeconomic groups, moved away from the nobility. And she also created or at least systematized the practice of being examiner herself. She would interview the examinees and that later on evolved to be the palace exam. So had three tiers, the provincial, the metropolitan and the palace. And Wu Zetian might not have invented the palace examination. She systematized the palace exam. So raising the profile of the KE Ju.
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D
Right.
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C
So now the ordinary people can know, okay, Even the Emperor gave the exam. So it must be something very good. What Zhu Yuanzhang did was so in the modern language, he provided the basic education. He funded the basic education. He created a preparatory system, nationwide preparatory system that young boys participated in and prepared for the exam. That was incredible.
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D
Right.
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C
So equivalent to a modern version of basic education and all paid for by the imperial government. They didn't charge tuition. And the demand for these preparatory schools was very, very high. It was a very, very extensive system.
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D
Right.
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C
Because when you take the exam, you need to prepare. If you don't have that, then even if nominally exam is open to everybody, it was not really open to the people from poor families.
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D
Right.
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C
Song Dynasty also began to do some of that. But Zhu Yuanjiang really increased the provision of the preparation. So that was really remarkable. We talk about Fukuyama. I came away even more impressed with China, Imperial China, in terms of how systematic the system was. Can talk about implications. In fact, then even Francis Fukuyama. And it was not just kind of a general bureaucracy. It was very well designed, very systematic, penetrating very deeply into the society. There were something like 2,300 preparatory schools scattered in the country. China then had about 24, 100 administrative units. Right. So it's, you know, that's pretty good coverage. It's a pretty good coverage.
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D
Right.
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C
So I think China deserves lot of credit for coming up with the universal education. You know, we can criticize it on other grounds, but let's acknowledge how substantial that achievement was.
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B
Yeah, I mean, it was universal in another sense too, is that it had, I mean, by the time of Zhu Yuanzhang, they fixed this Song dynasty style, Neo Confucianism, the Confucianism of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi as the standard. So it was the Four Books and the Five Classics. And that again, to your point about it being scaling tool that imposed this orthodoxy. It's funny, you kind of toss out this idea that Confucianism was a good basis for the examination system precisely because it was so ridiculously wordy and difficult to master. It made me think of this principle from biology where there are certain displays for mating. They're so ridiculously, biologically costly. They're so elaborate. And so, you know, they serve so little function outside of that that it's just the sheer difficulty of them, the sheer expense of themselves that sort of signals fitness as a mate. Because it's kind of funny, your idea was that it sort of drained off any excess energy or time that might have been put into dissident activities, destabilizing purposes.
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C
Yeah, but Kaiser ridiculous is your term, and it's a hypothesis, it's a conjecture. Right. So essentially, I kind of model the Confucianism as a selection mechanism for human capital. And you need to come up with a stringent threshold, high threshold for human capital if you want to scale the system. So think about Christianity, right? So that, you know, that's just not terribly, you know, I. I don't really know as much about Christianity, but the 10 commitments. And so if you kind of memorize those, that's a pretty low threshold.
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B
Nobody does.
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C
Yeah, so. Okay, nobody does, but that's a pretty low threshold. Right. So you can't really use that to select human capital. Whereas Confucianism is such a wordy ideology.
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D
Right.
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C
300,000 characters, 400,000 characters. And essentially, if you want the people in the pipeline, in the bureaucracy who can memorize and who can commit to one idea only, you want that ideology to be the curriculum, rather than legalism and Taoism and Buddhism. Those other ideologies, especially Taoism and Buddhism, are kind of ambiguous, and they are kind of this and that on one hand. On the other hand, when you do the standardized test, you don't want that. You want straightforward answers. So this is where the Neo Confucianism came in. More straightforward, more narrow, as compared with classical Confucianism, technically speaking, that was put in place by the Yuan dynasty before Ming, but Ming really scaled it.
- [37:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we talked about the Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang. There's another Ming emperor that you talk about quite a bit who ruled toward the end of the 16th century, the Wanli emperor. You make at various points in the book, a fascinating comparison between him and his near contemporary on the other side of the Eurasian landmass in England, Tudor England, Henry viii. They are just so different. One, you know, Wanli emperor is so completely unconstrained compared to even this most autocratic British monarch.
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C
Right.
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B
I mean, I thought it was really illuminating. Again, it put me in mind of Fukuyama, you know, because his whole argument about institutions of political constraint, because, you know, the church figures so strongly in this argument that you make, you know, it. It's the church that he has to battle so that he can divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. And then he goes to war with this. He's excommunicated. It's basically, mind you, he's not like a Lutheran. This is not part of really. This is sort of sitting alongside, in parallel to the Protestant Reformation. Really fascinating. But China never had these religious institutions that challenged secular authority. And in fact, you go on to make the assertion that China basically had a congenitally weak civil society all around. Can you explain what you mean by that? I mean, you go so far as to say that Imperial China and its communist successors are states without society.
- [38:42]
C
Yeah.
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B
Can you talk a little bit about that? It seems like a pretty bold claim.
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C
Yeah. So, yes and no. Right. So maybe in the way that I put it is bold, but the idea is there. I think it's important to distinguish between organized society and a society that is just there. So you always have households, for sure. You always have commerce in China, and you have Buddhist religion.
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D
Right.
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C
Imperial China. But the key thing is that those were not organized.
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B
Right.
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C
And so that's the distinction that I make between Europe and China.
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D
Right.
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C
And China, Imperial China never really had, at least as far as I know, any kind of organized religion with its own organizations and finance and divisions. And Van de Can used to have his army. And so it was an incredibly organized apparatus.
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D
Right.
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C
It had its own independent finance, and universities in the west had their own operational independence, financial independence. So China had religions, China had intellectuals. But China didn't have organized intelligentsia, didn't have organized religion. So I really emphasize that organized rather than just the scattered elements. And I think that's true of China today.
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D
Right.
- [40:29]
C
So I know there are Chinese who in China who believe in Christianity, who believe in Buddhism, but do you see them organized? Do you see them having their own.
- [40:43]
B
Only by the state. Right.
- [40:45]
C
Only by the state, yeah. So there's an office in the State Council.
- [40:48]
B
Exactly.
- [40:48]
C
It's called something like Administration of Religious Affairs. And by the way, this is a little bit on the side. So contrast China with Vietnam. When I was in Vietnam, last time I saw Catholic Church, the churchgoers lining up outside of the Catholic Church on the streets with Candles, lit candles, praying. You never see that in China. Right. So the priests in China, Catholic priests in China are not appointed by the vantage. And so that's the claim that I make. I hope it's not terribly controversial because I think is pretty factually valid observation.
- [41:32]
B
Sure. I mean, yeah, China had merchants, but it didn't have powerful guilds. Right?
- [41:36]
C
Yeah, they didn't have guilds. Right. So Western Europe had a lot of merchant guilds. And I even contrasted China with Russia.
- [41:44]
D
Right.
- [41:44]
C
China had intellectuals. The whole thing about system was to create educated, knowledgeable people. You know, you can argue about the things they are knowledgeable about, but in terms of literacy, it was incredibly substantial achievement. But China didn't have independent intellectuals. Even Russia had that. I would argue that China is the most autocratic country in the world in that sense. It's a state prevailing without any. Any society. And generations of Chinese rulers ensured that outcome, but also created system that would demolish these alternative paths of mobility.
- [42:39]
B
Right. I would say that, you know, even within that system, while the emperor surely still had final say, there was sort of this informal way by which intellectuals within the state, the ministers, they had kind of tacit access to channels of consultation and even remonstrance that were sort of codified culturally. But, yeah, never formally, but it still had. I mean, the norms had some weight, so it was possible to push back. I mean, we have hairui and people like that, Right?
- [43:15]
C
Yeah, but Kaiser, I agree with you completely. But I would argue formalism matters, institutions matter. So you had that Nu.
- [43:24]
B
I agree with that.
- [43:27]
C
Because the problem with just having the Nuan is that it really depends on the emperors.
- [43:33]
D
Right.
- [43:33]
C
And in the contemporary situation, it really makes a difference whether the ruler is Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang or Hu Yaobang or Xi Jinping.
- [43:43]
D
Right.
- [43:44]
C
But because of lack of formalism, because of lack of institutional safeguards, and the outcome can be very, very different depending on the preferences of the rulers. I would actually go even further than what I just said. I would argue that when you have only the norms of remonstrances without the institutions, essentially it matters where it is least important, because you can remonstrate against the emperor who is most tolerant. They don't kill you instantaneously. That situation is actually least necessary in terms of having that system. You need a remonstrances when you really have a bad emperor, you need remonstrances.
- [44:36]
B
Today, and then you don't have it.
- [44:38]
C
And you don't have it.
- [44:39]
D
Right.
- [44:39]
C
So Whereas in the 1980s, and I hope we get into that in the 1980s, you actually needed less.
- [44:46]
D
Right.
- [44:46]
C
Precisely because the rulers then were more tolerant.
- [44:50]
B
So let's try to do that. Let's try to move forward in time a little bit. I mean, we've been bogged down between the sway and the main. We'll actually have to come back to this again. We revisit your database of Chinese inventions. But you have this interesting idea that the modern equivalent of the Kezu is the GDP metric. Just a little. A million years ago, when I was a graduate student, I was working on the emergence of technocracy in post Mao China. And I was looking at a lot of sort of historical antecedents for this. And I also lighted on the Cuju system as being really important. Sort of the old bottles into which the wine was poured. Now there's these new bottles. But for me it was the technocrats that you had to sort of prove your belief in the prevailing orthodoxy. Back then it was Confucianism, now it was scientism and have demonstrable mastery. In this case it was by having an advanced degree in engineering or in physics or in. In chemistry from a top tier university. So I thought that was maybe where you were going to go when you were talking about. And I saw the title of your book, you went in a different direction. I thought it was really fascinating. How is the GDP metric sort of equivalent to Kezu?
- [46:13]
C
Yeah, so it is equivalent only in the performance measurement sense. Right. So I think the idea is that when you run such a large system, when you run a small system, it doesn't really matter. But when you have a large organization, the imperative is to come up with consistent set of metrics. I mean, this is not terribly revolutionary idea. You know, look at the modern organization, profit maximization, shareholder value, you know, we can criticize those, but the imperative of large organization is to have consistency in the metrics, in the performance measurements that you have. In the Kudgeri system, it was the exam score and it was objective. You either succeed on the test or you fail. And also we show in the book as well as in the paper that I published with my co author Claire Young, that the K system really worked in terms of being objective. So having consistency is very important because you promote the right people, you promote the right human capital. But the other element of it is that consistency also gives you legitimacy.
- [47:53]
D
Right.
- [47:54]
C
So if you and I work for the same organization, I see Kaiser being promoted simply because you have long hair. And then, you know, so then I say, well, I cannot have long hair. So, you know, so it has to be something that both you and I can do, right? And, you know, maybe get a client and convening conferences that are successful and things like that. So it also has this legitimizing effect. Legitimizing effect is important because of incentives. If you don't believe in the system, you don't participate in it.
- [48:35]
B
Right?
- [48:36]
C
So gdp, there are a lot of criticisms of. I also used to criticize GDP system. Until you see the alternatives. Okay, so, okay, so let's throw away the GDP as the metric. Now what do you have? You have loyalty to the ruler. You have ideological commitment. You have, you know, mass campaigns. Mass campaigns, class struggles.
- [49:02]
D
Right?
- [49:02]
C
So I think that's my, my bottom line. If you accept autocracy as it is, you also have to accept a autocracy or a big organization has to pursue some sort of consistent metric. And GDP gives you as the best consistency as you can ever have because everything else is a crapshoot.
- [49:31]
D
Right?
- [49:32]
C
And so GDP is much better than these other things. And look at what's happening in China today.
- [49:38]
D
Right?
- [49:38]
C
So once the GDP as a metric is thrown out of the window, look at all these incredible misconduct and really, really just undesirable behavior on the part of the local officials. I would, you know, I miss the days when GDP was held as the king. You know, once we shift the system from autocracy to democracy, we can have a separate discussion. Right. So my larger premise is that once you have an autocracy, then a autocracy that presumes more consistent metric is a better autocracy than a autocracy that presumes inconsistent metric. And better yet, it is a metric that incidentally or intentionally benefits the ordinary citizens. And I would say GDP, by and large, benefits the organized citizen.
- [50:38]
B
Yeah. I don't know if you've read Jeremy Wallace's book yet, but, yeah, I think he makes broadly. Yeah. A similar argument.
- [50:42]
C
Yeah, yeah, Cornell. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [50:45]
B
One thing I found really compelling was your explanation of a phenomenon I've actually had a difficult time explaining, which is why the Chinese leadership is so technocratic, except at the very top. I mean, it comes down to the fact that regional power trumps ministerial power. And that is a really interesting argument that you make. And you show the data. You just almost never see promotion into the Politburo Standing Committee, from ministerial level, from the central level. It's always quite the norm to see promotion from leading provinces or autonomous regions into the party secretariat. Now, is there any evidence that this is done by design? Is this something that the CCP has sort of built in. That the organization department built in this granting of non executive politburo seats, especially to. To provincial party secretaries.
- [51:40]
C
Yeah. So I have to say that I don't have immediate direct evidence on the intention of the CCP in terms of the design of that system. Right. So I mean, we as social scientists.
- [51:59]
B
It's so consistent, though.
- [52:00]
C
Yeah. So, yeah, that. That's the key point.
- [52:03]
D
Right.
- [52:03]
C
Because the data are so overwhelmingly consistent. The other side of the argument, which is that the system rewards these regional leaders. And look at the Soviet system is almost the opposite.
- [52:20]
D
Right.
- [52:21]
C
So the system rewards the regional leaders rather than ministerial leaders who were usually think of as kind of technical technocrats. And my hypothesis, it is only a hypothesis and conjecture rather than kind of documentary evidence. Is that this is a system that motivates the regional leaders to perform.
- [52:50]
D
Right.
- [52:51]
C
Because they are far away. And you could argue that it came from many, many years ago or even many centuries ago. When the system to monitor their conduct was very underdeveloped. There are two ways to. Kaiser, if you are my boss, there are two ways you can control me. One is that you monitor my behavior. So you say, yashang, come in. Give me your report. What did you do yesterday? What did you do last week? Right. So that's one way. And you say, okay, you get $5,000 more because you did this. The other way is that you created a system that I automatically behave in ways that are consistent with what you want me to do. Right? So, okay, so that's. In economics, they are like stock options, right? So I don't really value you on a daily basis. But hey, I mean, if you can sell a million products, well, our stock prices are going to increase. And then you get a benefit from it, right? So I don't really need to evaluate you on a daily basis. That in and of itself is sufficient to motivate you. In a system that is large, that is complex, that is informationally challenged, you see more use of incentives rather than the use of information collection. And I will put China in that category. That's why you need to have a system where regional leaders, even without central officials looking down on you right over your shoulders, you say to yourself, gee, I mean, if I. If I perform, then I would get promoted to the politburo, right? So maybe that should be the way for me to do it. Rather than kind of just seeking and maximizing your own self interest.
- [55:03]
D
Right.
- [55:04]
B
I'm wondering if you looked at historical antecedents for this. If you Looked at during imperial dynasties, whether there was some system in place to co opt regional leaders to get buy in. Because you know, China perennially suffered from this. You look at the Tang after the Anushan, before the Anushan rebellion. But this system of military governors is always problematic. How do you get them sort of buying into and have their interests aligned with the center?
- [55:32]
C
Yeah, that's an excellent suggestion. I have not, I definitely didn't in my book. There may be other historical social scientists who have that. Definitely that gave me an idea. I should look into it. I'm sure there were historical antecedents to that because the CCP doesn't get the system out of the blue. It was not, as far as I know, it was not a conscious design, at least from what I have read. If you look at people like Chenyun, you know, who was really in charge of personnel and he wasn't really talking about the design issue, he was talking about the specific practices moving people around. That system did exist.
- [56:21]
B
That's old.
- [56:22]
C
Yeah, that's old. That's definitely old.
- [56:24]
D
Right.
- [56:24]
C
So as a way to motivate and to reduce the incentive to misbehave and in many ways. So there's a branch of economics called organizational economics. Lot of these practices can be readily explained in terms of basic tenants in organizational economics.
- [56:48]
D
Right.
- [56:49]
C
Organizational economics is concerned with, you know, firms and business organizations. But you can kind of apply their insights to running a country, a top down country. You, you, you cannot really apply that to a democracy. Right, right. Because democracy, the elections and elections of governors and so it doesn't really apply. But when you have a top down system like a corporation, the insights of organization and economics couldn't apply. And this is exactly what I did in that chapter. Do I have direct evidence? No, I don't. I have to be very honest.
- [57:27]
B
One of the really interesting findings that you came up with I thought anyway was how wealth doesn't just fail to correlate with khaji outcomes, it actually seems to correlate negatively with kudji outcomes. What do you think explains that? That was fascinating. Maybe unpack a little bit. I mean, I think maybe there will be some people who will quibble with, for example, your proxy measure for wealth, which was number of wives.
- [57:54]
C
Yeah. So that's a good challenge and pushback. But the problem with the historical data is that you work with what you have, you don't work with what you want to have. And so my philosophy is, okay, so this is what we have, let's see what we can make any use of it until the critics have different data, and maybe our work can be validated or can be refuted. But I'm not very happy with people who say, oh, this is just the wealth measure, which is the number of wives is not the right measure. Okay, so tell me. Give me your data and I will run the Right. So that's the same thing that applies to the historical database on technology. And people dismiss it not because they have their own data, it's just somehow they dismiss it.
- [59:05]
D
Yeah.
- [59:06]
B
My theory was that if you have multiple wives, you've got other things to do besides study for the khaju.
- [59:12]
C
Yeah, well, so. So there are historical accounts of having multiple wives. The first wife, multiple wives may not be the right way to think about it. It's really wives and concubines.
- [59:26]
D
Right.
- [59:26]
C
Concubine is an economic phenomenon. So. So. So we know that from historical research. So it's not all those a plausibility to say that multiple wives do indicate some sort of level of wealth.
- [59:46]
D
Right.
- [59:48]
C
So that's one data point that we have in the data on Curdu examinees. We don't have really data on land holding on those things. But let me explain the idea. So the Kudju system performed two functions. One traditional function, and the function that many people are familiar with is it is selecting human capital for the imperial bureaucracy. I think that's a very important function. But what Claire and I provided in our paper is an additional function. It is not to select certain people.
- [60:31]
D
Right.
- [60:31]
C
From emperor's perspective. So who are the people you don't want to be in the system? People who have independent wealth, who can challenge you, who are powerful.
- [60:45]
D
Right.
- [60:45]
C
Unlike the European system. The European system had troubles with nobility.
- [60:50]
D
Right.
- [60:51]
C
Henry viii, Catherine the Arrogant, she came from a very prominent family, and Bolin came from a very prominent family. You don't see that in the Chinese.
- [61:03]
B
Yeah, I've seen the Tudors.
- [61:04]
C
Yeah. You don't see that in the Chinese imperial system. What the Chinese emperors wanted to do was to maximize the status difference between him and the rest.
- [61:20]
D
Right.
- [61:20]
C
So the argument we provided is that Keju system also systematically deselected those people who could potentially pose a threat to the emperor. And those are the rich people, the landlords and things like that. That's again, it's a hypothesis. It is consistent with the statistical evidence that we looked at. But I'm definitely open to other interpretations and to other data sets.
- [61:53]
B
You're also probably familiar with that argument that the whole sort of burgeoning bourgeois was Sort of bought off by. I mean, because what you did, if you were a Yangzhou salt merchant and you had any money, is you spent that money to educate your son because ultimately you wanted him to climb that one available ladder of success in Imperial China.
- [62:15]
C
That's the lure of Khudri system.
- [62:17]
D
Right?
- [62:18]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [62:19]
C
You maximize the. So, going back to our earlier discussion, could your system monopolize your time, your energy, your attention and your life goals?
- [62:34]
D
Right.
- [62:34]
C
Your ambition.
- [62:35]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [62:36]
C
Your ambition. I challenge anybody to think of a system anywhere else in the world that can do that on a consistent basis with such a large number of people and for so long. Right. Church at one point in the west probably did that.
- [62:54]
B
Yeah. I was going to say, you know.
- [62:55]
C
But it gave away to other things. Right. It gave away to commerce, it gave away to universities, it gave away to politicians. So it's just. I find it difficult to come up with an alternative with a system elsewhere in the world that rivals the power and the allure of Kodri system.
- [63:21]
B
Absolutely. So one argument that you make in the book is that the sequence of politics and bureaucracy, the development of politics and bureaucracy, really matters. And you argue that China developed bureaucracy first, whereas in the west there was already a very robust politics before the creation of civil service bureaucracies, and that they were thus very constrained by politics. Now, that doesn't strike, I think, all readers as a good thing, prima facie, make the case. Then why, in fact, was it a blessing that bureaucracy came after politics in the West?
- [64:00]
C
Well, so I don't really know why. I'm just observing the difference. And there let me credit to Fukuyama, I think he made. Maybe other scholars made a similar point, but I kind of. Maybe I spent more paragraphs on this than they did. I think it matters in the following sense, right. When a bureaucracy happened in the middle of other contending forces, they were just one of those forces. So essentially, by either by design or by default, you have a bureaucracy that is competing for intention, competing for money, competing for talents, with other forces in the society, with other institutions. That is a definition of pluralism.
- [64:59]
D
Right.
- [65:01]
C
And so essentially, you kind of. You are dealt with a deck that you have, and so the bureaucracy is not able to overwhelm the political system. Bureaucracy. We often complain about bureaucracy. When you go and register for your automobile, you just don't like the experience. So bureaucracy has a tendency of being very rigid, very stiff, very unfriendly, you know, very dictatorial and things like that, all of that. That's true. But imagine a Bureaucracy that has all these elements, but there's nothing else that. That constrains the bureaucracy, and that's China.
- [65:46]
D
Right.
- [65:46]
C
Whereas as much as you don't like R and V, it is, you know, one piece of your life that you have to put up with the bureaucracy, but everything else, you don't really have to put up with it. Right. So it matters in that sense.
- [66:02]
D
Right.
- [66:02]
C
And it matters because bureaucracy in the west added to the plurality, whereas bureaucracy in China subtracted plurality. And the economic consequences, the political consequences of that difference are incredibly large. And we are still feeling it today.
- [66:30]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [66:31]
C
You know, I personally favor the Western system. Let me. Let me be very clear. I. I want to be transparent about my priors, but I also admire the Chinese. Any system that. That is so powerful in the Asian times, without modern communication, without modern system, is, you know, you really have to admire it. So I admire it in a technical sense. I don't admire it for the effects, the stagnations and the repressions that it produced.
- [67:09]
B
Well, I mean, it was so effective that it was bound to outlive its usefulness and I think. And cast a very, very long shadow. I think the essence of your book is that these things, the things you talk about in east, they worked so well that they continue to exert a lot of influence. There's a couple of sections in your book where you go into stuff that I find delightful, but I think other readers, some other readers are going to. It's going to give them pause. You introduce, for example, Joseph Henrik's theory about how literacy actually rewires our brains, changes the neurobiology of people in the West, Part of what turned them weird, which has always been one of my favorite acronyms, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. There's another bit where you talk about Nisbit, about the Geography of Thought, which I thought was a marvelous book as well. But these things are. There are people who are pretty dismissive of this kind of stuff. It's too speculative. I mean, there is, of course, a lot of speculation. It seems like to me, a very interesting place to look. But you talk about this, the question of why literacy, we're talking about Henrik here, why literacy seems to have made this change to Westerners, but not to highly literate Chinese people preparing for the cuz you exams. Can you talk about why you see literacy within the state? That's, you know, literacy in the service of the state as quite different from literacy or numeracy that exists outside the state or even in opposition to the state? Because you know, Hendrik again, just says, you know, literacy basically was the foundation for this sort of oppositional, democratic, adversarial politics.
- [69:03]
C
Yeah. So Kaiser, first of all, I do not dismiss that kind of research. I actually have tremendous respect for Richard Nesbit and Joseph Eirich.
- [69:14]
B
I love that stuff too, just to be clear. I love that.
- [69:16]
C
Yeah, I love that stuff. You could quibble, right, because it's based on experimental research rather than real life research research. The beauty of experimental research is that it sort of zeros in on the essence because you can have many, many controls. So the factor that you want to really understand can be isolated from these other things. Whereas in real life, real history, you can't really do that because everything is moving, you know, simultaneously. You don't really know what's going on. So the essence of that type of research, if there's one thing that I regret in graduate school, is not having studied more of that stuff. But what's interesting is that Joseph Herridge, he was talking about literacy having this biological effect on human brains. Liberalizing, inquisitive, challenging the authority. But we don't see that in China at all, right? So I quoted work by Evelyn Rossby that shows that China actually had decent literacy. Not at the same level as Europe, but it was pretty impressive during the Qing dynasty. And yet you don't really see this liberalizing effect. I mean, one piece of evidence that you don't see the liberalizing effect is kudu system itself. It was never reformed to extend the suffrage to the female gender. So by definition, it never became liberal. So how come that Chinese literacy didn't have this liberalizing effect? You know, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so I cannot cripple with the claim that literacy changed human brains. And I suspect that the cursory literacy also changed the Chinese brains. But I added a condition to Heinrich claim.
- [71:39]
D
Right.
- [71:39]
C
Heinrich was talking about literacy in a liberalizing, pluralistic society, that is Europe. Right. So in that sense, I crippled with this claim.
- [71:51]
D
Right.
- [71:52]
C
And so weird W represents the plurality pluralism, Western, West.
- [72:00]
D
Right.
- [72:01]
C
So that was a key contextual condition that he took as a result, whereas I took that as a condition and cause. So if you don't have this W. Right, he meant West. But we could interpret it not as Western Europe, but the set of conditions that Western Europe had. Political competition, economic competition, ideological competition, without the. That the changing brains don't produce these other effects.
- [72:41]
D
Right.
- [72:41]
C
Such as economic growth, such as cognitive revolutions. So that's how I reinterpreted Henry's insight.
- [72:52]
D
Right.
- [72:53]
C
But then look at what happened in China and look at what happened in East Asia after the Second World War. War, Right. So Kaiser, you are familiar with the pessimism expressed by Max Weber about Confucianism and you know, Confucianist countries, culture cannot grow the economy. That's just manifestly nonsense.
- [73:16]
B
Right?
- [73:17]
C
False. Right, nonsense. But the thing is that East Asia only began to grow when East Asia had the right conditions.
- [73:30]
B
Right.
- [73:30]
C
Entrepreneurship, globalization, and in the case of China, economic reforms, then the brain wiring probably began to produce the effect. So that's how I kind of reconciled Joseph Henry's observation with the observation of Ezehiq.
- [73:50]
B
With all due respect to him, he's talking about a change. This is not purely experimental. He's making an historical argument because this is situated in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is what he's talking about. He's talking about the Gutenberg revolution and he's talking about the Protestant Reformation, which they go hand in hand in Europe. And on top of that, look, this is a period of endemic religious war, of the cataclysmic 30 year war. And it's just. Yeah, there's so many other threads to look at that are happening at the same time as we're seeing literacy take off. So I think that he's maybe over attributing to just literacy itself, something that had maybe multiple causes anyway.
- [74:37]
C
Yeah, but Kesha, I'm willing to defend him a little bit. You are right that the specific observation about the Protestant Reformation was not based on experimental research, but the idea that being repeatedly exposed to reading rewired your brain, that was experimental research. He applied that insight backward in history to Reformation. Right. So I'm willing to go along with that. You know, he's a biologist, I'm not. So I. You're right that there are other things going on that reinforce that biological change, but that's not that different from what I argued in my book, which is that there were other things going on in China that counteracted a biological change in the human brain in induced by the Koju literacy. So I take the experimental research seriously. I do believe that he's right about that. But again, I'm not a biologist.
- [75:50]
B
I don't think you need to subscribe to ideas about cognitive rewiring. Literacy numeracy changed us psychologically or physiologically rather. You don't need to subscribe to that in order for your argument to work, though. You go on and things like work ethic and memory, the results of biological data. But anyway, actually, let me go Back a little bit to Kuji and scale and scope. And this is another thing that occurred to me as I was reading it. I just thought of it just now when you're looking at the pressure to create scaling tools, as could you, rather than just start with the creation of these tools and say, okay, this is why China was able to scale. I think there are other variables we could look at like just simply the geography of the North China Plain. Right. That there are no natural bounds to. You know, you sort of have to have large territory under control because there are not natural boundaries. Like you would have no major mountain ranges or gigantic impassable forests like you would have in Europe. It was just one large, extremely fertile plain that was going to sustain a large population with no natural barriers. So it was going to. There was sort of a natural size to that polity that would make necessary scaling tools rather than the other way around. In other words, you don't need khudju in order to have a large polity under one central control. But to have one polity under central control, it helps to have something like Kudji.
- [77:30]
C
No, I agree, Kaiser, I agree. I think it's not just a quantitative observation, but a qualitative observation. So to govern such a large polity in such a consistent manner and retaining the essential features of the autocracy for such a long time.
- [77:57]
D
Time. Right.
- [77:59]
C
I would argue that those have to do, have something to do with the scaling power of kudu system. Right. So otherwise you ended up like India. Right. So it's also a large, you know, continental size country, but you have all these kind of differences and here and there. And because there's not one unifying mechanism. So. Yeah, so. Or United States. Right. So it's also large country, but then you have federalism, you have very different religions and you have incredible level of diversity. So you can, you can have a large country, but you can have a large country with such a single mindedness. Homogeneity. That's what China is. It's not just the fact that it is a large political system.
- [78:57]
B
I want to talk a little bit about the 1980s and the movement toward more scope and more pluralism that you talk about that ends really with Tiananmen in 1989. This is something that's debated endlessly. How pluralistic was China? Just between 78 and for that decade until 89. What's your take on that? Do you think that this was really a period where scope conditions were developed that really kind of helped China along after 92, after the revival of reforms.
- [79:29]
C
Yeah. So I think on that maybe my own thinking has also evolved over a period of time. You may or may not know my last book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Heuristics.
- [79:43]
B
Yeah.
- [79:44]
C
Talked about 1980s and 1990s, the Shanghai model and all of that. So I have to say that I find it surprising this time around to identify sources of political and institutional heterogeneities that existed in the 1980s to a level that I previously didn't recognize.
- [80:12]
D
Right.
- [80:13]
C
So not. Not just ideologies.
- [80:16]
D
Right.
- [80:16]
C
And the freedom of expressions. And. And I believe China in the 1980s with other social media. Social media obviously, but that's a. That's a technological thing because that allow people to post ideas that are different from official ideology. But in a kind of pre Internet era, China was quite impressive in the 1980s in. In terms of different ideas contending with each other, calls for political reforms. I was impressed with that before, but this time around I'm even more impressed with the political diversity. If you look at the political system, you have like five different individuals occupying five centers of power. The secretary of the ccp, the Premier, the president of the country, and the chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, and the chairman of the Central Advisory. Central Advisor. So hopefully we can get into that. I actually think that's a critical.
- [81:33]
B
Yeah, it no longer exists.
- [81:36]
C
It no longer exists. Right. And then you look at the political landscape after 1993, it became much more centralized.
- [81:46]
D
Right.
- [81:46]
C
Basically it was a rule of two people, the party secretary and the premier. And that's it. Rather than divide it among five, now you have some division between the two. And then over a period of time, under Xi Jinping, obviously, yeah, you have a premiere, but as we know that the premiere is not. Is not terribly powerful. So I have to say, even though this is pretty obvious, I didn't think about that issue before I wrote this book and how Tiananmen basically demolished that level of political plurality.
- [82:34]
D
Right.
- [82:34]
C
How real that plurality was. We can have a debate in the 1980s and early 1990s, but I would make the following argument if the. So going back to our early discussion about formalism, if the institutions persisted over time, the five centers of power, if that persisted, I bet China will be very, very different from it is today. Just imagine if you have a powerful Central Advisory Commission, people like Zhu runji think about 2012, people like Zhu Runji were on it. Jiang Zemin on it.
- [83:18]
D
Right.
- [83:19]
C
Huintao, obviously.
- [83:21]
D
Right.
- [83:21]
C
And think about after the 20th party congress, because all these people are. Are on it. Exercising legitimate voices and says, I think, you know, China will be steward autocracy probably, but it would not be the kind of one man unconstrained rule by one leader. I'm willing to make that counterfactual point. And in my book I argue that China really change everything and politically, economically, we can have a debate. So in my 2008 book, I was quite negative on the economic aspects, but I, I begin to see, you know, the. It was a more of a balance. The leaders in the 1990s did globalize Chinese economy, but they retrenched the rural reforms, rural entrepreneurship. So it's kind of a wash rather than a unidirectional effect.
- [84:26]
B
Globalization, international scientific exchange, a whole bunch of these other things persisted after 89 or even took off after 89.
- [84:34]
C
Yeah, they persisted. They actually accelerated, accelerated after.
- [84:38]
B
And so these provide sufficient scope conditions so that at least up until five years ago, China still continues to have these. And you know, this is a major argument of your book.
- [84:49]
C
That's right.
- [84:49]
B
In the interest of time, though, I do want to skip forward a little bit. I mean, I don't want to talk about absolutely everything in your book and I want to talk about Tulloch's curse, the great Achilles heel, the vulnerability of the system that you talk about because you spent a good amount of time on this succession, the succession issue. Can you talk about Gordon Tullock, his ideas about the succession problem and how that is endemic to authoritarian regimes and then maybe how China has thus far been able to stave it off?
- [85:20]
C
Yeah, so Gordon Tullock was a very interesting academic. I think he was a lawyer by training, but he wrote about economics and political science. One of his least known books is Succession Issues in Autocracy. His basic argument is that autocracies do not get successions right because of wrong incentives. Once you nominate somebody, then the loyalty goes to that person. As an autocrat, you don't like it.
- [85:56]
D
Right.
- [85:56]
C
So. And, and also the nominated person has this constant fear of being denominated. I don't know if that's the word, but. But because autocrat has such a power. And the other problem in that situation is that the current leader has a incentive to observe the performance of the nominated person. So he has to kind of do it early because otherwise the person doesn't have a track history. But once you do that, you reduce your own power.
- [86:38]
D
Right.
- [86:40]
C
So you are in a very kind of perilous situation. You nominate, then you nominate early, then you reduce your own power. You don't nominate. Well, then Maybe somebody who succeeds you is not the person you want.
- [86:56]
D
Right.
- [86:56]
C
So he's sort of kind of dealing with these dilemmas and problematic, problematic situations. His argument is that the autocracies tend to fail, most likely when they don't handle successions.
- [87:12]
D
Right.
- [87:13]
B
Very little argument you'll get from me on that.
- [87:16]
C
Yeah. So I take that insight to look at China and there I made a distinction between other political practices that we talked about rotation and those things that the CCP has learned from history. But the problem here is that succession is not something they can learn from history. Because the Imperial China had hereditary successions, ccp, at least so far. Although North Korea, they have done it so far, they don't have it. This is perilous because you have to kind of invent the method as you go, and you don't have prior experiences to borrow from. And look at the history of Communist China. It's a pretty dismal record, I would argue.
- [88:14]
D
Right.
- [88:14]
C
Under Mao and under Deng Xiaoping, we're.
- [88:17]
B
All put in mind of Lin Biao by Prigozhin's.
- [88:19]
C
Wow. Yeah, exactly. Right. So the, the, the, the, the plane crash and Liu Shi poor, died in prison and, and poor, poor Hua Guofeng, Zhao Ziyang, you know, it's just, it's just, it's a dismal record, I have to say.
- [88:37]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [88:38]
C
Until they figured out, okay, the term limit is the way to do it. And you know, I have to give that to Jiang Xiaoping. And the term limit, the age, mandatory.
- [88:50]
B
Age requirement, again, unfortunately, these were just norms and not actual.
- [88:56]
C
Well, no, no, no, no. That was in the constitution. The age retirement is, is normal. But the, the term limits, term limit is in the constitution.
- [89:04]
B
Not, not for that.
- [89:05]
C
But, but, but the problem is that.
- [89:07]
B
Yeah, for the presidency, but not for the chairmanship.
- [89:10]
C
Correct, correct. And also, you know, Chinese constitution, you can rewrite it pretty, pretty easily.
- [89:17]
B
Apparently you can. One thing they did learn from history though, one thing that they did learn, I mean, they learned this from the Anshu Zhi Luan from the Anluxan Rebellion, and they learned this from the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty, is how to subordinate the military. Right. This is something you talk about as well.
- [89:36]
D
Yeah.
- [89:38]
C
So the military has inferior status. Part of it is because you, because you elevated the mental power over military power. But part of it is the history, the lesson from the history. And Chinese military is firmly under the control of the ccp. And this is why the succession. So so far, right. Succession failures have not kind of translated into catastrophe.
- [90:09]
D
Right?
- [90:10]
B
Yeah.
- [90:10]
C
My worry though is, you know, to some extent the military now is more powerful than before and also under a leader who has elevated the importance of war and that elevates the importance of the military. My worry is that as ideology is declining, as economic growth is, is slowing down, my fear is that China is moving toward a more militaristic autocracy similar to Latin America. And coupled with succession difficulties, I, you know, I don't really know how to think about that.
- [90:53]
D
Right.
- [90:53]
C
When you have more powerful military, when you have economic difficulties, when you have succession complications, they're going to have deal with the succession sooner and later. I mean, it's just you can't really avoid that issue. I think it's going to become a very complicated situation going down the road.
- [91:14]
B
I fear it will.
- [91:15]
C
I don't have a crystal ball, but I fear for that scenario.
- [91:20]
B
Let's talk about the T in east, about technology. You set out to answer in your own way the famous Needham question. I think most of our listeners will be familiar with Joseph Needham. You know, we can maybe briefly ID him here. For those who don't. He was a British biochemist. He had a romantic dalliance with a Chinese graduate student of his name, Lu Guizhen. I think her name was Lu Weijian.
- [91:44]
D
Yeah.
- [91:44]
B
He became then fascinated with the Chinese language and then with science in China. And then before his death in 1995, he actually oversaw the publication of some six volumes, most of them in multiple parts of this magisterial science and civilization in China, which you are now intimately familiar with. The Needham question is really why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place not in China, but in Europe. Why, despite China's quite prodigious advances in science during up till the late medieval period. So let's talk about this. You created a database of inventions which was just enormous. And you did it in the most interesting way. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you wanted to do this in the first place?
- [92:37]
C
Well, so first of all, I'm collaborating with a number of Chinese professors on a book project. We have finished about two out of six chapters, is under contract with Princeton University Press. Just on the Needham question, we don't deal with these other exams and autocracies. So I think by being a professor at mit, I got very interested in. I'm not a tech person, unlike you, so I'm not a tech person. I'm not an entrepreneur and neither am I really just to. Well, you have a history and technology and science have played such a large role. So I got interested in that topic. But my previous interest was understanding the science and technology in ccp. But I began to really think historically about why China was once so advanced in technology and why it simply disappeared as a technological power. So that's a Needham question.
- [93:54]
D
Right.
- [93:55]
C
And Needham asked that question very forcefully in 1969. And I began to review the literature, began to read. I mean, I wasn't impressed with the answers. Mostly not because the answers themselves are right or wrong. It's because I don't really know whether they're right or wrong. It's just all kind of speculative. It's all very vague and broad generalizations and Chinese culture about lack of scientific attitude and this and that. You know, all of that can be correct, except there's no proof of that. Right. So there's no kind of. There's no evidence whether or not any of that really explains anything. And also the other thing is, when you look into this literature a little bit deeper, even the ones written by Needham himself, exactly when Chinese technology began to decline, it's very fussy. So what Needham said is, oh, it began to decline in 17th century, 16th century. If you look at the kind of the empirical graph he constructed, it wasn't constructed on the basis of data. It was constructed out of his own mind. And it was really a mental graph rather than empirical graph.
- [95:21]
B
Sure.
- [95:21]
C
And that's not really. I mean, he's a biochemist, but his pronouncements are not data driven. It's totally understandable because he's a towering figure. I have enormous respect for him. The kind of collections that he managed to create, it's just unbelievable. Right. So don't take me wrong. I have absolutely enormous respect for Joseph Nitam, but I think we can do better. Let me put it in a different way. We can build on the work by Nitin and others and take it to the next level, which is data driven. But then how do you do it? Well, actually, more than six years ago, I got money. And by the way, our applications for National Science foundation, both in US and China, were rejected. So I raised money from private sector to support digitization of the entries recorded by Nitin and by Chinese historians of science. And the result is this database of over 10,000 entries spanning 5th century BCE all the way to the end of the 19th century. So this is the basis of our claim that Chinese science and technology were most advanced when China had more plurality.
- [97:09]
D
Right.
- [97:09]
C
Right before the Sui dynasty. And that is 1,000 years earlier than what historians commonly believe. The timing of Chinese technological decline, they usually say 17th century, 16th century. If you actually look at Needham's dating of that, it's really based on the rise of Western science rather than the decline of the Chinese science.
- [97:38]
B
Terribly.
- [97:40]
C
Yeah, so that's, that's not really, really. I mean, he. And that made him argue further that Chinese failed to develop science and that was the reason why they couldn't develop industrial revolution, and that that argument itself is problematic. And the empirical basis on which to make that argument, at least if we go with our data set, is not correct.
- [98:07]
B
So your data set, though, is a list of actual inventions that are listed in Needham and in other sources. And your criterion for why they are worth calling an invention is simply because Needham says so?
- [98:19]
C
Yeah, so I have no independent capability to second guess Needham. And, you know, people push back on that. All I can say is, as academics, all we can do is rebuild the work of the prior generations of scholars.
- [98:42]
B
I have no objection to that. Here's where I would push back a little bit, though. So you demonstrate a really strong correlation between periods of maximum inventiveness in China with periods of decentralization, of political fragmentation or fracture.
- [98:57]
D
Right.
- [98:57]
B
So we have the Spring and Autumn period, actually, that goes. That starts a little before, you know, so that's 771 to 580s BC. 570, but you know, the Warring States Period and then the Three Kingdoms and you know, the Northern and Southern dynasty dynasties. Then you know, Liu Chao Shi, Liu Guo. So these are also periods of endemic warfare. Yeah, and I suspect that we'd see a pretty strong correlation in Europe also between technological inventiveness and the prevalence of warfare. So are you making, I mean, is warfare just another scope condition to you? I mean, because look, you do grant that the Han sue interregnum, as you.
- [99:43]
C
Call.
- [99:44]
B
Was a period that had maybe, you know, too damn many scope conditions. I mean, it was violent. It was extremely violent.
- [99:52]
C
Yeah.
- [99:53]
B
I wonder if you have a way to include warfare as a driver or to deal with that in some way.
- [100:02]
C
Yeah, so that's an excellent question and excellent pushback.
- [100:08]
D
And.
- [100:11]
C
The correlation is there.
- [100:14]
D
Right.
- [100:14]
C
I'm not going to deny it, but let me sort of acknowledge that. And then, and then, and then add a number of other points. One is that there was a later period when China also fell into disunity, and it's called the Wudai Shuk war.
- [100:33]
D
Right.
- [100:33]
B
So 60 years, though, that, that.
- [100:36]
C
Yeah, that's true. It was.
- [100:38]
B
But 53.
- [100:40]
C
It was shorter. It was Shorter and then the Hansui interactment. First of all, you don't see this burst of inventiveness during that period of time. Maybe it's too short, maybe that's the reason. But the era already had ideological closure as compared with the Hansui Interactive. But that's a weaker defense. And by the way, we are working on these issues now in our current book. In the book that you read, I didn't go into that. There are other points that I want to make. The other is that war definitely makes a country a period more inventive by demanding military technology. That's true. But think about that statement. That's all on the demand side. It's not automatic that the supply will be there. As we all know from technology, the simple existence of demand doesn't always translate into supply when you have the right conditions like coming up with new ideas and things like that. So think about the Manhattan Project. Just imagine that Hitler didn't prosecute Jewish scientists and you don't have the Neo born, you don't have those people coming to the United States.
- [102:26]
D
Right.
- [102:27]
C
Just the fact that you have the war may not have led to the success of the Manhattan Project. I mean, so the human creativity, the scientific power. So we need both. We need a supply conditions. And the supply conditions I would argue are one, government support, Manhattan Project government support, and the other is the. The scope. Right. So I'm reading Oppenheimer's book and it was just fascinating how these scientists debated with each other and contested each other in terms of their different ideas. So demand conditions do not translate automatically into supply condition. Supply conditions require human ingenuity, creativity, and those things. The other thing that we can do, and we're planning to do that, is to categorize technology into military technology and non military technology.
- [103:31]
D
Right.
- [103:32]
C
If the Hansui interregnum was as inventive in non war related technologies, then it cannot be totally explained by war.
- [103:45]
D
Right.
- [103:46]
C
So Kaiser, I agree with you 100%.
- [103:49]
D
I agree with.
- [103:50]
C
You know, there are people who made that point about Europe because Europe was divided, they constantly fought with each other and therefore they needed the military technology. So I agree 100% with that.
- [104:05]
D
Right.
- [104:06]
C
But there are other non military technologies that Europe also pioneered and that capability to come up with those technologies is a function of something else. Right. So this is probably not a very clear explanation. It's kind of clear in my mind, but maybe I didn't express it as earlier.
- [104:27]
B
In any case, we both agree that the tong, which of course follows on this way strikes a Very nice balance where you have both kind of scope conditions but sufficient political control. So it's a nice balance between scale and scope.
- [104:42]
D
Yeah.
- [104:43]
B
So I guess you asked the analyzing question which is the driver for the balance of the book. Is the reform era CCP, like the Tang in that respect, was it autocratic and repressive, but still managed to have scope conditions? I obviously thought so. I mean, during that reform period, that's what I named my band, Tang Dynasty. And it was sort of for that exact reason, without invoking scale and scope, I thought this is another period of hopefully cultural effervescence that was driven by a spirit of cosmopolitanism and openness. But anyway, let's talk about the. Because you make this argument, I think a lot of people would probably be surprised. I certainly agree that China's technological progress under the CCP during the reform period was not just a matter of scale and scale alone. That it's actually in the blurred line between the state and private sector. You argue instead that during this period of reform and opening, China had scope conditions that were different than ones we ordinarily envisioned. So walk us through. What were the scope conditions of China during the reform and opening period?
- [105:53]
C
Yeah, so we do come back to this definition of the reform era. I believe that era to be from 1978 to 2018. So when I talk about the reformers period, I was talking specifically about those years rather than since 2018.
- [106:13]
B
And 2018 obviously is the year that Xi Jinping abolished the term limits. So that's why the end of reform.
- [106:20]
C
So that was kind of almost like an operational definition of the end of the reform era. I think there were several elements. One was critically academic collaboration. When I was doing the research for that chapter, I was really genuinely surprised to find out that China began to engage in scientific collaborations before economic reforms, before economic opening to FDI to foreign trade.
- [106:56]
B
That's right.
- [106:57]
C
Very early on, you know, it was probably not something that people pay attention to, but I did, you know, just the sequencing of it was so striking. China began to send students to America before the two countries established diplomatic relationship. Already established a diplomatic relationship. China signed agreements with France on scientific agreements before China promulgated joint venture laws. So that was like head on very forefront of Deng Xiaoping's reform agenda. Most people think about that as kind of human capital way, training the students and things like that, getting foreign education. I agree with that. But think about the implication of that. When you move a scientist from Tsinghua University to mit, she is going to have the academic freedom of mit. She gets trained at mit, probably a more powerful scientific institution. Definitely there's that human capital effect. But she gets to enjoy the academic freedom of the West. This is an argument that I made in that chapter, which is that China succeeded because China, even though it didn't have academic freedom itself, it can borrow part of it by collaboration. And then I can extend that analogy to commerce and technology. Think about Huawei. The success of Huawei was a result of collaboration. It collaborated with French companies, British companies, American companies. Its mobile phone has excellent camera. It collaborated with the German. Is it Leica or Zeiss? I forgot what Zeiss. Right. So it is a result of collaboration rather than going it alone.
- [109:17]
D
Right.
- [109:18]
C
So this kind of insularity idea, oh, China succeeded because of the whole government opposed. There's that, you know, I'm not going to say that's not important, but the scale only succeeded in areas where you also had the scope. And if you look at the high tech sectors, right, High tech startups, they borrowed the legal and financial autonomy of Hong Kong and other overseas territories.
- [109:55]
D
Right.
- [109:56]
C
And this is very, very different from the view that China succeeded only because of government support. They succeeded in the context of globalization. They succeeded in the context of academic, commercial globalization and institutional globalization, and in the context of government support. So it is not the opposite of convention argument. It is adding an extra layer of explanation to the as compared with a conventional exponential. And now the issue now is now you only have the government support left, right. So can you carry on the same rate of success as before? My conjecture is no.
- [110:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, there are some people who would say that they've kind of passed a critical mass already where they've enjoyed those scope conditions for long enough that the foundations are in place that maybe it can sort of run on fumes for a while still and continue to deliver.
- [110:59]
C
Well, I mean, how do you do that with semiconductor?
- [111:04]
D
I don't get it.
- [111:06]
C
So this highly collaborative industry, speaking of.
- [111:12]
B
Collaboration, I'm glad to see that the Biden administration at least decided to provisionally renew the US China science to technology agreement for six months. But gosh, I mean, it's imperiled again, very worried. And I'm doing a show about that very, very soon.
- [111:28]
C
I applaud the decision. I think doing science is a open activity. It benefits the mankind, it benefits everybody. There's no reason that we cannot collaborate with China on scientific research, technology, sensitive technology. We can have a debate. But in terms of open science, we should collaborate with anybody because that's beneficial.
- [111:57]
B
So you talk about how China has this knack for scaling up, scaling over, and scaling fast. And you offer some really interesting examples of projects that kind of embody this ability. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [112:13]
C
Yeah, so I gave a number of examples. One is the health code.
- [112:19]
D
Right, Right, sure.
- [112:20]
B
Covid health codes.
- [112:21]
C
Yeah, yeah, Covid health code. You know, some people are wary of a negative on that, but during the early days of the pandemic, it really, really worked in terms of more targeted quarantine.
- [112:37]
D
Right.
- [112:38]
C
It was a classic example of being able to scale, but also being able to collaborate. One of the things that people don't mention very often is that the technological solutions were provided by the private sector.
- [112:52]
B
That's right. Tencent and Alibaba.
- [112:54]
C
Yeah, by Tencent and Alibaba. And it was not provided by the government. And usually we think about that, we celebrate that as a successful example of private public sector collaboration.
- [113:11]
D
Right.
- [113:12]
C
And the other. Well, but Xi Jinping may have a different idea. The other example I gave is 5G, and that again, is a collaboration. Huawei is a private sector company, and government policy obviously is public. Right. So that's a collaboration. And I have fundamental problems with the claim that Chinese successes are all a result of scale.
- [113:45]
B
Right.
- [113:46]
C
If you look at these examples in great detail, scale is there, but scope is there as well.
- [113:57]
D
Right.
- [113:57]
C
So I don't want to say government support doesn't matter or even counterproductive.
- [114:03]
D
Right.
- [114:03]
C
So I'm not a kind of a hierarchy and believer. I do believe in the power of the government, but the power of the government is important and effective only in the context of collaborations and scope control conditions. Historically speaking, that's also true. We have a measure of government support for inventions by looking at the proportion of inventors being on the government payroll, and that has been very substantial. But then China began to decline when the scope conditions disappeared.
- [114:42]
B
So I want to leave most of the rest of the book. The conclusions that you draw about where China is right now and the precarious future of the whole east system that you talk about because of Xi Jinping's virtual elimination of scope conditions. I want to encourage you to talk about that when you deliver your keynote address at our conference and leave something for that. Meanwhile, though, there is one issue that I want to push back on, and then one issue that I want to ask you about. One is when you talk about Xi Jinping's anti corruption campaign, you argue that he's painted himself into a corner by pursuing anti corruption to the extent that he has, he's made it basically impossible for him to step down. He's got, having purged 4 million party members, he's or investigated at least 4 million party members. He's now got too many enemies that, you know, stepping down is basically impossible. But was a rebalancing favoring scale over scope made necessary just by the sheer extent of corruption in 2012 when he took office? I mean, it seems to me like a surgical approach, like the one that prevailed during Xi's predecessors where they would do occasional anti corruption drives instead of this now, what, seven or eight year long campaign. Gosh, no more. It's 10 years now.
- [116:10]
C
That's a 10 year, 10 year, 10 year.
- [116:12]
B
Kevin, would that even have been close to sufficient to put a dent in the problem? I mean, I feel like, sure, he painted himself in a corner, but what else could he have done?
- [116:24]
C
Oh, I think there are other things that he could have done while minimizing the political liabilities. First of all, we all know that if you have to purge 4 million officials, it is a systemic problem, not an individual problem.
- [116:44]
D
Right.
- [116:44]
C
So is there anything that he has done that suggests a systemic approach? I would argue no. Right. So he's going after these individuals.
- [116:55]
D
Right.
- [116:56]
C
Just think about 4 million people, right behind these 4 million people, they are spouses, children and supporters. You multiply that 4 million by 4 or 5, you antagonize 20 million people, 16 million people. And these are powerful people too. So just as a rational autocrat, and I would argue a rational autocrat has to do things taking into account both the positive effects of his actions as well as the potential liabilities. And you want to be smart about that. You don't want to antagonize 20 million people. What I think should have been done is you are absolutely right that by 2012 the corruption was endemic, pervasive, and many people applauded the anti corruption campaign at that time. What I think would have been a better approach is you declare some sort of amnesty, right. So you return the assets by February, whatever, 16th of 2013 and that's it. So I don't really punish you as, as persons. All I care about that requires quite.
- [118:25]
B
A bit of trust.
- [118:28]
C
Well, true, right. But by doing that, and you can create trust by making sure that you, and this is a Singaporean system, by the way, so if you don't, I mean essentially if, if you don't comply, I go after you.
- [118:50]
D
Right.
- [118:52]
C
And that's what they did anyway.
- [118:54]
D
Right.
- [118:54]
C
So they went after the 4 million people. And so it doesn't actually require trust, it requires the belief that if you don't do it, I have a way of knowing that you lie, that you choose cheated. Right. So very few people believed that Xi Jinping could really purge 4 million people at the beginning of his leadership. But he proved that he could do it. Right. So there's no reason why I think you couldn't prove yourself to be effective in discovering these problems exposed.
- [119:34]
D
Right.
- [119:35]
C
So I would argue doing that both gets to the issue of corruption. So from now on, you cannot do this anymore. But I don't really punish you for your past behavior. So that's one. And the other, maybe that's too much to ask, is to reform the system. Disclosure, asset disclosure, transparency. But that requires a belief that the system is problematic. I do want to say that this is different from the traditional methods. And there are two traditional methods. One is killing the chicken to show to the monkey. Right. So that was basically Hu Jintao's approach. Right. So they kind of. They kind of went after two or three people, but clearly that didn't scare off the monkey. There were so many monkeys that.
- [120:36]
D
That.
- [120:37]
C
Emerged, so that didn't quite work. And the other is killing the chickens and the monkeys.
- [120:42]
D
Right.
- [120:42]
C
So that's Xi Jinping's approach.
- [120:44]
B
Tigers and flies both.
- [120:45]
C
Right, Tigers and flies. And I think the problem with that approach is like riding the bicycle, you cannot stop.
- [120:53]
B
That's right. Got the tiger by the tail.
- [120:56]
C
And we're seeing that now. Right. So, I mean, one idea is, oh, after the 20th party congress, okay, that's the end of it. No, I mean, now they are looking into the medical hospitals and doctors. It is riding the bicycle. It cannot stop. And once you stop, you are viewed as weak and you invite challenge. So you always want to get ahead of your challenges. It is not a very good method.
- [121:29]
B
Well, you'll hear a lot more from Yasheng Huang at our conference, which I really hope a lot of you will be able to attend in New York on November 2nd. Of course, for the listeners to read for themselves. The book is going to be out on August 29th. It's called the Rise and Fall of the How Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China's Success and why they Might Lead China to its Decline. Thank you so much for your time, Yashang. This has just been fantastic. I have so many more questions I would love to ask you, but we'll save it for another time. Let's move on now to recommendations. First, a quick reminder again of our upcoming next China conference, which is November 2nd in New York. It's a wonderful event space that we've got on the east river in Midtown East. We have an amazing lineup of speakers. Not just today's guest, Yashang Huang, but also highly interactive breakout sessions where there's bound to be just all sorts of topics that, you know, listeners will be keen to dig into with the speakers that we've invited. I'm really looking forward to this. There's even going to be a game show to wrap up the day. So get your tickets now. Just click on events from our page@thechinaproject.com all right, let's move on to recommendations. I've kept you so long, I feel bad. But Yashang, what do you have for us?
- [122:50]
C
Well, I'm going to be boring as a professor. I'm going to recommend a book. I'm reading the biography of Oppenheimer, the American Pernicious. And I haven't seen the movie because I want to finish the book before I see the movie. So there's one tidbit on the book that I thought was inspiring me to think about these issues that way. And it's related to my current project. If you look at Oppenheimer and others in the Manhattan Project, these were the path breakers, the father, mostly father, but there's actually also female scientists of the atom bomb. These were original creators. Many of them were left wing communists, right, or sympathizers with the communism. Whereas if you look at Soviet Union and China, who also followed the footsteps and created their own atom bombs, I bet the scientists there were communists as well. So rebels create conformance, replicate. And I sort of, sort of, you know, the book didn't make that argument at all. The book is not about Soviet Union, about China, but I'm going to work that into my current book. And so replication actually requires conformity. So Peter Thale's idea about zero to one requires breaking the current methods and breaking out of the current mode. And that requires a rebel, right? A commonness in the competent system is a rebel. And there's a book by the title of something like Hippies and Physics. And I'm going to reread the book. I read it a while ago, so kind of has a similar idea. So I recommend the book both because Oppenheimer is a fascinating individual, but it also gave me at least this particular insight which I'm going to build on for my next book.
- [125:03]
B
Fascinating. Yeah. I have not read it. I have seen the movie. The movie is quite good. I mean, I didn't bother to recommend it just because it's, you know, it's. Everyone's seen it along with, you know, Barbie.
- [125:16]
C
Yeah, I'm not recommending the movie. Well, I mean, I haven't seen the movie, but I'm recommending the movie.
- [125:21]
B
Yeah, I think you'll enjoy the movie. It's quite good. And it's based very much on American Prometheus, so. All right, so that's a great recommendation, by the way. My recommendation is something much more Frivolous. It's a YouTube channel by this guy named Drew Durnill, D U R N I L who publishes pretty much every day. And it's just focused on global geography, on history and economics. It just makes it extraordinarily accessible for young people. My daughter, actually, I kept seeing her watching this YouTube guy and she got me hooked on it. He's got like 900 plus videos and they're all. I mean, he's constantly looking at statistics, at graphs, at charts, at maps, just showing different rankings of different geographies on different issues. And it's a fun and pretty enriching overview constantly of facts and stats about our world. He's very clever. All sorts of interesting tidbits from current social science studies and polling and so forth. He's doing his part, I think, to combat the well known ignorance of Americans about geography. Definitely check it out. Especially if you are a younger listener or you have younger children or siblings that you want to show this to.
- [126:46]
C
Oh, I'll look into it.
- [126:48]
D
Yeah.
- [126:48]
B
Yashang, what a pleasure and congratulations on an excellent, excellent book. I know you're going to have lots of people talking about it both positively and critically, but I'm sure you're very well prepared for that.
- [127:00]
C
Thank you. Kaiser. It has been such a pleasure and to have such an extensive conversation. I really enjoyed it from the very beginning to the end. Thank you.
- [127:11]
B
Thank you. I am really looking forward to seeing you in New York in November.
- [127:15]
C
Yeah, I'll see you. Thank you.
- [127:16]
B
The Seneca Podcast is powered by the China Project and is a proud part of the Seneca Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Guo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email@sinicathechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review at Apple Podcasts as that really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Sitar, as it's now called, or on Facebook at the China Proge and be sure to check out all the shows in the Senate Network. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.