Yascha Mounk on China and Western Liberalism

Summary

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Sinica Podcast: Yascha Mounk on China and Western Liberalism

Episode Date: September 17, 2025
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: Yascha Mounk – Political scientist, writer, founder of Persuasion, contributing writer at The Atlantic, host of The Good Fight podcast

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Sinica Podcast features a wide-ranging conversation between host Kaiser Kuo and Yascha Mounk about how Western liberals are confronting the reality of a rapidly rising, illiberal China. The discussion delves deeply into Mounk’s recent experiences in China, his essays on the country’s strengths and weaknesses, the nuanced reactions among Western liberals to China's success, and the extent to which China’s rise challenges faith in liberal democracy. The conversation also touches on generational shifts, soft power, demographic challenges, and the prospects for cross-fertilization of ideas between East and West.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background: Why Yascha Mounk Is Focusing on China

• Mounk’s Motivation:
  • No “moment of epiphany,” but a realization that China was a glaring blind spot in his understanding of the world, especially for someone writing about global democracy.
  • His goal is not to become a China expert, but to reach a level of cultural and linguistic fluency akin to what a well-educated Western public intellectual might have about, say, Spain. (08:05–10:06)
  • Candid about the difficulty of achieving even this “modest, but ambitious” objective, especially with the language barrier.
• Learning Chinese:
  • Finds early language acquisition deceptively easy due to simple grammar, but hits a plateau with comprehension and real-world communication (10:29–11:26).

“My purpose is to know as much about China as a well educated Western, quote unquote, public intellectual...would about, say, Spain.”
— Yascha Mounk (09:08)

2. Experiencing China: Outsider Perspective

• The Cab Driver Cliché:
  • Both guests joke about the trope, but defend it as a way to gain diversity of linguistic exposure and everyday perspectives, emphasizing its value when exploring as a newcomer. (04:41–07:09)
• Duration of Visits:
  • Mounk has spent about a month in China over several trips, including language study and conference attendance. (11:26–12:18)

3. China’s Strengths and Weaknesses: Interwoven & Nuanced Assessment

• Surprising Qualities:

  • The absence of a certain cowering atmosphere, despite tight political controls:
    “There’s a kind of Western imaginary...where people are extremely scared to talk about politics...That’s not really what I found.”
    — Yascha Mounk (13:15–16:25)
  • Many ordinary Chinese are open about both pride and criticism of their country.

• High Modernism:

  • Referencing James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” Mounk highlights China’s infrastructure and the campaign for linguistic unity as examples of high-modernist state ambition—with both benefits (cohesion, efficiency) and costs (overreach, loss of cultural diversity). (16:25–17:02)

• Structural Paradoxes:

  • The same features that create dynamism (e.g. hard work, national ambition) also generate burnout and social strains like “996” culture and youth disillusionment.
    “The strengths of the system and the weaknesses are related to each other.” (17:45–20:12)

“I think that’s a way to analyze any country. And it is of course a way to analyze China.”
— Yascha Mounk (19:16)

4. Demographics and Social Attitudes: A Profound Challenge

• Parallels With the West:

  • Young, educated Chinese echo frustrations of young Westerners: high costs, slow job ladder, unaffordable housing, economic anxiety. (21:04–23:03)

• Particularities:

  • China’s demographic crunch is more severe due to the one-child policy and a cultural skepticism about love and marriage.
    “I was quite struck talking to people...how low a priority love is for people in China.” (23:58–27:46)
  • Perceived risks and burdens of marriage are acutely felt; many young people “mistrust” both love and wedlock as ideals (25:11–26:38).

• Regional Pop Culture:

  • China’s soft power may lag in the West, but its escapist dramas are popular in parts of Southeast and South Asia. (35:33–36:57)

5. The Limits of China’s Soft Power

• Soft Power Deficits:
  • China, unlike Japan or Korea, has not exported many globally recognized celebrities, stories, or brands (apart from a few public figures such as Yao Ming and Ai Weiwei) (31:26–33:14).
  • Possible reasons discussed: censorship, top-down culture, domestic market size, lower average income, and relative lack of universalizing instincts compared to immigrant societies like the US (38:04–39:37).
• Global South Successes:
  • Acknowledgment that China’s cultural products and influence are significant in regional neighbors, if not in the US/EU. (35:33–36:57)

6. Alliance Networks: America vs. China

• America’s Enduring Asset:
  • Deep and dense network of global alliances, contrasted with China’s comparably “thin circle” and fraught regional relationships (40:56–42:14).
• Hegemonic Resentment:
  • As China rises, it may encounter the same anti-hegemonic dynamics that have hampered the US.
    “It’s structural that the more China rises, the more it’s going to...deal with some forms of irrational fear.” (44:37)

7. On Western Media Coverage and Epistemic Humility

• Changing Perspective:
  • Mounk finds himself more acutely aware of media cliches and simplifications, but doesn’t believe most coverage is entirely off-base—just selectively framed (45:55–47:14).
• On Not Over-Claiming:
  • Praises the humility to say “I don’t know” and recognizes the elusive, opaque nature of Chinese elite politics and factionalism (47:14–48:27, 51:52–52:43).

8. The Western Liberal Crisis and China’s Role

• Liberal Discomfort:
  • China’s success challenges prior liberal assumptions (e.g., about democracy being a precondition for innovation).
    “There was a belief that...you need the culture of free inquiry...China shows that you can create a system that certainly doesn’t have free speech about politics, but...does allow significant advances.” (55:05)
• The Real Crisis Is Internal:
  • The West’s “crisis of liberal faith” stems more from domestic malaise than China’s ascendancy.
    “Most of that crisis comes from the internal contradictions of liberalism itself.” (55:52)
• Limits of the China Model:
  • It’s hard to “export” Chinese governance:
    “It works pretty well in practice...but it’s a mess in theory...It would be extremely hard to implement the Chinese model anywhere else.” (57:28)

9. Universalism, Relativism & “Priority Pluralism”

• Shifting Western Attitudes:
  • Mounk and Kuo reflect on the challenge for liberals: how to balance belief in universal values with the recognition that institutional design and priorities differ across cultures (60:42–65:16).
  • Mounk: “We should be very aware of how incredibly difficult it is to influence the world, and therefore, by and large, that should not be our ambition.”
• Priority Pluralism:
  • Kuo’s proposed framework: cultures share core values but prioritize them differently; maximizing all at once isn’t possible, so trade-offs are natural (65:10–67:35).

10. Inter-Cultural Communication and Critique

• Challenges in Explaining Nuance:
  • Westerners often fail to grasp that intense censorship and widespread outspokenness coexist in China; this baffles many foreigners and can lead to unintentionally apologetic impressions (67:35–68:59).
• Chinese Reactions:
  • Some “self-loathing” expats or defenders bristle at any criticism, falling into over-correction against Western bias (69:06–70:23).

11. Using China as a Foil: Dangers of Enemy-Driven Unity

• Risks of Externalizing Division:
  • Attempts to rally fractured Western societies by framing China as an existential enemy are both morally fraught and unlikely to succeed: “It’s much more tempting to hate the person who’s your neighbor...than...a government...far away.” (72:41)
• Avoiding Zero-Sum Thinking:
  • Emphasizes that the first imperative must be to avoid war and keep sight of the wellbeing of over a billion Chinese (74:23).

12. On Learning from Illiberal Successes

• Selective Borrowing:
  • Mounk is in favor of learning from China in domains like investment in research, technology, food—less so for political institutions due to incompatibility and risk of unintended consequences (75:08–76:34).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “There’s a kind of Western imaginary of China which resembles Moscow in 1953...That’s not really what I found.” — Yascha Mounk (15:15)
• “The strengths of the system and the weaknesses are related to each other.” — Yascha Mounk (19:16)
• “China’s demographic crunch is more severe due to both policy and cultural skepticism about love and marriage.” — Yascha Mounk (23:58)
• “Most people in the United States or Europe would struggle to name a living Chinese person...It’s really quite striking.” — Yascha Mounk (31:26)
• “To have a true competitor to liberalism, you have to have a system which can be replicated elsewhere. The problem with the Chinese model is ... it’s a mess in theory.” — Yascha Mounk (57:28)
• “Let’s not be naive about the kind of role we can play in the world...but that doesn’t mean that we have to be cultural relativist. We shouldn’t.” — Yascha Mounk (65:10)
• “I do worry...that the frame [many take] to China is one that looks more for the reasons why China will fail rather than starting anew and looking for the reasons why it has enjoyed success.” — Kaiser Kuo (70:55)
• “...the first imperative in the 21st century is going to have to be to avoid World War 3 and to avoid a major war.” — Yascha Mounk (73:12)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [08:05] — Yascha on the decision to spend time in China; learning for perspective, not expertise
• [13:15] — Surprising absence of fear in everyday political talk among Chinese
• [16:25] — High modernism, linguistic unification, and central planning
• [20:12] — Work ethic: dynamism and burnout as two sides of the same coin
• [23:58] — Demographic crisis and skepticism about love/marriage in China
• [31:26] — On China’s lack of globally-known cultural ambassadors
• [40:56] — American versus Chinese alliance structures; Belt and Road, wolf-warrior diplomacy
• [45:55] — How Yascha’s view of Western media coverage has changed (epistemic humility)
• [55:05] — China’s challenge to liberal faith; crisis of liberalism is mostly “internal”
• [67:35] — Explaining the coexistence of repression and openness to skeptics in the West
• [72:41] — Dangers and futility of using China as a scapegoat for domestic Western polarization

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Book & Media Recommendations

• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  (77:29–79:47)
  A classic novel about historical change and adaptation; resonant with contemporary China’s rapid transitions.

• Adam Gopnik, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism”
  (79:57–end)
  A defense of liberalism emphasizing tolerance, gradual progress, and the minimization of cruelty.

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is thoughtful, modest, and candid, mixing humor and philosophical reflection. Mounk and Kuo are careful to maintain “epistemic humility,” acknowledging the limits of both outsider and expert perspectives. Rather than drawing facile conclusions, they contemplate the structural ironies of modern society—how strengths and weaknesses are entangled, how values must be traded and prioritized, and how both China and the West face mirrored problems on different scales.

Both caution against black-and-white thinking—whether about China’s future, the prospects for liberalism, or the possibility of learning from ideological rivals. Mounk, in particular, insists that clear-eyed appreciation need not descend into relativism or despair, but that liberals must be honest about what China’s experience both dispels and confirms about their own beliefs.

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This summary is designed to capture both the substance and the spirit of the episode, providing a detailed roadmap for listeners (or non-listeners) wanting a deep but nuanced understanding of the topics discussed.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that share, shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from Beijing, where I will be throughout September. If you are around, drop me a note and say hi. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free as always, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I need you more than ever. You can get [e-mail] and listeners, do your part by becoming a paying [e-mail], you will enjoy, in addition to the podcast itself, the transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China focused columnists and commentators. And of course, you will rest easy in the knowledge you are helping me do what I honestly believe is pretty important work. So help out, check out the page, see all it's all on offer and see you there. I've developed a really keen interest in trying to understand the perspectives of smart people, especially public intellectuals who have reach and influence and who are only recently starting to really grapple with understanding China and all that it means. I know that this show often features your academics and diplomats, your analysts or journalists who are all people deeply steeped in China and and who have areas of real China expertise. But I find it just as valuable sometimes to talk with people from non China backgrounds, observant, analytical people who've been focused on other things and are just now kind of turning their attention to China. It serves as a kind of reality check and often a very good way to get a sense of the state of the discourse viewed from the outside, outside of the fractious world of China specialists. And that's why I invite people like, you know, Anne Marie Slaughter or Adam Tooze onto the show. I find that people like this can often point things out to me that I'd simply not otherwise have noticed. So today I am really delighted to welcome Yascha Munch to the show. Yascha is a political scientist, writer and yes, public intellectual who has Written really extensively about democracy, about pluralism and the challenges facing liberal societies in the 21st century. He's the founder of Persuasion, a contributing writer at the Atlantic, where I've read a lot of him and of course the host of the Good Fight podcast, which I've listened to a lot and with as much avidity as I have read his writing. I had the pleasure of meeting him very briefly in Shanghai earlier this year when he did me the tremendous honor of attending a little talk I gave. And it feels especially fitting to reconnect here because Yasha has just published a two part essay, a little series on China. One cataloging what he sees as its remarkable strengths, the other what he fears may be its deep weaknesses. For liberals in the West. And cards on the table, neither I nor I think it's safe to say my guest today really shies away from that label. As a Western liberal, China poses a dilemma that is as psychological really as it is political. Some, I think, have tried earnestly to learn from what they see China as having done right. Others have looked on with envy, chiefly at its apparent abundance. I say that with the know, deliberate word choice. And some are frustrated by the well intentioned regulatory safeguards that can prevent us from building in our own societies. And so they look at China with, you know, a certain sort of starry eyed aspect. Still others have really responded with with very deep skepticism. Sometimes it's healthy, it's usually healthy, sometimes it's merely reflexive. Many have resorted to self soothing and to to cope, while some even self identified liberals have succumbed to full blown moral panic or joined the course of warmongering. So in short, China's rise forces liberals to reckon with questions about values, about governance and pluralism. It's not always pretty, but it does strike at the core of our own political identity. And Yasha in his inimitable way has jumped into that thicket. Yasha Munch, welcome to Seneca.

[A]

Thank you so much, Kaiser. It's a real pleasure to be on.

[B]

Great, great, great. So let me first give you just the tiniest bit of ribbing for indulging in that conversations with cab drivers cliche, which is.

[A]

I know, I know, yeah, it's a.

[B]

Bit Tom Friedman, right?

[A]

It is. But in my defense, I don't speak the language very well and I'm very conscious of speaking to an audience the median member of which is going to know a lot more about China than I do and probably speak a lot better Chinese than I do. But I do think that if you're in a place and have a lot of conversations with people. You, you can learn something about that place, particularly if you're not just speaking with the help of interpreters.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And as you, as you pointed out, I'm just re at the beginning of, of trying to learn about China. But I was able to be in, in China for a while in, in June. And frankly, one reason why take as many cabs as I can is that it's the best language lesson. Yeah. Because if you're taking language classes, which I was, you'll always speak with a teacher who has a pretty standard accent.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Right. Whereas if you're taking cabs, then you gonna get the accent of whichever part of the country they're from, and that's actually gonna improve your comprehension skills a lot more than sitting in a classroom. So when I'm in Shanghai, I try to take as many cabs as possible. I have to talk to the cab drivers about something. And so sometimes I end up learning something that I, what I, that I put in the very few essays I've written about China in my life. But I'm aware of, I'm aware of a pitfall. I'm aware of a cliche.

[B]

You know, I have to also say, I mean, I find it's actually useful. I talk to them all the time as well. I mean, what else are you going to do? You're stuck in a closed space where somebody with somebody for at least half an hour when you're going pretty much anywhere in any of the big cities in China, so no reason not to talk to them.

[A]

And by the way, the same is true in the United States. I mean, I think part of talking to cab driver cliche comes from the idea that here I am, a white Westerner who doesn't really know the country. I turn up and I speak to free cab drivers. And I think I've perfectly understood it. And certainly if you go into it with that attitude, you're going to go get things very badly wrong. But I always learned from talking to cab drivers in the States as well. I mean, I was in Washington D.C. about a month ago and spoke to a Ethiopian American cab driver guy who grew up in Ethiopia, moved to the United States when he was about 30 years old, who doesn't like Trump and was telling me about what he dislikes about Trump. And then he was saying, but, you know, I'm glad they sent him a National Guard because D.C. is really unsafe. And I feel like finally somebody is doing something about that. I don't personally agree with that. Cab driver. But that gave me an interesting point of information about how some people are thinking about this.

[B]

Sure, sure. Absolutely. No, I mean, I was really just kidding, but I didn't expect to get into it quite so deep. But no, I think you've raised some very, very good points. And yeah, I definitely enjoy my conversations with Uber drivers and whatnot whenever I'm in the States as well. So your essays, including what I read about, you know, as your 21 observations on China from your brief earlier visit, are, you know, quite textured. I think they're really quite nuanced and very personal. I really enjoyed reading them. So tell me about the process for you, sort of coming to the decision to come and spend months actually living in China. Was there some point of epiphany or a sudden realization that you really, really needed to try and get your head around to China? Or was there maybe an article you read, a conversation you had, whether in Germany or in the States, that led you to this pretty radical decision?

[A]

That's a good question. I don't think there was a moment of epiphany. But, you know, I'm somebody who writes relatively broadly about the world. One of my key interests is the future of political systems and whether democracy or some other regime form is going to dominate the 21st century. But I'm also someone who tries to stay abreast of the news and to understand that was going on in the world more broadly. And I realized that perhaps the most important subject that I don't know that much about, along with artificial intelligence, which I'm also trying to learn more about, is China. My aspiration is not to become a China specialist. There's many accent China specialists, and that's not the path I've chosen in my life. And I think it's probably too late to compete with anybody in that line of work. But my purpose is to know as much about China as a well educated, Western, quote unquote, public intellectual, as you put it, or political commentator would about, say, Spain. Right. I'm not an expert in Spain, but as somebody who grew up in Europe, yeah, I can understand some Spanish. I have a basic sense of the history of Spain. I've spent some time there. You know, I have a feel for the place, far from the field that an expert would have for it, but enough that I kind of have a sense of what the country is like. And I realized that like most people who spend their time writing columns for newspapers and magazines, et cetera, I didn't really have that for China, even for China is obviously an incredibly important and influential place. And so my goal really was to get to the kind of level of cultural and linguistic and political fluency with China that I have of places like Spain, which is both modest because, as I'm saying, it's not trying to get to the level of specialist and quite ambitious because, frankly, learning enough Chinese that you actually can understand something and can have a conversation is, as many of your listeners know, not an easy challenge.

[B]

Not easy at all. You and Adam should compare notes sometimes. So you're both taking on this Herculean task of learning this very, very difficult language. You both already speak German and English, and so they couldn't be two more different languages, though. I mean, Chinese and then the Germanic languages. My God. But yeah, good luck to you. How's that going so far? How's the language learning?

[A]

It's going gradually. I think the beginning is easier than you think because the grammar turns out to be so easy and so pleasingly modular and logical. Right. I mean, to put something in the plural, you just add men. And to put something in the future, you just add way. And, you know, you feel like you're really progressing. And then I think you get to the beginning of this long plateau when you say, all right, I've learned a bunch of grammar in some words, but I'm having trouble speaking and I'm really having trouble understanding and comprehending whether it's real life, people you encounter, or media. And then it sort of. That's the stage where I think you attempted to give up. And I think I'm sort of trying to move along that plateau. And it certainly helps to spend time in the country. And so by the end of my last day in Shanghai, you know, I was able to talk to people in cafes or cab drivers or friends of friends that I encountered. Certainly not with any great degree of fluency, but I'm probably at the level of HSK4B2 or something. Something along those lines.

[B]

Not bad, not bad. And then give us some, some sort of time parameters. When did you get there and when did you leave? How long did you spend there?

[A]

Oh, so I really haven't spent very much, very long in the country yet. This is my third trip in about as many years. The first time was at the tail end of the pandemic on a. Whatever it is, a 72 hour transit visa or 104 hour transit visa, whatever it is. So then the next time I came because I was invited to speak at a conference at Fudan, and that was in the middle of term. So I was only able to be there for about five days. And now, you know, in the, in the summer, I was able as a German passport holder to come into the country for some language study for about three weeks.

[B]

Okay, okay, so add it all up. It's still about a month. Right? So not, not it's about a month.

[A]

Yeah. So it's, I mean, very limited. I'm aware.

[B]

Right. So you wrote a pair of these essays. You described China's strengths. As I said, you know, it's infrastructure, it's technocratic drive, cultural unity, all that stuff alongside its, you know, well, well known weaknesses. You know, disenchantment these days among young people, demographics, deficit in soft power. When you look at these two lists, is there something that surprised you in the course of your visits? Because this is no criticism of you. With my lack of outsider perspective, maybe it's because of me. Nothing on either of these lists would, I would have thought, been all that surprising. Even as somebody who's never really been to China, as long as they were paying some modicum attention to the news, reading social media and whatnot, I mean, there wasn't anything that jumped out at me as like, wow, I hadn't thought of this as a particular strength, or I hadn't thought of this as a particular weakness. So I'm more curious about what, what it was that might have surprised you.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think that probably the strengths are more obvious than the weaknesses. I'm not sure that the strengths that I list all that surprising. I do think that there's an absence of a certain kind of weakness which perhaps itself is a strength that is surprising. I mean, the most obvious of this is that obviously China is an authoritarian country and people who criticize particular political figures of a government in particular ways can very easily find themselves in hot water. But I do think that the. And that's very real. But I do think that there's a kind of western imaginary of China which resembles Moscow in 1953 or perhaps in 1980, in which people are extremely scared to talk about politics, in which ordinary people would be very worried about voicing any kind of criticism of a government. And to return to the cliche we discussed at the beginning of conversation, that's one area in which talking with ordinary people is really helpful because it turns out that ordinary people, I think, have a lot of pride in how the country has developed. I certainly don't get the sense that most Chinese are hankering for some kind of western style democracy, but they're also pretty open about the things that they're critical of. They're also pretty open about things that they think are corrupt or don't work very well or about the difficult circumstances of their own life. And so I think that there is an ability for people to feel like they have their say and perhaps with a system in smart ways to pick up on where the discontent is, which is one of the strengths of the system that is not very visible from the outside. The other thing is what I wrote under the heading of high modernism. Now I'm a reader and a lover of James Scott, the great Yale University, late Yale University anthropologist, seeing like a state, right? Seeing like a state who pointed out the ways in which these attempts from the center to control and to improve certain schemes to improve the human conditions, he says in the subtitle of the book, have failed. But these attempts from a very centralized vantage point to rationalize the world in such a way that it's supposed to improve things. And Scott is very persuasive about the fact that that often goes wrong, and of course, it has often gone wrong in Chinese history as well. But I think there's also strength to a certain form of high modernism that it's easy to overlook. Now, part of that is obvious, like infrastructure, right? The inability of the United States to build high speed rail from San Francisco to LA compared to, you know, the incredible growth of infrastructure and high speed rail in China. But part of that is to push towards a kind of form of culture and linguistic unity, right? So I'm really struck by the fact that China really never had a lingua franca. I mean, it had a written language that was shared. But of course, most people, as in most parts of the world, were illiterate. And then most people in modern day China could in the past not have communicated with each other because the local dialects or the local languages were just too far apart from each other.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And, you know, through one of the most extreme exercises of high modernism in the contemporary world, China is changing that. Right? Basically, any Chinese person under the age of 30 now does have a lingua Franco with each other. And as long as that policy is kept up for the next few decades, a huge majority of Chinese people, first time in the history of a country, are going to be able, without much effort, to communicate with each other.

[B]

Absolutely right.

[A]

In Putonghua. And that, you know, that, for example, I think, is a genuine strength of a country that is quite remarkable, but comes with downsides and disadvantages. Of course, that may not quite be obvious to outsiders.

[B]

Not Unique to China, of course. I mean, Italy went through this, of course, and so did France, and really so did England. I mean, there have been these projects of. Of imposing a sort of national lingua franca. What I really liked in your framing in those essays was how he talked about sort of this intimate entanglement of strengths and weaknesses. The way these higher modernist ambitions that you talk about produced both high speed rail and overproduction. How this insane work ethic produces real dynamism, real economic growth, but also burnout. I really liked that framing. I thought that was an excellent thing. And I think I'm going to borrow it and use it.

[A]

Thank you. Please do. Yeah, I mean, I borrow it from Isaiah Berlin and it's something that I think is important about the world in general. I see people who love their friend because he's so spontaneous and fun and always makes you commit to an evening and suddenly it's 1am and you've had the best time. And then they get really angry at that same friend because sometimes they'll stand you up or they'll turn up late, or they'll be unreliable. And you know, those two character traits are related. It's very hard to have a one without the other. And so my personal principle is that you have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your friends and take them for what they are. And if you think the weaknesses outweigh, then you don't have to be friends with them. But to hope that this person is going to stay as fun as they are and also always be reliable is just a losing endeavor. And the same is true with countries. I love Italy, which is a wonderful place, and a lot of what's wonderful about it is how humane it is and how people prioritize hanging out with each other and human connection. But the corruption of Italy is related to that. It's because the bureaucrat is going to say, but this is my friend, I'm just going to stamp this paper. Who cares about the rule that you end up with those parts of the culture as well. And so I think that's a way to, to analyze any country. And it is of course a way to analyze China. And you know, to name one, one example that you briefly evoked, it is impressive how hard working the country is, how rapidly it's transformed itself economically, how driven a lot of a country remains today, what kind of level of service you can expect in all aspects of your life. And of course, it is also the 996 work culture, the extreme meritocratic competition, the Fact that the English exam on the Gaoko is now about as hard as the SAT is for native speakers in the United States. That produces burnouts and people supposedly wanting to lie flat. I haven't seen as much of that in my personal conversations while I've been in the country. Or the desire to have putong Shanghua, the desire to have an ordinary life, a convent's life, to opt out of the corporate rat race and perhaps just have a safe state sponsored job in a third or fourth tier city rather than trying desperately to make it in Beijing and Shanghai. So once again, yes, the strengths of the system and the weaknesses are related to each other.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, you talk about that mutual envy between the rich and the poor in China. Just an anecdote from a conversation that you had. But I thought that was really, really interesting. And you mentioned Isaiah Berlin and he's been sort of a touchstone for some of my ideas that I do want to get into with you because I'm really curious to see what you think of them. But yeah, it's actually related. And when he talked about how the Italian might prioritize one thing or another. I do want to talk about the way that values are prioritized in China versus in certain Western liberal democracies that we're familiar with. And we'll get into that in a bit. But I want to touch on some of these other weaknesses that you identify. These crack in China's rise. To what extent do you think that they are fundamental and structural versus maybe circumstantial and potentially fixable? It's a big question.

[A]

But yeah, I think that is a very big question. I mean, look, I think part of this actually is just the cost of success that any society is going to have. I'm struck by the extent to which some of what young, well educated Chinese people tell me runs very parallel to what my students might say at Johns Hopkins. They have high expectations because the parents probably already had pretty good jobs, most of them. Their parents may have been very poor and come from rural areas, et cetera, but many of them who are in the early 20s now, you know, they have parents who kind of made it right. You know, they worked really hard to get into a good university and now expect to have a good career. And then they look at the cost of a lifestyle that they in some ways take for granted from a parent's generation. And they say, my God, you know, buying an apartment in Beijing and Shanghai is so expensive, I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to make that the expectations on me if I want to get married for the kind of material security I can provide for my spouse is so high. I'm not sure that even is an aspiration. But I have. And you know, whereas our parents probably had it much tougher in terms of how they grew up and the limitations of opportunities when they were young, there's also all of the space because everything was developing so rapidly and so you could go and have these crazy careers. And you know, now I look at the jobs I'm offered and you know, it's working incredibly hard for slow progression in some big company and not really having a life. And is that really worth it?

[B]

Right, right, right.

[A]

Is the deal actually won that I should take? And that doesn't sound so similar to somebody who's complaining that yeah, they can get a pretty decent job out of college if they're lucky and they work hard, but it's going to be a very slow climb up for corporate hierarchy or ladder in New York or Boston or la. And the cost of housing there is incredibly expensive and the boomers mess it up for us. I mean, it's not quite the same story, but it has more resonance than you might think.

[B]

Yeah, and I'm really glad you bring that up because it's something that a lot of people overlook. Just when they do point to these problems, I mean, often they are mirrored. Exactly. I mean, that brings me to a question that I have about one of the common criticisms, and it's one that it's not a criticism, it's one of the sort of features of life that's empirical, which is of course the demographic decline, the collapse, you could even say, I mean, it's probably going to be more severe than even UN projections. But I mean, there's some people who'd say that this alone is going to constrain China's long term ambitions. But I'm really curious about this. So do you see for example, China's demographic future as comparable in some way to the falling birth rates in liberal democracies? I mean, is it a symmetrical kind of challenge? Is that one like the sort of rat race or not having a better life than your parents had? Is it comparable in that sense?

[A]

So I think the problem of depopulation is global at this point. It doesn't exist in all parts of the world. There's still countries in sub Saharan Africa that are very poor, that have very high birth rates, but it is present in virtually all parts of the world. I mean, strikingly, countries like India and Mexico, which many people often still think of as high fertility countries, have now fallen below replacement rate. The Islamic Republic of Iran, despite its theology, is at, I believe, 1.6 children per woman. So way below the replacement rates, a little bit above two. Yeah. And of course, you know, I had breakfast this morning with a senior French politician who was very worried about the low birth rate in France. And France actually used to be of European countries that did comparatively well. And then there's places like Italy and Spain and other countries in Southern Europe which have a particularly low birth rate for, for, for the West. So this is a global problem with the exception of very, very poor parts of the world. Having said that, I do think that the problem in East Asia in general, and perhaps in China specifically, is more profound. One reason for that is the one child policy which has set up a cultural norm of having very few children to an extent that doesn't quite exist in other areas of East Asia. And one part seems to be cultural. I mean, I have to say that I was quite struck talking to people, both to individuals who were reflecting on their own lives and to sociologists and researchers who had access to very interesting studies. How low a priority love is for people in China and how low a priority marriage is. At the same time you go to a place like India, the priority of love is very low. You know, less than 1 in 10 marriages in India are so called love marriages. Most of them continue to be arranged, but nearly every young Indian person wants to get married. It's just they have a different idea of what marriage entails. It might not be the Western idea of romantic love. I'm quite struck in China by the fact for many young people, they think that just as the idea of a corporate career is a kind of false promise that is being pushed on them that they mistrust the idea of falling in love is one that is overhyped. In hugely romantic TV shows that still are quite popular, their abortive attempts at finding some love like that in the life often go badly wrong for any number of reasons. And then many of them seem to have come to the conclusion that this is just a lie that society is pushing on us as well. And then when you ask them, well, but don't you hope to have a life partner and get married? They say, no, I, you know, I, the expectations to get married are too high and the demands of life are already so many. That's just another set of obligations and another set of risk that I would be inviting into my life. And I remember asking a Couple of people in some amount of surprise. Well, that isn't part of the point of a life partner that they lose their job. You can help them out, and if you lose your job, they help you out. And so even in a pretty kind of instrumental point of view, that could actually be something useful. And the answer to that is, oh, but how do I know that if I lost my job they would ever look after me? They might just be straight out the door. And I was struck by that as a response, I have to say. Right. So I do think that there's something about a skepticism about romantic love coupled with a destruction of the expectation that you must get married and a traditional means of arranging marriages that still persist in a place like India, coupled perhaps with a certain lack of social trust and a lack of trust that somebody who chooses your life partner actually would have your back. That may help to explain why China's birth rates are lower even than that of some other countries with very low birth rate traits.

[B]

Right. I'm going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here because I get too good to resist. But a friend of mine who I think I should introduce you to next time you were in Shanghai, she's a Chinese American woman who worked in television in Beijing for a long time. She moved to Shanghai. I had a drink with her some months ago, back in the spring, I think. And she actually was at that talk that you attended. She is a screenwriter. She's actually a showrunner for a new sitcom, an American style sitcom, I think.

[A]

I think one was striking me. So to interrupt you, Kaiser, is that the expert team in Shanghai is so small, but at the end of my two weeks there, I went to a dinner in honor of somebody's birthday which had 12 people and I already knew 10 of them. And I'm 99% sure I know who you're talking about.

[B]

Okay, great. Right. Well, I'm going to have Joan. So we were having her on the show and I think her fantastic explanation of this sort of destruction of love as you were talking about is a function of the one child policy itself. That you have these single children, the men are coddled and entitled and believe that they have, you know, they're so used to being treated like princes that anything less than that sort of royal treatment is just beneath them. And the women are all taught that, you know, this is unfortunately a man's world. You need to be 10 times better to get just as far as. And so of course they're not going to settle for these little Entitled little sniveling shits. Right. And so, yeah, I think it's great and it's set up so well for. I mean, it has such comedic potential and at the same time it's so damn tragic.

[A]

And I hope that Joan succeeds in her mission to ring the sitcom over the high level sitcom to China because I have to say that I struggle to find Chinese watching material that keeps me sufficiently engaged. So I very much look forward to the premiere of her show. And I will binge all of it if it's as good as I'm hoping it will be.

[B]

Yeah, well, I hope she's listening and she's a listener, so she'll bend. I actually had a really long, very interesting chat with her boyfriend at a party in Beijing the other day. So he's up here, a Danish journalist. But anyway, let's talk about soft power, which is another thing that you highlight, the relative weakness of Chinese soft power compared to Japan to Korea. Do you think that this is a temporary lag? Something systemic maybe? I mean, I have my own theories about this, multiple factors. I mean, I do want to hear what you have to say, but I'm just going to see this. Of course, what you naturally point to censorships or the top down over centralized control of culture production. These are all very natural and I think those are part of it. But I think a big factor might just simply be that China isn't anywhere close to where Japan was in terms of per capita GDP, let's say as a percentage of say, American GDP when its soft power really manifested itself in the US. So I mean, I remember sometime in the 1980s, suddenly I knew the names of all the Akira Kurosawa films and I knew all the names of the sushi fish. And Japanese culture was everywhere. And it was around the time that Japan hit about 75% of, you know, contemporary American GDP per capita. And you know, weirdly, the same thing happened when kind of Korea rounded the corner 70% threshold and suddenly, you know, these K dramas and K pop were everywhere. I mean, maybe it's too Marxist of a theory, but maybe it's one of these superstructural things that comes from a more economic foundation. What do you think?

[A]

Yeah, let's start with a bare fact of it, which is just that I think most people in the United States or in Europe would struggle to name a living Chinese person. I don't mean Chinese origin person, but somebody who actually was born and raised in China, who is not Yao Ming. Right, exactly. Xi Jinping. Yao Ming. AI Weiwei. I mean, you can, you know, maybe a few famous people in the west, and that's about it. I mean, you know, I. I'm not sure that you get beyond five people who have a name recognition of more than 25%. I mean, it's really quite striking.

[B]

Probably the same for South Korea right now. I don't think a lot of people know their names. I mean, even if they know the names of bands and outside of fandoms, they probably don't know the individuals, you know, in bts. I happen to know all their names because my daughter has festooned our house in posters of them. So I.

[A]

But that's already a difference, right? I'm not sure. Yeah, look, I take the point, but it's not clear to me that, you know, perhaps your daughter knows Chinese bands, given that she's growing up a bit, that, you know, the equivalent mistakes, something like that, might. Might not know those names either. Now, you know, China obviously has a cuisine which is very popular worldwide because it's. It's a wonderful cuisinery, wonderful set of cuisines. It has, of course, Chinese origin people who are incredibly successful in the diaspora and who are often good ambassadors for Chinese culture in other ways as well. It, of course, has an incredibly rich history that people are aware of, even if they might not know it deeply, but they know of Confucius and they know that there's a deep tradition of Chinese philosophy and that that's something to respect. But when you look at contemporary products of Chinese culture, you know, the list gets very thin.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You have TikTok as a technological medium, but of course, most of what people consume on TikTok in the west is Western content, but not really Chinese content. You have some animes now or some movies that are very successful in China and a few other places in the world, but not really much beyond that. And so, you know, I think that's just quite a striking fact now.

[B]

And God help us, we have Labubu now. My God.

[A]

Yes. And that, I mean, that is, you know, and perhaps that speaks to what you were talking about, that one of the explanations for this is that if you still have quite low GDP per capita, you know, despite the enormous progress that China has made, your products are going to be geared towards a market that is quite different from that of the average consumer in North America or Western Europe in particular. And it is interesting that when I ask people about the nature of Chinese television and, for example, whether they would enjoy something like a sitcom, a lot of the people I spoke to said, no, you know, we want something that's escapist. You know, anything that's not escapist is not going to please a Chinese audience. And that certainly comes from not the people who are sort of struggling to go up a corporate ladder in Beijing and Shanghai, but comes from the delivery workers and the factory workers and, you know, the many people in the country who have just actually quite tough lives. And so perhaps, as the society continues to move up the income ladder and people perhaps start to have more leisure, they will also be interested, for example, in consuming television shows and movies, et cetera, which might then speak in a more natural way to people in North America and Western Europe, and certainly the Soviet Union, despite censorship, which was every bit as strong as it is in China, was able to produce at least some cultural products that actually had appeal outside of the Soviet world as well. So I don't know that I have an answer to that, but I am just struck by this, and I would say that I have very low confidence about which direction this is going to go. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in 20 or 25 years there's all of these Chinese cultural products that suddenly are incredibly popular in the United States or in France or elsewhere in the Western world. But by the same token, I don't think that I have enough of the firm grasp of the reasons for that relative weakness of soft power that I would be astonished if that turns out not to be the case.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you don't have a fixed theory on this, but I do want your reaction to a couple of other possible things. I mean, one is that when you just talk about North America and Western Europe as sort of targets, and we often talk about soft power as it relates to, well, you know, us in the west, and we completely ignore Chinese soft power in the global south, which is not inconsiderable. If you go to Vietnam, if you go to all over Southeast Asia, the same sort of escapist fantasy costume dramas, things like that, they're actually quite popular in much of Southeast Asia. They're growing in popularity in parts of South Asia, especially Pakistan, of course, but, yeah, and even in some places with sort of traditional political hostilities to. To the People's Republic. So that's one thing. The other is this. I often wonder when we're talking about soft power, how much of the lack of an effort to export cultural products could have something to do with the huge domestic market itself. I mean, there is an aesthetic divergence and so what are you going to do Are you going to design something that's going to have universal and thus limited domestic appeal, or are you going to try to designing something that is, you know, that you can sell in the language that you speak, in the aesthetic that you're familiar with, for an enormous market, the one that maybe you have sort of soft consumption of late, but still.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So those are a couple of theories of mine to throw in there.

[A]

It would be interesting to look more deeply at the origins of Hollywood's dominance of the world. And obviously what the United States shares with China is a huge internal market. And so you could imagine that perhaps early on Hollywood really was just producing for the American market.

[B]

What it didn't share is, I mean, total global hegemony. Right. The United States, especially in the post war period, I mean, this has been unparalleled really in history.

[A]

Yeah. But just to say one more thing. So it could be that early on, the US mostly produced for its own market, but later on, perhaps once there was a cinema in every small town in America, people started to want to produce much more for other countries because that's how they could continue to increase profits and increase reach. Perhaps there's a theory like that. On the other hand, you might also.

[B]

Yeah, the theory is called Marxism.

[A]

Well, on the other hand, American culture is in certain ways built to be universal because it's an immigrant society.

[B]

That's true too.

[A]

So, you know, from the beginning, Hollywood had to appeal to people who had just arrived in the country, who had arrived in the country 10 or 20 years ago. And so perhaps the amount of adaptation that you needed to make an American movie understandable to somebody outside of the United States was much lower versus, of course, China being a very old society and a society which continues to have a lot of internal migration, but quite few immigrants from the outside. Perhaps when you produce a movie for the Chinese market, because it doesn't have this thing that's quite specific about the United States and a few other countries in the world that, that, that being shaped by an immigrant society, it just makes it harder. The trade off you're describing between am I serving the specific cultural taste of a Chinese market or a broader set of viewers?

[B]

You're not faced with that in America. Right.

[A]

Given. Yeah, given the nature of, of Chinese culture. And I think it's a difference between American and British culture. I mean, humor plays a huge role in Britain because it's an island whose inhabitants have been there for centuries. And so you can rely on the assumption that you're going to get the same cultural references, and that a small inflection in your voice is going to successfully communicate that you're actually being ironic rather than serious. American humor can't rely on that. Or at least historically couldn't rely on that because you always had 10 people in the audience who just arrived seven years ago and who might have learned English, but who didn't understand those subtleties of expression. And so American humor is quite different and more universal than British humor.

[B]

Right, so instead it was slipping on a banana peel and falling, hitting someone in the face with a pie instead. Right, Yeah, I take your point and I think it's a very interesting theory about the sort of the multi ethnic nature of America. But I think there's also something even more basic, which is that America invented and pioneered a lot of these mediums and they got to sort of decide the norms and forms. And there was a certain path dependency after that. Anyway, we can go on about that for a long time. But related to this, because it is sort of about the ability to attract you contrast America's pretty substantial, although fading, network of friends with China's thin circle of allies. I wonder whether China will be able to overcome this through economic statecraft, through belt and road and mineral deals and all that stuff. I wonder if they are actually just more cultural and historical in their foundations and maybe that those grievances are stickier than what a couple of belt and road deals build you a stadium and a highway will actually do. Honestly, I wonder how resilient American alliances are after Trump 2.0. What are your thoughts about that?

[A]

Yeah, look, I think one of America's biggest trends is its deep system of alliances around the world. I mean, America is not just surrounded by friends. In the case of Mexico and Canada, it is allies with virtually all of the countries across one of its major oceans, the Atlantic. It has allies in far off places like India, for example.

[B]

And of course, all these things that you're describing are very questionable right now. I mean, you've just talked.

[A]

No, of course. And one of the tragedies of a Trump administration is that they don't understand the strength that has given the country. And it comes from a fundamentally zero sum worldview. Trump thinks, and he's been explicit about that since the days of the art of a deal, that in any deal there's a winner and a loser. And just like at a poker table, famously, if you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you. You know, if, if, if the other person with whom you just struck a deal isn't squirming and isn't angry and isn't ranting at you, then probably they think they're winning, which must mean that you are actually losing. And since America's allies around the world have historically valued the partnership of America, Trump has concluded that America must be the sucker and he needs to address that. And that is deeply destructive of the biggest strength that America has. Absolutely.

[B]

That's my concern.

[A]

Now, it is interesting, I think, that when you look at a map, China is surrounded by countries with which it, for the most part has historically had very complicated relationships. And we just had the remarkable summit in which you saw, you know, Xi Jinping alongside Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, Putin and Kim Jong Un. So obviously some forms of cooperation are possible between those countries. But, you know, India and China continue to have territorial disputes and are quite deeply hostile to each other in a number of respects. Even when China and Russia were both ruled by communist parties whose histories are deeply linked and intertwined, China and the Soviet Union repeatedly came to very serious conflicts, both because of territorial disagreements and because of competing geostrategic interests and because of other reasons. China obviously has historically very traumatic relationship with Japan because of Japanese imperialism and Japanese occupation of parts of China's territory, a complicated relationship with Vietnam. You can go on. I do think that this is a problem that China's leadership is going to have to solve. Now, one reason to one way to do that is through the Belt and Road initiative and other ways to actually invest in neighboring countries and countries that lie further afield and show them that you're able to help them have very good development. But the temptation then is both to use those initiatives to serve short term profits for China and to use the leverage of those projects give you to impose some forms of political control on those countries. And I think in that respect, both China's inflexibility in terms of repayment and other things have led to some amount of rebellion in those countries. And the attempt at using wolf warrior diplomacy to actually assert China's interests has quickly made those countries wake up to some of the dangers implicit in this as well. And I will say one more thing, which is that some anti Americanism may be reasonable and some anti Americanism is irrational, rooted in the fact that people are always going to hate the top dog and always going to be resentful about the top dog because the top dog makes you feel small and the top dog makes you feel dependent.

[B]

Then you think that China is replicating this.

[A]

Now, I think it's structural that the more China rises, the more it's going to, in the best case, deal with some forms of irrational fear of China just because people are always going to have resentment against the local or the regional hegemon. And the more China tries to use its influence over countries, thanks to things like belt and roll, and in a quite explicit way, the more that structural driver of fear of China is going to be complemented with an additional, perhaps more rational fear of the ways in which it undermines local sovereignty and so on.

[B]

Again, there's sort of implicit psychology in national relations that I think we all sort of intuitively recognize. And that's one of the features of it, that ganging up on the Big Guy, that's a feature of all factional politics. I want to pause here for a second before moving on to our next topic and ask you just a pretty simple question, which is how have your views on English or German language media coverage of China changed, if they have changed at all, from before you started taking a keen interest in China and the present? In other words, do you find you view media coverage of China differently before and since?

[A]

Well, there's this great line about the media that you trust the media and you think it does a pretty good job of representing things until in any way the media reports on an institution that you know pretty well, or some question you know pretty well, perhaps some story involving you, and then suddenly you realize that it gets a lot of important things wrong. But of course, the temptation is to go back and assume that the moment you read about something you know less about, it must be pretty accurate and pretty right. And. And I guess I would say that before I started to learn more about China, I assumed that the coverage would have all kinds of biases and all kinds of simplifications.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But I wouldn't have been able to tell you which. I could have instincts about that, or say, oh, this smells like a cliche, or it smells like the sort of thing that, you know, an editor at home would ask a foreign correspondent to write up, even if a foreign correspondent perhaps is a little bit skeptical of a story. But I didn't really know. And now I feel like my assessment of how accurate the coverage is hasn't really changed that much. But I have some more confidence in saying this feels like a cliche that just is good for clicks back home. And this is the thing that actually seems on track or seems insightful. But I'm also aware that I still have serious uncertainty about how much I understand the country myself.

[B]

Of course, yeah, I mean, and I want to ask you about how you sort of sit with your own sort of epistemic uncertainty when it comes to China. I mean, for example, you talked about the importance of factionalism and how that lurks beneath the surface, you know, in, in the party, despite its sort of facade of unanimity and, you know, the factionalism. I raised this just because, you know, this is one of the things, one of the. The framings for our understanding of elite politics that I'm actually not sure on. I honestly don't know. I mean, I've heard the arguments on both sides. Should we understand elite politics in terms of factions? Is that useful or. I've heard arguments pretty persuasive ones against as well. So, honestly, this is one of those many issues on which I just don't know where to come down. And so I've gotten very used to just being able to just look someone straight in the face and say, I simply don't know. I think you're very aware of your role as a relative newcomer to this and to the complexity of it. I mean, a very admirable way. I like that you don't over claim. Many people in the field do. So how do I think you have a good instinct to avoid that temptation? That's maybe something I feel like everyone should try to cultivate a kind of epistemic humility.

[A]

Well, I think, you know, by the way, one of the things I love about writing a lot on Substack is that it gives you the freedom of form to play with that. I mean, the reason why my first essay about the top is called 23 observations about China is that I didn't feel like I had. You know, I went to China for five days and here's my definitive take on it. Right. But I did feel like I'd learned a lot of things. And, you know, when people asked me over a drink, hey, what did you see in China? I thought I had interesting things to say and I wanted to be able to share them with my readers. And I think having this kind of form where you can just have 23 disjointed observations that don't claim to aspire to an internal coherence is one way of doing that. So I think you can sort of be relatively certain about specific things while being quite explicit about the fact that it's really hard to know how that adds up into an overall picture. And that's probably the way to do that without being really boring. Just answering every question of, well, I don't know. Now, on the question of factionism specifically, I guess I would distinguish between what we know from political science about factionalism in autocracies more broadly, which surely applies in China as well, to what we know right now about the role of various factions. And, you know, it turns out that democracies have deep factions and they're quite open and they're able to organize very openly. And often they're called political parties, for there's other forms of political factions as well. And how to manage those is one of the deep questions that the founders ask themselves in Federalist 10 and other major writings. Right. In autocratic regimes, factions often are hidden because there is no open party politics. In most of them, the scope to disagree with the political leadership is much more restricted. But often people have patronage networks and they are still competing over the top positions in the state and they're competing over the rents that they might be able to extract from having political power. And so that is always a feature of autocratic political regimes. It has very obviously been a big feature in the relatively recent history of China. And I think the question is sort of at the moment, to what extent has one person actually been able to monopolize power in the hands in such a way that factions are not a particularly important factor in what determines the policy that the CCP will pass at its next party congress, and to what extent under the surface, in ways that are very difficult for ordinary Chinese or for journalists to see, those factional systems have actually survived and determined a lot of what's happening in ways we can't really track. And I certainly don't have an answer to that specific question. But I think I can set it up from general knowledge and political science in such a way that this is a life question that we have to answer. I will say one more thing which I think is interesting. You know, when I've spent some time in India, that's a place in which I feel it's very easy to get to know the elite, because the elite is fully English speaking for historical reasons, because they're very open to talking to visitors, because of course, they're not afraid of being seen talking to you or what they might say to you or something like that. It's often harder to get a sense of the country as a whole, in part because there the cultural gulf is often wider and because it has very big regional, religious, linguistic and so on.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

I feel like in China, where obviously there's a huge amount of regional linguistic diversity and ethnic in some amount of religious Diversity, which I don't want to underplay. I would say it's the other way around. Right. I mean, I certainly don't feel like I have a good model of what makes a top official tick, in part because it's much harder to have extended conversations with them. But I think it is relatively easier to get a feel for the pulse of Chinese popular culture or even for the lives of a lot of ordinary Chinese people. And so when I'm thinking about what I know that I have limited knowledge about all of these things, but I think I have a little bit more confidence when I'm able to say something interesting and perhaps surprising to Western audiences about the life and the outlook of a lot of ordinary Chinese people than I do about the inside baseball of what really is happening behind closed boards.

[B]

I would even go further than that and suggest that in China there is a certain kind of a more evenly distributed, more uniform political culture that transcends regional differences and linguistic differences. I mean, you can sort of know something about Chinese elites, or at least that is, I mean, you're not going to have to abandon your assumptions when you go across a provincial border. It's all fairly similar.

[A]

I mean, yeah, the regional differences in politics are, of course, limited in part because people are moved around a lot by the party of the top level and so on. Right.

[B]

Well, Yascha, I think, I think it's really interesting that there's sort of a second order effect here when it comes to patron client relations in China. The Chinese bureaucracy is ages old, and they've had a lot of experience in trying to bust that up. There have been long held practices about not allowing officials in provinces to build those networks by moving them around quickly. Three years. And the Organization Department does the same thing in, in China. It, it sort of takes proactive measures to prevent the creation of these sort of patron client networks. But, yeah, there's only the, the that they have to do that. It all suggests their tenacity. Right. So maybe, yeah, I, I, again, I, I'm just, this is, I only sort of pluck this as one example of epistemic, you know, humility, and you'll find that, you know, you're experiencing it now as a relative novice. Years from now, you will still throw your hands up at some. I have no, no idea. So, yeah, get ready for that. I want to turn now to the real reason I wanted you to come on, and that is really to talk with you about the way that liberalism, that Western liberals have, you know, had to, to come to terms With China, I mean, of late I've been thinking a lot about the way liberals are struggling to, you know, sustain confidence in their tradition when faced with an illiberal, but at least by some important measures, undeniably successful illiberal state. China, do you see what we're in right now as any kind of a crisis of liberal faith? I suppose you probably do, but the real question is, does China play a role in that? And if so, how much of what.

[A]

So I do think that the example of China disproves some comfortable assumptions that liberals have had that I, as a philosophical liberal, would like to hold on to if it weren't for the fact that empirics seems to prove otherwise. For example, there was a belief that it's not going to be possible to make significant scientific progress on important areas of frontier research outside of a democracy because you need the culture of free inquiry, the culture of free speech, in order to be able to accomplish that. And I think China shows that you can create a system that certainly doesn't have free speech about politics, but certainly is very constrained in the political rights that people have. But that seems to allow for enough robust discussion, certainly of scientific matters to create a kind of scientific public sphere year that does allow significant advances, whether it's in solar, solar technology and battery technology and EVs and a whole set of other areas we could go on to list. So I think some of that has clearly turned out to be overstated, and perhaps that helps to undermine the faith in liberalism. Nevertheless, I'm not sure that China is at the heart of the crisis of Western liberalism today for two reasons. The first is that most of that crisis comes from the internal contradictions of liberalism itself. You know, it's not like the United States is working fantastically at the moment, right? But people are looking at China and saying, oh my God, China is such an incredible place that even though things are going swimmingly here, perhaps we have a wrong system. The problem is that the citizens within liberal countries like the United States and France and Germany, etc. Are increasingly unhappy with their governments and perhaps unhappy with their system of government that they feel like they're not really being listened to, that they feel like their countries are not delivering for them, and that is leading to, I think, a primarily domestic crisis of those liberal institutions. The fact that China is doing pretty well might sort of be like an added factor in this, but I don't think that primarily is what drives it. The last thing I will say, which I think is a limit of a Chinese model is that to have a true competitor liberalism, you have to have a system which can be replicated in other places. And the problem with the Chinese model is that it works pretty well in practice in a number of ways. Some advantages, some disadvantages, we can debate, but clearly very impressive performance over the last 30 or 40 years. It's a mess in theory. And what I mean by the fact that it's a mess in theory is that it would be extremely hard to implement the Chinese model anywhere else, particularly in any place that doesn't have a longstanding communist political party and a very long standing tradition of meritocratic bureaucracy and high state capacity. So if you ask people in Zimbabwe or in Nigeria, would you rather live in a place that's run like China? They might say yes, because it obviously has significant advantages over the much poorer, much more corrupt, much more troubled forms of public administration that you currently have in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. If you ask people there, we from the political elite in Zimbabwe are offering you a deal where we're going to start to behave like the Chinese Communist Party. Do you want to go along with us? Do you trust that deal? They're going to say, hell no, because they'll say you might import all of the bad things of that model, but how on earth can we trust that you're going to import the good things of that model? Are you going to be as competent as a Chinese bureaucrat? Are you going to be as meritocratic as that? Are you actually going to lead to this rapid development? Probably not. So we don't want that to be fair.

[B]

China is very aware of its particularism. Right. I mean, that's why with Chinese characteristics gets appended to everything. Right?

[A]

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, I hope that that remains the case, but it's one of the somewhat reassuring things. But I don't think the Chinese political leadership wants to impose its model on every other country that they're allied with. But it does limit the extent to which China's success poses a threat to the liberal paradigm because it's not in competition with it the way that the Soviet Union was.

[B]

Right. Implicit in what you say here is that liberalism itself is kind of a proselytizing religion. Right. It has this need. I mean, it believes very strongly in its own universality. Right. It's fairly rigid in that way. But I've always, I've long believed that Western liberalism has had a changing relationship to particularism and especially to sort of relativism. I think that in the 60s and 70s especially sort of watching countries come out of a colonial experience that they were, you know, that liberals were deeply, philosophically opposed to. They were ready to accept that values in those places were very much shaped by historical circumstances, by culture, and they might be valid even if they diverged from our own liberal values. But today liberalism just seems more, well, frankly, dogmatic, more universalistic. Do you agree with that? And if so, do you think that this shift has happened? Why? I mean, why has this happened? And how does China's successor or challenge fit into that story?

[A]

Yeah, I think the story may be a little bit more complicated than that, because I would say there's two dimensions here. One dimension is the extent to which Western liberals believe that there are certain values which are universally valid. And on that, I actually think that a lot of people, certainly a lot of students I teach, have come to be less sanguine about that. That in the 1950s, 1960s, people would have said, of course, it's very important for individuals to be self determining. Of course it's very important for individuals to be able to have basic political liberties. Of course they're important for women to be able to free, to make choices about themselves. Whereas now I think a lot of the students I have would say, well, you know, we are just Eurocentric. This is just, you know, Western values. You know, if in Afghanistan, the one to allow the Taliban to tell women that they're not allowed to go out of a house unless they're fully veiled, then who are we to judge? So I think there's a kind of form of moral relativism that has entered the discourse perhaps in the 1960s that's grown to be stronger, but actually I think is much more present in the minds of the average American today than it would have been 50 years ago. Now, on the other hand, I think that there is sort of a set of questions in high politics about the extent to which we're willing to live with compromise, the extent to which we need to recognize the limitations of our own ability to impose our values on other countries. And there, the unipolar moment after the fall of the Soviet Union certainly created the huge temptation to be overly sanguine to think we can go into Iraq and we're going to turn it into a blooming democracy, and that will be a model for the Middle east and everything suddenly will become much better. And we can do that in all these different countries in the world. And obviously in 50 years, most countries in the world will be democracies, and that'll be wonderful. And There, I would say that, you know, in the Cold War, people had the recognition that there's a big geopolitical, geostrategic adversary, which made that hard. After the fall of a Soviet Union, there was a moment of hubris where a lot of politicians from the United States and beyond were much too sanguine about their ability to do that. And then the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other military interventions have somewhat revitalized relativism.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yes, Bled that. No, I actually think we should have a mix of those two.

[B]

Well, so do I. So do I.

[A]

Right, so. So I think that we should. You know, I'm a philosophical liberal, and I do think that every individual in the world should have some rights of self determination and that when those rights are curtailed, that is something that is sad to me that I care about. And insofar as I have agency to improve that, I would, I mean, if I could flip a button to make sure that women in Afghanistan are able to leave the house while wearing a burqa and able to access a primary education and able to do all of those things, I absolutely would. I don't think that some notion of cultural self determination should override the rights of those women to go to school if they so choose, which currently they don't have. I think it's a confusion to think the Taliban get to choose that because of different cultures. No. What about those women who want to go to school? Why does a government they did not elect, they did not select, get to choose for them, but they won't get an education? I think that that is absolutely a tragedy and absolutely something that would be good if it wasn't the case now. I also think that we should be very aware of how incredibly difficult it is to influence the world, and therefore, by and large, that should not be our ambition. I don't think the ambition of the United States should be to somehow change the political regime in China, because I don't think that we know how to do that. And if we did, and we tried, then for good reasons, of nationalism rooted in Chinese history, that'd probably be a huge backlash anyway. So let's not, you know, pretend that we know how to do things that we don't know how to do. Let's not be naive about the kind of role we can play in the world. Let's understand that international relations can. Can quickly turn very dangerous and toxic if people fear that we're going around the world in the moral crusade trying to remake that in those ways. I think Liberalism has been chastened and it's a good thing that it's been chastened. But that doesn't mean that we have to be cultural relativist. We shouldn't.

[B]

Right, right. I mean, like you, I'm sort of looking for a third way. We don't have that magic switch. I guess part of what I would do is I would sort of classify the Afghanistan to the world, you know, Taliban regimes like that as outliers and look at instead at sort of the larger community of nations where there are actually quite a number of shared values, but that simply get prioritized quite differently. You know, where for example, certain states will prioritize the civil and political rights that you say, you know, the self determination, the individual self determination, but others will prioritize economic rights. That isn't to say that they completely devalue the other. I mean Americans care very much about economic rights and maybe they don't enshrine them to the extent that they do civil or political rights. So I've actually, I'm very uncomfortable with universalism, but also recognize a lot of the dangers and you know, this sort of thinking that your students just described where you know, they, they are okay with women in Perta and in Afghanistan and not allowed to seek even primary education. So I've been developing this idea that I call priority pluralism. And I guess I'll send you this essay that I wrote on this. Other people may have heard me riff on this before, but I think that like your quote of Isaiah Berlin, we can't have all good things in all people. Right. I think there's trade offs and just like your Italians who can be extraordinarily chummy and friendly, but also that comes with corruption. I think that you cannot maximize all values simultaneously. So different cultures will develop kind of different elasticities. They're willing to trade down three points of civil and political liberty for one point of increased administrative efficiency or of economic wheel. Right. So I mean that's just sort of that. I'm sure that you've had a lot of conversations with people in China. I'm sure that many of your western liberal friends have also pushed back on sort of the rosier parts of this two part picture that you paint. And I'm curious what kind of criticisms you've gotten from people whose opinions you really value on other side too critical or too rosy? I don't want to go on bang on too long about my own ideas here, but.

[A]

Well, I think in the west, what's hard to explain is A point that feels quite basic once you've spent even relatively limited time in China, which is the coexistence of a genuine, repressive, sophisticated system of censorship and surveillance with a feeling that people have at least il in real life of relative ease of criticizing aspects of a system in which they live. I think a lot of people in a place like the United States think that either you have complete freedom of speech or there's the secret police listening to everything you say and you complain once about the bus being late and off to the Gulag with you. And so I do find that sometimes even quite politically sophisticated people to whom I try to explain how that system of surveillance and censorship can coexist with a very big directness and outspokenness that is part of, I think, Chinese culture. Actually they can start to think that I'm trying to make excuses for regime or something like that. I think that can be hard to how to explain. I'm sure you've had that experience.

[B]

Yeah, I'm imagining a conversation between you and Ann Applebaum, for example, wondering what that does like, I speak to Ann.

[A]

Often and I think she'd be perfectly happy to take that point. But yes, I think that is an area that is hard to explain. I do think that with some Chinese interlocutors and with some experts in China who kind of perhaps can fall into a certain kind of self loathing adoration of China. Right. A certain kind of, oh, everything is better here and everything in the west sucks. And partially, perhaps we're not fully aware of the relatively different class positions in the two societies, et cetera. You know, there can also be a bristling at any criticism. There can be a kind of like, look at the amazing things that this country has achieved in a very short period of time, which is certainly true. You know, everything else will sort itself out and any problem is just temporary and it's going to resolve itself. And if you are worried or concerned about aspects of a society, that's just because you're kind of Western imperialist, coming in here thinking, you know, wrongly, you know, better. And I think that's also unhelpful. I mean, more broadly, I would say that cultures thrive and it's very hard to get that balance right. I think United States, sometimes we are on, we fall down on the other side of that balance when they have a proud sense of their strengths and also an honest sense of our weaknesses.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think, you know, perpetuating a culture where both of those things are true is very, very hard. I Think over the last year, sometimes in the United States we've been too tempted to devalue elements of our political system or of our culture that actually work pretty well and are pretty important. I think perhaps in China the risk is for understandable reasons of historical pride and hurt that anything that's a criticism can be shut out pretty quickly.

[B]

I certainly hope I don't fall into the category those self loathing foreigners who hate now.

[A]

I don't think so.

[B]

No, no, I know that I don't. But. But what I do worry about right now is that the frame that even some, some of my smartest friends tend to take to China is one that looks more for the reasons why China will find fail rather than starting a new and looking for the reasons why it has enjoyed the success that it has. I think that there's a certain amount of what I described as sort of self soothing and copium in that and I do worry about that and I think that there's a reckoning coming with it. I could go on for hours and I hope we do have a chance to talk about this over a drink at some point. But over the past decade. Let me change gears here and ask you about this because your focus is on the problems of our own liberal societies. But over the past decade we've seen efforts, especially in the U.S. i think it's less common elsewhere, but to try to reduce domestic polarization by building China up as some sort of common enemy. This was done in a kind of just crazily on the nose way by Rahm Emanuel, the former congressman, Chicago mayor, Obama chief of staff. He was recently of course, Biden's ambassador to Japan. And he wrote this recent op ed in the Times where he basically says the enemy is not us, it's them, it's China. Do you think that strategy works? And at what cost? What dangers do you see in rallying liberal democracies around a foreign adversary as sort of a cure for polarization? As much as I fret over polarization, this cannot be the answer to me.

[A]

Well, you know, the good thing about America is that it's such a vast country that in some ways, like China, it tends to be inward looking. And I'm not sure that strategy is going to succeed for a very simple reason that it's much more tempting to hate the person who's your neighbor or down the street who has views about things that directly touch on your life that you disagree with, even if some of those disagreements are themselves quite small or minor or petty or silly than it is to be really, really activated by a government or a country that is very far away and about which most Americans know very little. So I mean, I think that I have moral compunctions about that kind of strategy because the first imperative in the 21st century is going to have to be to avoid World War 3 and to avoid a major war. And for obvious reasons of international relations, one of the two countries that might go to war with each other in the 21st century is the United States and China and the world where it has to have a huge priority. As somebody who has universal political values, I care about the well being of people around the world. And that must mean I care about the well being of over, you know, 1.3 billion Chinese people. I mean, if we want humanity to be doing well, we, we need to want 1.3 billion Chinese people to be doing well. And it so happens that I now have friends and acquaintances there and there's many things like about the culture, but, but even just in pure terms of trying to solve, you know, American political polarization and so on, I just don't think that that is going to be a winning strategy. Unless we're really on the cusp of war in the midst of a war.

[B]

Well then they really are the enemy, right?

[A]

Yes. Yeah, but thankfully we're quite far away from that.

[B]

Yasha, maybe I'm projecting a little reading me into you a little too much, but I wonder, because you talk about the moral costs of such a thing, but there's moral costs of learning from illiberal regimes, from illiberal societies too. I mean, but at the same time, I think that where you are wrestling with as many of us are, we kind of see that there must be certain institutional innovations that we liberal democracies could borrow from China technocratic planning without compromising our values in some way. Is it possible, I think that this is a project you're engaged in, if I'm not wrong.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly many things we can learn from China, you know, from good cuisine to, you.

[B]

Know, there's no moral cost to that one.

[A]

I'm in Paris at the moment and I have to say that the Paris culinary scene, which I've always personally found to be quite disappointing, has been greatly enriched by the arrival of a few decent Chinese restaurants. You know, I mean, to obviously things in technology and frankly investment in research and the university system. You know, it's much easier to get funding for ambitious forms of basic research in China nowadays than it is in the United States. That's something that United States has to fix. I personally don't think that there's many elements of the strictly speaking political system that we can or need to emulate from China, partially because, you know, I do think that the Chinese political system has serious problems of its own, but partially because it would be very hard to sort of integrate or implement that in any coherent way because of the vast differences between those two systems for the same kinds of reasons in which it's really hard to go to Iraq and impose democratic institutions that are going to work for reasons. So I know we have something more specific in mind, but I have to say that that's not at the heart of what I've been thinking about.

[B]

Yasha, it's been such an amazing pleasure to speak with you. I really wish we had had more time to talk when we were in Shanghai. And I do look forward to maybe seeing you somewhere else in the world and sitting down and having a good meal with you, because you clearly do enjoy Chinese cuisine and I'm a very good restaurant orderer, so I think I will dazzle and amaze you. But first of all, thanks for taking so much time to talk with me about this, and I think there will be future conversations to be had.

[A]

I look forward to them. And I have to come to Beijing, so I look forward to you dazzling me with your order when I get.

[B]

There and then other things, the music scene, everything about this. So let's move on to the section of the podcast that I call recommendations, where I'd like to ask you just to talk about a book you've read about a movie or a film or anything else that you think my listeners might be interested in hearing about from you.

[A]

You know, perhaps in context, this is a little bit of a cop out, but one of my favorite political novels is the Leopard, which is.

[B]

Ah, Dilapidusa. Yeah, De la Padusa. I love it. Yeah, I love that novel. I recently reread it.

[A]

Beautiful movie. Yeah, it's a beautiful movie as well, by the way. There's a horrible Netflix series they made a couple of months ago. It's really awful.

[B]

It's beautifully shot, I gotta say. I mean, it's such a terrible departure from the actual book, but the cinematography in it is stunning that you have to.

[A]

I mean, you know, Sicily is a beautiful place. Anyway, the point is that it is a beautiful personal story. It's a romance. There's many things going on in it, but fundamentally it is asking the question of how you deal with historical change and how you Accommodate yourself to historical change, how you shape historical changes. And even though that is a set of questions posed in this book at a very different historical junction, a very different culture, it resonates with the rapid development of China and the disorientation that that has brought into people's lives. And so I think that it's a novel that'll provide a nice dose of escapism for people who are thinking about China every day and then perhaps in unexpected ways, might rhyme with questions they themselves have about the way that country is changing.

[B]

Absolutely. I mean, it is. Well, it's a foundational text in American undergraduate political science. I don't know if you're aware of that, but everyone I know who studied political science like I did in the 1980s is assigned that book at some point by somebody. And that's sort of why we are all so familiar with it. It's also just a rollicking good story. I mean, it's got, you know, love and marriage plots and things like that in it and, you know, infidelities. And it's a wonderful and a smart, trusty dog.

[A]

It's got everything.

[B]

Trusty dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got it all. That's a fantastic recommendation. And, you know, if for no other reason, you know, do look at the Netflix show if you. After you've read the book. I mean, because it's candy. It's eye candy. Especially because, you know, Monica Bellucci's daughter is in it and she's quite something.

[A]

If you're speaking about Icon in the Leopard, go watch the original movie by Visconti with Claudia Cardinale. You know, it has all the eye candy you need.

[B]

Okay. Okay, I will do that. I have not actually seen it, but I reread it just over. I guess it was. Yeah. This winter I reread the Leopard, and it holds up well. So in the spirit of our discussion today talking about liberalism, I'm going to name check Adam Gopnik's book, which he wrote actually, well, six years ago or so. It's called A Thousand Small the Moral Adventure of Liberalism, which is a fantastic defense of liberalism as a tradition of tolerance, of gradual progress, of pluralism, of trying to end cruelty, which I thought was just a really, really good way to think about that. It's a really good. Yeah, it's a super readable, very sensible book and sort of reconnects me with a tradition that I still proudly hew to, in spite of the fact that it's becoming like a religious faith and less of sort of an empirically violent, viable, kind of provable thing that I can see in the world around me. But hey, what a pleasure again, thank you so much. Yasha thank you.

[A]

Kaiser. This is wonderful.

[B]

You've been listening to the cynical podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me. Kaiser Guo. Support the show through [e-mail] where there is a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Or email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show so generously this year. Huge thanks to my guest Jako Molk. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.

[A]

Sam.