My China Priors, Part 1

Because you, gentle reader, deserve to know where I'm coming from

Listen to my narration of this essay here!

Parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.

A Thought Experiment

On my first trip to China in 1981 I began a thought experiment that would shape how I engaged with China emotionally and intellectually over the next 40-odd years. The distance between my privileged and comfortable American life and the life of a kid my age in China would never again be greater: they would instead converge across those four decades until they were, in material terms at least, not so very far apart. And so it’s good that I started my experiment, which began with a “there but for the grace of God go I” epiphany, when it did.

My brother Jay relates in the “Ma-moir” he published last year, Ma in All Caps, how we’d visited family in Wuhan on that trip — half-sisters of my mother and their kids, my half-cousins — and how one of them, roughly my age, had pilfered a lockback Buck knife from me. We recovered the knife, which was for whatever reason dear to me, but I felt immense guilt at having so angrily accused him and demanded its return. Had he asked for it, I said to him but more to myself, I would have given it to him. Narrating the audiobook last November, I flushed with remembered shame on reading that passage — but realized in that same moment that this was when I began my construction of an “alternate timeline,” where I would sync the events of my actual life next to this imaginary born-in-China version of me. I was nine in that otherwise somnambulant, suburban year when my grandfather died; Other Me was nine in that same tumultuous year that saw the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Chiang Kai-shek. I was 10 when my class took a trip to Radio City Music Hall to watch the movie version of the musical 1776 to commemorate the American bicentennial; Other Me was also 10 when over 300,000 people died in the Tangshan Earthquake that July, and when, two months later, the Great Helmsman went to meet Marx — events that all registered on my parents’ psychic seismographs on the other side of the world.

Over the coming years, I would flesh out that alternate, imaginary autobiography. I would buttonhole people whenever I learned that they had, like me, been born in the Year of the Horse: Describe the tents you lived in after the quake. What toys did you own as a kid? How did your parents react when the Gang of Four fell? When did you first try Coca-Cola and what did you think? Tell me your whole cassette tape collection in 1985. When did your family get its first TV? Color TV? When did you own your first bicycle? Where were you on the night of June 3, 1989? I suppose this was early training in the exercise of cognitive empathy, but at the time I might have told myself it was for a novel I intended one day to write — or for a more convincing legend should I ever choose a life in the Wilderness of Mirrors. 

Whatever its original intent, I now count this as one of my China priors. I’ve got a lot of them, these pre-existing beliefs and go-to heuristics, and it occurs to me that people reading what I write, or listening to my podcasts or talks, probably deserve to know what some of them are: the experiences, the instincts, the habits, the mental models that shape the way I think and talk about China. So what follows is an attempt to enumerate some of the more important ones — even the embarrassing ones — through a sort of skeletal autobiographical approach. 

Raised by Communists

So let me start at the beginning. I am the second son of Chinese immigrants born on the mainland — my father Jenkai in Kaifeng, my mother Mary Tan-lee in what’s now Wuhan — who left China at the respective ages of 17 and 11 for Taiwan. They’d both come from families that enjoyed some prominence, though for very different reasons — families that knew one another, as they were from adjoining counties in southern Henan province. They played bridge together, my four grandparents, in Nanjing in the 30s, before the War. My parents both came to the U.S. in the mid-1950s, met in Columbus, Ohio, and got married in 1960 in Berkeley, California, where my father was about to finish his Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

My parents, naturally, can be credited (or blamed) for shaping my early notions of what it meant to be Chinese. Chinese was my first language, though I lost most of it by the time I had finished grade school at Tioga Hills Elementary in the tiny hamlet of Apalachin, New York. I experienced much less racism than might have been expected in an all-white neighborhood. My parents were much loved in the neighborhood for my mom’s contributions to potlucks, my dad’s skills with all things mechanical — carpentry, concrete, masonry, electrical — and his generosity in lending power tools. They loved America but were fiercely proud of their heritage and instilled that same love in the children in the best way they could have: by modeling what they thought of as Chinese values: filial piety, thrift, reverence for learning, appreciation for Chinese aesthetics, and compassion for those who, in their ignorance, ate casseroles and bland burgers instead of Chinese cuisine. I remember jumping up during dinner to answer the door one summer evening in 1974 to find the whole neighborhood assembled on our lawn, with flags and drums, to parade my parents in celebration of their naturalization as American citizens.

My father, especially, marveled at the American system, praised the fundamental decency of Americans, and adored the civic virtue that Americans seemed to possess in abundance. But he was also very critical of inequality, championed bussing and affirmative action, and loathed American militarism. His left-leaning politics, which he shared with my mother, were a reaction I suspect to the relative political conservatism of their own parents. All four grandparents were intellectuals, all college-educated, and they’d all thrown their lot in with the Kuomintang. My paternal grandfather, the historian Kuo Ting-yee, had been close to the leadership in Nanjing when the KMT had its capital there, and closer still during the War, when they retreated to Chongqing. Later, my maternal grandparents were both members of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan. My devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother was a good Nationalist. Her husband, my grandfather Liu Jingjian, had, by contrast, crossed Chiang Kai-shek at various points in his career — including, in 1929-1930, on the battlefield during the Central Plains War when he served as an officer under the warlord Feng Yuxiang. He spent most of his life in Taiwan after 1949 in effective house arrest. 

I remember the Nixon opening and can recall images of Nixon and Kissinger in China when I was just shy of six. Though they were ardent Democrats, my parents credited and defended both Nixon and Kissinger to the end, even when as a college student I insisted that the latter was a war criminal with Laotian, Cambodian, and Chilean blood on his hands. For all they praised Nixon’s bold gambit, they supported George McGovern in 1972, though they hadn’t yet been naturalized. A piece of art I created at age five — a McGovern poster in crayon — was displayed in all their homes: Apalachin, Tucson, and after 1999, Beijing. 

The Nixon opening drove a deep wedge into the Chinese emigree population of our region of Upstate New York. I became aware of the rift on a family trip to watch a Little League World Series game in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, two hours from our home, in 1974: Taiwan teams were a powerhouse back in the 70s, and a team from Kaohsiung was playing an American team for the championship. The Chinese in the crowd were more or less evenly divided between those waving the ROC flag, and those — like my parents, and like us kids — waving the PRC flag. That was the first and only time I’ve ever waved a national flag.

My father's first trip back to China in 1975, when such visits were still rare for overseas Chinese, left an indelible impression on me, filtered through the lens of his slideshows and stories of what, I came eventually to realize, was a standard Potemkin Village tour: model People’s Communes, the marvels of acupuncture as a substitute for anesthetics, the magical transformation of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial nation into the New China. He returned from that trip laden with goodies that held a kind of power over me: revolutionary songs on LPs pressed in red vinyl (many of which I can still sing), stacks of China Reconstructs magazines, a real PLA jacket with red bars sewn to the collar, Mao hats with the authentic, heavy red stars (years later, I would scoff contemptuously at the ersatz hats sold to tourists at the Great Wall and the Summer Palace), bags of White Rabbit candy with the edible rice paper inner wrappers, tangy haw flakes in two-inch-tall tubes, and even propaganda movies on reels: My favorite was one called The Little Trumpeter, or 《小号手》, an animated film from 1973 that you can see on YouTube, about a kid who joins the Red Army and saves the day with well-timed trumpets summoning the guerillas. They’re led by a handsome, lantern-jawed warrior, with the 浓眉大眼 nóngméi dàyǎn — the thick brows and big eyes — of the period revolutionary hero, those eyes ablaze with revolutionary dedication.

At SUNY Binghamton, while my father showed his slides or screened pro-PRC films like Felix Greene’s 1975 classic Freedom Railway, about the construction of the Tan-Zam (or Tazara) Railroad, my mother would press English translations of Selected Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong and Mao buttons into the hands of wide-eyed college students and local labor activists. She began writing for leftist Chinese publications like 《水牛》Shuǐniú — Water Buffalo. 

Idealism and Disillusionment

But even as I absorbed this romantic vision, I was also witnessing my father's gradual disillusionment with Mao, with Communism, and indeed with politics. I remember a cross-country road trip in the family’s Ford Econoline van in 1978 when he recounted heated debates he'd had with my grandfather about the nature of the revolution and the futility of trying to change human nature overnight. My grandfather, he said, understood well — and presciently — the reasons for the Communist victory in 1949: “All of my best students have joined the Communist Party,” he once told my father, just after the Japanese surrender. His firstborn child, my grumpy, frumpy aunt Guo Qian, had refused to leave the mainland with the rest of the family out of devotion to the Party. But Kuo Ting-yee feared the Communists’ utopian visions even more than he loathed the venal authoritarianism of the KMT. My father’s idealism gave way only grudgingly. On that road trip I also remember him saying to me, “But I still believe that the core morality of communism is superior to that of this capitalist society.”

By the time of the first full family trip to China in 1981, my father had been thoroughly disabused of any affection he had once had for Mao’s revolution, and never again did I hear him speak of that “core morality.”  My mother, who I suspect had once held Comrade Jiang Qing in high regard, didn’t drop a beat as she morphed instantly into a gung-ho supporter of Deng’s Reform and Opening. She never did bother with the details of ideology: For her, she simply loved “China” in the abstract, and never stopped resenting, and rebelling against, her own mother’s conservatism, Catholicism, and domineering personality. My father, too, kept an abstract devotion to the country of his birth and dedicated himself to bettering life there. I admired that about them, and especially the way my father manifested that dedication: quietly, unobtrusively, with no expectation of recognition or much reward. I was primed to like China, and to feel a deep personal attachment to the place. On that first trip, I promised myself I wouldn’t utter a word of complaint — in part because I knew that my conspicuously more talented brothers would complain constantly, and I might finally earn the approval of my parents. It worked. In China, I ate whatever was put in front of me, smiled politely at every new uncle and auntie to whom I was introduced, and took both a feigned interest in every exhibit and perverse pride in my stoicism.

My interest in China, built as it was on somewhat flimsy and frankly ulterior motives, nearly didn’t survive high school. In Tucson, from ‘81 to ‘84, my parents opened their home to the many visiting scholars and graduate students who’d made their way to the University of Arizona in the early 80s. In honesty, I struggled to connect with them: it was a chore to drive them around, to clean up after the enormous receptions my mom threw for them, and especially to clean the apartments they had inhabited — rented to them basically at cost by my parents, who’d bought a cheap two-story stucco apartment building with about 24 units near the university. The filth left behind even after only a semester or a year was bewildering to my older brother and me, who were always saddled with the cleanup. I struggled to reconcile these slovenly ingrates with the idealized image of Chinese scholars I’d formed. By the time I graduated high school, I had very little interest in China. My Chinese language abilities were at a low ebb. I had yet to take anything like a romantic interest in a Chinese girl.

In my freshman year at Berkeley, I took an introductory history course taught by David Johnson, who told us all candidly that he had no interest whatsoever in China after 1949. The China he loved no longer existed, he said; it had been destroyed by communism, and he couldn’t be bothered to think about the place let alone travel there. These being the Reagan years, my focus was on the Soviet Union. I took Russian history classes, Soviet politics courses, and courses with titles like “The Balance of Power in Eastern Europe,” and planned to start Russian in my junior year. 

But in the summer of 1986, after my sophomore year, my parents planned a big family trip around Asia: Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, then to China for the remainder of the summer. The China I encountered was almost unrecognizable from the one I had seen just five years earlier. It was as if it had gone from black and white to vivid color. I had only the most rudimentary sense of what had brought about this change — “the market,” “foreign investment,” “export earnings” — but it was clear even to dopey 20-year-old me that the trajectory was a good one and that I should refocus on China, and leave off my erstwhile concentration on the Soviet Union. I’m glad to have studied Russian history and Soviet politics; it’s hard to overstate how important it is to know something about the system on which the PRC’s political system was so closely patterned. But it was a good time to pivot from the USSR to China. Less than six years later, after all, the former would no longer exist.

Equally important to my rekindled interest in China was the fact that, through a random connection of my father’s made during that same trip in ‘86 after I’d already gone back to Berkeley, my college rock band, Freefall, had been invited to play in China. I won’t bore you with the details but the upshot is that we were to play a series of gigs at enormous venues in Beijing and Shanghai, all expenses paid once we landed: We had only to get ourselves there. But we couldn’t. The rift between me and the guy who effectively forced us to abandon the tour caused the band to break up. But I was determined to go to China to play as soon as I graduated. I had one last summer school class to take — paleontology, as I recall, to fulfill a stray natural sciences requirement I’d overlooked — but once done with that I hightailed it to Beijing.

There are so many ways in which that first year spent living in China, from 1988 to 1989, shaped my own perspectives, my academic pursuits, and my attitudes toward China. That year left me with a group of friends, mainly in the rock music scene, whom I very much wanted to keep in close contact with and with whom I hoped to collaborate in the future; a massive intellectual puzzle that I had seen up close, to which I had been an eyewitness but which still baffled me in many ways; and a conviction that my future would be intimately tied to China's future, as well as the rather hubristic belief that I might play some part in shaping that future through my ideas.

Above all, I realized how little I still knew. I had to get my Chinese language in shape — to learn at least to read with some proficiency, and to speak well enough to have more sophisticated conversations about the things that obviously mattered so much. That certainly meant graduate school — something that I had intended in any case to pursue. Before I left the U.S. for China, I had letters of recommendation from reputable scholars in political science and history secured, a GRE study guide, and application materials for the University of Washington, Stanford, and U.C. Berkeley. I originally intended to study Chinese foreign policy.

Keep on Rocking in the Not-so-Free World

But after meeting the guys with whom I would form Tang Dynasty, I had — by spring of 1989, I think — decided to stay in China for at least another year and not return to the States that summer as originally planned. I had been approached to play a role in two movies: One I've written about earlier, "The Crazy Chick Who Played Rock 'n Roll," but another one too — a production by Australia's ABC, written by Linda Jaivin (a China scholar who was then married to noted sinologist Geremie Barmé). My best friend and former roommate at Cal, Drew Szabo, had come to China —arriving, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, on the very day of Hu Yaobang’s death, April 15. The atmosphere of relative freedom during the student occupation of Tiananmen, during which massive parties were held at places like the Ancient Observatory at Jianguomen and Ritan Park where the nascent Beijing rock bands all played to huge crowds, must have persuaded me that not only could I make a career in China but that I'd have a hell of a good time as well. Remember, I was only 23!

The tragedy of June 4 changed all of that. I remember that the day that martial law had been declared, Ding Wu and Zhang Ju came to my grandmother's house, where Drew and I had spent the night and they told us the news. From that day forward we understood that the chances of a serious crackdown were considerably higher. But for the two weeks that followed, it still felt like a stalemate, and life went on largely as it had: rehearsals with the band, riding bikes to Tiananmen to see what was new with the demonstrations, and, in the final days of May and first days of June, riding out to the west of the city to see where columns of armored personnel carriers had massed, their progress toward the square blocked by throngs of people.

Here, a digression because it’s just a great story, bizarre for having played out at such psychological and physical distance from the events in Beijing. While things were moving toward their horrifying climax in the capital, we began preparing for what was to be Tang Dynasty's first tour as a band. A promoter had arranged for us to play some shows in China's northeast — in what used to be called Manchuria. Drew and I actually played in two bands then: there was Tang Dynasty, along with Ding Wu and Zhang Ju; and there was another band, a trio with Sean Andrews and I trading guitar and bass duty and Drew playing drums. That trio was called STG (which stood for "Short-Term Gratification") and we played mostly standard 70s rock covers: AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult.

On the morning of June 3, Ding Wu and Zhang Ju came by to pick us up to take us to Beijing Station to board the train to our first stop, a city called Baicheng in the western corner of Jilin Province, near the border of Inner Mongolia. We played on the night of the 4th, but were completely unaware of the brutal suppression of the demonstrations: That must have happened while we were asleep on the train the previous night. After the show in Baicheng, Sean got in a tiff with the promoter, insisting that he had been tricked: We weren't playing in Inner Mongolia, as he had been told, but were instead heading to another Manchurian province the following day — to a city in Heilongjiang called Qiqihar. “I already been to Manchuria!” shouted Sean in his Arkansan dialect. Sean borrowed some FEC from me  — the foreign exchange certificates that were then in use in China —  to buy a train ticket back to Beijing.

That left us with only the one band, Tang Dynasty, but we didn't think that would be a problem. So we boarded a train the next day, June 5, and rode it overnight, arriving in Qiqihar — just 250 kilometers away — only the following day. We learned about the suppression of the demonstrations only then, on the morning of June 6, in Qiqihar: Arriving at the hotel, I saw a Scandinavian couple frantically rushing between counters in the lobby trying to place calls, and I offered them to help translate. They explained they were trying to leave China "after what had happened in Beijing. "I assured them that we had "just come from Beijing," and that things were still in a stalemate, but their obvious fright told me that something indeed had happened. We hurriedly checked in, I got my keys, went into the room and turned on the television to learn that the massacre had taken place. The news showed only the PLA soldiers who'd been killed, and the violence from the side of the protestors, of course, but it didn't take long to figure out that there had been a massive, violent denouement to the protests.

I called my grandmother in Beijing, and she tried her best to assure me that things were already calming down in the capital, that there had been no violence near our home and that she was safe. But she told me that I should call the American consulate or the embassy right away and that everyone was worried about us. I did as instructed. The man on the other end of the phone at the Shenyang consulate knew right away who I was: “Your parents are worried sick! Is… Andrew Szabo with you?” Yes. “You two need to get out as soon as possible. People like you will be first against the wall!” I assume he meant rock musicians — carriers of spiritual pollution? More helpfully, he told me that he would book us on a Canadian charter flight departing from Changchun for Hong Kong on the 13th, and that Drew and I should be on that flight.

We had our own difficulties to sort out, though. That night we played just as Tang Dynasty, and there was something palpably amiss with the audience. We later learned that they had actually run riot, burned down the ticket booth, and were demanding their money back. It turns out that the unscrupulous promoter had told people that Sean, Drew and I were "Michael Jackson's backup band," and when the only visible musicians on stage were all obviously Chinese, singing in Chinese — Drew, the only white person, was in the back invisible behind his drums — they naturally felt cheated. We were escorted by a dozen security guards back to our hotel. 

The difficulty was that we still had another show to play in Qiqihar the following night, and so we quickly recruited a local drummer who could at least keep time, asked our friend Bob Mitchell to play keyboards and rehearsed a couple of songs that Drew could sing passably while he played bass. Bob, an accomplished pianist, was a student we had met a couple of weeks earlier in Beijing. He had elected to come along with us on tour despite having wrecked while racing a bike through Beijing's streets the night before we left, and was still covered in road rash over which he had smeared Vaseline and affixed some toilet paper as gauze. He’d ridden the hot trains, sitting stoically upright while his shirt soaked through with sweat, not uttering a word of complaint — like me, in 1981, but covered in nasty wounds. That night we pulled off "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd and a couple of other songs, Drew making sure to show his rather large proboscis in profile, and the crowd was placated.

That evening, we all decided to end the tour and head to the coastal city of Dalian to lay low for a week before Drew and I had to fly to Hong Kong. We arrived in Dalian on the 8th or 9th, checked into a cheap hotel on what was then called Stalin Road, and spent most of our days just exploring the city without much of an agenda, wandering into places like “The Museum of Medical Anomalies,” which was as disgusting as advertised. Meanwhile, Drew and I tried to make sense of what had happened, buying whatever newspapers we could manage to get, and watching satellite news reports in our hotel, which to our surprise had CNN and BBC, apparently uncensored.

We took a train back up to Changchun in time to catch our charter flight, and arrived in Hong Kong where friends of my parents took us out to some nice meals and on a tram ride up to Victoria Peak. We saw various sights in Hong Kong, but were only there for a few days before flying home — first, for me, to California where I stayed at Drew's parents' house for a few more days, and then home to Tucson.

I had nowhere else to go, really: I had no more apartment in Berkeley, very little money, none of my application materials (indeed, nothing but a guitar, some effects boxes and cables, and perhaps a week's worth of clothing). Luckily, there was an eminent scholar of Chinese foreign policy at the University of Arizona named Allen S. Whiting, who knew my parents socially. I met with him, told him about my adventures and my interests, and he said he was eager to take me on as a student. Luckily for me, the University of Arizona's Department of East Asian Studies — it was still called "Oriental Studies" that first year — was willing to provisionally admit me and count courses I took toward my degree as long as I was eventually admitted, which I was the following spring after I'd taken my GREs.

At Arizona that first semester I took a course called “Political Risk and Intelligence Analysis” with Whiting, and wrote papers on Kazakhstan, the South China Sea, and Kashmir. I also took a mixed upper division and graduate course on Modern Chinese History with Charles Hedtke, who I adored: His focus was on intellectual history, and he had studied at Berkeley under the great Joseph Levenson, whose works he introduced me to and who has remained a lodestar in my understanding of Chinese intellectual history. 

One thing that I had come away with clearly after watching the Tiananmen Protests was a clear sense that students and intellectuals, and their relationship with the state, were a major driving force in Chinese history. That's what I focused on in my studies: the state and intellectuals in China. My master's thesis ended up being about the symbolic language, with all its culturally specific referents and antecedents, deployed by both sides during the Tiananmen Protests. But the theory behind it involved positing four different modes of relations between intellectuals and the state throughout China's history, focusing on the mode of "loyal opposition," in which intellectuals have tacit access to consultative channels with the sovereign, and a language of remonstrance evolved. I argue that what we saw in Tiananmen was a move from this "loyal opposition" mode to one of direct rejection of authority.

While writing this, I also became very aware of an important disparity in the ways that scientific and technological intellectuals — S&T intellectuals — were treated by the state in the aftermath of Tiananmen as compared to the way that people from the social sciences and humanities were treated. I began looking into the whole discourse on technocracy and Neo-Authoritarianism in the 1980s and was fascinated by the way that China during the first decade of Reform and Opening had already become such a technocratic polity, and yet this important transformation had gone so unremarked upon. I started to refine my ideas about state and intellectual and hit on the notion that China's long tradition of privileging knowledge elites and regarding demonstrable mastery of a corpus of official knowledge as a qualification for office-holding was playing out once again, where that corpus of knowledge was knowledge of the natural world — a scientistic ideology — and demonstration of mastery was basically a degree in the natural sciences or engineering. Like the keju system — the Imperial Civil Service Exam system that had been used in China for over a thousand years — it was a form of knowledge-based bureaucracy. This all came really from my having been in China during the protests.

I’ve thought a lot about the fact that I had watched the protests develop from the first march on April 17, and was in the square during many of the most important moments, like the May 4th anniversary and Gorbachev’s visit, but found myself hundreds of miles away, on tour with the band and thinking about sound checks and set lists when the crackdown occurred. Things might have gone very differently, and I'm quite certain this quirk of fate had an impact on my China-related worldview. I often wonder whether direct experience of that paroxysm of violence would have made me even more sympathetic to the dissidents, or would have made me more of a regime critic. It's one of the many ways in which contingency shaped my attitudes and views. 

What Do We Have So Far?

Let’s pause here to take stock. Where are we so far with priors? Stepping back, insofar as I’m able, and looking at the first quarter-century of this life, I see someone with two distinct loci of identity that were, by good fortune, never really brought into tension: someone allowed to inhabit two worlds and to think well, on balance, of both of them. This owes to my parents’ ability to do the same. I never saw them agonize over conflicting claims of identity. They laid claim to both, free of contradiction in part because neither of them was especially self-reflective. That’s an obvious privilege, and it’s certainly predisposed me to resist ever taking sides and to believe in the possibility of reconciliation.  

Recently, I’ve come to realize that being the second child of immigrant parents in America is itself an extravagant privilege, too: we benefit from all that selfless sacrifice and emphasis on education typical of the first-generation immigrant, but our older siblings have already taken the brunt of the tiger-parenting bullshit, and we’re given much more freedom to pursue our passions. 

Watching my father first wholeheartedly embrace all that Party propaganda in the mid-70s, and then repudiate it probably seeded the deep suspicion of ideology I still carry and made me realize that even the most rational among us is fallible and susceptible to manipulation. I always admired his candor about it — and the fact that it didn’t turn him cynical. I think I share that trait, but of course, in my case, all that enthusiasm for the Red songs and the romance of revolution are far enough back in my childhood that I’m no more embarrassed about any of that than I am about the fact that The Flash was my favorite DC comic hero. (Come to think of it, he wore red). It’s made me be able to empathize with people who are caught up in revolutionary fervor: Had I been one of my grandfather’s best students — highly doubtful! — I suspect that I, too, would have made my way to Yan’an and thrown my lot in with the Reds, at least if I were unaware of what Mao would go on to do.

I like to think that while it would be decades before I had a name for it, I was from an early age a practitioner of cognitive empathy. It’s something I’ve cultivated from my teenage years on. And yet I have not by any means directed it toward everyone to whom I should. Trump voters, for instance: I often chide myself for not extending that same cognitive empathy I do to, say, Chinese elites, when I probably know them just as well or even better.  But when it comes to China, I’ve long felt that I have a well-honed intuition for how a notionally “ordinary” Chinese person will react in a given set of circumstances. It’s not infallible, and It’s never something I’ve been able to articulate, but I do feel that I have a much better-than-average grasp of the emotions and the patterns of conscious thought particular to those brought up in Chinese culture.

I sometimes worry that this habit of mind that I've tried to cultivate in myself and inculcate in others might somehow paralyze me, and result in a kind of de facto moral cowardice — that I might lose my moral compass because I've gotten so adept at playing myself in a kind of moral mental chess. I want to be able not only to articulate where my moral red lines are but also why I draw them where I do. This has proven elusive to me for reasons I’ll explore in the next installment.

Finally, I feel compelled to admit to an instinctive urge to defend China when I hear criticism of it — and this even extends to the ruling party, and even to Xi Jinping. Part of me, when I hear criticism, subconsciously reacts with something akin to, "Hey! That's my mother you're talking about!" Sometimes the urge is barely perceptible, even though I think my sensitivity to it is quite high. I can fight down this defensiveness most of the time, but I’m aware that despite my best efforts it remains present in concentrations detectable by others. To be fair, I have the same reaction when the U.S. is, to my mind, criticized unfairly — and that extends to the Democratic party, and even to Joe Biden. My father — who my professor Charles Hedtke once accurately described as a “Compucian,” instilled in me a normative preference for rational thought, and a tendency to denigrate “mere” emotion, so I'm constantly examining what I say for evidence that I’m letting those irrational feelings lead me to soften criticism of China, or avoiding topics where criticism is deserved and inevitable. I realize that this admission can and will be used against me in the court of Twitter, but so be it. 

In the next (and final?) installment of this exploration of my “priors,” I’ll talk more about my academic interests and how they helped shape my framework for understanding contemporary China; my decision to leave academia; my uglier brushes with Chinese nationalism; my time spent as a reporter and how, again, contingency conspired to afford me sunnier vistas than many of my peers; and how my priors all come together in the way I run the Sinica Podcast. Thanks for reading!

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Image: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. /g/g-pmuQfob8d-image-generator. Modified by Johnny Kuo