Listen to my audio narration of this essay above. Parts 1 and 2 are now un-paywalled and can be read here and here.
You’re taking this way too personally
I know that no good empirical evidence supports the familiar stereotypes about birth order. But as the middle child — the second of three boys, with a sister who came along a few years afterward — I was the peacemaker in the family in just the way conventional wisdom says middle children tend to be. When my parents fought, my instinct was to find a compromise, remind everyone that there are deep reservoirs of love to be drawn upon, keep them from escalating and fighting dirty, and —when necessary — physically separate them and shuttle messages back and forth. I seized the car keys so my mother wouldn’t drive off angrily, as she was wont to do. I chided my father for his reflexive, smug seizure of the rational high ground and his maddening disdain for emotion.
As U.S.-China relations deteriorated, especially after 2018, I couldn’t help thinking of the two nations as my parents. I’ve touched on this before, In a sense, the two countries are my parents: I feel very much a child of the two, feel a very equal love toward them both, feel personal shame at their many misdeeds and pride in their accomplishments. As with my natural parents, I recognize patterns of bad behavior rooted in that common inability to empathize with the other. Like my parents, they’d usually prefer to get the last word in and score that point rather than compromising in a way that produced outcomes that, if not actually “win-win,” at least weren’t lose-lose.
When U.S.-China relations hit the skids five or six years ago, I thought a lot about getting therapy. It’s something I’d tried only once, almost twenty years earlier, but the upshot of that one session was that the very nice doctor at United Family Hospital in Beijing told me that I didn’t need it. He’d reviewed all my answers to the questionnaire they’d had me take, asked me what was troubling me, and then just diagnosed me with run-of-the-mill heartbreak. “Maybe drink less coffee for the insomnia and anxiety. And go meet someone nice,” he said. “That will fix you right up.” It did.
In the bleak days of the downturn circa 2018, I didn’t end up trying therapy, mainly because I think I figured out what the problem was. Doomscrolling on Twitter and getting into heated arguments about China with social media randos — none of that, obviously enough, was good for me. But what convinced me I didn’t need to seek professional help, stupid as this sounds, was that I started inventing dialogues with various shrinks, and their diagnoses were pretty much the same, whether my imaginary interlocutor was a Chinese American version of Jennifer Melfi from The Sopranos or a cigar-smoking Jew from interwar Vienna: You’re taking this way too personally, Kaiser. You deserved no credit when the relationship was improving, and I suspect you subconsciously believed you did; by the same token, you certainly don’t deserve any blame for the widening gulf and the rising hostility, as I suspect you subconsciously believe yourself to deserve.
Hardly an earth-shattering breakthrough but it was probably right: I may have believed all that bridge-building meant something, and certainly felt if not guilt or fault then at least a sense of failure when the bridges were washed away. In all probability, my efforts ultimately have had no more effect on grand geopolitical trends than Aztec sacrifices did on the rising of the sun each dawn.
But once every so often I’ll get an email or a comment somewhere telling me that what I’m doing does matter and does make a difference. Sometimes they even come from people who are in positions to affect policymaking in the U.S. or even in China, and I have to say, those little rays of sunshine make the sacrifice worthwhile.
The stabilization in my mood, though, is testimony more than anything to the ability of humans to adapt to just about any new circumstance, no matter how terrible. If someone had gone back a decade with the latest issue of Foreign Affairs in hand I’d have been downright despondent at how bad things had gotten in so short a period: Will no one speak out in defense of globalization? A former Deputy National Security Advisor — a guy I once palled around with in Beijing, no less — and a former congressman who’d chaired something called the “House Select Committee on United States Competition with the Chinese Communist Party” calling for “winning” a “Cold War” by nothing short of regime change in Beijing? A smart former Obama administration official arguing very well, but in an unmistakably defensive crouch, against an apparent consensus that China’s economic growth is stalled and that China is in steep decline? Someone tell Gordon Chang! Surely this messenger had come from a terrible alternate timeline.
Yet here I am, thinking about how my interview on Wednesday with the Tufts professor who wrote a great new book on the history of the struggle for Taiwan will surely persuade key folks in DC to try a different approach with Beijing. Or how the show I’m planning about Chinese electric vehicles and the constant complaints around overcapacity might just help settle the discourse. I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing because I’m incorrigibly optimistic. But for those just joining us, in the interest of fairness I wanted readers and listeners to understand what motivates me, and why I tend to see things as I do.
Why I Left China
The timing of my family’s move from Beijing to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in June of 2016 was critical. In hindsight, 2016 was a pivotal year for the U.S.-China relationship, but the shifts I can see with such clarity now weren’t so obvious then.
There had been something of an expat exodus from China in the mid-2010s, with several of my better-known acquaintances heading back to their home countries beginning in 2014. A few folks — a publisher of expat magazines, a blogger, and an English teacher who had amassed followers on Twitter — wrote “Why I’m Leaving China” essays announcing their departures, usually with a tone of disappointment in China. That the handful of such essays came to be seen as a genre unto itself was perhaps unfair, and there were probably more satires of the genre than “expat flounce” essays written in earnest, but in any case, by the time of my departure, anything more than 140 characters about leaving became a “kick me” sign.
Many people assumed, incorrectly in my case, that people in my peer group had somehow seen the writing on the wall, and had foreknowledge that things were going to get bad in China. It had absolutely nothing to do with that. I’d seen periods of tightening in China before, and in each case so far they hadn’t lasted long: campaigns against spiritual pollution (1983) or bourgeois liberalization (1986-1987) began and ended in my absence. The hardening after 1989 had mostly ended by the time of my first trip back in 1991. Various “strike hard” (严打 yándă) campaigns throughout the 90s and 2000s, all petered out and never really touched my life meaningfully. I figured that this, too, would pass — the hardening that we’d begun seeing, and which I had taken to calling “the new truculence” by about 2012, would wind down in a few years tops, as would the anti-corruption drive, once Xi no longer felt internal or external threat, I confidently — and wrongly — predicted.
The truth is our decision to move to the U.S. had been taken many years earlier, and by 2011 we had a specific date in mind. My daughter — our oldest — would finish grade school in June of 2016, just at the time that the lease on our apartment, which we managed to lock in, would come up. We began preparing the ground for the big move two years before. I had started sounding out Baidu about allowing a transfer to our new Silicon Valley research center. Fanfan had gotten a little more serious about trying to learn English.
As different as we are, Fanfan and I were in perfect congruence in our pedagogical preferences when it came to our kids. Neither of us had it in us to be “tiger parents.” We both believed in raising the kids “free range” style in their preschool years, not burdening them too much with the music lessons and tutoring, multiplication tables, and character memorization that were all de rigueur among our peers in Beijing. I read them Dr. Seuss and the classics of my own childhood, which my parents had presciently saved. They played to their hearts’ content and were just kids. A Chinese elementary school education, Fanfan and I agreed, would be good enough to equip them with the discipline and study habits necessary. We agreed that a U.S. college education was optimal for them, and since from middle school onward the Chinese education system would focus too much on the gaokao college entrance exams, it made sense to leave before either of them started middle school.
In March, Fanfan and I took a trip to California. I worked out of Baidu’s Sunnyvale office, and in the spare time I had, we looked at real estate. It was a frustrating effort: traffic congestion was Beijing levels of awful, and we were unable to find any homes we loved that we could reasonably afford. We actually began rethinking leaving China: “Why trade one city with awful traffic and overpriced housing for another one,” she asked.
But days after our return to Beijing, I was contacted by a former Hong Kong-based editor for the New York Times named Amadeo Tumolillo, who was coming to town on behalf of a New York-based media startup called SupChina. He was on an exploratory trip and had been told I was someone he should meet, so I invited him out to Baidu. I saw a good fit between what they wanted to build and what Jeremy and I already had: a popular podcast on current affairs in China, a recognized brand, and two guys who were willing to quit their day jobs and turn their podcast hobby into a full-time job. (Jeremy’s company, Danwei, had been acquired by the Financial Times and had been turned from a reader-facing website into a boutique research outfit — something he never quite took to).
SupChina liked the fit, too: within six weeks of that meeting, we had been given an offer that would mean steady employment and — particularly attractive for me — the chance to live anywhere in the Central or Eastern time zone. Jeremy and I accepted the offer from SupChina, and we gave notice to our respective employers. My last day at Baidu was near the end of April.
As I was getting ready to leave, I did a few interviews with various media outlets and came away with the distinct impression that the narrative around innovation in China had shifted perceptibly. I don’t know why it happened only then, but it seemed like a new consensus had formed: China wasn’t condemned only to copy American tech for eternity, but had already shown a surprising capacity to create innovative tech of its own. I remember giving a slightly flippant quote that ended up running in a major American paper — something like, “It turns out you don’t need to know the truth of what happened in Tiananmen Square to be able to create a mobile phone app.”
At the end of May, I played a farewell gig with Chunqiu at my favorite Beijing live house, Yugong Yishan. We played a long acoustic set and then our full-tilt set to a packed house. It was one of the most bittersweet moments of my life: 15 years with these guys, and a million memories and inside jokes from all that time rehearsing, hanging out in green rooms, riding the trains all over China to play shows. After our encore, I teared up. The movers came the next day, and the four of us moved to a hotel near Sanyuanqiao for our final weeks in China, eating in all our favorite places, drinking in all our beloved watering holes. Yang Meng, Chunqiu’s singer, persuaded me to do one last little show in a small, out-of-the-way bar — an unplugged set with just him, the other guitarist Kou Zhengyu, and me. This was the night before I actually left, on June 18.
Coming to America
I never really experienced “reverse culture shock.” America was always a kind of baseline for what was normal for me, even as I could tick off a hundred things about the country that were anything but normal. I couldn’t understand the whole “reverse culture shock” idea — certainly not when, during most of my time away we could see every movie and TV show that mattered, download all the music, read all the books, keep up with the news, and talk to our friends in the States every day for free.
What I experienced just shy of five months after arriving in the States proved as much of a shock to my American friends and neighbors who hadn’t been away as it did to me, gone 20 years. Like so many other Americans, I had a premonition of it the night of June 23. At an Airbnb in the town of Cary, where we stayed for a week before we moved into our first rental in Chapel Hill, I was stunned to see the results of the Brexit vote.
Soon after settling down in Chapel Hill, I picked up a flyer from the local Democratic Party soliciting volunteers to register voters, and in the following months I volunteered to knock doors and man phone banks as well. Fanfan was initially put off by my sudden enthusiasm for this sort of activity. She had seen me get active in 2007 and 2008 in support of Barack Obama, even approving my donations, but she could understand that: she shared my enthusiasm for him. When we arrived in the States she still had a dislike for Hillary Clinton, believing her somehow to be, without evidence, “anti-China.” But it had nothing on her visceral disgust with Trump: the sight of his face made her curl her lip as if reacting to a bad smell. She joined various WeChat groups — Chinese people in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area who were sharing tips for recent arrivals, information about schools, group buying excursions for fresh seafood from the coast — and was finding, to her horror, that support for Trump among recent immigrants from China was extensive and passionate.
I thought a lot about the drivers of support among certain segments of the Chinese American population for Donald Trump and even wrote about it for what was then still SupChina just days before the election. I was still confident of a Clinton victory, and even after the shock of election night, my focus was still on what his presidency would mean for us as a family living in America, and not on foreign policy.
Relations with China had, of course, already been on a bad trajectory during Obama’s second term, arguably even during the later years of the first. But there were still bright spots to point to in the U.S.-China relationship. Obama still clearly recognized the value in engagement, still believed (as he often repeated) that a strong, prosperous, and stable China was good for regional stability and American interests, he had managed to reach agreements with Beijing on carbon emissions that paved the way for Paris, had managed to secure Americans all these wonderful 10-year multiple-entry visas, had successfully pressured China into a climbdown on cyber-espionage, and had kept the Taiwan situation stable.
I comforted myself by thinking that Trump’s fundamentally transactional nature, his isolationist propensities, his sheer ignorance of foreign policy, and the likelihood that he’d be pouring gasoline onto one domestic dumpster fire after another all meant that he wouldn’t have the time or attention to do much more than slap some tariffs on Chinese trade goods, and could probably be placated easily. A little flattery, some soybean purchases, and the U.S.-China relationship might survive. Hell, Xi Jinping might even raise the banner of globalization and see Europeans, also smarting from tariffs, rally to it. Populism will burn itself out, and things will return to normal.
None of that happened in the end, and the fanatical Sinophobes enjoyed the preponderance of influence even before their extremism — Charlottesville, for instance — drove out “globalists” like Gary Cohn, and long before Covid brought out the worst sort of awful bigotry in Trump himself. In 2020, as the U.S. entered its second month of Covid lockdowns, he pulled out all the stops.
I get that China might be blamed for the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector — that China came to represent, in the American mind, all the ills of globalization. I get that its state subsidies create market distortions and that its poor record in IPR protection and unequal market access is unfair to American business. I get that many Americans care deeply about competitive elections and dislike single-party rule, that some object in earnest to China’s censorship, to its treatment of ethnic groups like the Tibetans and Uyghurs, and that there were many Americans who rooted for the Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019. None of this surprises me, and indeed I would broadly agree with many if not all of these critiques.
But these things all taken together — and you can add as many concrete issues as you like — still don’t explain the sense of threat that so many Americans profess to feel toward China: the outright enmity they have for China (or, as they insist, for “the Chinese Communist Party”). Count this as one of my priors: I simply believe there’s something else there — something about China’s rise that has evoked an atavistic hostility. Over the last five years, I’ve tried to understand its source. Is it just that American primacy will brook no challenge, and that it’s impossible that we’d make room for a peer competitor? Is it about China’s rise defying these almost axiomatic beliefs Americans have had about the inherent superiority of our political system, or about the assumed relationship between a free market economy and democracy? Is it that China has shown itself to be capable of technological innovation in the absence of political freedom? Is there a racial element to it?
It would surprise me if there weren’t. I think I captured part of the deeper American anxiety in an essay I wrote for The China Project in the summer of 2020 after realizing that the white Trumpian reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death was similar to the American reaction to China’s eruption onto the global stage. “Both are rooted,” I wrote, “in the fear of loss of primacy and privilege. It’s a fear that many don’t even know they feel, but it’s one that Trump has an uncanny, instinctive ability to harness and to amplify. Just as Trump's presidency and the white ethnonationalism it has empowered together represent an irrational response to the loss of white privilege in an increasingly diverse, multicultural United States, so too, does Trump’s foreign policy — especially toward China — represent an irrational response to a similar loss of American privilege in an increasingly multipolar world.”
“Zoom out from the national to the global,” I wrote, “and the twilight of white privilege in America looks a lot like the twilight of American hegemony in the world: The armed white nationalists who have grown more vocal and visible in the years since Ferguson find their analogy in the China hawks urging us into a new Cold War. White fragility is American fragility in microcosm.”
The Taiwan Question
In December 2013, my family — parents, siblings, their spouses and kids — converged on Taipei for a long-planned winter holiday. Until my father took ill with some sort of respiratory condition just after New Year’s Day, it was a terrific gathering, organized mainly around meals as my family’s lives usually are, with trips to the National Palace Museum, a day trip out to Yilan and the Kavalan Distillery, and late nights with Fanfan and my sibs in rocker hangouts and Japanese whisky bars.
I’m ashamed to say that it was only my second trip to Taiwan. I had by that time lived in China for 17 years and had traveled to Asia at least seven times before moving to Beijing, but prior to that family gathering, I had only been in Taiwan once, in 2008, on a short business trip. I’d been sent there from Beijing that time to look at a company the ad agency I worked for was interested in acquiring. But that target company’s business played into a prejudice I’d already formed: it was a creator of comment spam, and its owner unembarrassedly explained how its service would set up multiple bot accounts on hundreds of separate IP addresses that could bury unflattering comments about a company, a brand, or a politician on a BBS or an internet forum under hundreds of innocuous, positive, or totally unrelated comments. I hid my revulsion under a polite smile, asked a few perfunctory questions, and got out of there.
I came to really like Taiwan once I started spending a lot of time there, even if the reason I was there so often was that my father, who never fully recovered from that illness, was convalescing at Taipei Veterans General Hospital or at a rental we found for him nearby for over three months, during which I flew to Taipei five times. Baidu was very kind about allowing me to work remotely from Taipei to look after my father. I found it to be a very high-trust society, admirable in many ways, and as I write this section, I'm embarrassed by my earlier, unfounded prejudices. The Sunflower Movement was in full bloom in 2014 during my time in Taipei, and I took the opportunity to talk to people on either side of it. I began reckoning with how little I knew and began to confront longstanding prejudices. Since a major goal of this whole narrative has been to cop to such prejudices, I’ve saved this one and singled it out for more in-depth treatment as it ranks high among them.
As you may recall from the first installment of this confession, my parents were, throughout my childhood and adolescence, ardently anti-KMT. I’ve mentioned their leftist politics and the pro-Mainland stance they took after the Nixon opening. They made their choice: Back then, PRC stamps in an American passport made you immediately suspect, if not indeed persona non grata, in Taiwan; and ROC stamps would do the same. (By the early 90s, I’m given to understand, the Taiwan side started inserting a temporary, removable page where you could have the ROC stamps so as not to impede travel to the mainland.) The upshot is that my parents rarely traveled to Taiwan before the 90s; indeed, my maternal grandfather's funeral was the first time I can remember either of them going, which was I believe in 1993 or thereabout.
I didn't go. In fact, I never met my maternal grandfather, and In all honestly had never heard a kind word spoken about the man by my mother, her sister in California, any of their three brothers, or even his wife — nothing except superficial comments about how handsome he looked in his military uniform, how he sat a horse well, and how he was charming if a bit glib. My mother and he were basically estranged. It’s clear that he was a cad, and a bigamist: those half-sisters of my mom's in Wuhan at the beginning of Part 1? They were the daughters of his first, overlapping wife. We did the math: One of those half-sisters was older than my mother, and one younger.
Growing up I knew I had many relatives in Taiwan, but all but some second cousins were on the distaff side — the Liu family. The ones I was close to had all come to the States by the early 70s. I was close to one uncle for a while, but only because, as a teenager, he had vowed revenge on Chiang and was removed to the States and remanded to my parents' care. My Uncle Stanley, as we’ve always called him, often took care of me when I was a baby. He must have imprinted on me: after all, he wore his hair very long, fancied himself an artist and independent filmmaker, and left a bunch of great records at my folks' house that I listened to a lot: Iron Butterfly, Led Zepplin II, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Marianne Faithful.
But in the early 80s he married into a Taipei banking family, and I couldn't stand his wife or her brothers, roughly my age. They later divorced, as she had become a devout Buddhist who donated extravagantly to some so-called “master” whose material needs were suspiciously great for a holy man. Uncle Stanley wasn’t above a certain materialism, either. Visiting him in Southern California once in high school, in early 1984 — I’d driven out from Tucson with some high school friends — I was shocked to learn he had voted for Ronald Reagan and planned to again. We lost touch until much, much later.
Stanley was the second of the three boys, who were 3, 4, and 5 in birth order. His older brother, who we called Uncle Joseph, had spent time in prison for his politics, which only made my mother — who had come to the States at 18 — hate the KMT government even more. He had reputedly been brilliant, but was, in hindsight, suffering badly from PTSD from the very rough treatment he’d been given in prison. My mother often said that he’d been tortured but it’s not something I brought up with him the few times we met him while I was in college in Berkeley.
My mother's only sister, my Aunt Theresa, was the one relative on my mother’s side to whom my family was always close. She came to the States in the early 70s for college, lived for a while in Philadelphia and Boston, then settled in California with her tall, taciturn, and very talented architect husband, my Uncle Peter. Beginning in the late 90s, they had a number of projects in China, and owned a place in Beijing in the same building Fanfan and I lived in from 2011 to 2016: a neighbor of theirs in Foster City, California, had bought the place as an investment, so we leased it from that neighbor and saw my aunt and her family in Beijing often. Her kids were, like my sibs and me, both born in the U.S. Her older son, my first cousin Arvin Chen, has made a successful career in Taipei as a filmmaker, with a few delightful features under his belt. We're close, as I am with his brother Alex, who works in tech and often stayed with me when visiting Beijing. Arvin and I mused that the two of us represent two alternative career paths: both ABCs, both Cal graduates, but one went to Beijing after college and speaks Chinese with that accent, and the other went to Taipei, and still speaks Chinese with that accent.
This leaves my mother's youngest brother Wei-chi. I won’t mince words: I genuinely loathe him and have for many, many years. He was a dissolute playboy, a braggart, a showoff, and an embarrassment. In the late 90s, when I was still in Tang Dynasty, he drifted and grifted his way to Beijing, to my horror, and began trading on my name. Before I broke with him, I’d started calling him 坏舅舅 Huài Jiùjiù — Bad Uncle — but he loved the monicker and started using it. “A guy I met in a bar introduced himself to me as Kaiser’s Bad Uncle,” friends of mine in Beijing would tell me. He would move into Aunt Theresa and Uncle Peter’s very nice apartment in Beijing whenever they weren't in town, and tell people it was his — as well as the Benz in the parking garage. I still don't speak to him. Unfairly, I suppose I associated his horrible traits — his flashiness, his constant mooching of money from his siblings, his general sleaziness — to the Taiwan of the 80s and 90s, when he lived there still and we were still on speaking terms. “Kaiser!” he said to me on more than one occasion. “You know how much these pants cost? 800 dollars! 800 dollars!”
My maternal grandmother, Sung Man-hsi 宋慢西, came and lived with us at various times in the 1980s in Tucson, and then again in Beijing in the 2000s. But by then she was suffering from dementia, and though I never really got to know her well, when I was young (and rather stridently atheistic) I didn't much care for what I took to be her hypocrisy and grab-bag of absurd pieties directed at conflicting deities. I regret not having tried to understand her better: She was quite a force of nature. She helped found a prominent private music school, 光仁小学 — Catholic Guangren Primary School — in Taipei, and served as its first principal. She had been a minor star in early martial arts films, and still practiced Tai-chi sword in the 80s when she lived with us. She had been an alternate to the Legislative Yuan, representing a district in Henan Province.
I suppose she fared poorly, though, by comparison to my paternal grandmother in my eyes: My Nainai was humble and scholarly while my Laolao was haughty and aristocratic; Nainai was wise and infinitely patient, while Laolao was snappish and could be a scold. She had forbidden my mother to date while in college, and didn’t speak to my mother for years after she moved from Ohio to California to be with my father, leaving school and marrying while still quite young, at only 22.
Bad Taiwan experiences on my father’s side deepened my prejudice. My paternal grandparents had left Taiwan by the early 1960s. My grandfather's works weren't being published in Taiwan, which remained under martial law until 1987. To be fair, they weren’t published in China, either, until much later: “Your grandfather wrote with too much objectivity for either side to feel comfortable,” my father had said. But it was particularly galling to me that he had political difficulties in Taiwan when, as far as I could tell, he’d done so much for Taiwan. He and my grandmother left, first to the East-West Center in Hawaii, and thence to the Harvard-Yenching Center, and finally to Columbia.
Again, the whole point of this piece has been to offer an honest account of where my influences come from, warts and all. The fact that I've left Taiwan largely out of the story thus far is part of the truth of my upbringing: Taiwan didn't figure in, except negatively. They were the "bad guys" when I was a child: The KMT figured in the stories I heard as the side that was corrupt, that had to be coerced before it would fight the Japanese, that squandered the aid money provided by the Americans, that persecuted the heroic revolutionaries, broke the dikes of the Yellow River and killed millions for no real strategic gain, that stood for the landlords and the compradors, that were responsible for the hyperinflation.
I realize this is unfair, and things were either much more complicated or my flattened account flat-out wrong now that I've been able to study the history on my own. But I'm not writing here about what I think now: I'm writing about my priors. Taiwan, to me as a child and an adolescent, always seemed materialistic, grossly stratified. My parents told me about the shabby way that the mainlanders who came to Taiwan with the KMT treated the Taiwanese — that they regarded them as traitors and Japanese puppets. But I also saw that my mother, at least, wasn’t immune to that same bigotry: she never liked the fact that my first girlfriend in college was Taiwanese, and snorted in disgust when I mentioned that her parents watched TV entirely in Japanese. I grew up with an impression of Taiwan as excessively superstitious, and too fawning on both the Japanese and the Americans. Its very survival as a separate entity was the result only of American meddling that temporarily thwarted the historical inevitability of “reunification.”. Again, I realize now how one-sided this all was, but one doesn't pick one's parents.
My father eventually felt well enough to return to Beijing, but with the air there as terrible as it was, we hurriedly arranged for him to get back to the Bay Area. He died in Berkeley in late July, 2014. By the end of his life he, too, was full of praise for Taiwan. Both of my parents had gone back to Taiwan to vote in elections every four years — yes, they had by then become KMT supporters — and couldn’t praise the healthcare system enough. He had, by the same token, grown increasingly disillusioned with China. Corruption was endemic, as he’d learned firsthand, but massive anti-corruption campaigns of the sort the then-new General Secretary was orchestrating weren’t the answer. “Deeper change in the system is needed,” he once said. I answered back saying it was hard enough to change the tires on a moving bus, but Dad, you’re talking about swapping out the engine. Incremental change can still get you there without massive disruption. The price is just too high, I said. “The price,” he said, “will only get higher over time.”
Thinking About Thinking About China
When I re-launched Sinica after the demise of The China Project, I saw it as an opportunity to take a slightly different approach to the show. I still wanted to talk about current affairs, but didn’t want the show to be driven by the news. Rather, I wanted to make the show more about thinking about thinking about China: to really dig into underlying issues, to talk about why we ask the questions that we do, to explore the philosophical assumptions that inform our approaches, and — as I hope I’ve done here at an individual level — to examine the factors that have shaped our own biases as a society. Because I believe that the questions that truly fascinate us tell a lot about our perspectives — perhaps tell us more than anything else — I thought I’d end by enumerating some of those questions.
I think back at the issues I’ve raised again and again when I have a guest on the show who thinks deeply about these issues. How much does history constrain human agency? Because obviously we’re not entirely free of constraint. History matters — but how much? Does that vary from place to place? What are the right metaphors we should use in even talking about that constraint — gravity? Fetters? Freight? What determines how fast a society really can change? How much explanatory value is there in “culture” when it comes to thinking about why China — or any other country — behaves the way it does? How do you say meaningful, insightful things about Chinese thought or behavior without spouting essentialist nonsense? Are there discernible differences in the way the brains of Chinese or other East Asians and Americans or other Westerners work, as Richard Nisbett argued in his book The Geography of Thought? Does the metaphorical thinking that linguist George Lakoff described, in the American context, as so central to our political thinking have equal applicability to Chinese political thought? Are there different metaphors, and if so, what are they?
I’m also interested in questions nearer the surface, but still nigh impossible to answer confidently: Can the U.S. make room in the world for a peer competitor with radically different values? What does the U.S. or “the West” actually want from China? What, as the more common question goes, does China see as its eventual place in the world? If for 180 years China’s great national quest has been for wealth and power, what will constitute its new quest now that the old one has largely been fulfilled? What constitutes political legitimacy, and does China’s leadership possess it? Are the views of critical and dissident intellectuals in China overrepresented in the Western reading diet on China, and if so, how can we better understand what more mainstream intellectuals think? What is the true extent of the Communist Party’s commitment to Marxist ideology? What ingredients, old and new, are being combined in the new ideological stew that China’s Party leaders are cooking up — and will it be to the liking of a young, tech-savvy generation with no direct memory of the revolution, or of Mao?
This is just a small subset of the questions that spark my interest. This doesn’t mean that I’ll ignore electric vehicles, AI regulations, the overcapacity debate, the environment, China’s relations with the nations of the Global South or for that matter the dozens of “China and” relationships: China and India, Germany or the EU, Russia and Ukraine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, India, ASEAN, and the Philippines, to name but a few. And because I believe an understanding of the humanities is vital, I’ll do my best not to ignore film, literature, music and more.
I invite you to join me in exploring all these topics. I’ll exercise my best judgment in bringing on guests to the show and picking themes for my weekly essays. With a better idea of where I’m coming from, I hope you’ll help to keep me honest — but also perhaps cut me a little slack from time to time. I look forward to your feedback.
Image: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com
Thank you for putting out this three-part series. One can only imagine the time it took to come up with the multitudinous incidents in your life, to digest them yourself, and organize them into a coherent whole. The discussion of therapy was particularly poignant. In many ways this whole series has been, shall I say, therapeutic for you, at least as therapeutic for you as it is informational for the rest of us.
I have been listening to you for years, and never written, your gift for introspective thought, your agility in adjusting to the left turns that an interview always presents, your assembly of precise adjectives, and, yes, your political leanings have become second nature. The piece of the puzzle that you have brilliantly filled-in is the answer to the 为什么 (why) question. (I sense that there is even more that could contribute to the picture, but this is a wonderful start.)
With gratitude and respect, -- Dennis
Hi, Kaiser. It must have been 20 years since we met in Beijing for the first time. You were writing a profile for a "northern china cotton farmer" when we chatted in the office of my first employer, a commodities trading company.
I learned so much more about you and your mom & dad from this 3 episodes. Let's keep in touch.
Forrest Hu (from Singapore)