Transcript: Adam Tooze on the U.S., China, the Energy Transition — and Saying the Unsayable

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Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a 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 shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Dalian, where I’m working, as I’ve done for many years, in one of my side hustles writing for the World Economic Forum, this time for their Annual Meeting of the New Champions, held in alternating years between Tianjin and Dalian. 

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 Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. 

And listeners, please support my work on Substack at sinica.substack.com. There you’ll find, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, though not this week because, you know, I’m traveling, and now a wide range from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. 

I was delighted to see, on the roster of speakers here at the World Economic Forum meeting, none other than Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian who’s been on the show a couple of times before. Adam is the author of Crashed and Shutdown, about the two major global economic crises of our time, the great financial crisis of 2008 to ’09, and the COVID recession, respectively. His other books include The Wages of Destruction, about the economy of the Third Reich, and The Great Deluge, about the Great War and the interwar years.

Adam will modestly insist that he’s not a China specialist, and yet I am among the many, many people who, arguably, are China specialists who take very seriously what he has to say on China. This is no surprise given his wide-ranging Catholic interests, his multidisciplinary approach, his comparativist instincts, and, I think, his historian’s sense for the extent to which China both is and isn’t subject to its own historical inertia. He has what I’ve taken to calling “dragonfly eyes.” If you want to glimpse into how he thinks, and if you haven’t already, then definitely check out Adam’s podcast Ones and Tooze, where, among other things, you can learn, and I think it was last week’s episode, all about the history behind Chiquita Bananas — it was in the news recently, of course, and their shenanigans in Colombia with right-wing death squads and whatnot.