Transcript: Criticism and Conscience

A Conversation with David Moser

Listen to the audio in the embedded player above, or read the complete transcript below. Thanks to the great folks at CadreSripts.com, to intern Keya Zhou for the image, and Lili Shoup for checking and formatting the transcript and inserting all the links!

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 Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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. 

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I am joined today by my dear friend David Moser. You all remember David. Of course, he used to co-host the show from time to time, actually pretty frequently when Jeremy or I weren’t available. And he’s been on, in the capacity of guest, on many, many, an occasion, including one very memorable and fairly recent show about the COVID lockdown protest of November 2022 in Beijing at Liangmaqiao. David also co-hosts the excellent Barbarians at the Gate podcast, along with our good friend, Jeremiah Jenne, and he is the author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language. I’m going to describe him as a polymath, and he’s going to make that terrible joke about “I don’t really know anything about math.” You’ve done that twice.

David Moser: Yes. Thank you for doing it for me. It saves a lot of embarrassment. Yeah.

Kaiser: Anyway, so a couple of weeks back, I published this essay that was, at a fundamental level, a response to a question that I got from Robert Daly — a very fair question, entirely fair question, asked in absolutely good faith, basically about how I justify the fact that I tend to level a lot more criticism at the United States than I do at China, even though the politics and many aspects of Chinese society are just as effed up as the United States. For sure, if you are a Sinica listener and don’t subscribe to the newsletter, there’s still a fair chance you’ve heard this essay because I published my narration of it on the podcast feed as well. So, not long after that, I got a very long email from David, sharing many of the thoughts he had after reading my essay. And it’s some seriously introspective stuff, but really important things, I think, to reflect on as outsiders to Chinese society to varying degrees, as David is, even though he’s lived there for 30-odd years, and especially as outsiders who are often invited to share our perspectives publicly.

So, today we’re going to try something really different. I’m not really structuring this as an interview, so much as a conversation. And we’re just going to riff off of a lot of the topics that David and I each brought up in the exchange that followed. I invite you first to listen to that essay or to read it so you have a better idea of what we are talking about. It’s not paywalled. You can find it easily at www.sinicapodcast.com, or just listen to it in your podcast feed. 

Let me get the ball rolling here and put this to you, David, hoping for a totally candid answer. What’d you think about that essay of mine? What did I get wrong? What did I leave out? What did I do right?

David: Well, I mean, first of all, it resonated very resonantly in my brain because you and I have talked about this off and on throughout the years, and we’ve also encountered the same kinds of controversies that you deal with a lot and have affected your public persona and public pursuits quite a bit over the last decade or so. So, I thought that it was a great exercise in all sorts of examination of different kinds of relativity. I think in this day and age when there’s so much black and white commentary, I mean, the double-sided, the confrontational media, especially in the United States, but in the China field as well, that seems to have gotten worse over the last year. So, I don’t have any criticism of your essay. Maybe just… it didn’t end up with a definitive opinion, which I sort of liked because it was this sort of uncertainty, the internal conflict that we go through. And I thought it was just a really good sort of presentation of all those different subtle kinds of decisions and, I would say, just rhetorical tricks that people use and so and so forth. So, I just really thought it was great.

Kaiser: Well, thanks.

David: What I’d like to do today, I hope, is we both can talk a little bit about how we’ve handled this issue through the last few decades because we both went through the same ’80s period, ’90s, the rise of the internet, the Beijing Olympics, and lots of pivot points where there were dramatic sort of changes in the cross-cultural relationship but also in the media landscape. That’s sort of what struck me because you’re certainly in the media, and I’m in the media here, I’m in academia, but I also go on state media very often.

Kaiser: Yeah, you do.

David: And so the issues come up every single time I do that, whether it be a podcast or a TV show or whatever, every single time.

Kaiser: Yeah. Walk me through how you think about that when you do it. I mean, I know I’ve wrestled with it before. I used to, when I lived in China, I did a number of state media appearances. Then I started to get really just sketched out by it. I had this fear, I’m sure, I mean, we’ve talked about this too — are we just being used? Even when they tell us explicitly, “Oh, speak your mind, be critical,” I even then realized, am I not being manipulated in some way? I mean, you and I have talked about how English media doesn’t land in China, right? It lands outside of China, mostly, when you’re doing this, the state stuff. I mean, not everybody is tuned in to watch CGTN in China in English, of course not, right? So, them inviting us to be more critical basically serves this end of making it appear from the outside, like discourse in China is more unfettered than in fact it is. How have you wrestled with issues like that?