Transcript: Historian Rana Mitter on ideology in China's "New Era" — live from Salzburg, Austria

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to this special live recording of the Sinica Podcast here at the Salzburg Global Seminar. Hello, Salzburg.

Audience: Woo!

Kaiser: Oh, hell yeah. I am Kaiser Kuo, and I am delighted to be joined here by Rana Mitter. You know, the truth of it is, though, any one of you here in the audience could easily even plucked up here so I could subject you to my ruthless line of questioning, and you would’ve acquitted yourself, doubtlessly really, really well. But the unfortunate victim is Rana Mitter, who you all know as ST Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, formerly, of course, professor of History at Oxford University, and author of, among other works, Forgotten Ally. That’s the American name. The British name is the really utterly bland China’s War with Japan — the Americans have a way of hyping everything up to make it more exciting — and China’s Good War. The American title is China’s Awesome War. Both books I’ve spoken about with him before on Sinica. Rana, it is just so wonderful to see you here in beautiful Salzburg and to have you back on the Sinica Podcast.

Rana Mitter: And Kaiser, it’s always a huge pleasure to be in your tender and somehow expert hands, and any other parts of the anatomy that you choose to exercise tonight.

Kaiser: Ah, excellent. Okay. Well, we have actually been tasked tonight. We actually have an assignment. We are to talk about this question of whether and, to what extent, China is a revisionist power. So, let’s start there, before I get to the questions I really want to dig into you with, which are questions about how China’s leadership understands this historical moment, its challenges as well as the opportunities that it presents. Because after all, we all know that crisis in Chinese is… 

I think that these two sets of questions are actually very much related. So, let’s focus first on the question of China, its ambitions, its intentions, and its limits when it comes to reshaping the world as it used to be part of my intro.

Rana: Absolutely. So one of the things that I think has become one of the hottest questions in geopolitics, and certainly here at the Salzburg Global Seminar, we’ve been spending quite a lot of today kicking it around, is how far does China want to change the world and how far is actually happy just living in it and making sure that the bits and pieces actually fit together quite well. And I’m sorry to have the tick of an academic here, Kaiser, but I’m going to go straight into referring to actually a really important, really interesting academic article that came out a few years ago, and which is well worth referencing. And that’s by my colleague, actually wonderful scholar at Harvard University, Alastair Iain Johnston — one of the really interesting thinkers on China’s international relations.

Kaiser: Couldn’t agree more.

Rana: And he has written a piece, you probably know this one actually, Kaiser, about different aspects of order that China’s interested in. They’re about, now I’m going to betray myself because I can’t remember off the top of my head exactly how many orders there are. I think there are either seven…

Kaiser: Six of seven. Yeah, I think-

Rana: Either seven or 11. [Editor’s note: it’s actually eight] And I don’t think I’m just thinking. I may just be thinking of soda, having said that, but his point is that asking the question of — is China a revisionist power? Does it want to change world order? — is not actually subtle enough a question. You have to say, “Well, look, does China want to change the international order, let’s say at the United Nations?” And the answer is, to some extent, yes, at least the stated intention is that the order set up in 1945 with the five permanent members of the Security Council, UK and France among them, may or may not fit what is appropriate for the 2020s. On the other hand, aspects of global order, such as the World Trade Order, China got into WTO back in 2001, that’s been suiting China in many ways pretty well.

There’s no particular desire, I think, to turn that upside down. And then, of course, new areas, and ones in which you are particularly expert, Kaiser, which is the virtual world, the question of the cyber world and how that’s going to be ordered and regulated. Well, China has a lot of interest in how that’s going to be ordered, but then, of course, so does the rest of the world. So, orders rather than order, I think is the way that I’d answer your question.

Kaiser: Three so far. That’s three. Okay.

Rana: Right. We’ll see if during the course of the rest of the podcast we get through the other four.

Kaiser: No, I think that it is really important to emphasize the plural. And also, that, of course, rules-based or otherwise, it is an order that has been largely created by, and we had a little bit of a discussion this morning about what to call it. Kerry Brown calls it the Enlightenment West, the Euro-American West, whatever you want to call it. But it is not in order of China’s creating to be sure. And so, you know, when we talk about whether it is a status quo or a revisionist power, that is something we also need to keep in mind. It is not necessarily looking to overturn the entirety of the apple cart. It’s not just Alastair Ian Johnston’s excellent piece, but a RAND study from, I believe, 2018 also looked at this and decided that China was sort of a selectively opportunistically revisionist power.

We actually hear a lot of metaphors for how China acts with respect to the global order. But perhaps because I am based in the states and we are incapable of any type of metaphor except for sports metaphors, one that I hear a lot is that, “Here we are playing a friendly game of rugby, but the Chinese team shows up in American-style NFL shoulder pads, and they hit a whole lot harder.” It’s really sort of not a fair approach. And there are many along these lines. They’re playing completely different games. They’re not being very sportsmen like they’re playing to win rather than just to be good friendly chaps and to show up and play sports. What do you make of that? And do you have any go-to metaphors that you like in terms of how China’s posture toward those orders?

Rana: So, you have mentioned sports metaphors, Kaiser, and I have to say that I’m not someone who has a huge knowledge either of rugby or indeed football. Having moved recently to the United States, I’ve learned that apparently football is not soccer as most the rest of the world thinks of it. But rather a game, which, correct me if I’m wrong, there are some Americans here in the audience, proper ones, in which it is almost never the case that a foot touches the ball. There appears… I mean, have I missed something here? I watched the whole of, I believe you people call it the Super Bowl.

Kaiser: The Super Bowl, that’s right.

Rana: Yeah. Not a lot of foot-ball contact going on there.

Kaiser: There was like a 54-yard field goal or something like that.

Rana: Okay.

Kaiser: I mean, right.

Rana: I was watching-

Kaiser: It’s a sport that was invented by the Department of Defense, and it’s been rigged by the Biden administration so that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce-

Rana: And…

Kaiser: But will ensure that Kansas City Chiefs…

Rana: Which position does Taylor Swift play? She’s a quarterback or something, right?

Kaiser: Yeah, right.

Rana: Okay. Anyway, so you can tell by now that sports metaphors are not probably going to be the most successful way in which I express what’s going on. Let me go with a game instead. Bearing in mind that we’re talking about order and a fragile order, and one that has a potential for basically falling apart quite quickly if the wrong pressure is applied. Are you familiar, Kaiser, are you familiar, audience here, actually, with a game called Twister?

Kaiser: I am. Yeah.

Rana: Okay. So, you’ll be aware that basically…

Kaiser: We played it at middle school parties, this in lieu of making out, right?

Rana: I wondered whether we were going to go there, and Kaiser, you went there. What can I say?

Kaiser: I go there. I always go there.

Rana: Okay. Well, all I can say is that it’s played quite often actually after a pot in the colleges of Oxford. That may or may not be true. We can explore that later. But for those who don’t know, and even for those who do, twister is a game in which basically you play on a mat, and essentially you have to try after throwing various numbers on the dice to stay upright while twisting yourself around the other people who are playing the game.

Kaiser: Right. Left foot blue, right foot yellow, right?

Rana: Yeah. Or left foot South China Sea, right foot Southern Pacific Ocean. The bottom half of the end of your right-hand toe, possibly think somewhere on the Panama Canal. In other words, there is an arrangement and a delicacy about this particular game that, as long as it’s working fine, works fine. But you know, and I know that the danger of any game of Twister is that at the end, if you twist too far, you may bring the entire thing come down. And let’s just say people can get hurt if they go wrong. Now, I think this isn’t exclusive to China, but actually the idea that essentially there’s a lot more entanglement, a lot more entitlement, and one that could possibly come crashing down, well, to me, that spells twister as possibly the metaphor.

Kaiser: I now see why you chose this metaphor. I mean, the entanglement business, that’s great. Kudos.

Rana: So, moved from the Enlightenment to the entanglement in the space of five minutes. I think that’s…

Kaiser: So, okay. Now on to serious things. I’m pretty sure, I mean, let me just take us on a brawl, the room agrees that China is not a sort of pan, apple cart turning over revisionist power. It is selective, yeah?

Rana: Yes.

Kaiser: Okay. Right, very good. Alright, so onto the other thing. We’ve settled at least one of the world’s great problems. And all we did just like five minutes.

Rana: Let’s see if we can do all 17 of them by the time we’ve done today, right?

Kaiser: So, bigger and deeper and more tortuous things. But one of the reasons that I’ve always found it pleasurable to speak with you is because you actually enjoy these sorts of topics, not just about historical topics, but even historiographic topics, and more importantly, the way that historical narratives are enlisted, say, for political ends. You’ve offered some of the most, I think, thoughtful perspectives on the way that the telling of the story of, say, China’s modern history, the Second World War recently has been sub focused on is really, it’s enlisted to buttress the Party’s legitimacy. So let’s connect our conversation about revisionism with China’s sense of where it is right now historically.