Transcript | Yascha Mounk on China and Western Liberalism

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

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 this week from Beijing, where I will be throughout September.

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I have developed a really keen interest in trying to understand the perspectives of smart people, especially public intellectuals, who have reach and influence and who are only recently starting to really grapple with understanding China and all that it means. You know that this show often features academics and diplomats, or analysts, or journalists, who are also people deeply steeped in China and who have areas of real China expertise. But I find it just as valuable sometimes to talk with people from non-China backgrounds, observant, analytical people who’ve been focused on other things and are just now kind of turning their attention to China.

It serves as a kind of reality check, and often a very good way to get a sense of the state of the discourse viewed from the outside. Outside of the fractious world of China’s specialists. And that’s why I invite people like Anne-Marie Slaughter or Adam Tooze onto the show. I find that people like this can often point things out to me that I’d simply not otherwise have noticed. So, today, I am really delighted to welcome Yascha Mounk to the show. Yascha is a political scientist, writer, and, yes, public intellectual, who has written really extensively about democracy, about pluralism and the challenges facing liberal societies in the 21st century. He’s the founder of Persuasion, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where I’ve read a lot of him, and, of course, the host of the Good Fight podcast, which I’ve listened to a lot, and with as much avidity as I have read his writing.

I had the pleasure of meeting him very briefly in Shanghai earlier this year, when he did me the tremendous honor of attending a little talk I gave. And it feels especially fitting to reconnect here because Yascha has just published a two-part essay, a little series on China, one cataloging what he sees as its remarkable strengths, the other what he fears may be its deep weaknesses. For liberals in the West and, you know, cards on the table, neither I, nor I think it’s safe to say my guest today really shies away from that label as a Western liberal, China poses a dilemma that is as psychological, really, as it is political. Some, I think, have tried earnestly to learn from what they see China as having done right, others have looked on with envy, chiefly at its apparent abundance. I say that with deliberate word choice. And some are frustrated by the well-intentioned regulatory safeguards that can prevent us from building in our own societies. And so they look at China with a certain sort of starry-eyed aspect.

Still, others have really responded with very deep skepticism. Sometimes it’s healthy — it’s usually healthy. Sometimes it’s merely reflexive. Many have resorted to self-soothing and to cope, while some even self-identified liberals have succumbed to full-blown moral panic or join the chorus of war mongering. So, in short, China’s rise forces liberals to reckon with questions about values, about governance and pluralism. It’s not always pretty, but it does strike at the core of our own political identity. And Yascha, in his inimitable way, has jumped into that thicket. Yascha Mounk, welcome to Sinica.

Yascha Mounk: Thank you so much, Kaiser. It’s a real pleasure to be on.

Kaiser: Great, great, great. So, let me first give you just the tiniest bit of ribbing for indulging in that conversations with cab drivers cliché, which is, you know-

Yascha: I know, I know.

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s a bit Tom Friedman. Right?

Yascha: It is, but in my defense, I don’t speak the language very well, and I’m very conscious of speaking to an audience, the median member of which is going to know a lot more about China than I do, and probably speak a lot better Chinese than I do. But I do think that if you’re in a place and have a lot of conversations with people, you can learn something about that place, particularly if you’re not just speaking with the help of interpreters. And, as you pointed out, I’m just at the beginning of, of trying to learn about China, but I was able to be in China for a while and in June. And, frankly, one reason why I take as many cabs as I can is that is the best language lesson. Because if you’re taking language classes, which I was, you’ll always speak with a teacher who has a pretty standard accent.

Kaiser: Right.

Yascha: Whereas if you’re taking cabs, then you’re going to get the accent of whichever part of the country they’re from, and that’s actually going to improve your comprehension skills a lot more than sitting in the classroom. So, when I’m in Shanghai, I try to take as many cabs as possible. I have to talk to the cab drivers about something. And so sometimes I end up learning something. But I put in the very few essays I’ve written about China in my life, but I’m aware of the pitfalls. I’m aware of a cliché.

Kaiser: I have to also say, I mean, I find it’s actually useful. I talk to them all the time as well. I mean, what else are you going to do? You’re stuck in a closed space with somebody for at least half an hour when you’re going pretty much anywhere in any of the big cities in China. So, no reason not to talk to them.

Yascha: And by the way, the same is true in the United States. I mean, I think part of sort of talking to cab driver cliché comes from the idea that here I am, a white Westerner who doesn’t really know of the country. I turn up and I speak to free cab drivers, and I think I’ve perfectly understood it. And certainly if you go into it with that attitude, you’re going to get very things very badly wrong. But I always learn from talking to cab drivers in the States as well. I mean, I was in Washington, D.C. about a month ago and spoke to an Ethiopian-American cab driver, a guy who grew up in Ethiopia, moved to the United States when he was about 30 years old, who doesn’t like Trump and was telling me about what he dislikes about Trump. I mean, he was saying, “But, you know, I’m glad they sent him a National Guard because D.C. is really unsafe. And I feel like finally somebody is doing something about that.” I don’t agree with that cab driver, but that gave me an interesting point of information about how some people are thinking about this.

Kaiser: Sure, sure. Absolutely. No, no, I mean, I was really just kidding, but I didn’t. expect you to get into it-

Yascha: I know, I know.

Kaiser: Get into it quite so deep, but now I think you’ve raised some very, very good points. And yeah, I, I definitely enjoyed my conversations with Uber drivers and whatnot whenever I’m in the States as well. So, your essays, including what I read about your 21 observations on China, from your brief earlier visit, are quite textured, I think. They’re really quite nuanced and very personal. I really enjoyed reading them. So, tell me about the process for you, sort of coming to the decision to come and spend months actually living in China. Was there some point of epiphany or a sudden realization that you really, really needed to try and get your head around China? Or was there maybe an article you read, a conversation you had, whether in Germany or in the States, that led you to this pretty radical decision?