Sinica Live with Ian Johnson

Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Ian Johnson.

Kaiser: Welcome to this live recording of the Sinica Podcast, here at the Rizzoli Bookstore in the Flatiron in Manhattan, New York City. Hello, New York.

All right! The Sinica Podcast is a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, and we are, of course, part of The China Project, reporting faithfully with neither fear nor favor about a nation that is reshaping the world. My name is Kaiser Kuo, and I am joined by The China Project’s Editor-In-Chief, Jeremy Goldkorn, who graduated from Baruch College, where he and his Brazilian Jew-ish roommate, George, both gave up promising careers as drag queens to work for Goldman Sachs and Citibank before being elected as editor-in-chief here at The China Project, while his roommate went onto a career in politics, I believe. Anyway, Jeremy, greet the people, won’t you, and then introduce our special guest for the show this evening, will you?

Jeremy: These are getting more and more absurd, Kaiser. Thank you. Hello people. We’re delighted tonight to be joined by Ian Johnson, who is a veteran journalist who cover China in different capacities for now 35 years, or more than, with publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. So, he should be feeling at home in New York. His work has earned him well-deserved acclaim, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Shorenstein Journalism Award, and a Nieman Fellowship. He’s also the author of two major books on China, Wild Grass and The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, about which we interviewed him on Sinica back when we were still in Beijing. After getting expelled from China in 2020, maybe we can talk about what he did to deserve that, he took up a position as senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kaiser: Let me add that I have always placed Ian in that rare class of journalists who would be every bit at home in the classroom in an academic setting, as in the newsroom, in a journalistic one. I’ve always found that he brings scholarship and genuine erudition to his news reporting, and I think conversely brings immediacy and a sense of urgency and readability to his more scholarly works. And in all of this, there’s always this deeply felt empathy, which is really conspicuous on every page and a humaneness that I think has always placed him among my personal favorite journalists of the past few decades.

Jeremy: Indeed. So, Ian Johnson, welcome to Sinica.

Ian: Thank you very much. All of that talk on humaneness and so on and so forth, just shows that the writing persona is not necessarily the same as the real person’s personality, but I’ll take it anyway. Thank you.

Kaiser: Rén (仁). Humaneness — That’s what I meant. I was just translating it directly. Anyway, I suggest that we start this conversation by talking about some of the things that have been in the news of late and then maybe move back to some of the deeper issues and ask you, Ian, to draw on your three-and-a-half decades now of experience with China, to talk about some of the underlying problems and some of the trends and some of the major lessons learned. And then let’s wrap up by talking about the work that you’re doing right now at the Council on Foreign Relations, especially a book that you’re writing or that… And you’ve submitted your manuscript, as I understand, on unofficial history. So, that’s a little overview of what we’re going to be doing tonight.

Ian, why don’t we start with… I would describe this, we’ve all seen this happening now. There’s some movement, possible foreign policy shifts that have been written about quite a bit. We’ve seen, for example, Qín Gāng 秦刚 and not, what’s his name? Lè Yùchéng 乐玉成, raised to the foreign ministry. We’ve seen the odious Zhào Lìjiàn 赵立坚 moved away from a podium where he can make mischief to a place where he can make maybe slightly less mischief. It might not be a charm offensive. Let me describe it as a slightly-less-offensive offensive, but is there something going on here? What’s your read on this, Ian?

Ian: The Panda is back. No, I think they are clearly making an effort to tone down the wolf-warrior diplomacy. It’s not uniform across the board. Recently some countries, like the United States, put some restrictions on Chinese nationals or travelers from China coming into their country. When the United States did it, China didn’t react. When Japan and South Korea did it, they reacted by limiting the number of visas to Japanese and South Koreans. So, there probably is something like a hierarchy of friendliness and friendship, but I think that they do probably, on some level, realize that at least temporarily, while they’re facing a lot of problems at home, they don’t need more trouble abroad. And so, you can see that there’s a bit more of a friendly tone, for sure.

Jeremy: Speaking of trouble abroad, do you think there’s been any shift in Beijing in the position on Ukraine, which obviously the invasion, the Russian invasion was preceded by Xi and Putin’s talk of a no-limits partnership? Is there any change in the attitude to Russia, to Ukraine, do you think?

Ian: I don’t think so. I think that they really wish this problem would go away. I think it’s clearly must be, on some level, an embarrassment to Xi and to the government, the way they embraced Putin just before he invaded a sovereign nation, and that this doesn’t reflect well on his choices and his emphases. However, they’re kind of stuck with it, and I think they are probably just going to keep the current pace of, I think what a Ukrainian analyst I talked to calls it pro-Russian neutrality. So, they’re not going to violate any sanctions, or at least I don’t think they will, but they’re going to try to keep as close to Russia as possible. It wouldn’t surprise me, for example, if the Ukrainians were to successfully push back the Russians and say, go after the Crimean Peninsula that the Chinese might step into that moment and say, “Hey, we’ll try to negotiate a peace here,” or to help Russia out in some way. But I don’t see them covertly sending weapons to Russia. Could be wrong, but I just think they want to not destroy trade relations and so on and so forth.

Kaiser: I was just at Davos and a friend of mine who is a well-known Chinese podcaster like me, tóngháng (同行), who was attending the press conference given by Zelensky’s wife, Zelenska, Madame Zelenska who said that she had a letter that she was delivering from her husband to Liú Hè 刘鹤 to be given to Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. And of course, my plucky friend asked, “What is in the letter?” She tried to be a little bit evasive, but in the end kind of said something to the effect of we are asking China to help frame the beginnings of some sort of a negotiation, which is a very interesting thing. I mean, she didn’t make the specific content of the letter privy, but hinted enough that that was… That’s all on public records, so I’m not exposing anyone here.

Ian: And they’ve tried that before. So far, China hasn’t…

Kaiser: Has not bitten. Right. But nor was it handed directly to somebody who’s close to him as vice premier.

Ian: Right. True, true.

Kaiser: Anyway, do you think that China ought to be maybe given a little bit more credit for having been sanctions compliant thus far? I mean, I think that if you were to pull an average American off the street and ask him where Beijing is, he sort of sees this new Axis of Evil evolving and probably imagines that China has been violating sanctions left, right, and center, but the facts are that China has yes, bought hydrocarbons and carbohydrates from the Russians, but not-

Jeremy: Carbohydrates.

Kaiser: Yeah. Hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. Yeah. That’s clever, isn’t it?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: So, trying to cut carbs a little bit. Anyway, go. What do you think?

Ian: Well, I think, yeah, it probably would surprise most Americans or some Americans to know that clearly China is acting out of self-interest because they don’t want to be lumped in the same… They got enough troubles at home, I think, right now. They don’t want to have to be seen as in violation of sanctions and getting into that whole can of worms. But it is probably something that people should recognize a little bit more, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s out of some benevolence or a belief that Russia doesn’t have the right to do this or that they wouldn’t do something similar if they had the chance to do it, especially vis-à-vis Taiwan. But it is worth noting that, for sure. Yeah.

Kaiser: The best explanation I heard for China’s behavior with Russia is that they’re, I guess the English translation would be like huddling together for warmth 抱团取暖bàotuánqǔnuǎn because they both feel themselves to be very much on the out, out from that clubby West, right? So, they’re sort of huddling on the outside to keep each other warm, not out of any enduring affection for one another, but just for the body warmth. What do you make of that?

Ian: Yeah, I think they’re uneasy allies. And it’s also made uneasy, partially because there’s an unequal power dynamic where Russia used to be the bigger brother, especially in the Soviet, the Communist era, and now it’s very much the really dysfunctional country that’s relying just on exporting natural resources and things like that. I think even in military technology, I doubt they have too much more than China has, or maybe in some aeronautics and stuff like that. But otherwise, there’s not too much Russia can offer China except natural resources. And so, it’s an uneasy relationship.

Kaiser: 35 years. You saw how that happened, right? I mean, from the general sort of, well, still a bit of respect paid to the older, socialist fraternal country to just sort of being dismissive of them as these yáng dǎoyé (洋倒爷). These guys that were schlepping bags of silk from the Xiushui market back across frozen Siberia, right?

Ian: Yeah. When I first went to Beijing as a student, I was at Beida, and we had Russian Soviet students for the first time, I believe that year ‘84 was the first year that there had been students from the Soviet Union back to China since the Sino-Soviet split in, what is it ‘60 or something like that? ’61, ‘60, something like that. Yeah, it really has changed. And the Russians kept the enormous Soviet embassy. They kept some, and there’s still older Chinese people who know Russian and know some Russian folk songs and go traveling to Russia. It is an older generation, for sure, but there’s some warmth there, I think.

Kaiser: Yeah, they know two songs. They know Katyusha and Moscow suburban Nights.

Jeremy: Moscow Nights.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Jeremy: It’s a karaoke favorite actually, isn’t it? Moscow Nights. Yeah.

Kaiser: You didn’t know this was karaoke Night here at the Rizzoli Bookstore, huh? Come on up next. Shall we move on? Let’s talk about coronavirus.

Jeremy: Yeah. So, you wrote about the coronavirus pandemic in the very early days, the spring of 2020. And you’ve obviously followed it since then. What do you make of the way the Western press if-

Kaiser: Did you just say Western Press?

Jeremy: Yes.

Kaiser: I thought you didn’t like to use the phrase ‘western.’

Jeremy: I was about to explain. The American media, the broadsheets, how did they cover the coronavirus? How have they covered it? Because it’s been such a wild ride from Wuhan to the sudden abandonment of COVID zero.

Ian: Yeah. So, you could say that basically the press has covered it as if China did everything wrong all the time. So, when they did COVID zero, that was wrong. When they locked down, that was wrong, did COVID zero, that was wrong, and then they opened up, that was wrong. And maybe they did everything wrong, but they did avoid, at least up until now, they’ve avoided the million deaths that have afflicted or affected the United States. I think that I recall when there was, this is probably in March of 2020, the public health… One of the public health reporters for the New York Times wrote an article, and it was comparing the lockdown in Wuhan to the barbaric lockdowns of like the Middle Ages and the early 20th century when the Spanish flu was racing through North America, and they had pictures of flu wards and it looked so terrible — bed next to bed, and so on and so forth.

How could China do that? The funny thing was Western countries were doing pretty much the same thing a month or two later, right? I think there wasn’t maybe a lot of self-reflection. This gets to deeper questions of what the media’s role is and what kind of stories are reporters conditioned to report, and what are they supposed to be doing? I think 80% of reporters abroad would say our job is to find problems in the society where we’re reporting from and to report on it. And they consciously would reject the idea that they should be more like anthropologists and trying to find out the macro trends in a country and looking at it. I think from that perspective, the coverage of COVID isn’t surprising. The idea that the lockdowns were all wrong and then the opening was all wrong also isn’t that surprising, but maybe it raises broader questions about how the media covers China.

Kaiser: I would love to get into that. Jeremy, would you be okay with us sort of taking a little detour into this topic of?

Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, you know I’ll disagree with everything you say, but if you’re okay with that, let’s do it.

Kaiser: Sure. No, no. I mean, I think Ian raises a really interesting point, and I think this is something that I’ve certainly seen Peter Hessler write about, and something that I’ve talked about quite a bit, which is that if I open an American newspaper, I’m going to see a lot of negative reporting about things that are happening in America. But I live here. I know that of a Sunday I’m going to drive my SUV to Costco and fill it up with unnecessary things, then come home and find my daughter listening to K-pop and my son playing Fortnite. I mean, life is not as bad as all those shootings would suggest. I’m not going to open the window and smell burning tires in the street. Although just those negative stories might give you that impression. I have the rest of that newspaper, which is balanced, right? That newspaper that tells me there are a lot of perfectly “quotidian and ordinary things” happening, people just going about their lives. And that doesn’t make me feel like the country’s on fire. Now, if I’m reading about China and there are only seven or eight stories in there, or 80% of them are about the troubles, what am I going to imagine China to be like as an American? Right?

Jeremy: That’s absolutely true, but America-

Kaiser: You know you disagree with everything I’ve said.

Jeremy: No. What I disagree with is the same thing actually happens to America, and being a fairly typical person who grew up in America, you always see it through an American lens. Whereas I grew up in South Africa, so I have friends calling me and saying, “Oh, are you alright, there was like a mass shooting. Oh, everybody’s dying of COVID.” I mean, that is how news operates. I don’t think that’s something that’s-

Kaiser: Right. But there’s a power dynamic involved. And you know that the discourse power of American media is much, much more mighty, right?

Jeremy: Is that right, Ian?

Ian: Of course, it’s right. I used to work-

Kaiser: Ian, you can just take a break. We’re just going to hash it out.

Ian: I feel like I’m in the middle of a family quarrel here.

Kaiser: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast.

Ian: Yeah, I know. So, you have to ask yourself, what are journalists supposed to do? What’s their role in society? Most journalists were basically trained covering local news, and then maybe they covered national news, and then they were maybe sent abroad. And so, it’s the same… It’s that training that teaches you to find all the problems and report on them. And that’s, by and large, a good thing. I do think, though, that sometimes when you’re in a foreign country, you should try to find out the bigger trends as well. And some reporters do that, and sometimes they will write one of those.

Kaiser: You’d do that. I mean, more to the point you do that. That’s why I think that you are-

Ian: That’s why I’m on the podcast, actually.

Kaiser: Exactly.

Ian: No, no, just kidding. No, but people do that. And so, there is an effort made, but I think it’s probably inevitable just the way the media’s set up.

Kaiser: It’s structural.

Ian: It’s structural. The rewards are not there. You’re not going to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on how China lifted millions of people out of poverty. That’s probably just not going to happen. That’s just the way it is. And so the ambition of people is to win prizes and get the recognition from peers. And so that’s going to be negative news. And China, of course, makes it easier to do that because there is quite a bit of negative news, and it’s hard to get the government’s point of view on stuff. It’s like pulling teeth. You cannot get interviews with people.

Kaiser: And that’s not the worst of it.

Ian: What is the worst of it?

Kaiser: I mean, harassment, detention.

Ian: Oh, that? That badges of honor!

Kaiser: Or, getting roughed up.

Ian: You get promoted when you get detained and sent… That’s not a problem.

Kaiser: I mean, but that shabby treatment of journalists tends, I think, to create more negative reporting, which in turn begets more shabby treatment, which… I mean, it’s a nasty spiral.

Ian: Yeah. And I think also reporting overseas, regardless of what country you’re in, it’s also quite different. I used to, when I was early on in my career, I did fixing, in other words, research and, and work for journalists in Germany and also in China. Reporters are conditioned to at least have a couple of stories a week where you get up in the morning and you say, “I’m going to report on story X.” And you go out all day and you make phone calls and you talk to people, and at three o’clock in the afternoon you start writing, and you hammer out your story, and by six o’clock, you file it and go home. And maybe it takes you two days to do it, or three days, but it doesn’t take you three weeks or three months.

And especially in a place like China where it’s hard to get information, it’s a lot more like cooking a stew where you come upon the ingredients haphazardly and you have to throw it in the pot when you get it. And then at some point, the stew is ready. It’s not like something that you can stir-fry up in an afternoon. I’m mixing my, sorry, my cultural literacy here, or illiteracy. But…

Jeremy: So, your cooking obviously has problems here.

Ian: Yeah. So, it’s a challenge, I think, for a lot of reporters. It can be really frustrating if nobody will return your phone calls. And so that leads you to human rights stories because advocacy groups will talk to you, victims, if you can talk to them, will talk to you. The government won’t talk to you anyway so there’s not really much point in trying. And in a day, you can-

Jeremy: And there’s a guy bleeding in front of you, or something, so…

Ian: So to speak, right. Yeah, exactly. Metaphorically, somebody’s been grabbed and thrown in jail. You can knock out that story, 800 words. And it’s a good story, it’s a legitimate story, but it’s kind of like the one story you can do in China that is easy to execute and gets you recognition. And that also is part of a structural problem, I guess as well.

Kaiser: You have a lot of pet peeves about… I mean, we’ve talked about this before.

Ian: A lot of things. Yeah.

Kaiser: A lot of things, but let’s stick specifically to the problem of reporting in China. I mean, we’ve both talked about the problems of overreliance on social media, for example. I mean, I’ve heard you riff on that. Go.

Ian: Oh, get me a beer, please. No, I mean, I think the problem with social media is it makes all these things worse. In some ways, bad journalism is like a bad scientific experiment. You have your hypothesis and you go out and you get sort of three sources. I remember when I was a business reporter, you needed to get three analysts to confirm which way the stock market was going, and then that was good enough. And you get the three analysts say something, then you bang, you could write your story. It’s kind of like that…

Kaiser: A Chinese idiom.

Ian: There must be a Chinese idiom for that.

Kaiser: Yeah. If three people say they saw a tiger, then there was a tiger.

Ian: Then there was a tiger. Yeah. In terms of covering countries, I think it’s somewhat similar, but social media makes it so much easier to get those three things. You can totally cherry-pick and find stuff. And we see this all the time. People are, especially after journalists were expelled from China as I was three years ago, the U.S. media lost most of the key people at the three major newspapers that still have large staffs in China. So, they were reporting then from Hong Kong, and then later Seoul and Taipei. That led people to do their reporting via their sort of WeChat circle of friends. And this is, of course, not ideal, and nobody really wanted to do it, but it is just a reality of what’s happened, especially over the past few years.

Kaiser: I’ve often wondered whether the sheer number of reporters in Taiwan made the Taiwan issue bubble closer to the surface, or whether there’s some correlation between that.

Ian: You know, it’s hard to know how many are there. I know the Times moved its headquarters to Seoul. So the Hong Kong editing operations, they moved, after the national security law was passed, they moved it to Seoul.

Kaiser: But I hear you that you cannot swing a dead cat in Taipei without hitting a former mainland-based American journalist.

Ian: Yeah, probably. It may have brought awareness of Taiwan up, but you don’t see a lot of Taiwan, stories about Taiwan per se, right? It’s people based there. And another thing that newspapers did, they used to be so scrupulous on datelines, right? If you were reporting on a place, you had to have the dateline of where you were reporting from. Now they just tend to drop the datelines. And that way you don’t realize that people are reporting from Seoul about China. Again, not necessarily anyone’s fault, but I think for savvy readers, it would help shape one’s understanding of how the news was gathered if you knew where it was being reported from.

Jeremy: And you don’t think that that complaint about cherry-picking is actually a problem with all journalism because-

Kaiser: Not just China journalism, you mean?

Jeremy: Not just China journalism, but I mean any kind of China journalism. I mean, you’ve written a book about religion in China which Kaiser and I used to tease you about because-

Kaiser: Because you’re an atheist. Because you’re a godless atheist. That’s why. Because you recognize no value-

Jeremy: I mean, aren’t you just cherry-picking the few weirdos in China who are religious? Kaiser loves to cherry-pick the few weirdo positive bits of news coming out of U.S.-China relations. I mean, isn’t that kind of a perspective one brings?

Kaiser: Sorry, that’s just not true. I’m rigorously empirical and I’m never subject to confirmation bias. I’m unbelievably free of all this.

Jeremy: That was a question for Ian, by the way.

Kaiser: I know.

Ian: Yeah, I think it’s true. Of course, it can be true, but I think social media just reinforces that. It makes it so easy to find what you’re looking for and it’s so quick. And you are living much more in these echo chambers that you can’t avoid it really. So, yeah.

Jeremy: Do you think it’s much worse for China journalism than it is for journalism about anything really? Elon Musk tweets something and that, I mean, what we used to call inches and inches of column space.

Ian: No, it’s a problem. I think it’s a problem across the board. Maybe China is just… it’s more pronounced because to some degree it matters so much, but also, it’s a harder place to report on. So, it’s not like you can, if you just made a little bit more effort, that you could do a better job. You have to make a lot more of an effort to do a better job. China, because it’s so hard to do a good job, I think that that makes it easier to just resort to social media and things like that. There aren’t the sort of obvious… If you’re a reporter in the United States and you want to figure out what… Say you’re a foreign correspondent for some European or whatever Chinese media, and you’re in the United States, it’s not hard to figure out what’s really going on in the country.

I mean, you could look at the New York Times and the Washington Post, yes, it would be negative news, but there are so many NGOs, there are so many people you could talk to. You could figure out things… There are so many magazines and advocacy groups. You just have too much information. In China, it’s the opposite. So, I think it’s so hard to figure out what’s really going on, even in things like the number of COVID deaths right now. Then you just are driven to anecdotalism. Like some guy went to someplace, Shijiazhuang and saw a crematorium working late at night. And then immediately it’s like the crematoria in China are working overtime because of all the dead people. I mean, who knows if it’s right or wrong, but this is what we’re sort of left with.

Jeremy: And satellite pictures. It’s the other new thing.

Kaiser: Where I want to go with this is, look, we’re living in a difficult time right now. We’ve had a number of horrific shootings just in recent days, and I don’t think people can be blamed for having left immediately to what turned out to be an incorrect conclusion that these were anti AAPI hate crimes given the number of them that have happened. For example, a woman in Bloomington, Indiana being stabbed in the head by somebody who explicitly said it was because she wanted one less Chinese person in the world. Anyway, there’s this pretty toxic environment here, and it’s not just in the extremes of the violence and the vituperation directed against Asian Americans — It’s also just in the broader Sinophobia. And I believe the two things are intimately linked. I wonder whether the media and the way that it has reported on China has any, I won’t go so far as to say blame, but does it have any responsibility in the creation of this threat narrative of the zero-sum mentality in the xenophobic atmosphere that now pervades this country?

I mean, what could we have done differently? I mean, can we just wash our hands of it as media people? I mean, I talk all the time about atrocities in Xinjiang, but I probably convinced myself that no, nobody’s actually attacking Asians out of solidarity with the oppressed Uyghurs.

Ian: Well, I think, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of different thoughts. I guess one is that the people who are doing the attacks are probably not parsing the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for their coverage of China. However, you could say that often they’re mentally ill people, and you could say they reflect the zeitgeist, right? So, when the president says “kung flu” and stuff like that, the Wuhan virus, then some people somewhere down the food chain thinks it’s all Chinese people’s fault. And I don’t think there’s a coincidence that those attacks really took off at that time, right? It was in the spring of 2020 when there was this whole spate of attacks. So, it was clearly there was something going on.

I don’t think it’s just the media per se. I think it’s also political leaders. Clearly, it’s easy to say Trump and his reckless rhetoric, that’s part of it. But also maybe even the lack of a clear change of tone in the current administration has, on some level, played a role. I don’t think the current administration, they’ve been very careful to show solidarity with AAPI citizens and to avoid any rhetoric like that. But still, the policy has hardly changed, and China is seen primarily as an enemy.

Jeremy: Yeah, I suppose that’s one of those areas where I would approach the question rather differently from Kaiser in the sense that I would tend to blame the Chinese government for…

Kaiser: Of course, you would.

Jeremy: the hostility of the media rather than blame the media for reporting on it and thereby inciting xenophobia in the United States.

Kaiser: So, the attacks on Asian people are ultimately the fault of China, right?

Jeremy: That’s not what I said.

Kaiser: Oh, okay. We’ll settle this over drinks later, or pistols at dawn.

Ian: I’ll stay up for that.

Kaiser: Yeah, I’d definitely stay up for that. What about this, Ian? There’s this piece that you wrote, I thought it was absolutely terrific, you wrote a profile about one of my favorite people who is writing on the space today, Jessica Chen Weiss, who’s a professor of government, of political science, at Cornell University. And she’s been writing some of the braver pieces calling for a more measured response to China. She’s really getting right up against the so-called bipartisan consensus of what we’ve been calling the Washington blob. Well, what compelled you to write about her, and how do you think her quixotic quest is going?

Ian: So, right, Jessica Chen Weiss teaches at Cornell. She wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs, I think in September, on the Washington Consensus. She had spent a year as a… basically she took a year sabbatical or leave from Cornell, and she worked in the State Department.

Kaiser: In policy planning.

Ian: In policy planning. And came out of that and wrote her piece for Foreign Affairs. And just, she’s very careful and she’s thankful for her time in State, and she thinks the administration overall is doing a good job, but she thinks there’s a lack of nuance and almost like a missed opportunity, which I think in hindsight really was true. When the Biden administration came in two years ago, they fell into this trap of needing to look tough on China. And there was this almost stage-managed confrontation in Anchorage where right in front of the foreign press, Blinken rips into China. The Chinese counterpart then, of course, it’s almost compelled right next to him, right in front of the press, not behind closed doors. And he rips into him, and you have these big fireworks. And that had to have been a calculated strategy in order to show we’re not going to cave into China, even though we’re Democrats and the Democrats are in the White House, etc.

That I think was sort of a missed opportunity. And then there was a variety of other things she points out, which was, and some of it’s understanding that the Trump administration had broken off alliances or alienated allies and friends around the region. And so the Biden administration’s policy has been to rebuild all those alliances and try to rebuild them and friendships and solidify them, and then go to China sort of later. So, they never really reached out to China early on, and then sort of did a variety of things like the AUKUS deal with the U.K. and Australia and submarines and reinvigorating the Quad.

Kaiser: And how does all these look from Beijing? They don’t really seem-

Ian: Well, from Beijing’s point of view, it’s like you’re trying to encircle us with alliances and stuff like that and you’re not really interested in talking to us. So, you can understand where they were coming from, why the Biden administration would do that. But the ultimate effect was that you didn’t have any chance of doing anything with China. To this date, there’s no real trade policy toward China. There’s no effort to reopen, say restart the Fulbright-

Kaiser: Chengdu consulate or the… Right?

Ian: Yeah, the Fulbright thing, the Peace Corps, the consulate all of these things would be…

Kaiser: Low-hanging fruit.

Ian: Well, they’re low-hanging fruit, and they’re all own goals that the U.S. scored against itself in the Trump administration. I don’t even know if China would go for it, because why would you want to allow the U.S. to reopen a consulate, right? Why would you want to allow American researchers to traipse around China on Fulbrights and learn about China? You don’t really want that. Those were projects that existed that we, as the United States, cut off in the Trump administration, but the Biden administration hasn’t even really tried to reverse this. And I think this is somewhat bewildering. I think [Chen Weiss] reflects that. I guess, when you say where is she in her quixotic quest? I think there’s a significant number of people, maybe more in academia, but in the China expert community, in the think tanks, who think that the Biden administration is missing opportunities to, not go back to engagement or to a rosy past, but just to at least try to reengage with China.

And that could also just help by normalizing China. I mean, one thing I noticed when I was teaching in China, I taught at a study abroad center also in the 2010s, the number of students just went down because there was this overall feeling that China was uninteresting, it was an authoritarian dictatorship — much of this is true, but that there was nothing at all to be gained by dealing with China. And that’s almost the sense you get in a lot of circles in the U.S., that why bother dealing with this country? This is sort of 1938, and we should just isolate and arm ourselves for the coming conflict rather than trying to at least try to have the guts to try something more positively oriented.

Kaiser: And I find that when people make that argument, it’s binary. There’s a good guy and a bad guy. It’s simplistic and it’s compelling to a lot of people. And then they turn to Jessica on her quixotic quest, or to me, her Sancho Panza, I am joining her on that quest. And there are many of us who… And what do we offer? We say, “Sit down. I’m going to give you a three-hour history lesson. I’m going to introduce all this nuance and all this context, and I’m going to paint this for you in 87 shades of subtle gray. And there’s no patience for that. They don’t want that. There’s one narrative that’s clearly going to win out.

Ian: I like the shades of gray idea for Sino-U.S. relations. That would be an interesting-

Jeremy: Fifty shades of gray.

Ian: Fifty shades.

Kaiser: So, I have not read that, but I guess you’re making some sexually perverse S and M references.

Ian: I haven’t read it either.

Kaiser: And yet you know.

Ian: Yet I know.

Kaiser: Yet you know. No, seriously, I mean, is there a way for us to win the day? I mean, because it feels like rhetorically we are about… I mean, all of their arguments appeal to these things-

Jeremy: The “us” being you and Jessica, and their being…

Kaiser: You.

Jeremy: Me? Right, okay.

Kaiser: Right now. No, not you. I mean, I know you’re sort of still… I mean, this is very performed, right? You know that, right? He’s actually…

Jeremy: You think so?

Kaiser: He actually is a closet panda hugger. But no, serious, just back to my question, though, I feel like, how can we recast this in a way that can win over hearts and minds? Is it just simply a lost cause? Are there ways… because I feel like their arguments play to the strengths of all of our cognitive weaknesses, all these inherent biases whether it’s confirmation bias or it’s that tendency to remember negative things more easily than we remember positive things. All the things that psychologists have told us about the way that our brains work, their narratives fit perfectly into that, where ours, we’re asking for too much from people. What’s the fix?

Ian: I’m not asking a lot from people, but no, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that hard because I think the self-interest ultimately is finding a way to coexist with China. Whether you like it or not, this is the realpolitik side of the equation is that you have to deal with China, and you can’t deal with it by always casting it as an enemy unless you think the country’s about to implode or whatever, collapse. I do think quite a lot of the hawkish views are increasingly being seen as somewhat ridiculous. Now, in a few years from now, people may prove that I’m absolutely wrong, but there’s this whole story going around Washington that China will invade Taiwan by 2027. And this is this whole thing that’s come up, that it’s because the PLA has a goal that by the hundredth anniversary of the PLA, they want to have a modern blah, blah blah, some slogan armed forces. They’re always coming up with these plans and dates and anniversaries and stuff like that, just like they were going to eliminate poverty on the hundredth anniversary of the CCP and so on.

And so, this then convinced people in Washington and said, “Well, if China has a modern military, that means they’ll be able to invade Taiwan.” Ergo, they will invade Taiwan sometime around 2027. And this was major people like think tanks and so on were writing papers, ex-military people testifying before Congress saying there’s a likelihood that China will invade by 2027. And this just got this own dynamic. And then people are writing papers, footnoting this testimony before Congress, which sounds really definitive. And it’s all sort of based on this loose vague PLA plan to be modernized by their hundredth anniversary. I think if China were really going to invade Taiwan, it would be a big, big decision. They’re not going to make it based on some anniversary goal of the PLA.

Kaiser: I would urge everyone who hasn’t already read it, to read John Culver’s piece in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication on their website. John Culver wrote about what we would actually see if China were, in fact, preparing an invasion of Taiwan. And it’s not just what we’d be able to see from satellites about troop movements or disposition of naval vessels, but actually things that would happen in government and things that would show up in the economy that would prepare for a footing. So, I heartily recommend that piece.

Jeremy: Ian… go on.

Ian: But just one final thing. I think a lot of people realize that this is increasingly, this is kind of nonsense, and more and more people you talk to in Washington realize, ah, yeah, that’s probably not going to happen. Those things are discredited. And so I do think that there is some kind of pushback that’s happening.

Kaiser: I’m glad to hear it. I’m hearing that from a lot of people now. I’m hearing that from people who are publishers of some of these leading journals and publications that they’re seeing that happening, and so I take some courage from that in the Year of the Rabbit.

Jeremy: What about the world of think tanks because you have spent much of your career in the media, but also in academia. And recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, you’ve been exposed to the blob really, in some ways, quite a full on experience. And the blob is full of think tanks. How do you think think-tanks in the United States affect the way we talk about China here?

Ian: Yeah, it’s been interesting working at CFR. I had the opportunity of working either in Washington or New York, and I picked the New York office because I thought that will keep me further away from the blob and the somewhat self-referential world of offering policy suggestions for everything that’s going on in Washington and the whole Washington discussion. But it’s been very interesting working at the Council. Just today, I was giving a briefing to a member of Congress, very interested in China.

Kaiser: Was It George Santos?

Ian: He said he was George Santos. You get to talk to people and you get a different kind of access when you’re a journalist. When you’re a journalist, it’s very much… I have to be super careful what I say, if I even meet with you, because this could appear in the newspaper. It’s understandable. When you’re with a think tank, you’re primarily just offering advice or your opinion, or they want to talk to you for whatever reason. And so, it’s easier to sit down and just BS with people in their offices. I think, on some level, think tanks are great. They do deeply research issues. They have genuine experts in the field on things like the military or diplomacy and so on and so forth. They’re much more policy-oriented than academics are.

It’s a unique phenomenon of the United States. It does though lead to, especially because so many people are in D.C. and they’re all kind of moving in the same circles, reading each other’s works, I think there’s this fear of looking silly, right? And it’s like this in any group. You don’t want to be silly and say something that’s too contrarian. So, everybody then tends to move in the same direction. Like, you can’t say anything about China and Washington if you don’t first acknowledge that it’s a threat to world peace and then blah blah, blah, blah, blah. You got to sort of-

Kaiser: The litany.

Ian: Yeah, the whole litany, and then you can say, “However, we should still dah, dah, dah, dah.” I think that there’s a bit of groupthink that goes on there, for sure.

Kaiser: Amen. Amen.

Ian: It may be true. For all I know, it’s even worse in Beijing or other places. I’m not sure whether think tanks contribute to that. If it’s different, say, in Paris or Berlin where they do have think tanks, but they’re not as embedded in the policymaking apparatus. That would be interesting to compare those things.

Kaiser: Should we talk about your book that’s coming out? First of all, I want to extract a promise from you here before all these assembled people that when said book does reach the press, you are going to come back onto our program and talk about it with us, yeah?

Ian: I hereby promise. I’ve been-

Kaiser: You’ve seen it. Yes, before all these witnesses. Okay, great. So, you are writing about unofficial history, about people who are challenging the official historical narrative. Why is history so important to the Chinese Communist Party in the first place?

Ian: History legitimizes the party’s rule. The sort of narrative is that… You can see this, if you go to the National Museum of China and Tiananmen Square. They have this road to rejuvenation, this sort of fixed exhibition. When you go on the ground floor on the left-hand side, it’s been there for 10 years. And it basically says, there were well-meaning patriots who tried to fix China in the 19th century and the early 20th century, and they all failed. And it was only really when the Communist Party came to power that they brought China off its knees. And there’s some truth to this, of course, that they did take power in China, at least at that time. And they fought the U.S. to a standstill in the Korean War, and they made China a nuclear power and all that sort of stuff.

So, you can sort of understand it, but that’s the story. Of course it’s not legitimized through democracy. You can sort of see it as a popular uprising, but I think a lot of historians show that this idea that it was a mass peasant movement that brought the communists to power on the back of this peasant army is really not accurate. It was much more that they need history to legitimize the rule and to continue to legitimize it. Therefore, this leads to censorship, of course, most obviously say when you’re talking about the virus, let’s say it started three years ago in Wuhan — they need to show that their policies were absolutely correct and that the verdict of history still shows that the party must rule China and only the party can save China from chaos, etc. And this is why Xi Jinping did that big resolution on party history a year and a half ago only the third time in a 100-year history of the Party that they’ve had something like that.

Kaiser: And there’s this obsession with the crime of historical nihilism. What is historical nihilism or nihilism?

Ian: That is when you deny, basically when you deny the party’s view of history. That’s essentially what it is. But you’re denying that the party has this historical role in running the country. So, one of Xi Jinping’s main things, when he took power, first of all, he went to the Revolutionary Museum. That was the very first thing he did in 2012. And then he also said that the first 30 years of Communist rule, in other words, the Mao era roughly, and the reform era, the next 30 years of Communist rule were two sides of the same coin. That you could not fǒudìng (否定), you could not negate one and accept the other. So, it wasn’t acceptable to say, “Well, I’m for a reform and opening, but I’m against Mao. You had to accept Mao as part of it. And that would mostly be what you’d face, but maybe among Maoists or neo-Maoists in China, you could also say you can’t just accept Mao. You also have to accept the reform and opening period. In other words, all of the party’s history was good.

Kaiser: So, what were some of the points of contention that you looked at in your book? What are some of the big issues? Like I imagine it might be things like the Party’s role in defeating the Japanese. I mean that’s a perennial one, and that’s one where if you take the stance that they kind of held to themselves, yeah, there was the New Fourth Army and then the Eighth Route Army, even they did a little, but mainly it was the nationalists who beat the Japanese. Saying that is anathema in China, and that gets you painted. Is that something you explored in the book?

Ian: Yeah, a little bit about that. I looked at different eras all the way up to 2020, and the virus. And even, because I just handed in the manuscript I included a little bit from last year as well. So, on different battles-

Kaiser: Is that all the way up to the A4 revolution or?

Ian: Well, yeah, I mentioned that as well just at the very end. There’s a chapter called virus, which is just all about the whole virus debate. And interesting parallels to the SARS epidemic, right?

Kaiser: Sure.

Ian: In some ways we thought that they learned the lesson. In some ways they had learned the lesson. They didn’t deny it for so long, but they still denied it for a significant amount of time and tried to control the narrative. So, I include that as well. I mainly focus on a few individuals who are active in China today, who are still making samizdat publications, underground documentary films and things like that. And I guess one of the goals, if you want to think of it from the Washington discussion we are just having, is that it’s not true that nothing’s going on in China.

There are still independent-minded people in China. They’re still producing things. The venues they have to show their things is limited. It’s harder. There are no independent documentary film festivals anymore. It’s hard to circulate stuff on social media or to work as a journalist, but there are still people doing absolutely fascinating work, and they’re doing it out of a sense of duty and a sense that this matters because in China, history has always mattered. It isn’t just recently. It goes back thousands of years. And in the telling of history in China is the good guys always win. Ultimately, it’s Sīmǎ Qiān 司马迁 who matters. It’s Sū Dōngpō 苏东坡 who won, right? It’s not the emperor who banished him and so on and so forth. Those people, their telling of history was what won. And these people are driven by the same motivation, the same idealism. That even if-

Kaiser: Fantastic.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: Can’t wait to read it. And then thank you for promising to come to us first with it. I look forward to your-

Jeremy: He didn’t say first, actually.

Kaiser: Okay. I want to leave time for questions, but so why don’t we move on to recommendations first before we do that.

Ian: Alright.

Kaiser: Yeah, let’s do that. But first, a quick reminder that the best thing you can do to support the work that we do with the Sinica Podcast and with all the other shows in the network is to become a The China Project subscriber, an Access subscriber. If you aren’t, if you’re one of the people in the audience tonight who isn’t, for some strange reason, a buck, one little dollar is all we ask for a one-month free trial period. And then, of course, you’ll forget not to renew. I said the quiet part out loud.

Jeremy: Oh gosh.

Kaiser: I’m just joking.

Jeremy: I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.

Kaiser: The great thing about podcast is you can edit them. Anyway, Jeremy, why don’t you start off, what do you have for us by way of recommendations?

Jeremy: It’s somewhat self-serving one in terms of the China project. We have a new column that’s coming out every week by the writer, Paul French.

Kaiser: Yay, Paul French.

Jeremy: And it’s called “The Ultimate China Bookshelf.” And each week, he recommends basically a classic China book written by foreign writers, Chinese writers, any time, pretty much up till about a decade ago. And the idea is to build a library of books that have stood the test of time.

Kaiser: Great conceit. That’s a great idea. Yeah, and it’s good. He started off with — guess what book? Anyone know? Yep. Yep. 400 Million [Customers]. That Carl Crow. Yeah. So, who got that? Oh, right, Lee. Oh, perfect, perfect. Yeah, ding, ding, you win a prize. Where’s that hat we were going to give away? Amazing. Yeah. Ian, what you got for us?

Ian: I wanted to recommend a novel that was published in translation in English last year by Wáng Xiaǒbō 王小波 called Golden Age.

Kaiser: Oh yeah.

Ian: And that was a classic that came out in 1990.

Kaiser: Early ‘90s. early ‘90. Silver Age and then Golden. Yeah.

Ian: Yeah. And it was absolutely a trendsetting important novel. It’s still in print in China and it’s never been completely translated before, but it just came out… Well, it came out last year, but maybe not a lot of people are aware of the novel. I did a review of it for The New York Times in June of last year. And so, we could maybe put a link or something for people who want to find it, but I think it’s a really… It’s one of those books that’s hilarious and it’s also profound at the same time. And I think it’s just a really… you can understand why this is such a-

Kaiser: Who’s translated it?

Ian: Somebody called Yan Yan. I don’t know who that is.

Kaiser: Great, great. Oh, fantastic. That’s a great recommendation. I had no idea that it had been translated and that it was available. I’ll check it out. Didn’t you want to make a musical recommendation as well?

Ian: Oh, well, I was going to actually, so I did have… Since coming back to the United States, I started to recollect or collect again LPs. And one of the things, for anybody who’s interested in jazz, Blue Note, the New Jersey-based label has been reissuing some of their classic jazz LPs. And they have this, people go into their vaults and reissue some of the older albums with even more complete liner notes and things like that. And it’s just really a pleasure to have the physical object in your hand, similar to reading a really nice, say hardcover. Of course you can get the stuff on Spotify. I listen to Spotify also. I’m not against that. I’m not a complete Luddite, but there is something different, the muscle memory also of seeing it, of knowing where the tracks are, of reading the liner notes and seeing the beautiful black and white pictures that they took back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it is something that really adds to the experience, I think.

Kaiser: After hearing you say that, I feel a little bit guilty in what I want to recommend here because it’s sort of, instead of reading, I want to recommend the audiobook version of a specific book. A few weeks ago, I recommended The Passenger, the newest novel by Cormac McCarthy. There was a coda novel, it’s often sold together called Stella Maris. The audiobook of Stella Maris is read by the two greatest living audio audiobook narrators, Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini. And it is an entirely dialogue book, it’s a very short book, of Julia Whelan reading the voice of a very troubled and very brilliant young woman who’s checked herself into the Stella Maris mental facility in conversation with her therapist, who’s voiced by Edoardo Ballerini. And it’s unbelievable. It’s just great. I mean, it’s just a bravura performance by both of them. So, Stella Maris in audiobook from Audible voiced by Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini, whose voice I really envy. But hey, Ian, thank you so much for taking the time.

Ian: That was my pleasure. Thanks for having me all.

Kaiser: What a great conversation. It really felt like being back in Beijing again, huh? Except that it’s not. All right. Thank you all for coming.

Audience: Woo!