Tag: china

Countering Chinese Nationalist Talking Points

Update: please see the update note after the guide image for some additional arguments and refutations.

I compiled a handy guide to some of the most common strategies and talking points by Chinese nationalists online (on forums like twitter and reddit). [Sharable image first, copy-able text follows.] This list is far from exhaustive, but should be a good base for combating most arguments. Please share additional talking points or strategies in the comments.

One overriding thing to note: anyone in China has to use a VPN and violate Chinese law in order to be engaging on these forums in the first place. So don’t hesitate to draw attention to their hypocrisy and disrespect of Chinese law.

Update: This was posted on reddit, and the discussion there generated many more arguments and responses. Consider

These are really low hanging fruit. What about the more difficult points to combat that nationalists often make? How do we counter misinformation like this:

“It’s easy to criticize the CCP, but don’t the people have a right to say they want a government and society that is different from what Americans have? How do you promote freedom and human rights without also weakening the institutions that maintain China’s independence and uniqueness we value which many other countries have lost to globalization and westernization?”

“I think that the integration of China’s economy with the US has promoted the values we all want to see adopted by our government: free trade, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, etc. But now, the US is severing ties with China by imposing tariffs (even on goods like solar panels and EVs which are desperately needed to combat climate change), sanctioning and banning Chinese companies, and regressing to unfair trade practices like subsidizing domestic industry — practices it has criticized China for. How can the CCP in its current form be opposed when the good actors on the global stage like the US can’t be relied on to help in this fight and demonstrate correct behavior? How can we pressure the CCP when the US wants to punish China rather than shape China for the better?”

“Whenever the extremely high incarceration rate in the US is brought up, the disproportionate imprisonment of minorities there, or the forced labor practices the US and its state governments engage in, people always do whataboutism and say hush, you have no room to talk when the CCP is doing the same and worse in Xinjiang and Tibet. I think we should oppose human rights violations no matter where they happen in the world, but the conversation always gets turned to sanctions against China and opposing the CCP. In contrast, you’ve never heard someone say ‘it’s time for regime change in the US’ or ‘why not have sanctions against the US for its crimes’, and that’s because the US is still the global policeman, judge, jury, and executioner. It’s above reproach, above the law, and unaccountable to anyone. The US should be expected to be a state party to the Rome Statute; it should be expected to support and comply with the WTO; it should be a state party in the Paris Climate Accords all of the time, not just when it feels like it. If not for its military power, the US would be considered a rogue state.”

A (self-described) Chinese commenter replied to these points (my posting them here is not an endorsement):

As a Chinese person to answer these questions:

The Chinese people certainly have the right to choose a government that is different from that of the United States, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not given the Chinese people the power to choose a government that is different from that of the CCP

The CCP has frantically suppressed civil society, from rights lawyers to investigative journalists to ordinary citizens. The CCP has used every means to crack down and persecute them. More than a decade ago, an old man took the initiative to monitor the misuse of public vehicles by officials. The CCP secret police lured him into prostitution with a scam and made it public. An attempt was made to ruin his reputation.

The CCP does not practice free trade. Take the communications industry for example. The CCP pretended to open up the communications industry when it joined the WTO, and after it joined the WTO, it opened up only a very small number of proliferating businesses. The same thing happened to the insurance industry. The CCP has formulated a series of “documents” to create a glass ceiling for foreign investment. Foreign investors are not allowed to participate in the most important insurance business at all. By contrast, it was not until the Trump era that the US government began to restrict Chinese telecoms operators from doing business in the US.

Liberalism itself encourages independence and uniqueness. Holding independence and uniqueness against Western civilisation, Hong Kong, the most liberal city in China, retains the most traditional culture. Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, people had been forced to destroy countless traditional cultures. They even destroyed the tomb of the legendary “Yellow Emperor”, the ancestor of the Chinese people. The independence that the CCP tries to retain is in fact their uninterrupted rule over the Chinese people.

Every country violates international law to a greater or lesser extent. But the United States remains the foremost defender of the international order. On the question of the US supporting Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars against the Russian invaders, China is supporting Russia on a massive scale. Including, but not limited to, massive prepaid energy orders, drones, industrial equipment.

Without further ado, the guide:

Strategy	Definition	Example	Idea about how to counter
Whataboutism	AKA “tu quoque fallacy”, turning an accusation around without actually addressing it	Criticizing CCP ➔ “Oh, America is perfect?” Criticizing Xi ➔ “But Trump did…” Criticizing Xinjiang ➔ Native Americans, Slavery “You don’t have freedom or democracy in the US, everything is controlled by corporations”.	Agree that these things are all bad and it’s important to oppose them anywhere in the world.
Jingoism	An overt assertion of national strength	“You can gloat now, but pretty soon we’ll own your countries” “You’re just angry that China has managed Covid better than you and you’re left with a failed government that’s getting you killed”	The west laments its imperialist past. Why does China want to make the same mistakes the West did? Point out that most people around the world don’t tie their pride to their national strength; what matters is whether people are having happy lives. How does international power make them happy?
Economic Essentialism	Using China’s economic growth to excuse unrelated things	“Sure the government wanted to put down the rebels in Tiananmen in 1989, but clearly it was justified considering how much economic growth China has achieved”.	Why can’t China figure out how to have economic growth with freedom? Point out countries like Japan, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan have done so. It’s not one or the other. Why does the CCP fear its own people?
Hansplaining	Resorting to the “mystery” that is China that foreigners will never understand	“It’s easy for you to criticize something you don’t understand. Only real Chinese who grew up in China would understand why this is necessary”.	It’s fine for a culture to be complicated and difficult to understand. But how can such a culture become globally competitive?
Nation-Government Conflation	Interpreting an attack on the CCP/Government as an attack on the Chinese people	“Me and my country can never be separated”. Attack on the CCP ➔ “why are you racist against Chinese people? What have we done to you?”	Breaking the government/nation conflation is the key to fighting Wumaos. CCP propaganda has indoctrinated people that an attack on the CCP is an attack on the Chinese people. We need to be clear that the world would love to see a prosperous, happy, and free Chinese nation.
Outright distraction	Taking a conversation that is going against China and making inflammatory (usually political) comments to distract	“Do you think Biden or Trump is the bigger tool of China?”	Call out the blatant CCP distraction, downvote, and move on. Do not feed the trolls.
Praise of China	Posting articles or comments that explain how good something is in China	“China has built the world’s fastest supercomputer…”	“It’s so cool what humans are capable of. Who cares that it’s Chinese?” Agree that it’s great. Every country has great things. That doesn’t confer greatness on the other 1.4 billion Chinese and more than it confers greatness on non-Chinese.

July 2, 2024

Arguments for Natalism on the Left

Natalism, the belief in the need for higher birthrates, is increasingly a topic of concern for various thinkers and prognosticators (Robin Hanson, Tyler Cowen, Zvi Moskowitz, and Elon Musk among many others). However, the calls for natalist policies are almost unanimously from the political right. I would like to argue that it would behoove the political left to take on this banner as well.

The reason that the left has been reluctant to promote natalism are somewhat obvious. One of the core ideological constituencies of the political Left in many developed countries is young educated professionals, many of whom are child-free: some simply by the vicissitudes of professional life, and some of whom by ecological or personal choice. For the child-free members of this group, to embrace natalism would be hypocrisy. And for a leftist group or party to embrace natalism would be to risk alienating this important source of votes, funds, and political energy. Natalism is closely associated with the “traditional family” and “family values”, typically conservative calling cards.

That said, there are a two strong arguments to make for the left embracing natalism, one of them Machiavellian and the other Darwinian.

The Machiavellian argument is simply that natalism could be a powerful argument and political tool for advancing many leftist causes. I will take the American example here, even though the US is out of step with most western countries on these issues, but the example should be illustrative to other political systems nonetheless. Some of the dreams of the American left include expanding public healthcare, instating paid medical and parental leave policies, and funding public schooling, including higher education. A powerful political argument from the natalist perspective is that the cost and burden of having, raising, and educating a child is too prohibitive and that this is a significant reason for the choice of many adults in developed countries not to have children. By putting in place these policies, the cost of having, raising, and educating a child is distributed to society as a whole, just as the benefit of having that additional participant in the economy is distributed – public goods should have public funding. Should the American political left embrace natalism, it could seek common cause with natalists on the right to find compromises on these policies for the benefit of boosting the birthrate.

On the Darwinian side, Leftists should consider embracing natalism to ensure their ideological and demographic sustainability. In the short-term national scale, if left-leaning individuals and groups continue to have lower birth rates compared to their right-leaning counterparts, the political landscape could shift significantly over a few decades; higher birth rates on the right could lead to a future where conservative values and policies dominate simply due to numerical superiority and intra-familial transmission. As Robin Hanson argues, over time this could mean a far future that is populated by the descendants of high-fertility subcultures like Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are of course very religious and conservative. When Hanson first promulgated this idea, I was resistant and argued that

“The idea that society will be dominated by the high-fertility subcultures is reductionist and assumes that the part of society one is born into is nearly perfectly correlated with the part of society one affiliates with as an adult, which is not the case. Conservative religious groups have higher fertility, but many people raised in those environments convert to more secular or liberal worldviews as adults. Parts of society that don’t have high fertility compete with high-fertility parts by being more alluring. Equilibrium can continue indefinitely.”

However, I did the math, and posited a scenario in which there is a dominant culture D with fertility rate 1.5, and subculture S which is only 5% of the population but has a fertility rate of 4. To ensure that S never becomes dominant, the conversion rate from S to D needs to be approximately 29.33% per generation. This means that for every 100 S individuals, at least 29.33 need to convert to D each generation to prevent S from ever becoming the majority. 29% is a high barrier, considering that fewer than 10% of Amish leave their communities. It would be much easier to simply increase the fertility rate of mainstream society.[1] By promoting and supporting family-friendly policies that encourage higher birth rates within their communities, leftists can help ensure the populational vitality of the coalition.

In the long term global perspective, falling birth rates in secular, developed countries can lead to a significant population imbalance compared to developing countries, which, without stereotyping, are on average less secular and egalitarian than western countries. This will put secular liberal values at a disadvantage globally in bodies such as the UN or its successors. Further, countries experiencing starkly declining populations may increasingly rely on immigration to sustain their economies and address labor shortages (NB: I am pro-immigration and this is overall a good thing!). However, as shown in the previous link, this immigration will increasingly have to come from nations with more conservative cultures, posing increasingly difficult demands on systems of integration/assimilation, which may over time threaten the influence of liberal and secular ideals (we don’t have to go full Houellebecq and see some abrupt takeover). This process can be slowed and eased by boosting domestic fertility.

[1] Note that this sort of scenario only really plays out in a peaceful world; in a more belligerent time like in most of human history, dynamism in social organization and scientific and technological advance allowed the dominance of countries with small populations over larger ones; see, for example, the Mongol, British or Japanese victories over China, or Prusso-German successes over Russia, or for the most extreme examples the incursions of Pizarro and Cortez in the Americas.

June 10, 2024
China’s Coral Reef Economic Stimulus

Chinese manufacturing policies are unsustainable. That doesn’t mean they won’t accomplish China’s goals.

The Chinese economy has been drawing contradictory comments in recent months. Amidst the gloom and doom of prognosticators declaring that the Chinese economic engine may finally be stalling, there is the new and sudden alarum about the flood of cheap Chinese exported goods that are now overwhelming global markets. While these opposing narratives may seem incompatible – how could a stalling economy be so productive and competitive? – they are actually very closely related. China may be pursuing a stimulus strategy that I liken to a coral reef: though many subsidized companies will fail, their skeletons will scaffold the success of China’s future industrial titans.

The Disease

On the one hand, it is incontrovertible that the Chinese economy is not what it once was. Property giants are imploding, Chinese outbound tourist numbers have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and the deflationary cycle of low consumer confidence threatens a long malaise. Chinese economic growth, even according to the official numbers, is clearly in a new low-growth mode, one deemed by the Economist as “economic Long Covid”.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2022&locations=CN&start=2004

The Uniquely Chinese Cure

But the way in which China is choosing to address this crisis is showing some signs of success, and is the result of Xi Jinping’s unique ideological outlook. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has begun a slow return to its socialist ideological roots and sought a different form of stimulus than the standard prescription other economies would employ. In most of the world, the textbook response to a slowing economy would be a Keynesian, demand-side stimulus meant to put money into consumers’ pockets and jumpstart spending, keeping the economic engine moving – think of the American “stimulus checks” cut under Obama in 2009 or Trump and Biden during the pandemic in 2020-21. Xi Jinping and his tongzhi, however, view that kind of stimulus as capitalist decadence, fearing that any direct payments to individuals from the government would precipitate the kind of needy indolence that western conservatives love to lambaste (just one of the many ways in which Chinese governance is actually quite right-wing on the western spectrum). They refuse to pursue that textbook route. In seeking a resolution to the policy dilemma, the PRC has decided to use a variation on the same stimulus strategy they used during the 2008-9 crisis, which then injected money into local governments, construction programs, and large industrial corporations. The hope was then, as now, that by tying access to stimulus funds to jobs and industry, individual citizens would be compelled to go out and be productive, stimulating the old-school Maoist spirit of nationalist industriousness. At the same time the government could make long-term investments in critical areas like infrastructure and industrial technology.

This time around, instead of injecting money into bloated and debt-ridden local governments and construction sectors, China is focusing on what it sees as the future: high-tech export-oriented manufacturing, with a clear emphasis on electric vehicles.

“In June last year, China introduced a 520 billion yuan ($71.8bn) package of sales tax breaks, to be rolled out over four years. Sales tax will be exempted for EVS up to a maximum of 30,000 yuan ($4,144) this year with a maximum tax exemption of 15,000 yuan ($2,072) in 2026 and 2027.

According to the Kiel Institute, a German think tank that offers consultation to China, the Chinese government has also granted subsidies to BYD worth at least $3.7bn to give the company, which recently reported a 42 percent decrease in EV deliveries compared with the fourth quarter of 2023, a much-needed boost.”

–https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/20/are-chinese-evs-taking-over-the-car-market

Beyond these significant numbers, EU and US policymakers suspect even larger, undisclosed boost from the Chinese government (particularly debt-driven incentives from local governments), prompting official investigations and declarations, and an even an official Chinese acknowledgement of industrial overcapacity was real – a claim that Premier Li Qiang later reversed course on.

The finger-pointing and blame game dynamics aside, the policy is not sustainable. Whether the subsidies are paid for by local government debt or by spending down of China’s cash reserves, or whether these industries are truly competitive, having large, tax-free industries is not sustainable for China fiscally, and in any event not acceptable for the world marketwise: “China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity” stated US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In short, the world was unprepared to prevent the first China Shock, but will not accept a second one. Eventually, there will be a reckoning of China’s industrial overcapacity, many unprofitable zombie firms will close, and global markets will react as they deem necessary.

The Coral Reef Economy

There are two ways to understand the current dilemma. The first way is to assume that Chinese policymaking is a shortsighted reaction to a slowing economy and that policymakers did not anticipate the global backlash. The second is to think that policymakers took these steps despite these obstacles because there was a longer-term goal in mind. What, then, might that longer-term goal be? I find the analogy of a coral reef to be potentially helpful here. Though coral reefs are huge rocky structures, corals themselves are small living animals. In their deaths, the skeletons they leave behind make up the structure of the reef itself and remain useful to their successors, serving as scaffolds, the reef as a whole growing fractally upwards and outwards on the bones of the corals’ ancestors. Likewise, the Chinese EV push may be hoping for a similar outcome: although most of the current EV manufacturers will not survive once debts are called in, stimuli are removed and global markets harden, their skeletal infrastructure will remain in place to serve their kin: skilled workers, upstream supply chains, downstream market and aftersales contracts, distribution networks, and most importantly technical innovations, will remain in place and can be bought out and more efficiently utilized by the (as China perhaps hopes) handful of surviving EV manufacturers who can, like corals, use the skeletons of their comrades to grow upwards and outwards. Furthermore, growing corals compete with other coral species for space, and an EV sale by a Chinese company, even a company destined for failure, is one fewer sale for a non-Chinese EV company. The Chinese “surge” in EV exports are not just beneficial for China directly, but, in China’s zero-sum vision of global competition, are indirectly beneficial for China by depriving rivals of the same sale, suffocating the competitiveness of the Teslas and Volkswagens of the world. The reef after the stimulus-fueled surge will be one in which the surviving Chinese companies can reign supreme.

I will not argue that the second analysis is indeed the perspective of PRC policymakers, or even if it is that the “coral reef” scenario will play out as outlined here. Many would argue that China’s policy responses are indeed short-sighted and reactive, and that only the long-promised shift to higher consumer spending will guarantee China’s long-term financial stability and comfortable integration into the global political economy. But it is difficult to deny that Chinese EV manufacturing has made impressive leaps in both technology and capacity in recent years, and regardless of the fate of the current market situation, it seems likely that at least a few such manufacturers will remain globally competitive in the long term.

April 23, 2024
Culture as a Trade Barrier

Or one way illiberal states get the better deal on trade agreements

A concept that I would have imagined was thoroughly discussed, but which I somehow cannot find discussed anywhere, is the concept of culture as a trade barrier. Now the idea that culture affects trade is nothing new – no one ever claimed that every country should buy equally all the products of the world; culture is a normal and expected part of the global marketing and trade landscape. But what I have never seen discussed is the extent to which culture can act as a hard barrier which can act one way more strongly than the other, or as one that is malleable for the purposes of statecraft – particularly in the hands of totalitarian societies that can shape public opinion and craft cultural trade preferences more easily than democracies.

What I mean when I say that culture can be a trade barrier, and often should be studied and analyzed as one, is this: different peoples in different countries tend to buy different things. Sounds simple, right? But it’s not simple. Some cultures can be very fussy about the products they consume coming in particular forms or from particular places, and these preferences can make foreign producers of ostensibly similar products (replacement goods, to use the formal term) have to fight uphill battles to get their products into those markets, even if there’s not an equivalent in the other direction (I list several examples below). These preferences can take many different forms: sometimes people tend to buy things that are from their own country, or tend not to buy things that are from a specific country, for completely irrational reasons or even without any particular reason, just by background cultural “by-default” programming. Or sometimes, because of the cultural traditions and preferences of the country, there may be an extreme difficulty getting the citizens of the country to buy things from somewhere else. Critically, these preferences are not fixed, and are susceptible to marketing campaigns, but are equally susceptible to state programs of marketing or propaganda (depending on your perspective).

Nationalized Preferences

For an example of “national preference” trade barriers, we need only think of “buy American” campaigns. In the context of World Trade Organization or other free trade agreement (e.g. the European Union or USMCA), national governments have their hands tied on providing direct subsidies, protections, and benefits to the industries covered by the agreement. For example, if it is agreed that countries should trade bicycles without trade barriers, it would be a violation if a party to the agreement were giving government subsidies to their domestic bicycle industry, or doing something to restrict the imports of bicycles, causing an unfair advantage in their competition with trade partners; the WTO has mechanisms for levying punishments on violations by members. However, countries have the possible workaround of trying to shift national preferences. A campaign encouraging people to “buy American” can potentially have small effects that shift buying preferences and result in some difficulty in non-American products competing in certain contexts – a slight raising of the cultural trade barrier. Though in practice these campaigns don’t have much effect in the US, in other countries waves of national sentiment can constitute huge trade barriers: the Chinese government has long fanned the flames of anti-Japanese sentiment, causing Japanese shops and factories to be damaged and close due to Chinese protests, and even causing rebranding of Chinese brands accused of being “too Japanese”; when this happens, Japanese sales to China of many goods predictably fall. Critics may argue that preferences of national origins are often “signals” of quality (i.e. with no further information about products that appear identical, most western consumers would likely judge “made in China” to be lower quality than “made in Germany”), this is not a 1:1 correlation with preferences for buying things from a specific country – people may choose to buy from one’s own country even if it doesn’t mean cheaper or better quality, or buy from “friendly” countries over “unfriendly ones” as seen by American boycotts of French-sounding products at the outset of the Iraq War. So clearly there is something else going on aside from signaling.

Denationalized Preferences

For the denationalized “cultural preference” barrier, take milk for example. In country A people may be perfectly willing to buy and use UHT (Ultra-High Temperature pasteurized, i.e. shelf-stable) milk as any other milk. And in a neighboring country B people may overwhelmingly prefer to use fresh, refrigerated milk. As a result, country B can UHT-pasteurize and export all of its excess milk production into country A, but country A will have a much harder time shipping fresh milk to country B at affordable prices, since such shipments would require refrigerated trucks and much more efficient logistical planning to ship the milk larger distances over international borders. Thus, the culture of country B constitutes a form of trade barrier relative to that of country A. For a data-backed real-world example, consider the preferences in bread consumption of France versus the UK. In the UK, bread is often consumed, as in the US, in a soft, pre-sliced form, easy to pop in the toaster for breakfast, and just as easy to keep fresh on the shelves for days on end; in France, bread is by and large consumed fresh, with a crackly-crusty exterior while still being soft on the interior, a juxtaposition that breaks down within hours if wrapped in plastic, or becomes too dry and hard if left unwrapped – in short, impossible to pack and ship internationally. As a result, we got the following (before Brexit):

French exports of bread to the UK dwarfed the inverse – France could produce and ship the kind of bread that Britons wanted to eat, but the UK couldn’t produce and ship the kind of bread that French wanted to eat. Thus French exports to the UK were, since 2005 or so, 3-6x UK bread exports to France. There are certainly other possible explanations for this phenomenon, but I imagine that the cultural barrier is a significant one.

Another notable real-world example, though slightly more abstract, was salmon. Prior to the 1990s, Japan consumed very little salmon and almost exclusively in a cooked form, viewing salmon as a fish prone to parasites that should not ever be consumed raw, whereas in Norway raw or lightly smoked salmon is a staple of the national cuisine. In the late 1980s, Norwegian fishermen found themselves with a surplus of Salmon and insufficient markets to offload it into, and thus they sought to change the culture of Japan through a fierce marketing campaign that transformed the culinary culture of the land of the rising sun – salmon sushi is now arguably one of the most iconic emblems of Japanese cuisine. The culture of Japan constituted a trade barrier, and clever Norwegian marketing lowered, or even reversed, the cultural trade barrier.

The Illiberal Advantage

As I mentioned, one aspect of this discussion – the impacts of culture on trade – are nothing new. But what is often missed from these analyses is that it does not operate equally for all countries – some countries have much stronger cultural “walls” than others. It stands to reason that authoritarian regimes with tight media controls (e.g. China) have much more power to shift culture in a direction that brings economic benefit – for example, encouraging Traditional Chinese Medicine as a way of stimulating the domestic market and raising a trade barrier to foreign pharmaceuticals, or perhaps doing behind-the-scenes manipulation to discourage state-affiliated firms (increasingly all major Chinese firms) from buying from geostrategic competitors. As such, liberal democracies have a strong incentive to understand this greater power of their non-democratic rivals and trade competitors to shape tradeflows and effectively circumvent and nullify aspects of free trade agreements. A solution would be to create monitoring offices at the WTO or embedded in trade agreement arbitration mechanisms to set limits on the scale or intensity of marketing campaigns or state manipulation of cultural preferences that affect trade.

January 24, 2024
Peculiarities of China

I have now spent nearly 1.5 years in China. I thought it fitting that I take some time to try to remember the things that were shocking to me when I first arrived, before everything becomes normalized to me.

You Can Turn Around Wherever the F*** You Want

Without question one of the most shocking things about China is the culture of driving. It is simultaneously terrifying and amazing. There are two simple rules that everyone follows to the letter: 1, do whatever the f*** you want. Now obviously I exaggerate a bit for effect, but compared with the US, it certainly seems to be a laissez-faire driving environment. You can get into the other lane whenever you want, pull a three-point turn in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, or make right turns whenever other people are going that way, or turn left against traffic on green. This works because of the next rule: 2, be prepared to stop on a f***ing dime. In this regard, Chinese drivers are surely among the best in the world. Everyone is sublimely excellent at watching their own asses. Chinese drivers are incredibly alert. Every single time I take a car anywhere I witness behavior that would without question cause an accident in the US. But in China, it doesn’t, because the drivers are just excellent.

Pollution is Serious

Despite declaring a war on pollution and having a lot of success in tackling it, China’s pollution is still really bad. I reside in one of the best areas in the country for pollution, but still experience days that are rated as “very unhealthy” according the World Health Organization Standards. And unfortunately, despite constant moves toward green energy, China is still building an enormous number of new coal-powered plants – equal, in fact, to the total amount that the rest of the world has taken offline in recent years, meaning that a whole lot of the successes that western environmental movements have made in reducing carbon emissions will essentially be neutralized in the next few years.

The Old China is Still Around

Despite acclamations of the rise of New China, even here in the heart of Shanghai you find tiny little shops filled with hand tools and artisans. Nevertheless…

The New China is Big and Beautiful

China is heaven for fans of modern monumental architecture. Interior spaces are utterly massive, and many have incredible lighting and exterior design. Every time I look at a Chinese skyline at night I feel that the cityscapes – even in smaller towns – have overshot the visual aesthetics of sci-fi worlds like Blade Runner 2049 in their attainment of senses of superhuman grandeur. But these imposing edifices are thrown into even starker relief in places where…

Old and New Sit Side-by-Side

One hears this truism far too often, but it is far too true. Much of China’s development has been haphazard, and high-tech commercial areas sometimes happen to spring up very near to ancient monuments. Shanghai is one such example, where dozens of temples around the city sit nestled among skyscrapers and Buddhist monks bump elbows with CEOs on the sidewalk. In fact it’s hard not too, considering that

Chinese Crowds are Next F***ing Level

One knows that China is heavily populated, but the extent to which that is true eludes the imaginations of those who have never been there. If you dumped the entire population of Europe and Latin America into the United States it would still be hundreds of millions shy of the population of China. And it’s mostly concentrated in cities. 6 of the 10 most populous cities in the world are in China, including spots 1, 2, 3, and 4. You could triple the downtown population of New York City and it would be only about that of Shanghai and still far under Chongqing. You do not know crowded if you don’t know China crowded. Which can get extremely unpleasant when you factor in the facts that:

Smoking is Ubiquitous

What’s that guy doing?

Picking out fruit in the fruit store. While smoking a cigarette.

What’s this guy doing?

standing next to a no-smoking sign. While smoking a cigarette (I asked this person if he could read, and he just glowered at me). More than a third of the Chinese population smokes (however this statistic exhibits strong sexual dimorphism, with the rate for Men being over 50% and that for women being under 5%) . I have heard anecdotally that one reason for the high smoking rate is that cigarette sales taxes are a huge source of revenue for local governments, but I do not understand the structure of Chinese civic finance enough to verify or refute that assertion. However, I have recently noticed a sharp uptick in the number of anti-tobacco messages through various channels. No-smoking signs exist in most of the places you would expect to find them in the West, but they are routinely ignored as a matter of principle, to the extent that I have taken to using the simile, “as useless as a Chinese no-smoking sign”. It is particularly accepted – to the extent that it is essentially the rule – to smoke in bathrooms, and every train station bathroom I have ever been in has reeked of cigarette smoke. Despite the signs.

Squatty Potties

One hears about there being squatting toilets in China. However, a typical reaction is to assume that they are the old style toilets of poverty, and that modern toilets are new and sitting-style. This is absolutely not the case: the squatting toilet featured here is on a new model high-speed train. Many people simple prefer the squatting potties because they can actually help with defecation. The problem, however, is that many people take that preference so strongly that they insist on squatting on western-style sitting toilets, such as the one at the Starbucks where the sign was posted. Starbucks felt the need to respond to that proclivity with the second point on the sign listed here.

Cherry Tomato is a Fruit

There is an aphorism in English that “intelligence is knowing the tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”. The Chinese would take great offense to that, as cherry tomatoes are regular features of fruit salad – in fact one of the most common ingredients. Cherry tomatoes are featured atop fruit pizza, in yogurt, and even candied to sprinkle atop ice cream. In case you’re wondering, they’re no sweeter than American varieties; in fact, I’ve had many varieties in the US that were far sweeter and less tart.

Eating on the job in professional settings

What you see in this photo is a pharmacist, in her lab coat, in a store that is open for business, eating her dinner with a companion in the middle of the store. This behavior is extremely common. There is no shame or embarrassment or even an attempt to hide it behind a counter. Nope – plonk a table down in the middle of the store and chow down.

White people for advertising purposes

It may be somewhat hard to see in this photo, but there are three white people used for advertisements in this photo – one in the bottom right and two at the top left. Regardless of the product, white people are often used to give a luster of quality and classiness to a product, particularly older white men who look like they could be professors. Though the official line is that China must walk past the West, in practice a lot of Western things are still celebrated as ideals.

Atypical food combinations

What, you don’t put cheese and mustard on your waffles? What about mayonnaise and corn on your pizza? How about espresso lemonade, beer-flavor latte, or yogurt and green tea? For me the things that are completely foreign in China are not shocking; it’s the the complete re-appropriation and recombination of Western foods that makes me do a double-take. And although it’s usually shocking, I’m constantly appreciative of the willingness to completely reimagine the artificial boundaries we place on food in our own cultures.

Very strong opinions about borders

China does not see eye-to-eye with its neighbors regarding where international boundaries lie, and makes sure to defend its position at every opportunity. Legally, all maps and globes printed in China must display the government’s official opinion on borders, including the famous nine-dash line of maximalist claims in the South China Sea (reaching all the way to the coast of Borneo). And by all maps, I mean all maps, even novelty things or those in a children’s movie. In fact, these kinds of things are perhaps most important of all from the perspective of the government: it’s important that kids be raised from birth always seeing the maximalist territorial claims, always believing such positions as “Taiwan is an inseparable part of China”.

A lot of dress-up

Many people like dressing up in, let’s just say “atypical” clothing in China. The two most common kinds are this kind of Victorian Doll type getup as seen here, or more commonly “Hanfu“, “Han clothing”, an anachronistic mishmash of any kind of historical attire worn in China from really any pre-modern period. As long as it looks historical and Chinese-y. This movement is often, but not always, associate with a Chinese nationalist movement to reject Western-influenced attire.

Lots of thermoses

This photo depicts a thermos store. A store…entirely of thermoses. This was not even the only one in this particular mall. Many Chinese carry thermoses ubiquitously, usually filled with tea leaves, and no airport, train, or waiting room is complete without a complementary hot water dispenser so that people can top-up their tea bottles. In literally every taxi I have ever been in in China, the driver has a thermos full of tea (this is not always the case for Didi, the Chinese Uber clone, for some reason)

December 9, 2019
On the Relative Longevity of Chinese and Roman Civilization
Ask yourself this question: which survived longer, China, or Rome? The conventional answer is China, of course. By why is that the conventional answer? Is that not just a story we tell ourselves?

Why do we say that China is 2000 years old, but that the Roman Empire fell 1500 years ago? China was conquered and divided numerous times in its history, its dominant languages have changed drastically (though maintaining the same writing system so physical evidence of those changes is fleeting), and the dominant religions, customs, and institutions have oscillated and varied immensely.

For comparison (note, this is in very broad strokes):
- All European languages with the exception of Greek use the Roman alphabet – or Cyrillic, which was created by an Eastern Roman emperor.
- The leaders of the Roman churches (in Rome and Constantinople) were the unquestioned religious leaders of Europe until the 1400s in the East, until the 1500s in Northern Europe, and still today in most of Southern Europe.
- All European legal systems with the exception of the British ones derive in large part from the Roman/Justinian code.
- The claimed successor to the Roman Empire in the West, the Holy Roman Empire, existed from 800 until the 1800s; if you count Byzantium, there was never a gap in the continuity of claimed successor empires until only 200 years ago. China, in comparison, had the Warring States Period, the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Ten Kingdoms, etc.
- The above empire was conquered by a French Emperor presiding on a government substantially modeled on the Roman Republic including Consuls and eagle-adorned legion banners.
- The German empire was later reformed by a Kaiser, the word being derived from Caesar.
- Latin was the dominant academic, diplomatic, and scientific language of Europe until the 18th Century.
This list could go on, but I’ll leave it here for now.

I’m not attempting to make an argument for the survival of Rome per se, but merely in comparison to what is the generally accepted continuity of China, for example. If we accept the legitimacy of Chinese successor kingdoms after periods of imperial collapse and chaos, then I fail to see why the Holy Roman Empire doesn’t count as a legitimate successor kingdom to the Roman Empire by the same criteria. The HRE arguably has even more legitimacy, given that it had the sanction of an actual continuing institution of the Roman Empire, i.e. the Catholic Church, and all the while a very real Eastern Roman Empire saw themselves as every bit as Roman as the Western empire. They referred to themselves as Romaioi, for example.
June 11, 2019
Not China

I begin this blog in China, where I have just begun a sojourn of several years, so forgive me if some of the early posts in this blog ostensibly about the West discuss China. However, there is an incidental benefit to beginning in this way: in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald or Langston Hughes had to escape the confines of their upbringings in order to truly understand the nature of such upbringings, perhaps it is only here in China that I can begin to contemplate what it really is I understand and care about with regard to the West.

What is the West?

Perhaps the easiest way to define something is to point out what it is not. Some people group the Arab World into the West; some put the former USSR on the list; Latin America, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, are all, due to their long histories of Western colonial influence, blurry areas that are in some ways Western and some ways not. Many areas seek to attenuate Western influence and cultivate native traditions and cultures, but few areas understand themselves in stark opposition to the West. China is an exception.

In China, this is a Zhōng/Wài or 中/外 distinction. Things are of the Middle (often better translated as Central) Kingdom (中国, Zhōngguó)，or they are from outside (外面, Wàimiàn).

What is the West? Well, for starters, it’s not China.

These days it is common to think of the world in terms of the growing rivalry between the US and China, the looming clash of civilizations before the rising China, with its billion workers, omnipresent surveillance state, social credit system, and tightly controlled media apparatuses, overwhelming the world with a model antithetical to western social norms – valuing order, stability, tradition, and social harmony over traditional Western values like freedom of speech, inquiry, and criticism, disruptive problem-solving or avant-garde creativity.

I want to push back on that to an extent, and at least for now to say that the West is not going anywhere anytime soon. Though the West will no longer occupy the driver’s seat of global geopolitics that it has for the past 3+ centuries, the West will remain a distinct civilization that will have to be understood on new terms, without all the sinews of power and global hegemony. A post-omnipotent West; a post-hegemonic West.

The problem with the above model about the Chinese tide is that it blindly extrapolates China’s growth over the past 20 years into the future 20 years. The simple fact, however, is that this has already begun to change:

The 8-15(!)% annual GDP growth rates that shook the world economy between 1993and 2008 have been in the rear-view mirror for nearly a decade now. Just last year, China declared that it would be a global AI leader; then just last month, China walked back all such ambition, calling for an international approach to AI development. There is now renewed talk of China sliding into the so-called Middle Income Trap, which I will elaborate on in a later post, but which is in simple terms a status in which a country can lead middle-income industries like automobile manufacturing, but fail to accrue enough human and financial capital to spark a transition into a high-value, knowledge-based economy.

If I am permitted to make one very strong claim that I cannot prove, but would like to see if it plays out, I would say this: a culture which, like China, prides itself on order, stability, and respect for social harmony, and which limits disruptive speech and ideas, will inherently always struggle to make the transition to a creative, knowledge-based economy. The Chinese Film Industry is perhaps the most blatant example. Though the spark in Silicon Valley may have been lost, it was at one point the atmosphere of unabashed entrepreneurial creativity that led to the Digital Revolution. I shall not say that it is impossible, but from right now I struggle to see how the culture of stability, order, and harmony can push the envelope into a broad-based 21st century economy.

I recently attended a talk by Ted Plafker, Beijing correspondent for the Economist, in which Mr. Plafker noted that China’s Great Firewall and other media policies had a significant drag on economic and scientific growth, as Chinese researchers, businesses, and innovators in all fields had an ongoing struggle to acquire data and inspiration from the rest of the world (there’s another side to the Great Firewall which I will discuss in a later post).

Anyway, let’s see if I’m wrong.

October 11, 2018
Pride and Prosperity:
The Pillars of CCP Legitimacy

The Chinese Communist Party has ruled over the People’s Republic of China ever since its victory over Nationalist forces in 1949. For the past six decades it has maintained a monopoly on political power despite wars, crises and political dissent, and today is the largest and one of the longest-ruling political parties in the world. Nevertheless the party’s rule does not come easily, and the CCP has turned to various strategies over the years to end dissent and lend legitimacy to the one-party system. To solidify its rule, though, the CCP has turned consistently to two main ways of satisfying the 1.3 billion people of China: first, it taps into strong sentiments of nationalistic pride and identity and binds them to the CCP, and second, it seeks to improve the material quality of life of its citizens and endeavors to present itself as the best means of doing so. It is through these two avenues that the CCP has maintained its power in China both historically and today. Yet even these time-tested methods of legitimation have their intricacies and drawbacks, leaving the CCP in a precarious position of tentative rule.

The Chinese sense of nationalism has been one of the grassroots bases of support for the CCP since the 1930s and the struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation. By the end of the war in 1945 the Communists had seized on nationalism as a powerful recruitment mechanism and articulated it even more effectively than the so-called Nationalists, garnering the momentum necessary to win the ensuing civil war but with the side effect of internalizing nationalist sentiment as a source of identity and legitimacy as a ruling party. On proclaiming the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao declared that “the Chinese people have stood up,” a humble yet blatantly nationalist remark that broke with the universalist Marxist ideology (e.g. “workers of the world unite!”) which the CCP at least nominally followed.

Even as other claims to legitimacy have fallen to the wayside, nationalism still forms part of the backbone of CCP ideology, outlasting even the namesake communism. Indeed, “the Communist Party stirs patriotic feelings to underpin its legitimacy at a time when few, even in its own ranks, put much faith in Marxism” (Kahn). Various issues today lend strength to those Chinese citizens who take a hard line on nationalism as well as providing issues by which the CCP can articulate its nationalist identity, ensuring nationalism plays an important role in both domestic and foreign policy of the CCP.

“Japan, which China says killed or wounded 35 million Chinese from 1937 through 1945, gets the most attention” on the Chinese nationalist front (Kahn). Of course, as the primary opponent against which the CCP built its nationalist identity, Japan naturally feels the brunt of Chinese nationalism. Anti-Japanese sentiment has surged in recent years, with events such as the outrage over the Zhao Wei dress incident and glorification of Feng Jinhua’s desecration of the Yasukuni shrine perhaps only the first in a long line of anti-Japanese outbursts in China (Gries “New Thinking” 832, 5).

Though Japan may be the most prominent target on the CCP’s nationalist agenda it is certainly not alone, as “official propaganda and the national education system stress the indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers from the mid-19th century through World War II,” known as China’s “Century of Humiliation” (Kahn). During that time period European, American, and Japanese interests subjugated China, inflicting wounds which still scar the Chinese consciousness. However, the re-acquisition of Hong Kong and Macau in the 1990s served as a rallying point for Chinese nationalist who depicted China as a lion roused from slumber, all of which played perfectly into the age-old narrative that the CCP was leading China to national might.

However, amidst the pride of power comes apprehensiveness of weakness compared to the United States, as illustrated by the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The incident, despite American assurances that it was purely accidental, stoked a firestorm of anti-western and, more specifically, anti-American sentiment. However, through Chinese eyes, the bombing “was not an isolated event; rather, it was the latest in a long series of western aggressions against China” (Gries “CNN” 17). The Chinese public was outraged, and the CCP, reflecting such strong national sentiment, echoed the people’s outcries of intentionality and called for apologies from the US (Gries “CNN” 19-20).

This illustrates an important change: the power of nationalism can be at times unwieldy and has become a force beyond the CCP’s control. “The 1990s witnessed the emergence of a genuinely popular nationalism in china that should not be conflated with state or official nationalism…the party’s legitimacy now depends on accommodating popular opinion” and as such the CCP has in recent years become subject to the force it once commanded (Gries “CNN” 20). This has dire ramifications for the future of Chinese power, as the CCP can no longer direct a course in its foreign affairs but must placate the hardliners in populist fashion. The issue of Japan is one which may play out worst for China’s future. The CCP is unable to pursue any conciliatory policies with Japan for fear of appearing “weak before nationalists at home” and thus cannot use Japan to counterbalance the influence of the United States – an outcome which is in the long-term worst interest of a China with global ambitions (Gries “New Thinking” 848).

Thus nationalism, long one of the CCP’s reins of power, may have lost its power to effect loyalty and fully legitimize CCP rule. Instead of using nationalism to its advantage, it has become a necessity for party survival, even if its application may be to the long-term detriment of Chinese power. Unfortunately for the CCP, nationalism and foreign policy may not be the only areas wherein necessity, not desire, has become the call to action.

The other traditional area in which the CCP has articulated its legitimacy has been its stewardship of the people, bettering their lives materially and reducing inequality and exploitation by the ruling class. At the outset of the People’s Republic this was the nominal goal of the communists (and indeed communism in general) but over the course of the next thirty years, disastrous policies in socialist and communist endeavors resulted in the Reform and Opening of the post-Mao era (Thornton). Since that time China has transitioned to a full market economy, shedding almost all vestiges of its communist origin and namesake, “gambling that people would overlook the failure of communism as an ideology if Communists could make them richer” (Pan 117). What has resulted, ironically, is the exact exploitation that the CCP came into power to eradicate: authorities systematically repress peasants, income inequality is on the rise, and corruption and graft deprive the people of wealth and opportunity. Yet the CCP attempts to address all of these issues and others, managing to cleave tentatively to power by supposedly bettering the lives of its people.

Pension reform represents a major way in which the CCP has averted unrest in recent years while simultaneously addressing issues of inequality, with efforts to provide a basic social safety net materializing in the Social Insurance Law passed in 2010. Representing “a major step in the CCP’s efforts to tackle problems of income inequality and inadequate welfare” the legislation aims to unify and codify many of China’s disparate and inadequate welfare systems (Frazier 386). By this increase in welfare and pension benefits, the CCP sought to avoid the “often dramatic urban protests” which “posed multiple challenges to the CCP’s legitimacy” and thus the party shored up support amongst the urban poor and re-affirming its narrative of working for the betterment of the people.

One of the longest-standing and most well-known of the CCP’s solutions has been the One Child Policy which is aimed at controlling once-unsustainable birthrate by limiting most families to having one child. Through the policy, “officials have sought to curb the excesses and inequities and have argued that the policy has prevented roughly 400 million births and allowed the country to prosper and better live within its resources” allowing material wealth and opportunity to be distributed amongst fewer people overall, helping to secure their welfare in the long term (Yardley). However, the policy threatens a future drawback: demographic crisis. “China’s fertility rate is now extremely low, and the country’s population is aging rapidly,” indicating that in the near future, young workers may be insufficient to sustain the more populous elderly (Yardley). In response to this looming issue, CCP policymakers have flirted with altering or ending this longstanding policy, demonstrating that working for the good of the people has been the goal all along: first reducing birthrates to prevent overpopulation, then relaxing restrictions to prevent demographic collapse, both of which work in the interest of national stability, ensuring government legitimacy.

Perhaps most importantly, the struggle against corruption has been one in which the CCP aims to garner loyalty by casting itself as a staunch defender of the people, against abusive local officials. In recent years corruption cases such as that of party officials in Shenyang and “shoddy construction” of earthquake-felled buildings in Sichuan has revealed enormous corruption at the local level (Pan 131, Alpert). Without fail, however, the “state media [present] the case[s] as an example of the party’s resolve to keep its cadres honest” and unerringly portrays corruption as a purely local issue and anathema to the CCP’s national practices and ideals (Pan 131).

Yet despite all its toil and propaganda, the CCP’s decades-old narrative of working for the good of the people may finally be beginning to wither away, for “China’s propaganda machine…is sometimes hamstrung in the age of the Internet, especially when it tries to manipulate a pithy narrative about the abuse of power” (Wines). As news such as the Li Gang case spreads around the country and the national populace becomes aware of the “scale of malfeasance” transpiring around them, it may not be long before the legitimacy of one-party rule is irreparably damaged (Pan 131).

So how does the Chinese Communist Party maintain its power today? It does so in the same ways it always has. By taking up the banner of national pride and strength, the CCP earns the support and loyalty of nationalist elements. And by portraying itself as the supporter and benefactor of the people it gains the trust of the common man. But as the tides of history turn and the people learn to contest the monopoly of Communist power, the CCP may find its twin pillars of legitimacy looking remarkably fragile in the coming years.

Works Cited
- Alpert, John and Matthew O’Neill. China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. Dirs. Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill. 2010.
- Frazier, Mark. “From Status to Citizenship in China’s Emerging Welfare State.” Gries, Peter Hays and Stanley Rosen. Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market. RoutledgeCourzon, 2010. 386-404.
- Gries, Peter Hays. “China’s “New Thinking” on Japan.” The China Quarterly (2005): 831-850.
- —. China’s New Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
- Kahn, Joseph. “Beijing Finds Anti-Japan Propaganda a 2-Edged Sword.” The New York Times 3 May 2005.
- Pan, Philip. Out of Mao’s Shadow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
- Thornton, Patricia. “Comrades and Collectives in Arms: Tax Resistance, Evasion, and Avoidance Strategies in post-Mao China.” Gries, Peter Hays and Stanley Rosen. State and Society in 21st Century China. RoutledgeCourzon, 2004.
- Wines, Michael. “China’s Censors Misfire in Abuse-of-Power Case.” The New York Times 17 November 2010.
- Yardley, Jim. “China wants gradual shift away from its one-child policy.” The New York Times 8 December 2008.
January 7, 2011