 The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Thursday evening. As you can see, I am back in Puerto Rico and back to a schedule where we'll try to do interviews on Thursdays, although next week I'm traveling so there won't be today. I'm really happy to have Scott McDonald with me. Scott is an expert on China. He is a lecturer at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, where he's also getting a PhD in international relations, writing about the influence of Chinese philosophy on Chinese foreign policies. We'll talk about that. He's also the Assistant Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Fletcher School. He's a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer. He was in the Malawians 24 years and was a military professor at APCSS. I don't even know what that is, so maybe you can tell us. We taught Chinese philosophy in strategic thought and generally has a lot of experience in East Asia. He has made that really a focus of his, at least a latter part of his military service and of his PhD studies. Scott, welcome. Thanks for joining us. There's a lot we can talk about. Of course, as my listeners know, I've been consumed lately by them at least, by what's happening in Israel. I do want to get to the connection between China and Israel because I think it is important and there's some really interesting things happening. Of course, for the last year and a half, the news has been consumed by Ukraine and Ukraine Russia. Of course, China has an interesting role to play there. To some extent, China is a pivot point around which many of what seemed like the opponents of the United States are centered around. So I want to get at all of that, but I really want to do some... Oh, anyway, so Scott offered, maybe we should not talk about China today. Maybe I should just talk about another Middle East and I said, no, no. I really do think that probably long term, China is the most interesting and maybe most important foreign policy issue that the United States faces. So I want to make sure we give it the time and the thought and of course, as I said, it is connected to everything else going on in the world right now. So maybe, Scott, you can give us a little bit of background around your work in Chinese philosophy. Your interest in it, where it came from and the kind of work you've done around that. Sure. I started off as an undergrad, very interested in political theory. I was interested in how societies were formed and why they acted the way they did. Partly led to my joining the Marine Corps to defend the US Constitution, which is ultimately a statement of political philosophy. A few years in, the Marine Corps decided I could probably do all right learning Chinese. A bit of a surprise to me, but I was sent off to learn Chinese and to become a specialist on People's Republic of China for the Marine Corps and got sent to school, sent for language and sent to the PRC to get follow on language training and cultural immersion. And so I spent the rest of my career trying to figure out the PRC through a number of roles, either diplomatic or operational. How do you understand the PRC? And I kept watching what they were doing and trying to explain it to the ambassador or the general I was working for. And I'm like, they're looking at this differently. There's something fundamentally different about the way they're understanding this problem because it does not make sense to us. And I went back philosophy. I got to dig into the philosophy, right? And when I started studying China, of course, we were introduced to Confucius and Laozi. I said, I need to know that better. So one day I said, this is my course, right? And I broke open a big old book of Chinese philosophy and started reading and digging deeper and deeper into the ideas, what matters, right? How are the ideas different? And how is that going to lead to different actions? And so ultimately, I fulfilled my lifelong goal of getting out and going back to school to work on this PhD. So I could be a professor. And that's the course I chose to study. How do these ideas, which from my own experience living there, interacting with PRC officials in a few different roles and my study of the ideas, I think that understanding the philosophical fundamentals that are different, it helps to explain how they see the world, how they understand it, and how they evaluate actions. So how would you describe Chinese philosophy? I mean, obviously there's a lot of thinkers, but the core of that Chinese philosophy that you think is today having an impact on the PRC. Great. So Chinese philosophy, of course, as you mentioned, there's lots of thinkers. And sometimes we are taught it as competing. The predominant strains are Taoism, Confucianism, and to a lesser extent, Buddhism. But in Chinese philosophy, it actually comes from Taoism, there are many paths to the same destination. And there's this understanding that they all have value in certain regards. And early on, Taoism really emphasized metaphysics with some epistemology. Confucianism has some epistemology and really emphasizes ethics. Not that there's not a little bit of the others. Buddhism helps emphasize bring it all together, and Buddhism was actually translated into Chinese using kind of Taoist ideas as the basis. So there's a lot of similarities there. In the Song dynasty, some scholars got together and like, things aren't going right, we have to be better. What's the right answer? And eventually what developed is what we in the West call Neo-Confucianism, which is basically a syncretic fusing of some of these core ideas. You get a lot more of the metaphysics that comes from Taoism, the hard ethics of Confucianism. And for the rest of the imperial period, that was the governing philosophy. And I argue that carried over into the nationalist and the communist periods. So give us a sense of kind of what is the metaphysics of Neo-Confucianism, maybe metaphysics, topology, ethics, and politics of the Neo-Confucianist philosophy. So from a metaphysical perspective, this world is in constant change. And it's not just that there is change, but that change is a core principle of metaphysics. And so to really understand the world, you need to understand how things change. And you're familiar with the Yin-Yang symbol, the white and the black that spin into each other, because weakness is always becoming strength, and straightness is always becoming weak, and there's these cycles. So you need to understand that. But within that context, China is the center of the universe. Metavysically, everything flows out from that. And a few other principles like the strength of weakness, that there is a natural tendency for things to go towards the weak or towards the bottom. And so there's some strength and emptiness. How do we know this epistemologically? Well, if you see the classic pictures of the sage sitting in a mountaintop, it's very rationalistic, the epistemology. It's because I know it's because I sit and think about it. That's how I get cultivation. And Confucius emphasized very heavily what it comes from the ancients. That guy knew, and it seemed to work well. And so we're going to do what he did. He's always talking about the Duke of Zhou, goes back to the Duke of Zhou. In ethics, then, so from the perspective of the Taoist, you got to understand this nature, the way things work. And then how do you behave? Well, as nature would want you to behave, right? You work in conjunction with the natural tendency of change. You can shape it a little bit by nurturing that situation. Mungs, they use the analogy of corn, right? You can't yank up on it. You got to give it water and soil and sunlight. But you can nurture it in that direction, but act minimally. And that's the action to take. But defining right and wrong, the Confucians tell us it's all based on the centrality of the family, which is basically a metaphysical given in the Confucian worldview. And so Confucius says, if a son would never betray a father, would never betray the wrong actions of a father, the father would never betray the wrong actions of the son, uprightness is found in this. He says whatever has to be done for the sake of the family is ipso facto good, right? That is the standard. Lie, cheat, steal, murder. Is it for the family? Then it's good. But because of the hierarchical relationship, nature of Confucian relationships, and there's five that govern our entire society, right? Ruler to minister, husband to wife, father to son, friend to friend. Oh, an elder brother to younger brother. So these all fit in the hierarchy. So my family is right. But if my family and that family are faced with another village over there that's a problem, well, my family and the other family, we're now our village, right? And so there's this hierarchical sense and the concept called relational alterity that all feeds up to the emperor on top. And the emperor is ultimately in charge of the world family because China is the center of the world, right? And so all of the world is one large family in Chinese Tianxia, all under heaven. And so he morally leads all of society. That's your very quick back in the napkin metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. That's great. Couldn't do it on one foot like Rand did. But you know, that was close. It was close. So there's no concept of reason. There's no concept of kind of a scientific method and reason in epistemology. No, it's what can I glean from nature, right? What have people done before? During the Song dynasty in this time of churn, there was a lot of people looking at investigation into principle. Okay. And you know, as an objectivist, first time I read that, I mean, ooh, maybe there's something here, right? What's the principle involved here? But it got very rationalistic as well. I'm going to stare at this cups of bamboo all day until the principle pops out at me, right? And so it really, it ends up almost looking at shadows, like being in Plato's cave. Laozi says, if you really want to understand the world, stay inside. Sit and think about it. So it ends up being very rationalistic. And of course, there's a danger in that when you move into the real world, because if you gain knowledge from thinking about the way that things should be, or the way that someone told you it should be, when you're presented with facts that contradict that, how do you handle that? How do you incorporate that into your knowledge base? And to what extent do you accept it or reject it? And you can, you know, get into, get yourself into some trouble there, because you become, you start acting counter to reality. Yeah, it sounds, sounds like some of the stuff I read about Mao. Yeah, so we'll get to that. So, so they had no Aristotle. No, not nobody of the equivalent of Aristotle who brought grounded them in reality. No, no. So, so how does this play into communism? Because communism, of course, is a, is a whole different, I mean, a very similar, I guess, but, but somewhat different emphasis in terms of metaphysics and epistemology and ethics, it's far more like class than about family. And the hierarchy is structured a little differently. So how does Mao and the Communist Party, you know, adopt Chinese philosophy and make it theirs, and, and, you know, integrate it into the communist ideology? Right. So, communism or Marxism in particular is coming to China while they're in the throes of the revolutionary period. Right. And this is, you know, you have the May 19th movement after World War One, where people are rejecting the West, they're rejecting the Qing, Qing already gone by that point, they're rejecting the tradition. So they're, they're looking for ideas. Right. And things need to get better. We have poverty and lack of education all over, we're backwards, we're not succeeding in the world. What are we going to do? Right. And the revolutionary class, many people grabbed onto Marxism. Of course, there were a lot of young Chinese later to become leaders studying in France and studying Marxism there, some went to Soviet Russia. But this idea of, oh yeah, we need revolution. And the people who are dispossessed need to rise up and take it. It really appealed to people. And Mao very much saw it as useful. In fact, here's, you know, the great leader of Chinese communism never read Das Kapital. Really? Yeah. He has a series of, the closest he came to doctrinaire lectures on Marxism were done while the Communist Party was hiding in Yanan. And they were, you know, largely paraphrases of other works that he read. He was never a doctrinaire Marxist. He called himself a Marxist. And he did things that, that he thought were promoting it, you know, acknowledged the Soviets as the leaders of world revolution. But he was first and foremost a Chinese patriot. And his education had been like a lot of these people in the classics is how he started. To his dying day was enraptured by the, especially Chinese literature and was much more likely to quote Chinese literature or Sun Zhe than Marx or Lenin. But he, so he used the ideas that were valuable to him. But what was he pursuing? He was pursuing the rejuvenation of China. And very much a Chinese patriot in that regard. And how do you rule China? Huh. Oh, those guys that came before had some ideas, right? And so the first thing he does when he occupies his new headquarters in Beijing is get the records of the emperors and their, how they ruled brought into his room. And he's known to have consulted it frequently because that's how you rule China. So he thought of himself in a sense as an emperor? Well, he would be very quick to deny that because always we tore down the emperor, but he acted very much like the emperor. He understood that the the emperors had found the ways to rule China, right? If you look at the dynastic cycles, you know, early in the dynasties, they tended to be pretty efficient at managing this large, you know, dispersed country. If you look at the way that the Communist Party uses their cadres to run China, it's a lot like the way the Confucian aristocracy, bureaucracy used their gentry to run China. So there's definitely some things he learned there. He very much looked up to the first emperor, right, who was maybe not very Confucian, but very much a centralizing figure who saw that you had to rule China, you know, with an iron fist in order to make it work. So, you know, you mentioned that they, you know, they detach from reality and the floating abstractions. I mean, it strikes me that Mao's denial of the mass starvation that he is causing sounds a little bit consistent with that view, or even, even his attitude towards the cultural revolution. Do you see it that way? So early in the cultural, I'm sorry, early in the Great Leap Forward, certainly people were afraid to tell him how bad it was going. He was taken and shown the model cities that, you know, were not actually holding straight to the collectives, but were making it look like it worked. So to some extent, you know, hard to say that there are works that have dug into this and I haven't personally shown. So he certainly wasn't completely read in at the beginning. Later, it's a cost to do in business, right? I have to get this country up and running. And you know, if there's casualties along the way, there's casualties along the way. He was not that concerned with the fact that he was going to lose some people, right, which you just might recall his paper tiger speeches and how he would talk about nuclear weapons and go ahead, nuke me. I still have 500 million people, sorry, less at that time, but I'll always have people more than anybody else. Yeah. The cultural revolution was a bit different. Cultural revolution ultimately is about power, right? He would, after the Great Leap Forward, he like, things are bad, he kind of retires, steps back and people, other people start taking power and he realizes his legacy is dying and he's no longer important. And the gyrations of the cultural revolution were in large part him stamping out enemies and taking back power. And are they going to be losses? Yep. But what's important is the authority because remember that hierarchy, right? There's only one emperor on top and there can only be one ruler in Beijing and it's got to be Mao because other people don't understand. I can get this done. He thought very highly of himself in that regard. And there's no real opposition, intellectual opposition or is it just silenced and philosophical opposition? Is there anybody, is there any kind of liberal ideas in China during this period coming from the period where they were exposed to the West and they were exposed to, you know, they did go to France after all. Now, Francis, they didn't teach liberal ideas at French universities, but maybe they got it from foreigners there, I don't know. Yeah, well, the groups studying in France very, and were tended to be in the Marxist circles, right? And socialist study groups. And after some of them got there, those were the groups paying for more people to come and when they would get to France, those are the people they would go work with. There were certainly other ideas in the early revolutionary period brought in, you know, Sun Yat-sen and the nationalist, you know, Sun Yat-sen was educated partly in the United States. Several of the people who worked for him had lots of Western ideas. But then there was this mishmash, right? I bring in some Western ideas. I still have some Confucian ethics that are going on. And then, you know, the whole system was very corrupt, which served further to denigrate some of those ideas in the eyes of people while those who were claiming Marx were knocking out, you know, evil gentry who were actually doing evil things, right? And so, you know, these guys are our saviors. They're pretty good. As they established control and then started to develop and rule, there were certainly differences of opinion on how do we develop this place, right? How do we rule? But, you know, the Communist Party, whether or not it's Communist, is absolutely built on the Leninist model. And so there can be only one head, right? And so those people would get purged. And there's a series of incidents, first in a fair where a leader up in the Northeast who was like one of the rising, possibly number twos, gets chopped down and purged because he's an alternate center of authority. And then, you know, you have the anti-rightist movement. They, we need help to develop China. So all you intellectuals come out and tell us your good ideas. And eventually they did. And then we realized they're a threat. And so we send them all down. So absolutely, there's several periods where there were opportunities for ideas to rise up. But often then, if you self-identified, you would be eliminated. So they found a way to maintain centrality. So when Mao dies and Deng, you know, takes power, to what extent is Deng a, again, a product of the same philosophy? To what extent does he buy into Mao? He strikes me as predominantly a pragmatist, although, you know, it may be pragmatism in the Chinese philosophy are not that different. Well, he was in some areas, absolutely. And specifically, I would argue in those areas that are not that important to Chinese philosophy. Okay, he absolutely came up the same way. He's not that much younger than, than, than Mao started being brought up in the Confucian tradition. Unlike Mao, he actually went to France and went to Soviet Russia. But he was probably even more so than Mao was a Chinese patriot, right? Now as a Chinese patriot, Mao's number one, Deng was very much about rebuilding China. And he absolutely came to believe that the only way to do that was to maintain the hierarchy and the centrality of the party. And so even when the, when the party twice sends him down and punishes him, he never loses faith that though I don't think I should have been sent down, the party is the answer. And so when he comes back from being sent down the second time, he's once again focused on party building. How do we fix the party and make it work? How do we strengthen the party? And his pragmatism in the realm of economics is very much driven by that I need to do something to fix the society and maintain the party's position. And, you know, Chinese philosophy doesn't have a lot to say about the economy. You know, they were looked down upon class, those traders, they're out looking around, not doing the intellectual stuff, not that there wasn't plenty of it throughout Chinese history, but it's not, you're not reading about it in the textbooks of classical China. It's something that's left. So I'm going to do what I have to do to get this economy running to maintain the party's position. And so yeah, he understood from classical China, China, both the hierarchy issue, but also how the world works. And if you look at some of this foreign policy and slowly developing, how is the situation changing? And how do I nurture that to move it along in my direction? But when it comes to the economy, hey, what works? You know, I don't care if the cat is black or the cat is white. As long as it catches a mouse, it's a good cat. Absolutely. And in that sense, it seems like he abandons even a pretense of communism, although he still claims to be a communist, right? And it's all about power and it's all about the party and the China cannot survive unless it has a central authority. Right. Well, you know, even Mao and Deng really would say this over and over again. What is Mao Zedong thought? Mao Zedong thought is taking Marxism, Leninism, and adapting it to whatever the situation is in China today, which means it's literally anything. What works today? As long as we understand the centrality, the party's on top, the party is ruling the country. And of course, we really see that the centrality of the party and his willingness to put it all down with Tiananmen Square. Right. They were a threat to the party, an alternate source of authority. The students are claiming to speak for China. The students actually told us what to do. How dare they? And he was the guy who ordered the tanks out, as far as I can tell, right? Ultimately, he was the one who had the last word and said crush him. Yep. So there was this impression, at least, and we talked about this before the show that I had. I first went to China in 2005, and then went repeatedly in eight, and then in early teens, and then my final visit was late 2018, that there was not only the economy was liberalizing, but that there was really a certain level of openness, not complete, obviously. The first time was the 2005. No, second time was the 2008. It was the 2008 was Atlas Shrugged, was published in Chinese. So first, the very fact that Atlas Shrugged would be published in Chinese was interesting. And then, but we did a seminar, a whole day seminar on Atlas Shrugged at Raymond University in Beijing. But one of the professors said, you see that color out there, out the window, and that's the secret police watching me because the Olympics were about to happen. And he was not allowed to talk to phone press before and after the Olympics, something like that. But it seemed like they picked and chose how to how to oppress their people, but they also allowed them some, you know, freedom Atlas Shrugged being published. Most of Iron Man's works are in Chinese. And I think still sell, although I'm not sure. And so they seem to be economic freedom, in many respects, less regulated. A businessman used to tell me in the US. And there seemed to be some intellectual freedom. Is that your impression? Was that was that what was going on? And and who allowed that? How did that happen? How did how did they get away with it, in a sense? Hey, several different layers there. Very interesting. So yeah, who allowed that? Insert whatever you want to talk about there. It's it's a big bureaucracy. And there are some things that are very important. And the decisions are made only at the top. Under Xi Jinping, more and more things are made only at the top. But there's also a lot of leeway for just managing and getting by. And so starting under Dung, especially, there were specific things that you do not do. There are specific things that you do not say. And as long as you don't do that, we really don't care. In fact, we would like you to go off and make some money. It would be really good if you wouldn't make some money. And so the economy being less regulated, there are large sections of the economy that were completely unregulated. In some sense, the average food cart dealer had a lot more freedom than your average American businessman. However, it was always subject to the whim of the local official who decided tomorrow that we're not going to sell meat on a stick on this block anymore. And you just lost your business, right? So there was no recognition that you had a right to that. It's just that right now we don't care. And so less regulated, but constantly subject to win. I think a good example is in the late 1980s, in the run up to Tiananmen, intellectuals were doing more and more. The party was encouraging intellectual exchange because it was seen as a good way to get good ideas from the West and how do we improve things. But there was always this kind of unspoken understanding of where's that line. There's an interesting book by Harry Link. He's a well-known in the China community, not as much a political scientist. I think literature was his expertise, but he was there in the run up to Tiananmen living there. And it's called Evening Chats in Beijing, where his job was to engage with these intellectuals. And he talks about this bifurcated life that they lived, constantly pushing the boundaries of what they could talk about, but understanding that if they crossed it, they would be done. And that those people who then, oh, I can make things better, and would take an official role, you would see them change. And now the words that they were saying would be the words of the government. And then the thoughts that they were thinking would be the words of the government. So as long as you have a system on top that that has red lines and doesn't allow completely free thought, you know, you're always going to have this limit on how far ideas go unless people are really willing to step out. But even those intellectuals had a base understanding that the party was fulfilling its proper role and trying to do what was right, because that was the role of the leader and the party was the leader. And when I lived in Beijing and traveling around the country, it was fun to engage cavies in conversation as it is everywhere. And you would often hear, you know, complaining about this or that ill. The problem was never the government. It was that bad official or this corrupt guy who was going outside of what they were supposed to be doing. And to some extent, Xi's anti-corruption campaign helps this perception. There are problems and those officials were bad, right? COVID gets out of control. We fire some local officials. Problem solved. And so by effectively doing this and the party reinforcing its role in making things better, the average person thinks that Xi is largely doing his job and doing it largely well because China is now stronger and richer and more respected than it's ever been. Just read the newspaper. That's what matters. Yeah. So Xi's kind of backlash against whatever opening seemed to have been going on that happened, I think, from when he came to power really to today. There seems to be an ever-increasing centralization of power. Is this a backlash against that liberalism that was sneaking into China or was this just Xi's personality of centralizing and being more authoritarian? I think at root it's a concern that liberalizing had gone too far. Liberalizing is always generally a bad word, right? But the way that it went too far is there started to be other sources of authority, right? I mean, Jack Ma, for example, Jack Ma was a sweetheart, right? He was making China look good. But when people start to wonder what Jack Ma is going to do to fix the economy, rather than what the party is going to do, the party now has a problem, right? Because now there's a competing source of authority. And I think that things were starting from the party's perspective to get a little scary because things were starting to get away from them. Of course, you can argue whether or not his actions are the right solution, but I think that has been driving a lot of even shutting down internet English education. It's because they said it was bad for this and that reason. Well, it's back now. It's just run by the party or sanctioned by the parties because somebody else was setting the curriculum in the terms by which Chinese were learning English, not acceptable. So clubs of young Marxists were shut down because they were starting to look more Marxist than the Communist Party, so about authority. So where do you see internally in China? Where do you see this heading? I mean, it seems like over the last 10 years, there's been more and more centralization. You know, Jack Ma was another center of power, but so was the entire private industry in a sense, particularly tech, became a separate center of power. And now it seems to be centralizing. Is this, you know, even in the face of economic slowdown, do you expect that to continue? Yeah, I don't see them giving up on that, right? And they're trying to maintain these nominal private, nominal, you know, that we're still going to have the innovation that comes from the private center. We just have the party committee inside the business, right? That, whoa, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're doing. But it kills innovation, right? When you are always looking over your shoulder to make sure what you're thinking is okay. The party is trying to fix that by mandating innovation. We're going to throw lots of money at it, and we're going to mandate innovation and everything will be better. But it hasn't happened, right? Banding innovation typically doesn't work, yes. Oddly enough, no, when you don't have the freedom to think, you don't come up with great ideas. And so they're starting to get worried. They want to move up the value chain because their economic model is failing. They are still geared to be the workshop of the world, but they're increasingly expensive. And now she has turned people off, right? People who were already considering it because of cost getting out of the PRC are very much looking for the door because there's uncertainty and, you know, businessmen don't like that uncertainty when they're investing money in factories. So recently, we've seen the, was it the defense secretary and the, and I guess the foreign affairs secretary both disappear and then, you know, get fired. We've seen some generals in the, I guess, space or the rocket. Strategic rocket forces, yeah. Strategic rocket forces being replaced and fired. There seems to be a lot of turmoil in the upper echelons, particularly on the foreign policy side. Do you have a sense of what's going on and why this is happening? So the best we've been able to tell is he had made a speech before leaving the before and affairs guy out for a second. There had been a speech before a lot of this started happening, re-emphasizing the importance of having clean procurement and stuff like that. And the two senior people in the rocket forces are assumed to have gotten in trouble with corruption, that they were lining their pockets. And this has been going on for decades, right? With when they were supposed to be making the biggest, bestest new missiles, they were getting rich. The defense minister actually was in that organization for like a decade. And so there's less information out about him, but here in the West, it's generally assumed that he is being implicated in all this as well. And the corruption is endemic. So why is this a problem for Xi? Well, he's hung his hat on stomping it out. But also, I'm spending all this money to force innovation, and it's not happening. I need some scapegoats, and these people are lining their pockets. They look like pretty good scapegoats to me. In fact, they are part of the problem. We need to get rid of them. And Xi is very worried about looking bad. And because he has to maintain his position there in the party. And I think the foreign minister at least comes from some of that looking bad. This is his handpicked guy that's now out having dalliances and giving birth to out of wedlock children who I think might technically be an American citizen because he was born in the States, right? And so this is a horrible embarrassment to Xi. So I think that's why you see some of these people going away. In the West, we focus a lot on the fact that these are his handpicked people. And what does this mean for his ability to maintain that position beyond that speculation? There's parts of that government we still have very little insight into. What's the sense right now in terms of his grip on power? Is it as complete sometimes as it appears? So here comes that prediction where I'm probably likely to be wrong, right? I think for a while that I think he's still in a pretty good position. I think he's pretty secure. He's gotten rid of most of the people who would oppose him. As long as nothing really bad happens, he's probably good for a bit. He seems to be generally seen as doing well still. Are there pockets that disagree? Yes. But I think overall, I think he's still got a pretty firm seat. What could disrupt that? A major international crisis, major economy tanking massively, some kind of larger scandal in the party, but... Zero COVID didn't do it. No. See, I don't think the zero COVID hurt him that much. I think right up to the end, I think he was actually doing pretty well. Were people getting tired of it? Yeah, were people frustrated? Yeah, we fire some local officials and we do well. But compared to the chaos that was going on in the West, we're sitting pretty. We got things right. And I've had conversations with Chinese who just lambast and do not understand how we could tolerate the level of chaos that we allowed during COVID here. It was just unconscionable, from their perspective. I think a lot of people saw it was okay. Now there were protests there near the end in a pretty impressive way that people came out. Those got crushed pretty quick and those people went away and we haven't heard a whole lot from them. They got quiet. I think a misread that the West is making is that those protests ended zero COVID. I think that they realized that zero COVID was beyond them. The strains that were circulating at that time, it was already out of the bag. They had no choice but to let it go. If they had maintained zero COVID, they would have lost all credibility because it was going to be all over. Yeah. And it was clearly hooding their economy. I mean, it was devastating economically. So let's shift a little bit of foreign policy. We've already talked 40 minutes. This is great. This is really fun. So from a foreign policy perspective, what is the goal? What is the ambition for China? I mean, you said at the beginning, philosophically, they are the center of the world. Do they have kind of Islamic global domination type ambitions or do they just want to be the richest, most powerful place on the planet? Yeah. They want to be the most important. I don't think they actually have objectives with the exception of a few areas that they talk about a lot of taking territory. But they do expect to be respected for their proper place. They expect to be deferred to. They want to be the one setting the standard. From the historical memory for two millennia, we set the standard. The world, as we knew it, operated based upon the system that we put in place. And that was good. It was good for us. And it was moral. We want to reestablish that. We people should defer to us. We should be the norm setters. And if you look at a lot of these initiatives that are out there, whether it be One Belt One Road, the establishing of a parallel set of institutions, more recently the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, while there's lots of eaches about little things that they do, what these are about at the end of the day is norm setting. Then the norm they're attempting to establish is, who is the final arbiter of what is the proper international system? It's Beijing. One Belt One Road. How do you join it? You sign a bilateral treaty with Beijing. Prove that you've accepted this system. And they're trying to reshape the way that the international system works to be favorable to them. Because the current system they're arguing is favorable to the United States. And we should be on top. So did they view kind of the, I mean, for the first millennia or millennia and a half, China did dominate. It was richer. It was more successful than the West. But since certainly the 17th, 18th century, the West has become much, much richer and much, much more prosperous. How did they explain that? Did they explain that as an eternal weakness is something that, yeah, what's the source of the West's success? So there's a mix. There is some internal weakness. Sometimes that internal weakness is blamed on foreigners. And it's a mix of foreigners. Remember, the Qing dynasty were foreigners, right? The Qing dynasty came down from Manchuria and conquered China. Manchuria is now part of the PRC. But they were hated as foreign conquerors for much of the Qing dynasty. The Boxer Rebellion in 1901 against the Westerners in Beijing, those secret societies that started that, when they talked about foreigners, they were talking about the Qing. But the Qing effectively co-opted them and sent them at the Westerners. But so they blame some internal weakness and duplicity by the foreigners. They used their tricky gadgets and they tricked us into these unequal treaties and they kept us down for a hundred years. Now we're finally out of that and we are going to reclaim our rightful place in the world. I personally think there's a little bit of a problem there explaining that it's all the foreigners fault. True. That's what the Italians do. Certainly some of those Westerners did some not nice things. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. Westerners did evil things and kept us down. Humiliated us for a hundred years, but we're back and we're returning the Chinese nation to its proper place in the world. So if they stagnate over the next 10 years, if the economy doesn't do well and they have problems, does that have foreign policy implications in the sense that are they going to turn around and find a way to blame the foreigners and feel like they have to do something about it? Will they blame the foreigners? Yes. Will it be effective is the question that's a little hard to predict. The fear in foreign policy establishment is that that could lead to lashing out militarily. The classic jingoistic appeal to national greatness in order to hide domestic problems at home. That is very risky because if you fail, you prove how weak you are and the party is certainly concerned about that and I think realizes the danger there. I think they are absolutely concerned that the contracting economy is going to do them in and they're looking for ways out of it. And part of the dual circulation model, they're trying to both reinforce their domestic economy because traditionally it's been a low consumer economy while also establishing an alternative international trade system that kind of avoids the West which they claim is keeping them down. I'm not sure that that's really going to be that effective because the substitution is not going to work unless they can move up the value chain. So they're trying. I'm not convinced it's going to work. Can the party convince people that it's somebody else's fault and to suck it up that is difficult but not beyond the range of possibility. So when you see these Chinese, I mean, there's so many Chinese students in the United States, to what extent do you think these Chinese students are picking up any Western values and taking them back to China? More and more of them are going back to China. To what extent has Western philosophy got a chance of having an impact on what is going on over there? So it's mixed. I speak to a lot of students from the PRC and certainly some embrace values more akin to what you or I might hold. And a lot of those people end up looking for a way to stay. Whereas a lot of plenty of them just go about their business and learn what they came to learn and really don't change their ideas and go home. I think there are, you know, there's a whole range and I don't think those that are taking, that are going back are necessarily spreading different values. They're going back because mom says I should. Interesting. That falls right into the confusion. Not to say that people don't do things because their mom said so here. But you know, I don't think they're necessarily breaking out of the value system. They're taking bits and pieces. So the ones that are staying here probably and staying in the West. So obviously Taiwan is one of the territories that they really think is theirs. There's also some other islands in the South China Sea and some other territories in that vicinity. So to what extent do you think they're likely to become more aggressive in terms of either launching an attempt to actually invade Taiwan and take some of these other areas that are in conflict? So I think an invasion of Taiwan is very unlikely. That would be an extraordinarily difficult undertaking that is more likely to lead to the fall of the party than the successful conquering of Taiwan. In my opinion, that comes from living there for several years, being on the ground, examining the terrain in Taiwan. Yeah, I lived there for three years, back 2008, 2011. And looking at the terrain and you know, I'm a Marine. Understanding amphibious warfare is one of the things we're supposed to do. And looking at that terrain, looking at the geopolitical situation, it's not likely to happen successfully or successfully at such a cost that they can tolerate. So I think they get that. Their problem is painting themselves into a corner on it. They should have let it go long ago. They would have been a lot better off. In fact, before Chiang Kai-shek fled there, Mao would have been willing to let it go, but now it's holed over from the Civil War and they just can't let it go. In the build-up, the military build-up, I mean, they're spending a huge amount of money on the military. Is it mainly for show or is it towards some particular goal? So yeah, multiple. There's certainly a show, a domestic as well as foreign, right? Frankly, I think that the chief role of aircraft carriers is to show their own people how great they are. They absolutely look at the Taiwan scenario as a pacing scenario and attempt to build a military that can do it. I don't think they have it yet, but they've kind of backed themselves into a corner. If Taiwan tomorrow says we are an independent state, they are going to invade regardless of the cost. So they're certainly trying to build a military that can do that. However, there's been a shift where a lot of what they're doing is actually about being a global power, right? Let me show the world that I have the strength and the capability to do what the Americans do, because the Americans look good because they are a global power. I should be the center of authority. I need to have that. In fact, I recently was reading an article, they certainly are not there yet, but commentators are starting to talk about how they are, which is exactly what they want to hear. Look, this is good. We are the great power. To what extent is the policies now driven by just being anti whatever it is the US is after? You look at Russia, you look at even the Arab world in Israel. To what extent are they pro-Russia or supporting Russia because it'll piss off the Americans? I think there is some of that going on. I don't think, this is sad, I don't think they're as bad at that as we are, because I do think there is a vision they are aiming towards. And part of supporting Putin, it does mess with the Americans, but it also helps shape the new order. Whereas unfortunately, I think you see a lot of US policy that is very reactive. Pick up the press, it's like, how do we counter China? How do we react to China? How do we do X because China did Y? Completely reactive. Do they do some of that too? Yeah, absolutely, but I think they have a little bit better of a vision of what do we want the world to look like 20, 30, 40 years down the road? Whereas we're still trying to figure out how do we keep China from getting whatever they're trying to get because we think it's going to be bad for us somehow. So what is that vision 30, 40 years, is there at the center of some alternative to the West? Not just an alternative to the West, but at least on equal footing. That they see themselves as being the nation that's listened to. They prefer the nation. They understand that 40 years from now, it still might be them and the United States, but at the very least on any given issue, it's 50-50 which way it's going to break, whereas right now the whole international order from their perspective is set up to favor the United States. And they're lying with Russia presentable with opportunity to lead because Russia is probably a declining power whereas they are a rising power. So would you say the same thing is happening in the Middle East? It strikes me that China has been quite involved in the Middle East over the last year with relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran and trying to establish there. I mean they've got probably reasons to be there partially because of oil. They need a lot of it and partially to counter the United States to present themselves as an alternative. Right, but I think it's interesting they're trying very hard to be there without being there. They saw that getting really involved in some of the Middle East problems caused the United States problems and so they are trying to demonstrate that they can be a force for resolving things without actually getting their credibility on the line. The way that they managed the recent rapprochement between the Saudis and the Iranians, a lot different from the method that the United States tried to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, getting very involved in their hands dirty. They saw that as oh no I don't want that, but I want to show that when it comes to understanding the way the world should work as opposed to the way that it is working, Beijing might have a better way to do it. And you're right, oil. They're more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are. Don't quote me on that, I don't have the figures ready, but they are buying so much from there. So technically we produce enough oil that we don't need, but it is a global oil. We don't even need most of the oil that we get from the Middle East. Yeah, exactly. Whereas they need every drop, I don't think they have much of a domestic industry at all. They have some, but it's not insufficient. It's pretty small. And then to what extent, I mean it's interesting the way they're treating Israel right now. I mean literally I think the other day I read a story where they've maps that they're putting out now don't have Israel even listed there. I just saw that, yeah, Baidu, their version of GPS apparently erased the name, I don't know. Which is weird for a couple of reasons. One is they're a significant trading partner primarily for high-tech products. And I think Israel sells them weapons. I think weapon systems are going from Israel to China. I think some of the facial recognition stuff that they use to oppress their own citizen is actually coming from Israel unfortunately. And then the second is that when I was in China at least, every time I mentioned Israel, people kind of lit up and it was like Israel's this amazing place. I mean they had this notion of Israel being some kind of big country with incredibly powerful. I don't think that has a sense of how small it was. But they seem to have a lot of respect for Israel and that seems to have gone at least from the leadership. What's your sense of what's going on there? So in terms of the geopolitical, right, they're trying to not make the mistake of being burnt either way. And let's face it, the international community, Israel is a bit of a pariah, just, you know, carte blanche, all things being equal. So it's more convenient to not get on their side even though they've absolutely had a lot of high-tech trade with them over the course. One part that I have to say, I don't understand, I do not know how this massive wave of anti-Semitism has been sweeping across the PRC from what I have just seen watching some of the news. I've seen some reports, I'm not super up to speed on it, but there's reports of anti-Semitism on wavewall and stuff. And like for what reason would that happen there? There are large segments of that society that are very xenophobic. I don't know if it's being sprinkled by the government or what, but that just strikes me as odd and I don't have an explanation for it right now. Okay. So finally, let's talk about US policy vis-à-vis China. So what's your estimate of how we've behaved towards China over the last 40 years? I mean, since kind of the rise or since Nixon's visit really, and then the rise of China, and in particular over the last couple of administrations where there seems to be a shift under Trump and then in some ways Biden even tougher on China than Trump was. To what extent do you think any of it was strategic and where would you like to see America policy towards China move towards? So for several decades, the successive administrations for both parties, and let's face it, a lot of academia, was pretty certain that if we just trade with them, the people we get rich, the middle class will start switching from economic interest to political interest, and the society will liberalize and they'll be all great friends. And successive administrations just believe this would happen. And this happened around a lot of the world, right? Once you hit about 30,000 purchasing power parity, 30,000 per capita gross genetic product, societies tend to liberalize. Singapore being a standout, but then it didn't happen in the PRC and people were confused. But the administrations kept hoping, right? And there was a lot more hope, I think, than analysis that, well, if we just keep engaging, if we just keep talking to them, they'll come around. They really think just like us, right? This is, they got to see the world like we do. And this is the time period where I am personally going, we don't understand them. How can I understand them better? And I think that they were thinking differently about us and about the world. And then in the run up to Trump's switch, in the late Obama administration, many of the security practitioners from both parties are starting to go, something's not right. Something's not working. And Xi Jinping is getting more and more powerful now. And the PRC is starting to go its own way. And they continue to build exquisite weapons systems that appear to be aimed at us. And oh my God, they don't want to be our friends. And I tend to think that we over-believe that they would want to be our friends, that they were at least cooperative, whereas they've been looking at it for several decades, that the United States is enemy number one. And let's face it from a foreign policy perspective, the United States does not want enemies, right? We don't go looking for enemies. We actually tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. But they'd already decided that we were the enemy. And I was going around telling people, we don't want to make them our enemy, but we have to understand that they are looking at us that way. And so I think that finally was taking hold. And so you get the switch early in the Trump administration at about the same time that there were quite a few academics that some who are now in the Biden administration going, we got China wrong. We were wrong, right? We need a new way of looking at it, which is why this has continued in the Biden administration. Because the foreign policy establishment has come to the realization that the party's goal is to be number one. And from their perspective, that means they need to knock the United States down a peg. So does that mean that kind of what people call a Cold War II is inevitable? Does it mean that that's what the United States policy should be? I mean, how do we, what's the right way from foreign policy perspective to deal with the China? Yeah. So I don't like the Cold War II analogy for a few reasons. One of them is, Cold War, the US chose a specific policy, containment. And when you say Cold War policy, we tend to think in those terms. And containment is ultimately a second-handed strategy. It's letting the other guy run your strategy. And so I like to break away with that. Second reason I don't like it is it's a PRC talking point. Whenever you say something that they don't like, it's, oh, Cold War thinking. And then you get people reacting, oh, I didn't mean that. So they want to frame this as a Cold War because names are important. This is an important part of their epistemology, the name you call something. But it's not because we're not trying to have a global battle against the PRC. Because frankly, at the end of the day, if we just let them be, they're not that threatening. Even though they want a separate normative system, let's face it, the reason that the US normative system has survived, it's because by large, it's good for everybody. And most people, when you talk to them, most states actually like it and benefit from it. And so I don't think they're this actually big boogeyman. And we don't need to reorient an entire nation to fight a Cold War against the PRC. What we should be doing instead is rationally deriving what our own interests are and pursuing them. And pursuing them with nations who share our values and interests. And over time, those who are sitting on the fence are going to see that that's a lot better way to go than following the PRC. Because some of their initiatives, their attempts to establish norms, their investment systems, are proving over time to not be the shiny toys that they thought they were. And so all we really need to do is pursue our own interests, be good and be proud of being good. And I think that problem solves itself. So would you oppose, for example, like the Biden administration's restrictions on chip manufacturing equipment sale in chips to China? So by and large, my philosophy is trade is an individual concern and the government should be the heck out of it. That being said, there are specific cases of technology that people who view us as adversaries are absolutely attempting to use against us. And I think that's the one case where the government can legitimately come in and say, that can't go to that guy. And so I'm okay with that. But generally, don't stand in the way of trade unless there's an identifiable national security implication. Yeah, identifiable keeping the key because those can be invented quite easily. Right. And also these sanctions unless they're very targeted, very specific equipment you're trying to control historically don't work. You're better off just encouraging your people to be innovative and find the next technology. Absolutely. So this would be great. We've got a few questions. Let's go to those. Richard has a bunch of them. So let's take some of Richard's question. Richard says, I really like Scott's point that the US is too focused on knee-jerk reacting rather than articulation of a foreign policy of its own in Asia. What would a rational US strategy to Asia look like given the current geopolitical environment? So maybe here we're broadening outside of even China. Well, I actually am a fan of what's called free and open Indo-Pacific, which was actually first enunciated by Abe, picked up by Trump, who made it popular. The Biden administration has held on to it. And the idea is that basically there's some values that we think are important, that trade and people should be free and interactions and commerce should be open and promote interaction on that basis. I think the actual policy implementation has fallen short. That should be repeated constantly and actions should be taken to make things more free and open. And we're not doing that. One of the things we could do very easily is start dropping tariffs. Now, of course, in the perfect world, we just drop them all, right? But you want to get some impact out of it too. So set up a, I call them communities of common interest, right? We share interest with people and we share values. So tomorrow, anybody who trades good X, anybody who wants to drop tariffs to zero, the United States tariffs are zero tomorrow, right? The next week, you pick another good. And you show people that by engaging in free and open trade, everybody benefits. You find places in other places to cooperate. Free movement of people. How easy would it be to start, well, domestically is where the challenge is right now, unfortunately. But from a policy perspective to, hey, we're going to drop all immigration quotas from your country, right? Anybody who would drop it with us. And you start showing people that these values have power and they lead to everybody's betterment. And you start showing people, yeah, I really do want to work with the United States. There are common problems that we can work together even militarily. Trafficking in persons is straight up violations of rights and they affect all of us and they happen on ICs, right? So we cooperate with people who want to combat that and form small communities of interest. And what you're doing here is you're creating a number of cross-cutting organizations where people get used to working together and they see the U.S. system works. And so I would be in favor of building that and promoting U.S. interest rather than countering the PRC's vision of the world because at the end of the day, ours has a lot more staying power. Absolutely. Do you support, I mean, do you support the, what was it, the Trans-Pacific trade, whatever? Trans-Pacific partnership? Yeah. First of all, yeah, because it's trade liberalization. Okay, there's a lot of bad stuff in there too, right? And at the end of the day, a trade pact like that is still the government picking winners and losers. There were plenty of winners and losers being picked in those documents. TPP was in some ways better than a lot of the other ones out there, but it would have been a step, right? And us pulling out at the last minute, and here's an example where this was actually originally generated by people in the region who then looked to the United States for leadership and support. And all we had to do was say, we'll trade with you. So that was an easy win. And frankly, Trump pulled out of it, but the Obama administration had that thing signed, sealed, and was afraid to push it through ratification. And then both Trump and Clinton go hard against it during the campaign. It was horrible, right? But that would have been a nice first step. But at the end of the day, trade liberalization are still picking winners and losers. That's why I like to talk about my tariff idea, right? That we slowly start this mass liberalization with, hey, this country is willing to trade with us. So bam, and people start to catch on. Absolutely. Start with South Korea and Japan, if they'll agree. All right, let's see. Scott, Richard asks, Scott, do you think democracy in China had a, why do you think democracy in China had a brief moment after the Xinhai revolution, but then collapsed into war lordism? Was the opposition to the Qing more about Han nationalism and philosophical opposition to monarchism? Or did Western ideas play a major role? Western ideas played some role, but it was a mishmash, right? And that was part of the problem, right? Look at, for example, Sun Yat Sen's three principles of the, three principles of the people are in and of themselves a mishmash of Marxism, capitalism and Confucianism, right? There were lots of different ideas and so there wasn't just a solid, hey, we need a system of values that supports liberal governance and then a liberal government. It was, hey, we need something different and we have some ideas and this is our principle. The nationalist party, Sun Yat Sen's party, was a Leninist party, organized that way, funded by Soviet Russia. Now, was Sun Yat Sen 100% communist? No, but it turned him into a power, right? Yeah, it turned him into it later. So it was a mishmash of ideas and at the end of the day, when we advocate democracy as US politicians, they're talking about a vote, right? Which, and let's face it, that's all democracy is, right? Democracy, 50% plus one, but a liberal governance requires values, requires an understanding and a free government requires constitutional limitations on that government and commitment to the rule of law and that was lacking completely. And unfortunately, we forget that here we're the beacon of Republican governance in the United States and we don't advocate it internationally. And most people advocating don't understand what the word democracy means. Absolutely. And PRC claims to be the most representative of democracy in the world today, right? Because the party through its system collects the ideas of the people and sends it to the center and so they are democracy. Manifestation of the people's will. Okay, Richard, again, why did KMT lose the Chinese Civil War? Was it because they were less philosophically consistent than the CCP? Or do you think Chiang Kai-shek did the best he could given the situation in the 30s or was it because the Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the end of the World War II? So for those listeners who don't know KMT is the Kuomintang, which is the Nationalist Party, which was Sun Yat-sen's party. Also goes to Taiwan, right? Yeah, that's the group that ultimately fled to Taiwan and currently the opposition party in Taiwan. They've been going back and forth since the Institute of Elections. The Civil War was lost by Chiang Kai-shek and his hooligans, right? They were not philosophically consistent. It was a Leninist party. He thought he, you know, he was fascistic. Fascistic? Fascistic, I think he's ASA, right? It was basically a become a fascist party under him in many ways and horribly corrupt. As the questioner mentioned, never really had solid control of the country, but led through a coalition of warlords who were also skimming off the top, as generals were skimming off the top, abusing the people. Nobody liked the Nationalists. They lost that Civil War much more than the Communist won it and well before the Soviets went into Manchuria. It just took time for the battlefield to play out. Right. Moe Richardi says, do you think that China had a philosophical vacuum post-Deng reforms? It seems like the pragmatism is unsatisfying to young Chinese people I've met and many are open to radical ideas. But the Christians, I assume the American Christians, also see this as a big opportunity for them to kind of have influence on China. Yeah. Well, you know, communism is dead and has been dead for a while. And there was there was a lot of thought, especially there in the late 1990s, early 2000s, that this communism dying would be an entrepo for all kinds of Western ideas. We thought that the official churches were seen to be growing. The Westerners certainly thought they were growing, that this idea that kids would turn to religion because they no longer had a moral guidepost from the party. But you know, the party actually teaches Confucianism now and not just teaching Confucian values, calling them communist, but actually Confucius is taught now. And I think they came to realize that they did need a grounding. And part of it is nationalism. Part of it is a promise of economic success, which they've been delivering over the years. And part of it is reemphasizing the values upon which that nation is built. And you actually see this in Xi Jinping's speeches. He refers to the ancients quite frequently and talks about the 5000 years of Chinese culture. They are consciously promoting the values that they think Chinese people still hold, still matter to them, and which justify and legitimize the party's role. And so I think they've attempted to fill that gap. The young Chinese I speak to, there are some that are radical, there are some that are very conservative. I like asking people if they think Confucius is important. And then if they say no, I ask them a value question that is ultimately, and that is obviously Confucian, and they agree with it, right? Because they have this system. I remember, you know, one of my disappointments in China was that some of the radicals, some of the more liberal forces among academics, intellectuals in China, were really attracted to religion. And what they saw was that religion was the answer to China rather than kind of secular liberal ideas. And that was shocking to me that they would say, they'd asked me, because they were really interested in Judaism, they would ask me if the Talmud, you know, what would take to translate the Talmud into, I mean, just really focused on religion as being kind of a solution. And that was sad. Let's see, on the leeway asks, China is constantly encroaching on their neighbors. And many Chinese citizens seem convinced of their nation's superiority, superiority, because of China's longevity. Is Sino-Centrism too ingrained for China to ever become free and prosperous? Well, interesting question. I think Sino-Centrism is very ingrained. It is taught still. I mean, it's partly underline philosophy, but it's taught in schools. When I lived there, I was routinely lectured by taxi drivers on how they had 5,000 years of civilizational history and were obviously much better than my young country for that reason. I think that is an issue. Now that in and of itself, I guess it does stand in the way of liberal governance, right? Because it implies a centrality that makes it difficult to step out of. So it certainly does encourage the authoritarianism, though it's not specifically so. I think there are other values that are equally important, such as the importance of the individual, which I think is much more important ultimately, and could Trump the Sino-Centrism ultimately, because it's more fundamental, right? Because the individual is not respected as the end. The individual serves a purpose, starting with the family and the village and on up to the state. I think that's much more important. Interesting on the encroachment though, they've actually settled a lot of their land borders, sometimes to their detriment when it wasn't seen as important, but there are a few that they refuse to give up on. The border with India being the most notable land border, and then the South China Sea, and of course Taiwan, and then Senkakus. Senkakus and has a lot more to do with resources. South China Sea, I think, started that way, but they've kind of ingrained it now as an important historical issue, and it's gotten quite silly. Let's see. Michael asks, how is Iran's influence in China? Iran wants a map that Europe is the past America's the present, Asia's the future. That was a while ago. Do you see radical free market reforms happening in China before the US? No. Next question. No, I don't see it happening before, because the reforms are not taken because free market is good or because it's right. Even in the United States, you still get arguments to that effect. No, no, no. You have to let people do this as they're right. We do talk more about the positive. It will be better for the economy, but it is done in the PRC because it is seen as effective for the governing system. It's not taken for a principled reason, so no. Is there any way else in Asia that you see as kind of up-and-coming and potentially challenging China? Like challenging geopolitically? Geopolitically or economically? Well, Taiwan, economically, right? I mean, Taiwan is an interesting case, right? Because in some sense, they didn't go through the Cultural Revolution where traditional values were stamped out, but they also went through 50 years of colonization by Japan, and then since then, close relationship with the United States. So there's a very cosmopolitan feel there, and they've incorporated ideas from all over. There's still some traditional, a lot of Western, and very get up and go get things done. And look what that country has done just since 48. Not only have they liberalized, they went from making our cheap junk to being the center of making sure the cheap junk gets made all over. When you buy the made in China, it's probably made by a Taiwanese company, right? The trade deficit, and let's not get into trade deficits, right? I think it's a real policy, but the current accounts, payments deficit, right? The United States had this gap with Taiwan, and then Taiwan started opening factories on the mainland, and it went like this. And the one with the PRC rose at the same rate because Taiwan just shifted all its production to the mainland. The PRC's economic miracle is largely funded by Taiwan, made with intellectual property from Taiwan, made with a factory and economic know-how from Taiwan. When it's not from Taiwan, it's from the West, right? But Taiwan's not there first and let it. So like Foxconn, right? From the Taiwan, the NACO, there you go. They happen to do it in China. Yeah, it's an amazing place, and it's not just that they manufacture. It's now they have the world leader, the world leading chip manufacturer. I mean, it produces 80% of all the most advanced chips in the world. I mean, nobody even comes close, and that's in Taiwan. Right. But you know, there's also back office and IP work moving there, right? Because they don't just make those things, they make other things. There's so much anti-viral fighting for the West happens in Taiwan on the 24-hour cycle. Companies are moving their intellectual back offices to Taiwan too. So very dynamic and have really changed. It was a huge factor in changing the region. We talked about Japan being first, but Taiwan was kind of a different model. Hong Kong had another kind of different model. But yeah, so really impressive. All right, let's see. Richard, one thing I find fascinating is the contradiction of one-child policy and confusion tradition of family. It seems like family is so centrally important in Chinese culture. How was it that the CCP justified one-child policy in the context? And then I'll follow up with now that the one-child policy is gone, they're still only having one child, and in some cases not having children at all. And how does that fit into the Confucian philosophy? Because you've got this demographic catastrophe happening over there. So the one-child policy was certainly contentious. There's a little bit of supposition here. But the fact that the government did have the authority and could force you was a huge part of it, right? But also, memories of the Great Leap Forward and starvation were still very real. And people were starving. And so that was part of the justification, is we are all going to starve if we don't stop growing. And so that might have helped sell it. That's a little bit of supposition on my part. And the government had the ability to just force it. Now, oh my God, we don't have enough young people. Everybody go have babies. And they're not. Now, most couples, once they get married, still want their one child, right? Because you have to have that child to carry on your name and to make money to support you when you get old. But darn it, too, are expensive. And it is very expensive to educate and raise a child in the cities in China, especially vis-a-vis their income. You're suffering from the classic developmental problem. As you get richer, you have fewer children. And it's happening world over, right? Taiwan is down one child per female. Japan has been down there. South Korea. And it's not just Asia. Europe is below the replacement rate. One of the few developed countries that's not is the United States. The banks largely to immigration. Otherwise, it's negative. Without the immigrants, it's actually below placement. But yeah, it's funny. You talk about the science fiction as having to spread out across the cosmos to make room for humans. We're not going to have any humans to send out across the cosmos, right? The population on the planet is actually going to be declining before the end of the century. They're part of that problem. They still have their one. Only in Africa. And Africa is going fast. And the one place they can't afford to grow. That's going to create its own immigration challenges because they're going to want to leave. William, Chinese students study at private tutoring centers until what past midnight, China's now has youth unemployment rate of 21%. Is this due to the focus on a high school mass over real skills? Do you see this getting worse? Oh, the education problem, right? So focusing on not just high school math, but that test, right? It's all about that test. And your life is determined by that test. And, you know, I have children, right? It's all how do I get my kid to have the best possible chances? And people, people fret about this all over the world. You do see, I've lived in several places around the Far East and people care about is this system working for our children? And there are a lot of people looking to get out of it because they think that test until you die system is not working. It does not encourage creativity and innovative thought. Interestingly enough, seems like every time I'm in Singapore in a cab, the radio program that the guy's listening to is complaining about this problem, right? Friends we knew in Taiwan complaining about this problem. There are certainly parents in the PRC who are worried about it as well. Breaking out of that is hard because the test is still there. And so I might think I need to do something else for my child, but the test is still there. And so I have to train them for that test. You saw them looking for something different with some of the English language online training they were getting, right? Some way I can get my kid better prepared. But that was an alternative source of authority. So we had to crack that down. Interestingly enough, that's still going on now, but it's local is controlled by the government or regulated by the government. So it is a problem. They worry about it. And they're experimenting with ways to change it. I think it's really interesting that all the Asian countries that do the test to you die are looking to be more creative like the West. And the West is looking to be more test to you die and get better. More traditional education focusing on the liberal arts and ideas and critical thinking needs to happen in all places. So do you think that's the reason for the 21% the high employment? Oh, yeah, that's part of the question. Sorry. No, well, the 21% I think is a few reasons. The test itself, no, there has been an encouragement and an increase in university attendance. But the economy has not developed the jobs for university graduates, partly because they're still not moving up the value chain. And they're not creating that service economy that they're, frankly, we're hoping to. And so they're just not jobs for these people exacerbated by falling growth rates, probably because of that, right? And partly because of international economic conditions exacerbated by COVID, right? And then government policies towards the economy. So there's been a few things came together to lead to this huge unemployment rate, which is certainly a concern and a fear. Let's face it, that's the demographic that revolutions come from. And the party is not blind to this fact. So they're looking for ways to do it. This is interesting. She is doing this in a ham-handed fashion. This is a danger for him, I think. Oh, this is rough, learn to eat bitterness. Yeah, I saw that. And then just a couple of days ago, he told the 13th National Women's Congress that, well, really, the problem is we have too many workers and not enough kids, so women should stay home and have babies, which is going to go over like a lead brick. So yeah, that's not a smart move. So this could be a weakness of she, right? Because he's demonstrating with some of these things that he doesn't understand the way people are thinking. Right, Richard, I'm not sure I understand this question. Why does the bandit regime not allow me to type the characters for Gong Fei? Is this a conspiracy? Do you know what he's talking about? No, which characters? I can't see the chat, so I don't know what. Is it characters for Gong Fei? G-O-N-G-F-E-I. Let me type and see where I can go. By the bandit regime, depending on his position, he could be referring to, he's probably referring to the communists, but they both call each other bandits, so. Yeah, I'm not sure. Richard, you'll have to clarify. All right, Adam asks, Scott, some historians of ideas argue that Hitler's ideologue Carl Schmidt is a strong influence on Chinese CCP ideology from academics to Xi. What's your take? So I honestly can't say specifically. He has been read. He's read in US academia, too, just for comparison and contrasting. But ultimately, Carl Schmidt could be seen to help or reinforce. But I think at the end of the day, the political theory is set that you need a central authority. And I think Carl Schmidt might actually help them justify that, but they have other ways to legitimize it. So are there people studying these and looking for things? Yeah, I assume so. I don't know the answer for sure. I can't answer your question definitely. But I also don't think it matters to the extent that it supports what they are already doing. I think they'll use it to the extent that it doesn't. We already have a system that works. And frankly, you don't want to lean too much on the foreigners. Yeah. Okay, Michael says, what is being contemplated to influence on Chinese culture? It's strange that such a bad working meritocratic culture would embrace communist dictatorship. Read that last part again. It's strange that such a hardworking meritocratic culture would embrace communist dictatorship. Ah, okay. Well, my argument is that they didn't embrace communist. Right. Right. But remember, for two millennia, this hard working meritocratic system fed directly into the same hierarchy. We called them Confucian bureaucrats rather than party cadre, but they filled the same roles in society, and they did the same basic functions. And they were both meritocratic, right? You had to test in the Confucian bureaucracy. You have to apply for and then have several levels of education to move up to the party hierarchy. It's not like the Republican or Democratic party where you check a box and you join it. Yeah. You have to apply for and be accepted for party membership. So you also asked about if Conte and Plato would have any influence on Chinese culture? I think, like Schmidt, do some scholars and academics read them? Yeah. You'll certainly hear it quoted back to Westerners, but to the extent that they support their own views. And let's face it, some of the stuff, yeah, you can read some stuff from Confucius and some stuff from Conte occasionally and you go, hey, these guys are brothers, right? Yeah. Look at the way Laozi looks from Taoism, looks at the world and look at Conte. And there's definitely some places you can see it, but that doesn't mean that they're actually studying and using it. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. I mean, the mystics in some sense, the mystics all are very similar. I mean, but you know, academics in the PRC also study the American founders religiously, right? Okay. What can we learn from the American founders to understand what made America great? Because America became great and we want to be great. Is there something there we can mine? Is there something there we can use to understand what they're going to do? So there are absolutely departments in various academy that are purposely looking into all these ideas out there to see what they can glean. Yeah. Probably not gleaning the right stuff. Certainly in America, the academics are not gleaning the right stuff. Papa says, what will World War III look like? Does it start with China or Israel? People obsessed with World War III. So it starts with an oops. More than likely, it starts with an oops, right? Because, you know, the large powers, they don't want to fight a great power war. They know it's bad for them. Which frankly, is one of the reasons I do what I do, right? Is you have to understand that's why the Marine Corps originally trained me, right? You have to understand the way other people act. Otherwise, you're going to misinterpret what they do, and you'll stumble into war. Yep. Frank asks, China and Japan enemies, who was Cho-en-Li? So Cho-en-Li was the premier under Mao. He was a stately man, very well respected to this day there. Henry Kissinger Fonz over in, he's in love with the man, was astute, was practiced, was a smooth diplomat, and was very good at presenting a respectable face of the PRC on the world stage. He was, I mean, American diplomats who dealt with him almost universally respected him. He was ultimately a party member who believed in the authority of the party and that it should be in power. There was the people in the PRC who have something bad to say about him say that he could have done more to mitigate the negative impacts of the Cultural Revolution. Others will say if he wasn't there, it would have been a lot worse, because he did some tempering of Mao. If he wasn't there, Deng Xiaoping probably would have never actually made it back into power, which many people in the PRC think was very good for them. He was ultimately taken down by the Cultural Revolution as well, partly because he was seen as a possible alternate authority to Mao. Mao was concerned that people were starting to look to him to fix things, because he was the calm captain while Cultural Revolution went crazy. Interestingly, this is in some ways the source of the attack on Confucianism, because he was seen by many to be the classic Confucian scholar gentry who understood the system and made things happen. When Mao realized that he was a threat, he didn't name Joe by name, but that's when the Four Olds campaign started. That's where Confucianism got attacked, and that's where Joe ends up being taken down a peg, because that was what was used to attack him. Stifankos, I asked about trying to Japan being enemies. Oh, yeah. Well, there's a lot of history that goes into that. World War II and many horrible, horrible things that Japanese soldiers did in Japan, I'm sorry, did in China, has left a lasting emotional reaction among many there that is encouraged and reinforced in textbooks and museums to hate Japanese. When Japan does something the PRC doesn't like, the party will whip this up at the same time, lots of Japanese companies have also been responsible for the economic miracle. When I lived there, Toyotas were one of the main cars on the road, and Japanese televisions were the first ones in the market. Love-hate relationship, a lot more hate, and they are seen as by their role, by their modernizing first, by their continued relationship with the United States as upsetting the regional hierarchy. They were a vassal state in the imperial system. Now, the extent to which any vassal state saw themselves as a vassal state and were seen as a vassal state by the emperors, there was always a bit of a difference there, but they paid tribute. In the ritualized way it was paid and were seen as a vassal and now they claim to be the most important nation in Asia, it's absurd. Once again, lectured by taxi drivers on how these horrible comeuppance, piddly Japanese need to know their place. They're either talked of as just mongrels or wayward sons who were mythically the group sent out by the first emperor to find the fountain of youth who never came back. So there's a lot of animosity that's used by the party. All right, so Richard clarifies what he said before. So he says, Gung-Fai is a Taiwanese slang for communist bandit. Whenever I tried to super chat the characters, YouTube wouldn't allow it. Interesting. Not surprising, I guess. Yeah, I've not tried. I was not aware. Justin says, why did fascist ROC turn towards freedom in Taiwan? Hmm. Good question. Also a long, interesting history there. History of Taiwan is fascinating. Basically, they knew they weren't going to survive. The United States started having buyers remorse almost as soon as Chiang Kai-shek got to Taiwan, seriously considered abandoning him several times, suggesting that they were possibly looking at fomenting a coup. And then, so the nationalists realized they kind of had to at least look more democratic and efforts were made even under Chiang Kai-shek. And then the United States switched recognition. And though we maintain a relationship with the ROC, I'm sorry, with the authorities on Taiwan, switched recognition to the PRC. And at that point, Zhang Jing Guo, who was Chiang Kai-shek's son, in that particular presence, he realized that the only way that this survives is if we liberalize. And a dictator like his father had been part of leaving the secret police in some of the worst times on Taiwan. To his credit, he basically single-handedly turned the course of that country and basically allowed the opposition to, he basically stopped enforcing laws that prevented the opposition from voicing. And then named Li Deng-hui to be his vice president, who was Taiwan born, but a member of the Nationalist Party and would take over upon his death. And he became the first popularly elected president of Taiwan. And so a combination of the values being there, because, you know, lots of American service men there through 79, lots of ideas coming in, even afterwards, lots of exchanges through our unofficial relationships, lots of Taiwanese going to the United States, coming back for education, coming back with their children with citizenship. So lots of ideas coming in and a realization that this is just not going to work unless we become a liberal economic powerhouse. And they decided to go that way. They made it happen. Yeah. All right. Two last questions. Let's see. Justin says, why overseas Chinese, why do overseas Chinese tend to thrive? Is it Chinese culture or selection effects? I think it's selection effects and your classic, the first wave of immigrants hustle, right? Look back through US history. Every wave of immigrants, it doesn't matter where they're from, have been a dynamic force that have helped push this country forward, right? And the people who set out pick up their families and head to a foreign land to start anew, absolutely, there's a selection effect going on there. So I think, you know, there are capable industrious people born all over the world in every society and every culture, but not all of them have the individual gumption to pick up and do something about it. And I think, by being the United States, we fortunately tend to attract those people. It's just fantastic for us. On the really voices, are mainland Chinese affected by the success of the Chinese diaspora in places like Singapore embracing few market principles and thriving? If not, why do they disregard the diaspora's success? Interesting question. That's praise. So they definitely see people going out and succeeding. Sometimes if I'm the type of person that might do that, I use it as an excuse to go do it. If I'm the type of person that won't, often we'll find some excuse why they did it and I didn't. Maybe they had some reason to go, he's lucky. They do see people succeeding just like poor people anywhere see successful people succeeding. You know, people have different reasons and different ways to write it off. It doesn't necessarily, I don't think they necessarily equate. Oh, it's because they went to a place that has a liberal system that enables them to succeed. That person managed to succeed. And so I don't think there's necessarily a tie-in with that system. They don't see Hong Kong as an example of Taiwan. Hong Kong and Taiwan as examples of what happens when you liberalize. So the way that's played on the mainland is some of the good things that happen there is not necessarily because of liberalization, but they didn't happen in the mainland because we were kept down for a hundred years. We weren't allowed to go through that. If we hadn't been kept down for a hundred years, we would be that way too. And then the bad part of that, what they would call the lawn, the chaos, they pipe that up as a problem. When the protesters are in the streets of Hong Kong, they're not there arguing for liberalization. They're there causing hate and discontent and see what happens when people don't understand the importance of authority in our harmony and order. Same thing in Taiwan. You see people protesting. Those pictures are broadcast back to the mainland with the local spin put on it, just like they are from here. Every time the United States has a demonstration, paint it in the worst possible light to show why liberal systems are inferior. All right, we do have a couple more. Let's see. Fred and Harper, it seems to me that if you want to be in charge of a strong and growing economy, you liberate. The CCP would be stronger if they leaned into the model as the practical premise, less power but a stronger China. I would argue they disagree. They don't necessarily believe that because the chaos is going to cause problems. The chaos is an externality that cannot be controlled. And they would even go so far to say, even if it works over there, it won't work here. This place needs central control or it's not going to work. Order, social order is a high value. This one I think is for me. Do you think Alan Greenspan could have created Bitcoin? Is Alan Greenspan Sadi Moshi or whatever his name is? No. I don't think Alan Greenspan has the skills to create Bitcoin. No, there's no way. It was somebody young and very proficient in computers. Alan Greenspan is a good... He can run a regression. I'm not sure he can do much more than that. In terms of math and in terms of programming, I don't think he's the right generation. All right. This has been amazing, Scott. Thank you. I really, really, really enjoyed it. I think everybody on the chat did too. We'll have to do this again. We'll try to provide us with opportunities to do it again. It'll probably be in the news at some point, yes. Yes. Good. All right. Have a great night. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to all the superchatters. You were great. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. That really helps with the algorithms. I will see you guys tomorrow morning for a news roundup. Thanks, Scott. Have a great night. Thanks, everyone. Bye, everybody.