#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past, that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one, of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers, these were all parallels. And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism, even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. There was no, brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother. So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything, including politics. Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward-looking thing. It wasn't trying to, it wasn't arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conservative. So in all kinds of ways, you know, it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: My favorite book about, one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing, I feel like banning things. But there's also friction, which she says, she has three apps, fear, friction, and flooding. And she says they're all important. And I think this is true, not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get, even though you know that some people will get it. You just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally minded, tapped in Chinese will use, people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding, you just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist in operation. And I think the fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked. So I'm always interested in things that, things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarian. You can read Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you just, you know, you're not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state or anything. but it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China, things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. There's intense kind of censorship of that and certain events in that way.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: I do think the Brave New World side of things, I think with China, I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude, boot-on-the-face, 1984 style of control. But then during the COVID lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, Even places like Shanghai that had seemed much more the Brave New World kind of style had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now, I think it's, you know, there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments. In Xinjiang, they were when they were starting to round people up. There's this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how people were just starting to disappear off the streets and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And the cues could be something like somebody giving up smoking or not drinking alcohol because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something, a particular version of it. So he talked about how a group of the poets, when they would get, or writers, would they get together, they would, whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table, because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side of Xinjiang is this example, and Tibet also with incredible tight control.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Christina Larson, a very bright journalist, a friend of mine who's now working on other things, but was working on China, and she wrote about this in MIT Technology Review. She said, you need to think about China as having the best as well as the worst internet experience in the world. And you think about it with, When you think of the worst, it's easy. the Great Firewall, you try to search for what happened. You search for the tank man, you won't get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him. Search for things about Xinjiang and it makes it seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than massive extralegal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by things you have no control over. But she said, on other ways, when it comes to consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember after I, around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about like going out to eat. Like I said, oh, that's like Yelp. I said, well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We've got one that can tell you which part of the restaurant you want to sit in because there's a waiter that's in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or you know what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of slow things. The other line besides Best and Worst Internet I always like is William Gibson, who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present neuromancer. He wrote a rare, for him, non-fiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty.