Confucianism is a conservative, backward-looking philosophy centered on stable hierarchical relationships where both superior and inferior owe each other something, and it is fundamentally at odds with Marxism's progressive view of history.

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(00:09:54) AG1 will give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. (00:10:03) This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. (00:10:05) To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. (00:10:09) And now, dear friends, (00:10:10) There's Jeffrey Wasserstrom. (00:10:29) You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. (00:10:33) What are the parallels between the two leaders, and where do they differ? (00:10:37) Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. (00:10:46) So what are the commonalities? (00:10:49) What are the differences? (00:10:50) So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults. (00:10:57) and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. (00:11:03) And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. (00:11:12) Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are (00:11:25) books by him, collections of speeches. (00:11:27) And when Mao was alive, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. (00:11:33) But after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. (00:11:45) I was first in China in 1986, and you could go (00:11:49) for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. (00:11:53) You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere, the newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him. (00:12:01) and quotations from his words and things like that. (00:12:04) So with Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. (00:12:12) So that's a key commonality. (00:12:15) And a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that (00:12:25) he talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really, his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was The Monkey King, about this legendary figure who, this monkey king who could turn the heavens upside down. (00:12:40) So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things. (00:12:45) Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. (00:12:51) So you can see them as very, very different that way. (00:12:54) And Mao also liked to stir things up, like to have people on the streets clamoring. (00:13:00) So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself. (00:13:04) He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can't be controlled. (00:13:10) So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways that they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. (00:13:15) They're also different, and this fits with this orderliness that Xi Jinping (00:13:20) talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. (00:13:26) And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior. (00:13:35) Whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. (00:13:38) He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that had held China back. (00:13:43) So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly (00:13:49) did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party. (00:13:53) And that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them two as well. (00:13:58) So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. (00:14:06) So let's go all the way back. (00:14:08) You wrote that in order to understand the China today, we have to study its past. (00:14:13) So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. (00:14:21) Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius? (00:14:24) First of all, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. (00:14:27) He's around the same time as, you know, figures like Socrates and like with (00:14:34) Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. (00:14:45) So, you know, you can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common. (00:14:52) Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is (00:14:56) they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped keep, decide how you should run a polity. (00:15:12) Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. (00:15:20) 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. (00:15:34) He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship (00:15:43) owed something to the other. (00:15:44) So the father and son relationship was a key one. (00:15:49) The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. (00:15:57) And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. (00:16:02) And he had a whole series of these relationships. (00:16:05) 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. (00:16:17) And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers, these were all parallels. (00:16:22) 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. (00:16:36) In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. (00:16:43) There was no, brotherhood was not (00:16:45) an egalitarian relationship. (00:16:47) It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother. (00:16:52) So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. (00:16:56) It permeated everything, including politics. (00:16:59) Yeah, and there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. (00:17:05) So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of (00:17:10) non-personified deity like the emperor was to the minister. (00:17:15) So all of this had these relationships. (00:17:18) So the emperor was the son of heaven. (00:17:20) And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the text, we should study how the sages of old (00:17:29) behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. (00:17:40) So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward-looking thing. (00:17:46) It wasn't trying to, it wasn't arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. (00:17:53) So it was also a kind of conservative. (00:17:54) 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 (00:18:04) a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next. (00:18:07) So that's the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today, is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism, where communism, Marxism is supposed to let go of history, and Confucianism, there's a real veneration of history that's happening in China of today. (00:18:24) So they're able to wear both hats and balance it. (00:18:28) Yeah, you could say that in many points in the (00:18:32) the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. (00:18:43) Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to? (00:18:51) Xi Jinping, and before him to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit, the Olympics, there was more of this kind of (00:18:58) mix it all together view. (00:19:00) Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. (00:19:06) So Xi Jinping says that, you know, Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. (00:19:15) And there's really, you know, they had so little in common, but they both in his mind and the minds of others suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past. (00:19:27) Yeah, so this platonic notion of greatness, and that you could say connects, that's a thread that connects for Xi Jinping, the great history, multi-thousand year history of China. (00:19:42) Yeah, and it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. (00:19:46) You had, you know, the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit in 221 BC, he (00:19:54) is anti-scholars. (00:19:55) He burns books, and he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. (00:20:03) So he's very much against the things that Confucius stood for. (00:20:07) And Mao, in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, (00:20:12) He said, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. (00:20:15) Scholars can be a pain. (00:20:18) So he said, like, if you have to choose between Confucianism and that. (00:20:22) But Xi Jinping, I think, continually is kind of not choosing. (00:20:26) And if he wants to say, well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful, in fact, that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor, (00:20:36) who, by the way, didn't build anything like the Great Wall you see today. (00:20:39) He built walls and they were fine. (00:20:42) They were good. (00:20:43) But the Great Wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. (00:20:47) But still this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a, in many ways, a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single party rule. (00:21:01) That's something he clearly believes in. (00:21:04) And he's (00:21:06) a nationalist. (00:21:06) He wants to see China be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage. (00:21:12) Boy, so many contradictions always. (00:21:15) With Stalin, he was a communist, but also a nationalist, right? (00:21:20) That contradiction also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. (00:21:27) But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism (00:21:33) is the belief that, quote, people are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning. (00:21:39) So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. (00:21:45) Can you speak to this Confucius's idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today? (00:21:56) Sure. (00:21:58) there's an optimism to this. (00:21:59) There's an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. (00:22:05) And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. (00:22:12) So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. (00:22:23) And it did have this idea (00:22:27) a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. (00:22:34) And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded, (00:22:50) potentially. (00:22:50) And China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the last emperor. (00:22:57) The last emperor, the idea was that he could become, anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity through the kind of education. (00:23:14) Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education. (00:23:17) But I think that's a carryover from the Confucian times. (00:23:22) And over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracies should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive (00:23:42) kind of exams. (00:23:43) And the exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing, could set you on the road to a good career. (00:23:56) In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. (00:23:59) So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits, but then (00:24:10) Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. (00:24:20) So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there. (00:24:23) But to which degree this idea of meritocracy, that's inherent to the notion that we're all start at the same line, (00:24:33) there's a meritocratic view of human nature there, where if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. (00:24:43) And so the reverse, if you haven't succeeded, that means you didn't work hard and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the success. (00:24:52) Does that carry over to the China today? (00:24:55) there's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil serving exams, but the question was who, if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. (00:25:09) One thing that happened there was families would pool together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. (00:25:21) And (00:25:23) this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. (00:25:29) But there also was a kind of, there was always a tension of that, so what if you don't succeed? (00:25:37) Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. (00:25:47) You had this issue, and then it became something, well, (00:25:51) the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader. (00:25:55) And also, there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea, which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy, to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven, (00:26:21) if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove his, heaven will remove its mandate to him. (00:26:33) And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. (00:26:40) And there it sort of justifies rebellion. (00:26:42) And the idea is that if the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop (00:26:49) the ruler from being killed. (00:26:51) But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. (00:27:01) So it's an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is. (00:27:16) Okay, so it's meritocracy with an asterisk. (00:27:19) It does seem to be the case, maybe you can speak to that, in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value for excellence. (00:27:26) Hopefully I'm not generalizing too much, but from the things I've seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that, you know, it's just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. (00:27:42) Is that the case with the China of today? (00:27:44) There's been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having, there isn't the civil service exam, but there is the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get, what kind of institution to get into. (00:28:06) And I think, getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which (00:28:13) is strong in a lot of tradition. (00:28:16) It also a kind of, what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness and who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided. (00:28:27) This leads to a kind of outrage. (00:28:30) And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole (00:28:42) idea of kind of meritocracy. (00:28:44) And the 1989 protests at Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press in particular, was discussed as a movement for democracy. (00:28:53) But a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and the sense that people (00:29:04) despite all the talk, I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams, to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of backdoor. (00:29:16) And that led to a kind of outrage. (00:29:18) I mean, that's true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of that. (00:29:28) the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of getting ahead. (00:29:34) I hope it's okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. (00:29:39) Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general. (00:29:48) What happened in Tiananmen Square? (00:29:50) So in 1989, this massive movement took place. (00:29:54) The story of it's largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places, in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet bloc. (00:30:08) So I think it's often conflated with what was going on there. (00:30:14) And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were (00:30:19) an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao's death and in a sense, the student generation (00:30:47) of 89, and I was there in 86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests, there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about, that the government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up, we need to liberalize, we need to give people more control of their fate. (00:31:12) And the students felt that this was being done (00:31:16) more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm. (00:31:20) And that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction. (00:31:30) And it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in 86 when I was there in Shanghai in late 86. (00:31:39) And students protested. (00:31:40) And this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution, or at least since '76. (00:31:50) And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this physicist, Fang Li Jer, who was a kind of often thought a Chinese Sakharov. (00:32:03) He was a liberalizing intellectual. (00:32:06) But one of the things that students in Shanghai, where some of the most intense protests of that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert of all things, that Jan and Dean, the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. (00:32:23) And they were touring China. (00:32:25) It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert. (00:32:28) And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought (00:32:33) the Communist Party was moving toward was letting them be more part of the world. (00:32:38) And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. (00:32:42) And at the concert, some students got up to dance, because that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. (00:32:48) And the security guards made them sit down. (00:32:51) And for the students in Shanghai, this weather symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow through. (00:32:58) We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance. (00:33:02) And so the protests went on for a little while in 86 and posters went up. (00:33:08) The officials at universities said, no, this is out of hand. (00:33:13) We had chaos on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. (00:33:16) We can't go back to that. (00:33:17) And nobody wanted to go back to that. (00:33:20) So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. (00:33:24) And the students didn't want to be associated with that. (00:33:26) So it wound down pretty quickly. (00:33:29) And they thought, we're not like the Red Guards. (00:33:33) We don't want to make chaos. (00:33:34) We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. (00:33:38) The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. (00:33:41) The analogy partly sort of scared them, and also it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them. (00:33:48) So then in 1989, the protests restart. (00:33:52) And there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. (00:33:57) They, the space for them, students are thinking about doing something in 1989. (00:34:02) It's a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. (00:34:07) People are thinking about that. (00:34:08) But more importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May 4th Movement of 1919. (00:34:17) And the May 4th Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. (00:34:21) Some member, leading founders of it had been (00:34:24) student activist then. (00:34:26) It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. (00:34:32) And so the students thought, you know, the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. (00:34:42) People were reminded of what students did in the past. (00:34:45) And so there were sort of, there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. (00:34:51) And then a leader (00:34:54) Pu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party. (00:35:04) He had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking, partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 86, 87 protests. (00:35:14) And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. (00:35:19) He had been very high up. (00:35:20) He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. (00:35:23) And he dies unexpectedly. (00:35:26) And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. (00:35:30) And the students take advantage of the opening of their having to be commemorations of his death. (00:35:38) And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. (00:35:42) Hu Yabang was younger than some of the more conservative members. (00:35:46) They said, so some people are dying too young. (00:35:48) Some people don't seem like they're ever going to die. (00:35:52) And so they begin these sorts of protests. (00:35:55) This is in April of 89. (00:35:57) And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly. (00:36:02) And they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People's Daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for taking us back to the Cultural Revolution. (00:36:13) And this time the students say, no, you know, we're just trying to show our patriotism. (00:36:17) We believe that there's too much corruption and nepotism. (00:36:22) There's not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party. (00:36:28) And so they keep up the protests. (00:36:31) And there's a lot of frustration at this point. (00:36:33) There are also economic frustrations at this point. (00:36:37) The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. (00:36:46) And so there's sort of a sense of unfairness. (00:36:49) The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro managing of their private lives on campuses. (00:36:55) So the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. (00:37:03) It's an anti-corruption movement. (00:37:05) It's a call for more democracy movement. (00:37:07) It's a call for more freedom of speech movement. (00:37:09) But it's also a kind of (00:37:12) has some counterculture elements that are like, there are rock concerts on the square. (00:37:17) The most popular rock musician, Sui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he's there. (00:37:24) There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. (00:37:29) And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. (00:37:36) It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. (00:37:42) It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the communist bloc, which was about moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties in power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. (00:37:59) So there was a kind of disjuncture, happened at the same time as moves to end communism. (00:38:05) But of course, (00:38:06) I've said there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square, it seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction. (00:38:19) But then there's also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. (00:38:23) And clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand and this is not going to be tolerated. (00:38:35) And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. (00:38:41) Students from around the country are pouring into Beijing to join this movement. (00:38:46) They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. (00:38:49) So it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new. (00:38:52) new participants are coming from the provinces, and even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay. (00:39:00) And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form an independent labor union. (00:39:06) And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to (00:39:19) to members of other social classes, joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this, that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicious of student (00:39:39) activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. (00:39:44) But in China, there had been, from the history of the 20th century, a sense of students as potentially A vanguard. (00:39:52) So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in, and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square, (00:40:02) on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early on June 4th, and the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People's Liberation of Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression, and they're acting like an invading force. So this is where famously the tanks roll in. The tanks roll in, and I think also, (00:40:30) You have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank that's a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it's considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force. Can we talk about that, who's now called the tank man, the man that stood in front of the row of tanks? This was on June 5th in Tiananmen Square. (00:40:59) What do we know about him? What do you think about him? The symbolism. It's an amazing symbol. You know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks. And it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end, he climbs up on the tank. And the tank swerves, you know, it doesn't run him over. (00:41:25) And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn't mowed down. And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, look, the students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution. And the army showed restraint. And there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks during (00:41:55) Once the massacre began, people got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, look, actually, look at this. The heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers. And they try for the first months after it to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen A lot. They talk about these things. They show him it's just the Tank Man. (00:42:22) The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. And then, and there had been many, many people, some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers who were just mowing down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think, (00:42:50) the claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event, and particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did to him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city that was, that the (00:43:17) The image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule, and they really didn't want to have that image out there in the world. Yeah, we're watching the video now. He's got what, like, grocery bags in his hands? It's such a symbolic, I've had enough. (00:43:38) Like that kind of statement. and it's probably not a student. it's often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man bearing his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image (00:44:08) of bravery against tanks. And in 1968, in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. And so not that people would know, but that was an image, you know, what was so powerful in that was saying, we're not going to put up with this invasion. Again, I think you have the People's Liberation of Army, army looking like an invading force. And that's what (00:44:38) That's what the Chinese Communist Party, in a sense, can't deal with now. Even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989, and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control. And the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. (00:45:06) And you could say, look, and after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed. Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet bloc. Maybe we actually, maybe this was the right way to go. And you can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism. (00:45:30) It's one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken. So I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don't understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards. And perhaps that's what the Chinese government didn't quite understand. They lost information war, the meme war. So I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man's head? (00:45:56) Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal, guttural, like, I've had enough? It's so interesting to just speculate, and we just don't know, because he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important, because one of the students' main demands was then, I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square, would have been to say, we want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic. (00:46:25) We're not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We're here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that? And you mentioned about the power of the image. And I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, which has taken to heart the power of the image after that, because we saw this in, but when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government (00:46:53) on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of, crowds out of control. And initially there were in 2014, and again, initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds and it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, (00:47:16) of violence by crowds. And then they would show those images over and over again. They also worked very hard when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police. And they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre? Will there be soldiers on the streets? (00:47:45) the movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was beanbags shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside subway stations in 2019. And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don't make the kind of images (00:48:13) that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen tank man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, young woman that became another of the iconic images during the Vietnam War, those images really can have an extraordinary power. And I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping, there are very few photographs allowed (00:48:42) of the Xinjiang extralegal detention camps. There are very little, very little photo, there is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have. So nobody knows what happened to the Tank Man. No. What do you think happened to the Tank Man? I assume he was killed. Killed. I assume he was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often (00:49:09) figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there's been relatively few of, like, for political crimes recently, sentencing to death and things like that. It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But (00:49:36) the Tank Man, there was never a trial. There was never even a trial that was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared. And there's been somebody (00:49:54) who's like another figure like this who's disappeared. A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, the Sitong Bridge in Beijing. And it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of COVID policies, but also of dictatorial rule. And the banner somehow he managed to have it up and get it (00:50:23) long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he's disappeared and there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And again, you know, we don't know if he's still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn't want a competing story out there. They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking. How much censorship is there in modern-day China? (00:50:53) by the Chinese government. So, there's a lot of censorship. 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. (00:51:20) 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, (00:51:48) 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 (00:52:16) 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. (00:52:45) 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. But a sort of like something through allegory, something through (00:53:11) imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule, but things banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You've been able to since 1985. (00:53:34) You can buy, again, it's not about China. And actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984 that's like the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. And then by the 90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren't having fun. (00:54:01) And people said, like, you could read, some people would read 1984 and say, look, this is the world we're living in. It's a big brother state. But others said, well, that has some similarities to us, but, you know, he wasn't talking about a country like ours. Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we've got fast trains, we've got things are, we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did. And this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining. (00:54:30) Yeah, you've actually spoken about and described China as more akin to the dystopian world, the Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot of recently reread, over the past couple of years, reread Brave New World a couple of times, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st century might be more defined (00:54:54) to a degree, it is dystopian, any of the nations are, by Brave New World and by 1984. There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other, I think. And if we just think about control through distraction and (00:55:20) playing to your sense of pleasure. And one thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell when he was a student at Eden. And they were sort of rivals. And in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy in 1984 and said, you know, look, I've written this. Basically, it's kind of almost a little Oedipal, like I've written this book that (00:55:48) displace is yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I wanted you to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World and reviews this like not having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China. (00:56:15) And he just said, it's a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population. Basically saying more like what was in my book than in yours. I have to say, I think Huxley might be really onto something there. Truly A visionary. Although to give points to Orwell, I do think as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, (00:56:45) 1984 is a better book. Because Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly. Because 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime. Oh, and the dissection of language is just so amazing. No, I think you've got a point there, and I went back and reread Brave New World, and it's fascinating, but it (00:57:11) It's very, it's very messy. Yeah. I think there's a clarity to Orwell's 1984. There's A clarity to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, similarly, the construction of the elements. And she was a big fan of both 1984 and Brave New World. So (00:57:30) there's a way they go forward. But there was a kind of, it's not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited. Yes, he did. In the 50s. And he kind of said, actually, it seems, and he mentions China there. He says that in Mao's China, they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China (00:57:57) on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It's called the Dystopian Trilogy. And it's a box set where you have Zemia Tenzui, who then inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That's one book. And then there's Animal Farm in 1984 is the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. (00:58:23) And it was published in Complex Characters. You could buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland. And it's all the same, except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out. And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots. (00:58:53) that's taken out. And 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, (00:59:18) 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. I see why it could give a sense after you've thoroughly internalized the fear that you have complete freedom of speech. Just don't mention the government. (00:59:47) So you could talk about totalitarianism, you could talk about the darkest aspects of human nature, just don't. You can even talk about the government in a sort of metaphorical, like poetic way that's not directly linkable. But the moment you mentioned the government, it's like a dumb keyword search. It's, yeah, it's, and I think it's like one of these really good examples of how (01:00:14) China's distinctive, but it's not unique. (01:00:17) You have other settings where you have these like no-go zones that you learn. (01:00:21) And one example is in Singapore. (01:00:23) You know, there was this, so National University of Singapore has a world-class history department, but no Singapore historian in it. (01:00:32) Nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore. (01:00:35) Because, you know, it's incredibly wide-ranging what you can (01:00:38) what you can do, analyze. (01:00:41) But when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets to be touchy. (01:00:48) In Thailand, which I've been working on recently, you have this Les Majeste laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king. (01:01:03) And so you, in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around. (01:01:08) And there's a way in which you can say at the international, the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country won over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, (01:01:29) It's touchy, I should give credit for that insight. (01:01:32) Shivani Matani, who's written, co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong among the Braves, she was talking about that, in Singapore, at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong. (01:01:45) that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. (01:01:48) But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong, who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore. (01:02:03) And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondents Club (01:02:07) And then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about what the culture in this Foreign Correspondence Club. (01:02:14) And there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly, and then said, and there are things going on in Thailand that we're not going to talk about. (01:02:27) And there was this kind of, yeah, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing. (01:02:32) One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting, (01:02:37) I want to learn more is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind to compartmentalize things. (01:02:44) It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don't mention a particular topic. (01:02:51) My intuition would be about the human mind. (01:02:54) If there's anything you're afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. (01:03:00) You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technology. (01:03:04) And that idea, I think, underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech. (01:03:08) Why you don't want, in the United States, you don't want to censor any even dangerous speech, because that will permeate everything else. (01:03:17) You won't be able to have great scientists, you won't be able to have great journalists, you won't be able to have, I don't know. (01:03:22) I mean, I'm obviously biased towards America, and I think you do need to have that full-on freedom of speech. (01:03:28) But this is an interesting case study. (01:03:30) And that's actually something that you speak about, that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China, would be quite surprised. (01:03:38) Can you give the Nanjing Bookstore as an example? (01:03:42) Can you just speak to this? (01:03:43) If Mao visited China, let's go with that thought experiment. (01:03:47) What would he recognize? (01:03:49) What would he be surprised by? (01:03:51) So I wrote about, I wrote about imagining A revivified Mao, you know, going, wandering this really (01:03:58) cool Nanjing Bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. (01:04:08) And I thought about how he'd be like, what's going on? (01:04:12) You know, is the Communist Party not in control? (01:04:14) I mean, he talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together and you've got all these kind of things. (01:04:21) He'd also be (01:04:22) He also would have been shocked by all these, there were all these books about like how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. (01:04:31) It's like, you know, all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time. (01:04:35) Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. (01:04:41) He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas. (01:04:48) circulating. (01:04:48) So he might say, well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this. (01:04:54) So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I was just as amazed could exist in the early 2000s. (01:05:01) So you can still read, you can still buy copies in 1984, and you can still get some of these other things. (01:05:08) But that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. (01:05:11) I'm not sure you'd get (01:05:13) permission to translate some of those things now. (01:05:16) There's more of a sense of caution. (01:05:19) And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability, (01:05:32) to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. (01:05:41) And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. (01:05:48) It was in a metro station. (01:05:51) And it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. (01:05:59) But then it just got less and less space to operate (01:06:01) under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing. (01:06:06) And it then had to close in Shanghai. (01:06:08) And it's just been reopened in DC as JF Books. (01:06:14) And it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub. (01:06:17) And I'm really delighted. (01:06:18) It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book, (01:06:22) when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. (01:06:35) And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai. (01:06:42) So places like that, they stop being able to exist on the mainland, then they could still exist in Hong Kong. (01:06:49) But now in Hong Kong, (01:06:51) one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. (01:06:54) It just didn't feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there. (01:06:58) And it's reopened in upstate New York. (01:07:00) So you have this phenomenon of bookstores. (01:07:03) There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei and The Hague. (01:07:12) And I heard one is maybe it's going to open in or is open in Japan to (01:07:17) My sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, sort of carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't, and imagined someday being able to hold in China, but maybe can't. (01:07:39) So first of all, (01:07:40) Boy, do I love America. (01:07:42) And second of all, it makes me really sad because there's a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds. (01:07:50) And maybe I'm romantic about this, but books is a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish. (01:07:59) And without that, (01:08:00) So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about, and sometimes people will think because of censorship and that there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population control. (01:08:12) And I periodically will get students from the mainland, and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes, I teach Chinese history, and I feel like, okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the past that's been drumbeat into them. (01:08:29) But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system and it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it. (01:08:39) And this is kind of, I mean, some of them are people who just got curious by something. (01:08:46) And it is a porous system. (01:08:48) Even, you know, it's more porous than in North Korea, things like that. (01:08:53) So there are, even if there's that like fear, friction and flooding, which, you know, (01:08:59) Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there's still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued, or they see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media, you know, we'll share them something on, you know, on WeChat that (01:09:25) It doesn't get picked up by the censors, but they look at it carefully and they say, oh, well, wait a minute. (01:09:33) That contradicts what the government's official line is. (01:09:36) So there is, there's still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persists. (01:09:43) I mean, that's really beautiful to hear. (01:09:46) I mean, fundamentally, the human spirit, (01:09:50) is curious and wants to understand. (01:09:53) And it's some, especially the young people, as we mentioned, are suspicious of authority in the best kind of way. (01:09:59) And so they're always asking kinds of questions, but we always have the child, the young person inside us, always asking, like, that maybe I'm being lied to in all these kinds of ways. (01:10:10) But still, it's sad because there is, if you're not deliberately doing that or if there's not a spark (01:10:18) of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China, you might never really ask maybe a whole, there's a whole different perspective on history, on world history. (01:10:28) To be fair, I think United States is often guilty of this very United States-centric view of history. (01:10:36) I mean, similar with Europe, Europe was a very, Europe (01:10:40) sense of history. (01:10:41) I often enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world, talking to them about World War II, because it's like, it's clear that the emphasis, you've read certain chapters of the story, (01:10:55) lot of times and not the other chapters of the story. (01:10:59) The Western Front in Europe and the Eastern Front in Europe. (01:11:02) And then Japan and China's role in World War II and the history around that before and after World War II of China is not often talked about in the United States. (01:11:12) And I'm sure, if I could venture a guess, that the opposite is true in China. (01:11:17) I certainly know the opposite was true in the Soviet Union and even in Europe that directly experienced France, (01:11:24) Britain, Germany, Italy, they all have very different ways of speaking and thinking and reading about World War II. (01:11:33) And the same goes across all of history and all of culture. (01:11:37) So yes, it's always good to sort of question the mainstream narrative in your country and looking outside. (01:11:43) It's just harder to do in China based on technological, based on all the reasons you've mentioned. (01:11:49) And if I can, I just want to give a shout out. (01:11:51) Thank you. (01:11:51) I'll look at her work, Margaret Roberts. (01:11:54) the fear, the friction, and the flooding. (01:11:57) Her ideas, I can already tell there's a lot of brilliance here. (01:12:01) Fear, this is the most traditional form involving overt threats and punishments for accessing and sharing sensitive information. (01:12:10) However, Roberts finds that fear-based censorship is used selectively, mainly targeting high-profile individuals such as journalists or activists. (01:12:17) For the average citizen, the risk of punishment is relatively low, and fear alone is not the main deterrent. (01:12:24) She goes on to describe the friction and the flooding. (01:12:28) The friction is a tax on information access. (01:12:32) And flooding is less visible than fear or friction, but is a powerful tool for shaping the information environment. (01:12:40) Flooding one scares me more and more. (01:12:43) Flooding one is the brave new world. (01:12:45) Yeah, it is. (01:12:45) And I think it's a whole kind of, (01:12:49) the world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. (01:12:53) And Chinese Communist Party leaders, I brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some of the leaders were like looking at that. (01:13:01) And they're looking at, you know, there are all kinds of things that it both, going to Singapore, (01:13:09) can sometimes make you feel like you're in this futuristic setting in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world would be tried out there. (01:13:20) And I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are really, they both add to convenience at the same time they strip away. (01:13:29) They're collecting information about you, which can be also something that (01:13:36) can make your life easier at the same time as it's stripping you away of, I mean, we talk about the silencing of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news. (01:13:47) And so two things come to mind to mention. (01:13:50) One is (01:13:52) 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. (01:14:02) She said, you need to think about China as having the best as well as the worst internet experience in the world. (01:14:08) And you think about it with, (01:14:10) When you think of the worst, it's easy. (01:14:12) the Great Firewall, you try to search for what happened. (01:14:15) You search for the tank man, you won't get it. (01:14:18) You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him. (01:14:23) 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 (01:14:34) by things you have no control over. (01:14:36) But she said, on other ways, when it comes to consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced. (01:14:45) A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. (01:14:49) And I remember after I, around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. (01:14:55) They were talking about like going out to eat. (01:14:57) Like I said, oh, we've got such and such. (01:14:59) And I said, oh, that's like Yelp. (01:15:01) I said, well, yeah, but Yelp just tells (01:15:03) you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. (01:15:08) 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. (01:15:18) Or you know what the best dish there is in the last week. (01:15:22) Forget about these sort of slow things. (01:15:24) And you had a lot of things, you know, that were like, okay, you've (01:15:29) smart city and controlled, you can learn things about ease of movement. (01:15:33) And Singapore had some of these things tested too. (01:15:36) You had way before you go into an underground parking lot now in the US and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on a floor. (01:15:49) That was something that was years before. (01:15:51) in Singapore. (01:15:52) And you don't use, you used money less often there because you had a kind of transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. (01:16:01) And it was something that can be very seductive. (01:16:04) So 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. (01:16:14) He wrote a rare, for him, non-fiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. (01:16:22) And there are times when... (01:16:25) I shouldn't laugh. (01:16:25) But it is, it's a powerful... (01:16:28) Yeah. (01:16:29) He's not welcomed in Singapore, let's just say. (01:16:33) But he talked about how when he wanted to try to, he went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you sort of got a sense of what the future might hold. (01:16:44) So the dark side of this, the surveillance state (01:16:49) at its worst, which we're seeing, we see in Xinjiang in places. (01:16:52) And there, again, it may seem like I'm just obsessed with science fiction. (01:16:57) And there, it really is Minority Report. (01:17:00) It's this kind of like, you do certain kinds of behaviors, and we're seeing this other places too. (01:17:06) You know, we're seeing versions of it in the US as well, where it's like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X. (01:17:14) And so in Xinjiang, they were, (01:17:17) when they were starting to round people up. (01:17:19) There's this great book by a Uyghur poet. (01:17:23) 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. (01:17:32) 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 (01:17:47) more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something, a particular version of it. (01:17:52) 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. (01:18:08) So you really have this dark side of Xinjiang is this example, and Tibet also with incredible tight control. (01:18:17) And there's more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well. (01:18:26) But I think the question of whether we give up too much and who can abuse what we do give up is something that is being asked in the United States now about big tech companies as well as it's asked about governments, but it's also asked about big tech and what you have as a trade-off. (01:18:42) But I hadn't thought about it until this conversation, which (01:18:46) I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations because you have set lines, but then you kind of, the conversation goes and you think in a different way. (01:18:59) So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power and they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc was falling apart. (01:19:14) They knew that one reason why people, and this is like the simple way of, one way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe, was partly about ideals and just thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people, East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff. (01:19:36) And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store to see if (01:19:43) the images of better food and more choices were available there. (01:19:47) And it was true. (01:19:48) And I think this is a human, as human as the desire for more freedom. (01:19:52) So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don't have things like tian?