I am from Hong Kong. I grew up in a world where the right attitude for Chinese to have was that China has been gravely violated and humiliated: the late dynasty- the opium war, the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion, the Nanking massacre, the evil west stifling and disproving our modern progress. The need for redemption and vindication ran deep. We were also told the appropriate way to react to these insults: The Japanese is "a barbaric violator who never admitted its evil," the correct outcome of Taiwan is reunification, and the generational quest for all Chinese is to earn the respect from the West. We have been around for more than 5000 years, we deserve the world's respect! Failure to respond correctly would result in the condemnation of one's entire kinship.
In addition to the shame, in addition to the nationalistically and socially sanctioned responses to this humiliation, there are two 21st things that make the China situation vastly more scary:
1. Our inability to anticipate the power of modern technology
2. The interconnectedness of countries
The Power of Modern Technology:
The last two Great Wars showed us how little we knew about the destructive power of modern weapons. These wars also illustrated our collective lack of restraint, especially when we were all rallied up and pissed off. The combination of these two was deadly, and had only been contained in the last 70 years, by liberal democracies? International cooperation/check and balances?
Today we are tempering with powerful technologies, from robotics to biotech to information technology. We know very little of their potential. How would AI disrupt our workforce? What does it mean to wage wars with drones? What is manipulation versus advertising?
If history has taught us anything, governance and cooperation are ever more needed to guide and contain our use of these tools.
The Interconnectedness of Countries
China is actively manipulating the world order by being very aggressive with its international policies. Its investments in the African continent, the one road one belt initiative, the islands they have built in the southern sea.
At the same time, the speed of international escalation is much faster in the 21st century, thanks to technology.
Therefore, all in all:
The speed of escalation, chain reactions, aka shit going south, is going to be fast.
The power of modern day weapons is going to be poorly contained and extremely destructive.
basically, what's the problem of this? Why cannot China become number 1 after so many years of suppression and humiliation by the west? We can do much better than them.
HKers always think they are part of western, you are not.
It definitely seems more productive to match China's situation in the context of other countries than assume it's some weird exotic place. Another concept I feel like gets exoticized is "face." There are stories all the time of Americans not seeking unemployment insurance because it's "undignified," etc. People do things for their pride everywhere. It's not just some weird Asian concept.
But, it can also be true to describe some countries as being, on average, more or less pride driven than others. I do not know if that is so for China right now, but it feels wrong to imply there are no real cultural differences between nations.
Supposedly there are other countries out there where families regularly practice honor killings. You don't hear this about China at least. (Related: white people think Asians are obsessed with "honor" because they read Shogun, a book by a white guy, but I don't even know how to say "honor" in Japanese. It's never come up.)
As someone who moved to California with my parents from China and just recently became a naturalized U.S. citizen, I'm quite gravely worried about the state of my birth country. I'm very much in agreement with you on the observation that China is going through what many other nations went through in the 20th century, but I can't help but stop and think about the possibility of repeating episodes from the 20th century that really should not be repeated. It took 70 million perished souls to turn the Germany and Japan of 1937 into the Germany and Japan of 2021. I wonder if we can avoid the same with China.
Noah, if you read this comment, I would like to show you some of the things I read as a primary school student in mainland China. I think it'll be interesting to you and might give you a bit of insight into the development of jingoism among mainland Chinese today.
Excellent read. It reminded me of when I first saw the 2002 film "The Gangs of New York", NYC as a lawless, corrupt place, thinking that historically the US had advanced greatly since the time that the film depicted, but trying not to forget that it wasn't that long ago.
I think it's very important to consider what might have been. In the 90s and 00s it really seemed as if China was on this road to liberalization that will see them slowly join the fold of 21st century nations. BUT as a counterpoint I should point out that the "China is unique and has a unique destiny" view is extraordinarily popular inside China and leaders like Xi and others gin it up all the time for popular support. Oh wait I guess Germany et. al. all did that too.
And a big part of why Russia is unique, I would argue, is the national myth of cursed destiny that many Russians believe in -- that is, that the unique valor of their people comes from putting up with and surviving an unending series of catastrophic hardships. Which is very different than the near-universal national myth of "we are really awesome and anything bad happening is because we are threatened/betrayed/disrespected etc. and soon we will be awesome again"
Emmmm u just don't understand China, we never change. The seemingly liberal is a superficial game shown to the US to let us into WTO and don't attack us in trade.
Noah, I think you may be underestimating the continuing power of nationalism. In a time of rapid social and economic change, it allows you to escape your sense of extreme vulnerability as an individual by identifying psychologically with a much larger, more powerful, and long-lived national community.
E. H. Carr observes that the fundamental divide in international politics is not between heroes and villains, but between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. I'm skeptical that China will eventually chill out and accept the status quo, especially because I expect that the US will need to step back to deal with severe internal challenges (as suggested by George F. Kennan after the end of the Cold War, in "Around the Cragged Hill"). At the very least, I expect China to attempt to retake Taiwan, potentially by using force. China's repression of Xinjiang and Hong Kong have severely diminished the prospects for peaceful reunification.
Kennan has an analogy which I like: he compares China to France. "The two peoples are similar in a number of respects. They are both proud people. Both are conscious of being the bearers of a great cultural tradition." And there's there's some interesting similarities in their respective relationships with Japan and England (in each case, a smaller, less culturally developed, more peripheral country which at least temporarily achieved greater economic development and military power).
I do believe in the power of nationalism, and I don't think it's a given that China will chill out and liberalize, in fact prospects are looking dim right now
I think the metaphor of "exactly like us but a few decades" back is pretty powerful. I live in Vietnam and foreigners frequently talk about how deadly Vietnamese roads are (and how they'd never drive here). Yet Vietnamese road deaths today are basically exactly the same as in the US in the early 1970s.
Likewise, to understand how a lot of not-yet-middle class families live, all you have to do is turn on a Charlie Chaplin movie and see Americans with the bathtub in the kitchen because that's how you heated up hot water.
I think it is easy to conjure some kind of qualitative difference when in many cases it is just literally "hey, they're a few decades behind" (but hopefully catching up fast).
"A manufacturing-intensive economy is an intermediate stage in economic development — a feature of the rapid early period of industrialization."
I"m increasingly questioning this hypothesis. We see increasing desire and policy to support localized manufacturing from the US to Europe. The intermediate state may well be a services-heavy economy.
Also worth calling out the parallels between China in the last 50 years and 19th century US development.
The US leveraged it's extensive land (and presumably lower cost workforce) compared to England to manufacture cotton and more goods that England wanted. It was initially behind in use of coal, but literally struck oil first and pioneered that massive energy transition.
China has also leveraged land and low cost labour to manufacture things that the west wants. It built out world-leading capacity in solar panel and li-ion battery manufacturing.
So there are many economic parallels.
I do wish that countries could strike up a more conciliatory tone tone as you end your post on.
While the article is spot on, I think you could have factored in the tectonic shifts taking place in society at large, fuelled by the impending transition to web 3.0, it would have added even more nuance to the general argument.
I'm kind of amazed at how everyone here assumes that china is ramping up for military conflict when it seems pretty obvious the most militarily aggressive country in the world is the United States. China has not been in a war since 1979.
This article also completely ignores the elephant in the room, communism. The assumption is that china is communist in name only but that is not how the party sees it.
The assumptions made on this article are more interesting than what you've actually written.
Yeah, I really think it's important to remember the role of cultural/social history and the legacy of *past* material conditions and circumstances in shaping mass attitudes -- in literally any country, very much including the US as well as China. (One thing I am impatient for, as the US loses both relative and perhaps absolute power in the world, is for non-US people to *stop* assuming that US people act the way we do because of being denizens of the country that happened to be the past hegemon, and to start looking for the specific historical reasons why, for instance, there is no universal health system in the US or Americans are patriotically obsessed with the value of the dollar.)
It *matters* that there is a two-century-long legacy of the Western countries trying to subvert Chinese society in order to acquire distinct products that China had no incentive or interest in selling to them in a fair commercial transaction. It matters that this experience and the geographic distance produced by pre-20th century transportation means that Chinese people perceive a unified "West" in which the US and European countries are the same thing. (It matters that North Americans and Europeans have never thought this in 4+ centuries.)
It, yeah, probably matters that the Europeans trace their civilization only as far back as maybe the precursors to the ancient Greeks and Romans c. 2,500 years ago, and not to the Indo-European migration, which was more like 5,000 years ago.
All that matters as much as the current fact that Germany is basically the only Western country to have remained industrialized in the wake of the last forty years.
I've had a similar thought recently that China is like mid-late 19th century Prussia/Germany, although I was thinking about it from a liberalsing perspective. Prior to the revolution of 1848 peoples lives on a day to day basis were not free. Serfdom was still a thing, you couldn't form a trade union, if you worked in a factory your life was controlled by the factory owner and the state supported that with unequal contract law.
I see parallels with China in that the last 40 years or so, my reading is that there has been a huge shift in the amount of control the state has over peoples day to day lives. The one child policy is the most famous example of this, but there's also the amount of control the SOE had over your life - they provided your housing, your job, your healthcare and as such had a great amount of power over your daily life. My read is that this much less the case now. Housing and healthcare aren't provided by SOE anymore, there's a lot more labour market mobility.
Both Germany in 1900 and China in 2021 are authoritarian states where you can get sent prison or beaten up if you write the wrong thing or meet with the wrong people, but on a day to day basis this is a very different experience to the life of English factory worker in 1840 or a low caste rural Indian women today.
If I were to make a prediction on the basis of this analysis it would be that the Hukou system that discriminates against rural migrants into the big cities will be gone in the next 20 years.
I actually read a defense of Hukou that argued that while China was industrialising it Beijing could have ended up having massive slums and it's plausibly good that this didn't happen.
Yeah I think that's all basically correct but a different point to the one I was making (although I think it's an important oversimplification to say that Prussia was an army with a state) . I think when we think about political systems we mostly look at the formal systems of government and looking at it like that the Chinese system of government hasn't changed since 1976. But I think that that misses the something really important which is the degree of social control individuals experience on a day to bais and that this has changed a lot from 1976 to now in China. I think it's easy to miss this because the level of social control one experiences often lines up with the democractic-authrotiarian axis but sometimes doesn't, as in the case of 1880 Germany or contemporary China.
I am from Hong Kong. I grew up in a world where the right attitude for Chinese to have was that China has been gravely violated and humiliated: the late dynasty- the opium war, the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion, the Nanking massacre, the evil west stifling and disproving our modern progress. The need for redemption and vindication ran deep. We were also told the appropriate way to react to these insults: The Japanese is "a barbaric violator who never admitted its evil," the correct outcome of Taiwan is reunification, and the generational quest for all Chinese is to earn the respect from the West. We have been around for more than 5000 years, we deserve the world's respect! Failure to respond correctly would result in the condemnation of one's entire kinship.
In addition to the shame, in addition to the nationalistically and socially sanctioned responses to this humiliation, there are two 21st things that make the China situation vastly more scary:
1. Our inability to anticipate the power of modern technology
2. The interconnectedness of countries
The Power of Modern Technology:
The last two Great Wars showed us how little we knew about the destructive power of modern weapons. These wars also illustrated our collective lack of restraint, especially when we were all rallied up and pissed off. The combination of these two was deadly, and had only been contained in the last 70 years, by liberal democracies? International cooperation/check and balances?
Today we are tempering with powerful technologies, from robotics to biotech to information technology. We know very little of their potential. How would AI disrupt our workforce? What does it mean to wage wars with drones? What is manipulation versus advertising?
If history has taught us anything, governance and cooperation are ever more needed to guide and contain our use of these tools.
The Interconnectedness of Countries
China is actively manipulating the world order by being very aggressive with its international policies. Its investments in the African continent, the one road one belt initiative, the islands they have built in the southern sea.
At the same time, the speed of international escalation is much faster in the 21st century, thanks to technology.
Therefore, all in all:
The speed of escalation, chain reactions, aka shit going south, is going to be fast.
The power of modern day weapons is going to be poorly contained and extremely destructive.
I am very worried.
Me too.
That is to say, I am also worried.
basically, what's the problem of this? Why cannot China become number 1 after so many years of suppression and humiliation by the west? We can do much better than them.
HKers always think they are part of western, you are not.
The difference between China and the West is that Xi can choose which opinions are allowed. China is not a free country.
LOL here's some reading material for you:
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/03/what-flavour-oligarchy/
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/03/the-origins-of-a-distinguished-diplomatic-career-and-the-u-s-china-fight-for-primacy-bpr-interviews-ambassador-chas-freeman/
It definitely seems more productive to match China's situation in the context of other countries than assume it's some weird exotic place. Another concept I feel like gets exoticized is "face." There are stories all the time of Americans not seeking unemployment insurance because it's "undignified," etc. People do things for their pride everywhere. It's not just some weird Asian concept.
Definitely.
But, it can also be true to describe some countries as being, on average, more or less pride driven than others. I do not know if that is so for China right now, but it feels wrong to imply there are no real cultural differences between nations.
Supposedly there are other countries out there where families regularly practice honor killings. You don't hear this about China at least. (Related: white people think Asians are obsessed with "honor" because they read Shogun, a book by a white guy, but I don't even know how to say "honor" in Japanese. It's never come up.)
As someone who moved to California with my parents from China and just recently became a naturalized U.S. citizen, I'm quite gravely worried about the state of my birth country. I'm very much in agreement with you on the observation that China is going through what many other nations went through in the 20th century, but I can't help but stop and think about the possibility of repeating episodes from the 20th century that really should not be repeated. It took 70 million perished souls to turn the Germany and Japan of 1937 into the Germany and Japan of 2021. I wonder if we can avoid the same with China.
Noah, if you read this comment, I would like to show you some of the things I read as a primary school student in mainland China. I think it'll be interesting to you and might give you a bit of insight into the development of jingoism among mainland Chinese today.
Sure, I'd be very interested to see that stuff!
How can I reach you?
An email link should be on the Substack...
Is your email link only available to paid subscribers?
I can't seem to find it... Apologies!
Great piece.
Thanks!!
Excellent read. It reminded me of when I first saw the 2002 film "The Gangs of New York", NYC as a lawless, corrupt place, thinking that historically the US had advanced greatly since the time that the film depicted, but trying not to forget that it wasn't that long ago.
I think it's very important to consider what might have been. In the 90s and 00s it really seemed as if China was on this road to liberalization that will see them slowly join the fold of 21st century nations. BUT as a counterpoint I should point out that the "China is unique and has a unique destiny" view is extraordinarily popular inside China and leaders like Xi and others gin it up all the time for popular support. Oh wait I guess Germany et. al. all did that too.
Yep. That's what they all said. But the only country where it seemed to actually be true was Russia. And who wants to be Russia??
And a big part of why Russia is unique, I would argue, is the national myth of cursed destiny that many Russians believe in -- that is, that the unique valor of their people comes from putting up with and surviving an unending series of catastrophic hardships. Which is very different than the near-universal national myth of "we are really awesome and anything bad happening is because we are threatened/betrayed/disrespected etc. and soon we will be awesome again"
Emmmm u just don't understand China, we never change. The seemingly liberal is a superficial game shown to the US to let us into WTO and don't attack us in trade.
Noah, I think you may be underestimating the continuing power of nationalism. In a time of rapid social and economic change, it allows you to escape your sense of extreme vulnerability as an individual by identifying psychologically with a much larger, more powerful, and long-lived national community.
E. H. Carr observes that the fundamental divide in international politics is not between heroes and villains, but between those countries which support the status quo and those which seek to overturn it. I'm skeptical that China will eventually chill out and accept the status quo, especially because I expect that the US will need to step back to deal with severe internal challenges (as suggested by George F. Kennan after the end of the Cold War, in "Around the Cragged Hill"). At the very least, I expect China to attempt to retake Taiwan, potentially by using force. China's repression of Xinjiang and Hong Kong have severely diminished the prospects for peaceful reunification.
Kennan has an analogy which I like: he compares China to France. "The two peoples are similar in a number of respects. They are both proud people. Both are conscious of being the bearers of a great cultural tradition." And there's there's some interesting similarities in their respective relationships with Japan and England (in each case, a smaller, less culturally developed, more peripheral country which at least temporarily achieved greater economic development and military power).
I do believe in the power of nationalism, and I don't think it's a given that China will chill out and liberalize, in fact prospects are looking dim right now
I think the metaphor of "exactly like us but a few decades" back is pretty powerful. I live in Vietnam and foreigners frequently talk about how deadly Vietnamese roads are (and how they'd never drive here). Yet Vietnamese road deaths today are basically exactly the same as in the US in the early 1970s.
Likewise, to understand how a lot of not-yet-middle class families live, all you have to do is turn on a Charlie Chaplin movie and see Americans with the bathtub in the kitchen because that's how you heated up hot water.
I think it is easy to conjure some kind of qualitative difference when in many cases it is just literally "hey, they're a few decades behind" (but hopefully catching up fast).
Yep. Call me an economic determinist, but this is how I think of it!
"A manufacturing-intensive economy is an intermediate stage in economic development — a feature of the rapid early period of industrialization."
I"m increasingly questioning this hypothesis. We see increasing desire and policy to support localized manufacturing from the US to Europe. The intermediate state may well be a services-heavy economy.
Also worth calling out the parallels between China in the last 50 years and 19th century US development.
The US leveraged it's extensive land (and presumably lower cost workforce) compared to England to manufacture cotton and more goods that England wanted. It was initially behind in use of coal, but literally struck oil first and pioneered that massive energy transition.
China has also leveraged land and low cost labour to manufacture things that the west wants. It built out world-leading capacity in solar panel and li-ion battery manufacturing.
So there are many economic parallels.
I do wish that countries could strike up a more conciliatory tone tone as you end your post on.
Yeah, there might be a "U-shape" where countries transition out of manufacturing and then back in. Or it could all be historically contingent!
Will be very interesting if the US and other western countries can reindustrialize. Many tailwinds to do so!
Three things:
- Good post
- Some China authors I like: Yuen Yuen Ang, Yuhua Wang, Leslie Chang, and Peter Hessler
- Also, highly recommend anything done by Jia Zhangke if you’re in the mood for a movie.
Thanks!! Much appreciated.
While the article is spot on, I think you could have factored in the tectonic shifts taking place in society at large, fuelled by the impending transition to web 3.0, it would have added even more nuance to the general argument.
Agreed.
Indeed, excellent analysis and a great read. Thanks!
Thank you!
I'm kind of amazed at how everyone here assumes that china is ramping up for military conflict when it seems pretty obvious the most militarily aggressive country in the world is the United States. China has not been in a war since 1979.
This article also completely ignores the elephant in the room, communism. The assumption is that china is communist in name only but that is not how the party sees it.
The assumptions made on this article are more interesting than what you've actually written.
The obsession with historical humiliation was a popular trend in both Germany and Japan right before world war 2.
Yeah, I really think it's important to remember the role of cultural/social history and the legacy of *past* material conditions and circumstances in shaping mass attitudes -- in literally any country, very much including the US as well as China. (One thing I am impatient for, as the US loses both relative and perhaps absolute power in the world, is for non-US people to *stop* assuming that US people act the way we do because of being denizens of the country that happened to be the past hegemon, and to start looking for the specific historical reasons why, for instance, there is no universal health system in the US or Americans are patriotically obsessed with the value of the dollar.)
It *matters* that there is a two-century-long legacy of the Western countries trying to subvert Chinese society in order to acquire distinct products that China had no incentive or interest in selling to them in a fair commercial transaction. It matters that this experience and the geographic distance produced by pre-20th century transportation means that Chinese people perceive a unified "West" in which the US and European countries are the same thing. (It matters that North Americans and Europeans have never thought this in 4+ centuries.)
It, yeah, probably matters that the Europeans trace their civilization only as far back as maybe the precursors to the ancient Greeks and Romans c. 2,500 years ago, and not to the Indo-European migration, which was more like 5,000 years ago.
All that matters as much as the current fact that Germany is basically the only Western country to have remained industrialized in the wake of the last forty years.
I've had a similar thought recently that China is like mid-late 19th century Prussia/Germany, although I was thinking about it from a liberalsing perspective. Prior to the revolution of 1848 peoples lives on a day to day basis were not free. Serfdom was still a thing, you couldn't form a trade union, if you worked in a factory your life was controlled by the factory owner and the state supported that with unequal contract law.
I see parallels with China in that the last 40 years or so, my reading is that there has been a huge shift in the amount of control the state has over peoples day to day lives. The one child policy is the most famous example of this, but there's also the amount of control the SOE had over your life - they provided your housing, your job, your healthcare and as such had a great amount of power over your daily life. My read is that this much less the case now. Housing and healthcare aren't provided by SOE anymore, there's a lot more labour market mobility.
Both Germany in 1900 and China in 2021 are authoritarian states where you can get sent prison or beaten up if you write the wrong thing or meet with the wrong people, but on a day to day basis this is a very different experience to the life of English factory worker in 1840 or a low caste rural Indian women today.
If I were to make a prediction on the basis of this analysis it would be that the Hukou system that discriminates against rural migrants into the big cities will be gone in the next 20 years.
Hukou certainly doesn't seem to be doing China much good!
I actually read a defense of Hukou that argued that while China was industrialising it Beijing could have ended up having massive slums and it's plausibly good that this didn't happen.
Yeah I think that's all basically correct but a different point to the one I was making (although I think it's an important oversimplification to say that Prussia was an army with a state) . I think when we think about political systems we mostly look at the formal systems of government and looking at it like that the Chinese system of government hasn't changed since 1976. But I think that that misses the something really important which is the degree of social control individuals experience on a day to bais and that this has changed a lot from 1976 to now in China. I think it's easy to miss this because the level of social control one experiences often lines up with the democractic-authrotiarian axis but sometimes doesn't, as in the case of 1880 Germany or contemporary China.