Chinasplaining will backfire

A review of "China's World View", by David Daokui Li

I can clearly remember a moment after Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, where a Republican politician declared that his party just had to get better at explaining their message to the voters. I recall thinking that no, the problem wasn’t a lack of understanding — it was that voters, by and large, didn’t like the substance of the message.

I find myself experiencing a similar reaction to David Daokui Li’s new book China’s World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict. The book’s premise is that if Americans (and Westerners in general) simply understood China better, they would have much more positive attitudes toward the country. I believe that premise to be deeply flawed. Ultimately, I think that reading books like this will increase Americans’ understanding of China, but will lead, if anything, to a more negative view toward the country’s ruling regime.

I should mention that this book comes highly recommended by Tyler Cowen, whose instincts on these matters is rarely off. He writes:

Perhaps [China’s World View] is the very best book explaining “how China works today?”

“What should I read on China?  Which single book?” — those are two of the most common questions I receive.  There are plenty of perfectly fine history books, but I am never sure what I should recommend.  Now I have an answer to that question… 

The author covers…the importance of history, how the CCP works, local governments, SOEs, education, media and the internet, the environment, population, and much more.

There should be a book like this about every country.

I suspect that this praise is a bit Straussian. Yes, China’s World View does give useful, if brief, explanations of some of China’s institutions — its government, its education system, its political economy, and some other institutions. It’s surprisingly light on the economy itself, given that the author is an academic economist; China’s Economy, by Arthur Kroeber, is a much better introduction. Its discussion of the internal workings of the Chinese Communist Party is OK, but far less in-depth than Richard McGregor’s The Party (and just as dated). And so on.

Which is why I suspect that Tyler’s effusive praise of the book stems at least in part from the fact that it’s a window into the world view of the people who are actually in charge of China.

A great example here is the role of history in Chinese culture and thought. Chapter 2 of China’s World View is entitled “History is the Key to Understanding Today’s China”. The first line of the chapter boldly declares that “All Chinese are historians.” But the chapter is only 11 pages long! Although Li constantly reminds us that China’s thousands of years of history are essential to understanding the country, he covers essentially zero Chinese history before the First Opium War in 1839 — the one exception being an apocryphal tale from 2,200 years ago that supposedly inspired Mao Zedong. Almost all of the history Li talks about comes after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is rather astonishing, is it not? If I wrote a book telling people that they have to understand American history in order to understand America, I believe I would actually recount some of that history. (Side note: If you want a good book about the last four centuries of China’s past, I recommend The Search for Modern China.)

But David Daokui Li doesn’t do this; he simply assures us that the deep history is there, exerting its pervasive influence over every modern Chinese institution. What Li really seems to mean is that by observing those institutions, we can know everything we need to know about China’s past. Which suggests that this is how many of China’s elites may perceive themselves — as the living embodiment of deep history.

It’s certainly interesting and potentially important to learn that they see themselves this way!

So I do think China’s World View is an incredibly interesting book, and a useful one to read. But that doesn’t mean it succeeds at what it sets out to do. For one thing, I think it often doesn’t do a great job of teaching the reader about the realities of modern China.

Mystification by misinformation

A weakness of this book is that it was written over the course of a decade. As a result, although the book was published in 2024, much of the information in it is already out of date. For example, in Chapter 4, Li somewhat proudly describes China’s commitment to term limits for its supreme leader. He writes how Chinese people almost all agree with this policy, and admire George Washington for giving up power after eight years.

There’s only one problem — China abolished presidential term limits in 2018, and Xi Jinping is already serving his third term. More generally, Xi’s dramatic centralization of power in his own person, and his alteration of various norms and practices, is a huge story that China’s World View entirely misses.

Another example: In Chapter 7, Li brags about the fact that China hasn’t had a financial crisis in the modern era. But he neglects to mention the real estate crisis that is currently raging in China, despite the fact that this crisis began well before China’s World View came out. In that same chapter, he trumpets Chinese policies for keeping housing prices stable, even though as the book went to press, those prices were in steep decline.

Li consistently praises China’s real estate industry, which will strike many readers as spectacularly ill-timed. For example, in Chapter 9, he touts the success of a company called Dalian Wanda Group. That company is now in the process of selling off its core businesses to avoid bankruptcy. In Chapter 14 he confidently declares that “the Chinese property market is unlikely to be a detonating cord for the economy.” Oops.

In general, these triumphant pronouncements about the unbreakable resilience of China’s economy and the checks and balances within its political system make the book seem like something out of the mid-2010s — the ebullient early Xi Jinping era, when the institutions built under Deng Xiaoping and his successors were still robust, and the weaknesses of the country’s economic model hadn’t yet become common knowledge. In fact, that’s probably when most of the book was written. But much has changed about China over the past decade, and Li often failed to update his manuscript accordingly.

Anyway, while some of Li’s assertions about China are out of date, others are wishful thinking. In Chapter 11, he argues that increased middle-class desire for freedom of expression is about to force the regime to loosen internet controls. In fact, the exact opposite is happening. He also argues that Xi’s crackdown on private industry is winding down, but there’s every sign that the targets are simply shifting.

Some of Li’s data is suspect as well — again, surprising for a book written by an economist. For example, he claims that China’s total fertility rate is 1.7 or 1.8. In fact, the Chinese government’s leading demographic research institute now puts the number at 1.09. He claims that only 60% of Chinese people live in cities; in fact, the official number is 65%, while satellite data shows that it’s closer to 80%.

In other words, if an American reader were to treat China’s World View as a source of expert insider information on China, they would come away believing that:

• China’s real estate industry is a paragon of stability

• China has presidential term limits

• China has a healthy, robust fertility rate

• China is about to liberalize its internet

…and a number of other wildly false things.

Thus, although this book does have quite a bit of accurate, up-to-date information in it, the only way you can know which of the information is accurate and up-to-date is to already have read a ton of other books and news articles about China. That makes China’s World View a poor one-stop-shop for information about the country.

A window into a frightening worldview

The central thesis of China’s World View is that if Americans simply understand how China looks at the world, conflict will be less likely. But I think Li himself severely misunderstands his American readers; the worldview he lays out in the book will be more likely to trigger their threat perceptions than to soothe their anxieties.

For example, Li consistently compares the relationship of the CCP to the Chinese people as that of a parent to a child. This is done in order to illustrate the supposedly Confucian nature of Chinese society. But Li is apparently unaware of the deep revulsion that many Americans feel toward the idea of government as a parent. In Western dystopian stories, the supreme leaders of totalitarian regimes have titles like “Big Brother” or “Father”.

Li’s comments about China’s internal politics often display a startling combination of authoritarianism and elitism. In Chapter 14, he dismisses concerns about high inequality, arguing that because China’s people can’t vote, there’s no chance that they’ll “drag down the country’s economic dynamism” by electing leaders who “set a bad example of pleasing the poor”. When discussing potential threats to China’s economy, he declares that “the other critical social problem that today’s China faces is the fast-growing middle-income class”, fretting that middle-class people make too many political demands.

Statements like this sort of belie the notion of the Chinese government as a benevolent parent. And they also cast doubt on the idea that the Chinese “world view” that Li is trying to explain is really shared by the majority of Chinese people.

China’s World View also occasionally veers into kookiness. For much of the book, Li’s arguments sound like the kind of things a Western intellectual might say. But then in Chapter 13 he suggests that China escaped the Black Death because of the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine. In Chapter 14 he claims that the U.S. deliberately sabotaged Japan’s economy, causing its long stagnation. These sorts of claims suggest the existence of a commonly accepted canon of wacky beliefs among the Chinese elite, similar to the politicized canons of falsehoods embraced by many of America’s political movements.

Far worse, however, is that Li’s attitude often comes off as confidently belligerent. He claims that China’s “Confucian doctrine of peaceful coexistence” prevents it from seeking to conquer” its neighbors or “interfere in their affairs” — an idea that would come as news to Vietnam or Korea, both of which have been invaded by China many, many times. In chapter 14, he admits that China claims “a few dozen islands” currently possessed by other countries, but dismisses the significance of this claim, declaring that it “would have been regarded as child’s play in the eyes of the former Soviet Union”. That is not an encouraging comparison. In chapter 16, he declares India to be China and Pakistan’s “common foe” — a phrase that seems likely to alarm Indian readers.

In a darkly humorous contradiction, Li declares in chapter 17:

Will China seek to form alliances to challenge the United States and the West? The answer is clearly no.

But in Chapter 15, he says:

Obviously, China and Russia have become close allies in recent years, and they cooperate on many international issues, often going against the viewpoints of the West.

I guess this is what happens when you write a book over ten years. But the fact that Li’s assertions about China’s non-confrontational nature are subject to such rapid revision is not encouraging.

When it comes to Taiwan, the belligerence is at its most explicit. Li claims that “the U.S. White House has reassured the Chinese government that Taiwan is part of China”, which is false. In Chapter 17, he tries to reassure the reader that China will not fight the U.S. in a war over Taiwan. But the reason he gives is that China would defeat the U.S. if the U.S. tried to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In other words, Li says China poses no threat to America only because America is too smart to get in a fight with China.

That is not a reassurance. That is a threat.

In other words, the world view that David Daokui Li presents seems almost calculated to trigger Americans’ darkest fears. It’s a picture of an elitist, authoritarian government that sees its people’s desires as a threat, whose information space is insular and subject to strange ideas, and which sees territorial expansionism as a matter of course.

That doesn’t make China’s World View a bad book. In fact, if you care about China-U.S. relations, it is a very useful book to read. But if Li’s goal was really to reassure Americans that China poses no danger to them, I suspect his effort will backfire and achieve the opposite.

In general, I think that the whole idea of Chinese authors writing triumphalist books about China to American audiences is probably misguided. Another example is Keyu Jin’s The New China Playbook, which is all about the superiority of the so-called China Model of economics and governance. I haven’t read it, but Yasheng Huang has a good and scathing review in Foreign Policy. Basically, braggodocio about the success of an economic model that has brought China to 29% of U.S. per capita GDP is inherently premature.

Overall, books like this are likely to look foolish in the wake of the Chinese economic slowdown. And at the same time, they’re likely to trigger Americans’ threat responses, by portraying China as the kind of civilizational rival that the USSR and Germany tried to be in the 20th century. If I were Chinese elites, I would simply leave America alone, letting it tear itself apart with its own domestic divisions instead of focusing its energy and its fear against an external threat. But the next time Chinese elites listen to my advice will be the first time. After all, I’m just an ignorant American who doesn’t understand China at all.

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