Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao | Lex Fridman Podcast #466

The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom. You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders, and where do they differ? 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. So what are the commonalities? What are the differences?

So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. 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 books by him, collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. 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 speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere. The newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him and quotations from his words and things like that. 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. So that's a key commonality and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down, in a sense, that 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, this monkey king who could just turned the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought Disorder was a way to improve things. Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up, like to have people on the streets clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has A personality cult. It's not manifesting itself. He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can't be controlled. So there are a lot of ways that they're similar. A lot of ways they're different, they're also different. And this fits with this orderliness that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies, for the most part, and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior. Whereas Mao like things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that had held China back. 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 did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party, and that's been a continuity, and that connects them to the leaders in between them too, as well.

So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let's go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?

First of all, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with 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. So, you know, you can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is 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 decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became. Became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past, that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. And he had a whole series of these, these relationships. The husband to the wife was again an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers. These were all parallels. And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism, even something that in the west we often think of as a kind of quintessential egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.

So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything, including politics.

Yeah. And there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non personified deity, like the emperor was to the ministers. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And for Confucius he said, so we should study the text, we should study how the sages of old 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. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward looking thing. It wasn't arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conservative. So in all kinds of ways it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.

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. So they're able to wear both hats and balance it.

Yeah, you could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition Or to the kind of rebellious monkey king tradition, which was what Mao connected to Xi Jinping and before him, to some extent, Hu Jintao. We saw this a little bit at the Olympics. It was more this kind of mix it all together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model. But so is Confucius. And there's really. 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.

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. Yeah.

And it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China jumping forward a bit in 221 BC. He is anti scholars. He burns books and he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he's very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao, in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, he said, well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. Scholars can be a pain. So he said, if you have to choose between Confucianism and that. But Xi Jinping, I think continually is kind of not choosing. 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, who by the way, didn't build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls. And they were fine, they were good. But the Great Wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. But still this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as in many ways a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single party rule. That's something he clearly believes in. And he's a nationalist. He wants to see China be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage.

Boy, so many contradictions. Always with Stalin, he was a communist, but also a nationalist. Right. That contradiction also permeates through Mao all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, people are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning. So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius idea of education and how much does it permeate to the China of today?

Sure. So there's an optimism to this. There's an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. 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 potentially. And China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the last emperor, you know, 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. Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, But I think that's a carryover from the Confucian times. And over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy 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 kind of exams. 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. Could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits. But then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there.

But to which degree, this idea of meritocracy that's inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line, there's a meritocratic view of human nature there, where if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven't succeeded, that means you didn't work hard enough or do not deserve the spoils of the does that carry over to the China of today.

There's such a challenge in all these Forms of meritocracy because you had the civil service exams. But the question was, if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. 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. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of. There was always a tension of that. So what if you don't succeed? Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. You know, you had this issue, and then it became something. Well, the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader. 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, if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. 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.

Okay, so it's meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case. Maybe you can speak to that, that in the Chinese education system there seems to be a high value for excellence. 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. Is that the case with the China of today?

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 you get into. And I think, you know, getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition, it also a kind of what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness in who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy. And the 1989 protest at Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press in particular was discussed as a movement for democracy. 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, 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 back door and that led to a kind of outrage. I mean, that's true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of that. The way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of getting ahead.

I hope it's okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general, what happened in Tiananmen Square.

So in 1989, this massive movement took place. 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. So I think it's often conflated with what was going on there. And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were 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, liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao's death. And in a sense the student generation of 89, and I was there in 86 when there were some sort of warmup 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. And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, 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. 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, and students protested. 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. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this physicist, Fang Li Zhi, who was a kind of often thought Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual. 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, and they were touring China. It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert. And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. 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. And the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this sort of symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow through. We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance. And so the protests went on for a little while in 86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, no, this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. We can't go back to that. And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn't want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly. And they thought, we're not like the Red Guards. We don't want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them. And also it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them. So then in 1989, the protests restart. And there are a variety of reasons why they can Restart the space for them. Students are thinking about doing something in 1989. It's a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more Importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919. And the May Fourth Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some leading founders of it had been student activists then. It was an anti imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought the anniversary of that movement was always marked commemorated in China. And people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past. And so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then a leader, Puyaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party, he had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 86, 87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly, and there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say, the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said, so some people are dying too young. Some people are seem like they're ever going to die. So they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of 89, and the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly. 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. And this time, the students say, no, we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there's too much corruption and nepotism. There's not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party. And so they keep up the protests, and there's a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. And so there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macromanaging of their private lives on campuses. So the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti corruption movement, it's a call for more democracy movement, it's a call for more freedom of speech movement. But it's also has some counterculture elements that are like, there are rock concerts on the square. The most popular rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism and the Eastern Bloc. It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. 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. So there was a kind of disjuncture happened at the same time as moves to. To end communism. But of course, I would say 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 movement to just have a kind of course correction. But then there's also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. 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. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring into Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. So it's actually one thing that keeps it going, is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay. And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form an independent labor union. 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 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 turns people turn out when students protest something very different from the American case, where there's a kind of often suspicion of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China, there had been from the history of the 20th century, a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in, and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early 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 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 so 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. What do we know about him? What do you think about him?

The symbolism, it's an amazing symbol. 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. It doesn't run him over. 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. 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 images of the tank man. 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 there had been many, many people, some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers who were Just mown down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think 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 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. Like that kind of statement.

Yeah. And it's probably not a student. You know, it's often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is. It is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And, you know, 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 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. 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 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. And you could say, well, 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 blocs. 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.

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 more than me, more. So I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man's head? 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, you know, 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. 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, have 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 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, 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? 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. It 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 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 of the Xinjiang extralegal detention camps. There are 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 Deng man?

I assume he was killed.

Killed?

I assume he was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often 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 for political crimes recently, sentencing to death and things like that. It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But 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 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, 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 a dictatorial rule. And the banner. Somehow he managed to have it up and get it 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, 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 by the Chinese government?

So, you know, 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, where she says she has three Fs, fear, friction and flooding. And she says they're all important. I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get, even though you know that some people will get it. You just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally minded tapped in Chinese will use. People will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The Internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your vpn. So you just create friction so that okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding you just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist and in operation. And I think the fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked. So I'm always interested in things that things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarian. You can read Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you just, you know, you're not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state, if anything. But it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most, 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 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, things banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore, been able to since 1985, 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. And people said, 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 he wasn't talking about a country like ours. Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not. We Got fast trains, we 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.

Yeah. You've actually spoken about and described China as more akin to the dystopian world, a Brave new world, than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot. I've recently reread over the past couple of years, we read Brave New World a couple of Times and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st century might be more defined to the 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 playing to your sense of pleasure. And one thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that Aldous Huxley, who 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 of 1984 and said, Look, I've written this. Basically, it's kind of almost a little Oedipal, like, I've written this book that displaces yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I wanted you to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World and reviews as 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, 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, 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 rereading Brave New World. And it's fascinating, but it's very messy. 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 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, there are kind of.