Is a US-China Thucydides Trap Unavoidable? With David C. Kang from the ChinaTalk Podcast

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share a fascinating crossover episode from the China Talk podcast, hosted by Jordan Schneider and Ilaria Michela of the On Humans podcast, and featuring David C. Kang, professor of international relations at USC and author of Beyond Power Transitions: The Long Peace in East Asia. While the topic of artificial intelligence never comes up in this conversation, A notable first for this feed. Professor Kang's approach echoes one of my core principles for studying AI: things are best understood on their own terms, and analogies can all too easily lead us astray. Taking a ground-up, or you might say first principles approach, Professor Kang questions the approach that Western scholars have historically taken in their study of East Asian international relations, arguing that if we were to ground our analysis in East Asian history itself instead of in European paradigms, we might well develop dramatically different theories of how states interact and arrive at very different conclusions about how the Chinese state should be expected to project its power going forward. Considering the fact that so much AI analysis treats a U.S.-China Thucydides trap dynamic as inevitable, and therefore U.S.-China AI competition as existential, this, in my opinion, is an extremely valuable alternative perspective. Professor Kang's core observation, that from around the year 1000 until the 19th century, while Europe was locked in near-constant warfare between competing powers, East Asia experienced remarkable geopolitical stability, is for those who've not studied Asian history in depth— myself included— a real eye-opener. Professor Kang describes East Asia as a unipolar, largely hegemonic system with one massive power and several smaller states. China, despite its internal ups and downs, was practically always the dominant power in the region, And yet it did not seek to conquer Korea, Japan, or Vietnam. Instead, these neighbors maintained consistent peace through a system built on compatible cultures, mutual understanding, and a recognition of China's centrality. An approach Professor Kang thinks might still be available to Taiwan today were it not for the conceptual dominance of the Westphalian system. I was particularly interested to hear Professor Kang note that most East Asian dynasties have ended due to internal collapse, not external pressure or invasion, and argue that internal challenges remain most important for China today. Certainly from my perspective, the same is true about the United States. Of course, the future is unwritten, and Professor Kang's paradigm may or may not yield correct predictions going forward. As you'll hear, Jordan, who knows far more about China than I do and is also far more confident that we do in fact need a containment-style policy toward China, pushes back at several points along the way. Especially considering that disagreement, I really appreciate Jordan for engaging so deeply and publicly with alternative views, and thank him for allowing me to cross-post this conversation, thereby giving all of us a chance to reexamine our assumptions. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends or colleagues who might be interested in how these big geopolitical questions interact with AI developments. And we welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with Professor David C. Kang, considering Asian history and international relations on their own terms, from the China Talk podcast with Jordan Schneider and Ellari Mikhaylova.

How do great power transitions work in East Asia, and what lessons from the foreign relations of Imperial China can we take to understanding East Asia today. To discuss, we have on David Kang. He's a professor at USC and recently co-authored alongside Xin Ruma, who's currently out on maternity leave, Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of US-China Relations. Continuing on our Imperial China series, Hillary Michaela of the On Humans podcast is co-hosting. Welcome to China Talk, everyone.

Professor Kang, what do you think people who are not familiar with East Asian history get wrong when they think about international relations and war?

You know, the biggest thing that came to us from starting to research this book was how many times great powers stumbled for internal reasons and not because of great power war or challenges from the outside. I mean, to me, that's the biggest lesson. And when we take the history and we look to the present, we think we see both US and China with considerable internal challenges that are probably more important than their relations to each other. So that's what I'd say is probably the biggest lesson that I would have people take away.

You say that of the countries we're familiar with, a proper state of China, proper state of Japan, of Korea, of Vietnam, this forms towards the end of the first millennium. And from the time on that you start having these clear states, it's only a handful of times that there is a kind of land grab, a war in the kind of thing that's so familiar from European history. And that they, at least if you look at their dynamics with each other, it's remarkably peaceful.

Well, I mean, this is the thing that I've, you know, I've sort of spent my career trying to make that argument. And it doesn't mean that Asian countries don't ever fight. They fight a lot sometimes. But the way that wars work and the types of land grabs, and in this case, the type of power transition that we think are universal as part of the inevitable human condition, actually seem to be pretty European in nature.

Right.

And so one of the, one of the main points of the book is We started by asking, what do power transitions look like in Asia? Because everybody tries to take the European experience and squish it onto Asia. So it's like, is China today like Athens? Is it like Sparta? Is it like Bismarckian Germany? And we said, why would we try and figure out what European analogy fits with Asia? Why wouldn't we start with Asian history first? And see what lessons we would learn. And if you had actually started studying international relations and you didn't start with Europe and you started with Asia, you would never come up with a theory of power transitions, of rising and falling powers grabbing land and tiny advantages being exploited. You just would never come up with that theory. Instead, you'd come up with a theory of a bunch of really stable countries that have very clear conceptions of their own for lack of a better word, national identity. There was some conception there that Korea was clearly not China and clearly not Japan. Clearly differences in their, in their power and how big they are, but also very clear recognition that they can work out these types of relations that are unequal. And so instead, what you look at is what happened internally. And almost every single dynastic transition in East Asia came from internal reasons when, uh, one of the dynasties collapsed or decayed, or there was a rebellion. Remarkably few changed because of external invasion.

I guess we'll start at the Song because you decided to start at the Song. Um, how did they, how did they drop the ball?

So what we did was, um, look at the various, uh, dynasties. We just tried to see We didn't necessarily— Shinru and I didn't start out trying to make this larger argument. We started out just saying, I don't think it worked that way. Let's find the power transitions in East Asia. And then we ended up not finding very many. So what we did then is start to take the individual ones that might have looked that way and try and come up with, did they actually fit? And one of the, the one time in the last, say, 2,000 years that China's been conquered from the outside, Was when the Mongols conquered the Song Dynasty in, you know, over the, the 13th century, the beginning, you know, it took about 50 years till about 1279 or so when the, when the Mongols declared themselves the Yuan Dynasty. So we looked, it looks like a classic power transition. There you've got all these Mongol hordes and they come over and they attack and, and Song is falling and then they end up winning. So it looks like the classic rising power and declining power. But you don't actually have to look very closely to realize that Song China at its height had like 50 million people and was the richest, had 3 million men in its army. It was an incredibly powerful country that had come up with all this flourishing of internal and paper money and a canal system. And this is an incredibly well-run, dynamic Country. The Mongols at their height had a million people, they think. We don't really know. So there's just no way that this was a rising power and a falling power. Instead, what happened a lot was a lot of bad decisions within the Song. Eventually, they the Song in many ways were more focused. They actually tried to ally with the Mongols at one point because they were more focused on reclaiming some territory that the Yo, Liao, and other other countries on the side that had grabbed from them the 16 prefectures to the north. So they actually tried to ally with the Mongols to get back to what they considered to be old Song Dynasty, uh, uh, land, and were totally unprepared for what actually happened. So in many ways, the, uh, Song-Mongol transition doesn't look anything like what we would expect a power transition to look like. Instead, what we see is a Song China which is focused on what it believes is its own inherent territory and not paying attention to the actual threats that were coming towards it.

The fall of the Song, I think, is an interesting example because basically your argument is like these guys had no business losing, but they were just so emotionally bound up in their connection to these northern territories that they just made a lot of dumb decisions that opened them up to being rolled by the UN. And my first thought there is like, Europeans are emotional too. And they make a lot of dumb, not necessarily cold calculating strategic balance of forces things. And I think also sort of to give the UN some credit, right? Like it wasn't just the song that they were able to defeat and sort of doing that like comparison of, you know, adding up how many, you know, how many soldiers you have when the UN are almost more like, you know, they're coming to the battlefield with assault rifles and everyone else is playing with bows and arrows, particularly when you have the sort of other cases of them basically like destroying every, every like functional civilization on the planet. Seems like it would make a little, I don't know, kind of complicates the narrative a little bit.

Yes. No, absolutely. And you know, the argument isn't that the, that the Song just screwed up and, and the Mongols got lucky, right? I mean, the Mongols were, and Genghis Khan was, you know, like, what do you say about the greatest general in history who conquered more land than anyone ever has done before or since? So this isn't to take away from the Mongols per se. It's really to think about When we get to the Song Dynasty, first of all, did this look like a power transition? And no, it probably didn't, right? The, the Song had already been divided into 2 because they were so focused on fighting to catch back that the, uh, to get these prefectures that they had lost to the Liao, that they were now the Southern Song that had already been pushed back. And so in many ways, when we look at what the Song was doing and their focus, it was still on this internal return, or what did they call the honorable reclamation of lost land and stuff like that. They weren't sitting around saying, what are the external threats? What's going on? How do we prepare for them? And that's where I say they even tried to ally with the Mongols at first to get back and to get those territories back without realizing. They were actually letting the fox into the henhouse and things like that. So even the Song, way, way, way too late, realized that that was the real, um, the real, uh, uh, threat. The Song had decades of evidence that the Mongols were the real threat, but they worked with them because they were trying to get this territory back. And that's what I mean by these internal, these internal mistakes. I mean, We can see this. It's not like just one thing. It was over decades that they saw the Mongols getting stronger and conquering everybody else. And they're still like, let's use these guys to get that territory. And that's what I mean by a sense of, I forget what we used in the book, because I, we tried to avoid national identity because that's way too modern. But there is some conception of what Song China should be, and it was longer, older than the Song itself. And that's what they were focused on until way too late. And they're like, oh, what's going on? And then they had to try and adjust. And that's what we think is so important to know, right? Is like, how do you revolve or resolve this territory? And what is civilization? What does it mean to be Chinese? Oh, these guys are attacking us. And that's where we focused on it.

I mean, there's another interesting thing about the Mongols, which is that there's a big difference, right, in what happens to the east of China and what happens to the west of China. And I mean, the Mongols are just one of the examples of trouble on the western frontier. Yes.

The reason why— one of the things that I find so interesting is how the ways that we think about the world get sort of codified. They become conventional wisdoms. And then we stop even questioning it. So first of all, you know, the lessons of history are always the gladiators or, you know, Athens or things, the Crusades. It's always European. I get it, right? But it's still, it's always European. And secondly, even when conventional or what do you mainstream historians talk about China again and again and again, they talk about the threats to China came from the Western steppe. from the semi-nomadic peoples that lived, uh, you know, along the Great Plains, whether it was Mongols or the Xiongnu thousands of years ago. And we just take that for granted. That's, as you said, that's why they built the Great Wall. All these threats to China.

I mean, even people who know Chinese history just from Disney films will know that there are some really wicked people there in the west who want to attack, and Mulan has to go and fight.

Mulan, right? The one thing we know about Chinese history is Mulan. Protecting China from the barbarians, right? But, but what's so fascinating when you start with that is any Western IR theory, the game of Risk, all of the ways that we think about international relations say that the bigger countries threaten and bully the smaller countries. But we simply talk about, oh, China was facing threats from these tiny semi-nomadic peoples. There's no way that should work if you just start with a massive country with 50 million people and a bunch of smaller polities to its side, whether East or West, they're the ones who should be afraid of China. China shouldn't be building walls. Everyone else should be building walls against China. But this is not the way that it should work. And especially if we look to the East and to the South, where these were recognizably kingdoms, these are recognizably sort of nascent— I call them nascent states, right? They were governments. They had territory. They were bureaucratically administered. These weren't semi-nomadic tribes moving around from various agrarian regions to up the mountains and down. These were settled agrarian states, bureaucratically administered with longstanding bureaucracies. They had written language, they used Chinese script, et cetera. These were clearly governments. They, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, should have been terrified of China. And yet nobody's building walls to defend themselves against any of this. So on the eastern side and the southern side, These countries managed to craft remarkably stable relationships with each other. Now, in a way, this shouldn't be surprising. If we can move away from what we think should happen from Europe and we just start with, well, there's a bunch of countries, some are bigger, some are smaller, but all of these countries that are trying to do the same things could literally understand each other. Literally. And when I say that, I mean, They use Sinic script. Every, every alphabet in Japanese is borrowed or modified from Chinese characters. The Koreans use it, the Vietnamese use it. 60 to 70% of the vocabulary in these countries is Chinese borrowed words. They were consciously trying to be like Chinese. The Chinese could recognize, literally recognize them, see something they understood, they could talk, and they crafted relations. And these smaller countries in many ways tried to emulate the Chinese experience of— they often even borrowed the same governmental form, 6 ministries, et cetera, et cetera, a written examination to hire civil servants. So in a way, if we start from that, it's not surprising that these countries could craft stable relations with each other. They had what I call, what we call in the book, a common conjecture. Both sides, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Chinese, Had a common vocab— literally a common vocabulary and an understanding of what mattered, what didn't matter, how to interact with each other. It doesn't mean they always got along. There's lots of pushing and shoving, but it was within a shared understanding of what the world meant and how we should handle it. And that's very different from Chinese or even Korean relations with the semi-nomadic peoples, whether they be Mongols or Xiongnu or whatever else on their west. who didn't want those same things. The Mongols didn't want necessarily to have written bureaucratic systems, etc., etc., until the part of them conquered China. And then they did for about 100 years, but it fell apart because that culture was very, very different and it never really became settled. So you have very different types of patterns here between countries that understand each other, that literally use the same vocabulary and talk to each other, and then peoples that don't want the same things. So in many ways, what we came back to was this, when we talk about international relations, that it's not simply power differentials. It's not simply who's stronger and bullies everyone else. It's, do we understand each other? Do we have a common culture of vocabulary, or are we part of a great conversation where we're like, okay, we should do this, we shouldn't do that? And you see very different patterns of stability and war in East Asia. than you did in Europe or other places.

And I think one really interesting thing to notice in the history is that it's not that this case was always just rolling along with them having bureaucracies, et cetera. Actually, with Jordan, we interviewed Yasheng Huang earlier for a whole thing where we talked a lot about the way that the civil service exam shapes China. And it's really, I think it's a nice link to your work where you show it's not only China. But it's then also Japan, it's Korea, it's Vietnam emulating that civil service exam. And also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's the Sui Dynasty, which is the dynasty that really institutionalizes it. I mean, they attacked Korea several— there was like skirmishes between them and Korea, but it's really after that kind of civil service era, especially when it reaches all the places that you start seeing this peace. And I think what's why that's so important is the case of Vietnam, because a lot of Vietnamese would say, hold on a second, there was— China was the constant bully. And your pushback, if I'm right, is that, well, there was a time when there was a lot of things happening, but if you look at Vietnam with the civil service exam and a proper state from the year 1000 roughly onwards, Yeah. you don't have that anymore. And so there really is a kind of time before and a time after. And it is, it is once these cultures start to really kind of Work in the same roughly similar way that you get this remarkable stability.

Absolutely. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

I mean, one of the ways in which Vietnam, for example, has maintained its independence was by instantly engaging in tribute relations with China at the time, Song, right? When they became independent around 1079. Uh, and they, they entered into tributary relationships. And I'm currently doing some research right now where I'm trying to go back through the Ming Shi Lu and the Qing Shi Lu, which are the veritable records of the Ming and the Qing dynasties in China, which are about, yeah, 1400 to 1900. And I'm really interested to see how the elites in Beijing, in the, in the Ming government talked about Vietnam. Because the Vietnamese would tell you, and this is very much a 20th century perspective back on time, which didn't exist at the time, right? Well, they were always bullying us. They're always trying to invade. But if you look back at what actually the Vietnamese were saying to the Chinese, often they were saying things like, there would be a debate in Vietnam as to which, you know, there's some rebellion and there's a faction and both sides would appeal to the Ming court or the Qing court and say, We're the legitimate rulers, recognize us. And the Chinese, that you can see these debates in China among the elites where they say, we got to figure out who we recognize here. But there is almost no discussion in the Qing historical records. There's no mention of, hmm, should we invade this time? Is this our chance to take over Vietnam? It's all, who's the legitimate ruler? How do we stabilize our relation? And on the Vietnamese side, Often it was, if we have recognition from China, then we're the legitimate ruler. We're the ones. Uh, and it was this very much an aspirational type of relationship. That border between Vietnam and China was formally negotiated. And I think that I should, I should look, I think it's 1079 that it was formally negotiated. And that border is literally in the same place today.

That is wild.

That's almost 1,000 years where that border has not changed. Right. They put down 2 bronze pillars. There's a great book by Liam Kelly called Beyond the Bronze Pillars. They put down these gates and here's where Vietnam starts and here's where China starts. And that's what it's been ever since. That's remarkable stability.

Let's push back a little bit. So I think the key difference that Illary and I came to with comparing the East Asian experience with the European experience is, as you pointed out, at the end of the day, there's China and there's some gnats. And some of the gnats figure out how to not get squished, and some of the gnats don't. And so we don't have any kingdoms in Yunnan anymore. Tibet had a rough time of it. Xinjiang had a rough time of it. I mean, just all these ethnic minorities who used to do their own thing get sort of agglomerated. And you also go north with taking over big chunks of Northeastern China, but like you know it it just so happened that there was enough sort of historical happenstance that you know Vietnam, Korea, and Japan woke up early enough were sort of far enough away were not important enough to to create this sort of like understanding where there was there wasn't enough of a payoff from a Chinese leader perspective if they're also if they're already. Basically, like getting all that they want, and they get to feel good that these foreigners are bringing them you know cows and like inscriptions or whatever. The thing that I thought was what what really sort of like brought this home to me was I think this was a quote from a scholar you have that said over the centuries Korean elites as stakeholders rather than outsiders helped shape the imperial tradition. The palpable irony of all of this is the myth. of China's moral empire persisted even until today, partly because generations of diplomats had been repeating it to China's imperial forefathers for centuries. But to come away with the conclusion is to forget why Korean envoys and memorial drafters use this notion of the moral empire in the first place. It was to convince empires and their agents that behaving according to Korean expectations was the best way to be imperial. And we're recording this a few weeks after Yom Kippur. Um, and this like resonated really dramatically with me, like reading the Jewish prayer book where basically like all of the prayers are like God, like trying to convince God to like let you live another year. And, um, you know, what it does is like it quotes back different parts of the Bible where the, where, you know, God promises the Israeli people like, we're going to be, I'm going to be nice to you. And like, I forgive you. And, um, it sort of feels like the same thing where they're just like—

Yes.

All right. Like, we have no choice because, you know, from your, like, national power calculation perspective, China is just like 100x bigger than we are. This is not the sort of thing where you've got, you know, a Holy Roman Empire and you got a French king and you got some, like, city-states in Italy trying to, you know, work, work out, like, who's top dog or whatever. So, I don't know. Thoughts, reflections. That was a lot.

Yeah.

No, I have absolutely. Because you've said in a different way, in, you know, one of the key arguments about the book, which is that it's not about the relative power, it's about the shared understanding of what— how you should behave and how you should interact with each other. And that almost none of us actually go through life always ready, you know, with my shiv.

Correct.

Ready to push back when people— no, we have a basic understanding. You should do this. You should do that. And that's what I mean about the great conversation. Right? I love that book, by the way. Shout out to Sixiang Wang. Sixiang Wang, S-I-X-I-A-N-G Wang. We should put links to all these books. They're so good. Right? But this is the conversation. It's not that somehow under the Sui Dynasty in 500 AD, they came up with a bunch of rules and then everybody just followed them for the next 1,500 years. No, it's constantly being adjudicated, adjusted, things change. I mean, the difference in the Korean state, you know, with Silla Dynasty in 600 versus, you know, 1600 is 1,000 years of history and stuff like that, right? So yeah.

My argument would be like, the only reason you can have this conversation in the first place is because that relative balance of power doesn't change, of China just being The, you know, 1,000 times more powerful than everyone else. And these other 3 polities just trying to like survive. And that is the, that is the constant you see from 500 to, um, I don't know, 1870. Um, which, uh, which allows this to even manifest in the first place.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So one of the other things that I probably should have said, uh, one of the ways that I do this with, if I, if I sort of give a talk is I say, look, Europe was a balance of power system. It was a multipolar system. It was, and it still is today. Asia has and is a hegemonic system. It's got one massive power and a bunch of smaller countries. They're not going to behave the same way. The way that we think that multipolar balance of power systems behave doesn't track or analogize to East Asia. It's a very different system, and it's developed that way over 1,500 years or so, you know. Actually, from the first time China was unified, let's call it 2,000 years, is everybody had to figure out not how do we expand and become stronger, blah, blah, blah. It's how do we survive and exist and grow and pursue what we want in the shadow of an enormous, enormously central power that is not— it's not going away. You're not moving away. They're not moving away, right? You are stuck. You have to work out this unequal relationship. And to just hint about the future a little bit, that is what's going on today. The one thing I just do, I want to say, you know, every aspirational quote I hear, every time I read from somebody in the DC blob about Asia's going to balance China, I say, no, no, they're not. No, they're not. That is never going to happen. The countries in Asia are not going to join a US containment coalition against China. That's not How it's going to work. They have to live with China. They don't have to like it, but they have to craft a relationship with this massive country, and that's what they did back then. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

So I think would it be right then to say that the European model, you know, you assume kind of billiard ball table. You have these equally sized balls, very hard as themselves, but then they, you know. Bump into each other, bounce off each other. And yeah, and then when you look at East Asia, what you see instead is that you see things crumbling from the inside. So it's not that there's no violence. There is the internal rebellions. There is the western frontier. Yes, with the steppe nomads. But the logic of Europe is not the logic that you would see, especially not between these four countries. I think Korea is kind of poster boy for that. kind of relationship with China. Vietnam, many Vietnamese would push back and say, no, no, no, no, no, the Chinese were always trying to come. And then they talk about the transistors and you say, yeah, but the transistors were before this whole, you know, sinification of the Vietnamese culture.

What about Japan?

Japan not only, of course, has the famous wars in the late 1800s, early 20th century, but even the really things go wild in East Asia.

Yeah.

in the late 1500s, the Imjin War, which I think most listeners won't even have heard about. I literally, I didn't register that this war ever happened before I read your book. And it sounds like things really went wild. Um, why don't you tell the quick story of the Imjin War and also think, how much do you think that Japan is actually a little bit more Europe-like than, than the rest of these examples?

What's made this so fun over what, almost, you know, 2 decades now that I've been doing this stuff. has been how many things I think we should do differently when we teach international relations in the United States or in Europe. Right. Like, I grew up, my father's, you know, my father's from Northern Korea. He actually, you know, from north of Pyongyang. And when I'm growing up, I wasn't paying attention. You know how your parents always say it. And he's telling me some story about, oh, well, the Japanese tried to invade. They kept trying to invade Korea all the time. And we fought them off with these turtle boats. Right. I heard about this turtle boat guy. That's all I knew about Korean history until I started this, right? You know, yay for the turtle book guy who's Admiral Yi Sun-shin, who by the way should be studied in every international relations book, every course, because he's an extraordinary admiral, an unbelievable admiral who won these phenomenal battles with like 13 of his ships against 300 Japanese ships during this war. And the other thing that I thought we should all learn is we should be studying the Imjin War because it doesn't work the way we think it works. So who's heard of the Spanish Armada, right? Everybody's heard of that. You know, I'm gonna contrast that cuz 1588, the Spanish Armada, the Spaniards tried to invade London and they sent, I think it was like 130 ships and 20,000 troops. The biggest force in Renaissance Europe ever seen. 4 years later, on the other side of the globe in 1592. The Japanese tried to conquer China and they started by invading Korea to get to China. So exact contemporaneous with the Spanish Armada, 300,000 Japanese troops, 700 ships. The scale of the war was 5 to 10 times what you could even think. You couldn't even think of that in Europe at that time. That's the ability of these countries to fight war when they wanted to. The scale they could fight, the logistical organizational capacity of these East Asian countries dwarfed anything you could do. Why, by the way, why?

Is that because of their civil service, their bureaucracy being more centralized, more complicated?

Yes. And this will get, this will get back to briefly what, what Japan is or is not. In, uh, 700 AD. The Japanese ministry had like 7,000 people working in its bureaucracy. 500 years later, the Catholic Curia had around 500 people working in it, and it was the most organized thing in all of Europe, right? The Japanese, who are widely considered less organized, less sophisticated, less educated, et cetera, than Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese. Japan was considered the barbarian one, the less developed one. Its organization and its bureaucrats and its civil service exam, which they used for like 400 years, dwarfed what you could imagine in Europe. All these countries had the capacity to do that. They just didn't choose to do it that way. China did because they always— China always had a big army because they had, again, the Western Steppe and all those kind of things, right? So when they decided to fight, the capacity of these countries to create a massive army and ships and organization and logistics and supply was Unthinkable in Europe at the time. So that's the context why we should study this war. It's one of the great wars and it doesn't work the way we think it should work because number one, China was always bigger. As we pointed out, China was bigger than Japan. If anybody should be invading, China should be invading Japan. But this Japanese general Hideyoshi had unified. There had been a breakdown for about 100 years. There was a breakdown of central rule in Japan. So Hideyoshi unified Japan, and then nobody is, I have not yet heard a definitive argument for why he decided to invade China. Ego and hubris is certainly one. There is a large argument that it was domestic politics, and it's because he had united a bunch of warring different factions, daimyo and stuff like that, in order to both get their soldiers out of Japan so they couldn't revolt against him. And to keep them happy and get them more, you know, more, uh, gold and stuff like that, send them out. What's pretty clear though is that he didn't actually do a whole lot of scouting and measuring of the relative balance of power between him and China and, or even him and Korea. There's almost no record that they were sitting there saying, they're weaker, we are stronger. Any of these calculations of balance of power. that we say occurs when wars start. There's almost no evidence that he did any of that. Oh, the other interesting thing about this is if you just get one big country and 2 small countries like Korea and Japan and China, one big country, China, 2 small countries, all IR theory would say the 2 small countries should ally together and form an alliance against the big country.

And it's very modern, by the way, with those 2 countries. There's a lot of people who think, why are they not Well, friendly wouldn't each other.

And they're still saying that, right? But so, I mean, there's so much, there's so much that tracks to today as well. Like, why don't they, you know, anyone would say the small countries should ally together and huddle together against the big country, but that's not what happened. Instead, Japan invaded Korea, who was not expecting it because they, they, it was, again, it was like, you must be kidding. The Koreans had word that there was a buildup for a couple of years and they were like, refused to believe it. Went to the Chinese and said, we need help, China. Even the Chinese didn't believe it at first. They're like, you're kidding me. So it took a while for the Chinese to actually take it seriously. And then the Chinese sent troops and essentially along with Admiral Yi Sun-shin cutting their supply lines because he was a great admiral, the Japanese advance got pushed all the way back to Pusan. They spent a couple years negotiating. Hideyoshi died, and then they invaded again a second time, and then got crushed and went back to Japan in 1598. Now, the other amazing thing about this is, obviously, the Korean government would not have survived if the Chinese weren't there. The Chinese troops were completely in charge of the Korean Peninsula after this war in 1598. All they had to do was say, okay, we're in charge. You guys are, you know, This is now the 33rd province or whatever. That's all the Chinese had to do is stay. But within about a year, they all went home. They're like, this isn't our country. This is Korea. Okay, good luck with that. And then they took off. The Koreans were actually trying to get them to stay because they thought the Japanese might come a 3rd time. So none of this tracks to the way we think it should happen. The Chinese could have just stayed. They're like, this isn't our country. That goes to not power. That goes to a conception of who we are and who we aren't. And do we care about this and do we not? It's not a simple endless expansion, you know, like gas that expands to fill the, you know, the space available. Countries don't. Empirically, they don't simply expand as much as they can. And so much of this war doesn't act at all the way we think that war should act. Interesting enough, Japanese slink home. Form the Tokugawa Shogunate. For 200 years, they don't do anything. Actually, almost 300 years, up until— 300 years, 1598 to like 18-whatever. For 300 years, these countries then just sort of interacted with each other. So it's a very interesting war, and it doesn't track at all with the way we expect wars should track. But it does track with China's a big country. Korea had good relations with it. They are, you know, Japan had this one guy. who for very interesting domestic reasons decided he was going to try and invade everyone else. But the system sort of snaps back to stability in ways that we simply do not see in the European experience. It's the only war between Japan, Korea, and China in 600 years from like 1200 to 1800. So the only war in 600 years between these countries, and they clearly had the capacity to fight. Which is the thing. It's not that they weren't able to. It's not that they were a bunch of tribes running around. You know, these were countries with massive capacities that simply chose not to fight.

And I think that it is easy to see the, the Indian War as the kind of weird exception that almost proves the rule of the stability, because like you said, the reaction was like, no, you gotta be kidding. Like, that's obviously not going to happen. Oh, okay. It is happening. But the same, it does not hold for the much more familiar Japan attacks China in the late 1800s. And then of course with the World Wars. And I think that that's one of the kind of key things that we wanted to push back when we were talking with Jordan earlier is that one of the kind of major IR theories that you feel, based on the book, is too Eurocentric is the so-called Thucydides trap, which is, you know, they have the rising power and the, you know, the declining power. And whenever that happens, they're almost, What was the famous number? Was in 12 out of 16 cases where you have this, there is a war.

Yeah. There's a war. Yeah.

And then you say that, well, you just don't see that in the East Asian history, which is okay. Fair enough. But there is, um, a much more Thucydides-like way of reading that, which is that yes, because you just don't have any power able to challenge China. I think this is also what Jordan was getting at earlier. And lo and behold, the moment when Japan, due to industrialization, is able to challenge the hegemon, they immediately do. So in what sense do you think that East Asia is a counterexample to the Thucydides trap, which excites a lot of attention nowadays because of the China-US dynamic, versus actually it's one of those cases where, well, you know, you have like a sample size of one in the whole East Asian history of this being the case, and lo and behold, Japan behaves exactly like the Western IR theorists International relations theorists would predict Japan to behave.

That's great, right? I mean, and this is, this is where I think it's so interesting because you have a traditional, or whatever you want to call it, East Asian world order. And that world order had its own set of principles and values and expectations. And it was, as we've been talking, remarkably stable. The arrival of the Western imperial powers in the 19th century blew that all apart. And I think in some ways this is one of the— I haven't done research on this. I'm still— I'm going back farther in time as opposed to up closer. But to me, this era is— if there are IR scholars out there who want to talk about how do we understand a change of world orders, this is the time people should be studying. Because there's examples of like the Japanese learned first Western theory, and they learned French to speak French. And they come and they're arguing with the Chinese in 1879 over Taiwan and the status of this and the other thing. And the Chinese wanted to use the tribute system way of interacting, speaking in Chinese and the same principles and the norms. And the Japanese were like, what are you talking about? We, we write in French. We write down a contract. And they're like, what's a contract? I mean, literally different worldviews. How do you sort that out? What does it mean, right? So there's as much, uh, questions of what is modernity, or what does this mean to have an international system, as well as just simply who's stronger or not. They didn't understand each other anymore. They were using different languages to argue about stuff. And Some of the most fascinating research is why Japan responded better than China. And in many ways it makes sense that, you know, I would, my quick and dirty explanation is, you know, China was the, you know, was the hegemon. They were like, why should we change? Whereas the Japanese were happy to change. And so rapidly learned, you know, borrowed German military training and English business practices and everything else, right? So you do get a very different set of worldviews. And when we get back to the actual war, right, what— the way I would call it is I'm not so sure I would call it a power transition war per se, because this was as much about Japan defending its own survival as it was about expanding into China. And the Japanese were lucky in some ways because they weren't as valuable a source as China, so they had more time to adjust. And then the question for the Japanese is, how do we become a great power? And I think it's more that question that was motivating the Japanese than a Thucydides power transition trap. It was like, how do we become recognized and survive as a country? Well, what do great powers do? They have a flag. I mean, we'll get to the other stuff, but this is not super— they have a flag. I have this great photo of the Japanese emperor, 2 years apart, like 1870. In one, he's dressed in the traditional garb, and then he's dressed like Bismarck. He's got a sword and a mustache and a bunch of medals. I mean, they're like, this isn't how we do it if we're going to survive. In a similar way to how do we make ourselves recognizable? But on top of that, we get a military, we become a colonial power, we take possessions, and then we say we're just like you. So half of what Japan was doing was actually aimed from the racial equality clause At the League of Nations in 1919, to simply being an imperial power was aimed at the European countries, as well as then half of it focused on China and readjusting that relationship. So I mean, it sort of fits again if you don't look too closely. It fits. But if I look at the Japanese motivations, I see as much survival compared to the Western powers as I do a. simple transition of power with respect to China itself.

Okay, fair enough. But I think that because, I mean, your whole book is titled Beyond Power Transitions, I think we can't let you off the hook so easily.

Do I?

Go ahead.

Yes. Keep my feet to the fire.

It might be the case that you have an alternative explanation to the kind of power transition explanation. But it's another thing that, yeah, okay, you can explain away this one case. It's another thing to say that East Asia does not support a kind of power transition theory, because again, there the pushback would be like either it kind of positively supports or it's kind of neutral because you just don't have a normal moment with any power transition happening in East Asia, which then the kind of traditional IR scholars would say, well, if we do have a genuine power transition happening somewhere, for example, with US-China, well, we have to go to look at the only cases where this has happened and whether we exclude the Japan case or not. It still looks like, well, we are back in the classical 12 out of 16 cases because the whole East Asian history, although it's fascinating and it shows this remarkable capacity of countries to live peacefully with each other, well, it doesn't show that you can have a power transition without war.

Well, okay, so 2 other things. In some ways I would say fair enough, right? We are getting to the question that we get to today. We're getting to that question, which is, Is the entire world now Westphalian? Right. Has the European Westphalian model of international relations, you know, nation states, balance of power, as I said, flag, you know, are we all that way now? And so none of the other stuff has any impact. And in some ways, if that's the case, that yes, we are all Westphalian, then we do then have a debate about does this apply, does this not apply, etc., etc. The question though is how deeply did we actually make this transition to a Western country, so to speak?

Right.

And my argument there is that I don't— I think it's extremely thin. I think it's very superficial. One of my big critiques of power transition theory is that it should be universal. That's what they claim. This is a universal— our argument, we are trying to regionalize power transitions to Europe, so to speak.

Right.

That it wasn't simply inevitable. That it was based on some ideas and beliefs about how we behave, et cetera, et cetera, that happened in Europe and not anywhere else. If we go to Asia, we don't see those same beliefs. We also don't see that same behavior. The argument then is that, okay, if it is this same set of ideas, then if the entire world is now that way, do we still see power transitions or not? And our question is, how much has Asia really changed? Right? Because 2 things, 2 things I would say about that, actually, back to Japan, and then we can talk a little more broadly. The thing about Japan is that, number one, I don't think they were ever as strong as China measurably in the 19th century anyway. So I'm not sure the conditions fit. It sort of looks like because Japan was rising and China was falling, but the minute we try to actually say, okay, they have to be getting bigger, what is the percentage? When does the war start? I think you lose that because I don't think Japan was ever as strong as China was. And so I'm still not convinced you had a power transition. So it might've been a war, but I'm not sure it's a power transition war at all. It looks sort of that way, again, because we've sort of said, oh, sick man of Asia is China. But China was never as weak as or small as Japan was. It always had more people and more guns and stuff like that.

Yeah, but hold on a second. Without US support, do you think that they would've won a war against Japan?

Here's what I think. The Princess Bride, what's the first law of whatever? Never get involved in a land war in Asia. I'm afraid you've, you've missed maybe one of the fundamental errors. Never get involved in a land war in Asia. I think the Japanese were already bogged down long before the U.S. got deeply involved in the war, right? I'm not sure that they ever were going to be able to conquer, uh, China, you know, 1930, 1937, etc., etc. But even more than that, the question would be, was that actually in some ways a disproving case. I'm not sure that it was. I see this much more as an imperial project aimed at protecting or surviving the Japanese homeland than a China's weak, let's go for it kind of a thing. But I will say, and this is true, I will say what's amazing about Japan, and I always do this in my classes, Japan is the first non-Western country to industrialize. First non-Western country to beat a European power in a war in 1904. So I don't want to diminish their accomplishments or how strong this country was, how dangerous it was.

Right.

I know that might not be a satisfying answer.

So for all those civilizations out there who didn't like cynicize fast enough, how do you think about Western and imperial expansion over the course of, you know, the thousand years we're talking about. It's it's hard to sort of generalize over a thousand years of history and like lots of different, you know, there's lots of different particularities with like Xinjiang versus Tibet versus like Yunnan and and whatnot. But you know, you have people and what have you. But it basically like did they just decide not to run the South Korea, Vietnam playbook? Like what? Or was, you know, were the, you know, farmland was too good? Like what's the explanatory variable here?

Well, there's 2 possible explanations and I lean towards the cultural one as opposed to the material one, right? The material one would be, well, the farmland was better and the horses were, you know, it was better to have horses this way, et cetera, et cetera. So they just fought and, you know, they couldn't agree on what they wanted to do and things like that. I suspect, and I have a great quote in one of the books from somebody who does much more on the Western steppes than I do. Um, but he said, you know, the nomads and the Chinese had very clear conceptions of who they were and what they wanted and that nomads did not want. They didn't want to change their way of life. Right. And this is, this is, you know, sometimes you even see it now with sort of Mongolians every now and then on like Twitter or whatever else, someone will show the Mongolians. Yeah. Living in the yurts and riding the horses and being semi-nomadic, moving up the hills during the summer and things like that. I'm moving down and then moving back up. And so part of the answer is they didn't want what the Chinese wanted. These are incompatible worldviews and they knew it.

Let me try to push back on that. So there is a third or an in-between explanation, which is that there's actually 2 Western frontiers. One is the Himalayas. And you, you do see some stability in the Tibetan kind of whatever we're going to call it, statehood, et cetera. And then the other one is this famous steppe. And if you live on the steppe, you basically decided to live on grass. Humans don't eat grass. You need to have animals that eat grass and transform and turn it into an energy that humans can use. But grass is very not energy dense thing, which means that you have to move around a large area. So immediately, if you've decided this lifestyle, which is that you're going to live from grass energy, you are just going to fundamentally want to have a nomadic lifestyle. And once you have a nomadic lifestyle, it's almost like, uh, the energy demands will dictate the culture to be one where horse riding around a large plain is cool. And that's what you do to survive. And you can't have people cramming Confucian classics for a civil service exam, which then runs large granaries where you have rice stored for a famine, because that's just not how Life on the steppe works. So I think that if you just look at the steppe experience, I think it's quite understandable why they don't suddenly become a Korea. And I think that it is quite materialistic in a sense, even if of course culture funnels that material demand. So that's my suggestion on the energy history of the steppe.

But either one of you take it down. Say one thing, which again, there are material explanations for it. I think there's also a way in which they liked the way they lived. And you could imagine a bargain if they were going to be, you know, willing to play the game halfway where they could figure out something where they trade for this, they do that, etc., etc. And they did that a little bit, but they didn't fundamentally want to change their way of life. And I think that that's what it came down to, which isn't to necessarily push back on the cultural explanation. I've been more focused on the eastern side, which is relatively understudied. And so I will admit, I am not a steppe scholar. I've not been spending a lot of time thinking about China-Steppe relations as much as I've been trying to explain, because everybody focuses on that. That's where all the fighting was. I'm trying to explain the stability on the eastern side, which is not an excuse for not knowing it.

Yeah.

But to me, in many ways, the stability on the eastern side is in many ways more interesting because that's We don't ever expect that to happen.

Like the thing I'm thinking about in particular is less Tibet and less like the steppe, and more like that like swath of like Yunnan and Sichuan that got taken over from like 1000 to 1500.

Fair enough, fair enough.

Yeah, that you know kind of has like a normal landscape. It's not like a particularly dramatic place that Imperial China for whatever reason was able to just like. wash over. You had dozens of these little kingdoms and cultures, and the vast majority, I mean, basically every single one of them, if you're looking west, is no longer able to do their own thing.

Well, imagine a country that starts out with a populated, urbanized, sophisticated eastern seaboard that slowly moves out to a largely unorganized, uninstitutionalized frontier to its west, expanding outward, tending to slaughter all of the indigenous peoples who were there while they, while they pushed until they couldn't expand any longer. And you have 2 countries that did that.

China.

And the United States.

Right.

It's a— that to me is very simple because those are frontiers. And what happened is China expanded as we turned frontiers into borders up until they met Russia or up until they met the Himalayas or whatever else. And that's a very similar project that what goes on around the world. My one sentence history of the world is it's turning frontiers into borders over 20,000 years and 10,000 years. That's what we've done. And so those countries that— not those countries, those peoples They had been sort of sparring with Tibet for 1,000 years. I mean, the first Chinese that took, or first whatever, was like Tang was fighting and sparring with the Tibetans. Then they'd get free, then they'd get taken over. They had these constant troubles, which is why the Chinese expanded westward, right? It was, they tried defense with the Great Wall. They tried bribery with trying to give goods and stuff like that. They tried off— eventually they incorporated these as they moved farther and farther out, and the nomads retreated farther and farther back until there was nowhere to go. That is absolutely a, in some ways, a— I'm not sure I want to put a moral judgment on it. I mean, we did this in the United States as well. That's sort of what happened.

Okay, well, I think it's time. Let's make this all about our time. You know, you meet someone who's like, oh, this is all cool. I like history, but what the heck does this have to do with like whether there is an American ship bumping into a Chinese ship on the Taiwan Strait and all hell breaks loose?

Yeah.

Yeah.

To me, the first, the most important lesson, the most important lesson from looking at all this history is that we should ask and not simply assume Whether this power transition dynamic is the most important dynamic to be looking at. In other words, it is just taken for granted now in Washington, D.C., and probably around the world, wherever else, that rising and declining power and US is declining and it's going to get weak and China's rising, so they have rising ambitions. That's the key dynamic that's going on today in Asia. And if anything, our book should cause us to pause and ask, is that really the most important dynamic? And our answer would be no, it's not.

It's not at all.

And what do we mean by that? The most important dynamic, we still go back to the other lesson, which we've avoided. We haven't really talked about it that much, right?

Yes.

Which was that if you look at the Korean dynasties right next to China, every single one of them fell for internal reasons. The Silla Dynasty, the Koryo Dynasty, and then Joseon was in the 20th century, which is different. Every one of the Japanese, you know, Kamakura, whatever, they all fell internally. Same thing in Vietnam. Even the Chinese, they all fell. Song was conquered, but Tang internal, Ming internal, Qing internal, frankly.

Right.

These internal dynamics are in many ways way more consequential than external. I read somewhere, and I'm probably stealing this quote, so I forget who said it, but empires die from suicide, not murder, is a way to think about it.

Yes.

And so if we look at the big debate about China today, one is, is there going to be a power transition? Do they want to take over the world? But the other one is, at the same time, are they going to collapse? They have so many problems internally. I have spent my adult life hearing about the impending real estate crash in Jakarta. When Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, is he more concerned with what's going on internally or is he itching to make land grabs and things like that? Right?

Yes.

So to me, the biggest point of the book would be to ask that question. And we would end up probably coming down on the dynamics of what goes on in East Asia are going to be much more internal than they are external. Then there's a second. Let me just say the second one and then let's talk about whatever you want. The second one is this question of the shared understanding or the common conjecture. Yeah, there was a— viewed in the long arc of history, 18— let's call it 1841, whatever, the Opium Wars, sometime in the mid-19th century for up until 1979 or 1949, whatever. For about 100 years, China was going through one of its periodic internal chaos. It's not a rise, it's a return. And every country in Asia has dealt with a large, huge China, and now they're doing it again. And so every country in the region has to craft some type of working, living relationship with China. 'Cause nobody's going away. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that particularly American policymakers are making is in trying to get these countries to choose the US sort of completely in a very American style. I'm not even sure if it's European, but certainly an American style. Like, you're with us or against us, you're in our alliance, et cetera, et cetera. And Asian countries do not want to do that. Vietnam just joined the BRICS. Thailand just joined. These are not— Yeah, they don't get along with China on everything. Nobody does. We're always arguing with Mexico about stuff. But are these countries going to unequivocally contain and move away from China and de-risk and decouple? There is no evidence that I see of that. I don't see any evidence of that. They have to live with China and they have in some ways a shared conjecture still about what China is. And the biggest, the most important one for our purposes is I don't think any realistic Korean or Vietnamese Or frankly, Japanese, any responsible policymaker or scholar says, I think China wants to invade and conquer our country. So they're not acting as if they did. That doesn't mean they love them. That doesn't mean they get along well. But I do not think that Koreans or Vietnamese wake up saying, okay, do we need to, you know, do we need to go to the, you know, go to the trenches to fight China? They're going to come over the border. I don't think that's the case.

So I guess like the modern PRC, um, has some, has some imperial legacies. Clearly it's like on the same geography, roughly the same landmass.

Yeah.

Um, you know, script's changed, you know, still basically the same. Um, but we were talking earlier about just how much Imperial Japan changed, where one day you're wearing Yeah, yeah. I don't know what you— I don't know what you call it. One day, one day you're wearing robes, the next day you're wearing— you're cosplaying as Bismarck. And, you know, we've got a Marxist-Leninist system that has like, you know, Marx, Lenin, Engels as their, you know, 3 poster boys, not like Han Feizi or whatever. So how do you sort of— how do you interpret this question of to what extent is The modern PRC cueing off of versus going off this. Because of course, like Mao, right? Like he wanted global revolution, like funding revolutions in South America and Angola and what have you, threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union. So we have at least one really dramatic case study Um, in our sample size of like 4 CCP leaders who are, you know, at the level of, you know, are, are very much out there on the, on the spectrum of like, let's just like live in sort of peaceful harmony under this, um, you know, old system that we had a great time under since 500.

This is the question, and I don't think we answer this question enough. Is China today still the China of 2 centuries ago, meaning the answer almost every— a lot of my scholar friends who are sinologists, who know way more about China than me, answer the question without thinking, of course it's different. It's the CCP.

It's Xi Jinping.

Right?

There's— it's a— and they'll use these modern contemporary social science phrases like, it's a, you know, one-party authoritarian system with a blah, blah, blah. Right? As that is the main driver of how Chinese foreign policy will go, perceptions and foreign relations and everything else, right? It's the Communist Party that's trying to maintain power, the Xi dynasty, the Xi Jinping dynasty. I'm not so sure. There are, but this is the question we should ask because there are some ways in which, of course, we're all modern now. I do this not as a joke, but as sort of a fun thing. When I'm teaching intro to IR and I got a bunch of international kids as well as Americans, I'll say, how many of us have a passport? Everybody raises their hand. To the Americans that don't have a passport, I yell at them and I say, you should have one anyway. And I'll say, look, nobody in China is questioning that this is what matters, that you are a nation state, that this little book tells you who you belong to, that this is how we're going to— that's That's all modernity. That's all the modern world, whether we call it Westphalia or whatever else. Nobody questions that. If you listen to the Chinese, and I'm making a joke now, so please nobody get mad at me. It's a joke. So you can see. But if you listen to the Chinese national anthem, again, it sounds like it was written in 1870s Vienna. It's like, oom-pah, oom-pah. It's not—

Trained.

It's not Beijing opera, right? Which you'd think if it's Chinese, it would have this Beijing opera music or something else. But no, it's not. It's a Western thing. So in many ways, China, like everybody else, is living in a modern world. And the main thing that I would say that is not modernity is not new. And I'm actually working on this as well. And at some point, I hopefully, hopefully will get this to a point where I can try and publish it. But I think almost, almost every single main Chinese foreign policy interest or agenda or purpose is what I'm calling transdynastic. None of it is new. And that is what I think is really important. Because what I don't— yes, Mao had this sort of thing about global stuff and he devoted some money to it. But in general, if we go through the Chinese interests, what we see is they're not even just Xi Jinping's interests. They're not even CCP interests from the 1940s. Most of them were inherited from the KMT in the '30s and go back to the Qing Dynasty, if not more. And the most exact— the clearest example that I'll give is Taiwan. This is not a new interest. It's not a KMT interest. The Qing explicitly were saying, don't take this, Japan, or else our relations will be poisoned forever. This is not new. This is old.

Hong Kong.

That's 1841 or, you know, whenever the 1839, let's say, right? These are not new interests in sort of unifying what is China. And as of yet, I have not seen new. We have people who are credible. Let me put it differently. Who says we have important scholarly books written in English by top sinologists or whatever, you know, China relations, who claim that Taiwan is just the starting point. And then after that, it'll be a nice jump to the Philippines or it'll be a nice jump to Vietnam. And I'm just flabbergasted because that's how, if you have a one perspective, how you can make that argument. But I have never seen— that's one reason I'm going back to see what the Chinese wrote and the Vietnamese talked about each other 500 years ago. But you do not see that now. You know that Vietnam and China now conduct joint naval patrols in Haiphong Bay and stuff like that. They do this. They disagree about some things, but they cooperate on everything else. So I have a very different perspective on how much China's interests have expanded as its power has grown. I don't see that. I see its ability to try and get its historic or its very long enduring interests, its ability to try and affect those to be better. But I don't see a whole lot of thought of, well, once we get Taiwan, then let's take Japan.

So we'll grant you that. But I think this is the rub, right? Is that Taiwan in a sort of Westphalian sense is basically as close to a state as you can possibly be. And you have these treaties with the US and Japan, with the US and South Korea, With the U.S. and Vietnam, with the U.S. and the Philippines, and you know however much you want to say like yes they have to understand that they need to live with China. Like you don't see politicians in Japan running on at you know running saying like we need to like let go of our treaty with the U.S. And you know maybe Trump is president and like those treaties just disappear or something. But like the fact of the matter, the fact of the matter is right like the the world has decided. that it is not cool to invade and take over states.

Yes.

And after 1945, like, there have been a lot of awful, terrible conflicts. But by and large, they've been, they've been like civil wars or civil war adjacents. And Ukraine is an exception. And you've seen a really dramatic response from a lot of countries around the world who have said that this is not the sort of universe we want to live in, where countries can just take over countries. And yes, You know, all of a sudden, like, half the world is giving them artillery, you know, South Korea is giving them artillery shells, right? So, um, I don't know. What do we do?

Here's the question, and this is why it's such a rub. I agree with you 100%, right? One thing I point out is that when we all start saying, well, you know, China's getting bigger, so it's going to try and take Taiwan, then it's going to try and take Philippines and blah, blah, blah. I say that's the European model of the last 500 years, if not more. Do you know where they're doing it right now? In Europe, Ukraine. They're not doing it in Asia. That's happening still in Europe. These old massive armies and trench warfare and thousands of tanks and stuff like that, that's going on in Europe. It's not going on in Asia. So I think the Taiwan issue is in so many ways an exact encapsulation of what I'm talking about. Because the first question is, if it wasn't a Westphalian world, the issue of Taiwan would be very easy to figure out. The only reason Taiwan is an issue is that we have decided that there's only one legitimate type of polity, which is called a nation-state that gets recognition and has a seat on the blah blah blah blah blah. That is a very unique way of thinking about the world. Even in Europe, historically, there were kingdoms and principalities and, you know, I don't know, duchies and stuff like that. And certainly historically in Asia, there were nomadic kingdoms and then, you know, centralized Confucian kingdoms and all these other kinds of things. So the easiest way to sort this out is to simply not be Westphalian and say they can be this thing.

Right.

But that's not gonna happen 'cause the world doesn't exist that way. And we are stuck with this Very incompatible way of thinking about the world. So I have two thoughts about this. Look, if there was an answer, we would have found it by now. There are two two thoughts about this, and the first one is when we talk about China taking over Taiwan, I don't think the Chinese talk about it this way. Everyone in America is talking about it. You know, man, the amount of money being made in DC right now as people run these you know war gaming simulations again and again and again and again, right? We're all salivating at. Okay, if they do this by 2027, they're going to invade. I don't think anyone in China is actually thinking that way. Everything I know about the CCP and what Xi Jinping says is we reserve the right to use force because it's ours, blah blah blah blah blah. For all this reason we know, but it's not a we will invade kind of a thing. And I think the answer has been so far to kick the can down the road. And you know what? That answer has been really successful. I do not understand why we are trying to change the status quo on Taiwan. Because the status quo of the Americans not saying, we agree with you, China, that it's Taiwanese, we say, we understand that you think that. It's very different, isn't it? We're not saying we agree with the one China. We're saying we understand the Chinese think that. Just don't use force to change it. And the Chinese saying, I'm glad you understand it. We reserve the right to use force. Taiwan, don't you change your status. And the Taiwanese basically saying, okay, sort of. We'll have a flag, we'll have our own currency, we can have our own government, we can have a capitalist system, et cetera, et cetera, but we just won't call ourselves one. That has allowed Taiwan to make a transition from being a brutal authoritarian government to a Flourishing, thriving democracy. Taiwan has gotten rich. China has gotten rich. We have bought lots of cheap, really well-produced goods. So the status quo actually works. It's not perfect, but it works. And that's point number one. Point number two is when we talk about the Asian countries, they're not saying, oh, we're going to abandon the alliance with China. All right. With the alliance with the United States. You're absolutely right. But you know what I say? Do you remember when Pelosi visited 2 years ago in the summer? Within a week, every single Asian country, including ASEAN, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, came out and publicly endorsed the One China policy. They all reaffirmed it. You know who didn't? South Korea. But do you know what— do you remember— do you guys know that kerfuffle with South Korea after Pelosi visited? No. Pelosi went to Korea after Taiwan. She would— not a single official government official met her at the airport. President Yoon Suk Yeol didn't even talk to her, even on a phone call. And it was a massive kerfuffle in Korea because he was like, I'm on vacation. And there were photos of him drinking beer and stuff like that, right? He did not want to get anywhere near this. When I was in— and this is going to sound like name dropping, but it's not. So I was in the We call it Yongsan Presidential Office, the YPO, the new president thing. I was talking to one of the top national security advisors last year in Korea. So we're in the presidential office. And I say to him, does Korea still, you know, what's Korea's stance on the One China policy? And he said, we made our policy when we normalized relations with China back in 1992. It's One China policy. We haven't changed it. What we won't do is reaffirm it every time China wants us to reaffirm it. And they did affirm that they're not going to allow US bases to be used in event of a Taiwanese war. So I think if there is some kind of war, I think many Asian countries are going to back slowly away.

Well, what's fascinating is the One China policy is basically a weird version of this imperial common understanding thing where no one's super happy with it, but it means you don't get war. And I think the scary thing is what the CCP has done with autonomous regions and with Hong Kong, where the question is whether or not this sort of fudge it, okay, we'll like give you respect and like not embarrass you and you leave us alone, is, is, is going to be enough going forward. Where, you know, I mean, you saw what Mao did to Tibet and Xinjiang, then you had 30 years of like it being kind of okay, and then you had, uh, and then, you know, since 2008 really we've had a different story.

I know.

And obviously with Hong Kong, where that was going to be the poster child of what a sort of like enlightened imperial-style ruler relationship with Beijing would look like. And that didn't end to anyone's satisfaction.

So the Xi dynasty.

So, you know, like, you want to play this out a little more, like the parallels between One China policy and Korea writing nice letters to Beijing?

Well, I think there's two. The main distinction would be what's internal and what's external. To me, that's the main distinction. Now, again, as you said, we don't have to like it and we don't even necessarily have to agree with it, but the Chinese say this is all internal. And they say this, and I think they've got a point that Xinjiang and Hong Kong, they consider that to be internal. And that's very different than their relations with Vietnam or Korea or whatever else. And I think that we, we too easily say how they act here would be the same as they— we, you know, we, we sort of analogize or whatever else. But I think there's not— yeah. You want to say something?

Yeah, but I mean, like, is Korea internal in like 1100?

I don't think so. They had formal tribute relations, right? In fact, that's how— do you know, here's one interesting thing. Did we put this in the book? I can't remember. But, you know, the Goryeo Dynasty, the Korean dynasty at the time, was never conquered by the Mongols. They suffered unbelievably, but they never gave in. And the Mongols were unable to actually conquer them. The king survived. He had to keep moving around and stuff like that. Do you know how they actually sorted out their relations? Is when Kublai Khan decided he was going to use these Chinese ways of doing things. Uh, and then they entered into tribute relations. And yes, the Koreans had to give, you know, princesses and all this kind of stuff, but Korea remained as an independent country. Under a tribute relationship with with the with the Mongols under the Yan Dynasty.

Yeah.

But back to back to contemporary. Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess what I'm saying is like is like you know the sort of like that's the rub right is because if you can get to a tributary relationship where you know you you basically get to live like Korea did for a thousand years and like do whatever you want but you have to like in a on an international stage like play nice and. You know, send some gifts and you know say Chinese Taipei and your Olympic team, or maybe have a joint Olympic team. I mean, whatever, who cares? Like then, like you know, that's that's like a I think that's a trade-off that Taiwan and Taiwan's allies would be open to accepting, right? But you know, if Taiwan is just Xinjiang or just Tibet, then like you know, it's things get a lot more complicated.

Yeah, no, absolutely right. This is like— so part of the rub is what's internal and external. Do we think they're going to act the same to Korea than they would in Xinjiang? Taiwan is this interesting case because it is very, very, very, very rare and not clear what it is. It's not clear, right? The Chinese say, well, we took it over in 1683 or whenever, you know, it's always been part of China, blah blah blah. And everyone else says, well, no, it's not. But this is the question: what is, what is very clear about Taiwan? And and I'm not fudging, it's nobody has a good answer to these questions, right? So it's not me, nobody else has a better answer. Is this, what is very clear is that the Koreans don't think it's Korean, the Filipinos and the Vietnamese, the Japanese don't think it's Japanese. It might not be Chinese, but it's certainly nobody is saying, well, this is also ours. And that's one reason they say, well, this is all some kind of a Chinese issue, broadly defined civilization. That's You guys' issue. The other interesting thing about Taiwan that's very important to note is similar to the Western steppes, the people's— here's actually a great— I was thinking about this. There are 3 islands in the 19th century that got taken over, of which there's only one where there's a debate. And it's interesting because the one in which the debate is probably has the least historical claim to it. Let me tell you, right? The peoples on the island of Taiwan historically never organized themselves into the kind of government or political system that was capable of engaging in formal diplomatic relations with China or other states. They just didn't do it, right? The peoples of Ryukyu did. They had formal tribute relations with China and Japan.

And Korea.

And they were conquered in 1879 and it's never going back. There was a kingdom in Hawaii that got taken over in 1899 or something like that, and it's never going back. Right. There's a lot of these types of issue areas. What is clear about Taiwan is that it was one of them. And the argument there has as much to do with the larger political situation than it does about the The details of, well, they have a legitimate claim or they don't. Because I would make an argument that the people are— and that you get people in Okinawa talking about, we should be— there's a sort of rump Hawaiian independence faction that'll never work, but people are saying we should be independent. And everyone laughs and they're like, haha, that's never happening. And the people in Taiwan are independent, but it's much more because of the larger political context than it is their argument, their claim that they should have a legitimate government. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. That's politics. That's the world. Right.

I mean, you have a great line in the book, which is, despite decades of Western predictions to the contrary, it is by now widely admitted that East Asian states are not forming a balancing coalition against China out of fear of its rise. There's 2 ways to read that. One is the kind of, well, they don't see a need. And actually, I think you point this out that the military spending as a percentage of GDP has just been declining and declining and declining in all East Asian and Southeast Asian states, whether they are US allies or not. Um, but then there's another way of reading this, which is that, well, US is the kind of gray eminence, the elephant in the room or whatever. And a lot of people in the US would want to believe that It is only because of their benevolence and, and their fleet that such reductions in military spending can happen and that people don't feel like they have to really worry about China. So, um, yeah.

Yeah, this is, this is, this is what I've, I've heard that argument for decades, right? Um, and then I'm not quite convinced it's true, and I'll tell you, I'll tell you why for a couple of reasons.

Right.

We mentioned it briefly at the beginning when I think Jordan said Korea and Japan should be natural allies. I mean, the amount of bleeding I've heard over the decades about, come on, Koreans, stop being dumb. Don't you realize Japan's your friend and China's your enemy? It doesn't work. It does not play. Those are not arguments that are going to work. Koreans don't love China. They don't hate Japan as much as we think they do. But most of the region is not functioning the way we think it should in a good realist sense. So a lot of American policymakers or, or, you know, policy scholars are hectoring Asian countries, don't you realize you're supposed to balance China? And they're like, what are you talking about? So I want to start with that notion that it's not acting the same way. So we go to these type of, um, arguments, and you already hinted at one of the first things I want to say. Sure, the US is keeping the peace or blah, blah, blah, but if you're Vietnam or Malaysia, US isn't defending you. And you're closer to China than say the Philippines is, which is a US ally. So you should see difference. If the US is the cause of why countries aren't afraid, you should see a difference in the countries that do not have a US guarantee and you don't see that. That's number one. The second thing that I would say is in terms of the—

Okay. Yeah.

In terms of the US, what we want to see is what is the type of commitment. I'm often asked, in the last couple of years, I've been often asked, what is China learning from the Ukraine war? And my answer is usually, I actually think the lesson should be what is Taiwan learning from the US war, which is that the United States, for all of its talk, is very, very, very cautious about getting involved in a war, in an actual shooting war with a nuclear-armed superpower far from US borders, on the border of the superpower, which is not central to US survival. To me, that's the lesson of the Ukraine war. Are we really going to get in a war over the Philippines or something like that? We might. I really think that's a hard argument to make to the American people. Are we really going to be involved? And that is one of the key questions that all these countries constantly ask themselves. Can we trust the United States if we get into war? And I don't think necessarily that answer is yes, per se, despite what the alliance, what's written on the paper.

Professor David Kang, thank you so much for your time today. Final question I always ask my guests is, how has your research shaped your outlook on humanity?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be part of this, truly. Probably the biggest way that my research has changed the way I think about the world and my view on humanity is that the more that I've done scholarship, whether it's the original stuff I was doing on economic growth, and political economy and corruption in East Asia, and now obviously for decades on history, it's that our values and our beliefs are far more central to our behavior than as simple as some kind of cost-benefit analysis. I see this again and again and again. And I think we as scholars, as social scientists, we're much more comfortable with cost-benefit. Well, they're doing it for this reason, but I think people are motivated by what their values are and what they believe in. So much more than just are they going to benefit or not? And I see that across individual behavior and then the way that countries behave.

Less exciting. All right.

Thank you, by the way.

Not quite as profound question, but the Imjin War, are there any good books about it?

In no particular order, and just ones that come up, Liam Kelly's Beyond the Bronze Pillars about China-Vietnam historical relations is eye-opening. Eye-opening in how Vietnam viewed China. I would say Six Wang's book, which is the one that you quoted, Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Joseon Diplomacy with Ming China that just came out. That's a great book. That's a great book. I really like, for reasons that are, you know, I don't agree with everything at all, but I like Wang Yuhua's book. Yu Hao Wang wrote a book about state formation in China. It's much more material and cost benefit than my work, but he's getting to questions of how China grew and how it became centralized. And there's a book by Bin Wang. I can't find it now. But also on China, China over the centuries and how the Chinese experience is very different about its growth than the European one. Those are some of my favorite books.

Is it China Transformed?

Yes, China Transformed. Yes, that's the one. Elizabeth Berry wrote a biography of Hideyoshi, which is really insightful.

And since we brought up Hawaii, I just want to shout out The Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands by Gavin Dawes.

Oh, awesome.

It's one of the more beautifully written books I've ever come across. Like I probably read ten Hawaii books at this point, and it's just like far and away the best one. And in particular, does a great job of telling that story of the transition between you know being this kingdom and like you know having America ultimately end up in possession. All right, folks. Well, thanks so much for being a part of China Talk, everyone.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, okay. This was great. Thank you.

Come, all ye faithful, and adore the newborn King. Come, all ye faithful, and adore the newborn King. Come, all ye faithful, and adore the newborn King.

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