While researching the future of America’s contest with China, Evan Osnos visited Joan Xu, an American screenwriter with an office at a WeWork downtown:
She wore a slate-blue silk shirt and jeans, and handed me coffee in a mug with a WeWork slogan: “Do what you love.” Xu’s parents emigrated from China to the U.S. to attend graduate school in economics. She was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Maryland. “I grew up in white suburbs with other lawyers’ and professors’ kids,” she said. In 2003, when she was fourteen, the family moved to Beijing. Her mother became a professor at Peking University, and Xu entered a prestigious middle school, where she had to catch up by learning to read and write Chinese. “Before that, I was very much single-culture,” she said. “Now we were memorizing poems written two thousand years ago. That was just mind-blowing to me, coming from an American education, where two hundred years is old.”
After high school, she returned to the U.S. to attend Harvard, where she sang in an a-cappella group and reëmbraced American life. In her application, she described wanting to be “a U.S.-China bridge” who might bring the countries closer together. “Everybody was, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’ ” she said. She loved Harvard, where she majored in political science, but a tone in her classes surprised her. “My sophomore tutorial was themed ‘Democracy.’ It was basically a whole year of every famous professor coming in and giving a lecture about why democracy is the only legitimate form of governance.” She told me, “It felt like the political classes in high school in China, where everyone knows it’s propaganda. It didn’t encompass the world I’d known.”
Xu moved back to Beijing in 2012, and eventually started working on co-productions between Chinese and American filmmakers. “It was, like, ‘Oh, this is the future! The two greatest countries producing culture together.’ ” Her optimism has since waned. “It has become pretty clear in the last few years that the Hollywood-China co-production is not a thing. It still happens financially; it just didn’t happen creatively.” A breaking point came in 2016, with the release of a historical fantasy called “The Great Wall,” directed by Zhang Yimou; it starred Matt Damon as a warrior with Chinese comrades, all fending off monsters. In the hype preceding its release, the producer hailed it as “a new kind of film.” Afterward, USA Today judged it “a complete train wreck.” Xu told me, “No one has attempted to do a large-scale creative collaboration like that again.” She went on, “It was already, conceptually, about as middle ground as a blockbuster had gotten. So, it was just, like, ‘O.K., there is no middle ground. Culturally it’s just too different.’ ” Chinese audiences will watch Chinese movies, or American blockbusters, but the combination doesn’t work.
Xu still wants to be bicultural, but she finds it increasingly difficult to combine both sets of values. “All of my friends who are similar to me in Beijing, in every one of our industries, ‘U.S.-China’ is not a thing anymore,” she said. “We’re basically seen as just China people now.”
Xu told me she is “pro-China,” and I asked what she meant. “Most people who are within the sphere of the West kind of reflexively look at China and see, ‘Oh, wow, totalitarian dictatorship, oppression, no human rights, suffering.’ Just evil, right? To be ‘pro-China’ is simply to realize that’s not right; there is much more going on. It’s not perfect, but it’s just simply an alternative system.” She went on, “I would say that the ideals of human rights are not bad to aim for, but it’s not a universal, God-given thing. It was something that was consensus-driven at a certain point in Western history. If you look at Chinese social progression, things are genuinely getting better for most people, despite the problems. It’s more of a battle of narratives about values.”
I, for one, have little desire to live under even a 21st century version of traditional Chinese social and political values, whatever that might look like. It’s too alien, for all that some bloggers I follow sympathize with it.
If a 21st century version of traditional China looks like the nightmare they have now, then I definitely don’t want to be a part of it.
On the other hand, the model of “governance” being pressed by today’s Harvard types under the banner of Democracy ["Our Democracy"], the Rules Based International Order, Identity Politics for me and not for thee, management of difference by a professionalized political elite, the creation of difference for them to manage, and so on, does not resemble liberal democracy as I inherited it, with free parliaments [or equivalents], competitive party politics defined by ideology and interests, and open talk.
So I do have to laugh if they are doubling down at the freshman level classes. That wasn’t necessary 30 years ago.
If I could pick, probably a Constitutional Monarchy (where the Monarch does have real political power). But I would also want it geographically limited. The Monarch has to be within comfortable striking distance by his/her subjects.
None of it works, really. Not over the long haul, and not with changing cultural matrices underneath the structure of the governing institutions.
You set up a constitutional monarchy, and what happens? The nature of things being what they are, you eventually throw up a Caligula or a George III–Doesn’t matter if you do it by election or by inheritance, the same factors fall in on it, and you inevitably find yourself devolving into Spain under the Hapsburgs or Poland under its feckless system.
Similarly, republics don’t fare much better. Oligarchy eventually takes over, as in Venice or America, and then where are you?
The only real answer is to either put up with the cyclic decay punctuated by revolution and anarchy, or to simply say “Enough”, and stop doing this stupid crap. My take, after a lifetime of reading and observation, is this: Humans don’t do organization very well past about the level of hunter-gatherer band, and that relies on a constant turmoil of competing bands going through the same cyclic rise-good times-corruption-fall sequence, only on a small enough scale that it doesn’t matter overall. It’s how we populated the Americas, and spread out from Africa–There were no massive bureaucracies that pushed out, only small bands working their way around the world.
When you stop and think about it, that’s probably the most successful model for our species–Small bands competing with each other, maybe gathering for tasks requiring large-scale cooperation, and then collapsing again into chaos. Call it the “Buffalo hunt” model, if you like.
The root of the problem is that power attracts the wrong people, and encourages them in their folly. You set up a system where there are large power sinks, and sure as day follows night, the sociopathic types are going to gravitate towards them. You don’t solve that by trying to control their abuses, you stop that by not having the power sink in the first damn place. In a world where men like Adolf Hitler can only rant to his immediate circle, and there’s no machinery of the state to coopt, he’s a simple nuisance crank who might get up to violence all on his own, but who won’t be able to murder millions.
You want to know the real source of the problem? Look in the mirror; it’s you, and everyone like you who’s willing to accede power to these types, unwilling to be their own independent agent. Adolf Hitler wasn’t a phenomenon of “Adolf Hitler, Man of Evil”, he was the product of millions of Germans choosing to listen to his BS, buy into it, and then make him powerful through their support. Blaming him for what happened is like blaming the match for a fire–If you hadn’t built up the combustibles and then dropped the match into them, there wouldn’t have been a fire in the first place. Which is why German protestations of innocence in regards to what happened during WWII fall on unsympathetic ears, with me–If you hadn’t have given the Nazis all that power, none of that whole mess would have gotten out of the beer halls in Munich.
Collectively, human beings are really bad at setting up long-lasting institutions. It’s about time we recognized that fact, and quit trying. There is no “magic recipe” for it–It all ends in tears. So, quit trying to make it work. Stop building these organizational man-traps that accrue more and more power, which attracts more and more dangerously crazy people into their ranks.
You want a model for what I’m talking about, look at the FBI of today. Granted, it’s always had more than an air of corruption (name another agency run by the same man from the late 1920s until his death in the 1970s… I’ll wait.), but the recent revelations show just how bad it’s gotten, in terms of attracting the wrong people. Who are, I might point out, also extremely incompetent–Strzok and Page, texting their plans to overthrow an election, on government-owned devices? LOL… I know 12 year-old girls who practice better fieldcraft, and who maintain better operational security.
My take is that we all need to grow up, and recognize that putting your faith and trust in any form of government is a damn crock. They all fail, and when they do, the fall-out kills millions. You’re better off not setting them up, in the first damn place.
Kirk,
And then you have a zillion tiny tribes always fighting against each other for loot and women – women being the biggest prize, most of what men do is usually about sex. Either loot to impress a father enough to marry his daughter or just a sex slave girl from the defeated tribe.
Civilization is about defeating all this tribalism. And my opinion is the extreme opposite – it takes a Caesar to make a Pax Romana. It takes an Emperor to stop the Chinese fighting with each other.
Yes. Caesars sucked. Nero and Tiberius and all those. But the specific way they sucked was that they were brutal on the elites – on people who could have challenged their power. For the average peasant, Caesars were generally good. They kept the peace, they kept various tribes from killing, looting and raping them.
The mistake of the modern, one could also say, Americanist, or libertarian view is to see Power as inherently Leftist. Putting an equation sign between Lenin and Augustus. It is not actually so but it would take longer to explain it than a comment. Generally, look up Moldbug.
The core point is this: our big problem is not that Power opresses us. Our big problem is that people fight for power all the time and do a lot of damage during that. This is why tribalism is terrible. This is why we need Government. This is why we need Imperium. This is why we need one dude to say “I rule” – and enforce, so that we do not suffer from everybody fighting for power. This is why the Brotherhood Without Banners is right – does not matter who wins, just one should win and rule. Ruling implies suppressing fighting for power – which is terrible for the people. As for the all the evil did by the rulers – they were modern, revolutionary-dictator rulers. The evil they did was a continuation of fighting for power – killing all potential rivals.
“If a 21st century version of traditional China looks like the nightmare they have now, then I definitely don’t want to be a part of it.”
The 21st Century version of traditional China is not mainland China. Mao and the Red Guards broke the chain, and stamped communism in deep. The fact that the imposition of the simplified writing system made the classical texts much less accessible to the general public is only one part of it.
The 21st Century of traditional China is, for now at least, Taiwan. Taiwan still uses the traditional writing system, and up until the Westernization of the past decade or two, the educational system would have been quite recognizable to someone educated in the late Imperial period, and not just beatings in the classroom for not knowing your stuff but also the content, including calligraphy with a quill pen and plenty of instruction in the classics. On my last couple of trips a cab driver was reciting whole paragraphs of Confucius in the original classical Chinese to an appreciative passenger, and a TV comedy, of the sort that features buckets of water dumped on unsuspecting coeds, included one of Mencius’s disciples riding up on a motorcycle to unveil an appropriate proverb. The Tai Chi masters there can trace their lineage of instruction back long before the revolution, as (I suppose but do not know for certain) do the practitioners of traditional medicine, some of whom now pick up Western M.D.’s for good measure.
The Taiwanese moan about their politicians, but there seems to be a good balance of top-down planning with the democratic ability to kick the worst of the bums out, and overall the island seems a damn pleasant place to live.
Of course in the last 15 years, the educational system has been completely revamped along, I gather, more Western lines (no more classroom beatings) and the birth rate has plummeted, so the jury is still out as to the society’s ultimate success.
But as I shake my head both at what democracy has wrought in the West and at the techno-cult of Xi on the mainland, it is hard not to root for the plucky Taiwanese and hope they can thread the needle between the two systems.
Yes, Dividualist, strong kings suck in a very specific way: they loot the country and sell it off to their friends for pennies on the dollar.
To you it’s a foreign political tradition, but consider the Founding Fathers’ famous phrase: “No taxation without representation.”
Embedded deep, deep within is an understanding that your general well-being is coincident with your de facto political representation. In other words, it’s a great life in the capital, but GOD forbid you live in the hinterlands.
Progressives know this, but conservatives, neoconservatives, and neoreactionaries apparently do not.
Many think that doublethink is an indelible tribal marker.
Of all the systems of government Representative Democracy with qualified electorate works best. What most of the US used to have before Supreme Court rulings changed this. (It can be changed back
“…I shake my head both at what democracy has wrought in the West…”
The main problem with all these systems is that psychopaths and other bizarre control freak people climb the ladder and with most of them Pure Democracy, Kings, Oligarchs, you can not get rid of them without massive violence which is what you don’t want.
We want the “possibility” of changing things so that if the friction gets high enough we can throw the bums out. Taiwan was given as an example. A good one except I’m not so sure, actually have no data, on whether the voters have qualifications or not.
We want decentralization. That things have been changed to centralize power doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It’s defeatist to say there’s no way at all to change things and it’s just not true.
There’s a way to re-balance interest without firing a shot, calling in a Dictator, nominating a King or any other such radical proposals. If we were to stop worrying about what the Left thinks of us, they will hate us no matter what so…, we could wrap this whole thing up in our favor in about 6 months and we should. They will use every bit of power they have to suppress us. I’m actually not in favor of us doing the same philosophically to them. But in this case there’s unattainable moral goals and there’s the practical aspects of attaining and keeping enough power to be free and the two sometimes conflict. We must be practical if the other side is going all out for complete controlling power then we must counter it to save ourselves. How to do this.
The overarching principle in all these is to balance cities and rural interest. We’ve had trouble with this before, (Civil War), the urban interest won and have been consolidating power every since.
1. First we make sure all voters have some qualifications, high school diploma or equivalent, maybe pay a certain amount of property taxes, the actual numbers are not so important. The idea is that the voter have some skin in the game. Be a taxpayer or retired taxpayer who has put into the system instead of just receiving. This was ruled against by the Supreme court but this ruling can be tossed in the trash by a 51% vote in the House and Senate. Federal judges can be told what their jurisdiction is. It’s written right into the Constitution.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii
“…In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…”
“…with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…” The important part. The earlier part declares what powers they have but it ends with control of these functions by Congress. Congress could tell them to butt out of any Homosexual marriage rulings. They could do that with with lots of stuff they keep ramming down our throats. They could be stuck with only deciding water rights cases between States if they push too hard to SJW the Constitution to death.
2. Federal judges, once again, have ruled that in the States there can only be representatives based on proportional representation of the population. Before they had representation in the Senates of most States based on regions and population based representation in the Houses. Just like the Federal government structure. This change gives more power to urban areas. This ruling too can be thrown out.
3. Make sure all votes are by real registered and documented voters. Voter fraud is at extreme levels in the cities. They have more people voting than there are even voters in some districts. With the other two rules in place we would have the power to just call all their votes illegal and ignore them. We could have an electronic voting system that is foolproof against fraud, (this can be done I’m 100% positive and I even have a simple cheap way to implement). The votes could NOT be changed and each person and organization could 100% check each vote for themselves. How to implement this here,(Need to scroll down the comment as there’s some stuff on WWI that has nothing to do with it).
https://www.unz.com/estriker/the-last-days-of-the-holocaust/#comment-3693236
The only problem with any of the systems is you must control who gets to vote in the first place and who is authorized to vote. With the two other powers in place this could be assured.
If most States changed to the older method designed to protect minority rights, rural areas, then it would vastly improve our position. These two changes would insure that we could not be rolled over legislatively. Now some States may be lost already like California but they will lose power anyways because of the complete stupidity and incompetence of their Representatives. Detroit and other minority run cites have the same problems. In California the destruction of the spillway caused by not repairing cracks in it raising the cost from maybe $2 million to repair the cracks to as much as $500 million is illustrative of the way they run things. Not to mention they destroyed a valve in the dam that should have let the water out and they didn’t move heaven and Earth to repair it even knowing the record water level coming.
All it would take is willpower to do this. The Republicans by party line vote had the power to do this but flunked out and so do most States now. I would say the majority. If pushed we could force the same on the other States with Constitutional amendments after power is consolidated.
So in reality we had a perfectly good system, (not perfect as there is no such thing), and the same assholes that screw up everything screwed it up. We just need to re-implement what we had.
As for Representative Democracy in the Republics like (Venice???). failing. I don’t think they failed. I think they were killed which is a very different thing and really doesn’t accurately gauge what happened.
To be fair to Venice, it showed that a republic could last a long time, and it worked very well with a restricted electorate and a whole string of checks and balances among its councils and Doge.
But it benefited from being a small state with a coherent identity and an oligarch class with a coherent enough sense of self and its interests to work. Never big enough to have that elite fall all over itself in civil wars with the plunder of huge provinces. Just a few colonies and a lot of vulnerable but lucrative trading posts.
It also vaulted to a position of disproportionate power by being a maritime trading state with small territory and having come up with some useful institutions [or shared them with other North Italian small states] for organizing such a territory, when larger states had neither the infrastructure nor concepts to organize their larger territories nearly as well. Give those larger states a leg up, and even immediate post-feudal France is suddently vastly larger, richer, more populous, and militarily more capable than anything any Italian city state could put up. Charles VIII of France from 1498 cut through the north of Italy pretty easily, a harbinger of centuries to come.
In the end, Venice was still fighting the Turks with somewhat lesser success into the 18th century, but its commercial, industrial, and technological leads over other Europeans were gone. ANd it rapidly turned into a sort of tourism state of a kind familiar to us today, with not the slightest hope of self-defense or plausible allied protection when Napoleon snuffed it out in 1797. Nor, seemingly, anywhere near sufficient population mourning it to see it reconstituted in 1814-15. Even anti-Austrian factions by then had other ideas for an Italian future.
So it’s hard to not see it as a walking corpse long before it was killed. For reasons of technology, organizational development, geopolitics and economics more than institutional failure, granted. Though I have never seen anyone claiming its institutions were exactly vigorous in its last century.
Not an attempt to insult Venice- nothing lasts forever.
Sometimes I figure that last point is the one modern discussions of politics etc. wilfully ignore. Sooner or later your government will collapse, your state will fall, your nation disarticulate, and your civilization end in ruins. There is no magic formula to prevent it. There are formulas that might stave it off given particular external conditions. And you should always fight tooth and nail against aspirational successors, of course. Sometimes you’ll win, proving they weren’t yet the successors.