> Why don’t we just hire a Chinese person (maybe an immigrant, if we don’t trust the ones still in the PRC) to tell us what the Chinese National Character is? Why do we sent smart Americans to China to figure out what it’s like? There are literally over a billion people who already know that!
Isn't there a simple this-is-water explanation to that? You sort of hint at this yourself with his comments on party organization: important characteristics of America are invisible to Americans like me because that's just how things are, _of course_, how else would you do it? You have to go somewhere else and ask a Frenchman "Hey, why is it normal for you to shut down cities with strikes" or a Placer the equivalent stereotype of Place before they realize that's a fact that needs an explanation (and is worth discussing the consequences of.)
You could, possibly, send Chinese academics to America, let them observe what's different, then have them return to China to write _about China_, but I think it's somewhat easier to see what's odd about a foreign land and describe it than to see what that implies about your home? At least, I think I can point out a lot more of the oddities about places I've been than I was able to say "huh, why is American not like that?"
Largely because what the national character is isn't a real objective question. If you want objective facts there are a billion academic studies of cultural differences and differences in political attitudes.
Saying what the national character of a country is reflects a judgement about what you think is the most important features of a place. A conservative Christian is going to value different aspects of American character than an overeducated atheist like me.
> You have to go somewhere else and ask a Frenchman "Hey, why is it normal for you to shut down cities with strikes"
"Normal" is a bit of an overstatement. Right now, even though tensions are still extremely high over the pension reform, I can still move around Paris and barely notice anything is going on.
Heck, I live in Paris and the only knowledge of the “troubles” I have is from my family and friends in other countries telling me they saw something about it on TV. Also I think I saw a video on Twitter sometime in the last few months. And I’m not even French to be used to it.
Is the purpose of a somethingorother studies department really to define what the characterof somethingorother is? I rather think the idea is to study different sometingorothers to understand them better from a variety of perspectives and to integrate valuable aspects of their system / culture / history / perspective with ours, or at least appreciate them. Also to avoid destructive / disfunctional etc aspects. Asking members of a culture, say, Chinese, about their culture can of course be helpful, but an informed outsider view can also be.
The really interesting and somewhat disturbing part of this review is how shallow and uninformed the author seems to be about US society, culture and politics, given his subsequent rise to such an elevated position of inlfuence in China. It does seem like much Chinese policy may be affected by views like those quoted in the review. Makes me think I have overestimated the intellectual strength of current Chinese leadership.
This whole idea of a "Chinese National Character" or even more strange, a "US National Character" seems very bizarre to me. Yes, you could say there is something that could be called a US (or more commonly,, American) National Character , but, it's pretty indefinite, variable in time and geography, and contains lots of internal contradictions and variations. The idea of a national character probably means something different to a Chinese national than it does to most Americans, but I suspect it's not a very useful term in that context either, except for those trying to whip up nationalism and jingoism.
The comments about Japan vs US deep cultural differences seem particularly ignorant for someone so influential in China. A huge aspect of Japanese culture is the adoption of aspects of other cultures. Then there's the post war role of the US in restructuring Japan's political and economic systems, including democratization, adoption of a liberalized constitution, land reform and business restructuring. So, the Japan Wang Huning was writing about was deeply influenced by American ideas and values. Talking about deep differences between the "characters" of the two countries without mentioning these influences seems deeply uninformed to me. And typical of what's reported here about Huning's book.
In the specific case of China, the point is usually not to observe the People's Republic but to study China from before the revolution. After all, there was a great, ancient civilization that imploded in the early 20th century. While there are some echoes of it that can be observed in daily life in the PRC, most meaningful research requires examining texts and physical artifacts. Up until very recently, almost all scholarship in the PRC could only examine the world through a Marxist lens, and even today, everyday language still carries Marxist baggage. There's something to be said for an outside perspective that doesn't necessarily take it as axiomatic that Chinese culture was to blame for Manchu political failures.
I loved that sentence, too. Not sure it was a non-rhetorical question. ;) My answer is: Those fine jobs paid for by Americans are for Americans, mostly. And in my country: mostly for Germans (there are some Americans in "Amerikanistik", sure, but then: "some" - most of the native English speakers are mostly busy doing language-instruction). - Though any US-experts from the US would be hit daily with demands to explain so many aspects: they will learn rather quickly to develop new insights about their USofA. And they are more likely to find the better answers. (Also: German teaching books in US-colleges and schools are mostly not done by German publishers - Hueber is our market leader. Is it because the US-authors know more about how to teach US-students and thus make better books? - Nope. - Hysterically laughing: Nope! )
Former Middle Eastern Studies student here -- the academics in our department were overwhelmingly foreigners from the region who moved to the U.S. for their degrees.
I do think that the way we handle regulation in America is an important question. I think America has a low level of agreement on values relative to most countries but values people being able to have different values. If you have general agreement on values you don't need as many detailed legalistic rules. You can have rules that just ban something like behavior likely to deny your neighbor enjoyment of their property.
For instance, how do you deal with the situation where a neighbor insists on sunbathing nude where they can be seen from the window of a family of conservative Christians? In Germany, their shared culture has values respecting nudism/naturalism so the judgement goes against them. In Japan they would no doubt lose. But in the US you have the problem that you might get very different answers depending on who is making the judgement. That tends to mean we solve these problems via very explicit and legalistic means.
That solution tends to work pretty well if government is relatively small and is primarily about settling private disputes. However, we are discovering it's very difficult to extend this approach to large government programs. If you want the government to handle healthcare or even have job and housing programs you tend to get lots of inefficient legalistic rules.
> if the family sues the nudists for nuisance, they will lose, and if they go over there and threatens them, that's a crime and they go to jail. Even if the family goes to the city council and has nudism declared illegal, the virtually-certain result is that the nudists can go to court and a federal judge will say they have a First Amendment right to be naked
This is good, actually. The project of America is to shift responsibility of figuring out how to make differing values work in a diverse society to the domain where it makes sense, which is innovative & creative solutions within the communities (or markets) themselves. The Good Life will always look different to different groups of people. America says that this is usually not the government's job to fix — if you don't like the nudists being there, add a frosted glass screen onto your patio and call it a day. Or, maybe go talk to them and see if there's a compromise to be reached. This is what it takes to work with your fellow citizens.
You don't see the difference between freedom to do as you like on your own property and the "freedom" to force others to conform to your standards of behaviour so that you are never inadvertently offended by the sight of something you find distasteful? If something you see offends you, the onus is on you to avert your gaze.
Of course we don't give people the absolute freedom to do as they like on their own property. Try enacting Aztec ritual human sacrifice in your back yard, and you'll soon see the limits of "I can do what I want, if you don't like it avert your gaze".
If the nudists don't like the Christian family putting up a placard in their front yard that next door is on board the fast train to Hell, let them avert their gaze. Acceptable?
If the nudists want to sunbathe in their back garden that has hedges/fences so you can't stand in your back garden and see them, fine. The problem is if you look out the upstairs window and get to see a lot more of next door neighbours than you really ever wanted to know.
Suppose I'm not a Christian family. Suppose I get out my smartphone and start snapping pictures to put up on social media? Suppose I invite people round to look out my upstairs window at next door nudists sunbathing? Am I okay since "it's my property and I can do what I want on it"?
Of course there are edge cases and exceptions to every rule, we live in the real world, not the platonic realm of pure forms. But the point is that your brother in Christ upthread is claiming that there is no fundamental difference between liberal and theocratic social ideals, that we're all secretly perfectionists trying to impose our vision of the good life on everyone else. I'm saying that there is a fundamental difference, in that the theocratic ideal requires the domination of those who do not share the vision, while the liberal ideal posits that it is encumbent on all persons to define a space in which their particular vision can have free reign, even if it is only within their own heart, and that no one else is required to go along with it. The only freedom that liberalism requires you to give up is the freedom to dominate others.
"If the nudists don't like the Christian family putting up a placard in their front yard that next door is on board the fast train to Hell, let them avert their gaze. Acceptable?"
You didn't ask me, but I'm all for that being *legal*. If you want more control over your neighborhood, buy a house with an HOA that matches your values. The term *acceptable* has multiple potential meanings. I'm in favor of speech being legal that I would not consider to be 'acceptable.' But I'd work against unacceptable speech without calling the police or invoking state violence.
I'm willing to compromise in terms of allowing laws which require some kinds of barriers in order to maintain social harmony. But it's not my ideal.
If you're taking pictures and distributing them without permission that gets into a grey area of people owning their likeness, regardless of whether someone is wearing clothes or not.
I'd tend to say that it should be legal. But there's probably some fair case that it shouldn't, also, based on people owning their likeness or some similar legalese.
If you gather the neighbors around and watch someone in their yard then that may be creepy, but it should be legal. Are you going to have the cops come out and force people to stop looking? The nudists have abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy.
"Try enacting Aztec ritual human sacrifice in your back yard, and you'll soon see the limits of "I can do what I want, if you don't like it avert your gaze"."
A person's physical body remains *their* property, even if they are on your land.
Are we assuming that the sacrificed individual gave informed consent here?
I doubt if the law would actually accept nudism in practice on one’s own property. Plenty of property abuts the street with no fencing or cover. Hanging around naked as the school kids pass is probably an offence in most jurisdictions. Property laws are not that absolute.
The city council intervening would *also* be the government meddling; the judicial branch of the Federal government keeping that on a leash is still a net reduction in active government.
You've elided a key adjective when quoting me: "active".
One part of the government (the courts) are preventing another (the city council) from taking action against a citizen. The citizen is thus experiencing less impact from government as a whole.
I don't think liberalism claims not to make value judgements at all. Rather, it makes a clear value judgement about individual autonomy and freedom (eg more important than stopping ppl from advertising satanism in public). As such, there isn't any fundamental tension between these values and big public programs like healthcare. Those liberal values would say: fuck the ppl who don't want the government to fund abortion we believe in individual choice. I mean, that's a lot less extreme than the position of religious tolerance was back when we took religion seriously and really thought having the wrong beliefs would lead to an eternity of damnation.
Rather, the issue results because we don't actually all share strong liberal values or any other values. Yes, ofc gov has to make value choices but the problem with not having a clear consensus is that you need to have extensive and expensive oversight and detailed rules because you can't simply trust the person enforcing the laws to do the reasonable thing. And you can't solve that problem while we have such diverse values.
And No the nudists won't win in the us. Most places have laws regulating publicly visible nudity and the courts have been willing to uphold them against 1st amendment challenges (and usually against gender based challenges for female toplessness).
But, the issue is that we do need pretty explicit rules here because some quite a few Americans would see that kind of nudity as totally unobjectionable and tell the neighbors to get over it. OTOH there are also plenty of Americans who would like to tell the nudists on their walled enclosures they have to put on clothes because young boys can climb to the top of a nearby hill and see in with binoculars.
This reminds me of the “factoid” I had heard many years ago that Japan has ~10x fewer lawyers per capita and that was part of the reason it was outperforming the US.
Less time wasted in lawsuits and legalese protections from lawsuits and such.
Whatever the trust to that, assuming there is some, maybe it is simply an outgrowth of having more unified national values.
I heard the same, but heard that it was because Japan basically doesn't respect rule of law, and the Japanese court system is corrupt to the core. I suspect the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
This is fantastic, and the comparison to de Tocquville is very interesting. de Tocquville (and his contemporary the Marquis du Custine who wrote a similar book about Russia) seem to have been extremely insightful about core and definitive cultural attributes, where Wang Huning is mostly documenting differences. I am now very intrigued as to why this might be...
I'd say that the reason why we remember de Tocqueville 2 centuries later is that he was unusually insightful, and we've forgotten about his less perspicacious peers. Also, he spent longer in the US, came from a more similar culture (so that he had better reference points for the differences), and travelled more broadly.
"In the early 2000s, everyone in the West thought China would inevitably democratize; surely it was impossible to for a rich, technologically advanced nation of the sort China was becoming to remain a pseudo-communist autocracy."
Really, one of the astonishing things about the US is how we spent so much time and effort trying to push everyone into becoming a liberal democracy, and then, whenever it bears fruit, declare, "See, this was simply the inevitable tide of history."
I mean, seriously. The idea that economic development drove democratization in South Korea and Taiwan is silly. Lots of the world democratized to one degree or another starting in the late 1980s, after the Soviets admitted they were losing the Cold War (by allowing Gorbachev to push reforms), because now the US was in a position to demand it, rather than tolerating allied dictators. Ortega didn't cut a deal for elections in Nicaragua because Nicaragua had gotten wealthy, and neither was economic development why Pinochet stepped aside in Chile.
Similarly, the elimination of authoritarian monarchy in Europe wasn't an inevitable side-effect of industrialization, it was the result of their defeat in World War I. Nobody was more industrialized in Europe in 1914 than Imperial Germany. If the United States had formed a realpolitik alliance with the Central Powers (in order to pursue ordinary territorial ambitions like "acquire neighboring Canada and the West Indies, currently controlled by Britain and France"), there's no reason to expect that the kaisers would have ceased to rule in Berlin or Vienna. Indeed, the likely result of the war would have been a restoration of monarchy in defeated France, while some White army backed by the Germans and Austrians restored a czar in Russia.
Note that pretty much everywhere "freed" from autocratic monarchs by WWI reverted to autocracies within a generation, after the American people got tired of spending blood and treasure on the effort. And that when democracy returned to the continent, it advanced behind the US Army.
And, of course, there are all those people who claim the fall of the Soviet Union was "inevitable", as if the Soviets didn't have plenty of resources to maintain repression throughout the Warsaw Pact. The Reagan military buildup was publicly and explicitly proclaimed as specifically and intentionally aiming at ending the Cold War with a US victory, and it was the Soviet inability to match it without reforms that forced the Soviets to give Gorbachev his head.
The simple truth is that the US spent the last 110 years exerting a lot of effort in shoving its basic form of government down the world's throats, and the result was a fair amount of success.
I find this an interesting objection to liberal international dogma, it moves me a few degrees, but I'm still conflicted about the ultimate thesis.
It seems like you're pointing out that the positive correlation with industrialization and liberalization is imperfect, there are lots of counterexamples. From that you're arguing that the counterexamples undermine any causative explanation, so the real cause was the US imposing democratization against these places' natural tendencies.
But... US preference for democratization is also an imperfect correlation, and a lot of these populations had independent agency and pushed for it, and there isn't a single moment where the US cleanly flipped its national policy away from supporting strongmen that aid US national interests to supporting pluralistic electorates, an interest in its own right. It was schizophrenic about this for a long time and arguably still is today, with different factions within the massive US foreign policy establishment prioritizing vastly different things.
So your argument is so strong it pushes me straight to agnosticism. Maybe dressed up as "well all these things are probably weak but real factors, and local conditions predominate."
I think ancient Persia provides an instructive counterargument to the idea of linear trendlines in history, if you're shopping for one. If you dig through the age, you read about hundreds of years of freedom and openness, followed by hundreds of years of strict repression and control, followed by hundreds of years of liberalism, followed by hundreds of years of authoritarianism. (Possibly all just Achaemenidean and Hittite propaganda but nonetheless.) It's a bit of a Hari Seldon take I guess, we're all just riding the sine wave. Humanity: Sometimes we're like this. Sometimes we're like this other thing.
> Americans cooked food, strictly according to the recipe, strict measurement of various condiments, with a variety of measuring tools, a minute do not want to differ. Chinese people cooking, rarely look at the recipe, grab a handful is. The progress of science and technology in American society, the development of more and more specialized supplies, they require each person who wants to use them must comply with the rules.
This also shocked some of my Brazilian friends: when I said I would show them how to make cupcakes, I insisted on getting some measuring cups and spoons so we could follow a recipe. (While also secretly admiring the Europeans who are using more precise weight-based recipes using digital scales, pressing TARE before adding a specified number of grams of each new ingredient.) None of the Brazilians seemed to have a set of measuring spoons in their kitchens; various people said that you could cook or bake based on instinct, or if you needed a "tablespoon" of something, you could just get some kind of spoon from the kitchen and use a spoonful instead of getting a specific spoon with a capacity of 14.79 mL.
I thought that especially for baking that it was supposed to be easy to mess things up by using the wrong amount of leavening or liquid or something, maybe as opposed to a soup where you could add things "to taste", and I didn't feel like I had any kind of intuition for what the different ingredients in the baking recipe were meant to accomplish. Or even for making something like pesto, I would worry about potentially overshooting with far too much salt if I didn't measure it out using a recipe... because it would feel like one could mess it up easily in a way that would be complicated to recover from.
I have tried baking and my experience is that it's very easy to mess up by using the wrong amount of anything, although you can sometimes recover by knowing what it's supposed to look/feel/taste like and adding more of something until it does. But when I first start making a new recipe I don't know what it's supposed to be like or how to correct it if it seems bad.
From some conversations I've had with non-American coworkers, this is possibly a key difference. If you grew up cooking with your family, and go on to cook mostly what they cooked, you never need recipes. Most of my generation, at least, didn't ever learn to cook at home growing up.
That seems like a helpful point. I learned to cook almost nothing from my family, so it seems like I'm almost starting from zero with a wide range of recipes. (Plus, I'm interested in cooking things that I didn't grow up with.)
I grew up cooking with my family a lot, but it was mostly American and Italian. There's a lot of techniques I just never learned, and those I learned on my own as an adult. I found cookbooks didn't help me much, because most recipes are not great and because tastes vary, but books with a more technical bent like Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" or anything written by Kenji Lopez-Alt were extremely useful.
I also found it was *very* hard to find, say, English-language sources for what to use in Chinese dishes that didn't make ridiculous substitutions like ketchup (this is getting better, but it still happens a lot). I had the ingredients available locally once I knew what they were, I genuinely just had a hard time figuring out what to use.
Once I developed a wider range of techniques, the best book I found was "The Flavor Bible." Not a cookbook, but just the results of surveying a bunch of chefs about a bunch of ingredients asking "What goes with this?" So I can look up "carrots" and it'll give me a list of things like "butter" and "maple" and so on. Simple, and not so useful for a novice, but the only food book I decided was worth the space when I sold my house and started living in an RV.
Most younger Americans I know who cook are always trying new recipes. We have famous old cookbooks where it's a massive achievement to cook every recipe in the book even just once, the expectation is you will have far more recipes in one book than anyone could possibly need.[1]
A lot of my older acquaintances, especially from overseas, have a stable of simple recipes from their family they barely ever stray from. (Maybe this is just the economics of running a family rather than culture, it might just be age and family size driven rather than country of origin, not sure.)
These are different styles of cooking and one's more suited to instinct, the other to measurement.
[1] Did the rise of the cookbook itself inspire this insatiable desire to constantly try new foods and dishes? Ok probably not, cookbooks are ancient, but it's fun to imagine "Big Cookbook" deliberately, subliminally encouraging a broad cultural preference for constant culinary novelty. They'd write fawning newspaper copy for new dishes, like in this old NYT article-- "The pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew more about it!" https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/04/13/1944-the-times-discovers-pizza/
I think there's *some* of that "big cookbook" component, in the context of mid-century America trying to promote new industrialized ingredients and products, and a supposedly scientific mindset to diet. But I think that also created a gap of 1-2 generations that just didn't pass on much of its knowledge, and that knowledge is now gone, and if I want to learn how to cook what my grandma ate as I kid I need to rediscover it for myself.
Edit to add: quality of ingredients is also much more variable, and hard to capture in a recipe, in the US than elsewhere. If I'm grocery shopping in France, I can trust my vegetables and fruits and meats will mostly be good quality. In the US, not so much. Until I buy and open a package of chicken, I have no idea how it will cook, or how much seasoning it will need. This makes precise recipes less reliable, but *also* means that successfully doing things by eye or feel or instinct requires more experience to do well. Which of those effects wins out depends on how good a cook you are and how well you know the specific thing you're trying to make.
Side note: I travel full time so I'm always grocery shopping in different places. I never know what's going to be available or good from week to week, and just have to adapt and improvise. One time I was planning on having salad, but the local supermarket (whose sign literally said "The only grocery store in town,") did not carry lettuce. At all. They weren't out, there just wasn't a spot for it in the produce department.
So even for someone who grew up cooking with their family in the US, they could suddenly find their knowledge useless or wrong if they move a few counties or states away.
Yeah, I can see that. There are also natural changes in what we have access to and consider high quality ingredients. In the 1950s there are all these dishes that celebrate new industrial distribution. Canned pineapple and maraschino cherries and spam start going in everything. Ambrosia turns mass produced confections into a "salad."
A few generations back in my family and there was a lot of cooking with small game and small lake fish that was all pretty labor intensive to clean and cook. It's a lost art but I don't actually feel too guilty about not putting quail or rabbit on the table once a week.
I'll instead grab bok choy and fresh pulled noodles and a bone broth base from the asian grocery, or a few weeks ago I used a sous vide to make a citrus-marinated lengua filling, maybe I'll add a quick kimchi in there for korean fusion tacos. My culinary habits are absolutely unrecognizable to my forebears, but I think I'm alright.
Random aside, but a few years ago there was a scandal as major recipe sites started removing the "sort by rating" features from their websites. I would love to hear somebody who works on the backend of allrecipes or tasteofhome explain why.
I'm sure there was some stat that showed how much it hurt user engagement, I'd just love to hear the internal story behind that decision.
Some days I just want to see the top rated recipe on allrecipes and marvel at how underwhelming it is, some mac and cheese with tomatoes or something.
The "world's best recipe" (insofar as it's not a completely empty category) might just be so underwhelming it makes people question what they're doing and they never come back to the site.
> Ambrosia turns mass produced confections into a "salad."
My family has been making ambrosia out of whole mandarin oranges and whole coconuts, for I think most of the previous century. So I guess you could call that a celebration of distribution (except for the times when the relevant part of the family was in East Asia), but I don't think there's much "industrialization" about it. It certainly looks nothing like the pictures on Wikipedia.
I identify with the Chinese and Brazilians here, I'm terminally incapable of following a recipe. I can confirm that even when you're good at cooking this way, baking completely falls apart
What's funny to me is how imprecise Medieval recipes are. "Season to taste. Prepare in the usual way." They presume ... a lack of precise measuring tools? Extensive culinary knowledge that modern people just don't have? Easy access to any particular ingredient?
Though I suppose South Americans are the more illustrative example because they share our technology and still make their choices.
"Tasting History" is great like that. Take a Classical or Mediaeval recipe that is basically "get chicken, cook chicken, season chicken" and turn out a finished dish 😁
I think I read somewhere that the target audience for medieval recipes were high-level professional chefs, because those were the only cooks who knew how to read. Also they didn't have precise measuring tools, and thermometers weren't even invented yet.
I've heard the same. If the only people reading your book are palace chefs, instructions like "make a good gravy" and "add enough flour" make perfect sense.
I think it's really down to experience of cooking. If I've never made a recipe before or seen it made or grew up with my mother making it, then I'll use a recipe.
If I'm familiar with the dish or have made it a few times now, I'm a lot more comfortable with measuring by eye, swapping out ingredients, etc.
Your Brazilian friends are probably going by "this is the way my mother/granny made it" and, I'm the same way, she never measured stuff out - it was by eye, or "a handful", "a pinch", etc.
One is that people in the US cook a lot less than the historical norm, and therefore they are inexperienced and bad at it. They manage by following recipes which are absurdly exacting, and because they don’t really know what they’re doing, they produce edible but poor-quality food most of the time. Also because they don’t do it very often, they don’t have a large variety of ingredients and don’t know how to verify whether ingredients and spices are of high quality or not: they depend on labeling and prices for this, which tricks them into spending triple the price on fancy eggs or salt that have negligible differences from any other kind of eggs or salt. They cover over bad recipes or blandness that comes from poor cooking skills by adding extraneous, or extra, sugar to things that really shouldn’t have it.
The second aspect of this is why foreigners would be better. Many aren’t! Some have simply memorized a lot of recipes. But foreigners who are astonished by this are likely raised in cultures where cooking is actually done. In cultures that really do cook, they’ve internalized basic technique and knowledge in a way that Americans have not. (This is why, if you have a certain kind of mom, her cooking is the best you’ve ever had. It’s not just nostalgia: she has an enormous store of internalized experience and technique.) it’s hard for me to say what countries actually still cook. Any household I visit can simply be one where they don’t cook or still cook; I would need a huge sample size. That said, I have enough experience in the UK and US to say that both countries have, on average, terrible cooks, and somehow the UK is even worse on average than the US, which I can’t readily explain.
Once you, as an American, get enough hours in front of the counter and burner that you grasp basic technique, you begin to understand how very bad much cooking is. The difference between low to mid-grade ‘restaurant-quality’ food and most home meals is that the line cook has a basic understanding that salt is not optional, and he knows how much salt he is supposed to use per unit of different kinds of food. He can measure by eye and he knows when not to.
Once you get past the point of basic technique, it’s incredibly easy to improvise and exact recipes become a series of hints rather than a guide to be followed. You begin to recognize by feel the correct level of heat to use on different meats for different effects. You know what the basic categories of things are that will constitute a decent cooked sauce or raw sauce. You know that the size of the pan has a significant effect on how different types of food will cook in it and you can estimate this by eye. You probably use much higher heat for shorter periods, much more salt and acid, measure everything by eye, and you’re confident telling whether spices are good or not from their scent or appearance.
These are not things that can be communicated efficiently by anything but experience: the sort of book that tries to get these basics across quickly is 900 pages, narrowly focused to one cuisine, and still not comprehensive.
And, anyway, the level to which people think they need to be exact with baking is exaggerated. You just have to tolerate failure well and learn what you can mess with and what you can’t, and how many cumulative changes will end poorly, and what elements truly are critical.
When I was a kid, I watched Cajun Cooking with Justin Wilson. He used the palm of his hand as a measuring spoon. He'd pour the ingredient into his hand, then pour it from his hand into an actual measuring spoon to prove to the audience that his palm method gave the right amount, and then pour it into the pot.
I think baking vs cooking is probably a big part of it, but also, before my family moved to the US, we'd use actual cups and actual spoons for baking recipes, not specialized measuring cups / spoons. Even in baking you only need the right ratios, and adding too little baking soda will only hamstring you so much (although too much will indeed be problematic).
I think there are two thinks contributing to this (if it is true, i am not sure if its more than just a vibe people have):
The us doesn't have a "standard" cuisine so our diets are varied across cultures. Some italian tonight, some french tomorrow, etc. If you always cook a single cuisine you start learning the standard stuff and patterns and can reduce how much you rely on a recipe.
Second, to go along with Wang's comments on families, US children dont spend as much time at home as in some other cultures and in the US cooking isn't always the wife/mom's job. The cooking is spread out, so no one develops expertise and children dont spend enough of their young adult years watching and helping cooking from the expert.
I'll note there are a ton of exceptions to this in US cuisine. Does a Hamburger have a recipe? A hot dog? Eggs and Bacon? If you dont make the sauce, pasta doesn't either. This is actual cooking even if it isn't as involved as say making dumplings from scratch.
As a kid in Australia in the 1980s, we used ordinary spoons instead of "measuring spoons", and my mother assured me that this was fine because all tablespoons are the same size (and all dessert spoons, and all teaspoons). I never bothered to check whether this was the case, but all spoons of a particular category ought to be a similar size.
Recipes would also distinguish between a "rounded" and a "heaped" spoon of something -- does the pile of powder on your spoon have a rounded top or is it piled as high as it can possibly go? I guess that if you're measuring stuff with "measuring spoons" then this goes out the window and you just use a flat top.
My approach is pretty much similar to your mother's. I generally use the "small spoons" in my kitchen for teaspoon measurements and the "big spoons" for tablespoon measurements.
I've actually tested it and my small spoons are about 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons while my big spoons are pretty much really tablespoons. (Weirdly, they're very consistent. The small are consistently about 1.5 to 2 teaspoons and the big are consistently about 1 tablespoon. We've bought our spoons from a variety of places, mostly thrift stores, so I would've thought there'd be more variability than there seems to be.)
Even though the small spoons are bigger than teaspoons, I still use them for teaspoon measurements. For the most part, that is: for health reasons, I now have to monitor how much salt I eat. So when I add salt, I try to use more precise measuring spoons.
I agree that baking is much more fragile to ingredient ratios than soup is. When preparing a pizza dough, having 10% too much water will leave you with a sticky suspension, while having 10% too much flour will give a dry, brittle dough. So either you measure before, or you already know the required consistency and add the missing ingredient. (I measure before, obviously.) I expect that it is similar for leaving agents (even if it is not as critical).
At least ingredient ratios can be communicated with arbitrary precision. There is the whole can of worms (okay, perhaps not the best image) of getting the right amount of a temperature-dependent reaction, where the temperature is not be precisely controlled and visual or tactile inspection is required to judge the progress. Handling yeast dough, baking stuff in the oven and caramellization all come to mind here.
The 14.79ml tablespoon seems a bit over the top for me, that accuracy would only be required if the recipe specified the amount of tablespoons to four digits. Given that mostly single digit integer amounts are used instead, I think anything from 14ml to 16ml would probably be fine.
In general, I find it somewhat frustrating how little cooking borrows from chemistry. Magnetic stirring, bottle-top measuring dispensers seem like obvious items. Feedback controlled plates (either a bluetooth thermometer in a pot or point a thermal camera at the pan) or microwaves are also notably absent.
"He visits a science museum in Chicago, is shocked to see it is free for everyone despite America’s capitalist reputation, and is delighted to see the little children running around and pressing buttons and enjoying learning things about science."
This hits me right in the nostalgia. I spent the (brutally hot) summer of 1988 in an apartment without air conditioning near the Museum of Science and Industry. A friend and I spent so much time in the museum's air conditioned interior escaping the heat that we were able to recite along with halfthe exhibits.
("...because the engine isn't in the car! It's in the road! It's... ELECTROMAGNET POWER!!!")
Sadly, they ended free admission a few years later. Though the public libraries have a few season tickets available for free checkout so that families who can't afford it can go to the museum. But not like we did then.
Odd comment from someone who was active on an election-maps forum for many years: Iowa was actually one of the most left-wing states in America during the Reagan years. In 1988, at the conclusion of his time in office, it voted for Dukakis in an enormous landslide (...even as Dukakis went down to an enormous national defeat), and was his second-strongest state in the Union after Rhode Island.
Most of the Plains states were very conservative and this didn't matter too much, but Iowa -- belying its reputation -- is historically a very liberal state, having been one of very few where Barack Obama outright won the white vote (unlike, for example, California). It's swung to being more conservative in the Trump era, very much unlike California, but that isn't the alignment of even the quite recent past: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/906560060557467649
So it should be noted that, by going to 1980s-era Iowa, Wang was in fact going to a very angry and struggling place which was not at all happy with the national leadership!
Read those whole thing out to my Mom, talked through it. Some things brought up (shortly if already in the comments):
- Mention of de Tocqueville
- Baking (vis á vis recipes)
- Asking a fish what water is, as in Andrew Hunter's comment.
As regards the Proliferation of Regulations: the point about state capacity seems relevant, in that if you care a lot more about certain uses (enforcing conformity to the Party), you will have less to spend on other purposes (speeding). Might be worth thinking through difference between regulations based on Safety (e.g. speeding, food regulations, etc.) And regulations based on protectionism (e.g. many licensure requirements, other food regulations, large companies choking out smaller companies via regulatory burden).
The pamphlet “You know how back in your home country, all the media is carefully optimized to present everything in the best possible light? We have a silly custom in America, which is that all our media is optimized to make us look as horrible as possible. Relax and don’t take it too seriously.” got an uproarious reaction, and I think was mom's favorite line of the piece.
The invitation to think on, and window into, China and Chinese thought back in the 80s, was very interesting. Especially the degree to which much of what goes on in modern Chinese authoritarianism couldn't occur then for technological reasons (at least not in anything resembling its present form).
Tangentially, my sister and I have spent tonight listening to old Schoolhouse Rock songs, which are admittedly a decade and a half older than Wang's Iowan sojourn. Such a different country...
Amusingly, I took the Chinese student's question "How do people unify their thoughts?" as being meant in a collectivist sense: how do people make sure they agree with each other and all think the same thing?
But your later comments on it (about asking "how do you unify your thoughts?" on a date, and "nobody unifies their thoughts correctly") sound like you took it in an individualist sense: how does a person unify his or her thoughts and become a consistent individual?
“what do you unify your thoughts based on?” sounds to me more like "to what collective do you subsume yourself?", so still collectivist, but acknowledging multiple collectives floating around.
"Commentaries on the book hold up Wang as some kind of incisive critic of US society. My impression was that he opened a newspaper, read the criticisms Americans were making about themselves, and relayed them back to the Chinese."
This is exactly my take on Philip Alston's report on severe poverty in the US. He was clearly just regurgitating talking points from the media and Democratic politicians, so naturally the very same people whose talking points he was uncritically repeating praised him as a visionary.
“I cannot imagine you could run a country this way at all, but America seems to muddle through” -- to be fair, most of the rest of the core Anglosphere shares this view
Which is funny because the objective framing should actually be, “I cannot imagine you could run a country this way at all, but America is the most crushingly dominant economic and cultural force in world history by a stunning margin, maybe my understanding of systems and humans is poor and I should study this country dispassionately.”
Are the quoted parts written in English by Wang, or translated from Chinese by a human, or (recently) machine-translated?
Your comments about "mediocre English" suggest it's written by Wang himself, and indeed it reads like the sort of mostly grammatical but not very smooth or idiomatic English written by an educated Chinese speaker.
On the other hand, there are sentences like "Chinese people cooking, rarely look at the recipe, grab a handful is." - word salad that I can't parse, which looks like a language model going slightly wrong.
And then there's this: "Parking (Parking) is a big problem. On both sides of the street, there are clear signs indicating whether you can park. If you park in a place where you can’t park, you will receive a fine (Ticket)"
That looks like something that was written in Chinese, using the English terms "parking" and "fine" and putting a translation into Chinese in brackets. A human translator would then leave out the bracketed words entirely, but a machine translation would leave them in and translate them, resulting in near synonyms (as in "fine (Ticket)"), or literally repeating the same word, as in "Parking (Parking)".
I also wondered that. The edition I got seemed very hastily put together (it didn't have page numbers!) and didn't explain this.
Occasionally it says things like "Some people translate lobbyist as lobbyist, but other people translate it as lobbyist", which makes me think this was a rush job translation from the Chinese.
I've wondered the same thing. A few minutes of Google "research" didn't turn up for me any answers about whether it was translated or not.
Either way--but especially if it's a translation--I'm not convinced we're getting the strongest version of Wang's observations. It's possible his book is more thoughtful and incisive than the version that's available to non-Chinese-reading English readers like myself.
I managed to find a Chinese version of American Against America online. The original sentence about Chinese cooking is 中国人烧菜，很少看菜谱，抓一把就是。(link: https://liushooter.github.io/UsaVsUsa/chapters/chapter004.html ) I would personally translate this as something like, "When Chinese people cook, they rarely look at recipes. Grabbing a handful is good enough." The part about a handful being good enough is kind of an idiom where it doesn't make complete sense if you take the grammar literally.
So yeah this sentence's translation does not look like something done by an English-speaking human.
EDIT: Ah yes, I also found the sentence about parking; you were right. 停车（Parking）是个大问题。街道两旁，均有明确的标志牌，指示能否停车。在不能停车的地方停车，会收到罚款单（Ticket），如果不付款，法院就会通知你到庭，或者下次更新执照时遇到麻烦。
Great read, and a great question posed by Wang Huning: "How do people unify their thoughts?"
This is a really good question, and it is THE political science question. In democracies, this is related to the question: "Why do people obey policies they vehemently oppose, made by rulers they voted against"? And the answer is that people are assumed to regard elections as the legitimate way to appoint rulers, and therefore are obliged to obey the orders made by the present ruler even if they disagree with them, until the next election (when the process is repeated). This answer is the unifying thought that is supposed to be shared by everybody, i.e. it is the answer that "unifies their thoughts".
...although in the US - and this puzzles not only Wang Huning, but also people like me - one must add the total reverence US citizens have toward their Constitution. You US citizens often talk and act as if it was some sort of Holy Text, despite being written by human beings, just like any other law! The Mormons in particular, but the rest of you as well...It is the one really weird aspect of "how US people unify their thoughts" from the perspective of foreign observers. Not meant as a criticism, just as an anthropological observation. ("All countries have their Gods, and their holy stones. A thousand clouds drift under the sky, but the sky itself is just one.")
The Constitution is our Schelling point. We have a wide variety of cultural et al. backgrounds, and ordinary laws are numerous & time-variant, so neither are adequate to coordinate around. But there's just the one US Constitution, it is quite short, and changes only happen rarely & with widespread agreement.
I know. But the necessity of using a text written by ordinary mortals as your main nation-defining point, infusing it with a sort-of sacred aura, has some psychological effects, I suspect. (Not negative, but they make you a bit different.)
For sure. I think the quasi-sacred aspect is likely an evolved response to deter defection (in the game-theoretic sense) from the Schelling point, since that's really all that's keeping Hobbes at bay.
I know I'm late to this, but I "obey policies I vehemently oppose, made by rulers I voted against" to the extent that numerous men with guns will come to take me away if I don't. Which I presume is the exact same motivation of the average Chinese person.
THE political science question, as you say, is not "how do people unify their thoughts". THE political science question is "whose orders do organized bodies of men with guns obey, and why?" Now granted, the answer to that question may in itself involve unity of thought.
You are hinting here at the difficult and important question of what is the relationship between democracy and the rule of law (Rechtstaat). Not space to go into that grand debate in a comment, let it just be said that "constitutions" is a legal device used in many countries to partly shield the Rechtstaat from the risk that a majority decides to permanently deprive minorities of their liberties or even lives. Constitutions can also be changed, since they (like everything else related to politics) is man-made, but usually demand much more than a simple majority vote in Parliament. This reduces that risk, although it does not eliminate it. It helps if the Constitution across time has been invested with a sacred aura, as has happened in the US (the re-enchantment of the world, winking at Max Weber here).
Putin's Russia is technically still a democracy, just to illustrate the high stakes in this debate. (Although part of the minimum definition of "democracy" is the requirement that those in power do not use their power to make it difficult for someone else to win the next election down the line, and Putin's Russia may not pass this test.)
The number of men with guns required to maintain order against 49% of the population is, well, much, much larger than what we have. I’m sure there is at least some elements of what I think polscistoic is describing — a nearly mystical feeling that the transfer of power dictated by the Constitution grants legitimacy regardless of what shenanigans were involved along the way, similar in character to the divine right of kings.
It would really be ironic if the current Chinese crackdown on westernized culture is being driven by some 1980s screed about how the culturally superior oriental Japanese were destined to defeat America economically.
>For example, he spends a long time talking about the specific bylaws of the Democratic and Republican parties, and who the party chair is, and how they pick county level officers, and so on. Most Americans don’t care about this, but it’s easy to figure out why someone from China - where the Party is the power behind the throne - would expect Power to hide somewhere in the Democratic or Republican organizational structure.
As an European who has studied American history and politics to a great degree, I also admit I still find the American party system completely mystifying. The best explanation that I've seen is that American parties aren't as much "real parties" (as an European would understand them) but just sort of gigantic labels that are used to allow the real political sorting process (which happens throuh the primaries) to take place.
This isn't just me; I remember once crashing a local right-wing youth organization's event here on the American 2012 presidential elections (which were then just about to take place), which had a speaker who had participated in the GOP national convention. When he talked about the event and showed clips about it, everyone just kept laughing through this (ostensibly serious) presentation, since the proceedings, with their pre-scripted nature, the open discrimination against Ron Paul delegates, and the whole convention just being a gigantic rally for a candidate, is so alien to someone used to Finnish political party conventions, where the participants actually debate things and vote on them without the result being a preset thing.
I suspect that if Wang had come to any European country - say, here in Finland - they wouldn't have had any problems finding out about the political party structures, since, apart from being more democratic, the basic structures would be the same as in China. Indeed, there are (non-Communist, even non-socialist) political parties in Finland that have actually sent visitors to CCP's conventions, and while the whole ideology and culture is of course alien to them, the basic structures and proceedings were mostly familiar.
This isn't because Europe is copying China, of course, but because the CCP's structures are inherited from the socialist movement, and the basic socialist movement party hierarchy and structures were then copied by other political ideologies and parties, with adjustments - not due to any specific commitment to socialism, but simply because they worked. Then these party structures were imported to European colonies, etc.
It's possible that America would have gone through the same developments if it hadn't been for the Progressives making their innovations, chiefly open, competitive primaries. The primaries are probably the key to the American party structures forming the way they are, and thus becoming so alien to those from other countries.
I've read some socialists explaining that, even with all of its faults, the open primaries mean that there's no sense being outside the Democrats; the open primaries and FPTP basically mean that there's always going to be two parties, and even if, say, the Greens managed to surpass the Democrats, they'd just become the new Democrats, since the open primaries mean that all the moderate liberals would then just compete in the Green primaries (and probably win them).
Wang's characterization of the parties as franchises is actually pretty good. The party designation largely acts as marketing for a candidate. I say I am with Party X so you know i must believe 90% of what Party X thinks.
Because government power in the US is split on many many levels, it's not feasible to have parties which do much more than that. The issues that matter to some localities aren't the same as others even for people in the same party. And at the really local level, like a city council in a small city, candidates wont even mark themselves as part of a party. Mostly because it doesn't matter (the national democratic party doesn't have an opinion on zoning issues in some small town in Ohio for example), and also because most small towns lean heavily towards one party or the other so everyone running is probably part of a single party.
Primaries have some to do with it - though there are closed primaries in some states. We dont have proportional representation though so unless you win you dont get representation. It means small parties have little chance of taking off. It's easier for new political movements, like the Tea Party in your 2012 example or Bernie Sanders style left wing views, to be absorbed by the larger parties.
And of course, America is huge. In most large countries you would expect multiple regional parties, maybe with some agreements between parties at federal level. The parties at the EU level are alliances between regional parties.
"For example, Wang devotes a chapter to teenage runaways - again, the same amount of space he devotes to racism or drugs. It sounds like all of his information comes from one 1973 book, Juvenile Delinquency: The Stray Teenager In America, which says that in a single year, police caught 265,000 teenage runaways. Later it says that there are a million teenage delinquents in America, and Wang seems to think maybe these are all runaways or something. He suggests that this is because American families do not have “true inner harmony” because they are too individualistic, and spends a lot of time thinking about what kind of society could have fewer teenage runaways. While I am sure there are still some teenage runaways in the US, I am skeptical that the issue deserves the level of thought Wang gives it."
So Wang could turn around and ask you "why do you think teenage runaways aren't that important? what are the blinkers *you* are wearing?" His "one million delinquents" figure isn't that far off the mark:
Figures on runaways:
"It is estimated that 6 to 7% of youth run away from home each year – more than 1.5 million children and adolescents annually. NRS’ report, Why They Run, indicates that issues cited by youth as reasons for leaving home include family dynamics; physical, sexual, verbal, and other types of abuse; and economic issues at home. The study also found that almost half of the youth interviewed said they were forced out of their homes."
"Homelessness is a major social concern in the United States, and youth may be the age group most at risk of becoming homeless. The number of youth who have experienced homelessness varies depending on the age range, timeframe, and definition used, but sources estimate that between 500,000 and 2.8 million youth experience homelessness within the United States each year.
Youth run away or experience homelessness for a range of reasons, but involvement in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and severe family conflict have all been found to be associated with experiencing homelessness. These youth are vulnerable to a range of negative experiences including exploitation and victimization. Runaway youth and youth affected by homelessness have high rates of involvement in the juvenile justice system, are more likely to engage in substance use and delinquent behavior, be teenage parents, drop out of school, suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, and meet the criteria for mental illness. Experiences of unaccompanied youth affected by homelessness are different from those who experience homelessness with their families. While negative occurrences persist for youth experiencing homelessness with their families, their experiences may not vary drastically from youth living in poverty. Studies have also found distinct variability in outcomes among youth experiencing homelessness, suggesting that youth experience homelessness differently."
This is intertwined with homelessness, and I'm sure you can work out for yourself why this would be a problem. Start off with a 15 year old runaway and you can end up down the line with the likes of Jordan Neely.
Yeah, that needs a lot more clarification on definitional aspects. It uses 'children and adolescents' seemingly interchangeably with youth and if we assume say 10 years for childhood and adolescents that's 60-70% of children running away... So I assume we're counting the same kids multiple times (in which case I wonder if their confusing incidents with kids in the annualization numbers) or 'running away' is a much broader set of behaviors then typically construed (e.g. includes things like staying out past curfew or the like)
This review left me with great affection for Wang Huning, and a 2% more hopeful view of China and the CCP.
The reviewer either chose quotes that were especially revealing, or the entire book is like that: Wang *sounds* like all native Chinese I have known, not accent and idiom but *emphasis* on certain things and disbelief at other things.
It is almost impossible to make any statement about any people or culture without being Mau-Mau'ed as a racist, but: the Chinese culture and worldview are very different from ours. They have been a top-down empire of government officials ruling over a billion peasants for 3000 years. There is a deference to authority, and a lack of any [value? role? dignity? worth?] for individual people, that is so deep it is of the essence of the Chinese. It's the evolved arrangement and power structure needed to co-ordinate rice farming to feed xxx,000,000 people, and also the mindset that sees sacrificing millions of citizens for national goals as no big deal. (Many of these sacrifices have been related to dams and rivers. Mao's mass slaughters are a whole different level.)
This worldview is so alien to us that many cannot even see it as real, cannot understand it even as language or human speech.
Yet.
Individual people remain individual. Wang's voice is clear and he is very easy to imagine talking to circa 198x. I don't know what the real realtionship or power balance between the Chinese government and its citizens is at this historical moment. Friends who do business in China say there is a subtle spirit of independence but so subtle they can't read the faces or understand the in-group slang. More contact with Chinese people, and less CCP, would be great.
I want to write the greatest US campaign speech ever, wher I remind us that we are a VIRTUAL nation. The first nation founded on a contract, really an operating system, that is compact and somewhat Turing-complete. Not on tribal or territorial or religious loyalty. Very few people elsewhere understand that we take words VERY VERY SERIOUSLY here. We argue over fine points of 240 year-old language because we all believe to the core the other 99% of the words. Our most popular sport is mass violence that comes to a total halt for REVIEWS OF THE RULEBOOK.
"Here it is. Yes, this is it. Read it. It's boring in places but pretty tight and punchy. Not a page-turner but: hey it's short. They knew that govt stuff is boring so they edited it down and made it wicked simple...."
Was I the only one who thought this review was actually about some American who visited China/Japan and that Scott had flipped all the anecdotes and analyses to match and the reveal at the end was that it was all written by a young Chris Christie or something?
No, because the idea of an American visiting other countries and studying them in depth to learn important lessons for back home is borderline incoherent to me.
There's two types of Americans:
1. The ones who assume that the American way of doing things is always the best, and
2. The ones who assume that the foreign way of doing things is the best (aka the "Why Can't We Live In Enlightened, Topless, Europe?" school of thought)
"National franchise stores, such as McDonald’ s, Hardee’ s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, are available nationwide. The head office has no idea what they are doing other than selling the same goods."
I'm still reading the post, but I had to rush down and comment on that statement. I worked at Hardee's for three years in the mid 1990s. Over those years, that company seemed to change the basic structure of its sandwiches at least three times. Very little consistency. It made it difficult to work for them. That, I think, is evidence that the head office didn't even know what goods their business was selling.
Edited to add: I realize that's not important for anything in the post. Just an observation.
I'm actually kind of enamored now with the idea of McDonald's as a portrait of a well-functioning federalist body. The whole story of the McFish being one franchisee's answer to Lent, and then getting picked up nationwide is a beautiful parable on localist experimentation.
Franchisors only have so much power to dictate what franchises can do. And each company usually has basically a franchisees union that will push back on certain policies. For example when McDonalds started doing all day breakfast they had to make it so franchisees could opt out. Many of the biggest ones were against the idea. The owner of your hardees might have been changing suppliers or chaining the recipe themselves or based on what other owners had said works (just speculation).
McDonalds tends to encourage large franchisees which many units as well as encouraging only managers or other internal people to become new franchisees. On the other side Chick-fil-a only lets you own one franchise. The Chick-fil-a franchisees have much less power to push back on the parent. However, Chick-fil-a franchises make like 2x-3x the amount a McDonalds one does even operating only 6 days/week.
You may very well be right about the Hardee's I worked at. If it was a franchisee (and not a corporate store), it was probably part of a very big group of franchises. The GM wasn't the owner. The location was owned by some company in (I think) North Dakota, which is very far from the state my Hardee's was actually located in.
Edited: To elaborate a little on my original comment:
I've worked at two hamburger chains. Hardee's was one and Wendy's was the other (3 years at one and 5 years at the second). With Wendy's, the basic way of making sandwiches was pretty much the same. Even new or "boutique" sandwiches had similar patterns in how they were made, and those patterns resembled existing sandwiches. There were actually three patterns: "everything," "sauce + tomato + lettuce," and "catsup + pickles + onions+ mustard." Different sandwiches strayed slightly from that pattern, but there was a pattern nonetheless.
With Hardee's (or at least the Hardee's I worked at), there seemed to be no "basic" way of making most sandwiches (though while I was there, they did keep and follow a "catsup + pickles + onions + mustard" template for their smaller hamburgers). They seemed to "innovate" in a way that made it difficult for me as an employee to actually learn the process. In fact, I don't really remember sandwiches for Hardee's while I still have the Wendy's sandwich structure annoyingly ingrained in my brain and will probably remember it on my deathbed even if I live to be 100. Sigh.
A tangent, but... was the spelling "catsup" part of the Wendy's sandwich protocol? Like, if you close your eyes, can you call up an image of a "sandwich making" graphic that has the word "catsup" printed? Or is that just the local spelling where you grew up? [And if so, was your local brand Brooks Catsup of Collinsville, IL?]
I'm only asking because I envisioned such a graphic, laminated and affixed to the wall above a sandwich station, and the word "catsup" kertwanged my spell-check when I saw it. I know it's a valid variant spelling but can't imagine ever printing it on a sign.
I don't remember for sure, but it was probably "ketchup." I know they used Heinz, at least at the time I worked there and at that location worked. But it's possible they used it and still put "catsup" on signs. Strangely, I usually spell it "ketchup," but for some reason I spelled it "catsup" in my comment.
IIRC the mid-1990s was right about when Hardee's merged with Carls Jr., so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of recipe changes were gradually (and confusingly) rolled out as a result of that.
This reminds me a lot of Sayyid Qutb's <i>The America I Have Seen</i>, a similar foreigner-comes-to-America-sees-suburban-life-and-hates-it tale. Qutb later became one of the chief intellectual inspirations for Al-Qaeda, etc.
Mmmmmmmm, I struggle with this interpretation and I wonder if anyone else has done an in-depth review. The book seems important but....
Alright, I've read some of the book, I haven't finished and won't because, well, it's heavy and hard to read in the bathtub. But there's these... "void" sections that just confuse the dickens out of me. And it looks like you just took them to be simplicity but...let me give an example.
So the book really starts with...an examination of the Amish and the Amana. It's wild!
On the Amish:
"Over the years, despite the fact that the Amish have changed in one way or another, the basic spirit of this group has not changed much. It is curious: why has such a powerful modern civilization failed to influence and transform them? Hasn't Western civilization impacted many very distant peoples?"
...
"This is a real social phenomenon worth thinking about. In the heart of the modernized world, there is such a group of people who refuse to be modernized. Their remoteness is not in the geographical area, but in the spiritual world. They are voluntarily isolated from modernization. From this we can draw an opinion that if people refuse modernization in the spiritual sphere, then it is difficult for modernization to invade them. "
On the Amana:
"The Amana Colonies is a special place in Iowa. Americans call it the 'socialism' or 'collectivism' of the United States. How can such a place survive in a capitalist society like the United States? What kind of organization is it? It aroused great curiosity in me, a person from China, to know how "collectivism" is practiced in the United States."
FYI, the Amana were basically Amish communists whose community dissolved in the 1930s into the general American mainstream. Worth researching.
More Wang on the Amana:
"It is only by grasping the basic spirit that one can discern the name of the 1932 shift in Amana, the most fundamental cause of which was probably the abandonment and indifference of the younger generation to this faith. Under the powerful lure of this prosperous society, the younger generation turned to other values. Once this shift occurs in the younger generation, it is difficult for any force to ensure the longevity of an institution. This is a problem for all kinds of social systems. The problem facing many countries around the world today is a crisis of trust in the foundations of the system among the younger generation."
So Wang sets up, at the start of the book, this interesting juxtaposition between the Amish and the Amana. And, in the context of a rapidly liberalizing China and USSR, the question of why the Amish are...kinda succeeding while the Chinese are being forced to westernize is really important, especially from someone like Wang. So what great analysis does Wang give?
"If this problem is not addressed, the system will face challenges?"
This mf-er is either a genius or an idiot. And it looks like you (Scott) kind of went with the bumbling idiot interpretation. I have trouble buying this though. No ambitious Communist starts an examination of the US with the Amish and a culturally dissolved communist/socialist commune in the late 80's by chance. But there's this "void" thing, this intellectual blue-balling that happened all the time where he sets up an interesting issue and gives an analysis worthy of a fifth-grader. Everything interesting in the book (from what I've read) is to be interpreted through context, the actual text is...kinda garbage. Which sounds like the most Chinese thing ever but I also constantly struggled with whether I'm a dense American who can't...properly read how a post-Cultural Revolutionary ideologue in Deng's China would have to write vs me just reading way more meaning into the text than is actually there.
I really hope Taneer Greer or someone like that reads this review and gives his spin. Because you (Scott) kinda take the "Wang is dumb" approach and, honestly, I absolutely get that, but I'm really wondering if there's an old China hand who can confirm whether there's actually more depth here.
See Finnish Cooperativess in NE Minnesota. Purely economic and social. No spiritual element.
They are still very effective.
“ A co-operative is formed primarily to serve its members, but at the same time it is a unit of the cooperative movement for the purpose to do away with all exploitation in production and distribution.”
Having lived in China (2004, no clue how it is now) I don't think they got enough credit for some of their lack of bureaucracy. Though probably, as others mentioned, that changed as they became better able to implement their bureaucracy.
Place-studies people can get jobs in the state department or the intelligence apparatus. There's need for people who unify their thoughts based on the US constitution, but know a lot about other places.
Maybe Asians in general do see a conflict between freedom and prosperity: in the Japanese Shin Megami Tensei games, there is an ongoing conflict between Law and Chaos, but in the latest one (SMT V) they are instead named Order and Potential. SPOILERS: If you choose to side with Order, you create a world with prosperity but no individuality, and if you side with Potential, you create a world of 'immeasurable conflict' but where free thinkers thrive.
It's possible that it's not that America shows there is no conflict, but rather that with its starting material conditions, America could have been anything at all and it would have been a superpower. Maybe. Though I'm not sure if the material starting point of Canada was that different.
The idea of Americans being self organized in the view of the Chinese is supported by my experience; in the early 2000s some Chinese business partners of mine visited the US and among the experiences we treated them to was a combination potluck and folk music party at my parents' house. They asked who decided what food to bring and what musicians should be there and marveled at the fact that no one had instructed anyone on either of these rather important things, yet there was music all night and more than enough food for everyone.
>And Japan, despite all the virtues that made Wang think they would overtake the US, has stagnated instead.
Has it? Or is it simply managing a demographic downturn without the use of immigration while maintaining a high per worker income and first world living standards for all? Too soon to say imo.
Their productivity really does leave much to be desired, and while once associated with cutting edge tech they have more recently lagged behind (foreigners are surprised by how prominent fax machines still are there).
"What prevents me from dismissing it in this way is that, well, China sure is trying the project of having the first set of things [hard work, industry] but not the second set [crime, drugs, anomie]. "
How would one compare this view of ideal China to the Puritan society of New England described in your "Albion's Seedlings" review?
“Even if this process raises GDP, China thinks it’s militarily, spiritually, and socially important to have a manufacturing-based economy”
Sure, that’s a good description of the world post the Industrial Revolution. Countries that lose their manufacturing base lose their cultural, economic and military domination. Although there is a lag.
"All of these make sense once you think about them, but it’s still jarring that they each get more pages than, say, racial conflict."
Well that depends on how you think society runs, no?
Suppose you went to Saudi Arabia and wrote a book all about the royal family settles disputes, and how oil wealth is distributed. Then someone complained that you say almost nothing about Allah and how he watches over Saudi Arabia and rewards or punishes it. What would be your response? Probably something like "Yes, yes, the society TALKS about Allah a great deal, no-one's denying that at a superficial level it's all Allah all the time. But I'm interested in how things *really* work, not in the language people use to justify what they are doing".
Which is, of course, the same thing as when he talks about social relationships, and in particular the competing professors. We see this frequently in the US political and quasi-political space – vicious disagreements that (to an outsider) are very clearly all about personality and the personal desire to be top dog, but you're not supposed to say that in America, you're supposed to say that every such disagreement is about politics in some way, the two want different things for society, or disagree about the best path to get there, or whatever.
This is now so deep in the way "Americans" analyze things that it's often comical. Americans desperately want everything bad in the world to be the result of some "system", because that way you can retain a faith in democracy and "the people", you can blame everything bad on whatever system it is you're against. Everything is about "the system", nothing is about the people who make up the system. This doesn't *have* to be false; emergent properties do exist in physics and biology. But it's something that needs to be demonstrated, not something to be taken as an article of faith with alternative views angrily dismissed. (This is the essence of whether you agree or disagree with Margaret Thatcher's "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families". Economics has done the hard work of climbing from the behavior of individuals to the behavior of groups, how macroeconomics is therefore different from the behavior of individuals and individual firms, and how to reconcile the two. But no other social science has even made the attempt, and they're mostly downright hostile to even pointing this out.)
"So when China (possibly at Wang’s instigation) recently cracked down on its high-tech sector in a way that threatened to chill future innovation, maybe they did that on purpose and didn’t care."
Don't misunderstand this point by assuming that what the NYT says on the issue has any connection to reality. Specifically, what does the NYT mean when it talks about "China cracking down on its high-tech sector"? China cracked down on things like games, certain types of finance, certain types of tuition programs, and certain social media. Calling these "high tech" is like calling a guy who knows how to play Call of Duty well a computer genius.
As Dan Wang has pointed out https://danwang.co China has been very specific in what it has cracked down on, and it does not consider that stuff to be "high tech", unlike manufacturing, or even certain types of software engineering (eg designing and writing compilers and OS's). Now maybe Beijing is wrong, you only get serious software companies if you allow for the frivolous software companies (ie a restatement of the "two sides of the same coin" thesis). But once again, we'll need to see how this turns out, but nothing is helped by misunderstanding what China is and is not doing regarding "real" high tech.
> If there is anything to be learned from this episode, it is that whenever political scientists from foreign dictatorships visit the United States, we should hand them a pamphlet, and it should say “You know how back in your home country, all the media is carefully optimized to present everything in the best possible light? We have a silly custom in America, which is that all our media is optimized to make us look as horrible as possible. Relax and don’t take it too seriously.”
This is something I think about every time I visit SF/Berkeley or DC and I, say, step out of the Amtrak station where I am being harassed by homeless people and it's not in any obscure neighborhood - you can practically see the Capitol building from there. Or the encampment of homeless tents in front of SF City Hall.
Do you think that, despite all their social issues which are far worse than the USA, you see anything like that if you fly into Beijing/Shanghai or Moscow? I haven't seen anyone say that, and I would expect that all those social ills are forcefully pushed out of sight by the local & federal governments. (Because, especially for an ignorant foreign visitor, out of sight out of mind.) So, if you are a Chinese or Russian elite and you arrive in DC, what is your interpretation of the highly visible homeless going to be? "My god, they can't even, unlike everyone else, do something as trivial as cover up the homeless a block or two away from their most powerful building! They are *that* incompetent and unable to govern in the most minimal fashion. The American Empire must be completely rotten and ripe to fall with the slightest push."
If you tried to explain to them "oh no, come on, obviously the cities could expel the homeless any time they wanted, the homeless encampments are there because they *want* them to be there, for... er... it's difficult to explain... no Congress doesn't want them there but they can't just order the DC mayor to get rid of the homeless because, though Congress legislates for DC, the mayor is still elected and governs independently - please stop laughing we really do believe in that and it's true, look, it's complicated, you can't interpret American politics by your standards, no, our ability to build new apartments in SF or keep the DC Muni actually running really has very little to do with how well our missiles work, it's the outcome of a long history of urban politics and, are you familiar with a man named Moses? Not the bible one -"
Anyway, long story short, it seems like one of those 'things you can't countersignal': https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThhNvdBxcTYdzm69s/things-you-can-t-countersignal If you are already indisposed to believe America is all that, why would you look at these blatant, prima facie, examples you are personally witnessing of state incapacity, and try to come up with Machiavellian explanations of local internal politics, as opposed to the simple parsimonious explanation of 'America is weak and decaying'?
- It is hilarious that asking everybody to have a state ID (which would take care of many problems in one go, e.g., voter registration) would be unacceptable and creeping fascism, yet a driver's license is used in much the same way (except some of the good ways);
- Not selling alcohol on Sundays goes against the separation of Church and State
- The insistence on following measurements in recipes to the dot is weird (and a source of conflict with my girlfriend)
> So when China (possibly at Wang’s instigation) recently cracked down on its high-tech sector in a way that threatened to chill future innovation, maybe they did that on purpose and didn’t care. Maybe they wanted all the companies creating apps and social media sites and VR and whatever to go somewhere else, so they could continue to make widgets.
I think this is a very wrong way of looking at it. The high-tech sector is one of Xi Jinping's main keys to power due to surveillance and influence/propaganda applications (similar situation in the US), whereas depending on imports for widgets is a major vulnerability for China's economy because economic downturns or foreign forces can disrupt international trade (oil shocks are the classic example).
This is why intervention and upheavals are big in high-tech and why widgets are more hands-off; widgets generate economic growth and stability, not power for the people building them.
"But Wang didn’t get the pamphlet, so now he’s become the #2 guy in China and is optimizing for crushing any Western influences in Chinese society. Oops. At least that’s my theory."
Here is another theory: Wang's existence does not matter that much as a counterfactual. Crucially, Wang was *selected* by the people in charge because the story he was telling fit the narrative they wanted to push. This theory explains the relative mediocrity of the book. There was no drive to actually learn about America, only a drive for propaganda.
> Why don’t we just hire a Chinese person (maybe an immigrant, if we don’t trust the ones still in the PRC) to tell us what the Chinese National Character is? Why do we sent smart Americans to China to figure out what it’s like? There are literally over a billion people who already know that!
Isn't there a simple this-is-water explanation to that? You sort of hint at this yourself with his comments on party organization: important characteristics of America are invisible to Americans like me because that's just how things are, _of course_, how else would you do it? You have to go somewhere else and ask a Frenchman "Hey, why is it normal for you to shut down cities with strikes" or a Placer the equivalent stereotype of Place before they realize that's a fact that needs an explanation (and is worth discussing the consequences of.)
You could, possibly, send Chinese academics to America, let them observe what's different, then have them return to China to write _about China_, but I think it's somewhat easier to see what's odd about a foreign land and describe it than to see what that implies about your home? At least, I think I can point out a lot more of the oddities about places I've been than I was able to say "huh, why is American not like that?"
Placers are the one people I'll never see eye-to-eye with.
You should stay away from California, there's a whole city full of them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placerville,_California
Largely because what the national character is isn't a real objective question. If you want objective facts there are a billion academic studies of cultural differences and differences in political attitudes.
Saying what the national character of a country is reflects a judgement about what you think is the most important features of a place. A conservative Christian is going to value different aspects of American character than an overeducated atheist like me.
> You have to go somewhere else and ask a Frenchman "Hey, why is it normal for you to shut down cities with strikes"
"Normal" is a bit of an overstatement. Right now, even though tensions are still extremely high over the pension reform, I can still move around Paris and barely notice anything is going on.
Heck, I live in Paris and the only knowledge of the “troubles” I have is from my family and friends in other countries telling me they saw something about it on TV. Also I think I saw a video on Twitter sometime in the last few months. And I’m not even French to be used to it.
Is the purpose of a somethingorother studies department really to define what the characterof somethingorother is? I rather think the idea is to study different sometingorothers to understand them better from a variety of perspectives and to integrate valuable aspects of their system / culture / history / perspective with ours, or at least appreciate them. Also to avoid destructive / disfunctional etc aspects. Asking members of a culture, say, Chinese, about their culture can of course be helpful, but an informed outsider view can also be.
The really interesting and somewhat disturbing part of this review is how shallow and uninformed the author seems to be about US society, culture and politics, given his subsequent rise to such an elevated position of inlfuence in China. It does seem like much Chinese policy may be affected by views like those quoted in the review. Makes me think I have overestimated the intellectual strength of current Chinese leadership.
This whole idea of a "Chinese National Character" or even more strange, a "US National Character" seems very bizarre to me. Yes, you could say there is something that could be called a US (or more commonly,, American) National Character , but, it's pretty indefinite, variable in time and geography, and contains lots of internal contradictions and variations. The idea of a national character probably means something different to a Chinese national than it does to most Americans, but I suspect it's not a very useful term in that context either, except for those trying to whip up nationalism and jingoism.
The comments about Japan vs US deep cultural differences seem particularly ignorant for someone so influential in China. A huge aspect of Japanese culture is the adoption of aspects of other cultures. Then there's the post war role of the US in restructuring Japan's political and economic systems, including democratization, adoption of a liberalized constitution, land reform and business restructuring. So, the Japan Wang Huning was writing about was deeply influenced by American ideas and values. Talking about deep differences between the "characters" of the two countries without mentioning these influences seems deeply uninformed to me. And typical of what's reported here about Huning's book.
In the specific case of China, the point is usually not to observe the People's Republic but to study China from before the revolution. After all, there was a great, ancient civilization that imploded in the early 20th century. While there are some echoes of it that can be observed in daily life in the PRC, most meaningful research requires examining texts and physical artifacts. Up until very recently, almost all scholarship in the PRC could only examine the world through a Marxist lens, and even today, everyday language still carries Marxist baggage. There's something to be said for an outside perspective that doesn't necessarily take it as axiomatic that Chinese culture was to blame for Manchu political failures.
I loved that sentence, too. Not sure it was a non-rhetorical question. ;) My answer is: Those fine jobs paid for by Americans are for Americans, mostly. And in my country: mostly for Germans (there are some Americans in "Amerikanistik", sure, but then: "some" - most of the native English speakers are mostly busy doing language-instruction). - Though any US-experts from the US would be hit daily with demands to explain so many aspects: they will learn rather quickly to develop new insights about their USofA. And they are more likely to find the better answers. (Also: German teaching books in US-colleges and schools are mostly not done by German publishers - Hueber is our market leader. Is it because the US-authors know more about how to teach US-students and thus make better books? - Nope. - Hysterically laughing: Nope! )
Former Middle Eastern Studies student here -- the academics in our department were overwhelmingly foreigners from the region who moved to the U.S. for their degrees.
I do think that the way we handle regulation in America is an important question. I think America has a low level of agreement on values relative to most countries but values people being able to have different values. If you have general agreement on values you don't need as many detailed legalistic rules. You can have rules that just ban something like behavior likely to deny your neighbor enjoyment of their property.
For instance, how do you deal with the situation where a neighbor insists on sunbathing nude where they can be seen from the window of a family of conservative Christians? In Germany, their shared culture has values respecting nudism/naturalism so the judgement goes against them. In Japan they would no doubt lose. But in the US you have the problem that you might get very different answers depending on who is making the judgement. That tends to mean we solve these problems via very explicit and legalistic means.
That solution tends to work pretty well if government is relatively small and is primarily about settling private disputes. However, we are discovering it's very difficult to extend this approach to large government programs. If you want the government to handle healthcare or even have job and housing programs you tend to get lots of inefficient legalistic rules.
> if the family sues the nudists for nuisance, they will lose, and if they go over there and threatens them, that's a crime and they go to jail. Even if the family goes to the city council and has nudism declared illegal, the virtually-certain result is that the nudists can go to court and a federal judge will say they have a First Amendment right to be naked
This is good, actually. The project of America is to shift responsibility of figuring out how to make differing values work in a diverse society to the domain where it makes sense, which is innovative & creative solutions within the communities (or markets) themselves. The Good Life will always look different to different groups of people. America says that this is usually not the government's job to fix — if you don't like the nudists being there, add a frosted glass screen onto your patio and call it a day. Or, maybe go talk to them and see if there's a compromise to be reached. This is what it takes to work with your fellow citizens.
You don't see the difference between freedom to do as you like on your own property and the "freedom" to force others to conform to your standards of behaviour so that you are never inadvertently offended by the sight of something you find distasteful? If something you see offends you, the onus is on you to avert your gaze.
Of course we don't give people the absolute freedom to do as they like on their own property. Try enacting Aztec ritual human sacrifice in your back yard, and you'll soon see the limits of "I can do what I want, if you don't like it avert your gaze".
If the nudists don't like the Christian family putting up a placard in their front yard that next door is on board the fast train to Hell, let them avert their gaze. Acceptable?
If the nudists want to sunbathe in their back garden that has hedges/fences so you can't stand in your back garden and see them, fine. The problem is if you look out the upstairs window and get to see a lot more of next door neighbours than you really ever wanted to know.
Suppose I'm not a Christian family. Suppose I get out my smartphone and start snapping pictures to put up on social media? Suppose I invite people round to look out my upstairs window at next door nudists sunbathing? Am I okay since "it's my property and I can do what I want on it"?
Of course there are edge cases and exceptions to every rule, we live in the real world, not the platonic realm of pure forms. But the point is that your brother in Christ upthread is claiming that there is no fundamental difference between liberal and theocratic social ideals, that we're all secretly perfectionists trying to impose our vision of the good life on everyone else. I'm saying that there is a fundamental difference, in that the theocratic ideal requires the domination of those who do not share the vision, while the liberal ideal posits that it is encumbent on all persons to define a space in which their particular vision can have free reign, even if it is only within their own heart, and that no one else is required to go along with it. The only freedom that liberalism requires you to give up is the freedom to dominate others.
"If the nudists don't like the Christian family putting up a placard in their front yard that next door is on board the fast train to Hell, let them avert their gaze. Acceptable?"
You didn't ask me, but I'm all for that being *legal*. If you want more control over your neighborhood, buy a house with an HOA that matches your values. The term *acceptable* has multiple potential meanings. I'm in favor of speech being legal that I would not consider to be 'acceptable.' But I'd work against unacceptable speech without calling the police or invoking state violence.
I'm willing to compromise in terms of allowing laws which require some kinds of barriers in order to maintain social harmony. But it's not my ideal.
If you're taking pictures and distributing them without permission that gets into a grey area of people owning their likeness, regardless of whether someone is wearing clothes or not.
I'd tend to say that it should be legal. But there's probably some fair case that it shouldn't, also, based on people owning their likeness or some similar legalese.
If you gather the neighbors around and watch someone in their yard then that may be creepy, but it should be legal. Are you going to have the cops come out and force people to stop looking? The nudists have abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy.
"Try enacting Aztec ritual human sacrifice in your back yard, and you'll soon see the limits of "I can do what I want, if you don't like it avert your gaze"."
A person's physical body remains *their* property, even if they are on your land.
Are we assuming that the sacrificed individual gave informed consent here?
I doubt if the law would actually accept nudism in practice on one’s own property. Plenty of property abuts the street with no fencing or cover. Hanging around naked as the school kids pass is probably an offence in most jurisdictions. Property laws are not that absolute.
The city council intervening would *also* be the government meddling; the judicial branch of the Federal government keeping that on a leash is still a net reduction in active government.
You've elided a key adjective when quoting me: "active".
One part of the government (the courts) are preventing another (the city council) from taking action against a citizen. The citizen is thus experiencing less impact from government as a whole.
I don't think liberalism claims not to make value judgements at all. Rather, it makes a clear value judgement about individual autonomy and freedom (eg more important than stopping ppl from advertising satanism in public). As such, there isn't any fundamental tension between these values and big public programs like healthcare. Those liberal values would say: fuck the ppl who don't want the government to fund abortion we believe in individual choice. I mean, that's a lot less extreme than the position of religious tolerance was back when we took religion seriously and really thought having the wrong beliefs would lead to an eternity of damnation.
Rather, the issue results because we don't actually all share strong liberal values or any other values. Yes, ofc gov has to make value choices but the problem with not having a clear consensus is that you need to have extensive and expensive oversight and detailed rules because you can't simply trust the person enforcing the laws to do the reasonable thing. And you can't solve that problem while we have such diverse values.
And No the nudists won't win in the us. Most places have laws regulating publicly visible nudity and the courts have been willing to uphold them against 1st amendment challenges (and usually against gender based challenges for female toplessness).
But, the issue is that we do need pretty explicit rules here because some quite a few Americans would see that kind of nudity as totally unobjectionable and tell the neighbors to get over it. OTOH there are also plenty of Americans who would like to tell the nudists on their walled enclosures they have to put on clothes because young boys can climb to the top of a nearby hill and see in with binoculars.
This reminds me of the “factoid” I had heard many years ago that Japan has ~10x fewer lawyers per capita and that was part of the reason it was outperforming the US.
Less time wasted in lawsuits and legalese protections from lawsuits and such.
Whatever the trust to that, assuming there is some, maybe it is simply an outgrowth of having more unified national values.
I heard the same, but heard that it was because Japan basically doesn't respect rule of law, and the Japanese court system is corrupt to the core. I suspect the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Objection! That sounds like .... Ace Attorney!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Attorney
Yep lol, playing Ace Attorney and wondering how the hell anybody could write a legal system this way was indeed the spark that got me researching
My research ended up convincing me that the Japanese court system is depressingly similar to the Ace Attorney court system
This is fantastic, and the comparison to de Tocquville is very interesting. de Tocquville (and his contemporary the Marquis du Custine who wrote a similar book about Russia) seem to have been extremely insightful about core and definitive cultural attributes, where Wang Huning is mostly documenting differences. I am now very intrigued as to why this might be...
I'd say that the reason why we remember de Tocqueville 2 centuries later is that he was unusually insightful, and we've forgotten about his less perspicacious peers. Also, he spent longer in the US, came from a more similar culture (so that he had better reference points for the differences), and travelled more broadly.
"In the early 2000s, everyone in the West thought China would inevitably democratize; surely it was impossible to for a rich, technologically advanced nation of the sort China was becoming to remain a pseudo-communist autocracy."
Really, one of the astonishing things about the US is how we spent so much time and effort trying to push everyone into becoming a liberal democracy, and then, whenever it bears fruit, declare, "See, this was simply the inevitable tide of history."
I mean, seriously. The idea that economic development drove democratization in South Korea and Taiwan is silly. Lots of the world democratized to one degree or another starting in the late 1980s, after the Soviets admitted they were losing the Cold War (by allowing Gorbachev to push reforms), because now the US was in a position to demand it, rather than tolerating allied dictators. Ortega didn't cut a deal for elections in Nicaragua because Nicaragua had gotten wealthy, and neither was economic development why Pinochet stepped aside in Chile.
Similarly, the elimination of authoritarian monarchy in Europe wasn't an inevitable side-effect of industrialization, it was the result of their defeat in World War I. Nobody was more industrialized in Europe in 1914 than Imperial Germany. If the United States had formed a realpolitik alliance with the Central Powers (in order to pursue ordinary territorial ambitions like "acquire neighboring Canada and the West Indies, currently controlled by Britain and France"), there's no reason to expect that the kaisers would have ceased to rule in Berlin or Vienna. Indeed, the likely result of the war would have been a restoration of monarchy in defeated France, while some White army backed by the Germans and Austrians restored a czar in Russia.
Note that pretty much everywhere "freed" from autocratic monarchs by WWI reverted to autocracies within a generation, after the American people got tired of spending blood and treasure on the effort. And that when democracy returned to the continent, it advanced behind the US Army.
And, of course, there are all those people who claim the fall of the Soviet Union was "inevitable", as if the Soviets didn't have plenty of resources to maintain repression throughout the Warsaw Pact. The Reagan military buildup was publicly and explicitly proclaimed as specifically and intentionally aiming at ending the Cold War with a US victory, and it was the Soviet inability to match it without reforms that forced the Soviets to give Gorbachev his head.
The simple truth is that the US spent the last 110 years exerting a lot of effort in shoving its basic form of government down the world's throats, and the result was a fair amount of success.
I find this an interesting objection to liberal international dogma, it moves me a few degrees, but I'm still conflicted about the ultimate thesis.
It seems like you're pointing out that the positive correlation with industrialization and liberalization is imperfect, there are lots of counterexamples. From that you're arguing that the counterexamples undermine any causative explanation, so the real cause was the US imposing democratization against these places' natural tendencies.
But... US preference for democratization is also an imperfect correlation, and a lot of these populations had independent agency and pushed for it, and there isn't a single moment where the US cleanly flipped its national policy away from supporting strongmen that aid US national interests to supporting pluralistic electorates, an interest in its own right. It was schizophrenic about this for a long time and arguably still is today, with different factions within the massive US foreign policy establishment prioritizing vastly different things.
So your argument is so strong it pushes me straight to agnosticism. Maybe dressed up as "well all these things are probably weak but real factors, and local conditions predominate."
I think ancient Persia provides an instructive counterargument to the idea of linear trendlines in history, if you're shopping for one. If you dig through the age, you read about hundreds of years of freedom and openness, followed by hundreds of years of strict repression and control, followed by hundreds of years of liberalism, followed by hundreds of years of authoritarianism. (Possibly all just Achaemenidean and Hittite propaganda but nonetheless.) It's a bit of a Hari Seldon take I guess, we're all just riding the sine wave. Humanity: Sometimes we're like this. Sometimes we're like this other thing.
> Americans cooked food, strictly according to the recipe, strict measurement of various condiments, with a variety of measuring tools, a minute do not want to differ. Chinese people cooking, rarely look at the recipe, grab a handful is. The progress of science and technology in American society, the development of more and more specialized supplies, they require each person who wants to use them must comply with the rules.
This also shocked some of my Brazilian friends: when I said I would show them how to make cupcakes, I insisted on getting some measuring cups and spoons so we could follow a recipe. (While also secretly admiring the Europeans who are using more precise weight-based recipes using digital scales, pressing TARE before adding a specified number of grams of each new ingredient.) None of the Brazilians seemed to have a set of measuring spoons in their kitchens; various people said that you could cook or bake based on instinct, or if you needed a "tablespoon" of something, you could just get some kind of spoon from the kitchen and use a spoonful instead of getting a specific spoon with a capacity of 14.79 mL.
I thought that especially for baking that it was supposed to be easy to mess things up by using the wrong amount of leavening or liquid or something, maybe as opposed to a soup where you could add things "to taste", and I didn't feel like I had any kind of intuition for what the different ingredients in the baking recipe were meant to accomplish. Or even for making something like pesto, I would worry about potentially overshooting with far too much salt if I didn't measure it out using a recipe... because it would feel like one could mess it up easily in a way that would be complicated to recover from.
I have tried baking and my experience is that it's very easy to mess up by using the wrong amount of anything, although you can sometimes recover by knowing what it's supposed to look/feel/taste like and adding more of something until it does. But when I first start making a new recipe I don't know what it's supposed to be like or how to correct it if it seems bad.
"when I first start making a new recipe"
From some conversations I've had with non-American coworkers, this is possibly a key difference. If you grew up cooking with your family, and go on to cook mostly what they cooked, you never need recipes. Most of my generation, at least, didn't ever learn to cook at home growing up.
That seems like a helpful point. I learned to cook almost nothing from my family, so it seems like I'm almost starting from zero with a wide range of recipes. (Plus, I'm interested in cooking things that I didn't grow up with.)
I grew up cooking with my family a lot, but it was mostly American and Italian. There's a lot of techniques I just never learned, and those I learned on my own as an adult. I found cookbooks didn't help me much, because most recipes are not great and because tastes vary, but books with a more technical bent like Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" or anything written by Kenji Lopez-Alt were extremely useful.
I also found it was *very* hard to find, say, English-language sources for what to use in Chinese dishes that didn't make ridiculous substitutions like ketchup (this is getting better, but it still happens a lot). I had the ingredients available locally once I knew what they were, I genuinely just had a hard time figuring out what to use.
Once I developed a wider range of techniques, the best book I found was "The Flavor Bible." Not a cookbook, but just the results of surveying a bunch of chefs about a bunch of ingredients asking "What goes with this?" So I can look up "carrots" and it'll give me a list of things like "butter" and "maple" and so on. Simple, and not so useful for a novice, but the only food book I decided was worth the space when I sold my house and started living in an RV.
Most younger Americans I know who cook are always trying new recipes. We have famous old cookbooks where it's a massive achievement to cook every recipe in the book even just once, the expectation is you will have far more recipes in one book than anyone could possibly need.[1]
A lot of my older acquaintances, especially from overseas, have a stable of simple recipes from their family they barely ever stray from. (Maybe this is just the economics of running a family rather than culture, it might just be age and family size driven rather than country of origin, not sure.)
These are different styles of cooking and one's more suited to instinct, the other to measurement.
[1] Did the rise of the cookbook itself inspire this insatiable desire to constantly try new foods and dishes? Ok probably not, cookbooks are ancient, but it's fun to imagine "Big Cookbook" deliberately, subliminally encouraging a broad cultural preference for constant culinary novelty. They'd write fawning newspaper copy for new dishes, like in this old NYT article-- "The pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew more about it!" https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/04/13/1944-the-times-discovers-pizza/
Hmm.....
I think there's *some* of that "big cookbook" component, in the context of mid-century America trying to promote new industrialized ingredients and products, and a supposedly scientific mindset to diet. But I think that also created a gap of 1-2 generations that just didn't pass on much of its knowledge, and that knowledge is now gone, and if I want to learn how to cook what my grandma ate as I kid I need to rediscover it for myself.
Edit to add: quality of ingredients is also much more variable, and hard to capture in a recipe, in the US than elsewhere. If I'm grocery shopping in France, I can trust my vegetables and fruits and meats will mostly be good quality. In the US, not so much. Until I buy and open a package of chicken, I have no idea how it will cook, or how much seasoning it will need. This makes precise recipes less reliable, but *also* means that successfully doing things by eye or feel or instinct requires more experience to do well. Which of those effects wins out depends on how good a cook you are and how well you know the specific thing you're trying to make.
Side note: I travel full time so I'm always grocery shopping in different places. I never know what's going to be available or good from week to week, and just have to adapt and improvise. One time I was planning on having salad, but the local supermarket (whose sign literally said "The only grocery store in town,") did not carry lettuce. At all. They weren't out, there just wasn't a spot for it in the produce department.
So even for someone who grew up cooking with their family in the US, they could suddenly find their knowledge useless or wrong if they move a few counties or states away.
Yeah, I can see that. There are also natural changes in what we have access to and consider high quality ingredients. In the 1950s there are all these dishes that celebrate new industrial distribution. Canned pineapple and maraschino cherries and spam start going in everything. Ambrosia turns mass produced confections into a "salad."
A few generations back in my family and there was a lot of cooking with small game and small lake fish that was all pretty labor intensive to clean and cook. It's a lost art but I don't actually feel too guilty about not putting quail or rabbit on the table once a week.
I'll instead grab bok choy and fresh pulled noodles and a bone broth base from the asian grocery, or a few weeks ago I used a sous vide to make a citrus-marinated lengua filling, maybe I'll add a quick kimchi in there for korean fusion tacos. My culinary habits are absolutely unrecognizable to my forebears, but I think I'm alright.
Random aside, but a few years ago there was a scandal as major recipe sites started removing the "sort by rating" features from their websites. I would love to hear somebody who works on the backend of allrecipes or tasteofhome explain why.
I'm sure there was some stat that showed how much it hurt user engagement, I'd just love to hear the internal story behind that decision.
Some days I just want to see the top rated recipe on allrecipes and marvel at how underwhelming it is, some mac and cheese with tomatoes or something.
The "world's best recipe" (insofar as it's not a completely empty category) might just be so underwhelming it makes people question what they're doing and they never come back to the site.
> Ambrosia turns mass produced confections into a "salad."
My family has been making ambrosia out of whole mandarin oranges and whole coconuts, for I think most of the previous century. So I guess you could call that a celebration of distribution (except for the times when the relevant part of the family was in East Asia), but I don't think there's much "industrialization" about it. It certainly looks nothing like the pictures on Wikipedia.
I do agree with your general thesis, though. :-)
I identify with the Chinese and Brazilians here, I'm terminally incapable of following a recipe. I can confirm that even when you're good at cooking this way, baking completely falls apart
What's funny to me is how imprecise Medieval recipes are. "Season to taste. Prepare in the usual way." They presume ... a lack of precise measuring tools? Extensive culinary knowledge that modern people just don't have? Easy access to any particular ingredient?
Though I suppose South Americans are the more illustrative example because they share our technology and still make their choices.
"Tasting History" is great like that. Take a Classical or Mediaeval recipe that is basically "get chicken, cook chicken, season chicken" and turn out a finished dish 😁
Not chicken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CilkAVJLBUY&list=PLIkaZtzr9JDkeZTsRqocGfsf2NrkLpiID&index=7
Roman chicken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y
+1 for Tasting History. It's a fantastic channel.
I think I read somewhere that the target audience for medieval recipes were high-level professional chefs, because those were the only cooks who knew how to read. Also they didn't have precise measuring tools, and thermometers weren't even invented yet.
Hm... Interesting. I hadn't thought of literacy being such a strong filter.
I've heard the same. If the only people reading your book are palace chefs, instructions like "make a good gravy" and "add enough flour" make perfect sense.
I think it's really down to experience of cooking. If I've never made a recipe before or seen it made or grew up with my mother making it, then I'll use a recipe.
If I'm familiar with the dish or have made it a few times now, I'm a lot more comfortable with measuring by eye, swapping out ingredients, etc.
Your Brazilian friends are probably going by "this is the way my mother/granny made it" and, I'm the same way, she never measured stuff out - it was by eye, or "a handful", "a pinch", etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yInR3ywVjk
There are two things going on here.
One is that people in the US cook a lot less than the historical norm, and therefore they are inexperienced and bad at it. They manage by following recipes which are absurdly exacting, and because they don’t really know what they’re doing, they produce edible but poor-quality food most of the time. Also because they don’t do it very often, they don’t have a large variety of ingredients and don’t know how to verify whether ingredients and spices are of high quality or not: they depend on labeling and prices for this, which tricks them into spending triple the price on fancy eggs or salt that have negligible differences from any other kind of eggs or salt. They cover over bad recipes or blandness that comes from poor cooking skills by adding extraneous, or extra, sugar to things that really shouldn’t have it.
The second aspect of this is why foreigners would be better. Many aren’t! Some have simply memorized a lot of recipes. But foreigners who are astonished by this are likely raised in cultures where cooking is actually done. In cultures that really do cook, they’ve internalized basic technique and knowledge in a way that Americans have not. (This is why, if you have a certain kind of mom, her cooking is the best you’ve ever had. It’s not just nostalgia: she has an enormous store of internalized experience and technique.) it’s hard for me to say what countries actually still cook. Any household I visit can simply be one where they don’t cook or still cook; I would need a huge sample size. That said, I have enough experience in the UK and US to say that both countries have, on average, terrible cooks, and somehow the UK is even worse on average than the US, which I can’t readily explain.
Once you, as an American, get enough hours in front of the counter and burner that you grasp basic technique, you begin to understand how very bad much cooking is. The difference between low to mid-grade ‘restaurant-quality’ food and most home meals is that the line cook has a basic understanding that salt is not optional, and he knows how much salt he is supposed to use per unit of different kinds of food. He can measure by eye and he knows when not to.
Once you get past the point of basic technique, it’s incredibly easy to improvise and exact recipes become a series of hints rather than a guide to be followed. You begin to recognize by feel the correct level of heat to use on different meats for different effects. You know what the basic categories of things are that will constitute a decent cooked sauce or raw sauce. You know that the size of the pan has a significant effect on how different types of food will cook in it and you can estimate this by eye. You probably use much higher heat for shorter periods, much more salt and acid, measure everything by eye, and you’re confident telling whether spices are good or not from their scent or appearance.
These are not things that can be communicated efficiently by anything but experience: the sort of book that tries to get these basics across quickly is 900 pages, narrowly focused to one cuisine, and still not comprehensive.
And, anyway, the level to which people think they need to be exact with baking is exaggerated. You just have to tolerate failure well and learn what you can mess with and what you can’t, and how many cumulative changes will end poorly, and what elements truly are critical.
When I was a kid, I watched Cajun Cooking with Justin Wilson. He used the palm of his hand as a measuring spoon. He'd pour the ingredient into his hand, then pour it from his hand into an actual measuring spoon to prove to the audience that his palm method gave the right amount, and then pour it into the pot.
I think baking vs cooking is probably a big part of it, but also, before my family moved to the US, we'd use actual cups and actual spoons for baking recipes, not specialized measuring cups / spoons. Even in baking you only need the right ratios, and adding too little baking soda will only hamstring you so much (although too much will indeed be problematic).
I think there are two thinks contributing to this (if it is true, i am not sure if its more than just a vibe people have):
The us doesn't have a "standard" cuisine so our diets are varied across cultures. Some italian tonight, some french tomorrow, etc. If you always cook a single cuisine you start learning the standard stuff and patterns and can reduce how much you rely on a recipe.
Second, to go along with Wang's comments on families, US children dont spend as much time at home as in some other cultures and in the US cooking isn't always the wife/mom's job. The cooking is spread out, so no one develops expertise and children dont spend enough of their young adult years watching and helping cooking from the expert.
I'll note there are a ton of exceptions to this in US cuisine. Does a Hamburger have a recipe? A hot dog? Eggs and Bacon? If you dont make the sauce, pasta doesn't either. This is actual cooking even if it isn't as involved as say making dumplings from scratch.
As a kid in Australia in the 1980s, we used ordinary spoons instead of "measuring spoons", and my mother assured me that this was fine because all tablespoons are the same size (and all dessert spoons, and all teaspoons). I never bothered to check whether this was the case, but all spoons of a particular category ought to be a similar size.
Recipes would also distinguish between a "rounded" and a "heaped" spoon of something -- does the pile of powder on your spoon have a rounded top or is it piled as high as it can possibly go? I guess that if you're measuring stuff with "measuring spoons" then this goes out the window and you just use a flat top.
My approach is pretty much similar to your mother's. I generally use the "small spoons" in my kitchen for teaspoon measurements and the "big spoons" for tablespoon measurements.
I've actually tested it and my small spoons are about 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons while my big spoons are pretty much really tablespoons. (Weirdly, they're very consistent. The small are consistently about 1.5 to 2 teaspoons and the big are consistently about 1 tablespoon. We've bought our spoons from a variety of places, mostly thrift stores, so I would've thought there'd be more variability than there seems to be.)
Even though the small spoons are bigger than teaspoons, I still use them for teaspoon measurements. For the most part, that is: for health reasons, I now have to monitor how much salt I eat. So when I add salt, I try to use more precise measuring spoons.
I agree that baking is much more fragile to ingredient ratios than soup is. When preparing a pizza dough, having 10% too much water will leave you with a sticky suspension, while having 10% too much flour will give a dry, brittle dough. So either you measure before, or you already know the required consistency and add the missing ingredient. (I measure before, obviously.) I expect that it is similar for leaving agents (even if it is not as critical).
At least ingredient ratios can be communicated with arbitrary precision. There is the whole can of worms (okay, perhaps not the best image) of getting the right amount of a temperature-dependent reaction, where the temperature is not be precisely controlled and visual or tactile inspection is required to judge the progress. Handling yeast dough, baking stuff in the oven and caramellization all come to mind here.
The 14.79ml tablespoon seems a bit over the top for me, that accuracy would only be required if the recipe specified the amount of tablespoons to four digits. Given that mostly single digit integer amounts are used instead, I think anything from 14ml to 16ml would probably be fine.
In general, I find it somewhat frustrating how little cooking borrows from chemistry. Magnetic stirring, bottle-top measuring dispensers seem like obvious items. Feedback controlled plates (either a bluetooth thermometer in a pot or point a thermal camera at the pan) or microwaves are also notably absent.
"He visits a science museum in Chicago, is shocked to see it is free for everyone despite America’s capitalist reputation, and is delighted to see the little children running around and pressing buttons and enjoying learning things about science."
This hits me right in the nostalgia. I spent the (brutally hot) summer of 1988 in an apartment without air conditioning near the Museum of Science and Industry. A friend and I spent so much time in the museum's air conditioned interior escaping the heat that we were able to recite along with halfthe exhibits.
("...because the engine isn't in the car! It's in the road! It's... ELECTROMAGNET POWER!!!")
Sadly, they ended free admission a few years later. Though the public libraries have a few season tickets available for free checkout so that families who can't afford it can go to the museum. But not like we did then.
I loved this post and it and things like it are why I come here.
I really enjoyed this. Scott has never lost steam as blogger – even after all of these years.
Odd comment from someone who was active on an election-maps forum for many years: Iowa was actually one of the most left-wing states in America during the Reagan years. In 1988, at the conclusion of his time in office, it voted for Dukakis in an enormous landslide (...even as Dukakis went down to an enormous national defeat), and was his second-strongest state in the Union after Rhode Island.
At the end of his tenure, Reagan lost an enormous amount of support in the Plains over the farm crisis: https://www.iowapbs.org/iowapathways/mypath/2422/farm-crisis-1980s
Most of the Plains states were very conservative and this didn't matter too much, but Iowa -- belying its reputation -- is historically a very liberal state, having been one of very few where Barack Obama outright won the white vote (unlike, for example, California). It's swung to being more conservative in the Trump era, very much unlike California, but that isn't the alignment of even the quite recent past: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/906560060557467649
So it should be noted that, by going to 1980s-era Iowa, Wang was in fact going to a very angry and struggling place which was not at all happy with the national leadership!
Read those whole thing out to my Mom, talked through it. Some things brought up (shortly if already in the comments):
- Mention of de Tocqueville
- Baking (vis á vis recipes)
- Asking a fish what water is, as in Andrew Hunter's comment.
As regards the Proliferation of Regulations: the point about state capacity seems relevant, in that if you care a lot more about certain uses (enforcing conformity to the Party), you will have less to spend on other purposes (speeding). Might be worth thinking through difference between regulations based on Safety (e.g. speeding, food regulations, etc.) And regulations based on protectionism (e.g. many licensure requirements, other food regulations, large companies choking out smaller companies via regulatory burden).
The pamphlet “You know how back in your home country, all the media is carefully optimized to present everything in the best possible light? We have a silly custom in America, which is that all our media is optimized to make us look as horrible as possible. Relax and don’t take it too seriously.” got an uproarious reaction, and I think was mom's favorite line of the piece.
The invitation to think on, and window into, China and Chinese thought back in the 80s, was very interesting. Especially the degree to which much of what goes on in modern Chinese authoritarianism couldn't occur then for technological reasons (at least not in anything resembling its present form).
Tangentially, my sister and I have spent tonight listening to old Schoolhouse Rock songs, which are admittedly a decade and a half older than Wang's Iowan sojourn. Such a different country...
Amusingly, I took the Chinese student's question "How do people unify their thoughts?" as being meant in a collectivist sense: how do people make sure they agree with each other and all think the same thing?
But your later comments on it (about asking "how do you unify your thoughts?" on a date, and "nobody unifies their thoughts correctly") sound like you took it in an individualist sense: how does a person unify his or her thoughts and become a consistent individual?
“what do you unify your thoughts based on?” sounds to me more like "to what collective do you subsume yourself?", so still collectivist, but acknowledging multiple collectives floating around.
Even that's more individualist than I think was meant - you get to *choose* which collective to subsume yourself to!
"Commentaries on the book hold up Wang as some kind of incisive critic of US society. My impression was that he opened a newspaper, read the criticisms Americans were making about themselves, and relayed them back to the Chinese."
This is exactly my take on Philip Alston's report on severe poverty in the US. He was clearly just regurgitating talking points from the media and Democratic politicians, so naturally the very same people whose talking points he was uncritically repeating praised him as a visionary.
“I cannot imagine you could run a country this way at all, but America seems to muddle through” -- to be fair, most of the rest of the core Anglosphere shares this view
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
Which is funny because the objective framing should actually be, “I cannot imagine you could run a country this way at all, but America is the most crushingly dominant economic and cultural force in world history by a stunning margin, maybe my understanding of systems and humans is poor and I should study this country dispassionately.”
This could well be despite the weird parts though, rather than because of them
Are the quoted parts written in English by Wang, or translated from Chinese by a human, or (recently) machine-translated?
Your comments about "mediocre English" suggest it's written by Wang himself, and indeed it reads like the sort of mostly grammatical but not very smooth or idiomatic English written by an educated Chinese speaker.
On the other hand, there are sentences like "Chinese people cooking, rarely look at the recipe, grab a handful is." - word salad that I can't parse, which looks like a language model going slightly wrong.
And then there's this: "Parking (Parking) is a big problem. On both sides of the street, there are clear signs indicating whether you can park. If you park in a place where you can’t park, you will receive a fine (Ticket)"
That looks like something that was written in Chinese, using the English terms "parking" and "fine" and putting a translation into Chinese in brackets. A human translator would then leave out the bracketed words entirely, but a machine translation would leave them in and translate them, resulting in near synonyms (as in "fine (Ticket)"), or literally repeating the same word, as in "Parking (Parking)".
I also wondered that. The edition I got seemed very hastily put together (it didn't have page numbers!) and didn't explain this.
Occasionally it says things like "Some people translate lobbyist as lobbyist, but other people translate it as lobbyist", which makes me think this was a rush job translation from the Chinese.
I've wondered the same thing. A few minutes of Google "research" didn't turn up for me any answers about whether it was translated or not.
Either way--but especially if it's a translation--I'm not convinced we're getting the strongest version of Wang's observations. It's possible his book is more thoughtful and incisive than the version that's available to non-Chinese-reading English readers like myself.
I managed to find a Chinese version of American Against America online. The original sentence about Chinese cooking is 中国人烧菜，很少看菜谱，抓一把就是。(link: https://liushooter.github.io/UsaVsUsa/chapters/chapter004.html ) I would personally translate this as something like, "When Chinese people cook, they rarely look at recipes. Grabbing a handful is good enough." The part about a handful being good enough is kind of an idiom where it doesn't make complete sense if you take the grammar literally.
So yeah this sentence's translation does not look like something done by an English-speaking human.
EDIT: Ah yes, I also found the sentence about parking; you were right. 停车（Parking）是个大问题。街道两旁，均有明确的标志牌，指示能否停车。在不能停车的地方停车，会收到罚款单（Ticket），如果不付款，法院就会通知你到庭，或者下次更新执照时遇到麻烦。
Great read, and a great question posed by Wang Huning: "How do people unify their thoughts?"
This is a really good question, and it is THE political science question. In democracies, this is related to the question: "Why do people obey policies they vehemently oppose, made by rulers they voted against"? And the answer is that people are assumed to regard elections as the legitimate way to appoint rulers, and therefore are obliged to obey the orders made by the present ruler even if they disagree with them, until the next election (when the process is repeated). This answer is the unifying thought that is supposed to be shared by everybody, i.e. it is the answer that "unifies their thoughts".
...although in the US - and this puzzles not only Wang Huning, but also people like me - one must add the total reverence US citizens have toward their Constitution. You US citizens often talk and act as if it was some sort of Holy Text, despite being written by human beings, just like any other law! The Mormons in particular, but the rest of you as well...It is the one really weird aspect of "how US people unify their thoughts" from the perspective of foreign observers. Not meant as a criticism, just as an anthropological observation. ("All countries have their Gods, and their holy stones. A thousand clouds drift under the sky, but the sky itself is just one.")
The Constitution is our Schelling point. We have a wide variety of cultural et al. backgrounds, and ordinary laws are numerous & time-variant, so neither are adequate to coordinate around. But there's just the one US Constitution, it is quite short, and changes only happen rarely & with widespread agreement.
I know. But the necessity of using a text written by ordinary mortals as your main nation-defining point, infusing it with a sort-of sacred aura, has some psychological effects, I suspect. (Not negative, but they make you a bit different.)
For sure. I think the quasi-sacred aspect is likely an evolved response to deter defection (in the game-theoretic sense) from the Schelling point, since that's really all that's keeping Hobbes at bay.
I know I'm late to this, but I "obey policies I vehemently oppose, made by rulers I voted against" to the extent that numerous men with guns will come to take me away if I don't. Which I presume is the exact same motivation of the average Chinese person.
THE political science question, as you say, is not "how do people unify their thoughts". THE political science question is "whose orders do organized bodies of men with guns obey, and why?" Now granted, the answer to that question may in itself involve unity of thought.
You are hinting here at the difficult and important question of what is the relationship between democracy and the rule of law (Rechtstaat). Not space to go into that grand debate in a comment, let it just be said that "constitutions" is a legal device used in many countries to partly shield the Rechtstaat from the risk that a majority decides to permanently deprive minorities of their liberties or even lives. Constitutions can also be changed, since they (like everything else related to politics) is man-made, but usually demand much more than a simple majority vote in Parliament. This reduces that risk, although it does not eliminate it. It helps if the Constitution across time has been invested with a sacred aura, as has happened in the US (the re-enchantment of the world, winking at Max Weber here).
Putin's Russia is technically still a democracy, just to illustrate the high stakes in this debate. (Although part of the minimum definition of "democracy" is the requirement that those in power do not use their power to make it difficult for someone else to win the next election down the line, and Putin's Russia may not pass this test.)
The number of men with guns required to maintain order against 49% of the population is, well, much, much larger than what we have. I’m sure there is at least some elements of what I think polscistoic is describing — a nearly mystical feeling that the transfer of power dictated by the Constitution grants legitimacy regardless of what shenanigans were involved along the way, similar in character to the divine right of kings.
It would really be ironic if the current Chinese crackdown on westernized culture is being driven by some 1980s screed about how the culturally superior oriental Japanese were destined to defeat America economically.
>For example, he spends a long time talking about the specific bylaws of the Democratic and Republican parties, and who the party chair is, and how they pick county level officers, and so on. Most Americans don’t care about this, but it’s easy to figure out why someone from China - where the Party is the power behind the throne - would expect Power to hide somewhere in the Democratic or Republican organizational structure.
As an European who has studied American history and politics to a great degree, I also admit I still find the American party system completely mystifying. The best explanation that I've seen is that American parties aren't as much "real parties" (as an European would understand them) but just sort of gigantic labels that are used to allow the real political sorting process (which happens throuh the primaries) to take place.
This isn't just me; I remember once crashing a local right-wing youth organization's event here on the American 2012 presidential elections (which were then just about to take place), which had a speaker who had participated in the GOP national convention. When he talked about the event and showed clips about it, everyone just kept laughing through this (ostensibly serious) presentation, since the proceedings, with their pre-scripted nature, the open discrimination against Ron Paul delegates, and the whole convention just being a gigantic rally for a candidate, is so alien to someone used to Finnish political party conventions, where the participants actually debate things and vote on them without the result being a preset thing.
I suspect that if Wang had come to any European country - say, here in Finland - they wouldn't have had any problems finding out about the political party structures, since, apart from being more democratic, the basic structures would be the same as in China. Indeed, there are (non-Communist, even non-socialist) political parties in Finland that have actually sent visitors to CCP's conventions, and while the whole ideology and culture is of course alien to them, the basic structures and proceedings were mostly familiar.
This isn't because Europe is copying China, of course, but because the CCP's structures are inherited from the socialist movement, and the basic socialist movement party hierarchy and structures were then copied by other political ideologies and parties, with adjustments - not due to any specific commitment to socialism, but simply because they worked. Then these party structures were imported to European colonies, etc.
It's possible that America would have gone through the same developments if it hadn't been for the Progressives making their innovations, chiefly open, competitive primaries. The primaries are probably the key to the American party structures forming the way they are, and thus becoming so alien to those from other countries.
I've read some socialists explaining that, even with all of its faults, the open primaries mean that there's no sense being outside the Democrats; the open primaries and FPTP basically mean that there's always going to be two parties, and even if, say, the Greens managed to surpass the Democrats, they'd just become the new Democrats, since the open primaries mean that all the moderate liberals would then just compete in the Green primaries (and probably win them).
Wang's characterization of the parties as franchises is actually pretty good. The party designation largely acts as marketing for a candidate. I say I am with Party X so you know i must believe 90% of what Party X thinks.
Because government power in the US is split on many many levels, it's not feasible to have parties which do much more than that. The issues that matter to some localities aren't the same as others even for people in the same party. And at the really local level, like a city council in a small city, candidates wont even mark themselves as part of a party. Mostly because it doesn't matter (the national democratic party doesn't have an opinion on zoning issues in some small town in Ohio for example), and also because most small towns lean heavily towards one party or the other so everyone running is probably part of a single party.
Primaries have some to do with it - though there are closed primaries in some states. We dont have proportional representation though so unless you win you dont get representation. It means small parties have little chance of taking off. It's easier for new political movements, like the Tea Party in your 2012 example or Bernie Sanders style left wing views, to be absorbed by the larger parties.
And of course, America is huge. In most large countries you would expect multiple regional parties, maybe with some agreements between parties at federal level. The parties at the EU level are alliances between regional parties.
"For example, Wang devotes a chapter to teenage runaways - again, the same amount of space he devotes to racism or drugs. It sounds like all of his information comes from one 1973 book, Juvenile Delinquency: The Stray Teenager In America, which says that in a single year, police caught 265,000 teenage runaways. Later it says that there are a million teenage delinquents in America, and Wang seems to think maybe these are all runaways or something. He suggests that this is because American families do not have “true inner harmony” because they are too individualistic, and spends a lot of time thinking about what kind of society could have fewer teenage runaways. While I am sure there are still some teenage runaways in the US, I am skeptical that the issue deserves the level of thought Wang gives it."
So Wang could turn around and ask you "why do you think teenage runaways aren't that important? what are the blinkers *you* are wearing?" His "one million delinquents" figure isn't that far off the mark:
Figures on runaways:
"It is estimated that 6 to 7% of youth run away from home each year – more than 1.5 million children and adolescents annually. NRS’ report, Why They Run, indicates that issues cited by youth as reasons for leaving home include family dynamics; physical, sexual, verbal, and other types of abuse; and economic issues at home. The study also found that almost half of the youth interviewed said they were forced out of their homes."
https://youth.gov/youth-topics/homelessness-and-runaway
"Homelessness is a major social concern in the United States, and youth may be the age group most at risk of becoming homeless. The number of youth who have experienced homelessness varies depending on the age range, timeframe, and definition used, but sources estimate that between 500,000 and 2.8 million youth experience homelessness within the United States each year.
Youth run away or experience homelessness for a range of reasons, but involvement in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and severe family conflict have all been found to be associated with experiencing homelessness. These youth are vulnerable to a range of negative experiences including exploitation and victimization. Runaway youth and youth affected by homelessness have high rates of involvement in the juvenile justice system, are more likely to engage in substance use and delinquent behavior, be teenage parents, drop out of school, suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, and meet the criteria for mental illness. Experiences of unaccompanied youth affected by homelessness are different from those who experience homelessness with their families. While negative occurrences persist for youth experiencing homelessness with their families, their experiences may not vary drastically from youth living in poverty. Studies have also found distinct variability in outcomes among youth experiencing homelessness, suggesting that youth experience homelessness differently."
This is intertwined with homelessness, and I'm sure you can work out for yourself why this would be a problem. Start off with a 15 year old runaway and you can end up down the line with the likes of Jordan Neely.
"6 to 7% of youth run away from home each year – more than 1.5 million children and adolescents annually"
This can't possibly be true.
Yeah, that needs a lot more clarification on definitional aspects. It uses 'children and adolescents' seemingly interchangeably with youth and if we assume say 10 years for childhood and adolescents that's 60-70% of children running away... So I assume we're counting the same kids multiple times (in which case I wonder if their confusing incidents with kids in the annualization numbers) or 'running away' is a much broader set of behaviors then typically construed (e.g. includes things like staying out past curfew or the like)
This review left me with great affection for Wang Huning, and a 2% more hopeful view of China and the CCP.
The reviewer either chose quotes that were especially revealing, or the entire book is like that: Wang *sounds* like all native Chinese I have known, not accent and idiom but *emphasis* on certain things and disbelief at other things.
It is almost impossible to make any statement about any people or culture without being Mau-Mau'ed as a racist, but: the Chinese culture and worldview are very different from ours. They have been a top-down empire of government officials ruling over a billion peasants for 3000 years. There is a deference to authority, and a lack of any [value? role? dignity? worth?] for individual people, that is so deep it is of the essence of the Chinese. It's the evolved arrangement and power structure needed to co-ordinate rice farming to feed xxx,000,000 people, and also the mindset that sees sacrificing millions of citizens for national goals as no big deal. (Many of these sacrifices have been related to dams and rivers. Mao's mass slaughters are a whole different level.)
This worldview is so alien to us that many cannot even see it as real, cannot understand it even as language or human speech.
Yet.
Individual people remain individual. Wang's voice is clear and he is very easy to imagine talking to circa 198x. I don't know what the real realtionship or power balance between the Chinese government and its citizens is at this historical moment. Friends who do business in China say there is a subtle spirit of independence but so subtle they can't read the faces or understand the in-group slang. More contact with Chinese people, and less CCP, would be great.
I want to write the greatest US campaign speech ever, wher I remind us that we are a VIRTUAL nation. The first nation founded on a contract, really an operating system, that is compact and somewhat Turing-complete. Not on tribal or territorial or religious loyalty. Very few people elsewhere understand that we take words VERY VERY SERIOUSLY here. We argue over fine points of 240 year-old language because we all believe to the core the other 99% of the words. Our most popular sport is mass violence that comes to a total halt for REVIEWS OF THE RULEBOOK.
"Here it is. Yes, this is it. Read it. It's boring in places but pretty tight and punchy. Not a page-turner but: hey it's short. They knew that govt stuff is boring so they edited it down and made it wicked simple...."
This is my favorite review so far.
BRetty
N.B., this isn't part of the contest, it's Scott's own work.
Thanks for pointing that out, I totally missed that.
Was I the only one who thought this review was actually about some American who visited China/Japan and that Scott had flipped all the anecdotes and analyses to match and the reveal at the end was that it was all written by a young Chris Christie or something?
No, because the idea of an American visiting other countries and studying them in depth to learn important lessons for back home is borderline incoherent to me.
There's two types of Americans:
1. The ones who assume that the American way of doing things is always the best, and
2. The ones who assume that the foreign way of doing things is the best (aka the "Why Can't We Live In Enlightened, Topless, Europe?" school of thought)
You forgot the type who doesn’t realise there is a non-American way to do things at all.
"National franchise stores, such as McDonald’ s, Hardee’ s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, are available nationwide. The head office has no idea what they are doing other than selling the same goods."
I'm still reading the post, but I had to rush down and comment on that statement. I worked at Hardee's for three years in the mid 1990s. Over those years, that company seemed to change the basic structure of its sandwiches at least three times. Very little consistency. It made it difficult to work for them. That, I think, is evidence that the head office didn't even know what goods their business was selling.
Edited to add: I realize that's not important for anything in the post. Just an observation.
I'm actually kind of enamored now with the idea of McDonald's as a portrait of a well-functioning federalist body. The whole story of the McFish being one franchisee's answer to Lent, and then getting picked up nationwide is a beautiful parable on localist experimentation.
Franchisors only have so much power to dictate what franchises can do. And each company usually has basically a franchisees union that will push back on certain policies. For example when McDonalds started doing all day breakfast they had to make it so franchisees could opt out. Many of the biggest ones were against the idea. The owner of your hardees might have been changing suppliers or chaining the recipe themselves or based on what other owners had said works (just speculation).
McDonalds tends to encourage large franchisees which many units as well as encouraging only managers or other internal people to become new franchisees. On the other side Chick-fil-a only lets you own one franchise. The Chick-fil-a franchisees have much less power to push back on the parent. However, Chick-fil-a franchises make like 2x-3x the amount a McDonalds one does even operating only 6 days/week.
Franchises are a very interesting business model.
You may very well be right about the Hardee's I worked at. If it was a franchisee (and not a corporate store), it was probably part of a very big group of franchises. The GM wasn't the owner. The location was owned by some company in (I think) North Dakota, which is very far from the state my Hardee's was actually located in.
Edited: To elaborate a little on my original comment:
I've worked at two hamburger chains. Hardee's was one and Wendy's was the other (3 years at one and 5 years at the second). With Wendy's, the basic way of making sandwiches was pretty much the same. Even new or "boutique" sandwiches had similar patterns in how they were made, and those patterns resembled existing sandwiches. There were actually three patterns: "everything," "sauce + tomato + lettuce," and "catsup + pickles + onions+ mustard." Different sandwiches strayed slightly from that pattern, but there was a pattern nonetheless.
With Hardee's (or at least the Hardee's I worked at), there seemed to be no "basic" way of making most sandwiches (though while I was there, they did keep and follow a "catsup + pickles + onions + mustard" template for their smaller hamburgers). They seemed to "innovate" in a way that made it difficult for me as an employee to actually learn the process. In fact, I don't really remember sandwiches for Hardee's while I still have the Wendy's sandwich structure annoyingly ingrained in my brain and will probably remember it on my deathbed even if I live to be 100. Sigh.
A tangent, but... was the spelling "catsup" part of the Wendy's sandwich protocol? Like, if you close your eyes, can you call up an image of a "sandwich making" graphic that has the word "catsup" printed? Or is that just the local spelling where you grew up? [And if so, was your local brand Brooks Catsup of Collinsville, IL?]
I'm only asking because I envisioned such a graphic, laminated and affixed to the wall above a sandwich station, and the word "catsup" kertwanged my spell-check when I saw it. I know it's a valid variant spelling but can't imagine ever printing it on a sign.
I don't remember for sure, but it was probably "ketchup." I know they used Heinz, at least at the time I worked there and at that location worked. But it's possible they used it and still put "catsup" on signs. Strangely, I usually spell it "ketchup," but for some reason I spelled it "catsup" in my comment.
IIRC the mid-1990s was right about when Hardee's merged with Carls Jr., so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of recipe changes were gradually (and confusingly) rolled out as a result of that.
At high speed, it is not impossible for a car to destroy people.
This reminds me a lot of Sayyid Qutb's <i>The America I Have Seen</i>, a similar foreigner-comes-to-America-sees-suburban-life-and-hates-it tale. Qutb later became one of the chief intellectual inspirations for Al-Qaeda, etc.
PDF is here: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/3F/3F56ACA473044436B4C1740F65D5C3B6_Sayyid_Qutb_-_The_America_I_Have_Seen.pdf
Great book report, loved reading it. One point of clarification that perhaps should be updated...
"So far. China hasn’t quite caught up to America. Their GDP per capita is still a third of ours."
China's GDP per capita is $12k/year, vs the US at $80k/year. That's less than half of a GDP per capita 1/3rd of the US.
On a PPP basis it's $18k/year vs $64k/year or 28%, but still significantly behind 1/3rd.
China is just a LOT poorer than the US so far. Doesn't mean it won't change, but it's an important note.
Thank you for the correction. I think I accidentally compared GDP per capita to median income.
Mmmmmmmm, I struggle with this interpretation and I wonder if anyone else has done an in-depth review. The book seems important but....
Alright, I've read some of the book, I haven't finished and won't because, well, it's heavy and hard to read in the bathtub. But there's these... "void" sections that just confuse the dickens out of me. And it looks like you just took them to be simplicity but...let me give an example.
So the book really starts with...an examination of the Amish and the Amana. It's wild!
On the Amish:
"Over the years, despite the fact that the Amish have changed in one way or another, the basic spirit of this group has not changed much. It is curious: why has such a powerful modern civilization failed to influence and transform them? Hasn't Western civilization impacted many very distant peoples?"
...
"This is a real social phenomenon worth thinking about. In the heart of the modernized world, there is such a group of people who refuse to be modernized. Their remoteness is not in the geographical area, but in the spiritual world. They are voluntarily isolated from modernization. From this we can draw an opinion that if people refuse modernization in the spiritual sphere, then it is difficult for modernization to invade them. "
On the Amana:
"The Amana Colonies is a special place in Iowa. Americans call it the 'socialism' or 'collectivism' of the United States. How can such a place survive in a capitalist society like the United States? What kind of organization is it? It aroused great curiosity in me, a person from China, to know how "collectivism" is practiced in the United States."
FYI, the Amana were basically Amish communists whose community dissolved in the 1930s into the general American mainstream. Worth researching.
More Wang on the Amana:
"It is only by grasping the basic spirit that one can discern the name of the 1932 shift in Amana, the most fundamental cause of which was probably the abandonment and indifference of the younger generation to this faith. Under the powerful lure of this prosperous society, the younger generation turned to other values. Once this shift occurs in the younger generation, it is difficult for any force to ensure the longevity of an institution. This is a problem for all kinds of social systems. The problem facing many countries around the world today is a crisis of trust in the foundations of the system among the younger generation."
So Wang sets up, at the start of the book, this interesting juxtaposition between the Amish and the Amana. And, in the context of a rapidly liberalizing China and USSR, the question of why the Amish are...kinda succeeding while the Chinese are being forced to westernize is really important, especially from someone like Wang. So what great analysis does Wang give?
"If this problem is not addressed, the system will face challenges?"
This mf-er is either a genius or an idiot. And it looks like you (Scott) kind of went with the bumbling idiot interpretation. I have trouble buying this though. No ambitious Communist starts an examination of the US with the Amish and a culturally dissolved communist/socialist commune in the late 80's by chance. But there's this "void" thing, this intellectual blue-balling that happened all the time where he sets up an interesting issue and gives an analysis worthy of a fifth-grader. Everything interesting in the book (from what I've read) is to be interpreted through context, the actual text is...kinda garbage. Which sounds like the most Chinese thing ever but I also constantly struggled with whether I'm a dense American who can't...properly read how a post-Cultural Revolutionary ideologue in Deng's China would have to write vs me just reading way more meaning into the text than is actually there.
I really hope Taneer Greer or someone like that reads this review and gives his spin. Because you (Scott) kinda take the "Wang is dumb" approach and, honestly, I absolutely get that, but I'm really wondering if there's an old China hand who can confirm whether there's actually more depth here.
See Finnish Cooperativess in NE Minnesota. Purely economic and social. No spiritual element.
They are still very effective.
“ A co-operative is formed primarily to serve its members, but at the same time it is a unit of the cooperative movement for the purpose to do away with all exploitation in production and distribution.”
Gus Hall grew up in that area. I did too.
http://gallery.lib.umn.edu/exhibits/show/juhla--celebrating-150-years-o/cooperatives
Oh cool!
As far as I can tell though, the Amana were German radical Christians. Very much a religious group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amana_Colonies
Edit: Or is this some other kind of reference that I'm not getting?
The Finnish Co-ops are simply thoughtful, practical, social and economic cooperation. A bit of socialism without coercion.
That Gus Hall grew up in that environment and went on to become the leader of the American Communist party is not surprising.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Hall
Mmm, interesting. That does make it sound as though there's a subtextual language that is largely invisible to people who aren't looking for it.
Very interesting, I wonder if the translation has something to do with it.
Having lived in China (2004, no clue how it is now) I don't think they got enough credit for some of their lack of bureaucracy. Though probably, as others mentioned, that changed as they became better able to implement their bureaucracy.
Why was it written in English? Who was it meant to be read by?
Place-studies people can get jobs in the state department or the intelligence apparatus. There's need for people who unify their thoughts based on the US constitution, but know a lot about other places.
Maybe Asians in general do see a conflict between freedom and prosperity: in the Japanese Shin Megami Tensei games, there is an ongoing conflict between Law and Chaos, but in the latest one (SMT V) they are instead named Order and Potential. SPOILERS: If you choose to side with Order, you create a world with prosperity but no individuality, and if you side with Potential, you create a world of 'immeasurable conflict' but where free thinkers thrive.
It's possible that it's not that America shows there is no conflict, but rather that with its starting material conditions, America could have been anything at all and it would have been a superpower. Maybe. Though I'm not sure if the material starting point of Canada was that different.
The idea of Americans being self organized in the view of the Chinese is supported by my experience; in the early 2000s some Chinese business partners of mine visited the US and among the experiences we treated them to was a combination potluck and folk music party at my parents' house. They asked who decided what food to bring and what musicians should be there and marveled at the fact that no one had instructed anyone on either of these rather important things, yet there was music all night and more than enough food for everyone.
>And Japan, despite all the virtues that made Wang think they would overtake the US, has stagnated instead.
Has it? Or is it simply managing a demographic downturn without the use of immigration while maintaining a high per worker income and first world living standards for all? Too soon to say imo.
Their productivity really does leave much to be desired, and while once associated with cutting edge tech they have more recently lagged behind (foreigners are surprised by how prominent fax machines still are there).
A sudden thought after reading this bit again:
"What prevents me from dismissing it in this way is that, well, China sure is trying the project of having the first set of things [hard work, industry] but not the second set [crime, drugs, anomie]. "
How would one compare this view of ideal China to the Puritan society of New England described in your "Albion's Seedlings" review?
BRetty
I just wanna join in the choir to say this was a very good one
“Even if this process raises GDP, China thinks it’s militarily, spiritually, and socially important to have a manufacturing-based economy”
Sure, that’s a good description of the world post the Industrial Revolution. Countries that lose their manufacturing base lose their cultural, economic and military domination. Although there is a lag.
"All of these make sense once you think about them, but it’s still jarring that they each get more pages than, say, racial conflict."
Well that depends on how you think society runs, no?
Suppose you went to Saudi Arabia and wrote a book all about the royal family settles disputes, and how oil wealth is distributed. Then someone complained that you say almost nothing about Allah and how he watches over Saudi Arabia and rewards or punishes it. What would be your response? Probably something like "Yes, yes, the society TALKS about Allah a great deal, no-one's denying that at a superficial level it's all Allah all the time. But I'm interested in how things *really* work, not in the language people use to justify what they are doing".
Which is, of course, the same thing as when he talks about social relationships, and in particular the competing professors. We see this frequently in the US political and quasi-political space – vicious disagreements that (to an outsider) are very clearly all about personality and the personal desire to be top dog, but you're not supposed to say that in America, you're supposed to say that every such disagreement is about politics in some way, the two want different things for society, or disagree about the best path to get there, or whatever.
This is now so deep in the way "Americans" analyze things that it's often comical. Americans desperately want everything bad in the world to be the result of some "system", because that way you can retain a faith in democracy and "the people", you can blame everything bad on whatever system it is you're against. Everything is about "the system", nothing is about the people who make up the system. This doesn't *have* to be false; emergent properties do exist in physics and biology. But it's something that needs to be demonstrated, not something to be taken as an article of faith with alternative views angrily dismissed. (This is the essence of whether you agree or disagree with Margaret Thatcher's "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families". Economics has done the hard work of climbing from the behavior of individuals to the behavior of groups, how macroeconomics is therefore different from the behavior of individuals and individual firms, and how to reconcile the two. But no other social science has even made the attempt, and they're mostly downright hostile to even pointing this out.)
"So when China (possibly at Wang’s instigation) recently cracked down on its high-tech sector in a way that threatened to chill future innovation, maybe they did that on purpose and didn’t care."
Don't misunderstand this point by assuming that what the NYT says on the issue has any connection to reality. Specifically, what does the NYT mean when it talks about "China cracking down on its high-tech sector"? China cracked down on things like games, certain types of finance, certain types of tuition programs, and certain social media. Calling these "high tech" is like calling a guy who knows how to play Call of Duty well a computer genius.
As Dan Wang has pointed out https://danwang.co China has been very specific in what it has cracked down on, and it does not consider that stuff to be "high tech", unlike manufacturing, or even certain types of software engineering (eg designing and writing compilers and OS's). Now maybe Beijing is wrong, you only get serious software companies if you allow for the frivolous software companies (ie a restatement of the "two sides of the same coin" thesis). But once again, we'll need to see how this turns out, but nothing is helped by misunderstanding what China is and is not doing regarding "real" high tech.
> If there is anything to be learned from this episode, it is that whenever political scientists from foreign dictatorships visit the United States, we should hand them a pamphlet, and it should say “You know how back in your home country, all the media is carefully optimized to present everything in the best possible light? We have a silly custom in America, which is that all our media is optimized to make us look as horrible as possible. Relax and don’t take it too seriously.”
This is something I think about every time I visit SF/Berkeley or DC and I, say, step out of the Amtrak station where I am being harassed by homeless people and it's not in any obscure neighborhood - you can practically see the Capitol building from there. Or the encampment of homeless tents in front of SF City Hall.
Do you think that, despite all their social issues which are far worse than the USA, you see anything like that if you fly into Beijing/Shanghai or Moscow? I haven't seen anyone say that, and I would expect that all those social ills are forcefully pushed out of sight by the local & federal governments. (Because, especially for an ignorant foreign visitor, out of sight out of mind.) So, if you are a Chinese or Russian elite and you arrive in DC, what is your interpretation of the highly visible homeless going to be? "My god, they can't even, unlike everyone else, do something as trivial as cover up the homeless a block or two away from their most powerful building! They are *that* incompetent and unable to govern in the most minimal fashion. The American Empire must be completely rotten and ripe to fall with the slightest push."
If you tried to explain to them "oh no, come on, obviously the cities could expel the homeless any time they wanted, the homeless encampments are there because they *want* them to be there, for... er... it's difficult to explain... no Congress doesn't want them there but they can't just order the DC mayor to get rid of the homeless because, though Congress legislates for DC, the mayor is still elected and governs independently - please stop laughing we really do believe in that and it's true, look, it's complicated, you can't interpret American politics by your standards, no, our ability to build new apartments in SF or keep the DC Muni actually running really has very little to do with how well our missiles work, it's the outcome of a long history of urban politics and, are you familiar with a man named Moses? Not the bible one -"
Anyway, long story short, it seems like one of those 'things you can't countersignal': https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThhNvdBxcTYdzm69s/things-you-can-t-countersignal If you are already indisposed to believe America is all that, why would you look at these blatant, prima facie, examples you are personally witnessing of state incapacity, and try to come up with Machiavellian explanations of local internal politics, as opposed to the simple parsimonious explanation of 'America is weak and decaying'?
China agaist China would be an interesting book.
Well, he is right about some things:
- It is hilarious that asking everybody to have a state ID (which would take care of many problems in one go, e.g., voter registration) would be unacceptable and creeping fascism, yet a driver's license is used in much the same way (except some of the good ways);
- Not selling alcohol on Sundays goes against the separation of Church and State
- The insistence on following measurements in recipes to the dot is weird (and a source of conflict with my girlfriend)
> So when China (possibly at Wang’s instigation) recently cracked down on its high-tech sector in a way that threatened to chill future innovation, maybe they did that on purpose and didn’t care. Maybe they wanted all the companies creating apps and social media sites and VR and whatever to go somewhere else, so they could continue to make widgets.
I think this is a very wrong way of looking at it. The high-tech sector is one of Xi Jinping's main keys to power due to surveillance and influence/propaganda applications (similar situation in the US), whereas depending on imports for widgets is a major vulnerability for China's economy because economic downturns or foreign forces can disrupt international trade (oil shocks are the classic example).
This is why intervention and upheavals are big in high-tech and why widgets are more hands-off; widgets generate economic growth and stability, not power for the people building them.
> America Is Good In Ways, But May Of Those Ways Are Dying
Typo, I think? "May" should be "many".
"But Wang didn’t get the pamphlet, so now he’s become the #2 guy in China and is optimizing for crushing any Western influences in Chinese society. Oops. At least that’s my theory."
Here is another theory: Wang's existence does not matter that much as a counterfactual. Crucially, Wang was *selected* by the people in charge because the story he was telling fit the narrative they wanted to push. This theory explains the relative mediocrity of the book. There was no drive to actually learn about America, only a drive for propaganda.
This seems likely to me.