> 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?"
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.
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...
"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.
> 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.
"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?
"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
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)".
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.")
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).
"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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
"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?"
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.
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...
"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.
> 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.
"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?
"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
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)".
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.")
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).
"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.
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
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.