How We Talk About China, with Kaiser Kuo
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From Asia Society Switzerland, this is State of Asia. I'm Annette Cotanes.

Ask anyone with even the slightest interest in China to name one China-focused podcast, and their answer is very, very likely going to be Seneca. Our guest today on this podcast, Seneca co-founder and host Kaiser Kuo, has been talking about China from any number of angles almost uninterrupted for 15 years now on his show, churning out weekly episodes that cover politics, economics, culture, humanities, tech, you name it.

Informed by his decades of living and working in China, and having built a wide, wide network of people ranging from prominent economists to, his words, chain-smoking, drinking, rock musicians, if it's happening in China, and what isn't happening in China, Kaiser has got it covered with Seneca.

And he's taken the conversation to go beyond the news of the day, searching for an answer to the question, how do people in Europe and the US actually talk about China? After attending the World Economic Forum in Davos late last month, Kaiser swung by the Asia Society Switzerland offices in Zurich, where my colleague Nico Lussinger and I sat down with him for a chat.

Kaiser Roll, very welcome to the State of Asia podcast. Thank you, Remco. Thanks, Nico. Great to have you here in Zurich. This morning we were chatting and you said, well, I'm releasing a narrative shift on things regarding China. And you're here just after the news on Deep Seat broke and how it is

according to a lot of headlines, stunning Western AI companies. And I thought we've seen kind of a similar thing with the developments in the EV industry in China, the renewables, the move not too long ago from people fearing TikTok ban in the US going to the red note. And it's always in Western sources, Western news media. The West is stunned by what China has accomplished. And now with Deep Sea, you call that a narrative shift. What do you mean by that?

Well, I'm not 100% sure I would call it yet a narrative shift, but I feel a stirrings of it for sure. And it's fascinating to watch as it's taking place right before our eyes and watching people talking about it.

So, it's something I'm going to be, you know, keeping a very close eye on. I actually put out a very informal Twitter poll asking people whether, you know, what we're witnessing right now, as you say, because of the sort of TikTok refugee phenomenon where people leaving TikTok were suddenly going on to Xiaohongshu and finding a very warm welcome there and being sort of astonished by…

The low prices of groceries and the fact that people don't need to work two or three jobs to make ends meet and the relatively nice apartments that they live in, all of that. Then, of course, deep seek, right?

But as you say, this is happening, this is layered atop a lot of other things. For example, this recognition that China is just such a leader in renewable energies. I think a lot of people are now waking up to the fact that China is now for two years in a row installed more renewable capacity than the world had in the previous year. So it's quite stunning. And then, of course, electric vehicles. That's been very much in the news. So this stuff is accrued, and I think it may have hit one of those

those mythical tipping points at this point right now. And it's fascinating. And it's not so much, I mean, I try not to let my optimism get the better of me and start thinking about what does this narrative shift mean? You know, how good is this going to be? Is this going to usher in a whole, you know, China-sance, as I've been saying? That would be wonderful and all that. But I'm more interested maybe in why are we always caught off guard by these things? Why are we always so surprised by what's happening in China? What does it actually say about

Do you have an idea on why the US or Europe...

Seem to be caught off guard by China in these fields so often. Yeah, I've got lots of ideas about that.

I think that part of it, I mean, I was writing about this this morning on Twitter. And I mean, I'll try not to repeat exactly what I said, but I think part of it, you know, a very big part of it is the way that we lens the Chinese narrative. It's almost invariably political, right? Our reporters there are mostly people who've been trained in understanding the Chinese political system, which...

also often means they don't understand the Chinese political economy particularly well. They don't necessarily understand cultural shifts. They don't have necessarily the language training to read things, you know, free of sort of the distortions that come through translation or from just sort of impartial or just sort of only partial readings. So part of it is the way we report China. I think we've seen this before. For example, in the early period of the COVID outbreak,

I think we were really hampered by the fact that we were covering it primarily as a political story. We didn't understand it well as a public health story. And so when you look at back then, the narrative was either China has bungled this because of its Leninist political system, because of the inability of people to report up. And there's certainly some truth to that.

But then we also immediately afterward, as soon as China seemed to be doing well, we started talking about Chinese state capacity, how the Chinese political system has given the Chinese the ability to do this massive, massive tracing systems and these quarantines and massive testing rollout, things like that. I mean, we always look first to the political system to understand it. Mm-hmm.

once again, we're, we're in that same trap. I mean, we're, we're always in that same trap. Now this isn't the fault. I don't think of the reporters themselves. I mean, you're in China. You're one of only a handful of reporters for your organization. This has obviously gotten much worse because of all the expulsions. You can go back and figure out, you know, who expelled who first. And, you know, you could say that this is all the fault of the United States for having expelled all these people's daily and, and, um,

Xinhua reporters, or you could say it's the Chinese fault for having expelled these Wall Street Journal reporters after this really execrable op-ed by Walter Russell Mead called Sick Man of Asia. The timing and all that, you can parse that. It doesn't really matter. But the effect is that there are not enough reporters in China, and they're necessarily going to do the political stories first. There's really no choice.

So unfortunately, it leaves gigantic blind spots for us. So that's just one of many reasons I'll go into. I mean, I think that a lot of it is this sort of Orientalist idea that

East Asians, this is the same for the Japanese. They're only capable of imitation, not of innovation. This idea that they're, you know, these sort of soulless automatons that they can't invent. This idea that we've held onto for a very long time that, you know, innovation is the exclusive purview of the white man, the lone genius toiling in Menlo Park, you know, New Jersey or Menlo Park, California, right? In his garage. Right.

And that's, I think, a big problem as well, but many more reasons. Part of the reason why the DeepSeek story landed so well is it was excellent timing, right? Because the announcement, the release of their R1 model came really just a few days after President Trump's inauguration, but also after the announcement of the Stargate project. And I've been thinking a lot about this. Somebody called this a split screen. And I think there's lots to sort of read into the split screen because R1,

You have, in the space of a few days, an announcement on the American side, a $500 billion investment into data centers to advance AI. And then a few days later, from China, where the narrative is it's kind of an entirely top-down, state-controlled, huge bureaucracy-driven thing,

You have the guys who are basically running a hedge fund and their side project is an AI company and they develop this model basically on, appropriately on a shoestring budget. And then they're also publishing it as an open source model. In a way, it's, my sense, it's not a shift of narrative so much. It's kind of like a complete inversion. Yeah, yeah. An inversion of the narrative. Yeah. I mean, that's maybe what's even more stunning about it.

Now, let's be fair now. This is not apples to apples. I mean, Stargate is not a comparable thing to what one company does, but the optics are certainly there and they certainly...

are pretty shocking. And we should be careful to understand what these guys at DeepSeek actually have done. And there's another angle that I don't think has been really explored enough, and that is how it's the very thing that so many people were sort of complaining about how Xi Jinping was so hell-bent on driving people out of the finance sector. Engineers should be doing engineering. Physicists should be doing physics.

I think that this actually attests to the over-financialization of the American and many European economies. The idea that our best and brightest STEM students go to Silicon Valley, which, by the way, has very little to do with Silicon these days, and they work for what are essentially digital media companies, and they make a lot of money in these social media companies, right? Is that where our best...

uh, you know, physicists should end up. So China doesn't think so. And it cracked down very, very hard on these quants, especially they think that they were, you know, damaging, very damaging to the, uh, the health of the Chinese market. And so these having been sort of driven out, uh, they found refuge. They, they, they kind of had to pivot and yeah, it was a side project for them. Uh,

And I think that we can't take too literally this idea that the whole thing was built on $5.6 million. That's not. The training was done for $5.6 million. I think we can probably reliably believe that. But that doesn't mean that the entire neural network that they built was built for that. We still don't have perfect clarity on what kind of chips went in, on when those chips were actually purchased, on what kind of a stockpile they had before the October 23rd.

announcement last year, I'm sorry, two years ago, to really curtail exports of GPUs to China. So a lot of it is still unknown to us. The spring of 2024, you published this three-part essay, My China Priors, which is a very personal family and personal history about how you view China, how your family history influenced the views you have of China, of the US, and what you see your role being as a bridge builder, you called it, between those two countries.

I think somewhere near the end of the three parts, you write, I feel compelled to admit an instinctive urge to defend China when I hear criticism of it. And this even extends to the ruling party and even to Xi Jinping. They say, but adding, to be fair, I have the same reaction when the US is, to my mind, criticized unfairly. What a time to be alive for you.

To feel defensive of both of those. How do you do that? Strong medication. No medication so far. Actually, I think I've sort of gotten over it. I think that whole exercise, writing those three essays, was pretty cathartic for me.

Right.

I don't need to feel so defensive about either. I think this has helped me a little bit. And, you know, I think just sort of clearing that, getting that off my chest really helped in that regard. I do feel, you know, an instinctive defense, but I'm much better at fighting it down now. And I know, you know, how, what it looks like when other people act sort of defensively

I don't like it when other people do that. And so I try not to do it myself. But I think it's important to admit the tendency there. And it's no different. I mean, people may have really fraught and problematic relations with their parents. But I still don't want you saying mean things about my mother. I mean, it's a very human thing. I think there's no problem in admitting to that. What I think was so valuable about this three-part essay that you wrote is that I think it's very...

uncommon for people who spend a lot of their time analyzing a specific subject to be that open and direct and explicit about their priors and maybe you know the gaps they have but also the biases that they have and i think that's it's incredibly helpful for somebody listening to your podcast you're going to have that backstory and sort of to know where you're coming from and why the things you're interested in are interesting to you and why other things maybe not

And in a way, I think it's also very similar to this idea of strategic empathy or cognitive empathy that you've been talking about for a long time, right? This is exactly what it is, is to understand the other sides of genesis and history and priors and biases and cultural and historical kind of dimensions without necessarily having to agree to all of it. And so...

You went through basically through this personal exercise of allowing almost for other people to extend you kind of the cognitive and strategic empathy. You spent a lot of time arguing for that and I couldn't agree more. But at the same time, it also...

it seems to me very hard to actually achieve it. What are the most successful strategies if you want to achieve strategic empathy? We talked about before the limitations on reporting coming out of China, which I think puts a huge cap on how much we can do that. So if you're on the American or the European side and you want to develop more strategic empathy towards China, but also if you're on the Chinese side and you want to have more strategic empathy towards Russia,

Western countries, like how do you do that? I've often thought about that. That's a really great question. And I'm going to answer it in a strange way. I'm going to say literature. I'm going to say humanities. I'm going to say that what really, look, you can read all you want from other people, you know, in say the Chinese strategic class. But if you want to understand the sort of root psychology, the emotional responses to things, which are ultimately more important,

It's hard to get that barring that you need to either immerse yourself in that culture. That's expensive. Everyone's going to be able to uproot and go live in a Chinese village for years. That's just not going to happen for most people.

So what is the other way we have into the minds of, so I want to understand the mind of a Victorian in England. I'm going to read Jane Austen novels. I'm going to read Bronte. I'm going to read Middlemarch, right? I think it's important to do that, to time travel that way through letters, through literature. So I think that there's a lot of accessible Chinese literature in translation right now.

I'd say that's a very good start. Even silly things like watching Chinese soap operas. I think that's underrated and it's undertaught right now. Not everything has to be about national security and defense. Not everything has to be even about macroeconomics. Not everything has to be about industrial policy. It's a human endeavor, first and foremost. Figure out how they think. I have the extravagant

advantage of having grown up in a Chinese family and having lived in China for a very long time. So yeah, you'd ask that question in different forms a lot. And I think this is the answer I'm going to go with. Yeah. When we spoke earlier today, I've seen kind of a shift in the attitude of the Chinese leadership. We see visa-free travel being opened up to many more countries, which is, of course, very helpful with people-to-people contact, which could expand knowledge of each other beyond geopolitics.

Tell me a little bit about what kind of shift do you see in that leadership and where do you see that go? Let me first say that it's entirely anecdotal and impressionistic. It'd be hard for me to point to any specific policy document or sets of policies, but I

in regular conversations that I have with people who are in China or near China, there is a sense that things are loosening a little bit. I think this is to be expected right now. We see China actually feeling, despite all the doomspeak from outside and despite, you know, all that we read about the many travails that China is undergoing around, and this is not untrue, right? There is a problem with China

consumer demand. There is a problem with youth unemployment. There is a problem with excess capacity. There are a lot of these problems. These are not invented. But, you know, this is one side of the balance sheet. We don't look at the assets side as much as we look at the liabilities. This is a problem. And the assets have accrued pretty quickly in recent years. This whole idea of shifting from old to new assets

means of sort of quality drivers of growth. This is something that's happening, that's very much underway, and it's palpable. And so there is a growing confidence, I think, among Chinese people in the Chinese leadership. There's such a focus on the Malays lying flat, people, you know, who are studying runxue, the fleeing of China, you know, just...

capital flight and talent flight and all this stuff. But it's part of the story. It's not the entire story. So I think what I'm hearing from people who are in traditionally more sensitive areas, whether in culture or even in sort of critical politics, is a little bit of a loosening up. And this is, as I say, what we expect in periods where China feels growing confidence. I think that this also has to do

With the Trump administration coming in and the sense that this guy is transactional, we kind of have his number. We know how to deal with him. Yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty. But what's the worst he's going to do right now? He is not going to be as threatening to us as the Biden administration was. A couple of weeks ago on the Seneca podcast, you had Asia Society's Lizzie Lee as a guest. Yeah.

The brilliant Lizzy Lee. I mean, she's absolutely brilliant. One of the parts of that conversation that I remember most now is I think she asked you about your recent visit to China. I think it was last fall, right? So I was there in June and July last year and then again in October. She asked you, well, guys are telling me I'm hearing all this. She hadn't been back yet since the pandemic. Mm-hmm.

I mean, all this economic malaise and people are really a bit depressed and blah, blah, blah. And she asked you, did you notice that? And you said, not really. And I found that divergence between two experts and very knowledgeable people, both on China, in China. I found them very interesting. And not one is right, the other is wrong, but

Can you elaborate a bit on that? Yeah, I mean, I think that part of it is the group of people that she talked to versus the people I talked to. I mean, she talks to people who are probably going to have a more informed opinion. She talks to, you know, macroeconomic analysts. She talks to heads of enterprises. She talks to

you know, academic economists and things like that. I mean, who do I talk to? I talk to a bunch of, you know, chain-smoking, hard-drinking rock musicians. I talk to, you know, people I meet randomly in bars, you know, a lot of people who are just sort of ordinary folks. And I mean, I think I said this on that show, and I've said it before in writing. I feel like

Depending on how you ask the question or what your frame of mind is, the whole sort of context of the approach to the question, you can get a very different answer from the very same person in the course of one conversation.

I mean, on the one hand, if you start getting them talking about the device they're carrying, oh my God, they'll talk about how embarrassed they are at American electronics and how great everything is here. And then they'll segue from that into cars and whatever you want into architecture, into all the fabulous affordable amenities that they have now available to them. But then...

In the same breath, practically, they will also talk about depressed wages. They'll talk about how there are no really great job prospects, how the whole culture industry has sort of shut down in fear over crackdowns on taxation and things like that. I mean, it's a mixed bag.

I mean, and the longer the conversation goes on, the more confused you are. But I think that seems to be an important kind of realization is that based on the conversations that you've had, maybe there is right now in China kind of this joint feeling of both, let's say like technological...

maybe even technological superiority, like the EVs are certainly better, the phones are probably better, they're definitely cheaper for the same quality, but at the same time also sort of like broader, not economic stagnation, but sort of a slowdown. And I think, again, it's probably just important to acknowledge that these two feelings can coexist within the same society and within the same person at different times.

I wanted to ask about a chart that I've been very obsessed with. It was first shown to me by Adam Tooze, who was on your show several times. And he was here in November delivering our State of Asia address. It was, as we're used from Adam, a very far-ranging and broad-ranging address. But the one thing, the one chart that he showed to that I just can't stop thinking about is...

a chart showing Chinese consumer confidence over time. And it's, you know, it's a line, it goes a little bit up and down, but it's more or less sort of like flat. And then in April 2022, it takes a massive dive and, you know, drops like 30, 40 points. And then it continues kind of like flat, but on a much lower level. And obviously the reason for the drop is obvious. It was during COVID, it was the Shanghai lockdown. And so that kind of makes sense. What I've had a harder time figuring out is like,

why it never recovered. Right. So there was in a way kind of like something broke in April of 2022 and you know, how Chinese consumers feel that seems to have not come back yet. And I'm curious if you have an explanation given everything we just talked about and given that there are definitely kind of optimistic and positive feelings about how some things, you know, in, in sort of public life go in China, why that has not come back. I would attribute a huge percentage of it simply to the real estate market. Hmm.

I think that, you know, as we all know, the one enormous asset that, what is it, 95% of Chinese who are homeowners, you know, are tied up in is their residence and not necessarily just their primary residence, but maybe also that other investment vehicle that they've bought, you know, that home. So yeah, of course, they're extremely sensitive to the property market. So I think that's a huge piece of it.

But the other thing I would say, and this gets back to my literature thing, and I mean, if you know anything about the Chinese psychology, Chinese people, come on, we love to complain. We love to, you know, if one person, it's the most infectious possible thing in a Chinese group is one person grumbles and you got to outdo the other person and tell a tale of even greater woe and anguish.

I mean, there's a psychological dimension to this. And it's very, very hard to recover from low consumer confidence. I think it's – the Chinese government's approach to it, though, I don't think is – I'm not ready to write it off. I think that this is starting – I'm starting to see evidence of it in the way that they talk about the goods available to them. So the whole thing, this supply side approach to it, right? Yeah.

You know, I've heard it explained to me, you know, dozens of times by advocates of this. But the idea is that if the goods available to you are better, I mean, you're not going to sit at home with that crappy 1990s white good, you know, in your house, that really awful old stove or that awful dishwasher or that old bicycle or, you know, all these things. You're going to upgrade.

And when you start upgrading these things in your life and you look around you and you see that there are fabulous, available, domestically manufactured goods that are of unimaginably higher quality, you're going to spend. And I'm starting to see that happening. I go around to my friends' houses and they're just delighted to show me the things that they have. Does your Roomba do this? And they'll show me this amazing product.

programmable Chinese room cleaner that just does things that you can't even possibly... So all of this stuff is starting to happen, and I'm not ready to write it off. I think that it's a slow thing. It will take a little while, but I don't think they're wrong. We're recording this, as I think we've mentioned a couple of times already previously, about seven days into the second Trump administration, and you just returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

And that made me think about...

Eight years ago, when we were kind of in a very similar position and Trump had been elected and he was just being inaugurated, I think the Davos crowd was really freaking out. It was in early 2017. And Xi Jinping actually came to Davos. He was here in person and he gave this speech. I still remember how a translation of the speech was printed in full in Switzerland's leading newspaper, which I think today it would be a crazy idea to...

for a Swiss newspaper to print the Xi Jinping speech. But back then that was absolutely possible. And he gave this speech where he basically made the argument that China is now the, I don't think he said like free world, but China is now like, we're leading this now. The flag bearer of globalization. Flag bearer of globalization. We're still for free trade. We're still, you know, for common advancement. And I think back on the speech, I'm like,

God, what a missed opportunity. He could have actually done that, or China could have actually done that, and I think they didn't. Well, he tried. Yeah. I think they faced serious, serious headwinds, right? I mean, when the rest of the world doesn't want to play along, when everyone else is talking about decoupling, it's pretty hard to be the only one doing that. But...

You know, talk to people in the global south who is the – in the developed or developing world who is the flag bearer of free trade. And yeah, they will certainly say that it's China. I think that, yeah, we don't see it from the same perspective in the developed north.

But I don't think it was an entirely lost opportunity. I think that some of the things that he did, I mean, look around in the years intervening, what country has held the banner of green energy transition? I mean, and put their money where their mouth is, right? Another big theme during that speech.

I mean, in terms of trade, have China's tariffs increased noticeably from 2017? Only in direct response to tariff hikes by the United States have we seen Chinese tariffs increase, right? I think it's not an unfair argument to say that China has essentially still continued to champion. I mean, just now in Ding Xuexiang, the Chinese vice premier, he gave another speech at Davos in person saying,

And he started his speech off basically reiterating, I'm quite explicitly saying, eight years ago here or however long ago it was when Xi Jinping gave that speech, we still feel exactly the same. And then he went on to reiterate all those points. China still is sort of the, ironically, the last neoliberal champion out there standing.

They would much rather the world still be economically integrated. Nobody gained more from it than China. You know, the big hump of Branko Milanovic's elephant curve, that's China right there, right? All the elephants back there.

Those are Chinese people who, in the course of these several decades of globalization, have left the countryside to the cities and gained appreciably materially, right? So, yeah, I mean, there's no question that China still is all in favor of that. And they would love to go back to a world…

pre-populist uprising. You started the Cynical Podcast about 15 years ago, right? With Jeremy Goldkorn. It was more about the news of the day or of the week. And last year, you said somewhere, you wrote somewhere, I now wanted to be more, go a bit deeper and be more about how we talk about China. And I thought, how do they talk about us or about Europe or the US? And

Not the Chinese government, but Chinese people. Do they kind of look at us with glee like, oh, you're still writing Volkswagens that don't even have six screens in them? Yeah, there's a lot, a little bit of that sort of schadenfreude. And some of it is tongue-in-cheek. Some of it is honestly felt. I think that they're still very frustrated that old narratives persist. I mean, it's an enormous relief. That's why I think you see the Chinese response on Xiaohongshu to these TikTok migrants,

They've been very polite. I mean, they understand this opportunity to finally correct the narrative and they're doing their best to, you know, to be good hosts.

To not be too boastful when they show themselves, they'll not laugh too hard. But I mean, it's funny. I think that the feeling of having a little bit of pity almost for the people who've lorded it over them with their material superiority for so very long is a very new one. And it's produced a little bit of giddiness, I think. Not all of it warranted, certainly. But yeah, it's...

I think on balance, it's a healthy thing. I think that a more confident China is a better China. I mean, I think having that chip on their shoulder for so very long has not been a good force for global stability, right? Glad to see it sort of starting to now finally fall off. I want to quote Adam Tooze again from his address here in Zurich, because I think he just made so many points worth dwelling on.

And he ended his speech by saying that Asia, and I'm quoting, is both the greatest generator of change and the greatest generator of solutions. Now, he didn't limit this to just China. He meant all of Asia or large parts of Asia. But obviously, China is a very important part of this. And when it does come to the green energy transition, and that was Adam's point, the decisions that are being made today in Beijing and possibly in Delhi matter much more than decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C. or Brussels or anywhere else.

I think that's a very reasonable point to make that I would agree with. And I was wondering, given your perspective from both sides and both China and the US, I've been thinking a lot about what that means for us. From a European perspective, I think it's the same for American perspective. We're not used to not being the ones with the influence. We're not used to basically being

relegated to the periphery. I don't think that's necessarily something bad. I think you can do really well in the periphery if we accept that the solutions or the biggest generator of solutions is not us anymore.

What does that do to us? Like, how can we still be responsible citizens of this planet if we kind of already know that really what's going to matter is what kind of a small group of Chinese leaders decide when they wake up in the morning and really anything we do doesn't matter at all. Let me draw a line between Americans and Europeans first. Not that I mean to say that Europeans should have been and maybe perhaps already are used to having been relegated to irrelevance.

But come on. You don't suffer the same kind of exceptionalism in Europe that Americans do. You've had a little while to acclimate to it, even the Brits. But Americans have not. For Americans, this is still a very novel experience, right? I've written about this before. I think that there are two very distinct types of exceptionalism in play here. The United States has its American exceptionalism it's so famous for. And we know it from all these expressions around.

the indispensable nation, the shining city on the hill, what have you, all the way down to America first, right? But this idea that they've been singled out for a special historical destiny, that it's owed to America, that they should be the leader in all things, we've gotten used to it in the course of a couple of generations. And it's a sickness. I think it's a really bad one. China...

is, as I've written before, it's sort of no less deficient in humility. I mean, in terms of its own idea of itself and its historical, you know, sort of uniqueness. We know, you know, China does feel a special destiny too, but there is a really, really big difference. I mean, as ugly as both of these ideas might be, one of them is proselytizing and the other is not.

The United States believes that its values and its institutions are and should be true for all people in all times and, you know, will push these things quite actively as we all know and as we've all, you know, felt and probably to our consternation, right?

And China is very different. I mean, when you look at the Chinese ideology, do you think that if they wanted to package an ideology for the rest of the world, they'd call it Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era? That doesn't exactly roll right off the old tongue, does it? No, it's insane. I mean, so China is not a proselytizing religion. That doesn't exonerate it, okay? I mean, it doesn't mean that it's good because if you are living in China

as a minority nationality in China or if you're living in close proximity to China, the old idea of China is not necessarily one that you think is going to

is going to be good for you necessarily either, right? And, you know, but I think that it does put a limit, an inherent limit on China's appetite for quote-unquote global domination. I mean, it wants regional hegemony. Of course it does. But that's just sort of historic, right? It wants to revert to what it believes is an historic norm. Again, not such a good thing if you are living next door. What I think has happened is that American exceptionalism has been badly battered by these things in China. Right?

These things that have happened, they're mostly attributable in some way to China or they're related to China. So these pillars of American exceptionalism, one, you're not supposed to be able to have a functioning market economy except under auspices of political democracy. Right.

But China has done that, right? Two, these are both related to the relationship between politics and technology. So two, and I remember hatching this idea really here in Zurich in conversation with Evgeny Morozov. We were talking about these two narratives, and I ended up developing this into a bigger idea. But the

There was this sort of liberation narrative, right? This idea, emancipatory narrative, where technology, especially digital media, was supposed to free everyone from authoritarianism. It was like the quintessential techno-utopian dream, right? Social media was going to throw off the shackles of totalitarian slash authoritarianist rule. And this was the animating idea of the later color revolutions and, of course, the Arab Spring. And that flipped. That narrative flipped around 2015, 2016. Suddenly, technology was not...

It was actually a tool of repression, right? I mean, we all thought, of course, there was the Edward Snowden revelations. There was, you know, Russian meddling in the American election and in the EU elections as well. There was, you know, the whole crisis that we were undergoing of surveillance capitalism. We understood finally that it wasn't necessarily just this liberating force and for better or for worse, but maybe we overcorrected. But China was, again, the exhibit A in this.

Then there was that other one that Evgeny and I talked about, which was this innovation narrative, which we're seeing again here right now. The last vestiges of it being overthrown. But it really did, again, begin to flip around 2015, 2016, when suddenly there was this idea, oh my God, China is out innovating us. We need to stop them. They're going to eat our lunch. They're going to roll over us. They're going to be beating us in quantum. And oh my gosh, they have hypersonic blitzes.

ballistic missiles now. They've got all, you know, drone swarms. They've got all AI and rail guns and all this other, you know, technological stuff that it's...

You know, relegating us to obsolescence. It was a joke. I mean, I think it was a wild overestimation then. But it was another pillar of American exceptionalism knocked out. Industrial policy, we used to speak of contemptuously in America. This is something that, you know, other countries do out of desperation. We know it doesn't work. Governments can't choose champions. Governments can't determine. It's only the market that can do that. And so we have lived in denial of our own industrial policy for a long time until suddenly we weren't.

Suddenly we were practicing it without having had any kind of a national conversation about it. Suddenly we've got the Inflation Reduction Act. We've got the Chips and Science Act. We're doing industrial policy.

And free trade, the one we were just talking about. We used to be the banner, the great flag bearer for free trade in the world. Now it's a bipartisan thing to oppose it. You could not possibly pass a free trade agreement right now with any bilateral one or a multilateral one through the U.S. Congress, right? It's a non-starter. What happened? So all these things...

have really eroded American confidence and made us susceptible to this moral panic, which naturally is directed at China, which is the thing that knocked out all these pillars in the first place. So that's why we are where we are. That's what sticks in the American craw about China's rise. And frankly, I think it's pathetic. Right. We're at the end of this conversation. Thank you so much, Kaiser. Now,

On the Cineca podcast that you host and that I cannot recommend enough to people, you do something that I really like and I'm just going to blatantly steal, which is you ask your guests for recommendations at the end of the show and you give some recommendations yourself. So we're just going to do this here now to what are your recommendations for us today? I'm going to recommend just a bunch of sub stack newsletters. I mean, some of them are obvious, like Adam Tuz's chart book. If you're not reading Adam Tuz's chart book, you're really missing something.

A second one is Ziqin Wang's Pekingology, and The East is Red, both of these. Pekingology is spelled strangely. It's P-E-K-I-N-G-N-O-L-O-G-I-N.

Peking Nology. Zhishun Wang was here in Zurich, I understand, speaking at the Asian Society not long ago. He's absolutely brilliant. I would also recommend Interconnected from Kevin Xu, XU. That is a fantastic, especially if you're interested in technology and the way that technology and government interact.

That's a really great one. And then Robert Wu has a couple of them that he does. One of them is called Baiguan, B-A-I-G-U-A-N. These are all in English. That one is absolutely fantastic. Yeah, start with that one as well. And then just one for fun.

Chinese cooking demystified. It's just fantastic. If you're interested in Chinese cuisine, the guy who runs it with his wife, Stephanie, Chris is just such a man. She's such a model American, if you ask me. I mean, he has this brilliant kind of deep knowledge of it, but also this sensitivity and respect that is so admirable. I adore that channel.

So I have two recommendations. One is a book called Playground by Richard Power. Oh, God, I have that on my... That's for the plane on the way home. Excellent. I think you're going to have a good time on your way home. So it's a beautifully written novel that somehow manages to combine themes of the ocean and climate change with AI in an incredibly subtle and also somewhat surprising way. I don't want to give any spoilers, but there's...

The AI theme is very subtle and only comes to the forefront towards the end. So I very much enjoyed reading that and I think you will too. The other recommendation is also very directly food related. My recommendation is for a dish. You're not going to say Swiss cuisine, demystified, right? No. My recommendation is for an Indian dish that I think everybody will know called dal, which is the very sort of

Indian lentil based stew. There's not really one way to make it. There are a thousand ways to make it. And that's what I like about it. It's incredibly simple to make. It's incredibly quick to make. I always make like huge batches of it because my children love it as well. It never quite tastes the same because I never kind of follow a specific recipe. You don't need any like fancy ingredients. You can mix and match. You can put in whatever you have.

And especially kind of in like cold winter times, I think it's just an incredibly great comforting dish to eat. And I cannot have enough of it. And in fact, now that I talk about it, I want some more dal. We make it all the time at home. Yeah. And I like to do the kind of gussied up tadka dal, you know, where you actually have the fried spices on top. It's coming up lunchtime, but we still have some work to do here. So for this recording, thanks very much, guys, for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Nico. Thank you, Nico.

Kaiser Grow, talking with my colleague Nico Lutzinger and myself during his visit last week to the Asia Society Switzerland office here in Zurich.

Links to all the recommendations you heard at the end are in the show notes. And while you register for all the newsletters Kaiser recommended, be sure to also sign up for our own newsletter, which is published every Tuesday and keeps you informed on all events and activities of Asia Society here in Switzerland and at our 15 other centers around the world. We'll be back with more soon, including with an episode on the, let's say, dynamic times in global trade. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app to State of Asia.

to not miss out. For now, my name is Rem Kotanis. Thanks very much for listening.