Edge of Empire with author and journalist Edward Wong
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. This is Jeremiah Jenny broadcasting from the great state of New Hampshire. I'm home on summer vacation. I'm back in the 603. And I was going to say high above someplace, but I think we're getting into the point, David, of self-parody. You know, high above the streets of Beijing to somewhat high above the streets of Geneva to sitting on the street in New Hampshire. Next week, it's going to be like this is

Barbarians at the Gate reporting high above the 7-Eleven outside of Causeway Street in Boston. Where are you, David, though, in this world of ours? I'm in Seoul, South Korea. First time I've ever been here, or I've been here by the airports, but I've never really spent time here.

When I first got here, I wasn't too impressed with it. It just seemed like what you and I were just talking about, another Asian, big Asian city. But I was really impressed last night. My wife and I were walking around and we ran into this sort of a grassy field in the middle of the city, kind of a public space area. And there was a sign there that said open library or something like that.

And I looked there and there were maybe more than 100 people there, maybe 150 people, all sort of lounging, lying down on these long multicolored beanbag sofa things, reading books, reading books. This was about the time of twilight and they were like little kids and lots of mostly young people and even couples snuggled up together on the beanbag, reading books or sometimes even reading the same book.

which is very romantic, if you ask me. And I thought to myself, this culture is doing something right. There's 150 people out here reading books for entertainment in the open air at an evening venue like that. That's incredible. I don't think I've seen anything like that in the US. These are not Kindle they're reading. They're paper books. I mean, I had much more

admiration for this culture and what's going on here since then. What do you think? Can you imagine that in the U.S. or even in where else? China? I don't know. You know, I mean, I love old school books as much as anyone. And of course, it's summer, which is always a time for summer reading. And

I've been trying to catch up a little bit on my summer reading. And since I've left Beijing, I've had a chance to actually buy real books. It's been fun to kind of go back and forth, although obviously because of travel, I tend to use the Kindle. So by the way, you don't need to thank me for giving you the segue. Just go ahead and do the segue because you're already starting out in a great way. Books, books. Well, thank you, David. Yes. That segue was going to be a lot smoother when Joey decided to send me one.

What I was doing. See Jeremiah now. He's taking the cue of the books and going to the summer reading. And then he's going to go to something that we like to call the Segway. Yes. So speaking of summer reading. Thanks, David. Our guest today is Ed Wong, who has a new book out at the edge of Empire of Families Reckoning with China. Ed is no stranger to those of us who have been living in Beijing. He was, of course, an award-winning journalist. He covered the Iraq War and served as the Beijing bureau chief.

for the New York Times. His new book, it's absolutely great. I really enjoyed reading it as part of my summer vacation. It's one part family memoir, one part travelogue, all parts fascinating, and really is one of my favorite China books I've read this year. Ed, how are you doing? And thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Hi, good to talk to both of you. I think my setting is a bit different. I'm in Washington where there's been a lot of talk of China this week, mainly China, Russia, NATO, all the big geopolitical questions that we see in the headlines now. Yeah, I mean, certainly one of the things about a book like this is trying to get a sense of what's China's place in the world and of course, what China feels that its place in the world should be. And there are ways to look at that, both

in terms of international relations, culturally, historically, but your book takes a very holistic approach and also weaves through it. This is an incredible story of your family and your father. And I was hoping

Before we kind of dive into it a little bit, tell us a little bit about the book without giving too much away. Sure. Well, when I set out to write the book, one of my aims was to give the general reader, someone who doesn't know a lot about China but might have a minimal level of interest in it, a history of China that would be very readable. So...

that includes having a central narrative that I thought would be gripping or at least pull the reader along and allow them to learn a lot about Chinese history, mainly contemporary history from Mao up until Xi. And then I settled on the idea, well, what I'll do is I'll tell the story of mainly my father,

and his time in revolutionary China after Mao had taken over and my father's time in the Chinese army and the arc of his embrace of communism and of some of the ideals that Mao had set forth to his disillusionment later and then his eventual flight to Hong Kong in the United States. And I thought what I would do is intertwine that narrative with

with my own journey in China, starting mainly from 2008 up until now, where I was grappling with different issues that I was confronted with as I reported throughout China, issues that ranged from the rise of a much more nationalistic state

under Xi Jinping and even the late Ku Jintao era to China's efforts to control what we call its frontier regions, places like Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, for example. So I wanted to weave all of that together in a book that would

essentially contextualize a lot of this for readers from Mao onward, but even back to the Qing Dynasty, as we'll talk about, and then place the reader in China today, right now, and tell them where China is in the world. Throughout the book, you refer to your father as just father.

capital F. And I could sort of see the reason for that, but it was something that always, I was always aware of every time there was a new referent. What, can you just say, what was the reason to do that? I think it makes some sense because he's like a character in a way, but I don't know, what's your reasoning for that?

Right. I think you hit on that, David. He's a character in the book. And in the dedication, you notice I dedicate it to mom and dad. So I think that it's obvious I don't refer in my daily life. I don't refer to my dad as father anymore.

with a capital F, even in speech. I refer to him as dad or my dad. But when I was writing a book, I felt I needed to place some distance between myself and the person I was writing about who experienced China in the 1950s and 1960s, or even going back to 1960s.

49, 41, which is where his narrative starts with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, he was a child. Like that person I felt was someone who was distant from me and someone whose background, whose motivations, whose emotions I had to probe and really draw out for the writing of this book and then put on display for the reader and was different

than the person I had grown up with in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whom I saw every day and with whom I had conversations with throughout my childhood, but conversations that never really touched on any of these issues. So I felt that by calling him Father with a capital F and made him into this narrative character, but someone who was distant enough from me where I could write about it with some objectivity.

One of the takeaways I had from this book, and it may be just because it dovetails with interests of mine, is the idea of edges of empire, of frontiers. And I'm thinking in particular of your father and your family's background in this region of China, in Guangdong. And sometimes in China, people don't think of this as a frontier region. I remember once giving a talk

and talking about the frontiers of China. And someone said, Guangdong, like east of the past. And I said, that one, and also Guangdong, like the province. And it got a lot of pushback. It's like, that's been part of China since the Warring States period. But of course, when reading your book, you really get the sense of just how permeable

between the colonized Hong Kong and the part of China that was still outside the scope of the imperial powers, and then later on between communism and Hong Kong. And of course, Guangdong's own kind of cultural liminal place as this area that has its own language is part of Chinese culture, but is also somewhat

has its own identity. I was wondering, you know, how does that status of Guangdong, talk a little bit more about the status of Guangdong, both as a region, but also as a place of origin for most of the characters that inhabit your book. Right. And not just for most of the characters, but for a lot of Chinese whom

non-Chinese might encounter in the world, a lot of them originate from Guangdong. And I think that's another element of that liminal space that you're talking about, Jeremiah. As we know, a lot of the people who migrated to other countries and set up places like Chinatowns, set up restaurants, laundromats, other types of businesses were from this region of China. And so this region of China is...

is in my estimation, very much what we would consider a frontier region or borderland region in that it becomes this nexus point for the meeting of the Chinese political state or the Chinese empire and other

other elements outside of it. And that's done both through people in that region taking in ideas, as well as people from outside of China, as well as going outward, encountering other cultures, living and immersing themselves in other cultures, and then in many cases, bring those back to China and influencing China to a massive degree, as we know, especially in the 20th century. So I think that I definitely see that as...

this space where different ideas are negotiated, different forms of commerce, different ways of life. As I point out in the book, even different architecture, which surprised me. One of the most surprising things I found in my time in China was when I went back to my home county

of Taishan or Toisan in Cantonese or Hoisan in Taishanese. But I went back there twice and on the first visit, what stunned me was going through the county among the rice paddies, seeing all these villages with these grand villas and five or six story towers that were made to resemble European watchtowers or European villas. So for example, a lot of these buildings would not have been out of place in the Tuscan countryside.

And my parents had never talked about that or never pointed that out to me once growing up and just seeing it in person and then realizing the import of this was stunning to me. And I think it's very much emblematic of the fact that many of these people from Tyshane County had gone out to other parts of the world, taken in ideas and

from the West, from Europe, from America, from other places, and then decided to imprint their home county in Southern China with those ideas, with that aesthetic fashion, and with that culture.

It was very symbolic to me of that back and forth between Southern China and particularly Guangdong and Taishan County and the rest of the world. And then, of course, it's not just on the level of things like the aesthetics of architecture. Jeremiah, you and David know very well some of the biggest revolutionaries or the most influential revolutionaries in modern Chinese history came from Guangdong. And it starts with

Say the Taiping Rebellion, or the person who led the Taiping Rebellion, probably one of the deadliest civil wars in modern history in the world, originated from Guangdong and took in these ideas of religion, of Christianity, saw himself as a messianic figure, and then led this revolution against the Qing Empire that you could say planted the seeds for the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty.

And of course, Western forces got very involved in that civil war. And then it goes up to people like Sun Zhongshan or Sun Yat-sen, who traveled abroad extensively, took in many ideas, and then decided to lead a movement to overthrow the Qing, and a movement that eventually succeeded and established the new republics of China. And he came from Guangdong. And then, of course, you have

people in the Qing Dynasty era, like Kang Youwei and others. So they all come from that southern area.

And I think that it's hard to overestimate the amount of influence that that area has had on modern China, even though we often think of China as this entity that's rooted traditionally in the North. I was really curious about maybe the differences in diaspora Chinese about the past in this way, and especially about your father's attitude about Mao and the party back then, and to what extent his attitude may have changed over the decades.

There's a lot of examples, but I was curious about the Korean conflict because for your father, that was very important because he really wanted to join the fight, the army in the Korean Peninsula to fight the Americans. So the framing back then was that America had, I mean, in America, the idea was that they had entered the war to protect South Korea from the North.

This was the U.S. framing. But for Mao and the Chinese, this was a war to protect China from the imperialist U.S. And the idea is that the U.S. would take over North Korea and then invade the mainland. So your father certainly had this framing in his head when he desperately wanted to volunteer. Did you ever have discussions about this in retrospect?

Did his conception of this war evolve over time as he had perspective and maybe access to information he didn't know? This kind of thing. Did he have arguments with some of his family about this? Did he ever say, you know, I didn't really understand what was happening at the time? I mean, he certainly had his doubts about Mao, obviously. But did he reassess these historic incidents in a new light once he had spent so much time in the U.S.?

I think that when he looks back on that era, that very early 1950s era, the war began in the summer when he graduated from high school. I think he looks back on his choices as very natural ones that he and many other young people made at the time. And one interesting thing was when I went back

to China to work as a Times correspondent, I took a trip down to Guangzhou with my father, which is the core of one chapter of the book. And he then had a reunion with many of his classmates from that same high school graduating class. And they sat together over banquets and they talked. And several of them had served in the Korean War or had signed up for the military, just like he had. And he

He and all of them talked in a completely matter-of-fact manner about that war. And there was a sense of pride from the classmates who had gone and served there for people who had not been able to take part in it. But when I joined the military, there was some regret that they hadn't been able to fight in it. My father...

feels that it was very similar to when the American government exhorted young Americans to take part in their world wars, in the world wars that America fought in. And at a recent family reunion in Washington, where I presented the book to some of my family members, he stood up and said, you know, when I joined the military, it was like those posters of Uncle Sam saying, America needs you. It was exactly the same thing. Like it was, I was answering that call, and

And my attitude was similar to what many Americans have felt. I think that's part of one of the themes I wanted to bring out in the book is that the same types of motivations and impulses that course through Chinese society are very much in parallel with America. And one of the interesting parallels in the book, of course, is that my uncle, my father's older brother of four years, was in the US studying

on a US government scholarship and then eventually joins the US Army or eventually decides to work as an engineer for the US Army and then the US Navy and spends decades working as an engineer for the US Navy. So I think that these parallel tracks of these brothers illustrates very clear manner, sort of like the, both the contingency of the choices we make in our families, but also of sort of broader historical movements where both China and the US both had this,

these patriotic movements, momentum for serving the country and each answered their own call. My father doesn't look back on the Korean War as this completely misbegotten thing that China entered into. And if you look at our own historical assessment of it, we know that, for example,

MacArthur wanted to continue the campaign past the Yalu River and enter China. In fact, like the top general on the Korean Peninsula wanted to topple the communists, which is exactly what Mao had feared and exactly what Mao was telling Chinese citizens would happen if the Americans triumphed on the Korean Peninsula. And it was only Truman that decided to pull MacArthur back from that.

So I don't think that Mao's propaganda was entirely rooted in falsehoods, even though he amped it up for purposes of reinforcing nationalism and the party narrative, as well as his own control over China.

Your father's story, it kind of recalls one of those really old questions about the Chinese Revolution. And this was a debate that has been taking place since the 1950s. And like most debates in the West about China, it veers often into dangerous oversimplification.

But this idea is, were people supportive of the new regime because of their support for communism and communist ideals, or was it nationalism? And as we know, especially looking back, and as you talked about in your book and just now, people...

do things for a complex range of motivations. It's never quite as simple as a binary choice between ideologies. But your father's story does suggest, and what his friends say, does suggest that there was a great deal of nationalism behind their support of this new government.

There is in the book, and I don't see as much discussion of the ideals of, say, social reform or economic reform or communism as I do about just his love of the country and this idea that we need to protect our homeland.

Right. I think that's right. And that's a tension that I try and explore throughout the book. And I think that even in today's discourse in China, we're all trying to grapple with. My father, when I talked to him, I've had many conversations with him about his motivations for joining the military and then wanting to join the party. It was for this idea of building up China, of strengthening China. And to the degree that he believed in some form of economic ideology, it was simply that the policies that Mao was adopting earlier

early on would create a strengthened, industrialized China that would be on par with Britain and the US or would be able to surpass it. So I think he had some faith early on in the fact that Mao's economic vision would create a better China, a stronger China. But again, it's about this drive for

China and for wealth and power in service of the country and of its status in the world. He never talked with me in depth about Marxist ideology or Leninist ideology. I don't think he read deeply into those. And I don't think it was an important part of his desire to

to join the system. And I was wondering whether he airbrushed that out of his memories. But then when I went back and found these letters during my research for the book, I found letters that he had written to his older brother, Sam, soon after he left Xinjiang and also when he left China and arrived in Hong Kong. And the one that he wrote immediately after leaving Xinjiang and was in an engineering program in Xi'an

tells his brother Sam to come back to China to help rebuild it for the good of the motherland and for the future of the motherland. And the way he expresses the mission, it's all about building up the economic capacity and the power and the national strength and the national power of China. It's not about, oh, we have to adhere, we have to sign on to this global revolution. We're the vanguards of the revolution and we're bringing this

ideological change to the country that will then sweep the world as some communists were saying at the time and before 1949 too. So I don't think he signed on to that ideology. I think that a

One of the important things we should keep in mind as we explore and talk about China today, and I think that's very much missing discourse in America over China, is that many Chinese can feel this intense sense of patriotism or nationalism about their home country and still grapple with individual policies and political figures in the country and have their critiques of it. But overall, many of them want their country to succeed and they

are wary of the idea that other powers might try and constrain or subdue their country.

I myself have never spoken with people of your father's age about how they feel about China now. But I was wondering as I was reading your book that for someone your father's age that's looking at China now, you might be able to say, well, look, we've actually won. We're at least the second largest geopolitical power in the world.

But from their standpoint, from your father's standpoint, there's not a direct line from what he was volunteering for, what he was working for, and the line that it's taken in the last few decades. I understand that the Chinese are still, people like your father are still very patriotic and have nationalistic feelings about their home country, right? Does he have a feeling of what we were working for has come to fruition?

Or does he feel like this is just in another dimension? This is an unexpected result of what he was working for at the time. It seems like he would have very conflicted feelings about China's rise. Right. I think that his feelings on contemporary China, the China that the three of us have experienced, have changed over time. And they're complicated. So, for example, in the chapter in the book where I talk about his reunion with his high school classmates, he's...

They're driving through areas around Guangzhou. They visit the factory of one classmate who's become very wealthy. He's this marble exporter and his marble from the marble factory appears in the Great Hall of the People. It's in

Lawrence Moss in the UAE, for example. So he's one example of someone who's very much benefited from the post-Mao reform era. And during that trip in southern China with my father, I heard a lot of praise of Deng Xiaoping and his reform and opening policies, which, as you know,

people in Guangdong were at the forefront of a lot of those policies and were the first beneficiaries of a lot of those policies. And so I think that the way that people judge things is they look at decisions that leaders made in China and they gauge whether those decisions helped out the people or not. So I think, and in those conversations, many of the people acknowledged that Mao had pretty much declined

Severely in his later years, or even his in his mid years, and that eventually his policies led to ruinous situations for China. My father very much felt that way, which is why he felt he had to flee China. And that opinion, I think, is shared.

by a lot of other Chinese of that generation who lived through the Great Leap Forward, the famine, the Cultural Revolution, and then eventually saw the boom that took place when Deng Xiaoping started the reform and opening up policies.

Xi Jinping is a complicated figure, I think, in their minds. When my father visited in 2012 for the birth of my child, and that was the same time period when we took that trip to Guangdong, we were sitting watching the CCTV evening news one night. And it was right, he had come right when Xi had taken power in November of 2012 during that

Party Congress, the 18th Party Congress. And, you know, obviously there was wall to wall coverage of Xi and his first pronouncements and his first visits like to that museum in Beijing. And my father said, you know, the party now is more corrupt

than when the nationalists governed China. And he felt that way because the scale of corruption, the scale of he thought wealth was on an immense level now and that the pilfering that he believed was taking place by the oligarchs of the party, for lack of a better word, was on a scale that was grander than what existed under the nationalist.

And he said, I hope Xi really brings us under control. I think China can become stronger if Xi is able to bring that under control and then orient policies towards the betterment of China. And Xi did try to implement his anti-corruption campaign. And I think he did have a drive to bring the party under his control. But at the same time, he also said,

went on a course that reversed some of the direction of the reform and opening up policies that Deng and Sun Deng's successors had implemented. And then my father has become very cautious and very wary of that change in direction in China. And I think one lesson he learned from the Mao era was that when a person holds onto power for too long,

they become corrupted by that power. I think almost any historian looking at that, you know, at Mao's trajectory would agree with that assessment these days. And I think he feels that Xi is falling into that trap now, because as we all know, Xi has held onto power for more years than any person in the post-Dong era. And I think

You and I have many Chinese friends and contacts, and among them, there are a lot of people who expressed unease when Xi made that decision to stay on for his third term and who are still very anxious about that decision that Xi has made. The book is Edge of Empire. And, you know, we were talking about all Guangdong's place at the edge of empires or this kind of liminal zone. But there are other edges as well that you explore in this book, including father's

own time out in the frontier, out in Xinjiang province, what is today Xinjiang, serving in the army. And it's one of the stories that I find that people in China tell themselves about

China's own version of Manifest Destiny and how similar that is to how empire was taught in America for so long, that somehow we've kind of been bequeathed this amazing land that spans nearly a continent and incorporates all these colorful and wonderful people and beautiful scenery.

and yet minimizes the trauma that is inherent in any kind of expansion of power, of empire. And you have a really interesting take in the book. You say there is something that undergirds an attitude, a profound belief in their own innocence. And

You say the sense of innocence is what allows an empire to choose to walk paths of darkness in the name of doing good with the unwavering support of its citizens. The idea that we are almost the collective we, whether we are China or we are America, we are on the side of the angels.

And I feel that's something that connects the soul of America and the soul of China in some, frankly, troubling ways. But I'm curious, in your own travels to Tibet, to Xinjiang, partially as a reporter, partially following your father's footsteps, what's your take on how this empire still resonates with the people who

for whom the border, with the people of the border crossed, to borrow a phrase from the American context. Right. First, just as a preface to that, I think a lot of my views on both America and China have been formed in my adult firsthand experiences. And that starts with going to report on the Iraq War for America, which I'm very upfront about in the

prologue of the book, I think, contextualized somewhat by that passage you mentioned, and that it became much clearer to me. And it is also still clear to me as I report on American foreign policy now, that Americans do have this inherent belief that they're bequeathing something to the world, that every action they take is for the common good, for the global good,

And even invading an occupying country ultimately is supposed to lead to some benefit for that country and for that region. And as we know, the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of people framed it as we're bringing democracy to the Middle East. And of course, we can go further into this whole problematic idea of like the missionary zeal of America to impose democracy.

on other parts of the world, which in fact has huge ramifications in China and on the way that the party and leaders see view America. But China itself has that same instinct, I think. And I think it's taught throughout China

classes in China. It's this idea of the civilization, this enduring civilization, thousands of years as they frame it, that then has gone out to parts of Asia and civilized other parts of Asia, civilized the barbarians, as they say, and as mentioned in the title of your podcast. The idea that also other people who are not culturally

Chinese are then changed by the culture of China. So that, for example, the Manchus or the Mongols, when they decide to form their own empire that has interior China in the middle of the empire, then they themselves are somehow transformed by that Chinese culture and synthesized, which I think

A lot, you know, some historians, especially those of the new chain history school these days, have called into question that sort of very black and white view of cultural assimilation that both the Chinese government, but also a lot of Chinese people.

like to expound on. And so I think that contextualizes some of the encounters that I had out in places like Xinjiang in Tibet, which are documented in the book. From the very first trip I made to Xinjiang, which was in 1999, as a backpacker after graduate school, I was traveling overland between Hong Kong and

India and Delhi. So that immediately, that trip immediately imprinted ideas of the frontier and of the borderlands on me. But, you know, from the very first trip, I encountered Uyghur Muslims who were very uneasy with Chinese rule, who had

various complaints about it, whether it was about the way they treated Islam as a religion or the way the government treated the Uyghur language. Some obviously had more pro-independence leaning, seeing Xinjiang or at least the Uyghur heartland as something that should be its own country. I felt the same with

encounters in Tibet also. And then that feeling has, and those lines from people have been very consistent in all my trips to those regions. It's very rare if I go on a trip to those regions and am able to have a frank conversation with people where these issues don't come up to a degree. And I think that, you know, we hear a lot about, oh, Chinese tourists went out to that region, didn't hear that. But, you know,

Part of the thing is like, how frank will someone be with you? What will they express about their political views, especially in a country like China, especially in regions that have experienced serious repression or military occupation, which is essentially what happened to both Xinjiang and Tibet. And my father was part of that occupation early on. And I think that part of the advantage I have had in China is the ability to code switch

very easily in different parts of the country. So if I'm in Xinjiang or Tibet, I try and put forth my American or Chinese American identity very quickly so that I'm not perceived as, you know, a Han Chinese from the interior or a potential spy for the security services or for the police who's trying to like get information from them.

If I'm in Guangdong, then I'm trying to speak Cantonese or drop me a few words of Cantonese here and there so that people feel more comfortable with me than someone from another part of China. And if I'm in Hong Kong,

I make sure people know that my mother and father were both from Hong Kong and that I'm a Cantonese speaking person whose family has roots in Hong Kong rather than someone from mainland China or the PRC, for example. And then of course, if I'm in Beijing, I mostly speak Mandarin. So there's all this code switching that I do throughout my travels in China and my reporting in China in order to try and get

the most honest assessments of things and the most honest conversations possible from people. Well, Ed, thank you so much for joining us today. And I encourage everyone who is interested in China, particularly what's been happening in China over the last 10 to 15 years,

go out and get a copy of At the Edge of Empire, A Family's Reckoning with China. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And we hope that you can come back again on the podcast later on and talk some more about history, about frontiers, and about your own work. Thank you, Ed. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. It's great talking to both of you. It was also nice to see a shout out to some of my favorite restaurants in Beijing in your book, including the wonderful Su Su, the Vietnamese place run by Jonathan and Amy down there on Tianliang Hutong and some of David and my other favorite hangouts. That's right. Yeah. Especially speaking of empire, Jonathan and Amy have created their own restaurant empire there in Beijing. That's correct. They have.

I think by the time I left, I'm pretty sure there was a susu outside my kitchen. So it's great that they've been so successful. Daylit, thank you again for beaming in in the evening time. And thank you all for joining us on Barbarians at the Gate. Hope to have you with us again very, very soon. And as you know, we'll just kind of cue the drums. ♪