Where have all the American China Experts Gone?
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. I'm Jeremiah Jenny and joining me live from Beijing, the city that never sleeps unless Xi Jinping says it does, David Moser.

Well, the city may never sleep, but I sleep. Not too well since Trump was elected, but... Isn't it like 11 o'clock in the evening there, though? Yeah, it is. Yeah. I'm a night owl, though, so... However, why... More power to you. I've been going to bed at 9 o'clock since I turned 40, so, I mean, that's awesome. You're 40? Wow, I didn't know that. This dark funk that we've been in because of Trump is sort of...

alleviated a little bit now with the fact that there's lots of good news here, or at least some promising news. First of all, I don't know if our listeners know, but the CET Harbin program has been revived since shutting down in 2019. It will come back alive in summer of 2025. And if you don't know about it, it's probably one of the best study abroad programs ever. Very rigorous, research-focused program.

Full language immersion, not only with the spoken Chinese, but also the assignments and semesters, research papers and such are all in Chinese. And you have a mentor that you work with. It's an amazing program. I wish I could just take it because it's an amazing thing. That's coming back. And a little bit of light on the horizon, the two-year tuition-free master's program that my university has been promising us.

for the last year and a half, it looks like maybe it's going to actually get funded. So yeah, those two things are glimmers of hope in my limited horizon here. Well, I think these glimmers of hope are good because we've been complaining for the better part of three years about the

Almost complete severing of the kind of academic and people-to-people ties that really fuel any relationship, and particularly the U.S.-China relationship. So maybe we have some reason for optimism, and we certainly have somebody to discuss our optimistic forecast with, because joining us in the studio, or actually from his office in New Jersey...

is Rory Truex, Associate Professor of Politics, International Affairs at Princeton University, recently awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at that fine, fine New Jersey institution. His research focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian systems, which used to be Chinese politics. But if you've been following Rory on Substack or on his YouTube channel, he's quite interested in authoritarian systems developing even closer to home. And he's, of course,

an academic with great interest in keeping those connections between the U.S. and China alive.

So, Rory, thank you for joining us from the East Coast, United States. How are you this morning? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for that wonderful introduction. Since you're on campus right now, how would you characterize the current state of China studies at Princeton or at American universities? What's the mood? Is it still this kind of decline and being overtaken by Korean studies? Is there, as we talked about in the opening, some glimmer of hope?

So I think China interest is healthy. I think there's a little bit of a false narrative that, oh, our students are no longer interested in China. I think there's some evidence that it probably peaked a few years ago in terms of language enrollments. But there are plenty of young people still interested in China and wanting to learn about China.

My course has declined in enrollment. I think at one point it was 170. Now it's about 80 or something like that. I teach an undergraduate lecture on Chinese politics. But I also have aged. I'm less cool than I was. I teach at 330. So there's a lot of reasons that are not China-specific why my enrollment might be declining. But it's still healthy. And I think there are a large number of students who want China-focused careers, right?

I think the nature of those students has probably changed a little bit. I don't have hard data on this, but I've been doing it for 10 years. And I think impressionistically, sort of the national security types, the human rights types, the kind of pre-government types still remain.

I think what we've lost are probably just people who are like culturally curious and just want to learn about China and Chinese culture. And I think China is kind of an intellectual playground and sort of a whimsical way of approaching China. I think we've lost some of those students. They're probably studying Korea now because Korea has better soft power.

And we've also lost the kind of young business types, because I don't think China is the land of opportunity for foreigners that it once was. I mean, I started going to China in 2004. And basically, if you were a foreigner, you could get an awesome gig despite being wildly unqualified. And it's certainly no longer the case. So I think the students have changed.

I think there's also one of the central issues they face is how do I study China well, given the circumstances? And I think there is a bit of a bottleneck, certainly during the COVID period, but even in the immediate period after where they were studying Chinese, but they weren't going to China and they weren't getting that language experience, that immersion experience. And so I think we were losing people, kind of the young China core was being lost because kind of getting to China and studying China was too difficult. And so

they approach it with some reservation in terms of the security environment or their own access to government later on down the line. So I think there's this issue of how do we get this, how do we translate this interest into careers? And how do we translate this interest that starts on our campuses, how do we get it over

to Beijing and other places in China and then bring it back. So we enrich our understanding of China. I think that's kind of a big question right now. That really resonates what you just said with my observations. And I think I've mentioned it on this podcast before that the people coming now, which includes a lot of my former students, by the way, are sort of like those of us who came in the 80s and 90s, which is it was not a fun place to be.

but if so anyone who came here was dedicated and had motivation and had had had a plan in mind so i mean i think what you said kind of dovetails with exactly what i've been noticing here which gives me a little bit of hope

But for those people that come here and are dedicated, how do you feel that we should approach this problem of doing research in China with the downside of being the lack of academic freedom or the kinds of maybe freewheeling research that we used to be able to do because there wasn't such a focus on exactly what we were doing? That's a problem I have when I sort of talk to people who are asking me how to come here and what kind of program would be best.

is I have to sort of give a caveat that, well, you may not be able to study exactly what you want. I've had the same problem when I was with the Yangjing Academy at Peking University, a sort of disappointment that they weren't able to explore the things they were interested in. What are your suggestions for students like that who are dedicated but may not be able to carry out their ideal research once they come here?

I think this is an issue. First of all, your point about generations, I think, is really important. So I started going in the 2000s. That was when China was kind of fun and the research climate was pretty relaxed and everybody was running around on tourist visas.

teaching English and doing research and it really wasn't much in the way of constraints and I and then the different generational markers so you talk to people who came into the field in the 70s and 60s and I said this is this is nothing compared to what we had to deal with so I think it's important to have that perspective so I think in terms of research I think I think of it as two different experiences one is just getting to China maybe study just having an experience in China whether it's

taking a class through one. We have global seminars where students travel to China for just two or three weeks and just feel the place for the first time. Or doing language study. Princeton and Beijing is our language program. It's pretty darn good. And it's finally back up and running in Beijing. I think those programs, if I had to prioritize, what do we need to get back up and running? It's those sorts of things and getting people to have that language experience and the cultural immersion that goes along with it.

Because those are relatively safe, right? Those are experiences that shouldn't bring anybody into harm's way. And we know how to navigate that with our students. Research has become different. And I would say even at the PhD level and the professor level, everybody's struggling with how to navigate the research context. And again, it's a question of, can I have conversations with people? What will those conversations be like?

How can I guarantee anonymity from an IRB perspective in an environment where there's basically an authoritarian panopticon? So I think that the research climate isn't good. And even people who are professional researchers are struggling with this and how to navigate the issues there. So for the undergraduates, yeah, I mean, once upon a time, I had senior thesis students who had run off to China for three weeks in January with no real training, but

interview a bunch of people and then come home and write a senior thesis. And it wasn't really something we were worried about or thought much about. We don't do that anymore. We don't really, I mean, people aren't asking to do it. And if they did, we would probably advise them to think carefully about how to construct it. So

I don't really know what to say other than I think researching China is very much a process of feeling things out. And I think about my own work. My first real research project in China was on the National People's Congress, which for anybody who knows anything about China...

isn't the most important institution in the Chinese government. And I remember when I was studying it, I would tell my Chinese friends and my homestay family that I was studying the NPC and they basically thought I was an idiot for wasting my time studying the National People's Congress. It was like a way to signal, how do you signal you know nothing about China? Study the National People's Congress.

But the reason I studied it is because it was more transparent than most other parts of the Chinese government. And I knew that it was a little less sensitive. And so it was a way for me to get my own feet wet. I think I was probably 27 at the time, 26. I can't remember. Of just doing fieldwork, interviews, walking, running around China, trying to get access to people. And so that's my general advice to folks is...

If you're going to become a China researcher, you need to feel out where the lines are and you need to do so carefully. And that means identifying a project that you think is feasible. And then over the course of your academic lifespan, you can try to study all the topics that you're truly interested in. I'm doing work on much more sensitive topics now. I'm also not really doing it in China for that matter. But I do think...

I try to advise people about their kind of like full academic life cycle and how to think about it longer term. And that initial research experience is usually not perfect, but hopefully you can learn something. You wrote a really great article this year. We'll put it in the show notes as well.

And you talked about how you had taken, as you said, just talked about a well-trodden path to China expertise. And right now, it does feel like anyone who works with students in China who are interested in pursuing research, as you just said, have to be a lot more careful than we were in, say, the early aughts or, you know, the 90s.

What are some examples of some of the projects that perhaps a student has come to you with, either an undergraduate or graduate student, and you said, okay, that probably won't work today. And how did you counsel them as to perhaps an alternative way to get the same information? I think a lot of people right now are interested in how to study China without being in China.

It's almost going back to the '50s and '60s when people were interviewing folks off the ferry from Hong Kong about their village. Maybe it's not quite that bad, but it does seem like there's a real interest. I'm kind of curious, since you are working actively with students, and I don't want to give away the names of your students or anything or any specifics, but just how have you been able to counsel them on this? Well, I think part of it is about being adaptive, right?

In political science research, especially on China, there is no one perfect project. And we're all trying to triangulate with different types of information, whether it's quantitative or qualitative. And so if you want to study, I don't know, gender politics in China...

You know, you could go to China and try to talk to women who are involved in the movement and maybe meet with the All-China Women's Federation. You could try, you know, and you might make some progress. Or you could do what's called digital ethnography and from abroad, start to really embed yourself in those communities to the extent you can. You can take advantage of the diaspora. A lot of the feminist movement has now, it's gone transnational.

So there's always, I think that the advice I try to tell people is there is usually a way to answer the question you're asking. And the way you might want to answer it might not be safe. It might not be feasible.

But we should explore it and then think about different ways to go about it. So that's the kind of general advice I often give people. And that leads to this sort of triangulation, including and I think the diaspora has become more important for better or for worse. I think people are resorting to that type of research again because it's harder to do the kind of in-depth qualitative work.

that we once did. Quantitative work is different and I think a lot of us, I'm primarily a quantitative researcher but I have always tried to do interviews and quantitative data is still there for the taking. One can scrape Chinese government websites, you can do a lot of different things. The issues that we face are different. One is there's always this question of data quality and

Just because the Chinese government puts some data on a website or some information on a website doesn't mean it's that reliable. One good example of this is there's a website called China Judgements Online, which the SPC put up court cases from all these lower level courts. And we all started using that data, scraping that data online.

And that website is basically defunct now. And so it's the data can come and go. And we don't quite know how reliable it is. And then the added issue for us is you can spend all day staring at regression coefficients. But unless you actually know something about China, you can get the story wrong. Right. And so that's that's the thing I worry about, especially as a foreigner trying to know something about China. I worry that as time has gone on, I'm I'm

staring at coefficients quite a lot, but I'm not doing enough of like just talking with Chinese people about what's going on. And I think that's where our field is at a little bit of a turning point because

We're still producing research, but I'm concerned sometimes that it's not actually getting at the ground truth in China because it lacks that field perspective. So there's no easy answer, but I do think adaptation is a key part of this. In that golden age you just mentioned in the early 2000s when doing research was a little bit more relaxed and there was more elbow room here, I guess, academic elbow room. That was an era of blogs, of people who were just

not necessarily academics, but they were in some sense China hands. They'd been in China a long time and spoke good Chinese and had lots of blogs. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, I think, referred to these bloggers as feral sinologists, which is just people out there collecting information on the fly, nothing systematic and nothing rigorously academic, but interesting and socially valid. I mean, these were real people they were interacting with.

And I've had students come here. I'm thinking of one person in particular who's studying urbanization and other things, and was a little bit frustrated, but I noticed he had a very wonderful kind of notebook, diary that he had been filling with anecdotes of people that he had run into and

And I was thinking, you know, maybe it's not really the time for academics to flourish so much, but maybe a time for some more Peter Hesslers. You know what I mean? I mean, people who know China and they know it, you know, academically and they speak good Chinese. But maybe we need some people who can report from inside China about things that are very accessible and don't need to be officially investigated. What do you think about that?

And would you take that role if you could? I mean, I'm not feral enough, unfortunately. I think I'm a domesticated house cat in the academic sense. I completely agree with that sentiment. And I think there are a lot of great sinologists out there

that maybe wouldn't self-identify as such or maybe be deemed as such in terms of credential, but they're adding a whole lot to the conversation. I mean, I think about like Bill Bishop, for example. I mean, Bill is sort of, as we call him, the China hand's China hand, right? Everybody's reading cynicism and it's a big deal.

And it's just he's someone who just read about China for a very long time. Right. And obviously worked in journalism as well. But it's I do think there's just there's a lot of different ways to get China expertise. And I think the output we we put out into the world in academia is very constrained. It has to pass peer review. It takes years.

It's all theoretical and jargony. Nobody actually wants to read our papers, right? Like, let's be honest. So I'm a big believer in the kind of democraticness of the China field and welcoming a lot of different voices

some Chinese, some Western, and a lot of different approaches. And I think collectively, we can get at that understanding. One of my favorite examples of this is the NPC observer. Again, I'm going back to the NPC, which again, marks my own irrelevancy. But Chang Ha Wei, for a long time, is still doing this, has a really nice website in English and Chinese, where he's just following the day-to-day activity of the NPC, which nobody else is doing. But he's kind of translating it

both literally, but also for our understanding, and is really providing a great service to the field. So I think there are a lot of these feral sinologists out there who are doing really good work. I think from a human rights perspective, they also are less, they're more adaptable. I think about like the Xinjiang crisis and how many different people were doing work looking at

satellite imagery, all these different folks. And I think that also gave us confidence in what was going on because it was being triangulated on by dozens of different researchers by the end. So I think, yeah, I'm a believer in that. And I think we need to

I do think in academia, there's obviously a credentialism. And I actually think just because I have a fancy university behind me, I don't think I'm a particularly good sinologist. I think there are many, many other people who know a whole lot more than me and don't have the backing of my university. So I welcome, yeah, the diversity of voices for sure. You know, that era in the early aughts when there were a lot of China bloggers, and while we no longer use the term feral, we prefer the term free-range these days. Yeah.

There was a certain amount of free-range sinology going on. I think one of the differences between then and now is that the number of Chinese students who are now overseas and are part of adding to the narrative about China has grown exponentially in the last 20, 30 years. That's something I think that was different when we go back to those earlier years.

And I'm just curious, you're a teacher at a very prestigious university. You teach courses on China. Presumably there are a lot of students from China in those courses. And I'm just wondering on campus, you know, how has the rise of the diaspora community, which has given us so much great access, information, involvement in Chinese life,

How has that changed, if you will, how we teach, how we talk about China? What kind of stories are told and how the narrative about China is shaped? Yeah, that's a great question. And I also, you're using the phrase golden age. I think it's very funny. We often talk about this as a golden age. Nobody talked about it as a golden age then, right? Like we weren't aware we were in it until it was gone, right? And that's sort of the sad nature of Chinese politics.

I do think the China field writ large is changing. And it was once a field dominated by Westerners. And within the Westerners, if we're very candid, it was dominated by white people and often white men. And I think the field has become much more diverse and we are getting a lot more Chinese voices in the conversation. And I think that's great. In the PhD level, when we admit students who want to study domestic politics in China, I would say the vast majority of students

our students who apply for that are Chinese nationals. And it's actually rare now to see an American apply to do a PhD on domestic politics in China. And when you look at kind of at the assistant professor level, sort of people about 10 years my junior,

they're almost exclusively Chinese citizens. And they're excellent researchers. I mean, they make me feel obsolete. They have perfect Chinese, they have perfect quantitative skills, qualitative skills. They're really wonderful researchers. They also have a fair amount of courage to be doing what they're doing. It's not easy to write about China as a Chinese citizen. And so I welcome the diversity of voices. I do think

We need to preserve the kind of stock of Western China experts coming into the field. And, you know, we want...

we want that perspective as well. I think positionality matters. I think it affects how you think about China. And I think we need to preserve the full range of positionality. So that's something I also think about in terms of balancing things. The other issue to note is that not everybody who's Chinese, who's writing about China is critical of the Chinese government. A lot of people are patriotic and that doesn't mean they are 50 centers or anything like that. And so I

I think some degree of pushback from that community is happening on our campuses. And I don't think it's a bad thing provided the dialogue is civil and it's coming from a place of respect. I mean, whenever we have an event on Hong Kong or Xinjiang or one of the more sensitive topics,

The events do become charged on our campus, and I think that's true of a lot of campuses because it's very emotional for people. And so it can be fraught sometimes, but overall, I think it's a very positive trend for the field. I think all of us are aware of the fact that there's a lot more information exchange going

than most people would think, given this sort of stereotype that China is a very closed off informationally and that the, you know, the internet is rigidly controlled. And we all know that's really not the case. We don't know how many, maybe you have an idea, but, you know, I've estimated...

at least 100 million people have access to VPNs in this country, and maybe twice that. And also that when you actually get people together, not only the diaspora, but people who have studied abroad and are able to go back and forth, can have very frank and interesting and very fruitful conversations with colleagues on both sides, right? And certainly in email exchanges. And yet somehow it seems like those kinds of interactions and what's happening and the kinds of

ideas that are being exchanged don't seem to get out anywhere. It's not in the press. Such people don't really go on television. They usually don't turn these conversations into in written form and publish them. There's just so much interesting interaction at a very, very truthful and open level in this sort of invisible space.

you know, informatics space that exists but people don't like to talk about. David, to your question, I think one of the sort of uniform experiences for someone who's going to China for the first time is they are sort of blown away by how different China is from what they imagined. This was true of my wife when she traveled with me on a trip to Yangshuo many years ago. But I've just seen it happen in real time with so many people because

You know, you read about China in the West and you this sort of totalitarian dystopia is sort of what you imagine. You basically imagine almost like a North Korea, but with tech. And then you go to China and things are a lot. Yeah, there's obviously surveillance. There's people are kind of careful in what they say, but the conversations are a lot more free flowing there.

than you might think. And then the presence of government is actually much less intrusive than you might think. And so I think that dynamic probably has gotten worse in the last few years because we don't have the same level of people-to-people exchange, right? So there's just not as many Americans going and sort of seeing it for themselves. And so how do we kind of enrich the narrative and get those things happening? I do think that I would welcome your perspective on this. I do think

At the academic level, kind of at the intellectual level in China, people in those roles are much more circumscribed than they used to be, because I do think nobody wants to upset the big guy and go too far out on a limb. And so in my own conversations with sort of colleagues in China, Chinese academics, I can have a very good one-on-one conversation with them

in a private setting. But would I ever be able to do a podcast with them where they would be able to speak freely and kind of be critical? I don't really see that happening very easily. And so that's one of the issues is that we know these conversations are happening. There is a fair amount of self-censorship still in China at the elite level.

for people with a real stake in the game. And so I do think it robs us of a certain quality of our discourse because we can't, we don't really know a lot how our Chinese colleagues feel. We know how they feel, but we can't say how, they can't really fully show how they feel in public a lot of the time. And I think that's a big issue. And I do think that's accelerated in the last five to 10 years. Yeah, I think that's true. Um,

My feeling is it's a matter of trust and usually it doesn't take much time. Really just a brief conversation with one of these people in either an academia or just people who have some kind of status. It doesn't take much of a conversation before you begin to realize that they're really on the same page and we can talk very freely and no one's feelings are going to get hurt and it's not going to go beyond this conversation.

So yeah, I agree. And I just think there's so much more of a diversity of opinion here than people think. And yet I think you're right. It's kind of tragic that there are lots of great ideas. There's lots of really interesting theories and ways of looking at what's happening now. There's certainly a lot of opinions about the United States politics and Trump that you hear in private conversations.

but it doesn't go out. You don't get a sense that there's this kind of opinion and this kind of diversity opinion in China. I don't think, even in China, I don't think that gets out. It just stays among this group of people who trust each other. And yet everyone sort of knows that the rules are, you know, you don't mention Fight Club when in Fight Club or whatever the movie is, you know,

One rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. Yeah, that's right. One rule of not. Yeah. We'd have to figure out how to make that pithy for the context we're talking about, but we get it. One thing I wanted to ask, Rory, was we're coming into a period that's going to be quite, I think, rocky as an understatement. All this optimism about the renewal of some of these programs,

Who knows what happens when January 2025 rolls around? And so, you know, we're a long way away from President Obama pledging 100,000 students to come to China from the United States and things like that. It seems like it's now more incumbent on institutions and organizations to do what they can to rebuild or build the framework to keep these people-to-people exchanges alive.

Just I'm curious from kind of within academia, what are some suggestions you would have for institutions, whether it's Princeton, other universities, think tanks, study abroad programs? What can be done to help rebuild these bridges and also to mitigate perhaps some of the storm, if we will, to mitigate COVID?

some of the policies that are likely to occur with the Trump 2 presidency? I wish I could be optimistic. And we kind of started on an optimistic note. We've had some fun. And now maybe we'll get to the downer part of the podcast. Maybe that's how the general flow of these things. I mean, I'm worried. I think...

we sort of had this window of opportunity, right, where Xi Jinping says he wants 50,000 American students, all the Chinese university and academic bureaucracy. This is basically a campaign, which is ironic that instead of bushels of wheat or ingots of steel, it's

the American student is the quota metric here. And we see an inflation of this number. But so we had this window of opportunity that I think the American institutions and Western institutions started to respond and test the waters. And we see these programs starting to go back. The organizations I'm involved with are like Princeton in Asia, Princeton in Beijing, and

There was a degree of trepidation because of things like the travel advisory, but this was at a time when actually U.S.-China relations were fraught, but you had the Biden administration who wasn't hostile to people to people. I wouldn't say they were really focused on it, but they weren't hostile to it.

And things were relatively stable. There was diplomatic contact and so forth. And so now we're getting a government, let's be honest, where they will not be prioritizing people to people. And if anything, people engaged in that type of activity risk being vilified in the United States and viewed as too close to China. There's a political cost here.

to having relationships in China. And so the question is, and then there's things like the travel advisory, which could easily be lifted back up and politicized. It's right now it went down to level two. They could ramp it up to level three or level four as part of a kind of a bargaining ploy in a trade war or whatever it is. And so I think there's just a high degree of variance for what could happen. I mean, Trump invited Xi Jinping to his inauguration. I doubt he will go. But

You can envision a world where Trump, Xi, Kim, there's sort of an authoritarian bromance that takes hold and things actually get stable. Or you can imagine trade war redux and things get really unstable, Taiwan, all these things. And so instability is not good for academic programming, right? Because administrators are risk averse, parents are risk averse, students are risk averse. And so...

I worry that a lot of these programs were rebuilding. I hope they survive and I hope they thrive. I think the student interest is there. And I guess my advice would be, let's try and see how it goes. And if things take the wrong direction, then we then we think about pulling out or, you know, but like, let's keep trying. Let's not give up in advance.

Because I think a lot of the experiences that I'm hearing, you know, Schwartzman program, for example, PIB, Princeton Beijing this past summer, the student experiences have been great, really positive. And with the exception of a couple of minor security incidents,

that tend to happen when you send a bunch of 20 year olds to any place. I don't think there's been anything terribly nefarious. I don't think the Chinese government is terribly interested in our students or views them as sensitive or security risk. So I believe the risks to students are not particularly high and we should remember that and try. And that doesn't mean we won't need to course correct if things take a turn.

But my hope is that we keep trying. Well, Rory Truex, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I understand that you have both a YouTube channel and as I mentioned at the top of the show, a sub stack as well is where can they find you on the sub stack?

Oh, there's nothing more sad than a middle-aged man trying to promote his social media, but this is the world we live in. Try a middle-aged man who's running a podcast and, you know, we get jackets made and everything. Got the logo. No, I mean, I think on a personal level, I think, you know, in academia, we write for other academics and

For me, I've always wished our work could be more relevant to the public view. And I think we owe it to the public to kind of get some of our ideas out there. And so, I mean, my YouTube channel is barely functional, but I put my entire lecture course up on there. And people over the years have taken my lecture course. It's actually, I think, from 2016. So I should probably do it again because a lot of it is...

out of date, there's a lecture like, will Xi Jinping leave power? Who will his successor be? If you look back at some of this stuff, it's pretty painful, but it's there. The Substack is something I'm trying to invest more in. I really actually value that platform because you can just write pretty freely without worrying about editors or anything like that. And so it's

It's called Living in Truth. I've rebranded it several times now, so I'm going to have to stick with the name at some point. But Living in Truth is a dissident concept. It's originated from Havel, but a lot of actually overseas Chinese dissidents abide by this idea. And it's basically the idea that a lot of these regimes...

they dominate through lies and through mistruths and they force their citizens to go along with different mistruths. And so the idea of living in truth is behaving authentically and seeking out the truth. And I think that's an idea that's powerful to me. I think it's obviously relevant to China. I think it's increasingly relevant to American politics where you have the president of the United States and all of his followers continuing to engage in election denialism and all of this. So

So anyway, that's my rant. But so my sub stack is called Living in Truth. Right now, the only people really following me are David and my mom. So maybe we can expand that audience. But yeah.

That's pretty much the listenership of the podcast. Well, you don't have my you don't have my mom yet. But guess what? Now that you've brought me on, you might get my mom to become a listener. There you go. I will say, Roy, reading your sub stack that I do think and this may this may be a horribly dystopian thing to say.

But there are some real contributions that can be made to understanding American politics in this moment from people. And we joked about this in the beginning, but in all seriousness, who have studied how authoritarian systems develop, how they utilize the media.

how they develop their own systems that then overwhelm bureaucracies. You know, it's sad to say that we live in an age where there are some freakish parallels between the CCP and the, I don't know if it's a party or Kabul or what that's about to take over the U.S. government, but we do. Yeah, I believe that. And just because that issue didn't really carry the day in the election doesn't mean it's not true. And I do believe

So in comparative politics, which is my subfield of political science, we talk a lot about democratic backsliding and this idea that democracy is fragile even in places like the United States and people elect themselves out of democracy all the time. And they usually do it by electing populist strong man that claim to represent the people but really are just representing themselves. And so

I view Trump as an inherently authoritarian personality. I think he tried to steal an election and was rewarded for that by being reelected. And so I don't want to be dramatic or sensationalist, but I do think we need to be worried about the health of our democracy. And Jeremiah, I completely agree with you. I'm consistently shocked

shocked and saddened by like, oh, some of the things I'm seeing in the United States do remind me quite a lot of what I've seen in China and other authoritarian systems. So yeah, that's the kind of contribution I'm trying to make is like, how can we better understand authoritarianism? There are people who do this much better than me, like Ann Applebaum is wonderful at this, and she's running at the Atlantic. And so I think there's a weird moment right now where people who study these authoritarian systems have a little bit more to say about American politics. And so that's, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do.

Well, again, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy morning. I know this time of year is a busy one for teachers and professors. So thank you for joining us. And David, thank you also for staying up night owl, though you might be, and for recording this podcast late in the evening in Beijing. And thank you to all of you, including David and my mom, for listening to this podcast.

You can find us wherever you find or wherever podcasts are sold and or given away for free. And you can always find us on social media. I have now migrated over to blue sky because apparently I'm in a feet liberal who can't possibly handle an argument. Nevertheless, I find it a much more pleasant place to be than Elon's corner of poo. Anyway, until next time, I think that's our cue to, as they say around these parts, bring on the drums.

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