A father and son at the edge of the Chinese empire
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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the Chinese see these issues? As a child, the New York Times journalist Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People's Liberation Army.

But as he grew up as a second-generation immigrant in the United States, Edward was hungry to find out more about his father and his mother's pasts in the People's Republic of China. That hunger took him to study China at university and eventually to become the New York Times' Beijing bureau chief. Edward's new book, At the Edge of Empire, is a marvelously constructed work that traces his father's journey through China as a soldier in the PLA and his own reporting in China as an American journalist.

It reveals how China has changed between the lives of father and son, and also how in some aspects, very little has changed, such as the nature of political power. I'm delighted to say that Edward joins me now. Welcome to Chinese Whispers. Thanks, Cindy. Great to be here. Now, Edward, above all, I found this a really, really touching book. I would describe it as something of a family memoir. So can we start with your father? What made you want to write a book about him?

Well, the book, or maybe the general ideas for the book, have been percolating in my head for a couple decades even. In the mid-90s, I started getting more interested in China. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I was born in Washington. I hadn't been interested in China for most of my childhood. I think I was just your typical immigrant American kid who was trying to fit in in American society. And my father worked in restaurants. He

went to work in the morning, came home very late at night. I rarely spoke to him about his past. I rarely spoke to my mom about her past. And in my 20s, I went to graduate school and also studied Chinese in Beijing. I think that was when, you know, the China obsession really grabbed me. And I felt I needed to understand more about my family background. So while I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley, I started talking to my parents a bit more about their family backgrounds, learn more about

why they left China, learned also that my father had been in the PLA for the better part of a decade in the 1950s, and that he had been a faithful adherent of Mao's ideologies and ideas for that period. And so I was very curious about that.

And I did a short student film based on that, but it was superficial in many ways. And then after I finished my tour for the New York Times in China, which was almost a decade, I decided I wanted to write a book about China. And...

I'd always been fascinated by Chinese history since graduate school. So I wanted to capture the sweep of modern Chinese history for the lay reader. But I also felt I needed to do it in a way that would draw them into very definite characters that they could follow along. And my father seemed to embody many of the ideas that I wanted to represent in the book, both the

adoration of communism and of the possible futures for China under Mao, and then eventually the hardships under Mao, and how some of what he experienced in the Mao era still carries over to China today, especially under the governance of Xi Jinping, which, of course, I had covered for the New York Times and was very fascinated by.

I also wanted to talk about this idea of China as a reconstituted empire. And my father's posting, his main posting, which was in Xinjiang, the northwest of China, gave me a framework to discuss that. Yeah, we'll get onto that a bit more in just a little bit. But he was born in Hong Kong, is that right?

That's right. So he wasn't born into China under the Nationalists or China under the Communists. He was born to this British colony. And I think that gave him this interesting perspective on China, an outsider's perspective almost, similar to mine when I went back decades later.

He then went to the mainland, went to Guangdong province in southern China adjacent to Hong Kong because of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. He and his older brother, Sam, who's four years older, and some of their family members all went back to their home village in Taishan County of Guangdong province. And he grew up there. He grew up in the village. He grew up going to high school in Guangzhou. And it was in high school that he started learning more about

about the communists and more about Mao and about the civil war. Yeah. One of the things that I found so interesting about your book was the picture paints of Hong Kong of that time, because it busts some of the assumptions, I think, about the British colony and about China, at least for me it did. For example, Hong Kongers under Japanese occupation wondering about a Chinese future, feeling quite patriotic about it as a Japanese nation.

came in, as well as about, you know, just curious little things like the elite Hong Kongers in the British colony speaking English to demonstrate their status, but with the Chinese accent. I just found those bits so interesting. And I think people who, unless you're someone who lived through that, it's not really something that history books pick out. Yeah, and my family members were not part of that elite class, but they observed it. So my father, his brother, other family members have memories of that.

I found some documentation of that also. They were part of a merchant class of transnational Chinese, southern Chinese. So they moved between the colony and what we call mainland quite often. Right, Guangdong province. And that was one of the most fascinating things I found out about that part.

that region of China as well as Hong Kong was the ease with which they moved, the ease of commerce and the fact that, and also the ease of movement and commerce from Southern China to Hong Kong to Southeast Asia as well. So I felt that there was this very rich history of transnational Chinese trade

commerce interaction that was going on across this region. A lot of it originates with the Cantonese in Guangdong province, and then Hong Kong becomes this nexus point for them. And so my family moved very easily between the two places. And even up until the early 60s, they did because my, eventually my mother would be able to interact with my father, even after he had left the Chinese army, and she would go back to the mainland interact with him there.

And when he was in school in Guangzhou, that was under Kuomintang still, the communists had not taken over yet. And again, you know, it was just the bits in your book that the interesting vignettes, such as one kind of political supervisor, I guess, at the school.

handing around pornography for the kids so that they wouldn't be attracted to the political ideals of communism. I mean, in some ways, the KMT were pretty authoritarian in their own ways. Right. And I think that's one of the myths that many people in America who don't really understand the intricacies of the history still hold that they think Chiang Kai-shek was this democratic leader and that the U.S. was properly aligned in ideas or ideology with the nationalists. But in fact, the nationalists were authoritarian. And the U.S., I think,

people like Henry Luce and other political figures in the U.S. tried to pump them up as these democratic avatars in Asia when, in fact, they were the opposite. But the U.S. had decided to back them because of its anti-communist ideology. Yeah.

And so your father then goes to Beijing when he starts university out of patriotism for this new China that the communists are building. As you say, he gets posted to the Northwest. His family background comes into play when people are very suspicious of him. And I won't give too many spoilers for people who should absolutely read the book. Then he narrowly escapes China after the Great Famine, or rather during the Great Famine. It's all very convoluted and pretty touch and go at moments. Right.

But what I loved about all of this recollection, which, as you say, your uncle Sam also wrote about in a family memoir, is how Proustian some of the memories are. You know, it's the first row stuck that your father had after the famine that he remembers. It's the persimmons on the road out westwards into Xinjiang that he remembers.

That says so much about the memories of that time, I think. Yeah, I thought that was one of the most interesting things that I learned while I was interviewing my father. And I think it also taught me a lot about memory and human memory. And that we, obviously there's huge gaps in our memory of

our childhood and our early years, and even maybe from our lives a decade ago, but we only remember certain moments. And so the book was trying to capture those moments. I think I have a line in the prologue where he said, this book in many ways is a document of the moments that I've remembered about China that my father has remembered, because we can't construct this continuous narrative. And so my father did remember these things. And it's interesting to point out

the roast goose, the persimmons, and there's this bottle of soy sauce in his dorm room during the Great Famine that he wants to just take a sip from because of his starvation. And a lot of his memories revolve around food. Like, he'll remember these very vivid images, like, for example, a bowl of hot noodle soup with lamb floating on top when he reaches Xinjiang in the northwest with other soldiers. And

I think it's mainly or partly because he lived through the Great Famine and, you know, 30 to 40 million Chinese citizens starved and died during that period. He survived. And I think that ever since then, probably food has remained sharply etched in his memory, these moments in his past of food, and they hold a great symbolic value for him. Mm-hmm.

And of course, you write very early on in the book that growing up, you had always only associated with his takeaway uniform. So food was that part of his life after he moved to the US. Right. Why do you think that he was so reluctant to talk about his past life in China and your mother too? Yeah, I think that, well, they have different reasons. I think my father just had his head down

to the grindstone. He was trying to earn money for the family. It was a blue collar job and he worked long hours. I think he just wanted to build up a future for me and my sister in the U.S. and didn't want to look back

at the past very much. Eventually, when we did start interviewing him first in the 90s, and then later, much more recently about China, he had no reluctance about going back through all those events. So I think that it was a difference between him as this younger immigrant in America trying to build up his family there versus much later in life when he's when he's

Right.

When the communists took power, they persecuted her family. The villagers who were adherents or acolytes of the communists persecuted her family. And in the event, she took away all their wealth. They took away, for example, all her family photos. And to this day, she still talks with bitterness about how she doesn't have any photos left.

of her childhood. And so at a young age, her mother arranged for the family to flee to Hong Kong. And so they fled to Hong Kong. And she didn't go back to the PRC until much later in 1999 on the first trip that she and my father took together there. So

That flight to Hong Kong, of course, it underscores one of the main themes of the book and of Southern China, which is Hong Kong as a refuge or sanctuary for many Chinese over the years. But also because she had this very dark childhood in China, it's not a place that she enjoyed talking about. And even now when she talks about it, it's with these very dark memories of what it was. Yeah.

Yeah, I was struck by how many years it had been before. I mean, it wasn't just that they weren't talking about that life. They weren't going back to see their families there either until you started going back. How much did their silence on the Chinese part of their lives drive your desire as a second person

generation immigrant to find out more about that? I mean, I would say it was an important element. If they had talked much more openly and freely about it earlier, it probably wouldn't have been this mystery that I wanted to unravel. I mean, as a journalist, also as just someone who's curious about the world and curious about

what goes on outside our borders, of course, I became naturally interested in that once I knew there were things to discover. It was entire countries to discover within their past. And so I really wanted to unravel that. I've heard other, you know, other...

Chinese American or Asian American immigrants of my generation say, oh, they wish their parents had talked more about their past. And so I think that embedded within many people of my generation or younger generations, they wonder about these pasts of their parents or their grandparents. And one of the most interesting reactions I've gotten to the book is

from other Chinese American second generation immigrants or Asian American immigrants and they say, oh, now they're inspired to try and talk more with their parents about the past or they say that they wish they had talked more with their parents or grandparents before they passed away. How did your father feel about when you told him that you were going to China for work?

That's an interesting question. I think he didn't have many reservations about it. By that time, I think he was quite distanced from some of the disillusionment and disappointment he experienced earlier in China. And he's been an avid follower of Chinese history and Chinese politics. So even after leaving China in the early 1960s, he followed all the movements and the changes within China. So he understood how China had changed after the Mao era. He understood Deng Xiaoping and the

reform opening up era. And so I think he knew that I was going back to different China than the one he experienced. In addition, I just spent three and a half years reporting in Iraq on the war. So I think my parents were very, they were very relieved that I wasn't going off to another war zone and that China, for all the issues that it has, doesn't have an open civil war taking place within its borders. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

The major theme that runs through your book is that of empire. You say that China and the US are both empires. And I actually wondered, firstly, I'd love to hear why you say that. But secondly, if your experience in Iraq

kind of informed your China reporting as well, because you were seeing kind of two different manifestations of what you call empire. Right. It's pretty obvious to me that China is a reconstituted empire. And I say that China is the last remaining Eurasian empire of all the ones that ruled...

this huge landmass across the world from the British Isles all the way to Southeast Asia and Australia, China is the only one that has managed to rebuild itself as that. And the book traces that arc from the Qing Empire to today. We know that, for example, the British Empire dissolved, the Ottoman Empire dissolved, the Russians did, the French did. But

In China, the nationalists, when they took power, they tried to rebuild the Qing Empire, but failed. The communists actually succeeded through immense use of force and military invasion and occupation of Xinjiang, that enormous northwest region that's around one-sixth of current-day China, of Tibet, which is also an enormous vast region, western China, and part of Mongolia, and

Now they have their eyes on Taiwan, which was also part of the Qing Empire. So that's been the central drive in communist rule. It's part of the way that they justify, I think, their rule. And also it shaped their governance of not just those regions, but all of China, because I think when you're ruling an empire like that, the same type of empires that sprawled across the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of force is...

is something that you often resort to. And we see China doing that in these places like Xinjiang, in Tibet. And of course, my father, the core narrative of my father in the book is his military posting in Xinjiang. He's part of the initial wave of military occupation

of that region, where, as we know from headlines today, the Uyghur Muslims live, Kazakh Muslims live, and there is a through line from that military occupation that he was part of to some of the very dark policies we've seen unfold in Xinjiang in recent years, including the internment camps that have held a million or more Muslims, the forced labor, and other policies like that under Xi Jinping. Mm.

And your father, when he was there, I thought it was fascinating that he saw firsthand these efforts to integrate the Kazakh soldiers that had been there, that the communists had taken over at the time. And of course, you have that juxtaposition with your time there. How do you think the CCP's method of controlling those borderlands in that region have changed over the span of your book? During my father's time there, there were debates about how to approach this.

the different ethnic groups there. And I think that was because it was the first time the communists had occupied this region, and they weren't quite sure what to do with these groups. There were obviously nationalist movements among the groups. My father's first encounter with people of different ethnicities in Xinjiang was interacting, as you say, with Kazakh soldiers who had been part of this

group called the Ili National Army that had fought against the nationalists with the backing of the Soviets. So, you know, the communists thought maybe they should be aligned with the communists since the Soviets had backed them. But they also were wary of the nationalist or independence-oriented mindset among some of them and feared that they could be a militia that could fight for Xinjiang independence. So,

What the People's Liberation Army did was to dismantle this army and try and integrate them into the PLA. And my father was part of that initial project. He was sent out to this town called Altai in the very far northwest or northern part of Xinjiang.

on the border with the Soviet Union at the time in Mongolia. And he was told to help indoctrinate these Kazakh soldiers into communist ideology and belief in Mao's vision for China. And so that was his initial interaction. And he felt that for much of his time in Xinjiang with these Kazakh soldiers, later with Uyghur soldiers he interacted with,

He felt that there was a fairly good relationship that the PLA had established with these soldiers. But I also think that, you know, his memory might be whitewashing those relations a bit because...

As I was researching my book, I found these very vivid and eye-opening letters that he had written his older brother, Sam, after he left Xinjiang, and then another set after he left China altogether. And in one of the letters, he talks about his arrival in Xinjiang as a PLA soldier. And he says, oh, what I discovered was that Xinjiang was this

region of these very diverse ethnic groups, 15 or more ethnic groups. And they had very different mindsets, very different culture, very different languages. But the one thing that they all had in common was an intense hatred of the ethnic Han people.

And I thought that was an amazing line to discover because in my interviews with him, he had never mentioned encountering that belief among the other ethnic groups. But it's there in the letter. It's written only a couple of years after he left Xinjiang. So it's very fresh in his mind. And I thought that there's probably some parts of his story that he has that either faded from his memory or that he has suppressed. Yeah.

Yeah. And what did you find when you went back to Xinjiang as a journalist? I mean, I saw the rise in ethnic tensions growing throughout my years there. And this is in the 2000s? This is in the 2000s. I first started going to Xinjiang in 1999, right after I finished grad school, because I had already learned something about my father's story in the region. So I was making this long overland backpacking trip across Asia from Hong Kong to Delhi. So I went through Xinjiang.

into Pakistan. And I decided to try and stop at some of the places where my father said he had been posted, like in the Ili Valley in Yenang. But my understanding of what he had done there was very superficial at the time. And so I just saw some of these places. And even then, at the time in 1999, when I would speak with some, for example, Uyghur residents of Kashgar,

an oasis town in the far west of Xinjiang, they would tell me about the repressive policies that they felt the Chinese government was imposing on them. And there had just been this massive protest in the Yili Valley area that had been suppressed forcefully by Chinese security forces. So even then, I already started to see the tensions. And then, of course, in 2008, when I was posted to China, I

Yeah, it does seem to be have changed in...

Maybe in the manifestation, maybe not in nature in terms of your father's time to your time, in terms of how Beijing was treating the borderlands. Because what I mean by that is that the nature, the authoritarian nature has not changed. The idea that you can integrate or at least quell these borderlands has not changed. But the methods have changed and become much more surveillance based, much more transparent.

mass indoctrination, mass encampments, which your father has seen only in the early days of. Right. One interesting thing parallel in the history, and obviously it's a book about a father and a son, but there's another father-son pair that shows up in the book, which is Xi Jinping, the current leader, and then his father, Xi Zhongxun. So in my father's time, Mao had put Xi Zhongxun, who was a comrade, close comrade of Mao's, in charge of

rule over Xinjiang. So Xi Jinping was charged with formulating the policies in Xinjiang. And when I go back and look at documentation and talk to historians who've looked closely at that, we learned that there was a back and forth about how hard to go on the ethnic groups there. Sometimes they wanted to push forward the military occupation aspect of it. And sometimes they told the soldiers to pull back, stay in their bases,

and not interact that much of the population because they felt they needed to try and win the hearts and minds of the population, the same type of term that the U.S. government used in Iraq, for example. They needed to try and win their confidence. And so now, starting in 2014, Xi Jinping has decided to take

the hardline approach to Xinjiang, like the harder version of what his father had been debating. And that starts because of the violence that he thinks is taking place throughout Xinjiang. And I think at that time, the Communist Party and the Chinese officials really thought that

there was a chance that there could be an ISIS-like insurgency that arises in Xinjiang, even though, of course, as we know, many of the Muslims there are moderate and have no leanings towards ISIS. But they believe that that could take place. And they also believe that unless they do this hardcore assimilation of Uyghurs into mainstream culture, then the Uyghurs will always have this autonomy issue.

this desire for autonomy or this desire for independence embedded in their minds. So they decide, as you say, to start up the system in term and camps, and essentially they want to really pull out many of the practices of Islam out of the

Uyghurs and out of the Kazakhs. And then there's stories we hear of people being forced to eat pork, for example, or obviously being barred from going on the Hajj to Saudi Arabia. These are all core tenets of Islam, things that every devout Muslim should do throughout their lives. And here are the Chinese governments preventing them from doing this.

How extensive do you think the parallels between America's war on terror runs with how China has treated the Uyghur people? I think there are parallels. I think that there is this conversation that takes place in the backdrop that we're not...

you know, fully aware of. And it starts with the post 9-11 era, when China asked the Bush government to designate a group in Xinjiang as a terrorist, as formally as a terrorist group. So we already see this interaction early on between the US war on terror and China, and the Bush government agrees to do that. So already, they're putting this

seal of approval in many ways on sort of the Communist Party's vision of the threats in Xinjiang and then of their approach to that, to those so-called threats as well. And so the U.S. is supporting that. And then as China watches what the U.S. does, I think, in the Middle East, then it feels that it has leeway to push forward some of the same types of policies. And some of the

The concrete events I witnessed in Xinjiang reminded me of what I saw in Iraq. So, for example, on my last visit to Kashgar at the end of 2016, I saw security officers rounding up.

a group of young Uyghur men just in the central plaza in Kashgar and marching them off to a police station. It reminded me very much of when I would see American soldiers rounding up young fighting-age Iraqi men, corral them, and then take them off to a detention center in these large groups.

And so I think some of the same tactics that you see that the US employed in their so-called global war on terror, you also see playing out in places like Xinjiang. So when you say that the US is an empire as well, do you think that it's the same kind of similar sort of empire to China or different? I think the US is a different empire. I think it's

It's not the type of empire that exists in the 18th and 19th centuries where you had these like large territorial holdings that you had to keep by force, which China is today, in my opinion. But it has created a new type of empire where it has these overseas military bases. It projects military power throughout the globe.

I think the U.S. power rests on the size of its economy, the way it has integrated the use of the dollar throughout the globe, and that's important for its power, and then its military power. Probably more importantly than anything, the military power, which is, of course, a hallmark of empire, I think, and the projection of that power around the globe. So I think the U.S. has constructed...

a new type of empire. And, you know, people will argue that, you know, in some areas like in Asia, for example, many Asian countries might welcome the U.S. military presence in Asia as a counterbalance to China because they're also afraid of Chinese hegemonic power. But at the same time, when the U.S. undertakes

What does seeing China and the US respectively as empires, does it tell us anything about their relationship? And I mean, do empires get on, for example, with the U.S.?

One thing that you wrote that really struck me was a quote you saying that empires have a profound belief in their own innocence, that while evil can be done to these societies, they can do no evil. I mean, that seems to me not a recipe for getting along. Right. Well, I think that if you look at the history of empires, that's a consistent idea that is in many societies.

empires are superpowers from the British to the Americans to the French. And there's this idea of noblesse oblige that you're out there in the world because you're bringing something that the rest of the world needs or wants. You're giving them a gift. And I think that the European imperial powers felt this way and I think America feels this way. And then, of course, as they go through this, they ignore the darker sides of their empire, including things like occupying foreign lands and

the Chinese officials who run their empire are very much the same way. They feel that China is this very deep civilization in, of course, as you know, in the Chinese discourse, it's a 5,000 year old civilization, even though we know that that term is very problematic. And they believe that, uh,

that civilization imprinted itself on other current nation states around China, like back centuries or millennia ago, and imprinted itself on those, and that Chinese civilization and Chinese culture is a gift that can be brought to other parts of the world. And also, as well, the current Chinese political economic system is something that they believe functions well, is probably superior to that of the U.S., I think, in their minds, and that they think perhaps other countries have

would do well to emulate. I do think that there is a difference, though, with the former Soviet Union, and that we have to be careful about parallels with that. And even with the US, I don't think that in its current state, China is as messianic about exporting ideology as, for example, the Soviets were, or the Americans are. I do think that the Americans have this missionary zeal about democracy and about

bringing democracy to other parts of the world. And it could sometimes through force as in Iraq, which of course, as we know, is a complete disaster. And Afghanistan, their failed war in Afghanistan. And sometimes they'll do it through other means, trying to encourage, you know, a more robust civil society and then eventually elections in certain parts of the world. And also they have this idea that their economic system, the system of free market capitalism is integral to democracy.

democracies on that. It's also perhaps part of the roots of democracy. So if other countries adopt that market system, then their political system will change. I think that that's very relevant to their approach to China in recent decades, that they felt that

If they could bring China more firmly into this American-led system of global capitalism, then China's political system would change. But of course, as we know, China did engage with world commerce, but its political system has not changed. And I think that's taught a lesson to America and its imperial idea, its missionary idea of democracy and capitalism.

Absolutely. And so, Edward, I've saved the hardest question for last, which is that with the long span of your book, some 70 years,

As you say, so much has happened in that time. The U.S. has been proven wrong in its assumptions of what would make China more like itself. What do you think the next 70 years holds for China itself and also for U.S.-China relations? You're laughing now. Well, I'm laughing because you're a journalist, so you know that we journalists hate to make predictions. Especially if it's 70 years. Yeah, exactly. I mean, do you think that the Chinese Communist Party is resilient enough to...

live out another 70 years? My belief is we should never underestimate the party. I think one thing that's interesting is we've seen the party change and adapt to many circumstances over the decades. I mean, who would have thought that after the disasters of Mao, which were among the worst tragedies of the modern world, when you think about the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution,

and the level to which he brought Chinese society, that the entity, the political entity that was responsible for that, the party could have survived that and then eventually come to thrive even in the decades afterwards. And then when we watch what Deng Xiaoping did and his cohort did, how they decided to embrace China

some free commerce, some free trade, while still maintaining this command economy at certain levels of Chinese industry, then we see that the party is willing to experiment, it's willing to adapt as the world changes. And then, of course, we see it's willing to use force. And we saw that in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And we see that in the way it approaches, as I say, these frontier regions of China as well. And so...

I think the party has adapted to changing circumstances and it has the potential to do that. I think this is still this open debate right now in the world at large, whether a political system that is democratic in nature is more capable of adaptation and more capable of reacting to stresses within its society and outside its borders, or whether an authoritarian system such as China's

is the more capable one. And I think that if China didn't exist today, we wouldn't be having that debate because we saw what happened with the Soviet Union. And we look at smaller autocracies like North Korea and we say, oh, they're very backwards. There's no way that they can compete with

world powers. But then you look at China, it's the most successful authoritarian nation in the world. It's come a long way since Mao. It survived the Mao era and is the second largest economy now in the world. And it is exerting more diplomatic and economic and military influence on the world today than it has

done since the Qing Empire. So I think because of that, it's hard to write off the party. And even more recently, for example, we saw Xi Jinping's zero COVID policy and how that he closed off China, the economy fell, the economic growth fell. And I think many of the people looking at it from the outside, many pundits said, oh, there's no way Xi will reverse that because

It's a personal policy of his. He's deeply wedded to his policy. But then as soon as these white paper protests started in China, he immediately reversed it, didn't even look back, didn't try to justify it. They put out propaganda saying, oh, COVID's not that bad. Like, if you get it, don't worry about it. And then, of course, we've moved on from that. So we see when there is a reaction to a policy that they feel might threaten their legitimacy or threaten their rule or weaken the party or weaken their standing, they're able to adapt or reverse themselves.

I'm not saying this as an endorsement of their policies, but I do think that many people underestimate the adaptive nature of the party. And of course, on zero COVID, many pundits outside of China called it China's Chernobyl moment as well, as if this was a moment the system collapses because of the cover-up in Wuhan demonstrating that the system doesn't work. And yet...

it survived and more resilient than before. Yeah, not only did it survive, there was like barely any looking back or like analysis from in the public discourse there about it. And of course, that's because of their suppression of free speech. And there probably be much more hand wringing over what took place. But, you know, we don't detect a lot of internal searching over that policy. And I think they're just

intent on looking forward on trying to rebuild their economy, which has slowed down dramatically. So I think there are stresses. The economic growth is much slower now than it was 15 years ago. And I think those are the questions that weigh heavily on the party's mind at the moment. And Edward, finally, then let me rephrase my previous question in a slightly different way, which is, do you think that these two empires of the US and China could get

get on if China continues to be very, very strong in the world, if it continues to be the second or maybe even first largest economy in the world at some point? Is that tension baked into the system? I think there will be a long running tension, one for years to come. I guess one question I have is what you mean by the phrase get on? Does it mean as long as we avoid armed conflict or an open war, are we getting on? So

So that is possible. I think that is possible to avoid open war. I don't think that war between these two nations is inevitable. I think both governments want to avoid it because the costs will be devastating to both nations and to the world. And I think many other countries around the world want these two governments to avoid it. So I think that's possible.

I think it's possible because these are two nuclear armed powers and we haven't seen an open war between two nuclear powers before. I think it's possible because both economies are deeply intertwined with each other and with the world. And, you know, there have been previous wars, including world wars, where economies like Germany's were deeply integrated with other countries around it. But...

That was before the current system of global commerce that was structured after World War II. And I feel that there will be immense pressure from many different interest groups, whether it's other governments, business interests that will try and keep these countries from going to war.

But I do think that there is a problem that exists with these two empires essentially colliding now in the Asia-Pacific region, which is the military dimension of the rivalry. And that is because China is building up its military very rapidly. And of course, if you're sitting in

in beijing that's a perfectly natural thing to do you're now a superpower your economy is immense you have the means to build up a military you know that military power is important because you've studied history you've looked at the u.s and so you want to be the dominant military power in your backyard just as the u.s is in the western hemisphere but

But the U.S. wants to maintain its imperial status around the world. It wants to be the preeminent superpower around the world, the preeminent military player in the Asia-Pacific region. Some other countries want it to be that, too, like Japan, South Korea, for example, which are allies of the U.S.,

And so the U.S. will do everything it can to maintain its military posture in the Asia-Pacific region while the Chinese military and Chinese government try and push it further and further out into the further reaches of the Pacific. They're very concerned about that.

you know, American military presence close to its coast, near Taiwan, along the Japanese islands, along the Philippine islands. And so this is a part of the rivalry that I think is very, very hard to reconcile. Edward Wong, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers. Thanks a lot, Cindy. And Edward's book, At the Edge of Empire, A Family's Reckoning with China is available now. And there's much more in it that we didn't get the chance to talk about today. So do pick it up.