Mao vs Xi: politicking China’s environment — with Judith Shapiro
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It's a terrible shame that the Chinese state feels somehow that they can't trust their own people. Hello, listeners. Welcome to a new episode of Peking Hotel. I'm your host, Leo. China's economic modernization took a heavy toll on the environment. One's pristine landscape saw the arrival of chemical plants, hydraulic power stations, migration of large population, which polluted rivers, flooded villages, and destroyed clean air.

Environmental degradation provoked waves of environmental activism and became a rallying cry for the nascent civil society in the early 2000s. Today, we have Professor Judith Shapiro of American University to help recount some of those stories rooted in Chinese environmental politics. And this is the second conversation I've published on Professor Shapiro's

For those who don't know, Professor Shapiro is a professor at American University and she studies China's environmental politics from Mao to now. She once taught English in Changsha back in 1980 and wrote a series of best-selling books on China in the 80s. She worked as a senior program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy before turning to academia. And today she will share her experience studying China's environmental politics

and discuss the complicated relationship between the state, the society, and the environment in China. So enjoy! Hi Judith, last time we spoke about your early career from becoming a teacher in China in the 70s and 80s and how that turned into writing several books about China until joining the National Endowment for Democracy. And

After that, you made a switch to focus on the environment and China's environment in particular. Could you talk about that? I hoped when I left the NED to start to work on the environment and I'd applied for jobs at some environmental groups.

But I was not able to get a job because I didn't have the experience in the background. And so I went back to this idea that maybe I should get a PhD, as some people had urged me to do. I'd been more or less in the academic world as when I was teaching at Penn or Villanova or earlier. And when I was in New York, I taught at the New School.

These were always as adjunct positions, doing a single course. And then when Yang Hung and I were doing all that public speaking, we went to probably 100 universities in our time. But people always assumed I had a PhD, basically. And so getting the PhD was less a question of getting a qualification and more for me an opportunity to...

to do a career shift, to train myself in a different field, but also because I knew that the dissertation would force me to do a single authored book.

I mean, not everybody's dissertation gets published, but I knew that I had this kind of fear of the blank screen and that I'd always collaborated with other people. So I knew that, you know, I was kind of trying to outsmart myself, you know, and do that single authored thing that I was going to have to do with the dissertation. What made you decide, this is the thing I want to focus on?

Well, honestly, I've been a vegetarian since I was 21, I think. So am I, actually. Yeah, all my life. And I've always just been an animal lover. So it really comes out of this reverence for life, if you will. A lot of environmentalists are environmentalists because...

you know they're worried about climate change and the effect on future generations and of course i care about those things as well but um my intellectual and emotional interest is primarily in the non-human world i just really find that very very interesting i could watch another a non-human creature

for hours, you know, just to try to understand what are they doing and what are they motivated by and, you know, questions about do animals think and what is a good life and, you know,

when I learned that American University had some really good scholars of environmental politics and that they would be eager for me to do a fast PhD there, I decided finally to do it. And it worked out really well for me because in Chinese they talk about liu xiao, you know, and I ended up getting, like they basically created a position for me at American University so that I could stay. And on your journey of studying

the environment in China, were there significant mentors or gurus, the go-to people that you sort of call upon for advice for things? Well, there was nobody who knew environment and China, right? In fact, that's why "Mounts for Oregon's Nature" is considered like a seminal work because

I mean aside from maybe Vaclav Smil or Richard Lewis Edmonds, a few people had written about China's environment before, but there was nothing that really systematically looked at the Mao period and the environmental lens.

And how about on the Chinese side? Did you know Liang Congjie, the founder of Friends of Nature and grandson of Liang Qichao? Yeah, yes, very well. Oh, that's why I went back to China in '83. There's a story there. Oh, what's the story? Okay, so back in high school, I became friends with the daughter of John King Fairbank and Wilma Fairbank. She and I were both dancers. We went to like dance camp together.

And so after Son of the Revolution came out, she and I were continuously friends. But her father wrote a review of Son of the Revolution, I think, in the New York Review of Books. We got to visit them in New Hampshire. Holly, the daughter of my friend, had never been to China before.

And so her parents wanted to give her a chance to go to China, but they sent her and me together to China so I could help her. And so we went to the Central Song and Dance Troupe, which is the Zhongyang Wu Dao Xue Yuan or something like that, in Beijing for a couple of weeks.

And then we were in Shanghai also. And Holly is a choreographer, so she choreographed dance for them and all that. So that's when, because of the Fairbanks relationship to Liang Sicheng, that's when we met Liang Congjie for the first time.

And we actually carried Liang Sicheng's drawings of the... It's amazing, right? We carried the drawings of all of that Chinese architecture that he was trying to save. We carried those drawings back to the U.S. where Wilma was able to turn them into a book that was published by, I think, University of Pennsylvania Press, something like that. That's wonderful. Yeah. And so...

as I started to do environmental work and Liang Congjie started Ziran Zhiyou, Son of the Revolution, Friends of Nature, he and I continued to see each other. Every time I would be in China, I would go see him. And I got to know him pretty well, I would say. Him and his wife and the daughter. She was little at that time, but yeah. I enjoyed reading a framework of

the Maoist environmental approach in terms of the four pillars: political repression, there's the utopian urgency, dogmatic uniformity, and state-ordered relocations. Were there intellectual inspirations for this sort of framework? How did you develop this framework? So that's why I say that this book was the hardest book I've ever written, because it took so long to work out this framework.

It just took a long time to figure out this framework. It was a neat framework actually because the way you can bring these tendencies, these themes,

together with the chronology, so each one is attached to, whether it's the Great Leap Forward or, you know, some other sort of campaign like the Intellectual Youth Campaign or Educated Youth Campaign or the Third Front Campaign, you know,

or this Wei Hu Zao Tian, the grain first campaign. So I was able to work through the chronology of the Mao period while foregrounding one of these core dynamics, even though those core dynamics did play out throughout the whole period, but featured one. So this is a nice structure, but coming up with that structure, that was not something I did overnight. That took months and months to figure out.

Yeah, so the idea was not so much to say, oh, the environment was so terrible during the Mao period, even though there were a lot of bad things that happened to the environment during the Mao period, but more this conceptualization of humans and nature being in opposition to one another and that somehow by conquering nature you could improve yourself and also conquer any kind of reactionary tendencies you might have, you know?

And of course, the environmental degradation became much, much worse under the reform and opening period in objective, descriptive terms. But during the Mao period, this social construction of nature as an enemy was really interesting. And one thing that surprised me in researching this was I really didn't set out to write a book about Mao because, you know, the sort of fashionable ideas

in a lot of historiography now is to focus on, you know, the experience of the grassroots and all the resistance that happened and all the creativity that's available even under repression and all these things. But at each turn of the...

period, I found Mao was the one who said something. So often you really do have to assign quite a lot of responsibility to Mao for what happened here. How do you understand this system? You do have a supreme leader that's pretty powerful and key decisions have to go through him and he's often the one that drives all of it. But you also have a system that complies, that puts

decisions into practices, sometimes even in more drastic, more extreme forms than what the leader initially set out anyway. Exactly. That's the Chinese system, right? Because the top may be rather vague. They just give you some guidance, some guidelines, some core principles. But actually how you interpret them and implement them, that depends on the lower ranking officials. And in many cases, they want to overachieve.

so that's what happened with the great famine you know where each

each tiny village is competing with the other to claim that they're producing more grain. And so then the center doesn't know actually how much grain is being produced and they are taking it all, even exporting it overseas. And meanwhile, the people are starving. But in terms of writing this book, Mao Against Nature, I mean, what's the process? How did you actually write it? Were you spending lots of time in library? Were you visiting different places in China? Were you talking to experts? Yeah.

archive documents. So that's one more little sort of writing trick that I tell my students and I could tell anybody. Sometimes when you know you have a big project and you're daunted by the big project, it doesn't hurt to start with something that you...

understand well and you know it's going to go in there somewhere and it's not as threatening. And so I knew that I had some really nice newspaper articles. I don't remember where I got them. I think I got them in a bookstore in Kunming maybe about this Weihu Zautian campaign to conquer Dianshi Lake. And in 1970,

They stopped the factories, they stopped the schools, everybody went to Dianshe and they took these enormous boulders from one side of the lake, put them into boats, carried them over to the other side of the lake and tried to kill the lake and make more grain fields. And it was insane, right? It was, from an ecological point of view, it was doomed to failure. It was a huge waste of effort.

But you could talk to anybody in Kunming who was alive then and they remember doing it. And then there were these news articles with some pictures. So I started actually there, even though it's probably two-thirds of the way into the book, just to sort of get something done that I could understand. I was definitely in Kunming about this Densher thing because I wrote about the minority park, but I also...

had a chance to talk to some scholars who knew that this, from an ecological point of view, was a disaster, but they didn't dare to speak out because they were undergoing thought reform in these May 7th cadre schools during that time. And the same thing, Xishuang Banna was one of my cases where they were doing, they were cutting down the rainforest to plant rubber trees, and it was the same thing where I was actually able to talk to

you know, a biologist who said that they knew that this was not suitable for growing rubber, but that he couldn't speak out because he was undergoing thought reform. So that's the kind of

So it's a real mixed methods as they say. I was never in an archive. I don't know how to find an archive. I don't know what an archive looks like. I had that contract with Cambridge University Press. And so once I had that contract, I stopped trying to be very academic and went on to write a more narrative, story-based kind of a book.

A lot of times, like when writing about, say, the Great Leap Forward and the sparrow killing campaign, how would I do that research? I would travel around China and every time I saw an old person, I would ask them, hey, did you ever participate in the sparrow killing campaign? So it was very unscientific, right? And they, of course, all had participated. And so they all had memories of it. So what surprised me about the reviews was that people sometimes talked about

I remember a phrase, meticulously researched. Really? Okay, whatever. I'm very modest of you. No, but I mean, I don't think of myself so much as a researcher as I do as a storyteller. And what's your process of writing in general? Oh, delay, delay, delay, go for a walk, do anything but that.

No, I love to work on a text once it's out there even a little bit. I love playing with words. I love editing. I love polishing. I love reading it again and again and again and again and again to make it beautiful. I hate the blank screen. I hate the first draft, which is why I like collaborating so much. How many times do you normally edit before something is finished?

50, 100? I mean, yeah, never stop.

Just around when you began working on China's environment, there's a certain blossoming of the environmental NGO and civil society space in China. And there are lots of public events, protests, news outbreaks on pollution here and there about a lake or a river in Yunnan or even Yuanmingyuan in Beijing.

Could you talk about that whole period of environmental activism, which was pretty inspiring. Very inspiring. It was very exciting. And it was not only, you know, Sir Andrew Yeo, but like Greenpeace and many, many, many different groups. And so there's...

I did write about Chinese civil society, so that was more in subsequent writing about the environment. After I finished Miles War Against Nature and AU figured out a way to keep me at the school and I started doing a lot of teaching in these environment courses.

I was approached by a publisher to write a textbook about China's environmental challenges, and that was Polity Books. And, you know, with my usual resistance to writing anything, I...

I said no, but she was very persuasive, this editor. She said, oh, this is going to be very easy. Only 60,000 words. You'll just knock it right out. Never easy. Very, very, you know. And so I ended up doing it partly because I had already been thinking about how to teach environmental challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective. So when I teach my course, Environment and Politics, I teach...

you know, political science and environmental law and sociology and anthropology and environmental philosophy and, you know, all of these different strands. And so in some ways I've really been

already thinking about this quite a lot and to then think about how then would we understand China's environmental issues through all these different strands that made a natural kind of textbook and so civil society is of course one big strand and you know back to this way of organizing a book around four

core ideas, the textbook is organized also around core ideas of governance, civil society, national identity, environmental justice,

And the latest version also has extraction and extractivism in it. The original editions didn't have it. So these are the sort of core concepts that help us to organize our understanding of environmental challenges. Between the first and the second edition of this book, my thinking on Chinese civil society evolved quite a lot. And I'd been teaching some

sort of classic texts about the different... So within IR, there's a debate about whether civil society matters or whether only the state matters. And if civil society matters, how does it matter? And how does it shape public behavior and all that? So I'd read a bunch of those theoretical things. And I then created a topology of my own that included some of theirs, but added some based on what the Chinese civil society groups were doing.

And it was, as you say, in the 90s, a really exciting time. And they were able to do all these naming and shaming and symbolic politics and accountability politics and information politics and all these different sort of ways of exerting power, including not necessarily influencing the state, but maybe through social

social media going directly to consumers across borders. Then unfortunately, by the time the third edition needed to be published, the whole civil society chapter had to become very pessimistic.

For a long time, the civil society space for environmental activism was much bigger than for human rights or democracy or religion or even like HIV or any or even women's rights or gay rights or any of this stuff. You know, the environmental space was like the OK space. So I think it became a home for many people who were smart and wanted to do something. And

I just think it's a terrible shame that the Chinese state feels somehow that they can't trust their own people. You know, that's the bottom line. And what it means then is if the Chinese state says, don't worry, we're doing environment, you know, don't think about it, just trust us. And when we do a new recycling law, just do what we say, you know, but they don't understand that they need the support of the people and the so-called supervision of the people. It's

the mass line, right? They've lost track of this mass line. And in some ways, the Chinese state has failed to ally itself with its really best partners. Back to what we were talking about before about, you know, you love the motherland, but does the motherland love you? Often these people have nothing but good intentions vis-a-vis China. They love China.

So, you know, there was a kind of a fantasy, I think, from some Westerners who, you know, somehow thought if the environmental movement can, you know, blossom, it will mean that democracy will come to China. I think that's ridiculous, right? That's not what these people were trying to do. They were not trying to overthrow the Communist Party of China at all. They were trying to support democracy.

a better, more transparent governance system so that they could clean up the air and the water and save the animals and make China a really great place to be. That was, I think, for many people, the motivation. So it's a great pity that the Chinese state didn't trust people. You know, one time when I was teaching at Tsinghua University at Schwarzman College,

I went out one day, there were these people who were birdwatching. There were some really amazing birds in Beijing and there was a little birdwatching group. And I went one day, there was some rare bird there by one of the lakes and all of a sudden the Security Bureau came and they wouldn't even let this group of innocent birdwatchers come together to look at a bird.

And then people were saying, you know, we're just looking at a bird and they know we're doing it and with the right and all this, but they were still writing down everybody's name. So what's wrong with that? It's such a pity. That's pretty extreme. And to use all that public resource to stop people from watching a species of bird. Well, there's also underemployment, right? So it's not as if they're short of plainclothes policemen in China, right? Yeah.

At Ziren Zhiyou, there were four founders. There was Liang Songjie, and there were Liang Xiaoyan, and Yang Dongping, I think, and Wang Lixiong. And did you know? No, I recognize the name Yang Dongping because of that green yearbook. But I don't think I ever met. I don't know if it's a man or a woman even. Yeah. Okay. No. Yeah.

Because Wang Lixiong is the less well-known figure as the founder of Zanjiro. Because he later wrote pretty influential books about Tibet. Okay.

And I think he's a band writer in China now. No, no, no. Okay. I'm guessing the answer would be no, but I'll just ask anyway. Did you work with Greenpeace, WWF? Well, Greenpeace I know well because I know the Greenpeace here in Washington very well. And I knew people who worked at Greenpeace before.

in China also. What's your impression of their work? Well, I think they were doing great work in China for a long time, you know, and they had a lot of, a lot of people really admired their work and they were very courageous and, you know, they still have a nice office. I was there this summer. I passed by. I have a former student who works there. Really nice office, nice roof deck and yeah. Who are the key individuals?

At Greenpeace now? Then, when it was most prospering. Well, there's Li Shua, right? Li Shua is here in Washington now for the Asia Society. He was a very good spokesperson on climate and energy issues. I don't see that history written very well anywhere, except on what's now Earth Dialogue and what used to be China Dialogue. They had some pretty interesting piece from the early 2010s.

Otherwise, there is so much censorship around that topic of environmentalism and foreign supported activism that I feel like this is a history that's just been actively suppressed before we ever saw the light of day. Well, Greenpeace is a very decentralized organization. So, I mean, Greenpeace...

East Asia would have been raising their own money. Maybe they would get some money from headquarters in the Netherlands, but basically each of the green pieces, they decide which issues to focus on and which campaigns to run. They have a Hong Kong office. Right, they have a Hong Kong office. So there was always, I think, the idea that if they couldn't continue to work out of Beijing, they could retreat to Hong Kong. Yeah.

And did you connect with Liang Songjie later in your studies? Yeah, no, I used to see him pretty regularly. If I was in Beijing, I would come see him and his wife Liang Fang. I think I saw Liang Fang once even after he died. I think she's died now. They have a daughter who works in publishing. Street activism? I never really saw it.

There's many wonderful films that show different kinds of street activism. But I think for... I mean, first of all, I never was around it anyway. But I think if I had been around it as a foreigner, it's not really appropriate for a foreigner to be there. That's my feeling. Well, it gives the party an excuse. Say this is foreign. Foreign experience, yeah.

Yeah, but I mean, I have seen lots of images of different kinds of demonstrations. When I do public speaking about civil society, I have images of the PX demonstrations in Dalian or maybe Xiamen. There's demonstrations about the incinerators in Guangzhou. And yeah, there's plenty of

pictures of these street demonstrations but I never personally was a witness to any and I wouldn't want to be. Were you surprised to learn that there was street activism in China? No because I know that there is this kind of tendency to go into a mob mentality. Well from the Maoist era. Yeah.

Were there a lot of, do you think, a lot of Chinese overseas impact even when you first started working on environment? No, there was too much focus on the domestic problems. There was too much focus on stopping a dam or trying to conserve the Tibetan antelope or...

dealing with air pollution. For a while, the first international focus was more on trying to

help the Chinese state to understand why some of their international investments were not being so welcomed, why they were running into problems. So groups like GEI, the Global Environment Institute, had very close relationships with the government to try to help them see why some of the dams they were building in Southeast Asia were, you know, meeting resistance. So it was all within this kind of patriotic framing. Right.

And the Belt and Road framework. Yeah, right. What's your thought on that? Belt and Road, here's my thought on that. I have a lot of thoughts on that. But one thought that I have is that unfortunately...

A lot of the Belt and Road investments are in big infrastructure projects that have huge biodiversity implications. So when you carve up a landscape with a high speed rail or a super highway, or you build a deep water port or an airport, ultimately you're promoting a kind of fragmentation of landscape that's really bad, that promotes biodiversity collapse.

And I don't think the Chinese state has any understanding of that science. And then there's this whole, there's going to be more trade and everybody's going to get rich and we have friends and mutual consultation and all these great things are going to happen. But actually it's,

precisely that our planet is in this phase of hyper-globalization, this metabolism, they say sometimes. Metabolism of globalization has gotten so fast that actually you're promoting the collapse of the global ecosystem when you do more trade. So there's a belief in these sort of conventions of neoclassical economics that

comparative advantage and if everybody trades, everybody's going to get rich. It's what we call an environmental modernization framework. But a political ecology framework would argue against that and say the Earth's resources are limited and when you extract resources, there are always going to be winners and losers. And so this myth somehow that we can all just grow our way out of this environmental crisis is precisely a myth. And unfortunately, that's

part and parcel of what ecological civilization is all about, right? This notion of what, I always forget the phrase, but, you know, blue waters and green mountains are silver waters and gold mountains, whatever Xi Jinping says about that. That's, that's

Unfortunately, that's kind of a fantasy in environmental terms, in ecological terms, because you can't really have that degree of wealth and that degree of environmental protection. There's a contradiction in there. And it has to do with late-stage capitalism and the idea that late-stage capital

It's always going to be looking for new resources and new markets. And always going to be finding new technologies to scrape the bottom of the sea and get uranium from the far side of the moon and do all this crazy stuff. But it's all postponing. This is my personal view. I think it's postponing the inevitable reckoning. I mean, we're at a stage already with climate change.

We're not dealing with it. And the seas can rise really dramatically, not within our children's lifetimes, whatever children we have, within our lifetimes, right? And I wonder, as an environmental specialist, now putting that hat on rather than the China hat on, when did the paradigm of climate change sort of...

took over as the main orienting theme of environmental research. I get the sense that in the earlier days, it's more about protecting this lake and that particular species and this river. But at some point over the past 20 years, climate change became the organizing principle. Yeah. Well, it's so intertwined with these other issues, but it's not the only issue. And I think you make a great point here. And some people have said that

that we do need to pay attention to the fact that we have a biodiversity crisis even without respect to climate change. So we're in a sixth extinction, as they say, the Anthropocene, a global geologic age, which is the age of the human impact on the earth that is driving enormous extinction rates well beyond what the background extinction rate would be

And it's unfortunate in a way that the only focus for some people ends up being climate change because we still have these other issues to deal with. We would still have localized pollution. We would still have toxic wastes. We would still have questions about what to do with nuclear waste. We would still have many of these kinds of issues. But unless you deal with climate change, all the rest of the issues are gone anyway.

And as a scholar of Mao and living in the period of Xi, observing their environmental practices,

Can you compare Maoist environmentalism to C-ist environmentalism? Are they different? Are they similar? I think they're really different. Mao was, you know, nature was something to be conquered because he was leading a poor country. And so nature was something to be feared. People were still feeling cold at night.

So as China became much wealthier and there were more sort of shields between people and nature, I think nature became less feared. But Xi's version of environmentalism, ecological civilization is part of the Chinese constitution. It's in all of the documents, but his vision for ecological civilization is still very much tied in with

prosperity and China's greatness. And as I said earlier, I think it's not going to be possible to keep globalization humming at the rate it's going because there's so many people in the world who are still at really poor levels, who are still aspiring to have their basic needs met.

So if everybody wants to live like Shanghai, you know, if like right now the message is to the African people, for example, is, you know, you know, go the China way and you can have Shanghai in your background. And that's that's not realistic and it's not ecologically wise. And the academic field of China's environment.

was tiny when you first began, but now it's such a huge substantial field with people from all over the world working on this issue. Could you talk a little bit about the development of this field of China or environment in China and how it all developed?

I don't know. I mean, I think that in part it is the Belt and Road Initiative that has focused the world more on China because China really matters. If you live in Latin America or Africa in a way that it didn't matter 20 years ago, China is everywhere in the development field. And a lot of those developments have environmental impacts

But whether it means more people are focusing on China's domestic issues, maybe it's mostly in terms of climate change. This idea that if China doesn't really reduce its emissions, then this whole goal of keeping the planet from warming past a certain amount is going to be doomed. So there's that as well.

I don't know in terms of scholarship. I know that environmental history has become a field within China. I think it's mostly at Redmond. I'm not quite sure, Redmond or, I think Redmond.

So there are people who are working on Chinese history as environmental history that never did that before, understanding how climate change might have played a role in the rise and fall of dynasties and this kind of thing. But honestly, I don't necessarily follow all of the scholarship. There's a debate.

that I got involved with through one of my books is called China Goes Green, Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet that I wrote together with Yifei Li, Li Yifei from NYU Shanghai. And there we were trying to understand how China's ecological civilization actually translates into the lives of ordinary people. And we found it has very authoritarian kinds of

And that often the Chinese state dresses itself in, you know, a cloak of ecological civilization in order to say, force nomads into settlements or to create great big national parks, but to exclude people from those parks, those kinds of things. So, um,

So that is part of a debate around what is called environmental authoritarianism. There's an environmental authoritarianism debate out there, and there's a number of scholars who are working on that, not only with respect to China, but with respect to other parts of the world, Vietnam particularly. And now that lots of scholars find their access to China increasingly restricted, do you have

to people who are doing that sort of research? You're not really being based there. Maybe you go once in a while. How do you do that sort of study? Well, it depends on what kinds of questions people are asking, right? What do they want to know? I mean, there's a lot of focus on what they call environmental governance and the focus on...

I don't know, lower level officials and how they implement directives or try to reach targets. That kind of research is not banned, I think, by the Chinese government. If anything, they might want to understand better how can we implement our laws and regulations better. So there's that. And I think also in terms of biodiversity,

The Convention on Biological Diversity, as you know, was supposed to meet in Kunming and then it kept getting postponed because of COVID and then it got held in Montreal. But China's name is on the framework. It's the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework, something like that. And so the effort for the world to achieve a certain level of biodiversity protection is something that China, you know, China's reputation is on the line with that. And so that should be

a space where people should be able to work. Well, you would hope that. You would hope that. Obviously, the Chinese have sent pandas back to the US. So that does mean that it requires, they don't just deliver the pandas and leave, it requires ongoing scientific cooperation. And that's always a good sign.

There's also, between California and China, a lot of cooperation around climate change. So, you know, there's spaces for doing this kind of thing. I think there are. It's just the space for NGOs has gotten smaller.

new development for the past 10 years, one that's hard to ignore is the rise of Xi Jinping and his new leadership and a new era and a new way of doing things and new of seeing things and organizing all kinds of whatever is happening in China and outside China. For you personally, did the fact that Xi became the leader impact your research at all?

Well, it doesn't impact my research other than, say, when I write about China, I have to talk about the changes in intellectual freedom and space for Chinese people and intellectuals, both regular people and academics. Since Xi Jinping has been in power, I've been, you know, I taught in Schwarzman College three times.

And then this past summer, I went back after the pandemic. And I have to say that I was kind of shocked this past summer because at one point I was in an academic meeting. Some PhD students were presenting their work and some of their work was about the glorious contribution of Xi Jinping, like the glorious theoretical contribution of Xi Jinping.

And to me, that's just terrifying, you know, to think that that's the way that somebody in China feels that they have to, you know, that it's almost a kind of brainwashing that in order to get ahead in China, this is what you have to do. So I was, I was, that was the first time I really felt the chill, I guess, in China.

in academic life. Did China turn out quite what you expected? What you expected when you began studying, when you began growing? And I don't know, before Xi Jinping came to power and now? No, I mean, it's amazing what China has done. The transformation is amazing. It's not the transformation I would have sought for the Chinese people. You know, for a foreigner to visit China in the 80s

was really interesting. For a foreigner to visit China now, not so interesting. But for the Chinese people, they maybe enjoy a better standard of living. They definitely enjoy a better standard of living than they did in the 80s. So the question is not what's good for me, the question is what's good for them. And unfortunately, I think this closing of intellectual space

means that you have to question whether the material, the improvement in material conditions is actually worth it if you have to give up that much freedom. Yeah, I mean, I think it was pretty clear, maybe even before Xi Jinping got quite so autocratic and they started to clean up the air pollution and everything that maybe they're going to work it out so that

this intense pollution that was causing people to question whether the development model was actually worth it. They were going to be able to clean it up a bit and have the good standard of living and have the greater personal freedoms. And that was going to be like a really good job, China. You know, you did it. But, you know, they've lost all that farmland. They've lost their personal freedoms. It's not a beautiful place to live.

explore anymore. So ugly compared to what it was. I don't want to generalize about the whole country, but it used to be so interesting to walk in the little streets and see the little shops. What's changed for you? Why was the 80s interesting in a way that now isn't? Well, for me, what was interesting for me is not the same as what was good for the Chinese people. Of course.

With that, this is the end of our episode today. I hope you liked it. And we also have a Substack page under the same name, Peking Hotel. We'll put the link in the description below. I'll talk to you next time.