Reading on China

My first foray (mostly during early covid lockdowns), and probably not the best way to start. Very dense, and not really meant to be read cover-to-cover, especially by someone without a good understanding of Chinese geography (which I have gotten much better at since), or much context on pre-Ming Chinese history (still meh). Wade-Giles romanization made it even harder for me to link concepts and places up in my mind. Still, it was good as a context pump for almost everything else I read afterwards, and I will go back some day and hope to get much more out of it. I never finished it, but reviews say that it gets much weaker in the last chapters, especially regarding Mao. Fortunately, most of the other books I have bought cover exactly those areas.

At some point I would really like to understand how chariot warfare worked in ancient civilizations. They seem to have been extremely important in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Ancient China, yet my Thuringian brain can’t really comprehend how they could ever be useful, and why they did not constantly get stuck, break down in the woods, get encircled, and so on (why can’t you just kill the horses? you have spears!). It might be relevant that I have never visited any of these places. In general, I found the chapters on the gradual buildup of states and cities, and the constant noble warfare, interesting in the abstract, but have not really developed an intuition for how it actually worked, neither the political nor the military side.

I probably should have read Romance of the Three Kingdoms instead. This book’s treatment of the entire era left me more confused than enlightened, and if my goal is actually understanding how the China sees itself and its history, then I am off to the wrong start.

Came into this hoping for something like Caro’s treatment of Moses, both regarding the shifting political economies that Deng was working in, and the personal drives behind such an extraordinary mind. That is… not what this book is about. But it’s still very interesting, even if it lacks color.

The most striking throughline for me, somewhat concealed by Vogel’s very dry delivery, is how incredibly self-controlled Deng was, in the midst of constant threat for himself, anyone close to him, and with constantly shifting goalposts and no guarantee of anything. He lived a life without ever subordinating his career chances and odds of political survival to his personal emotions, even when they conflicted with the life and health of his family, his personal freedom, ideological coherence, or honor¹. He really was the ultimate grindset guy. Unfortunately, you don’t really get a sense of knowing what moved him from Vogel; the chapters up until his ascent after Maos death fly by with the biographical details, but it really feels like reading about an alien creature. Deng did not write down anything, and I got a new appreciation for the western tradition of record keeping and opening up of stored records, interviews, memoirs, and hagiographies, that at least create a paper trail for later works. I still also don’t understand the power dynamics in the Politburo at all, such that the later chapters on the battles over reform speed, succession possibilities, the falls of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, and the Tiananmen massacre, were interesting but didn’t leave me with a good sense of what actually happened, or could have been different. But I believe this to be not a problem of the book, but rather of me needing to become a full-time China scholar, if I want to get there.

I was very impressed with Deng’s almost single-minded obsession with scientific and technological progress, and specifically the realisation that China was too far behind, needed to play long-term strategies to catch up, and had to be mindful of their own backwardness. The second half of the book contains a staggering number of quotes by Deng exhorting people to respect and develop technology, and to scale back ambitions as long as they were playing catch-up with the first and second world. I suspect that a lot of more patriotic Chinese must have been extremely annoyed by him constantly trashing the scientific and industrial prowess of their motherland. But he was obviously correct, and now China is reaping the benefits. German political and industrial leaders would probably do well to adopt some of that attitude, now that we are getting clobbered in any manufacturing segment outside of EUV lithography components. But I see a lot more sentiments of “We have to celebrate our strengths, not just worry about our weaknesses” whenever the political debate gets slightly realistic and uncomfortable, and general failure to extrapolate the current economic trends, or their effects on our prosperity and long-term future. Complacency is a hell of a drug, and I definitely got more pessimistic about Germany’s outlook from reading how different the Chinese attitude and strategy was, and realising how far away from a serious effort we are.

I would love to celebrate Deng as a hero of humanity, having pulled hundreds of millions of people from crushing poverty. But I wonder whether he alone was able to chart a course where the CCP is still extremely authoritarian, but globally successful. Regardless of how much the US wants to fuck up its own global order, and of how gleefully it pulls the rug from under my own value system, I certainly don’t want to live in a world dominated by the Chinese mode of governance either. In the long run, I hope that I will be able to celebrate, not curse, that Deng was so incredibly competent.

The opposite of Vogel and Wang, this book is a narrow but deep view into two generations of students at good-but-not-great universities, as seen by an English professor. Hessler gives a lot of interesting color on the mental (and physical!) differences between the first real reform-era student generation, and the little emperors of (roughly) my own cohort. He then shifts into a personal account of the first year of COVID, ending with him being forced to leave the country before the later rounds of lockdowns, protests, and eventual policy flip-flop.

It gave me some better appreciation of the sometimes surprising amount of freedom, entrepreneurship, and initiative possible outside of the direct eye of the Party, but also of how the constant threat of institutional crackdown shapes everything you do. I also was not aware of how little reverence for Xi seems to be present among my generation, considering the size of his personality cult – Hessler gives some statistics of how many students used to write essays idolizing Mao and Deng, and how almost nobody does the same about Xi now. Chinese state propaganda always read very repulsive, impersonal, and out-of-touch to me, and it is somewhat comforting to know that my Chinese counterparts seem to feel the same way.

Hesslers passages on Covid origins or the relative competency of the governments and systems already read terribly outdated, and are probably the weakest point of the book.

I think the focus on the small, personal, and human, was a much needed break from the more high-level (Wang, Gernet) or cold (Vogel) other books. Dan Wang likes to talk about how funny and creative young Chinese are, but you rarely see examples without knowing Mandarin. I talk to a decent number of Chinese grad students in my job, but I find it harder to get to really know them, or have deep conversations about their country, than with Indians or Latinos. Other Rivers had some nice character portraits filling the gap, and I really should read more of this kind of book. But probably won’t, just from looking at the reading list at the bottom…

I credit Dan with initially sparking my interest in China at all, especially its economic development and futuristic spirit, and being the most interesting author I had read up to that point (before I found the rat-adjacent blogosphere, though Dan’s annual letters are still up there with the best of them). Back during my Physics undergrad, he showed me that you could actually be a guy that is deeply interested in and knowledgeable about history, technical subjects, and music (plus his food obsession, which I sadly cannot match), and he has been a role model ever since (yes, this sounds extremly parasocial on re-reading, but I’m really grateful to him). I was very frustrated that most of his output back then was hidden behind the Gavekal Dragonomics paywalls, and could not be more pleased with how much more public-facing he has become since. Of course, everyone and their mother has now swallowed his worldview whole (“total Dan Wang victory”, as Joe Weisenthal put it), but I feel like he gave me a solid five years of head start in understanding what China is actually able to do, and how incredibly unprepared and unserious my own country is in meeting that challenge. Come to think of it, I still sometimes have conversations with research colleagues dismissing China’s ability to compete in something - even as we are struggling to achieve things Pan Jianwei’s group builds as a matter of routine. The meme of “China copies, but does not innovate” really did some long-lasting damage.

Most things to be said about this book have been said during Wang’s (well-executed) media tour after publication; it is a breeze to read, fleshed out a lot of his previous ideas into a more coherent concept, and is well worth your time. The chapter about the abhorrent cruelty of the One-Child policy, and its later reversal, was the highlight of the book (though hard to stomach sometimes). It was funny reading this back-to-back with Hessler, since Hessler left China at exactly the right point before the downsides of Zero Covid started outweighing its successes, whereas Wang gives a much more balanced view (with some benefit of hindsight, of course). He gives a surprisingly confident assessment that China will not overtake the US in the global order, and endorses a (reformed) American model over the Chinese one. I’d love to live in a Capitalist Market Economy with Dan Wang Characteristics, and I hope he both proves right in his prediction, and is successful in his reform endeavours.

His “Engineers vs. Lawyers” dichotomy left me wondering where Germany fits in - Wang sometimes has residual appreciation for the relative manufacturing strength of Germany, and his emphasis on the importance process knowledge should be bullish for a german industrial renaissance, but on the ground the outlook seems pretty crap. Engineering-stateishness would also not be a good explanatory model for the political decisions I can remember, though it might be applicable more towards Schröder-era reforms during my early childhood. A lawyerly society we are also not, we don’t like to talk nearly as much as the anglos. Is Germany not a state of lawyers or engineers, but of former engineers that became managers and bureaucrats, and lost their edge?

Self-recommending, and the Cultural Revolution scenes were exactly as horrifying as they were needed to be. It seems like many important CCP leaders had origin stories almost as terrible as Ye Wenjie (c.f. Deng’s favorite son getting paralysed after being thrown out of a window by Red Guards), yet stayed loyal to the system and even perpetuated it. Why did Ye Wenjie lose her faith in humanity (and of course, in Communism and the Party), and they did not? I fundamentally do not understand the mental life of people who experienced all of the willful atrocities inflicted by the CCP on its own people, yet then chose to support and uphold that system. This also always confused me about some of the early GDR leaders, who survived purges and reeducations during exile in Moscow.