If you ever studied modern Chinese history, you likely met the “century of humiliation” in your first class. In 1840, British gunboats shattered the pride and legitimacy of the Qing empire, and the decades of semi-colonization that followed inaugurated a century of reform and revolution — all aimed at restoring an ancient, creaky civilization to unity and to the top of the world. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party told the same story and drew the same conclusion: the mandate belongs to whoever ends the humiliation.

In China, history has never been merely academic. Where elections do not exist, leaders seek legitimacy in historical title deeds — which is why the Party still teaches the story in every classroom and invokes it in every speech on national rejuvenation. The battle crossed the Pacific, too. John King Fairbank absorbed the nationalist framework in wartime China and canonized it at Harvard, organizing American understanding of modern China around two dates: 1840 and 1949. He built the field of China studies as we know it, and generations of his students inherited the framework with it, until American scholarship was teaching China’s nationalist mythology back to itself — and to Washington, where it still underwrites op-eds casting Xi Jinping as the new emperor. How America tells China’s story shapes how America makes China policy.

Dr. Alice Miller thinks we have the story wrong. From 1974 to 1990, she was a senior CIA analyst of Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics, and later a division chief supervising analysis of China, North Korea, Indochina, and Soviet policy in East Asia. She is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she edited and contributed to the China Leadership Monitor from 2001 to 2018. She published as H. Lyman Miller before her gender transition.

In part two of our conversation — edited for clarity and brevity — we trace her formation at Princeton under Fritz Mote, the ferocious “Who lost China?” debates of the 1950s, the eternal feud between historians and political scientists, and her heterodox verdict on engagement: it didn’t fail — it worked so well that Xi Jinping had to stomp on it. We close with a story of a different kind: her transition in 2006, and the unexpected grace with which the CIA, Hoover, and the Naval Postgraduate School received it. Part one, on her years decoding Beijing for the CIA, is here.

Enjoy!

Leo

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Music: Carnaval Op. 9 No. 18 - “Aveu”, Bishara Haroni, Artlist Classics, Robert Schumann

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• Early sinologist debates about “who lost China?”

• The fallacy of “The Century of Humiliation”

• The battle between historians and political scientists over contemporary China studies

• “How Did We Get China So Wrong?”

• An identity transition from Harold to Alice

Early sinologist debates about “who lost China?”

Last time we spoke about your job analyzing Chinese politics for the CIA. This time, I’d like to talk about your academic career and your views on how American scholars have analyzed China. You began studying China in the 1960s at Princeton. How did you develop your interest in Chinese empires?

I blame [Princeton sinologist] Fritz Mote. He co-taught the original Chinese language courses, but he also taught the courses on the later empires. His courses were just fascinating.

The impression you get from basic textbooks is, “If you’ve seen one dynasty, you’ve seen them all,” because of the dynastic cycle. But when you actually take the dynasties apart and look at their events and trends, it doesn’t look like that at all.

The really big trends are not the changes of dynasties. There are longer trends in society and economy that transcend the dynasties. For example, in the middle of the Tang, in the eighth century, a fundamental shift in taxation began to break the aristocratic system of land ownership, and created a situation that led to what flourished in the Song. Once you begin to see those things, it’s just endlessly fascinating.

You studied China in an era when the “Great Men of China studies” such as Mote and John Fairbank were still around. Could you talk about them?

Fairbank is one of the great founders of China studies. He did a lot to help establish it in the wake of World War II and the Communist Revolution in China. You also had Theodore de Bary at Columbia; Mote; Franz Michael from University of Washington — he was my mentor in graduate school; Arthur Wright at Yale, although his reputation is overblown —  his wife, Mary Wright, was much more important; Joseph Levenson and Robert Scalapino at Berkeley; and Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard.

What distinguished them? Were they in some sort of debate with each other over topics and methods?

The most important debates were among people who worked on contemporary China. People at Harvard, like Schwartz and Fairbank, had built up an interpretation of the 1949 revolution as reflecting the outgrowth of trends from the 19th century and Chinese social history. And so in that sense, the Communist Revolution was more Chinese than it was inspired by the Soviet Union.

Others, like Franz Michael, argued that the Communist Revolution reflected Soviet influence. They disagreed with Fairbank, and argued that this foreign impact and the roots of the communist movement are more important than the emphases that Fairbank, and people like him, focused on.

That debate was important because it fit into a broader political debate in the United States. The Republicans gained control of Congress in 1948, and began to make China policy an issue to attack the Truman administration with. When the revolution succeeded, the question “Who lost China?” became important in American politics.

Fairbank argued that the United States didn’t have China to lose, and besides, it’s a Chinese revolution. The other side argued that the U.S. did lose China by failing to recognize how it was really a revolution supported by the Soviet Union — this is as the Cold War was getting going.

Those academic debates were ferocious, and continued on through the 1950s into the early ‘60s. By that time, everybody was tired of it. Then, in 1964-’65, American involvement in Vietnam started, and the lessons of China’s revolution became important for understanding the Vietnamese revolution. All those arguments came back again.

The period before modern times was still underdeveloped. There just weren’t that many people working on it. It took until the early ‘60s for there to be a substantial textbook on Chinese history for traditional times. Fairbank wrote it with Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig. That was the textbook I used in my first course on traditional Chinese history.

The kinds of debates that infect contemporary China studies didn’t figure much in earlier periods. Nobody knew enough about Han times or the origins of the Qin empire to have major differences.

The fallacy of “The Century of Humiliation”

How do you evaluate Fairbank’s legacy? His views influenced politics, and he has a huge lineage of academic offspring now all over American universities.

Intellectually and sociologically, there are reasons to be critical. Some of his scholarship hasn’t stood up well. He was responsible for helping to introduce foundational knowledge about China. But as later generations came, they were naturally going to revise and reinterpret and criticize what was there sat down by him. That’s true of everybody. History isn’t a bigger and bigger pile of facts. It’s a conversation.

I’m critical of some of Fairbank’s views, intellectually. He is the progenitor of the standard story of modern Chinese history organized around two dates: 1840, for the Opium War, and 1949, the Communist Revolution.

I’m trying to write a book now that offers a different story of how we get to the China of today. It’s an effort to try to reinterpret the rise of the modern Chinese state, from about 1550 down to the present.

The conventional interpretation is: it’s a revolutionary reaction to the intrusion of the West in 1840 with the Opium War. The Opium War demonstrated that traditional Chinese politics could not be an effective basis for adaptation to the modern world created by the West, and so their tradition had to be abandoned. They had to establish a new way of doing things, and, therefore, they required a revolution, and that’s what the communists represent.

[This interpretation includes that] despite being a revolutionary regime, the People’s Republic in many ways continues many of the characteristics of the imperial regime. Mao Zedong looks like an emperor. The Chinese communist bureaucracy looks like the Confucian bureaucracy. Contemporary Chinese foreign policy really wants to restore the old tribute system of foreign relations.

The tianxia, all under heaven, system.

Yeah, that’s the standard story. My book tries to do something different, and argue that the modern Chinese state really is revolutionary. It’s a product of two major trends.

One is the rise of commerce and merchants from 1550 through the Qing and up into the 19th and 20th centuries. If you study Western history, or Japanese history in the Tokugawa period, merchants are a revolutionary class in creating a different political order. How does that play out in China?

The other major trend is the advances in military technology and the way wars are fought. They require a much more powerful state to get the money to pay for the army and the weapons that they use. They need a stronger bureaucracy, and they need some way of extracting resources and people out of society that are just tremendously different from the way traditional imperial regimes worked.

I argue that the imperial system was being hollowed out by the rise of commerce and the consequent rise of population. The local districts governed six or seven times the number of people in 1900 compared to 1550. The problems of government are much more complicated, and merchants are becoming active. They’re the main force in the 1911 revolution, and they continued to be important through the republican period.

The Nanjing period, under the old interpretation, looks like a failure — bad leadership, corruption, and so forth. Nobody wanted to study it. But more recently people in the U.S. have begun to reexamine that, and it becomes more and more clear that what Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanjing Republic tried to do is build a more powerful state, a halfway step toward what the People’s Republic developed.

It had a party army. It was a party-driven state. It had a state ideology, the sanmin zhuyi (The Three Principles of the People). It was the inventor of the danwei (unit) system of organising industries. Looked at in that context, it’s not that far from the People’s Republic.

As a consequence of that, my argument is politics and the nature of the state in the People’s Republic period doesn’t look anything at all like government and politics did in, say, the 16th century under the Ming. All of these comparisons that people draw — “Xi Jinping is like an emperor” — you see this all the time in American publications. It’s just ridiculous. He’s so much more powerful than any Ming emperor.

The nature of foreign relations under the People’s Republic since 1971 is so thoroughly based on nation-state sovereignty that this idea that they’re trying to rebuild the tianxia system is just ridiculous. If you look at Xi Jinping’s speeches on this — “community of common destiny,” that all the world should be organised — he’s talking about equality among civilizations. That’s not traditional, that’s based on nation-state sovereignty. I know there are Chinese intellectuals who like to talk about tianxia, but I don’t see any reflection of that in what Beijing says.

So the Century of Humiliation is not a communist invention, but actually a nationalist invention.

Both of those parties share that same line of argument. They just disagree about who’s the real inheritor of Sun Yat-sen’s ideology.

Fairbank was in China during the ‘30s and ‘40s. I think he just inherited it, and so did most Americans for a long period of time. The generations of scholars that Fairbank and others taught basically repeated that framework.

But more recently, some people have begun raising questions about that, and I’m one of them. I’m skeptical of it. I don’t think that’s the right way to understand contemporary China. That’s what my book’s about.

Why does it matter, essentially?

It matters in trying to understand from a proper perspective what China is today. It doesn’t look to me like a traditional empire or a dynastic regime. It looks like a modern state in many respects, and has many of the same capabilities. And if we think of it in the wrong terms, we’ll formulate wrong policy. It’s that simple. That’s why it’s important.

And the legacy of the republican period is quite complicated because you have the pro-democratic strand, which historians are trying to excavate to show, actually, China could have been set on a different path.

Yes, absolutely.

But there were also autocratic trends, which obviously the Communist Party embraced and magnified. Those are also part of the republican period.

I blame Japan. If the Japanese hadn’t invaded, I doubt that the communists could have defeated the Kuomintang. If you look at 1936, the Kuomintang was getting stronger. They were finally beginning to assert better control of different regions of China that they couldn’t at the beginning, in 1928. The pressure from Japan forced a militarized politics on the Kuomintang regime.

Mao Zedong personally thanked the Japanese prime minister for fighting the nationalists.

In 1936, at the end of the Long March, the communists were in real trouble. They were vastly reduced in numbers. Chiang was beginning to get ready to launch a sixth campaign to wipe out the communists. It could have been quite different.

The battle between historians and political scientists over contemporary China studies

I presume that, coming from a background in history, your natural intellectual instinct would be to dive into longer-term trends, but then, working on contemporary politics, everything is the now and the future. Did you ever have a sense of frustration as a result?

Yes. I usually say that I work on contemporary affairs for money, but I work on long-term history for love.

Many people who study contemporary China, both in government but also in academia, are political scientists. I’m critical of political scientists. I think it’s a fraud, and I complain about it all the time. I have good friends who are political scientists, and we have fun ridiculing each other.

The standard joke is: You put a collection of political scientists in a room and they’ll talk all day without ever touching a fact. And if you’ve got a bunch of historians in a room, they’ll talk all day and never come up with a theory. There’s just a basic divide.

Sounds like you should put them all in the same room.

Yeah. They don’t get along well. For political scientists, 1949 is the key date. But if you look at it from a historical pattern, you have to look at the republican period and even elements in the later Qing period to understand how we got here.

I am critical of many of the things that contemporary specialists in government think. They think they have a good understanding of what happened in traditional times. But scholarship on traditional times in the United States has gone so much further from when they were in graduate school and might have taken a single course on China from the Neolithic period down to 1900. What they understand is both old and based on conventional understanding, and it’s just been completely overthrown by recent generations of people who specialize in traditional times.

People in government still ask me, “Don’t you think the tributary system is what Xi Jinping has in mind?” and, “Don’t you think that Xi Jinping really looks like an emperor?” — simple ideas like that. It’s exasperating. They think they understand traditional Chinese history, but they don’t know anything.

After you left the CIA, you first went to Johns Hopkins, and then in 1999 moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford and worked on the China Leadership Monitor. What was the original design of the China Leadership Monitor?

Mike Oksenberg noticed correctly that nobody was paying attention to Chinese leadership politics. It’s a hard field. The information is not easy to get. He thought there ought to be attention to leadership politics, especially as it pertained to specific policy areas.

The original Monitor scheme was, I would edit and run it, and there would be five other people in specific areas. The idea was the same person would write in each area, four times a year. I preferred to get people who had government or think-tank experience. Academics are going to write about their political theories. Nobody’s interested in that.

Who was the Leadership Monitor targeted at?

We wanted to focus on the foreign policy community — I ran ads for it in Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations journal — and especially people in government. I had money to take trips to Washington to talk to people in the intelligence community, at State, at Congress.

Did you meet anyone interesting at Stanford, especially from China?

Occasionally. One of the most interesting people was secretary to first Zhao Ziyang, then Jiang Zemin, and then Hu Jintao. He wrote speeches for all three leaders. I can’t think of his name. He was a well-connected person, obviously. And it was obvious that you could get him to talk about these things and then he’d just stop because it got too sensitive. My rule of thumb has always been, anybody who tells you they know what’s going on in the Politburo obviously doesn’t know.

Except this guy.

He did know, but he wouldn’t talk about it, except in careful circumstances.

It’s the same in Washington politics. All sorts of people will tell you, “I know what’s going on in the Oval Office.” They have no idea.

Then methodologically, how can you know, especially from afar? You’re running the China Leadership Monitor. You have to figure out a way to get close to the truth.

We use the traditional Kremlinological methods that I talked about before. There’s no question about the authenticity of what’s said in People’s Daily. It’s official. You can count on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. What matters is: How does what they’re saying change over time in response to contemporary situations?

“How Did We Get China So Wrong?”

Did you know the people of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars [a group founded initially to oppose the Vietnam War, which later supported re-establishing U.S.-China relations]?

I knew some of them. I didn’t agree with their perspective. I thought they were unrealistic. I thought the Vietnam War was a mistake. Taking part in a nationalistic war is a losing struggle, because you’re fighting a people who are politically aroused and will do anything to save their country.

But I did think the Soviet Union was dangerous. I was not sympathetic to the People’s Republic. I loved China and its history, and Chinese people were great. I just didn’t think the regime was something to be admired. Because of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, they just appeared grotesque to me.

The question of the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, and to what extent did the American intellectual community and policy community know about them, interests me.

Not many people paid attention to the Great Leap, but in the agency we knew about it. Refugees came into Hong Kong and they would tell stories about people eating soil or eating grass, because there was no other food.

Or eating each other.

It was terrible. I remember people bringing that up in the later ‘60s when I was in graduate school. Some of the left-wing people said, “Oh, that’s just propaganda. It’s not true.”

Propaganda by whom?

By right-wingers in the United States. I’m not a right-winger, but I am trying to be realistic and calculate foreign policy based on realism, what’s in the best interest of all sides. Those kinds of debates were just, for me, off-putting.

Many people were interested in the Cultural Revolution. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars-types thought this was a great thing that Americans could learn from.

I remember when Nixon went to China in February ‘72, the American media went with him. They were talking about the first night in Beijing and it snowed. People came out of their houses to sweep the streets clean of snow. And all these commentators said, “Oh, what a great civic spirit the Chinese have. This is something we should all learn from in our society” — not recognizing that this was enforced by the regime.

There’s the saying that Soviet scholars hate Russia and China scholars love China.

I had a lot of colleagues who worked on the Soviet Union when I was in the agency, and they all detested the Soviet Union. One of the standard jokes was, “If you’re going to major in Soviet studies or contemporary China studies, do China because Russian food is terrible and Chinese food is outstanding. At least you get to eat well.”

I’m constantly wondering about how to understand America’s shift in attitudes towards China, both in engaging with China, and now in shifting to decoupling.

Engagement started with Nixon. It was built on a strategic foundation, not economic: collaboration against the Soviet Union. At a time when the U.S. thought the Soviet Union’s power was rising and America’s was declining. There was a convergence of interest between Beijing and Washington that Mao, Nixon, and Kissinger recognised.

Up through that time, the academic attitudes towards China were romantic and excited, because now people who had been studying China for years could actually go to China. A lot of people thought Mao was a great revolutionary — all that kind of baloney.

Finally the party’s own criticism of Mao in ‘80 and ‘81 meant that a lot of academics said, “Oh, maybe Mao wasn’t so great after all.” That introduced a dose of skepticism. But that didn’t really dent the excitement of working in China. China was joining the world economically, and the U.S. was backing it. ‘89 was a shock, but it was only temporary. For the business community, engagement continued.

What really caused the change, as far as I can tell, was the change under the Xi Jinping administration, which surprised many. People were thinking, “Xi is a reformer.” In some sense he is, he did try to change the system for the better. But what’s the standard for better? More control, more stability. The lessons of the Soviet collapse were really relevant and that’s why Xi Jinping keeps pounding on that.

Why do China specialists in America keep coming back to the question, “How do we get China so wrong?” That seemed to be the question after the Cultural Revolution, right?

It’s hard to get China right, and China changes sometimes in shocking ways.

It seems that there repeatedly were big calls that were wrong — the nature of Mao’s regime, where the ‘80s would go, the fact that Xi Jinping turned out not to be a reformer.

If you were paying attention in ‘08 and ‘09 and ‘10, you could see tensions, problems the leadership was facing. It wasn’t that surprising, especially when you read that report that Hu Jintao delivered at the 18th Party Congress.

How come so few foresaw the rise of Xi Jinping, and that Xi Jinping shocked so many?

I wrote an article on the Monitor, which showed that Xi and Li Keqiang were both appointed to the standing committee in that year at the 17th Congress. But if you looked at what Xi and Li were doing, Li was being prepared to become prime minister. Xi was doing stuff that you’d expect from a successor to the party leadership. And so, a lot of us thought Xi was going to be the general secretary.

People who didn’t follow the internal politics of the party closely in those days were the ones who were surprised. People in the business community, for example, were really taken aback, especially after the reform policies didn’t really go anywhere and the corruption campaigns expanded. The turn in the American business community was really decisive.

From your perspective, would it have been better if engagement didn’t happen, if Nixon choked off the Communist Party and never gave it a lifeline after the Cultural Revolution?

Nope. The whole American approach in the ‘50s and ‘60s was just wrong. I agree with George Kennan. He said that the failure to recognize Beijing in 1949, ‘50 was one of the greatest mistakes in American foreign policy. You want to have influence, you have to be there. And trying to isolate China, as the U.S. did fairly vigorously for 20 years, creates more problems than it solves.

China wasn’t going to break under Mao, and in fact, they developed nuclear weapons on their own after the Soviets left. Times were not good and it was a poor country, but it was going to survive. The changes that came from engagement since just before Mao died have been positive.

Do you think today’s debate is just a variant of the “Who lost China?” debate? Maybe not consciously, but in terms of the sort of dynamics, the questions being asked.

It’s more fundamental: Who’s our enemy now? Who’s threatening us now? The Soviet Union has gone. Who’s the next big kid to worry about?

My view is: Engagement worked. It was doing exactly what people said. It was creating a more vibrant and successful and prosperous and freer society in a lot of ways under Jiang Zemin and into Hu Jintao’s period. But it created political conditions for a reversal in China, and that surprised everybody.

My conclusion wasn’t that engagement failed. It was working so well that Xi Jinping had to stomp on it, which is what he’s been doing. But it created disappointment in this country.

Meanwhile, as China’s capabilities have grown, its economy has grown, its military capabilities have evolved, people outside China studies said, “Oh, this is a big country and it looks like it’s powerful. We need a new enemy, and we’ve got one. It’s China.”

All kinds of people who weren’t China specialists jumped onto it and have discredited engagement as an approach, and advocated for much tougher containment-type policies. They’re constantly misreading what the Chinese say. There’s a kind of unreality to aspects of the consensus approach in Washington these days toward China. That’s, from a longer-term perspective, counterproductive.

I support engagement because I don’t think the United States can change China, but the Chinese people can. What sorts of policies will support that? Cutting off contacts with Chinese society through containment policies makes it easy for the regime to say, “All our problems are the goddamn Americans’ fault because they’re trying to contain us.”

Engagement and contacts with Chinese society of all sorts — artistic and academic and economic and so forth — builds constituencies in China that have an interest in positive relationships with the West. And they will, to the degree that they can, try to influence the direction of politics and the regime to liberalise it, and they offer the best possibility of political change. Since the ‘60s, I’ve always supported engagement. To me, it’s the most revolutionary policy.

An identity transition from Harold to Alice

As you spoke, I realized I missed something quite big, which is your transgender story. Did the fact that you changed your gender impact your work at all?

I was worried that it would, but it didn’t, at least as far as I know. When I transitioned in 2006, I talked to Jean Oi, who was the head of the East Asian Studies program at Stanford. We went out to lunch. I told her I was going to change my gender. And she said, “Be strong, go for it.” She was very supportive.

I thought Hoover, which is quite conservative, would be negative. I went to talk to the executive director in those days, Richard Sousa. He said, “I know it’s a big step for you, but it’s not for Hoover. You’re not the first to transition here.” They were fine with it. They changed the name on my office door the very next day I went to the office.

And finally, I was teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. That’s an American military institution. I thought surely I would be fired. These were the days of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for gay people. And trans people, I could imagine, would be even less acceptable. But I told the department chairman, and he said, “Let me check it out with human resources.” I got a call about three days later from the school’s human resource people, and they said, “How can we help? You’re not the first to transition here. And let’s work out how this will play out.”

My big concern was it would affect my livelihood and my jobs, and in all cases it went fine. I was shocked. A lot of times it doesn’t go well for people. So I’m grateful.

Did you ever have problems in terms of your transition with others? It seems to me the Chinese community can be somewhat transphobic.

Nobody. I haven’t experienced a negative experience from anybody. I have given talks at the CIA. I had a contract for a while to go give talks on what I thought was going on. This was when I was leading the China Leadership Monitor. They had no problem at all with it anymore.

When I first worked for them, if you were gay — and nobody knew what trans was in those days — they thought you’d be blackmailable. They finally figured out that you’re only blackmailable if you’re secretive about your gender or gayness.

And now, there’s no problem with it. I’ve given talks and walked by the employee activities bulletin board, and there’s a gay/trans support group operating in the agency.

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Recommended reads

• Alice Miller and Richard Wich, 2011, Becoming Asia: Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations since World War II, Stanford University Press

• Alice Miller, 1996, Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China, University of Washington Press

• The Stanford Pride Oral History Project’s interview with Alice Miller

• China Leadership Monitor

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The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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The key words to the success of the Chinese communist revolution are luck and violence — at least, that’s according to Prof. Frank Dikötter.

Continuing from our last episode on Prof. Frank Dikötter’s new book, Red Dawn Over China, we trace the origin story of the Chinese Communist Party, and revisit how the CCP went from an obscure, unpopular, intellectual-led political force to take over the whole of mainland China.

Prof. Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

We left off our story in 1929 last time, when the Soviet Union launched an oft-forgotten invasion into Manchuria and set the tone of Sino-Soviet relations. In this episode — which has been edited for clarity and brevity — we continue the story from 1929 to 1949, and trace the rise of the CCP through the Long March, the Yan’an period through the Sino-Japanese War, and how CCP emerged victorious in the civil war.

The key words we explore are luck and violence. In other words, not your official nationalist communist history from the third “Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century” (emphasis added), but a history of how an incredible willingness to use force against fellow party cadres and civilians combined with extraordinary international luck. Japan, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. propelled the CCP to its self-proclaimed glorious founding of the People’s Republic.

Enjoy.

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• The Japanese threat kept the Communists alive

• Stalin, the great architect of Mao’s Chinese communist revolution

• How Edgar Snow put Mao on the map

• The gift of Manchuria

• No Stalin, no Mao

The Japanese threat kept the Communists alive

Last time we spoke about how the Chinese Communists were a small group of people with little appeal, until a now-forgotten war between China and the Soviet Union in 1929 proved to be a turning point.

By this point, the Chinese Communist Party basically doesn’t matter. It is a small group of individuals with questionable loyalties to Marxism. They were driven out of their own Soviets all over China and had to take cover in the far northwest of nowhere. Could you talk about the rise of Mao and how the Communist Party grew from obscurity into a force to be reckoned with?

The book is not all about Mao. He was for a long time a pretty minor figure. But he did emerge. He was recognized by Moscow in around 1929. He was seen as the one who might actually create that spark that ignites the prairie.

The entire period from 1929 up to the Long March has a number of interesting aspects which are somehow related to Mao but not necessarily entirely about him.

An informed listener might argue that if the Communists really were such a minor party, why did the central government, the Nationalists, spend so much time trying to surround the Communists and eliminate them? Why was it so difficult for Chiang Kai-shek to do this if they really were a small bunch of bandits?

By 1927 Chiang Kai-shek had reunited the south of China, established its capital in Nanjing, and then in 1928 he moved up to seize Beijing and unify the entire country. On his way up to Beijing his troops were attacked brutally by the Japanese in Jinan, Shandong province.

If you read his diary, it’s very clear that this was the moment when Chiang Kai-shek realised that the key challenge to the Republic of China was Japan. He wrote down his resolve to come up with a long-term plan. He said this needed careful planning and it needed a lot of resources to repulse the Japanese.

The question was, how can he do that? He couldn’t openly train the nationalist army to fight the Japanese. He had to keep a low profile. So the best way to maintain a large army and train them to fight was to go and fight the Communists. As long as he was fighting the Communists, the Japanese were happy. They were worried about Moscow and the Communists.

There were two stages. One was the encirclement of the Jiangxi Soviet. The second stage was the Long March. Some 80,000 troops departed, 10,000 arrived a year later, in October 1935. You could say that was a great defeat, or you might say Mao was clever in that the Nationalists never truly managed to crush him and his troops. They didn’t manage to crush him in Guizhou, not in Yunnan, not in Sichuan, not in Gansu. They made their way all the way up to Shaanxi.

Now, if you read Chiang Kai-shek carefully, it becomes clear that he used the Communists to unite the south of China. The Communists departed the Jiangxi Soviet. Chiang Kai-shek said, “Why crush them? Why not just steer them into the provinces which are reluctant to be integrated into a unified government directed by us from Nanjing? Why not let them enter Guizhou and then we follow them and we impose our own government? Why not let them go to Sichuan, and then we can impose our government?”

That’s exactly what he did. Merely months after the Communists entered Guizhou, Chiang Kai-shek eliminated the man in charge of the province and put his own man in control. He more or less unified Sichuan around that same period.

Another point: He didn’t want to pursue the Communists on their long march. He said, “Why send armed soldiers to run across the extraordinarily inhospitable terrain of Guizhou and Yunnan and Sichuan in pursuit of people who are very lightly equipped? We will block off their access to resources, we will steer them into inhospitable terrain. We will watch them as they die of hunger and disease.” That is precisely what happened.

Another aspect is what happened when the Communists seized terrain which was very often inhospitable. They started land reform. But when it comes to the entire 1930s there was no such thing as land reform for the very simple reason that these Soviets were established in mountainous, inhospitable areas where the villagers already struggled to survive. When the Communists arrived and imposed their own alternative state, they required ever greater amounts of grain to feed the army.

The idea that you can take land from a landlord and give it to the poor didn’t make sense there. There were no landlords. There were no rich people. Before you know it, there was an attempt to accuse middle peasants of being rich peasants. Villagers realized that the more they had, the greater the risk of dispossession. So they started producing less and less.

There is an interesting document where it says the villagers have become lazy, they no longer work. Why would they? In a great many of the Soviets, including the Jiangxi one, it wasn’t so much the military encirclements by the central government that led them to collapse. It was villagers fleeing to other regions, and starvation set in. That forced the Communists to abandon the region and seek greener pastures.

It’s ironic that while Marx said capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, what we’re seeing is communism collapsing under the weight of its own economic contradictions. The same pattern caused the Great Famine and many other economic disasters.

Anyone aware of the fact that the Communists were not able to run their economy after 1949 must wonder whether they were able to run an economy before 1949.

How did they run their economy, then? They must have had some sources of revenue, especially once they’re settled in Yan’an and northwestern China. They must have something to sustain themselves. It can’t just be pillaging villages, right?

It was pillaging from roughly the end of 1927 up until roughly 1931, when they didn’t have a Soviet base area. Then they managed to get hold of inhospitable terrain far away from the center of power. They basically exploited the local population until the economy collapsed through the sheer weight of that impoverishment.

Then, from 1936 onwards, there was the United Front. They got funding from the Soviet Union, but 70 to 90 percent of the funding actually came from Nanjing, the central government.

The Communists from ‘37 onward did nothing but fight the troops under the central government, not the Japanese. The Nationalists were quite upset about that, and stopped funding when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. They thought, well, if the Soviet Union can no longer dictate that we should fund the Communists, we can stop. And of course, Moscow stopped itself because it now had to fight the Nazis.

So around 1941, that funding stopped. There is some remarkable work done by Chen Yung-fa — I haven’t discovered much that is new — that shows how quickly the economy collapsed in Yan’an. They tried to have people work around the clock. They tried to trade, they tried this, they tried that.

All of it failed miserably until they started producing opium. And thanks to opium they managed to financially get through to 1945.

I once asked my grandma about our own family history. We’re from Northwestern China. She mentioned that her grandparents used to farm opium. Even now, a huge amount of government revenue comes from the monopoly on the tobacco trade. The revenue from the drug trade runs deep in China.

Stalin, the great architect of Mao’s Chinese communist revolution

Going back to the ‘30s and the early ‘40s, that was also when Mao staged a series of purges, ostensibly against KMT members, but also partly purging Soviet elements sent from Moscow. By this point, Mao became a rogue figure that Moscow couldn’t control anymore.

Yes and no.

As Mao’s troops arrived in Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, their star was at its lowest. They had some 40,000 followers in a country of half a billion. What were they to do? The solution was offered yet again by Stalin.

It was Lenin who enabled the creation of the Chinese Communist Party. It was Lenin who enabled them to join the Nationalist Party and spread the faith through the Northern Expedition. It was Stalin who sustained them all the way through. It was Stalin who told them to establish Soviets.

And then it was Stalin who in 1935-’36 came up with the idea of a United Front. He said something that should have been crystal clear to anyone in the Republic of China: you should unite with the central government and fight the Japanese because the Japanese are the real enemy. The Japanese in 1931 had taken all of Manchuria and had a very powerful army. They were the key threat.

The Communists at this point had zero appeal. Workers didn’t care. Villagers knew of all the depredations and were not keen on the Communists. The only appeal they had was with scholars and intellectuals, but they were concerned about Japan. The Communists went on and on about fighting imperialism and all they ever did to fight imperialism was burn down missionary hospitals and schools.

After about six months, very slowly the penny dropped and Mao thought, yes, let’s have a united front. So this idea came from Stalin yet again.

I can see why Mao would drag his feet. Here I am finally settled in northwestern China, no one is at my tail anymore, but I only have a tiny troop of 30,000. I hardly have an economic base. I’m hardly popular. And now suddenly Stalin comes along and says, “Here’s a brilliant idea for you: Why don’t you become cannon fodder for the KMT?” If I were Mao Zedong, I would think, are you crazy?

Well, not really, because what Mao did and could have done a lot earlier is, first, he realized the anti-Japan message was very popular. It enhanced the appeal of the Communists. The one thing that rescued communism from utter oblivion is nationalism.

And then, Mao was not keen to fight. He said very clearly, “we have joined the Nationalists in the United Front, but we are not going to fight them [the Japanese].” And he didn’t fight them. There was one brief clash under Lin Biao and that was about it.

But then, in 1938, a Soviet leader from Siberia, Genrikh Lyushkov, went to Tokyo and became a traitor. Stalin wanted to purge all of Siberia because he could see a war coming up. All of Manchuria was now in the hands of Japan.

The buffer zone was gone.

Japan was right on the border. So he wished to thoroughly purge the Communist Party and the military in Siberia. When that happened, the Japanese thought there was a great opportunity. They attacked the Soviet troops in 1939 in the battle of Nomonhan, which is hardly ever mentioned by anyone.

The Soviets crushed the Japanese with their tanks. It was a brutal encounter of steel which convinced the Japanese military that they did not ever want to fight the Soviets again. And instead of getting oil from Siberia, they went all the way down and got it from the Dutch Indies, Indonesia, and elsewhere, which meant that they had to control the Pacific Ocean, which meant that they had to attack Pearl Harbor.

This particular battle between Japan and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 had huge implications for the Second World War. Weeks later, a peace agreement was signed between Moscow and Tokyo, and Stalin had the east under control. Then he attacked — with Germany — Poland, and divided it straight in the middle.

Throughout all these purges Stalin actually wrote to Mao. It was Alexander Pantsov in his biography of Chiang Kai-shek who discovered a letter in the Soviet archives. In it Moscow clearly says that Mao should not trust the people generally described as the 28 Bolsheviks — in other words, the people who were sent by Pavel Mif and other Soviets to China. He says these people are all traitors and you shouldn’t trust them. You should trust Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Zhu De.

The leadership that emerged through the purges carried out in Yan’an from roughly ‘41-’42 to ‘43-’44 was actually the leadership that Stalin had highlighted in his letter. It is Stalin who said don’t trust any of those Bolsheviks. Mao is often said to have come up with his own team and to have gotten rid of all the Bolsheviks. But it was Stalin who initiated it. It is often thought that the great contribution of Mao was that he sinified Marxism in Yan’an. But that misses out a crucial part of the story.

Stalin in 1943 abolished the Comintern. The Comintern was the instrument to try to promote a world revolution. Why would he want to abolish that? Because there had been a turning point in the Second World War with Stalingrad. For the first time, Stalin — and the rest of the world — could see the end of the Second World War was coming near. The Nazis were being driven back.

Stalin was thinking ahead. He realized that if his troops went all the way to Berlin, they might as well stay in some of those countries, including Poland, which he had invaded with Hitler back in September 1939. So he abolished the Comintern and then said no communist party should follow the model established by the Soviet Union. Each party should respond to its own history, its own culture, its own social conditions, its own political circumstance.

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Why did he say it? Because he didn’t want the communist parties in Eastern Europe to look like mere puppets controlled by Moscow. He wanted them to look genuine, indigenous, coming from the bottom up.

Mao didn’t waste any time. The moment he realized that this was the new message from Moscow, he did exactly what Stalin told foreign communist parties to do. He indigenized it. He started saying exactly what Stalin had told him to say. “The Chinese Communist Party is unique. It has very different social conditions.”

That is still part of their speech.

It is. In many cases — the United Front, the fight against Japan, the formation of new leadership in Yan’an, the whole idea of the Sinification of Marxism in China — Stalin is time and again the great architect.

How Edgar Snow put Mao on the map

And for all that the Soviets have done, I think you make a rather daring claim that it is actually the American journalist Edgar Snow that put Mao on the map. At this point, it’s the Americans who are coming in to help the Communists. Could you talk a bit about that story?

Edgar Snow — fascinating man, journalist from Missouri — was invited to interview the Communists, Mao in particular, in 1936. He first published a number of articles which then would turn into a book called Red Star Over China that had enormous appeal.

It placed Mao and the Communists on the map and was the origin of this founding myth that the Communists were the ones who are in tune with the modern spirit of the 20th century and fought the good fight against imperialism, fascism, peasant immiseration, and feudalism. They’re the ones who will be about to fight Japan as well and liberate hundreds of millions. That story dates from Red Star Over China.

The Americans, as they moved back through the Pacific approaching Japan, these were horrific fights with huge casualties. So they were keen on the support of Stalin and agreed that Stalin would, in ‘45, invade Manchuria. They were also keen on getting the support of anyone in China, including the Communists. So from ‘42, ‘43 onwards, time and again, they urged the Republic of China — one of the four allied powers, a government that went with the Americans into Burma — to come up with an agreement with the Communists.

And not only that, but one American journalist after the other portrayed the Communists as mere agrarian reformers — as democrats, not true communists. It was Stalin again. In 1943, Stalin told the American ambassador in Moscow: these communists in China, they’re not real communists, they’re margarine communists. The Soviets told this to any American who was willing to listen.

If Stalin himself doesn’t recognize the Chinese Communists, portrays them as mere fake communists, how could he be wrong? So the Americans — not just the journalists, but the State Department, vice president — were so keen that they believed in this and saw the Communist as mere democrats, whereas Chiang Kai-shek was seen as a fascist.

This was the situation: Everyone could describe, write, criticize so-called free China, but nobody could travel to Yan’an, which was a forbidden zone. Yet Yan’an was portrayed as a realm of freedom and democracy, whereas Chongqing was portrayed as an authoritarian fascist regime.

After the purges in Yan’an, Mao started inviting a limited number of journalists and government representatives from the United States. It was a Potemkin village. These journalists visited model schools, model farms, and encountered actors. The archives describe how these propaganda teams made sure villagers who worked along the road would look up and wave at the foreigners. Everything was scripted.

There was this facade of democracy, behind which for the better part of three years tens of thousands of people had been interrogated, tortured, purged, and occasionally executed.

The playbook repeated itself again in the ‘70s when Nixon visited China. Rounds of foreign journalists, students, and tourists were invited to visit Daqing and Dazhai and came back starry-eyed.

There’s no end to foreigners who come back starry-eyed. It doesn’t matter what the Communist Party does. It can starve tens of millions and you will have the papa of Justin Trudeau come back and say there is no famine and this is a model to be followed.

François Mitterrand, future president of France, went to China, interviewed Mao and reassured the world on his return from China, in the midst of the famine, that nothing is wrong with the People’s Republic of China, these are all rumors.

The mistake made by the Americans and others during the Second World War was repeated time and again. That mistake is to deny, to not believe that Chinese communism is real communism, to believe that Chinese communism is really something else.

Kissinger believed that China is not communist. He writes about it being a Confucian entity. Bush senior, after the massacre in Beijing and elsewhere in 1989, was convinced that somehow Deng Xiaoping was a true reformer at heart. Clinton talked about China becoming a true responsible stakeholder, believing like so many others that with economic reform China would emerge as a democrat, that there would be political reform. They all thought that these Communists would somehow shed their skin and come out as full-fledged democrats, that we were just waiting. We’ll be waiting for a long time.

But it’s not just China that’s been exceptionalized. There are also American journalists and diplomats who visited the Soviet Union in the thirties, passed through gulags of all places, and still sung the praises of the great Soviet experiment. There’s something deeper about communist ideals getting hold of people’s imagination.

The book that one should refer to is Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander. He looks at how so many foreigners from so many walks of life visit these communist countries or other dictatorships and come back starry-eyed. George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, who should have known about how you put up a play, visited Moscow in the 1930s, visited model prisons, model schools, model farms, believed all of it, and died with the portrait of Stalin by his bedside. There are countless other examples.

Yeah, too many.

But in the case of China there is something quite different. There is a deep hatred of the Soviet Union among those on the right and occasionally also those on the left. In Europe, there was a strong anti-Soviet tradition on the left, but not necessarily when it came to China. In the United States of America, it was precisely the people on the right, the anti-Soviet leaders, who became most pro-PRC from the end of the 1970s onwards.

The gift of Manchuria

The Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong found themselves at the point where international forces were aligned in their interests. They had the Soviets who were backing them. They had the Japanese who were crushing their enemy.

And then the Americans came along and told their KMT partners — who were all America-educated, who were experienced with American society, education, political elites, economic elites, who spoke English, were Christian, who fought alongside the Americans, and who were a true ally — that actually you guys need to partner with your enemy in the northwest who weren’t doing that much other than just resting and biding their time.

What do you make of it? Was Mao just lucky to be in such a strong position, or was there something else to it?

It was absolutely great luck. A successful dictator in general is someone with great skills and Mao had a great many political skills. He knew how to manipulate people, how to read a situation. One of the greatest skills of successful dictators is that they know how to wait, and also how to use fortune and misfortune.

By 1945, Mao was quite disappointed that the Soviet Union was not coming to his rescue — until a million soldiers crossed the border into Manchuria. The Soviets said you can regroup in Manchuria provided that you call yourselves local guerrilla fighters, not Communist Party members. This is what they did. The Soviets handed the countryside over to them in 1945.

Once the Soviets left in May ‘46, the central government started moving up the railways and attacking the Communists. They were about to crush them, pushing back the Communists across the border into Siberia, when [American emissary] George Marshall intervened, imposed a truce, and then in September 1946 imposed an arms embargo on the central government, that partner-in-arms during the Second World War.

From September 1946 onward, the Communists were being armed to the teeth by the Soviet Union with one train load after another coming across the border from Siberia with weapons, with arsenals being established, with officers gaining advanced training in Moscow. While the central government had to, first, reconstruct an enormous country in rubble, just like Europe, and two, had to fight with their hands behind their backs against. It became quite difficult.

But even then it wasn’t clear that the Communists would win.

To me the key point is that once they had the countryside in Manchuria, now we’re not talking about some miserable little Soviet in Jiangxi province from ‘31 to ‘34. We’re not talking about some incredibly inhospitable terrain around Yan’an and Shaanxi province.

No, this is the most fertile piece of land for both the Qing and the Japanese Empire.

Yes, and Manchuria is about the size of France and the United Kingdom combined. It’s absolutely massive.

And it is also the most industrially advanced area.

Even after the Soviets stripped away a great deal.

All of that makes a massive difference, in that now they could, at long last, implement land reform. Land reform really is a way of targeting potential enemies, power holders. You are slightly wealthier. You have been elected as village head. We will now target you and pit the majority of the villagers against you, distribute your assets to all of them so that all of them have blood on their hands. And then we can recruit. And they recruited massively, frequently under duress.

So they could recruit a lot of men, and they could get grain from the countryside. Plus weapons — the weapons deposited by the Japanese in Manchuria, handed over by the Soviet Union, but also weapons from the Soviet Union. The amount of aid that they received was enormous.

Mao himself said that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But it is not enough to have a gun or many guns. It is how you use the gun. The Communists used tactics which are very difficult to beat. They waged what I call unrestricted warfare. They used barrier troops, so a soldier who turns around and flees is instantly shot. They used villagers as human shields.

But to me, the key turning point was the siege of Changchun. We’ve all heard of the siege of Leningrad, of a great many cities — but Changchun, not very often. An estimated 160,000 civilians died of disease and hunger after Lin Biao blockaded the city. He gave the order in 1948 to quite literally turn Changchun into a city of death. It took eight months. People used anything. They cut down trees, they took wood from buildings, they ripped asphalt from the streets just to stay warm. They ate the bark from trees, leather belts. Barely anyone survived. It was just awful.

Once Changchun fell and other cities were being encircled, you had to ask yourself the question, what would you do? Fu Zuoyi was in charge of Beijing. Are you going to undergo the same fate? Are you going to watch that center of culture being completely destroyed from top to bottom? Of course, he surrendered.

There were still large battles that took place. But ultimately cities began to fall like dominoes. High-level military commanders started to surrender. They no longer had the appetite. They couldn’t fight an enemy that was determined at all cost to gain victory.

There’s a very interesting document I read once in the Taipei archives. It dates from 1951 or 1952. A high-level commander from the United States spoke to Chiang Kai-shek during the Korean War. He said, “You know what the Chinese do in Korea? They will just keep on sending troops toward you. That’s just impossible to fight.” Chiang Kai-shek looked at him and said, “If you and the United Nations cannot fight the Communists today, what do you think I should have done back in 1948 and ‘49?”

It is quite remarkable that America withdrew support for the KMT in the ‘40s and basically put the Communist Party in charge, only to fight them anyway just a few years later, but this time for a tiny peninsula called Korea when they could have had China. Even to this day, I don’t see that much American reflection on what happened.

They didn’t want to fight them. They wanted them as partners and in the end they had to fight them in Korea at great loss and great cost.

No Stalin, no Mao

The story you’ve told is striking. The conventional wisdom is that the communist revolution in China was the result of an agrarian movement borne out of the corrupt KMT exploiting the peasants through capitalism and imperialism, a revolution that was on the right side of history.

Whereas your research shows the key words are violence and luck. That if you are violent enough at the right time, if you’re patient enough, things could go your way. Is that a fair summary?

Yes, and also if you have the enormously influential backing of Moscow and you have the unwitting help of Japan. So, great luck, but also great backing.

And the Americans. Three of the most powerful forces in the world — the Russians, the Japanese, the Americans — all at some point came to Mao Zedong’s aid.

Yes. They all contributed. Absolutely.

Before our podcast, I was reading the disanci lishi jueyi (Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century) — the party’s authoritative take on party history. No mention at all of the Soviets and the Americans and their role in the party’s rise.

No, of course. All these movements appear as entirely locally, indigenously, and spontaneously generated. It was the same with North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. The Communists, Mao in particular, helped the Vietnamese communists to a huge extent, only for the Vietnamese to turn against the PRC, much like the PRC turned against the Soviet Union in June 1960. It’s a very common pattern. But the reality is that without Stalin, no Mao.

Even that playbook of trying to tell an indigenous story, that’s a Stalinist playbook.

I think so. The command from Moscow was very clear. We have abolished the Comintern. You are no longer part of it and you should reinvent yourself as an indigenously generated movement responding to local conditions.

What can we look forward to next? What do you have cooking?

I want to write a history of China in the last two centuries. I want to bring the whole thing together. One thing I realized working on this book is the extent to which key events have been overlooked or neglected, and somehow this entire story has been twisted beyond recognition.

The first thing to do is admit that the Qing was an empire and that they played the same game that any other empire played, that they were responsible for a massive genocide of the Jungar, that they repressed brutally throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. During the 19th century a lot of these repressed groups finally saw a chance to fight back and the result was an absolute bloodbath costing tens of millions of lives.

I want to go back to roughly 1800, dig around in the 19th century and then link it up with the 20th century into a readable history of modern China. That’s the goal.

The continuity of political violence in China.

Yeah, or just a history of modern China that doesn’t sidestep the violence and the horror, doesn’t go into a mythology proposed by Beijing. An evidence-based history of modern China, I would call it.

Great, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Frank.

Recommended reads

• Frank Dikötter, 2026, Red Dawn Over China, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2010, Mao’s Great Famine, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2013, The Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2016, The Cultural Revolution, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Paul Hollander, 1981, Political Pilgrims, Oxford University Press

• Edgar Snow, 1937, Red Star Over China, Random House

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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In a historic general election, Victor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister for 16 years and Europe’s longest service prime minister to date, fell from his throne. A liberal-turned-populist, his rein was marred by controversies of nepotism, anti-democratic practices, pro-Russia foreign policy and a pivot to China.

I luckily had the chance to visit Budapest in person during the eventful week of April 12, and sat down for an interview with the famed Hungarian national magazine Magyar Narancs, first issued on October 24, 1989, just one day after the end of communism and the founding of the Republic of Hungary, replacing the People’s Republic. My friend from Asia Society, Sam George, was simultaneously interviewed too. He is an accomplished China analyst, a fellow Oxonian and now a Senior Fellow at the Center on US-China Relations.

The day Orban fell, I received an email from a friend, titled “Good job in Hungary”, and the message read: “I see that you and XXX did a good job restoring democracy in Hungary. Great!” This is of course pure banter, but I did not mind indulging for one second and fantasising being the straw that breaks a camel’s back wherever autocratic forces gather. So I replied: “Perhaps Beijing next?”

“No, not next. You need to warm up on some smaller problems.”

The interview itself is actually very little to do with Hungary per se, but mostly on China’s influence in Europe and the decline of the west. At any rate, since Hungary and China have been cozying up for years and Hungary is effectively rendered the CCP’s favourite backdoor into Europe, I’d count my pushing back against CCP influence in Europe in my good deeds towards the people of Hungary and Europe. So here’s me doing my entirely insignificant part in “peacefully evolving” Hungary.

Enjoy.

Leo

PS: Here’s the magazine cover and the interview in Hungarian. I thought it’s quite cool!

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• A crisis of Western confidence

• Where do you draw the line on Chinese firms abroad?

• East is rising, west is falling? Or maybe not

A crisis of Western confidence

Magyar Narancs: It is often suggested that Chinese influence poses a threat to Western democracies, yet in Trump’s second term, we may also have reason to worry about the behavior of the United States.

Sam Chetwin George: What is changing dramatically is not only the way the world perceives the roles of China and the United States, but also the classic narrative that sharply distinguishes democracy from authoritarianism. While JD Vance openly endorsed Viktor Orbán, Xi Jinping did not overtly participate in the Hungarian elections. The U.S. national security strategy quite openly backs “like-minded” political forces in Europe — far-right, nationalist, “anti-woke” actors — and the transatlantic relationship has been shaken. But none of this means that China is not also trying to advance its interests in Europe. It may proceed in a less ideological manner, but alongside business partnerships it is also seeking political ties and security cooperation. And, as in Viktor Orbán’s case, it consistently finds that less democratic leaders are much easier to deal with. The kind of security agreement signed by the Hungarian and Chinese governments in 2024 is not at all unusual wherever significant Chinese interests or assets are present. At the same time, such arrangements can easily erode democratic institutions, because they tend to strengthen the executive branch — that is, the political leadership in power.

Liu He: At the moment, there is no obvious risk of China interfering in European elections, but where it sees the need and has the capacity, it does use such methods: in Africa, for instance, it builds strong influence through investments, media presence, and political ties. By the very nature of an authoritarian system, the Chinese leadership — lacking democratic legitimacy at home — also perceives other democracies as a threat. China cooperated with and learned from Western countries during its rise, but by now it feels it has acquired the knowledge it needs; it would like to preserve the economic relationship, while remaining unwilling to undergo political change. China prefers monolithic, predictable, ideally one-man power structures. The logic of democratic alternation of power — with opposition parties and uncertainty — is alien to it. It wants to do long-term business with a stable leader.

What are we misunderstanding when we view China as a reliable business partner?

SCG: We forget that the Chinese Communist Party follows the Soviet model, on Leninist foundations. To this day, the Chinese leadership blames the West for the collapse of the Soviet Union and sees the liberation of the post-Soviet region as a series of “color revolutions.” The lesson they drew is that democracies subvert authoritarian systems from within. Xi Jinping sees himself as the heir to the October Revolution, and although the Soviet experiment failed, the historical project, in his eyes, did not end. Today’s global Chinese initiatives — on security, civilization, or development — are all meant to make Chinese norms of governance and security into international standards, and to create a world order more favorable to China. In this sense, Hungary can be seen as a testing ground.

Speaking with a Chinese and a New Zealand researcher, one inevitably wonders how objective one can be on the subject of China.

LH: I grew up in Beijing, but I attended high school and university in the United Kingdom. When I returned to China, I realized that the system keeps reproducing severe crises — from the Great Leap Forward and the famine to the Cultural Revolution and the events of June 4, 1989 and lately Zero-Covid Policy. However much China may appear to be a success story, in recent years emigration has become strikingly visible: businesspeople, students, and lower-income groups alike have been leaving the country in large numbers. I am convinced that China’s economic rise should not be attributed to the Party’s “grand design,” but rather to the fact that the authorities relaxed their grip while ordinary people tried to make their way despite the system. It is also clear that China would not be where it is without the West: without Jimmy Carter’s normalization of relations, Richard Nixon’s visit, the advice of liberal economists like János Kornai, American information technology, and European markets. So the question is: did the Party lift China up — or hold it back for decades?

SCG: I was born in Hong Kong, raised in a New Zealand family, and now work in New York at the Asia Society. My method, however, is a straightforward one: I study the history, ideology, bureaucracy, and propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party. I have been greatly influenced by Geremie Barmé’s “New Sinology,” according to which China must be read through its own intellectual history and political traditions. The main pillar of my work is that I take seriously what the Party itself says, because the system produces an enormous number of documents, and often does state its intentions quite clearly — just not always through the same channel.

For a long time it was almost a cliché to say that real economic and technological breakthroughs are born in democracies. Today, however, neither Trump nor Xi nor Putin seems to believe that idea. Could that theory collapse?

SCG: Faith in it has clearly weakened, and one sign of that is the growing Western phenomenon known as “Chinamaxxing”: the idea that China is not just a successful rival, but the future itself, perhaps even capable of answering civilizational questions that Western democracies cannot. Sometimes this enthusiasm is superficial and fashionable; sometimes it poses as a serious intellectual position. According to older modernization theory, autocracies are inherently limited, whereas democracies generate genuine innovation through free thought, competition, and a strong civil society. There is much truth in that: the internet and artificial intelligence both emerged in democratic contexts. Yet while the United States lacks a coherent industrial policy sustained across administrations, China’s planning system has demonstrated its own strengths. The Party clearly defines strategic goals, allocates resources accordingly, and economic actors know exactly which sectors they must compete in to win state support — for example, in electric vehicle manufacturing. For reasons of national security, the Chinese leadership wants an economy that does not depend on American power and can, if necessary, be mobilized for war.

LH: The issue is rather that the West has visibly lost confidence in itself: it has become uncertain about its own institutions, its own politics, even about democratic elections themselves. Into that intellectual vacuum has burst “Chinamaxxing” — the overestimation and romanticization of China. This is not a new phenomenon: from the orientalist fascination of the colonial era to Maoist nostalgia, from celebrations of the Beijing Consensus to pro-China influencers, there have always been efforts to paint autocracies as glittering, modern, and successful. But China only looks strong from the outside; in reality, it is a paper tiger. Almost all of Chinese provinces are as indebted as Greece was in 2010, and the state uses its own banking system to finance megalomaniacal national vanity projects in infrastructure, real estate and other sectors. The system may not collapse tomorrow, but Beijing’s bureaucracy is locked into firefighting every single day.

Where do you draw the line on Chinese firms abroad?

In Hungary, two Chinese giants, BYD and CATL, have established themselves with the government’s support. Could China use economic dependence as a geopolitical weapon in the same way Russia used energy?

SCG: One of Xi Jinping’s main objectives was to subordinate the private sector to the Party. The crackdown on Alibaba founder Jack Ma — who had become increasingly critical of the Party — was a highly visible example of this and a clear signal to the business world. Chinese firms, especially in sensitive industries, can only truly thrive if they align themselves with the Party’s five-year plans and national security goals, and Beijing is consciously trying to make other countries dependent on Chinese supply chains. Xi openly said six years ago that China was seeking to build a “capacity for retaliation.” Hungary, as an EU member state, is therefore an ideal tunnel into one of the world’s largest markets. I do not yet see China actually using economic dependence as a weapon in a fully explicit way in Hungary, but I do see that it has been given an opportunity to entrench industrial standards — alongside tax incentives and relaxed environmental rules.

LH: The main question is where Hungary draws the line in the face of Chinese corporate expansion. After the pandemic, Xi Jinping truly “put the private sector in order”: the Party no longer exclusively suppresses major private companies but seeks to integrate them into the system. Large firsmt in China compete with one another until some win and become designated as “national champions,” and then explicitly begin to serve the state’s strategic aims. A company like CATL cannot simply say no if Beijing asks something of it.

After a change of government in Hungary, could a new administration renegotiate the deals made with Chinese firms? Could we use our exclusive position to secure better terms?

SCG: Yes, and in such negotiations the issues could include compliance with environmental rules, increasing the share of local labor, or keeping a larger portion of the economic benefits in Hungary. Everything depends on how much room for maneuver Beijing perceives it has — Australia and Lithuania show that China is willing to apply economic pressure — and on what strategy the Hungarians formulate. Many countries make the mistake of not having a clear position, whereas China very much does: it has a capable bureaucracy and pre-planned scenarios.

East is rising, west is falling? Or maybe not

The war in Iran and the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz highlight the weakening role of the United States as the guarantor of global security. Could China emerge as a genuine global military power?

SCG: Despite its current stumbles, the United States still has the most extensive military infrastructure in the world, with broad alliance systems and bases, including through NATO. China has so far been a free rider in that system, benefiting from secure maritime trade routes and American security guarantees, while using its free resources to build up its own economy and industry. For Beijing, it is a risk that American power — partly because of Donald Trump’s politics — is changing shape, weakening, and becoming less predictable. That is why China is compelled to build up its own security capabilities, intelligence, economic defenses, and protection of overseas interests. But, in the immediate term, it is not going to copy the burdensome American model; it will move toward a more targeted security system.

LH: Even so, China is already a military actor — and the main hidden enabler of Russia in the war in Ukraine. Sometimes, certain European countries have a tendency to forget that. China’s military budget is growing rapidly, even though the United States or anyone have any prospect of invading China. So what is China’s military budget preparing for? The answer is simply Taiwan: the Party’s goal is the unification of a Greater China, by military means if necessary. And Taiwan is a developed economy, a thriving democracy, and a key node in the global supply chain for semiconductors and AI. Its fall would trigger a global shock.

SCG: China may present itself as having “peaceful DNA”, but it is not a pacifist power. Just remember the image of Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un together at the September military parade in Beijing last year: that is a picture of a world order they would like to see. When Xi speaks of the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” that includes the unification of Taiwan and the reordering of the South China Sea in line with Chinese interests. China has territorial disputes with several of its neighbors, and through the war in Ukraine it is supporting a conflict that serves its interests — weakening NATO, tying down American attention, while obtaining favorable energy deals. It is a cynical strategy, but a coherent and effective one.

The decline of the West is an old trope in European thought, one that Orbán and the MAGA camp also like to emphasize. Do ideologues of the Chinese Party-state also believe that the West is in decline?

LH: This is not a new idea in China but one of Maoism’s core assumptions: it holds the Party together, gives direction to society, and generates a political energy. Never mind that Europe and America remain economically powerful and are still the birthplace of vital technologies and innovation — the Western public sphere is fond of dwelling on its own problems, while official Chinese discourse relentlessly pushes for its own success stories. In my view, the “decline narrative” does more to force the West into continuous self-reflection and adaptation than actually reflecting reality. However, t is important to recognize that the decline narrative can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if over-repeated and taken too seriously.

SCG: And there are plenty of people eager to repeat it. When Viktor Orbán spoke of an “east wind” blowing through the world, he was in fact repeating a Maoist narrative: the idea that the center of gravity of history is shifting to Asia, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Think tanks linked to Chinese state security keep publishing analyses about “the end of the West,” the weakening of transatlantic unity, and the fault lines of European identity politics. Western leaders such as Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Carney are also speaking about a crisis of confidence. But the self-examination of Western countries should also be seen as a sign of healthy functioning rather than purely as a cause of paralysis and defeatism.

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

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• 擦星星事务所

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Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

How did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power, drive the Kuomintang to Taiwan, and found the People’s Republic of China?

One may be excused to think that such an old question must have been settled long ago. And indeed, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party is one of the defining and arguably the founding debates of contemporary China studies, as giants such as Karl Wittfogel, John Fairbank, and others fiercely disagreed with each other over 70 years ago. In the post-WW2 years of McCarthyism, this academic contention found itself at the forefront of the political battle over “Who Lost China,” as the American political establishment sought for answers — and scapegoats — in its complete political exclusion from mainland China, despite having aided China throughout its fight against the Japanese.

Yet, 70 years on, Prof. Frank Dikötter of Stanford University reopens this Pandora’s Box with another book: Red Dawn Over China — a play on words based on Edgar Snow’s famous book Red Star Over China, which describes the Yan’an days of the CCP. Prof. Dikötter’s new book tells a story of Soviet secret agents attempting to engineer a communist revolution in China throughout Republican China, and how explaining the rise of the Chinese Communist Party must squarely confront this history of Soviet influence.

For those unfamiliar with Prof. Dikötter, he’s the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

I interviewed Prof Dikötter on his latest book, and discussed his new findings and myth-busting of Chinese communist history in the classic Frank Dikötter fashion. This episode — which has been edited for clarity and brevity — is the first of a two-part series, and a joint production with JF Pod.

Enjoy!

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• Reopening the intellectual Pandora’s Box of how the communists won China

• Busting the myth of popular communist appeal in China

• Imperialist yoke in China, Russia vs. Japan

• When Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet embassy in Peking

Reopening the intellectual Pandora’s Box of how the communists won China

It’s amazing that you’ve written yet another book on Chinese history. You write books faster than most people can read. Why one more book on the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and why this period, from the 1920s all the way to 1949?

It’s really a COVID book. As a historian you have to think not just in terms of a topic but in terms of primary sources. If you have good primary sources, the book will write itself.

With COVID, the question was, what can I do? I was in Hong Kong at the time. I spent a good 15 years going across the border into the archives of the People’s Republic of China. And then, of course, the border closed down. So I started dabbling around in sources we have in Hong Kong.

I came across this extraordinary collection, up to 300 volumes of archival material that was collected and published from 1981 to 1988 by the Central Archives in Beijing in collaboration with the provincial archives. It was all material from the Communist Party from roughly 1923-’24 all the way up to roughly ‘47-‘48.

It was an extraordinary amount of material, it was here in Hong Kong, and it corresponded to a desire to go back and revisit those decades from 1921 to ‘49. I worked on the Republican era for the first 15 years or so of my career and then I crossed into the People’s Republic. This was going back into familiar terrain, so to speak.

What about this period attracted you? To me, the question of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution was a question that was quite hot in American academia in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, when Fairbank debated with Wittfogel about whether the communist revolution was due to support from the Soviet Union, or whether it was a self-contained, self-indigenous, self-originating revolution that came from an agrarian reformist energy in China. That seems to be an old debate that was long settled. And suddenly you’re reopening Pandora’s box.

I did think. As you said, so much has been debated and apparently settled. Do I still have an interest in the Republican era?

Besides me discovering this huge collection of archival material, I downloaded on my Kindle a book written by John Powell, a journalist who spent decades in China. The title is My 25 Years in China. In that book, John Powell travels everywhere.

There’s one chapter on what he refers to as a war in 1929 between Manchuria — basically the Beijing government — and the Soviet Union. It’s called the 1929 Sino-Soviet War. Now, frankly, I had not really heard of it. I had some vague inkling that something had happened. And we’re talking really about hundreds of thousands of troops. Stalin sends his very best marshal. We’re talking about gunboats, airplanes, towns completely destroyed, a massacre of civilians.

I Googled this conflict and there was one book written on it: The 1929 Sino-Soviet War by Michael Walker, published in 2017. In the introduction, the author says that very few historians of modern China have actually noticed this particular conflict. I verified that by going through all the mainstream books on modern history written by Europeans, Americans, not least of course some of the people you mentioned, John King Fairbank — very little mention of it at all.

So it occurred to me, rather than all of these debates having been settled for the Republican era, there were huge events that are entirely missing. The 1929 Sino-Soviet war is just one of them.

The raid on the Soviet embassy carried out in April 1927, during which vast amounts of Soviet material was discovered, is known but hardly mentioned. The March 1927 Nanjing incident in which troops led by communist commissars during the Northern Expedition massacred several high-flying Europeans and forced Europeans to intervene in Nanjing — barely mentioned at all.

I thought this period really should be read not from the point of view of secondary sources but really from primary sources. The secondary sources create an ivory tower. And you have to remember — with all due respect — the historians who worked in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were working in circumstances which were not exactly ideal. One could not just travel to the People’s Republic of China to consult archives. There was very little material available.

A lot of it revolved not so much around the examination of evidence but rather a particular ideological point of view. And it occurred to me that a lot of that ideological point of view, not least to one proposed by Fairbank and his followers, was rather sympathetic to the communists. Although what any reader of primary sources will discover when reading something about the communists in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s is that they were quite brutal and violent toward other people and each other.

Busting the myth of popular communist appeal in China

Let’s talk about some of the myth-busting new finds that you discovered.

Well, the most important find is not exactly rocket science. The evidence was there in plain sight. What really took me aback is something we all know but we don’t really sufficiently take into account.

When the Chinese Communist Party was established in Shanghai, in 1921, there were about a dozen people in that room, including several Soviets. It was set up entirely under the guises of the Comintern, the Communist International. It was a Comintern envoy from the Netherlands, Henk Sneevliet, who arranged that meeting, and he found it very difficult because the 57 members of the Chinese Communist Party that were represented by these delegates squabbled and hardly agreed on anything.

Within a few years this Communist Party attracted no more than a few hundred people, until the Soviets, including Lenin, realized that communism had very little appeal. They must create a united front, which was realized in 1923-’24, when the Soviet Union started subsidizing the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek on the condition that Communist Party members were allowed inside the ranks.

The key point is that at no point all the way until 1940 do the communists represent anything but a mere fraction of the population.

I can give you a few numbers. The most important one is probably 1936. You might say, well, that’s unfair because that’s the end of the Long March, which is basically a long defeat. But at that point, the Communist Party had about 40,000 followers in a country that is the size of Europe and counted about half a billion people. One out of 8,000 people in China was a follower of communism. It’s not exactly impressive.

For roughly the same years, 1934 to 1936, if you look at Finland, where the Communist Party was banned, one in 700 people was an underground follower of communism. If you look at a fascist country, Portugal, the number in 1934 was one in 280 people.

In any European country, with the exception possibly of Nazi Germany, the appeal of communism was much bigger than it was in the Republic of China. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to find a country in which communism had less of a popular appeal.

If you fast forward to 1940, according to the numbers of the Communist International itself — which were of course inflated — about one in 1,700 people in China was a communist. And in 1940 we’re talking about the United Front, so you could join the Communist Party if you wished to do so. That’s pretty much the same as the number of followers of the Communist Party of the United States of America.

So, to me, if you want to talk about the social conditions for the revolution, if you want to talk about land reform among the so-called peasants of China in the 1930s or the appeal of the communists, and you do not take into account these numbers, really you are just wasting time. They had the same appeal as a religious sect in a province like Henan.

I think this illustrates quite well that historians, when writing stories about the past, are often writing stories about their ideologies and their images of the past, the present, and the future, especially when evidence is lacking.

But also we have this story of how this obscure tiny group of intellectuals and students, with some amount of foreign funding and organization, grew to become the dominant power in the biggest country in the world, ruling over a huge landmass. And so the puzzle is, how did they do that?

I find it quite interesting that you start your book not at the end of Qing, not at the October Revolution in Russia, but at the French Revolution. Could you talk about why you begin the story about the origins of the Chinese Communist Party in France?

The reason is that there is a modern way of looking at politics, and the intellectual foundations are with the French thinkers behind the French Revolution. The power resides in the people. Not in a king, not in an emperor. It’s not granted by heaven, not given by a god, but resides in the people.

Then you had a long debate about, who are the people? Should women, marginalized groups, and enslaved people be included? Emancipation became a key term throughout the 19th century. But there was something else: Should that new political order be achieved through reform or through revolution?

The key turning point for the 20th century was Lenin, when he seized power from above in the 1917 revolution. He wasn’t going to wait for the emancipation of workers from below through reform and a legal process. He wanted to have a revolutionary party that dictated the revolution from above.

So he seized his power, had a monopoly over it, and then guided it all the way through. He was a great inspiration to a number of people, including Mussolini. He saw how Lenin did it and himself had a march on Rome where he imposed his power on a very reluctant parliament.

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Mussolini in turn inspired the Nazis to seize power, the Machtergreifung in German. It’s an interesting term, because in Chinese, it’s duoquan, which is a term so fundamental to Chinese communism. The idea that you must seize power from the class enemies and direct a revolution from above — that is the source of inspiration for the communists. But also, it would be fair to say, for the nationalists in Guangzhou who were themselves a revolutionary party by 1921, ‘22, ‘23 under Sun Yat-sen.

The point is that the Bolshevik revolution might offer a vision of a party seizing power from above, but the whole Marxist background has very little appeal. We read in textbooks that the moment the Bolshevik revolution appears, people in China are absolutely enraptured by what is happening. That is simply not true.

The evidence is that you have to wait until 1919 for a very small number of intellectuals, like Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, to be specifically approached by agents of the Comintern, established in 1919, for them to start thinking about Bolshevism and Marxism as an alternative. It’s a very small number of individuals who have been cultivated by agents from Moscow who actually led the establishment of the Communist Party in 1921.

Imperialist yoke in China, Russia vs. Japan

I find it fascinating the way you described these Russian individuals in Republican China in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. Could you talk a bit about this underground — or maybe not so underground — world of Russians in China?

What I have endeavoured to do in the book is not just focus on a very small number of Communist Party members. I also try to rethink the Republican era. I’m not keen to portray the 1920s and ‘30s as an era of great imperialism.

Subsequent governments, whether it is the Beijing government or then the Nanjing government, worked very hard at abolishing the so-called unequal treaties with extraterritoriality. Hankou was returned by the Brits in early 1927. The restitution of tariff autonomy takes place at the very end of the 1920s. I talk about a number of agreements signed by most imperial powers, not the Soviet Union, to relinquish all concessions within a period of five to ten years.

I also talk about very broad social trends. After 1917 there was a massive influx of Russians into Manchuria and Shanghai. Among them were agents sent by the Comintern, who were supported by what would become the Soviet embassy once the Soviet Union was recognized. And there was this fight between the so-called white Russians who were anti-Soviet, and the ones sent by the Soviet Union.

This is also a reason why Manchuria was such a complicated region, because the regional governor, Zhang Zuolin was anti-Soviet Union. He realized that Manchuria was seen as a buffer zone by both Russia-slash-Soviet Union and Japan. These two powers would determine the fate of the Republic of China throughout the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. They were the ones that started wars — the 1929 Sino-Soviet War, and the Japanese attacking in 1931 and 1937. But until the Sino-Soviet war 1929, the white Russians were very helpful to Zhang Zuolin in trying to restrain the Soviet influence.

Why did China matter so much to the Soviets at all, especially from so early on, when the Soviet Union itself was hardly as stable and prosperous as it needed to be?

It didn’t start with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union continued the approach of the Russian Empire. There was a background not just of competition and rivalry, but actually armed confrontation between the Tsarist Empire and the Japanese Empire. There was a war over Manchuria in 1904-’05, which the Japanese won.

And this continued after the collapse of the Qing. Both of them viewed each other with great suspicion and were constantly afraid that Manchuria would be seized by the other. They tried to take preemptive action to prevent this from happening in the 1920s and ‘30s, and this led to a full-fledged war in 1937.

When the Soviets came to China, agents tried to cultivate different kinds of Chinese individuals. They first used Marxism to appeal to idealistic students and intellectuals.

Later they decided, actually intellectuals and students are no use. What mattered is that you need a united front to cultivate power inside the Kuomintang, be part of that political machine and try to subvert it from the inside. And so you had folks like Zhou Enlai who were placed in high offices within the KMT.

Eventually the Soviets and Chiang Kai-shek fell out and the Soviets decided they needed their own troops for a military takeover of China. Is that an accurate description of the series of Soviet strategies towards China?

Yes. First of all, the Comintern, the Communist International, was established with the specific purpose to overthrow all capitalist governments. The communists wanted a world revolution. This was a pretty enormous task. In 1919 just one country was communist, the Soviet Union.

They tried in 1923 to engineer a German revolution, which failed miserably. Left-leaning parties in Germany were actually in favor of legal reform, reform at the ballot box, as opposed to revolution.

Then they turned their gaze toward China, which became their next big hope. What the Soviets were trying to do was more or less arm any faction that they thought they could control to influence politics in the Republic of China.

The Japanese did something very different. They just tried to get a hold of Manchuria, first in 1931 and then with a full-fledged war in 1937. Both were concerned about the relationship between the Republic of China and their enemy. The Japanese were afraid of an alliance between Nanjing and Moscow. Moscow was afraid of an alliance between Beijing or Nanjing and Tokyo.

Within this realm of imperialist competition, it seems to me there are broadly two camps. You have the Americans, the British, the French, who broadly wanted a unified China that they could trade with, that had a market, that had regular governance and a functioning state.

And then you had the Russians and the Japanese who favored the breakup of China so they could carve their own spheres of influence. Why did different imperialist powers have different visions?

The biggest contrast is really between the Brits and then to a lesser extent some of the other European powers versus, as you pointed out very correctly, Russia-slash-Soviet Union and Japan.

When we read about the imperialist powers carving up China at the end of the 19th century, that is an exaggeration. When we talk about the scramble for China in the 1890s, what comes to mind is the scramble for Africa. But what happened in Africa under Leopold II in Congo, for instance, bears no resemblance to what happened under the Qing during the 1890s.

What did happen was that many imperial powers wanted a port and they were afraid that the Qing couldn’t guarantee the safety of their own subjects in the ports that they were leasing. So imperialist powers — Germany, Italy to a lesser extent, Britain, France — all obtained ports and the right to have people living under extraterritoriality. They were afraid that they were being attacked, so they also started placing gunboats there to protect their own nationals.

This was imperialism, but it was hardly the massacre of huge swathes of the population in Africa, or reducing entire parts of Africa to slave labor and extracting resources. What the Germans and French wanted was what the English had. Hong Kong is the model they aspired to. They wanted a German Hong Kong, a French Hong Kong.

But the Russians and the Japanese wanted a buffer zone. They were afraid of the other seizing the territory in between, Manchuria.

When Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet embassy in Peking

But clearly the Soviets were not happy with just Manchuria. They were looking at the whole of China — Canton, Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan. So I think China was clearly bigger than a buffer zone story.

Yes, there’s two things. One is that they were not looking at Beijing and Nanjing; they were looking at Berlin, Paris, London. There was a raid on the Soviet embassy carried out by Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in April 1927, and then they seized mountains of documents.

Remarkable story.

A remarkable story which really should get at least a paragraph or two in any standard history of that period. Li Dazhao getting garroted to death is the only thing ever mentioned. Important as that may have been, what mattered is that Zhang Zuolin now had proof that Moscow had been funding the military overthrow of the internationally recognized government of Beijing all along.

The Soviets had this mission of worldwide revolution. The raid on the Soviet embassy in Beijing and the documents that came out of it were important internationally. The Brits thought that the Soviets might have been doing the same thing in the United Kingdom. There were widespread strikes in Britain around about 1926. So they in turn organized their own raid.

This is called the Arcos Affair, after the All Russian Co-operative Society — basically a sort of pseudo-embassy in London where the Soviets did their business. It was raided and it led to the rupture of diplomatic relationships between London and Moscow for about a year or two. In other words, this was a massive international event.

This raid on the Beijing embassy is hardly ever mentioned, although it gave rise to a raid in London, which is mentioned in every textbook. From the point of view of historiography, this is very interesting, but the key point is that the Russians were trying to do this everywhere.

The Japanese were concerned with the buffer zone. So was Moscow, but on top of that, they wanted to ignite a worldwide revolution and their hope was that if you could have a communist revolution in China, that could damage the trading interests of Britain in particular to such a point that people would take to the streets of London, and there would be a communist revolution there as well. They hoped to create a chain of events that would lead to a worldwide revolution. That’s what the Soviets were trying to do. So yes, you’re absolutely right, there was more than just a buffer zone there.

That takes us to the 1929 Sino-Soviet war, which I’ve never heard about and which I now realize is actually quite an important turning point. Could you talk about that? Why does it matter? And also, why do you think it’s somewhat buried?

The 2017 book by Michael Walker I mentioned earlier, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, is subtitled The War Nobody Knew. He confirms in the introduction that people don’t mention it.

Although John Powell — and a great number of other journalists — was describing this war to the world abroad. At the time it had a huge impact. The question was: if the Soviet Union is willing to go and fight the Republic of China in Manchuria and send well over 100,000 soldiers, which country will be next? Because the idea was that they were busy with their own revolution. But no, they not only reconquered all of Siberia, but they also were at least willing to go to war with a neighboring country.

Why did they do it? Because in 1929, after the raid of the the Soviet embassy in Beijing in ‘27, Zhang Zuolin’s son, Zhang Xueliang, realized that the Soviets were using the railway to which they have a concession — the China Eastern Railway, CER, the one that runs through Manchuria — to propagate communism and distribute pamphlets. He more or less arrested a great bunch of them and sent them back into the Soviet Union. That was the start of this war.

Zhang Xueliang was a keen opponent of communism. Stalin reacted and he was brutal. He sent a great many troops, crushed Zhang Xueliang, and imposed his own conditions. The interesting thing is that Stalin also thought that by opening granaries in Manchuria he could provoke a spontaneous revolution. In order to create a spontaneous communist revolution he wanted to create a pincer movement, with the Soviet troops in Manchuria who tried to provoke some sort of revolution, but there was also now a desire to give much greater support to the communists in the south. He specifically named Mao Zedong as a key leader.

Stalin’s ideas were always keenly reflected by Mao Zedong, in particular his saying that a single spark can set the prairie alight, which appears on the 5th of January 1930, merely months after the end of the 1929 Sino-Soviet war. If you just create that spark, the masses will join the revolution. This is Stalin’s idea, reflected by Mao. The result is that Mao got recognition from Stalin, and of course more funding.

Recommended reads

• Frank Dikötter, 2026, Red Dawn Over China, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2010, Mao’s Great Famine, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2013, The Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Frank Dikötter, 2016, The Cultural Revolution, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Michael Walker, 2017, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, University Press of Kansas

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What’s Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

In light of the recent reports that outdated data was the reason behind the U.S.’s mistaken airstrike on an Iranian school, I wanted to rerun this interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Shirk. In it, she recounts how the American military made similar errors when it accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, leading to a tense period in U.S.-China relations.

Prof. Susan Shirk is research professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, director-emeritus of the 21st Century China Center, and director-emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). Between 1997 and 2000, Susan served in the Clinton administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, overseeing U.S. relations with China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.

Click here to skip ahead to the section of the interview about the Belgrade bombing. Our conversation also covers other events that influenced U.S.-China relations at the turn of the century, including Jiang Zemin’s visit to America, China’s crackdown on Falun Gong, and the ever-present issue of Taiwan. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Other conversations with Susan Shirk are here and here.

Enjoy!

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

1. Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji and the party’s charm offensive in the States

2. China’s rising place in U.S. foreign policy

3. How the U.S. accidentally bombed China’s Belgrade embassy

4. The 1992 Consensus used to be Taiwan’s position, now it’s China’s

5. Falun Gong and U.S.-China relations

6. “Russia scholars hate Russia, and China scholars love China.” That’s no longer the case.

Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji, and the party’s charm offensive in the States

Could you talk us through Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit to the U.S.?

It was a moment when both governments wanted to go all out to stabilise the relations. The visit was great. Jiang Zemin was really happy. Jiang was the first Chinese leader who was simultaneously the general secretary of the party, president, and head of the military commission. Deng thought it was important to strengthen the leader institutionally. Before then, the “president” had little power. The president’s main role is to go around the world representing China as the head of state. Jiang Zemin loved that role.

He’s a natural.

We lavished respect on him. We didn’t have much else to give because we were constrained by domestic politics. What we could lavish was respect. He loved that. His staff were worried about demonstrators. And you could hear them, especially in Honolulu, and mostly about Tibet.

I was never very impressed by Jiang Zemin. I sat in on meetings, and he always seemed a little clownish. He liked to show off his Western learning and quote poetry or Shakespeare. He seemed to lack gravitas and seriousness about the issues. But President Clinton always said to his staff, “It’s really easy to underestimate this guy. So don’t underestimate him. He’s a very good domestic politician. He knows what he’s doing.” Clinton had more respect for him than we did. But he handled himself well on that trip. It was a real ice-breaker.

Is it fair to say he managed to charm the U.S. political establishment? He’s not the typical stern, stiff-faced communist cadre.

He tried, I don’t know that they were so charmed by him. He tried to show warmth, and they found him likeable.

One awkward thing happened. Jesse Helms — chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a southern Republican — was pushing to appoint a special ambassador to Tibet, which would offend China. Our official position is that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China. So the State Department said we cannot have an ambassador to Tibet. But what we had to give way on was to have a Special Commissioner for Tibet to address the issues related to Tibet and promote dialogue between Beijing and Tibet.

They insisted on announcing it publicly just when Jiang Zemin was visiting the United States. How insulting — outrageous. But we had to go along with it. Then, my job was to tell [China’s foreign minister] Qian Qichen we were doing this.

You were the messenger.

I was — and so embarrassed. I had to explain to him that the timing was unfortunate. It was imposed upon us by Congress. We had no choice. This is how the American system works. I didn’t go into any great length. I just said, “We’re doing it. It’s going to be announced today.”

What was his response?

He didn’t say anything rude to me. He was cool. “This is most unfortunate, but thanks for letting me know.”

What was your impression of Zhu Rongji on his trip?

Oh my gosh, he was fantastic. So impressive. Smart, sensible, dignified, and didn’t lose his temper with anybody either. He was respected by his delegation.

How did Bill Clinton interact with Chinese diplomats and other visitors?

The thing that always impressed me about President Clinton — we’d bring people to the Oval Office. He would make eye contact and speak to the visitor in English. But when the consecutive translator spoke, he didn’t take his eyes away from the visitor. Think about that. That’s not easy to do. Usually, when the translator is speaking, you sit back and think about what you will say next. But he was working his interpersonal magic on the visitor. He was just a superb communicator that way. Madeleine Albright also had a wonderful way of using humour. She had a great way of making personal connections.

And how did the communist officials respond to American diplomats? You mentioned in our previous conversation that things used to be stiff in the ‘70s.

Things got looser, for sure. And Qian Qichen was an incredibly impressive diplomat. I feel fortunate to have observed him when Jiang Zemin came to the United States. He would also visit the UN General Assembly and meet with Madeleine Albright. I remember one meeting vividly where we had been after the Chinese side to stop selling anti-ship missiles to Iran. We weren’t getting very far, but we brought it up in all these meetings because they put the American Navy in the Gulf at risk.

And then, at the UN General Assembly, Madeleine Albright had a meeting with Qian Qichen. He had spent part of that morning at the Israeli embassy. And before we even raised that issue, he just, out of the blue, says, “Oh, by the way, we’re no longer going to sell the anti-ship missiles to Iran.”

It was the one time I can remember that one of your objectives had suddenly been achieved. He said, “In my discussions at the Israeli embassy, I gained a better understanding of the risks of these missiles.” I don’t think he decided on the spot. The decision would have been made before he came, but still, I was struck by the fact that the argument from the Israelis seemed to influence the decision.

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China’s rising place in U.S. foreign policy

China was quite important in the Cold War era because it was a check against Soviet power. Now that the Soviet Union was gone, what was the place for China in American foreign policy?

We wanted to get China to cooperate with the United States on many issues like nonproliferation, the environment — “global public goods,” I would say.

We started having these open-ended security dialogues, with high-level meetings with China. We started building in time for unscripted discussion of foreign policy issues in various parts of the world — Africa, South Asia, the Middle East. We were giving China a lot of respect and boosting China up as a global power. Because if you look at the speeches from that time, our goal was to help China emerge into the world as a responsible power. And it appeared to be working quite well.

We managed to cooperate on a lot of foreign policy issues. We didn’t really accomplish much in terms of human rights, but we were creating a kind of global order that China was part of. When we had the Asian financial crisis, we created the G20. Because originally, we tried to get China to come to the G7, G8. We were so generous and open-minded we invited the Russians in, right? And we said, “Okay, let’s make it the G9. Let’s invite China.” China didn’t accept the invitation.

I remember when India tested a nuclear weapon, Madeleine Albright had to figure out, “How are we going to respond?” She felt we needed to have China be part of that response. She was in Europe. I think she was at a G7, G8 meeting, and she called Tang Jiaxuan, the Chinese foreign minister, and said, “Why don’t you come to the G8? Join the G8 meeting at least, even if you don’t want to formally join right now, and we can discuss what to do in Geneva.”

He said, “Let me talk to my colleagues; I’ll get back to you.” He came back and said, “No, sorry.”

Why do you think they turned it down?

They always felt, “Oh, that’s the West. That’s not us.” Even though Japan was there. I have no idea. They came to the G20, though. They liked the G20. But basically, China always liked the Security Council more than any other institution.

They have the veto there.

It’s their favourite.

Did the Asian financial crisis affect the U.S.-China relationship in other ways?

That was very important because it actually became an issue that China and the United States cooperated on, because China took, I think, quite a responsible position on the Asian financial crisis.

We did not want them to devalue their currency, as other countries had. We worked with the IMF, and China did not devalue their currency. That wasn’t easy for them, so we gave them a lot of credit. Zhu Rongji was in charge of managing this whole thing.

It was in the lead-up to Clinton’s visit to China that we expressed our appreciation for China’s responsible position. They didn’t even critique the IMF’s role and cooperated with the IMF. They supplemented it by creating a currency swap system with Korea and Japan. It was the start of a trilateral cooperation among them. In some ways, it stimulated positive developments in U.S.-China relations.

How the U.S. accidentally bombed China’s Belgrade embassy

One thing I really wanted to capture is your experience around the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Could you talk about that?

I was on my way back from work, and I got this call from the State Department and learned that there had been this bombing by NATO of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. I turned around and went back to work.

My approach was, “We just have to go all out to apologise.” I thought that, regardless of how this happened, we would need to apologise profusely to the Chinese because otherwise they would never let us forget our failure to apologise. We would hear about it for decades, just as what they’ve said to the Japanese: “You never apologised for all these historical atrocities during World War II.” The whole issue of apology is diplomatically and in foreign policy very fraught.

So that’s what we tried to do. President Clinton tried to speak to President Jiang Zemin. They wouldn’t respond. We went with Madeleine Albright to the Chinese embassy in Washington to apologise. They were pretty rude. We managed to do it, but it was a tense situation. The president went to sign the condolence book. We had the ambassador in Beijing fly a flag at half-mast and offer to go to the airport to meet the plane with the three journalists who were killed in the attack. President Clinton made some public remarks from the White House. We did everything we could to try to preserve a decent relationship.

We tried to investigate how we made such a terrible mistake. I was in charge of pulling together the explanation. That meant working with the Pentagon, the military, and the CIA, because the targeting was being done by the CIA. The CIA was incredibly helpful and forthcoming, whereas the military and the Pentagon were not. They were defensive about everything.

After we had the explanation, we went to Beijing to present it to the Chinese government and to negotiate compensation for the victims and their families and for the destruction of the building. I went with Tom Pickering — the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, a very seasoned, brilliant diplomat — to have those discussions.

Originally, Tom Pickering said, “I’m not going unless I have a uniformed military officer with us because the State Department did not make this stupid mistake. The military did.” Much to our dismay, they refused to send a uniformed military officer. The best we could get was the deputy head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he wasn’t even in uniform. But we had no choice. We had to go. We had someone from the CIA, and someone from the legal department of the State Department to help with the negotiations.

The other thing Tom Pickering insisted on was that we weren’t going to go commercial. We had to go on an official plane. It was really tough with our legs all intertwined with one another in this tiny little jet. We presented the explanation, we apologised, and negotiated compensation.

How was the explanation received in China?

Back when the Chinese government and the official media announced the bombing, they talked about the flagrant bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade with no recognition that it was an accident, the implication being that it was on purpose.

Of course, there was no reason for President Clinton to approve the bombing of the Chinese embassy. It’s the last thing in the world he wanted to do. He was trying to stabilise relations with China. But there was suspicion in China that, “Okay, maybe President Clinton himself didn’t want to bomb the Chinese embassy, but there must be anti-China officials in the military or different agencies” — a Tom Clancy-type plot to subvert relations with China.

We presented the explanation, and we did the negotiations. Still, much to my frustration, largely due to the public statements of the Chinese government, people in China believed it was done intentionally. The university students in Beijing got angry and wanted to demonstrate their resentment and anger against the United States. The Chinese government facilitated the protests. They provided buses to students at Peking University, Tsinghua, and other universities to go to the American Embassy. They did the same thing in Chengdu and other cities where we have consulates.

They did that because they were nervous. This was in May of 1999, just a few weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations. The Chinese leadership is always insecure, particularly under Jiang Zemin. They were worried that the students would repeat the demonstrations in Tiananmen or Zhongnanhai and protest against the Chinese leadership for being too weak in the face of American pressure, that the Americans felt they could disrespect and harm China to the extent of bombing a Chinese embassy in another country. In order to protect themselves, they diverted the student protests over to our embassy and consulates in China.

The students threw Molotov cocktails, paint, and bricks at the embassy. Our ambassador and a few other diplomats were inside, and there are these photographs of [ambassador] Jim Sasser in the embassy’s windows, almost like he was a captive. The police allowed the protests to occur. They’d been bussed in, and they didn’t try to stop them. It was infuriating and worrisome for the safety and security of our diplomats.

We tried hard through the embassy to get the Chinese government to control and stop the protests, which lasted for a few days. Even today, many people in China — probably most people in China — believe that the bombing was on purpose.

Recently, with the Chinese government offering tacit support to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and blaming the Russian attack on Ukraine on NATO enlargement, and the fact that NATO itself has become more concerned about Chinese actions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, the Chinese government has symbolically become very strongly opposed to NATO. Xi Jinping has once again stirred up anger over the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

I’ve felt very frustrated by this. In the year or two after it happened, the explanation based on the investigation that we presented to the Chinese government was on the website of the American Embassy in Beijing, both in English and Chinese. But after a few years, they just took it down. If you now search on Google for the bombing, you won’t find that explanation, and you will find several European newspapers that took a more conspiratorial view, about, “Oh, there must have been some figures in the U.S. government who were trying to undercut improvement of U.S.-China relations with this embassy bombing.”

The other thing they say, of course, is that this was not collateral damage, that we had targeted this building. And they say, “Oh, the Chinese were helping the Serbian government by gathering intelligence.”

All I can tell you is, I talked to our intelligence people. They said, “Yes, the Chinese embassy was used to gather intelligence. They monitor signal intelligence.” But they believed that the Chinese government was not actively assisting the Serbian government. They were using the intelligence for their own purposes. But in China, people assumed the Chinese government wasn’t telling them but that the Chinese government was assisting the Serbians to resist NATO.

I am 100 percent personally sure this not purposeful. It was accidental.

The problem was that the Chinese government and people had huge respect for American competence, and they believed that it was impossible for us to make a mistake like this. They have respect for our internal management of our own policy, policy implementation, and our military. So they thought, “Oh, it can’t possibly be an accident.”

When I put together the explanation with my colleagues, I wanted to add an appendix of some of the other terrible mistakes we’ve made because I thought it would make the explanation more credible. They wouldn’t let me do that. They thought that was too humiliating.

What was the conclusion? How did the bombing of the Chinese embassy happen?

NATO was bombing targets in the Kosovo War, especially in Belgrade, and they were running out of military targets. The call went out, “We’re looking for more targets.” Over in the CIA, there was a contractor who worked on non-proliferation. He was aware that there was a depot that the Serbians were using to sell missile parts and devices to other countries — but not China.

This contractor submitted this arms depot as a potential NATO target. He identified the location of it in a crude manner. He had the address, then looked at parallel streets and tried to figure out which building was this arms depot. Then, he runs it through an out-of-date database with a lot of locational data.

The military practice is to run things through three databases to ensure we don’t make targeting errors and strike a hospital, a school, or something by mistake. But I’m quite sure, in talking to the CIA and the military people, that these databases are not actually independently created. The mistakes in one database get repeated in the others. The Chinese Embassy had moved, and they didn’t obtain up-to-date information about where the Chinese Embassy was.

That basically was the mistake. They did strike a building, the Chinese Embassy, that had a lot of intelligence-gathering stuff. There were quite a few injuries. The building was destroyed, and three journalists were killed. Of course, in China, these state journalists are not 100 percent private journalists at all; they’re conducting collection of intelligence for the government and for the news media.

We told the story just like that in the explanation. And, by the way, just in the last few weeks, I have managed to get the U.S. Embassy to put this on the website in Chinese and English. Hopefully, it will stay there forever.

In recent weeks, Xi Jinping brought it up again during his visit to Serbia.

He visited Serbia and said something about how there are “blood ties” between the Serbian people and the Chinese because they’re both victims of American aggression.

And that legacy, that political messaging, is probably here to stay.

After it happened, it was very difficult. The Chinese cut off all diplomatic contacts with the United States for about six months. This was the period when we were trying to get back to finally conclude the WTO agreement. The only channel that they continued, which I found interesting, was discussions about North Korean nuclear issues. Otherwise, they cut off all diplomatic communication.

And at the same time, the military threat of China became an issue for America, especially regarding arms sales.

The research of my colleague, Tai Ming Cheung, who studies the Chinese military and dual-use technologies, indicates that the Belgrade embassy bombing was a real turning point in China’s military modernisation program. I thought it was the Taiwan Strait crisis, but his interviews with people in the military indicate that the Belgrade embassy bombing increased China’s sense of vulnerability. And the military hyped that to get more resources and bigger budgets.

The 1992 Consensus used to be Taiwan’s position, now it’s China’s

What was your approach to Taiwan as Deputy Assistant Secretary?

We took the risks of military conflict in Taiwan very seriously. Our inability to control what Taiwanese politicians say and do is a major challenge because they can be very provocative to Beijing.

We continually tried to reassure Beijing that “this isn’t us; it’s them.” And Bill Clinton, when he visited China in 1998, articulated the “Three No’s” at a library in Shanghai. That was all planned and managed and part of the negotiation, and it wasn’t anything new. Madeleine Albright had already said it when she visited China. And even going back to Kissinger — he said it. Our view about saying things related to Taiwan was that if we’ve said it before and they want us to say it, and we want them to do things — like commit to de-targeting our nuclear missiles toward one another, other deliverables — we’ll do it.

However, tensions over Taiwan were almost constant. During the time I was in government, the whole “1992 Consensus” — “there’s one China, but the definition varies between Beijing and Taipei” — was a compromise position that Taipei endorsed, and the “one China” principle was Beijing’s position. They didn’t accept the ‘92 Consensus. Look at today — the situation has flipped. Now, the ‘92 Consensus is the Beijing position.

I have always felt that all of these what I call “magic words” about declaratory policy on Taiwan are purely symbolic, and that both sides would be better off ignoring this kind of declaratory policy. Xi Jinping has gotten himself boxed in by the “magic words” now. It’s most unfortunate. It would be so much better to restore high-level dialogue with no preconditions, no “magic words” preconditions. Because Taiwan has an elected president, and this president has to maintain certain authority and respect.

They have domestic politics too.

Exactly. They cannot utter the words exactly upon the command of Beijing. If they do, they look like they have no authority.

But that’s what Xi Jinping wants.

Yeah, but it’s so stupid. It doesn’t get you anything. So that’s why I remain in favour of high-level dialogue with no preconditions.

What was the position of Taiwan in the greater context of U.S.-China relations? Why did the U.S. care about Taiwan, given its ever-closer ties with China?

We cared about Taiwan more as Taiwan became a vibrant democracy. But it became less amenable to our influence and control. So that was really a challenge. We have this friendly relationship with Taiwan that we just can’t walk away from. We can’t allow Beijing to absorb Taiwan, we have a legal commitment to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act.

U.S. and China have managed this knotty set of problems pretty well over the years. In a way, you could view maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait as one of the greatest achievements of U.S.-China diplomacy. Hopefully, we’ll continue to do that, just with no major changes in the status quo.

Falun Gong and U.S.-China relations

Did the Falun Gong demonstrations play any role in the U.S.-China relationship?

The Falun Gong Incident was important in terms of contributing to the insecurity of Jiang Zemin. The Falun Gong organised this massive sit-in around Zhongnanhai in complete secrecy, and there was no warning from the security apparatus to Jiang Zemin. So it really freaked him out. They were required to register as a sect or something like that, and they didn’t want to do that. So they organised.

Falun Gong is a variety of qigong, a Buddhist-related, spiritual, and physical fitness movement based on breathing exercises. At the time, it had gotten quite popular in China, especially with the elite, including party members, intellectuals, and businesspeople. The guru and head of Falun Gong lived in the United States, but the U.S. government had no contact with him. There was no effort to use Falun Gong to disrupt China. This was not an externally driven thing.

Jiang Zemin was shaken by the demonstration. According to reports that appear to have come from Zhu Rongji, he said at the time, “Just talk with them. Negotiate an end to this demonstration.” But Jiang Zemin instead launched a massive government effort to destroy Falun Gong, crack down on it, ban it, and set up a special office in the centre. Basically, this anti-Falun Gong movement continues. It’s obviously not a serious threat in China, but it contributed to the paranoid mindset of Jiang Zemin.

Did it impact your work as Deputy Assistant Secretary?

It did. For one thing, I had to learn about it. I remember we had a workshop at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to explain more of it to us. And it happened after we failed to sign the WTO deal when Zhu Rongji came. Next, we had this Falun Gong demonstration sit-in around Zhongnanhai, and then the Belgrade embassy bombing. So all of these things are basically human agency, accidental, unpredictable events, which had a major impact on U.S.-China relations. I think about them often because it contributes to my belief that this kind of stuff happens and could happen again in the future.

“Russia scholars hate Russia, and China scholars love China.” That’s no longer the case.

How did you keep up-to-date about China while in office, and how did you interact with the intelligence side of the U.S. government?

The intelligence side is great because they’re like colleagues who were China watchers. But I have to tell you, I had anticipated that one of the good things about going into government was that I was going to have access to all of these classified sources. I’m finally going to get inside the black box and really understand China.

It was so disappointing. They know not much more than what we know outside government.

Do you think they just don’t have the sources in China?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s gotten better, but I don’t think so. Because when I talk to colleagues in government about internal elite politics, they’re always asking me, “What do you think?” It’s not just that it’s classified material. They feel like they don’t know that much.

As a scholar and former official, how would you evaluate the impact of China scholars on U.S.-China policy?

I think it’s pretty significant. Going way back to the Cold War, many of these folks had good access and relationships with people in government. I wouldn’t exaggerate it, but it does have some influence.

Looking at today, when there’s such a souring of attitudes towards Xi Jinping’s China, the China scholarly community is now strongly critical of China. It’s much more like it was during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. We used to joke that “Russia scholars hate Russia, and China scholars love China.” But that’s no longer the case. They may still love China as a society, but they’re much more critical of the government. And big business is much more critical, too. You cannot find a group in America that is really defending China anymore because its actions are pretty indefensible.

And that’s a huge shift.

Huge.

As you finished your time in the Clinton government, did you want to stay in government after that?

Yes and no. It’s hard on the family, and I needed to get back. UC San Diego was incredibly generous in giving me three years off. Most universities will not give you more than two. If you want to keep your job, you’ve got to go back to the university. But it gets a little addictive knowing the inside of issues and the access to information. That’s the hard part to give up. But I did give up my clearances and everything. So I just walked away, back to the university.

Recommended readings

Susan Shirk, 1993, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, University of California Press

Susan Shirk, 1994, How China Opened Its Door: The Political Success of the PRC's Foreign Trade and Investment Reforms, Brookings Institution Press

Susan Shirk, 2007, Fragile Superpower, Oxford University Press

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The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

For many of us who pay a great deal of attention to and love Hong Kong, the earth-shattering protests of first the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 and then the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019 still seem like yesterday. Yet, memory is fading as reality moved swiftly beyond what we previously imaged possible. In just a little over a decade, Beijing has reined in Hong Kong’s native political movements through a series of overt, brutal crackdowns that transformed the very fabric of social, political, and economic life of Hong Kong, which once almost functioned as an independent city-state within the sovereign borders of the PRC. Families broken, dreams lost, visions shattered. Say what you will about the lessons of the protests, but one thing is clear: the Hong Kong we know is gone.

Much of what we do here at Peking Hotel feels nostalgic, reminiscent. And it is, for good reasons. It is worth remembering the past so we maintain a moral, rational, and truthful compass for the future. Oblivion to the past is just as dangerous as overdosing on nostalgia; the art is in a balanced moderation. And in the story of Hong Kong specifically, there are few figures greater than Jimmy Lai, the media tycoon who owned Apple Daily and staunchly spearheaded Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Last month, Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sedition and collusion with foreign forces under the infamous national security law. The merciless treatment of Jimmy Lai exposes a Hong Kong government that is closely aligned with Beijing’s political agenda, lacks confidence in its own democratic legitimacy, and projects fears through enacting violence upon those who dare to speak up.

Mark Clifford is Jimmy Lai’s biographer. He has known Jimmy for decades, regularly visited Jimmy’s dinner parties, and sat on the board of Next Digital, the parent company of Apple Daily. Mark Clifford is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He lived in Asia from 1987 until 2021, and was the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, and publisher and editor-in-chief of The Standard, both Hong Kong newspapers. He was a director of Next Digital, publisher of Jimmy Lai’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, when the government shut it down in 2021. I can think of few better suited than Mark to speak to his memory of Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai as a colleague, tycoon, activist, and friend.

So on the occasion of Jimmy Lai’s sentencing, we are fortunate to have Mark Clifford sharing with us his years of living dangerously in Hong Kong, the handover and transition of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, and Jimmy Lai the freedom-fighter. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Hope you enjoy.

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• A decorated career in journalism in Hong Kong under British and PRC rule

• Beijing vs. Hong Kong, a Greek Tragedy

• Jimmy Lai, the businessman who fought for freedom

• How Xi Jinping lost Hong Kong in 2019

• Leaving Hong Kong as an accidental activist

A decorated career in journalism in Hong Kong under British and PRC rule

After graduating university you worked as a journalist in the U.S. After a fellowship at Columbia University, Far Eastern Economic Review hired you to be their correspondent in South Korea. In 1992, they brought you to Hong Kong. What was the energy of Hong Kong like in the mid-’90s?

From the night I arrived, I’ve just always loved Hong Kong. I was an undergraduate in Berkeley, loved the Bay Area, loved hiking, biking, being outdoors, the ocean. And I love the intensity of an urban environment, like Manhattan. To me, Hong Kong brings both together.

The energy, the hustle, the drive, and the dynamism — it’s the most amazing place that I’ve ever seen. Part of it, I realized later, was driven by insecurity and the fact that wages in Hong Kong are low. There isn’t much of a social safety net.

Also, you were on the edge. I came five years almost to the day until the handover. It was three years after Tiananmen, five to go. The clock was ticking.

When did you first meet Jimmy Lai?

I met Jimmy Lai a year later as part of my duties as a correspondent, profiling him and [clothing brand] Giordano — this crazy guy who started a magazine right after Tiananmen and had his eyes on opening up a newspaper right before the handover.

Where were you on the day of the handover?

I went to the old Tamar basin, where they had a stage. Chris Patten and Prince Charles both gave quite incredible speeches. It was moving. Britannia, the ship with Patton and Charles, went down the harbor. People were cheering the whole way — not cheering like they wanted them to be gone, but cheering in support.

Then I took a bus up to the Shenzhen border. We watched the PLA troops come in, many of them in open back trucks, standing at attention with incredible rain coming down. It was dawn when I came back. New PRC flags were all over the city. When I saw those flags it really hit me. This is now part of China.

What were you feeling at the time? Hopeful? Pessimistic? Neutral?

All of the above. Everybody hoped for the best. I was quite pro-engagement, having seen the democratic changes in Korea and in Taiwan, and despite the horrors of the Tiananmen killings, wanting to believe that the same thing could happen with China.

But on the other hand, I had seen Jimmy Lai a few weeks earlier at an event at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong. Jimmy broke down and started crying and said that he expected he’d go to jail after the communist takeover. Here’s a guy who had a lot more direct experience with communism than me. It was sobering for me.

You arrived in Hong Kong as a reporter for Far Eastern Economic Review, moved to Businessweek, and then you were editor-in-chief for two Hong Kong newspapers. Could you talk about those experiences?

That was a huge change for me. Beginning of 2003, I took over as publisher and editor-in-chief at The Standard, which was the number two English-language paper. I had been in Hong Kong for just over 10 years and had always been part of the foreign media. When you’re working in a Hong Kong publication and you’re just dealing with Hong Kong people, there’s a richness and a texture to the city.

How was the relationship between the Hong Kong press and Beijing at the time?

English-language press is easier. The Hong Kong Standard was part of the Sing Tao family, owned by a guy named Charles Ho, who came out of a Hong Kong tobacco family.

Charles and the team at Sing Tao were in close contact with the people in Beijing, or with the Beijing representatives in Hong Kong. And they were often seen as a government mouthpiece. They were much more likely to criticize the Hong Kong government than to criticize anything with Beijing. I was mostly spared that.

Charles died in 2025. He was good to me, but I felt sorry for his cynicism. He knew how bad the Chinese communists were and yet he cynically played along because he liked the power, the glory, the money.

What does it mean to play along? Was the newspaper receiving political lines to take?

As far as I understand, certainly. I don’t know exactly the mechanism, but somebody was giving them a line that they wanted to take. They consistently reflected government and Beijing views.

But English-speaking publications didn’t matter as much in Hong Kong after 1997, so they left us alone. We had a lot of freedom. We won a lot of awards. It was a scrappy, hard-hitting paper.

After I’d been there a couple of years, I met the Kuoks, the family that owned most of the South China Morning Post. They were looking for a new editor-in-chief. I talked to them and went across the street — across the harbor actually. The Kuoks were also pretty close to senior people in the administration at the time.

It’s one of the dangers of media ownership by somebody who has a lot of other business interests. They’ll sacrifice their editorial independence because of concern about their other interests. That was true with both the Kuoks and Charles.

I don’t want to impugn their integrity by suggesting that there was a direct line between a particular story and a particular business interest. But, in general, they were reluctant to go as hard as a completely independent publication could, like Apple Daily and Jimmy Lai. When Jimmy was faced with pressure from the Chinese on his other main interest, Giordano, he sold his Giordano stake.

There wasn’t a lot of direct editorial interference. The Kuoks or Charles might make it clear that they weren’t so happy about something, but, so what? Sometimes I was told I shouldn’t have so-and-so as a columnist. But I had him as a columnist anyway, and that was that.

Of course, they didn’t renew my contract after a year either. This gets back to an encounter I had with Rafael Hui when he was chief secretary. I said that the press was particularly important until Hong Kong had universal suffrage, had full democracy. Rafael then told the Kuoks that I said that the SCMP would oppose the government until there was full democracy, which is just nonsense. That’s probably what cost me the non-renewal.

After leaving South China Morning Post, you left journalism and became the executive director at the Hong Kong Asia Business Council for 13 years. What led to that decision? That’s quite a different place to work.

I’d done what I could do in journalism. I didn’t want to leave Hong Kong. I thought this was an interesting opportunity to be on the other side of the fence. Along the way I did a couple of books, got my PhD, and got to interact with some of the most powerful, interesting people running some of the largest companies in Asia, if not the world.

The underlying, often unspoken reason behind the Asia Business Council was to try to knit together private sector ties. I remember the first meeting in New Delhi. During a coffee break, one of the members said to another member, “You own an airline? I own an airline too. We should talk.” It was these high-level private sector conversations.

Beijing vs. Hong Kong, a Greek Tragedy

Your time in Hong Kong overlapped with many political events. Not just the handover, but also major demonstrations, such as the massive 2003 protest about Article 23 — Beijing’s first attempt to impose natural security legislation. Could you talk about those? How did you see and experience them at the time?

There’s the backdrop of China’s entry into the WTO. And then of course, before Article 23, we had SARS and the government’s inept handling of that in early 2003. After SARS and after the 2003 demonstration, China took a much more active hand in Hong Kong.

You have to also see the broader international context of China opening up, getting the Olympics. People felt positive. If you look at polls, Hong Kongers felt more “Chinese.” That peaked in 2008. And then the sense of Hong Kong identity became stronger and the sense of being Chinese receded. We had a lot of cross currents at that point.

Where were you in 2003 when the march happened?

I was still working for Businessweek and I was at the JW Marriott hotel. It was a brutally hot day, over 90 degrees. And in air-conditioned comfort drinking iced tea, we watched these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people go by. That was a signal moment. You knew something had changed in Hong Kong that day.

The government withdraws Article 23, [Hong Kong chief executive] Tung Chee-hwa steps down. China seemed to have a light hand and yet still be responding to aspirations. People still felt optimistic that the Basic Law would be respected. There have been promises that there’d be a full universal suffrage for the 2007 LegCo elections. And then the run up to the Olympics, the WTO, there was lots of good momentum and the bad stuff hadn’t kicked in yet.

It’s like a honeymoon period for the first eight years. Everybody’s on good behavior, and then tempers start fraying. Both sides start mistrusting each other. Although I naively thought otherwise, in retrospect, the CCP demands control and subservience, and they somehow thought they could get that from Hong Kong. That was not in the cards. It was a Greek tragedy of both sides being fated to clash.

Fast forward to 2014, Umbrella Movement — you already left journalism, entered the Business Council. Where were you during those weeks, months of Occupy Central, and what did you see?

I started my PhD program in August 2014. Occupy started a couple weeks later.

That first night, that Sunday in September, I was in the library. I took a long walk from HKU up over the peak and down to my apartment in mid-levels. I got a text from a friend in London. I didn’t know what it was about, but she was outraged at what the Hong Kong police had done to the demonstrators. I went down there that evening and saw a lot of the skirmishing and smelled the tear gas. I remember it very, very vividly. And obviously, it was in Central for 79 days. It was incredible.

It’s historically so unique. What major city allows a 79-day occupation? You give the Hong Kong authorities and the Beijing authorities low marks for actually knowing how to negotiate a compromise and a way forward. Because I think we still could have found one then. But you have to give them high marks for diffusing the situation without violence.

How did the Business Council react to the Umbrella Movement in 2014?

I don’t remember talking with them that much about it. I know that Ronnie Chan, who was the founder of the Business Council, was a big supporter of CY Leung. He was somebody who just detested Jimmy Lai. I wouldn’t expect him to be positive.

Some people were frustrated that the Hong Kong tycoons never pushed back. If the tycoons are not with the people, then there’s no chance of succeeding. What do you make of this interpretation of events?

Your characterization is correct, but I don’t think there was any serious expectation that the business community would join with people.

There’s a long history of the business community, both Chinese and British, opposing democracy in Hong Kong. I happen to know that as a student of Hong Kong history. Did the student protesters know that or not know that and have unrealistic expectations? I don’t know.

If Beijing had decided something different, then we could have had something different. And it would have been unusual for the business community to go the other way. The closest you can see is Cathay. Cathay had tens of thousands of workers, and some of them were involved with the movement. The Cathay management was not going to punish them. For that, the Cathay management got punished and the CEO was fired. That person at least was British, so he could leave. But I don’t think any Hong Kong Chinese businessman was going to risk all their wealth and assets in a pro-democracy movement.

Jimmy Lai, the businessman who fought for freedom

Jimmy Lai is a critical figure in that regard, because he was the only one at his level who stood up for the rights, autonomy, dignity, liberty, and democracy of Hong Kong. Could you talk about how you got to know and understand him, and how your interest in him grew over time?

I met Jimmy in 1993. I profiled him for the Far Eastern Economic Review. It was the first of several profiles I wrote of him. I knew him pretty well, but I wasn’t part of his inner circle. I’d see him a couple times a year. He’d invite people out on his boat — journalists, priests, visiting scholars, an eclectic group of people. His dinner parties were the same.

In ‘93, he had founded Next Magazine, but he hadn’t founded Apple Daily yet. He described to me what he was going to do with this newspaper. The internet was starting. China was coming to take over Hong Kong. It seemed crazy, but he approached it as a business person and as somebody who loved freedom. Six out of 10 Hong Kongers had voted for the pro-democracy candidates in the 1991 election, which was the first territory-wide election ever after 150 years of British rule. He knew there was a market.

He went through every single newspaper, who owned them, what their line was, and how they were already starting to make adjustments for the coming of CCP rule. He realized he had a golden business opportunity. And he wasn’t just feeding people spinach and hard politics. He was the first to start printing color in Hong Kong. And Apple Daily had lots of lively stories — sensationalism, sex, sin — mixed with a real commitment to free markets and free people.

Jimmy was open ideologically. Reporters said there was less editorial kind of oversight and control than anywhere they ever worked. The only thing was, if he thought you were writing socialist, leftist economic stuff, you were out. But you could write just about anything politically.

From the beginning, it was a powerful, important paper. Apple did a lot of investigative work. One of the things that helped fuel the anger in 2003 was the so-called Lexus-gate, with Antony Leung, the finance secretary, who bought himself a new Lexus immediately before he raised the taxes on cars. Apple broke that. Apple broke something about a legislator who hadn’t declared interests, and he went to jail for that.

I don’t know of another paper in the world that’s had that broad popular appeal, and also had a lot of serious stuff. It also, more importantly, broke up the cozy relationship that existed between the press and government and business people. Apple was a no-holds-barred kind of place, and that ethos was set from the top.

You later joined the board of Apple Daily’s parent company, Next Digital. What prompted you to join the board?

I went on the board in 2018. I went on with Gordon Crovitz, who had been my boss at the Far Eastern Economic Review. He had been publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Why you? You were with the Business Council, which is full of his archenemies in the business world.

I don’t know, but it wasn’t just me. A lot of us had different politics, but we just love the sense of freedom that Hong Kong exemplified. Jimmy was a pole of that.

Crovitz and I had experience in media as a business. We clearly had affinities with Jimmy on whatever the pro-democracy, pro-free speech line was, but we knew media as a business. Next Digital needed that, especially as they were making the transition to getting digital revenue.

You joined at a pretty momentous time.

Yeah, but it didn’t seem like that at the time. 2018 seemed like it was a lull. Only in retrospect does it look momentous.

How Xi Jinping lost Hong Kong in 2019

Could you walk us through those months leading up to the summer of 2019, when the anti-extradition protests broke out?

It was a crazy time. In most places in Hong Kong, things were fine. But on the other hand, there’d be demonstrations in Central. I remember one time I was in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club having lunch and there was tear gas coming in. It was chaotic and violent in a way 2014 had not been.

It always seemed very David versus Goliath, but the marches were impressive. Some of them I marched in, some of them I just watched. But I don’t think I’ll ever in my life see crowds of this size. On August 18th, I wanted to catch the rally in Victoria Park. In an hour, I managed to get out of the subway station not more than maybe 100 feet. You could not move.

I have to contrast the scenes that I would see at HKU and elsewhere, where there was a lot of physical damage. These huge marches were a cross section of Hong Kong people — people of all ages. People felt secure and safe enough to bring their young kids or their grandparents. The crowds were so peaceful. It was people power of the most beautiful sort.

And yet you had a government that never offered to negotiate. They just stonewalled. That drove people to frustration, despair, and ultimately to violence. I don’t support that. I know Jimmy Lai didn’t support it. But I think one can understand the slogan, “you taught us that peaceful protest doesn’t work.”

What clicked for you, such that you decided to join the demonstrations?

In 2003, I was still a journalist and felt bound by this need for neutrality. The extradition bill just pushed me too far. It had been 22 years since the handover, and China clearly was backpedaling on its promises. In 2017, the foreign ministry had declared that the Sino-British Declaration was of no practical relevance, a historical document. In other words, this was an international treaty that China was just going to rubbish. It clearly wasn’t interested in living up to the Basic Law. I’d spent most of my adult life in Hong Kong, and I was just fed up with it.

Peaceful protest is part of the Hong Kong tradition. I might as well get out there with a million other Hong Kongers and do what I could. At that point, my board [at the Business Council] knew that I was on the board of Jimmy Lai’s Next Digital. Even though I was an independent non-executive director, they could draw their conclusions about where my political sympathies lay, even if I did not make any secret of it. There are times when you need to make a stand.

In retrospect, the late November district council elections in 2019 — when, as usual, Beijing was out of touch with Hong Kong grassroots reality and they thought there was going to be a silent majority that was going to vote pro-Beijing; instead, you had this landslide victory with record turnout — at that point, Xi Jinping said, “We’ve lost Hong Kong.”

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On August 10th, 2020, Apple Daily’s office was raided. Where were you that day? What communication did you have with Jimmy or his staff?

First, on February 28th, I was supposed to go have breakfast with him. I was getting in a taxi in the morning and I got a call from his secretary saying, “Mr. Lai can’t meet you today.” I was puzzled by this. There are some CEOs who are always late, or who cancel on things. Jimmy is always on time and he never cancels. Then I saw an email from him that he’d actually sent me 15 or 20 minutes earlier, saying, “I’m being arrested.”

That was pretty concerning. I saw him a week later. We had the breakfast, and everything was fine. But he was a bit taken aback. They had been civilized. They let him finish his exercises, take a shower, and come down. They held him a few hours, and then he was out.

August 10th was different. I was in Hong Kong, in my office. I was following it through news reports. I had no contact with him. We had an emergency board meeting. I was the only director in Hong Kong not in police custody — not a good feeling. It’s like, “Okay, I’m an American, I have no Chinese ancestry, so it’s unlikely they’re going to come after me, but still not a good sign.” They let Jimmy out late on Tuesday night. And then he was in the newsroom on Wednesday.

I left Hong Kong on October 27 that year. It was right after Asia Business Council had had one of its semiannual meetings. On an open call during this meeting Ronnie Chan implicitly threatened me with arrest under the National Security Law. That was not a good feeling either. I had bought my return ticket for early January. On December 3, Jimmy’s bail was revoked. He was put in jail.

My name was mentioned by the prosecutor. We had been doing these weekly live stream events that became an important part of the trial. We had everybody from Cardinal Zen to Chris Patten to [Israeli politician] Natan Sharansky to [American politician] Paul Wolfowitz on these programs. I was the moderator. Sometimes these things would have 200,000 people watching live, and they’d be reported in the newspaper. So there was some profile. That was probably what put me on the radar of the authorities. When they revoked his bail, they quoted me as saying “Jimmy Lai is a symbol of Hong Kong resistance,” which seems pretty factual and anodyne.

I decided to cancel my ticket. Honestly, I probably would have gone back, except they kept extending the [Covid] quarantine. Jimmy got out for a few days over Christmas, then they put him back in on December 31st. Then they had the big raid of what became the Hong Kong 47 on January 6th, 2021. That was a crazy day in history. It starts off with raids on 75 apartments in Hong Kong and ends with the storming of the Capitol by the MAGA people.

I and a few other people founded what became the Committee for Freedom and Hong Kong Foundation. The upshot was I never went back to Hong Kong, and just got involved in trying to do what we can for Jimmy, for the other six Apple Daily people who were in prison, and for the 600 or so Hong Kong political prisoners. It developed organically and unexpectedly. I’m so naive, I’d never dealt with a communist or Leninist party close-up like this before.

Later on, in May 2021, Jimmy’s shares were frozen. They tried to freeze some overseas bank accounts. In June, the director got a letter from John Lee saying that he suspected we’d broken the National Security Law, therefore he was freezing bank accounts of three of the key subsidiaries. We were out of business by the end of the month. June 24th was the last edition.

You left the Asia Business Council in January 2021. How did that happen?

I lost my job — or I offered to resign and it was accepted — because I knew that some of the members were uncomfortable with the fact that I was a director of Next Digital and that I’d been doing these live streams with Jimmy Lai.

Leaving Hong Kong as an accidental activist

You’ve written a biography of Jimmy Lai, titled The Troublemaker. What’s so special about Jimmy, in your opinion, that sets him apart? Is it the moral energy, the personal charisma? What is it?

He’s unique among dissidents that the CCP has dealt with. He has three things that they don’t like, and in some sense, don’t understand.

He’s rich, so he can hire great lawyers. He has many well-connected friends around the world. Jimmy put a huge amount of money into the movement. It came out in the trial. He spent more than 100 million U.S. dollars of his own money on the pro-democracy movement over the years. In that sense, I kind of see why the Chinese think he’s a black hand. He really put his money where his mouth was.

Number two, a lot of his power is built around media, and I don’t need to tell you what the CCP thinks of media. It’s propaganda, and it should reflect the state line, and if it doesn’t, it definitely should not oppose it.

Number three, the power that comes from actually having principles and convictions. Jimmy was always a guy with a strong sense of right and wrong. He’s also fearless, and he’s by nature a troublemaker. That’s where the title comes from. That’s what he called himself. I said, “Why do you do this?” He said, “I don’t know, I’m a troublemaker, just kind of born that way.”

The CCP understands the power and the wealth part. They understand the media part. I don’t think they really understand principles. Maybe the first generation of revolutionaries would, but the people running China now, I don’t think they have any principles.

You call yourself the accidental activist. Are you surprised by the direction you’ve taken?

Well, yes and no. I’ve always been interested in politics. I went to Berkeley, so I also describe myself as a recovering leftist.

A recovering leftist wrestling with the Communist Party to save a billionaire?

A right-wing billionaire.

In the most capitalistic city in the world.

Yeah, so in that sense, I would not have predicted it. But it’s not totally out of character.

Are you still in touch with Apple Daily folks?

As a board member, it wasn’t like I knew hundreds of reporters. But yeah, I’m in touch with some people. There’s a huge amount of loyalty. There’s this incredible network. In Taiwan, they had a big reunion. A thousand people signed up.

At its peak, at the end of the 2000s, the whole organization had around 4,000 people. In 20 years, he’d gone from nothing, from being in the clothing business, to building the largest truly independent Chinese language media operation in the world.

You left Hong Kong, not really with the intention of never returning, but events caught up with you and made you some kind of a diaspora from Hong Kong. How has that new life looked for you?

It’s been a fantastic chapter. I have to say, although I call myself an accidental activist, it’s the most satisfying work that I’ve ever done. It’s for a place that I love so much, where I spent most of my adult life. The spirit of Hong Kong is worth fighting for. Hong Kong matters for the future of a liberal international order. If China’s allowed, with no resistance, to steamroll and destroy Hong Kong, it’s bad for everybody who likes freedom.

The intensity that people have for Hong Kong, you don’t want it to degenerate into wistful nostalgia. It’s still a lively culture. Because of technology, we have possibilities that, say, the Hungarian refugees after 1956 didn’t have. We’re able to coordinate with a relatively small number of people. On the other hand, a lot of my Chinese colleagues are running into transnational repression issues. It’s a tiny city, but the battle for it is being played out globally. It’s fascinating. And obviously, we’re going to win.

What is winning?

First, to get political prisoners out of jail and to start having a thaw in Hong Kong where people are able to at least wear a T-shirt that is anti-government. The ultimate victory, of course, is the end of the CCP and democracy in China. But that’s not our focus.

Recommended reads

• Mark Clifford, 2025, The Troublemaker, Free Press

• Mark Clifford, 2022, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World, St. Martin's Press

• Supachai Panitchpakdi and Mark Clifford, 2002, China and the WTO, Wiley

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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Prof. Martin Whyte is a prominent American sociologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and International Studies at Harvard University. Prof. Whyte is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars on contemporary Chinese society, with a specific focus on social inequality, the rural-urban divide, and family structures in the People’s Republic of China. Prof. Whyte has traveled to China for over five decades, and was among the earliest American sociologists on PRC soil even when the subject of sociology was still officially banned. In the years of U.S.-China engagement, he helped resurrect the discipline of sociology from the abyss of the Cultural Revolution, and pioneered the field through conducting novel survey research, training students, and building academic collaboration with counterparts in China.

I was lucky to interview him at his house in the suburb of DC in 2024, when he generously shared his life and academic evolution with me. In particular, what caught my attention was that he has tracked the issue of inequality in China with three major national studies in 2004, 2009, and 2014. In 2023, the survey results got interesting as a new study was completed with Scott Rozelle and his team at Stanford, revealing that, unlike in previous studies, young people believe much less in the fruits of hard work and are more skeptical that they will live better lives than their parents. This conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, is a career-wise reflection by Prof. Martin Whyte, on his unlikely sociological journey with China.

Hope you enjoy it!

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• An American sociologist in Mao’s China, where sociology was banned

• The tragedy and complicated life of Fei Xiaotong

• The Maoist dating life: freedom of marriage, unfreedom of sex

• Baoding and Taiwan, a tale of two families

• Is inequality a social volcano waiting to erupt?

• Ezra Vogel, the mentor who built a community

An American sociologist in Mao’s China, where sociology was banned

To get us started, tell us about your first trip to China.

In 1972 I was invited to be in a panel organized by pro-Cultural Revolution activists, with three people who had all been in China.

I was fourth. I said, “Well, I haven’t been to China, but these people are all wrong. China is nothing like any of these people just told you.” I don’t think the audience believed me. So I was eager to go to China.

In 1973, I was invited to accompany a delegation of child psychologists. The Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China was part of an effort to send American delegations to tour China. They wanted to make sure each delegation had at least one China scholar. They couldn’t send a delegation of sociologists because sociology had been eliminated as a discipline in China in 1952. But psychology was not eliminated. Psychology was considered to have a physical science side to it.

There was no psychologist China specialist in the U.S., so they put me on the delegation. We toured a lot of kindergartens and nursery schools, and they took us out to communes and factories. It was a three-week trip, and my first exposure to China. I was working on my second book about the PRC, but I hadn’t been able to actually set foot there before.

Did you see anything interesting on that trip?

The child psychologists had brought along with them a four-volume reference book, the Encyclopedia of Child Psychology, published in the U.S. Their goal was to meet child psychologists and give that to them.

We visited five cities. And in each place, they kept saying, “We want to meet some child psychologists.” At every stop, they said, “It’s not convenient. We can’t find any here.”

Shanghai was our last stop. The head of our delegation put his foot down, “I’m not taking these damn books back to America. You have to find me some child psychologists to present these books to.”

We had a meeting in a hotel in Shanghai with the head of the Shanghai Education Commission. All of a sudden, they brought in these two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, absolutely quivering with fear. I’m pretty sure they were brought out of a labor camp to come and meet us and take these books off our hands.

That was one of many different bizarre experiences on that trip.

The tragedy and complicated life of Fei Xiaotong

In undergrad, you majored in physics. One would have thought that with a physics degree, when pivoting into the social field, you would take the quantitative social science route. But sociology is quite different, right?

Sociology is both qualitative and quantitative. After the U.S. and China had established diplomatic relations, it became possible to go into China and collaborate with Chinese researchers. Since I was by then teaching at University of Michigan, I had the idea of doing a survey study, which Michigan had become famous for doing.

Also, sociology had been rehabilitated in 1977, after Mao died, and [prominent Chinese sociologist] Fei Xiaotong had come to the U.S. as part of a delegation in 1978 or ‘79. Members of the delegation stayed in the homes of faculty members. Fei Xiaotong stayed at my house.

In 1984 or 1985, he was affiliated with Beida (Peking University). I wrote to him, “I’m thinking of getting funding to do a survey on marriage relations of married women in China. Do you think it would be possible to come and collaborate with your colleagues?” He wrote back and said, “No, it’s too early.”

What was Fei Xiaotong like as a person?

He was funny, and interested in everything. But he had an unbelievably complicated life. He was a very prominent person who decided to stay in China.

And who spoke up, perhaps naively, during Mao’s Baihua Qifang (Hundred Flowers Campaign).

Stalin had set the example by banning sociology. He said, “You can’t have two sciences of society, Marxism and sociology.” When sociology was eliminated in 1952, sociologists went into other fields. Fei Xiaotong was consigned to ethnology.

In 1956, he and others tried to speak up in favor of rehabilitating sociology, which should have been a reasonable thing to do, because the Soviet Union had just rehabilitated sociology.

The argument they made was the one made in the Soviet Union, that sociologists can study and help society deal with divorce, juvenile delinquency, and other social problems. But Mao was not having any of it.

There was a tragic case. Fei Xiaotong and his first wife were doing field work down in Yunnan somewhere, and she fell and broke her leg. He went and tried to get help. By the time he got back there, she died.

Fei Xiaotong and his later wife went through difficult times during the Cultural Revolution. They were forced out of their home, and his wife had a mental breakdown under the pressure. Fei Xiaotong disappeared from view.

In about 1972, he was partially rehabilitated, but still in ethnology. There was an anthropologist, Gene Cooper, who went to China and was able to interview Fei Xiaotong. Fei Xiaotong basically said that all the things that he had written, including his famous Chinese Peasant Village book, were all bourgeois. He had to parrot a very obsequious message about now he’s seen the light, and he’s doing proper Marxist sociology.

He was a marvelous and complicated guy who had extraordinary troubles in his life and managed to accomplish a lot in spite of that.

The Maoist dating life: freedom of marriage, unfreedom of sex

How did you eventually manage to do your first survey in China?

My first study was done at Sichuan University. It turned out that for reasons that I can’t comprehend, Sichuan and the State of Michigan had established a sister state relationship. A delegation from Sichuan was going to come to visit Michigan and tour the Ford Motor factory and various other things. They were also going to come to the University of Michigan. So the China Center sent around a notice saying, “Does anybody want to do research in Sichuan?”

I said, “I would like to do a survey study of the change over many decades from arranged marriages to free-choice marriages among the lives of women in Chengdu.” I got funding to do that.

Your first research was interviewing refugees in Hong Kong, is that when you decided to focus on studying Chinese families? Or did you decide already before going there?

I already had an interest in families and how they differ from country to country. It also seemed, if I was going to go into China and start collaborating inside China on doing research, family sociology was relatively safe, neutral, not politically sensitive.

The Chengdu survey about the change from arranged marriage to free-choice marriage — no communist bureaucrat could object to wanting to know how much a change that they had very much tried to encourage was impacting people’s lives.

In some ways, the family research was apolitical, but in other ways it was hugely controversial and dangerous to the party because of the one-child policy. How did you juggle between those two lines of research?

In the various family survey projects that I initially carried out, I didn’t focus on fertility and how many babies people were having. But I had students that did.

Soon after 1979, when it became possible to do research in China, Bill Lavely, who was a Michigan student and who’s now at the University of Washington, went to Sichuan to do a survey in rural localities. The one-child policy had been launched. One of the things he wanted to ask people in his questionnaire was, “If there were no official policy, how many babies would you like to have?”

He started his survey and collected roughly half the interviews that were planned. Then somehow the local political authorities got a hold of his questionnaire and said, “Wait a minute, you’re not allowed to ask this question. It’s now the one-child policy, so of course everybody has to want just one child. You can’t ask them how many they would want.”

They made him take out the question from the rest of the questionnaires that he was still going to distribute. But they didn’t confiscate the questionnaires with that question. So he had half of his respondents telling him how many babies they would like to have and so forth.

My own surveys were focused, first, on marital relations, and then on intergenerational relations.

What did you find in your Chengdu survey?

We interviewed women and asked them how they ended up with their husbands. Did they meet their husbands directly? Were they introduced or was it actually a strictly arranged marriage? There were relatively few strictly arranged marriages, even among the older women — I call them blind marriages, where the husband and wife had not even met before the day of the wedding.

My grandparents got married like that, on the second day after meeting.

That’s very hard for Westerners to imagine.

Somehow, they lasted for decades.

We had interviewed women who married over a 60-year period, roughly from the 1920s up to the 1980s. Before 1949 and into the 1950s, almost year by year, the more recent marriages had a little bit more freedom of mate choice. But then after 1957 up until the 1980s, there was very little further change.

So what was going on there? The basic argument is that even though the Communist Party wanted to encourage freedom of mate choice, they also were hostile toward free sexuality for unmarried people. No dating culture could emerge in the Mao era. Socialist society closed down lots of recreational venues where young people in the pre-’49 period could go to parties, movies, and dances. There actually were formal rules, that if you were a student, you were forbidden to have any romantic relationship.

Eventually, they realized that was a problem. Sometime during the Mao era, the work units started to try to bring people together — like, a textile factory and an automobile factory would have mixers.

From the standpoint of a Western society, if you are going to have freedom of mate choice, you have to have ways to not only be able to meet potential partners, but you have to get to know them and even get romantically involved and engage in some romantic intimacy — whether all the way to sexual intercourse or not.

All of that was very much frowned upon in China, as it was in the Soviet Union. There was almost a hydraulic theory that had developed under Stalin and Mao, that you only have so much energy and if you put energy into romancing and making out and kissing and having sex, you don’t have enough to study or work hard.

Perhaps that explains Mao’s lackluster performance in his political decisions.

Baoding and Taiwan, a tale of two families

You kept studying the Chinese family. Were there unexpected findings?

With the later survey I did in Baoding, where the focus was on intergenerational relations, there was this image that the nature of Chinese socialism was creating more tension between generations. But in the Baoding survey, we found a very strong sense of filial obligations among young people, and so forth.

The vast majority of the older people we interviewed had, if they were retired, pensions that were relatively generous. We found that there was a degree of security and satisfaction of the older people because they weren’t totally dependent upon support. We had Taiwan survey data that Al Hermalin and my other Michigan colleagues had conducted. We found that, in general, there was much more security of people in Baoding than in urban Taiwan.

One question we had was, are families in urban China or in Taiwan more modern? And it turned out that, compared with the Chengdu survey, Taiwan families are more modern. There was a dating culture, much more freedom of mate choice, experimentation, getting romantically involved, and so on. In Chengdu in the 1980s, most women married their first boyfriend.

But in terms of intergenerational relations in Taiwan, particularly the matter of whether married daughters supported their own parents or only their husband’s parents, things were still much more patrilineal in Taiwan than they were in Baoding.

Another thing we discovered: One of the questions we asked was, if a woman’s husband has died, is it okay for her to get remarried? Traditionally, in Confucian China, you’re not supposed to just go ahead and marry somebody else. In Taiwan, there was still a feeling that widows should not remarry. But in Baoding, there was much more acceptance of widows remarrying.

Baoding obviously is a less rich, less developed place than Taipei or other urban areas in Taiwan we were studying. But nonetheless, key things about family patterns had changed more in the direction of conjugal families as in Western societies and away from the traditional patrilineal family system than occurred in Taiwan. That was surprising.

How did all of these awesome surveys happen, logistically?

The Chengdu survey was funded mainly from the National Science Foundation, China Program grant. The Baoding survey was Luce Foundation. Actually, there were two surveys. It’s a little complicated.

I was negotiating with people in the Beida Sociology Department who agreed to be involved in this survey. But then 1989 came along. I had the money in an account in my university but I couldn’t spend it initially. And then, in the wake of Tiananmen, Beida and Tsinghua and some of the other elite Peking universities were under a heavy political cloud because of the activism of their students.

Our planned collaborators in the Sociology Department said, “Well, we’re going to send our students to get survey training in Baoding, not in Beijing. It’s too politically sensitive now.”

In the Chengdu survey, I did have reports. We were interviewing women of all ages, including middle age and older women, and asking them about their premarital history and asking them some questions about whether they had sex with their husband before they married. There were some complaints. “Who are you? Why are you asking me these questions?” Even in family sociology, it’s not necessarily all that easy to ask questions.

Then what happened is, in 1990, the Ministry of Education had been eliminated and replaced by the State Education Commission. And they released a secret edict in 1990 forbidding collaboration with foreigners on conducting surveys in China. So at this point, what was going to happen? I had this grant and I was supposed to do these two surveys.

That’s like your methodological death penalty.

My Beida would-be collaborators said, “Well, we’ve already worked this first survey” — which was about the mate choice and marriage thing again — “into our training plan for our students and sending them to Baoding and doing the interviews and so forth so we’re going to go ahead and do that.” And I said, “Well, Godspeed. Good luck. But I can’t send you any of the Luce money to do this.”

They conducted the survey in 1991. But then they said, “We’re sorry, we can’t share the data with you.” That remained the situation for a couple more years after that.

What happened to the sacred edict, I don’t know. It just kind of withered away. And eventually, we were able to get the data from the 1991 survey but I didn’t bother to analyze that because I was then deeply involved in planning the second survey, which was this aging and intergenerational relations survey.

Is inequality a social volcano waiting to erupt?

The other big survey project that you’ve done is the social volcano project. Can you talk about how you first conceived it and why did you begin to study it?

I was always interested in inequality. But the actual impetus came partly through a chance conversation.

While I was at Michigan, I had colleagues that were not China sociology specialists but who had an interest in China. One of them was Leslie Kish, who is a survey sampling specialist.

It’s kind of weird. I have these two very important people in my life, both of which were incredibly energetic and productive well beyond retirement, and both of whom died at age 90 when they went in for a medical surgical procedure and then problems developed and they died in the hospital, one was Ezra Vogel in 2020, and Leslie Kish in 2000.

I had coffee with Leslie and he mentioned he had just been on this trip to China. He told me that the director of the Institute for Social Research was trying to get people to do city surveys, and that ISR maybe had seed money, and did have I any idea for a new survey project that I would like to use ISR funding for to get started?

I said, “Let me see. I’ve done all these family surveys starting in the 1980s and through the 1990s. But now, it’s the end of the 1990s and maybe I should think of something new.”

At the time, I’d been reading that inequality was on the increase in China, that it was going to lead to political instability, maybe overthrowing the Communist Party, who knows. So I said, “I should do a survey and find out.”

I approached the Smith Richardson Foundation. They’d supported some other surveys in China. I said I wanted to do a study about how Chinese people feel about inequality and the increasing inequalities in their society. They said, “We don’t think that’s politically feasible. You have to do a pilot survey to show that your collaborators don’t get in trouble.”

I contacted Shen Mingming, my former student who was running his research center at Beida. We started in 2000 doing a Beijing pilot survey that Mingming and his center directed, and it was carried out successfully. They didn’t get in trouble.

Then I went back to Smith Richardson and got money from them. And by 2004, I was at Harvard. Harvard has the Harvard China fund. I had pieced together funding from different sources, enough to interview 3,200 and some people.

I did two subsequent national surveys [in 2009 and 2014].

What did you expect to find and how did you react when you saw the results?

There had been this extraordinary improvement in most people’s lives over the decades, leading to a great deal of optimism and expectation that that would continue, which we found in all of those surveys. In some ways, in retrospect, it’s not so surprising.

But some people challenged me. They said, “We think you’re finding these positive results because you’re carrying out surveys in China. It’s still a communist country and people are afraid to give their true opinions.”

But I don’t think that’s true. We also asked a series of questions about how people felt about various hukou discrimination customs. Is it fair not to allow migrants to get urban household registrations? Is it fair that they can’t send their kids to public schools?

On those questions, people had negative opinions. Even urbanites recognized that the hukou system is unfair. How can you categorically discriminate against people just by the accident of where they or their parents were born?

One of the big surprises was that, in 2004 particularly, there were more positive attitudes about inequalities among rural hukou people than urban hukou people. It’s partly because rural people felt they had been so suppressed for so long. It is also a fallout from Zhu Rongji and his smashing of the “iron rice bowl” in the late 1990s. Urban people weren’t as optimistic about their lives continuing to improve.

Were there things you couldn’t ask? How did you navigate the issue of self-censorship?

There were some tense arguments about some things. At one point early on with Mingming, he said, “We’re not supposed to include asking people whether they’re party members.” And I said, “That’s a basic social background fact about people that may influence their attitudes.” He relented on that.

In the 2004 survey, there was a series of questions about attitudes toward the hukou system. Two of the questions were, “Is it fair or unfair that migrants can’t send their kids to urban public schools?” and “Is it fair or unfair that there are certain kinds of jobs and work units that migrants can’t work in?”

When we were gathering to plan the 2009 survey, Mingming said, “Government policy now says that urban public schools are allowed to enroll migrant children and that these lists of work units and jobs that are forbidden to hire migrants have now been eliminated. So we can’t include those questions this round.” The 2009 and 2014 surveys don’t have those questions in them.

But it turns out, there are still very strong barriers that make it almost impossible for most migrants to enroll their kids in urban public schools. I wish that we had been able to win that argument but he was quite adamant that, “No, this doesn’t happen anymore because state policy has changed.”

And most surveys conducted in China don’t include Xinjiang and Tibet.

Not that those places have lots of people that would sway the results significantly, but that’s still a pretty big omission.

Yeah. You make compromises.

The most recent survey was from 2023 and this time it was done online. How did this survey come about?

Over the years, people had said, “Your last survey was 2014. That’s a long time ago now. A lot of things have changed.” But I said, “I’m not going to raise money.” And during COVID, I couldn’t go to China. To do another survey struck me as not plausible.

In March 2023, the Association for Asian Studies held its convention in Boston, and there was a panel on inequality. [Stanford University economist] Scott Rozelle and I were participants.

We went to dinner that evening, and Scott Rozelle talked to me about, “Wouldn’t it be nice to do a new survey? Is the social volcano finally going to erupt?” And I said, “I can’t do it.” The political constraints have tightened up in China. Scott said, “I have been collaborating with people at Southwest University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, and they are about to do some new online surveys and maybe they will be willing to include your questions in their online surveys.”

They’re not going to ask the whole questionnaire. My surveys had a total of 70 different questions. I made up a list of particularly crucial questions to see whether attitudes had changed. They agreed to incorporate many of them.

How do we interpret the survey results? The finding of your early surveys was that it’s not actually the bottom of the society that’s most discontent. It’s the middle section that’s most discontent.

Right.

And with this new round of surveys in 2023, it seems like the volcano has a higher chance of exploding now than before given people are beginning to complain about unfairness in the system.

We conclude in the paper that, “We don’t see a social volcano.” There’s a sharp drop in, “The chances for ordinary people to get ahead are quite good, do you agree or disagree?” But there are still more people who think they’re going to be doing better than worse.

And so in some ways, it’s only [a negative outcome] compared to the unusually optimistic views of those three earlier surveys. Those are, in some ways, a dramatic confirmation of the extraordinarily successful China economic boom.

But since 2010, China is no longer zooming ahead. It’s to be expected that people would have somewhat more negative views. And, of course, social volcanoes also are hard to produce in a society that has such strict political controls, and that have even gotten tighter over time.

Ezra Vogel, the mentor who built a community

You just mentioned that Ezra Vogel was an important person in your life. Could you talk about him?

From 2000, when I joined the faculty at Harvard, until he died in 2020 — 20 years — although he was retired, he was still incredibly active in China studies, publishing books, articles.

I lived 20 miles away, but he had this very big house right next to campus. Whenever he wasn’t traveling, he would host monthly China sociology dinner meetings at his home. Either one of the group would give a talk, or a visiting China sociologist would give a talk. Ezra would order take-out food from a Chinese restaurant. Sometimes Ezra would get in his car and go pick up the food. I would be in his house setting the table, putting out napkins, and putting on the kettle for tea and everything.

These monthly dinners were very important to students. When this massive Deng Xiaoping book was published in 2011, he would, over dinner in his house, tell the students attending about how he’d interviewed Deng’s children and other people that had worked with Deng, about the Chinese translation of the book and the kind of the negotiations and battles he had.

Toward the end of Ezra’s life, he was beginning to work on a biography of Hu Yaobang.

He published his final major book at age 89, this over-500-page book on the history of Japan’s relations with China through the centuries. At the time he died, he had two more books underway.

As he was working on the Deng Xiaoping book, a number of people said, “You’ve given too much credit to Deng Xiaoping for the success of the reforms and you haven’t paid enough attention to the leading officials that he used to implement those reforms.” Particularly, there were people who felt that Hu Yaobang deserved more credit.

He was working on that. He was also writing an autobiography. Unfortunately, I don’t think either of those books will ever be published because they were unfinished at the time he died.

That’s a big shame because I can’t imagine anyone else writing the Hu Yaobang book.

Probably.

For someone like that, would you say it’s just sheer genius or is there some sort of recipe that he’s following every day that sustains it?

Boy, I don’t know. You’d like to bottle it and sell it. Obviously, he was incredibly smart and he also had interpersonal skills that were very distinctive. There was no arrogance. You never got the sense, “I’m a Harvard professor, I’m smarter than you.” Ezra could talk to anybody, and he had good relations.

After his death, a colleague of mine, a Japan specialist in sociology, published this book in his memory, Remembering Ezra Vogel. It’s 155 short personal reminiscences of people, and includes people like Ban Ki-moon, the former head of the United Nations, but it also includes the Brazilian immigrant handyman that did repairs in his and Charlotte’s house, and secretaries at the Fairbank Center and so forth.

I can’t say everybody loved him, but he was just so open and friendly and approachable, and interested in virtually anybody.

Recommended reads

• Martin Whyte, 2010, Myth of the Social Vulcano, Stanford University Press

• Martin Whyte, 2003, China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations, University of Michigan Press

• Martin Whyte and Mary Brinton, 2022, Remembering Ezra Vogel, Harvard University Press

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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We are thrilled to welcome Professor Joan Kaufman, one of the world’s leading experts on HIV/AIDS and China. Joan has spent her career at the intersection of public health, policy, and social justice, working across the United Nations, philanthropy, and academia. Her work has profoundly shaped how the world understands health, human rights, and China’s role in both.

Joan first moved to China in 1980, working with the United Nations when China’s health system was just beginning to reopen to the world. In the 1990s, working for the Ford Foundation in Beijing, she pioneered work on women’s rights, reproductive health, and HIV prevention. From 2002 to 2012, she led China programmes for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, building bridges between Chinese scientists and global vaccine efforts.

In academia, Joan has held senior roles at Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis, and Tsinghua. She founded Harvard’s AIDS Public Policy Project, directed Columbia’s Global Center in Beijing, and taught global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School for many years. Today, she serves as Senior Director for Academic Programmes at Schwarzman Scholars, where she mentors emerging leaders to think critically about China and global health.

Today, Joan joins us to reflect on her life’s work, especially when it comes to her interactions with China’s HIV response over the decades.

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• Joan’s AIDS-fighting journey from UN to Harvard and Ford Foundation in Beijing

• The “unfinished business” of health reform in China

• A gaping void in global health aid

• The missing civil society

Joan’s AIDS-fighting journey from UN to Harvard and Ford Foundation in Beijing

Leo: Joan, to get us started, what’s up with the poster behind you?

I began my career in China working for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) from 1980 to ‘84. One of our big projects — and a big reason that Deng Xiaoping invited the UNFPA into China — was a scientific census to get a proper count of the Chinese population.

One of the goals in the early ‘80s, at the beginning of the reform and opening-up period, was to quadruple the GDP [per capita] by the year 2000. In order to do that, you needed to know the denominator, which was the total population size.

It was a really interesting time to be in China, right after the Cultural Revolution. Many people were traumatised, and distrusted foreigners — especially Americans. Those early days were pretty isolating. After the trial of the Gang of Four, there was a collective “opening-up” — emotionally, and in terms of more people coming in, more activities happening, and people being more relaxed.

I wasn’t working on HIV/AIDS then. There was little discussion or even acknowledgement. Those were still the early years of the HIV epidemic globally. China said “we don’t have any HIV/AIDS” for the longest time, until the epidemic exploded among injecting drug users in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in Southwest China, in the Golden Triangle area in Yunnan bordering Laos and Myanmar.

I left UNFPA in 1984 to do my doctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health. I got involved in the global HIV/AIDS response, managing a project on sex workers and HIV Prevention in Thailand, Mexico, and Ethiopia with the AIDS and Reproductive Health Network at the Harvard School of Public Health. That was a collection of epidemiologists and social scientists from around the world. I was also consulting to the WHO Global AIDS programme in Africa.

By the time I went back to China in 1996, for the Ford Foundation, I was aware of the exploding AIDS epidemic in China and the need to get organised quickly in order for it not to get out of control — even though China was in full denial. I started working with the donor community there — UNAIDS, and with several of the other donors, like DFID, that were meeting together as a donor group — to try to mobilise the Chinese on what was going on with AIDS and put in place effective prevention programmes.

Ruby: As one of the few people on the ground in the ‘80s and ‘90s, could you share with us what it was like? What kinds of partnerships and conversations were possible? What were the challenges?

The ‘80s were early days for the reform and opening-up period. The donor community was pretty small — it was mainly the diplomatic community. Few U.N. agencies were represented in China.

I traveled a lot for UNFPA in the early ‘80s. We had about twenty projects. We had a project with UNESCO on sex education in middle schools. I traveled to 10 middle schools in rural counties around China, in Hunan and Shandong and Hubei. Often, I was the first foreigner anybody had seen in a long time.

We did a lot of good work, and I made many good friends at the ministry level, with people who went into more senior roles and with whom I reconnected when I came back for the Ford Foundation in 1996. That allowed me to start with trusted relationships on some of the Ford Foundation projects that helped move China forward in many ways.

It was a different period of time, when China was receptive to development assistance. That may not be true for the Ford Foundation today, but at that time we were warmly welcomed. I made many grants — small grants, $20,000 or less — that were highly impactful in China. A small amount of money went a long way. I had a large budget — probably $2, $3 million a year — and was able to bid on more. It was a rich time for the Ford Foundation as well.

Ruby: When you say the China side was receptive, can you describe what that was like? How did they speak with you? What kinds of partnerships were you building?

I came in as the second programme officer for my portfolio at the Ford Foundation. The reproductive health programme was gaining steam globally. There was a big New York part of it and 14 field offices, many of which had reproductive health programmes. It was in the years leading up to the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (ICPD) in 1994, which was a significant every-ten-years global population and development conference.

The Ford Foundation’s China Office opened in 1988. The reproductive health portfolio began in the early 1990s because of the one-child policy and the need to look at reproductive health and rights within the population policy. That was a lot of what my portfolio was about. I also began the work on HIV/AIDS.

Ruby: After working for the U.N., you left China and came back to work for the Ford Foundation, an American philanthropy organisation. What were the differences between those two organisations, and how did Chinese counterparts receive you differently as a result of who you represented?

At the Ford Foundation, in those years, nobody really questioned the judgment of the programme officers, who had been selected for their expertise. It was a great job. We had a lot of independence to decide how to move on our issues based on our own programme strategy.

That’s not true anymore. It has changed a lot over the subsequent years. In that sense, I was probably in the golden period of the Ford Foundation in China. Now it’s much more centralised and organised, with a different approval process. But the U.N. was nothing like that — the U.N. is a big bureaucracy and works directly with a government counterpart for every project.

Leo: I can’t help but hear echoes from history. There is a long tradition of Americans doing health-related work in China, from Peter Parker building the eye hospital in Guangzhou in the 19th century, to Yale’s Xiangya medical school and hospital and the Rockefeller family founding the Peking Union Medical College. Did you see yourself as part of this historical lineage?

I did know a lot about it, because I was a “China wonk” before becoming a global health person. I did two degrees in Chinese studies and then I did a doctorate in public health. I’ve written quite a bit about the Chinese health system and medical history, including the Rockefeller Foundation — which incidentally funded my PhD research. I felt like I was evolving in a tradition.

Ford was the first foundation to establish a field office in China in the late ‘80s — predating the Gates Foundation by 12 years or more. We played an interesting role in that evolution of health assistance. Ford was focused on community-based approaches, including the development of civil society and an NGO community.

It was an open period. In the 1990s, China allowed the development of civil society. We were explicitly building — with government support — a set of genuine civil society actors on women’s rights. There were many women’s NGOs that were established with the support and assistance of the Ford Foundation in preparation for the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995. Those became some of the leading women’s rights organisations in China.

Similarly, in the HIV/AIDS field, my portfolio played an important role in building groups like the China Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS and the Positive People’s Network — those were patients, HIV-infected people that were playing a role according to the UN/AIDS GIPA Principle of “greater involvement of people living with AIDS” so that the affected communities were at the table for discussion. And we helped connect that group in China with the global network of people living with HIV/AIDS.

A lot of the work over the years was connecting the transnational civil society networks, sending Chinese organisations to the regional AIDS or women’s conferences, and then connecting those global civil society actors with the new organisations in China for strategy, for networking. That still exists even though many of those organisations are no longer in China because of the 2016 Foreign NGO law.

We were also working with academic researchers to fund important behavioural research on HIV/AIDS — about what was happening with the public emergence of a gay men’s community, and about HIV/AIDS and sex workers. We funded a lot of the behavioural research at Renmin University — the Institute for Research on Gender and Sexuality, Pan Suiming’s group (China’s leading sociologist and sexologist). The fabulous set of studies that came out of that were influential in shaping the HIV response in China.

And we worked directly with the government, with the Ministry of Health. We worked in partnership with UNAIDS and other organisations on the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS and TB. We’d sit at a table: the donor community with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention — China’s CDC — and draft the Global Fund proposals. It was a collaborative effort to get more money into China in the early 2000s to address the AIDS epidemic.

The policy changed in 2003 after SARS. That was largely a result of the donors working with the National Center for AIDS Prevention and Control at the Chinese CDC to take advantage of the post-SARS environment, so that China need not be in denial about the AIDS epidemic and could urgently put in place a prevention and treatment programme.

When the AIDS epidemic moved from Southwest China into Central China — Henan and the surrounding provinces — in the 1990s through a paid blood donation scheme, a lot of villagers were infected with AIDS and passed it on to their kids. It left a lot of AIDS orphans. It was a time of denial. When the people who were getting infected with HIV/AIDS were not just stigmatised drug users or gay men, it exploded into the open and became a catalyst for the policy change in 2003.

The “unfinished business” of health reform in China

Ruby: Joan, you mentioned HIV as a catalyst. Could you talk more about that? HIV/AIDS has been framed as a kind of “pivot point” for China’s health system reform, forcing it to confront civil society and transparency and rights in new ways. Whether the stigma or the disease itself, what has made AIDS different from other health crises in China?

It forced the government to not just treat it as a medical issue. That was the story of AIDS globally — you had UNAIDS come into being, coordinating all the other U.N. development agencies around the social determinants of health and creating an enabling environment for the AIDS response.

There were debates about access to essential medicine — about providing life-saving antiretroviral drugs to the people who were dying of AIDS in Africa — that were resolved around the late ‘90s by global actors and pharmaceutical companies.

The enabling environment issue — the way in which stigma affects people self-identifying and coming forward for testing and treatment — got on the global screen for the first time. Along with U.N. General Assembly meetings and the creation of the Global Fund for HIV, AIDS, TB, you had this active agency, UNAIDS, that put AIDS on the map and kept it on the map.

We saw echoes of that in the pandemic. There should have been some more lessons learned from the AIDS epidemic — the discussion of “you can’t just treat this as a medical or a tech fix.” You’ve got to look at how to create an enabling environment.

And about civil society: sex workers, gay men, drug users — you need people who are representatives of those groups to be able to actually reach their constituencies. You need community-based organisations made up of like people to reach and access those communities with HIV prevention, messaging, and technologies, and to get people into testing and treating.

HIV is a chronic disease these days, especially now that there are once-a-month or once-a-year injectables. We’re moving quickly toward making it a manageable chronic disease, but the first step for getting people to test and treat is to get stigmatised and marginalised communities to reach out through peer messaging and peer approaches.

That’s why civil society was and remains important in the AIDS response. We see that the new wave in China is young gay men, who are not being reached with HIV prevention messaging. Which is tragic, because treatment is free and available. How do you get the International Labour Organization to work to protect labour rights for people with HIV and hepatitis? Those efforts through other sectors didn’t really happen until the AIDS epidemic. Why do people not self-identify? It’s because they don’t want to lose their job.

I left China in 2001, and I felt my “unfinished business” was to work on getting all those international best practices in place in China. The AIDS Public Policy Training Project was very much that. I had a team of ten faculty members at Harvard, working with a counterpart faculty in China, where we were doing training at the municipal and provincial level for government officials and multi-sectoral groups about these policies and practices for the HIV response.

Leo: It’s astonishing looking back and realising how long the government welcomed and allowed foreign NGOs in China. The Chinese government’s Foreign NGO Law around 2016 was the end of a two-decade period of openness.

If we’re trying to get into the minds of your Chinese counterparts, especially those in government, why did they come to allow this whole field of uncontrolled foreign actors working with activists and civic-minded Chinese who are not necessarily the most obedient to the state? What was the logic there? How come this whole field got to take off for as long as they did?

During that early period of 2000 to 2010 — speaking specifically about HIV/AIDS — the government recognised two things.

One, that they needed the peer groups and the NGOs to reach the affected groups. Once the AIDS program was put in place, starting in 2003, they couldn’t do it without access to the communities that were at the most at risk for HIV/AIDS. That required engaging with these civil society groups, no matter how much they didn’t like them. It was a pragmatic recognition. That’s the story of the AIDS epidemic everywhere, not just in China.

The other part — which is more important — was to get the money from donors and the development assistance. They had to do it. The Global Fund had a requirement for civil society representation. Even if they had to fake it, they had to do it in order to get the money.

But there was a genuine understanding — certainly by the bodies that were developed during that period of time. The State Council AIDS Working Committee Office, the SCAWCO, was a progressive organisation made up of people who knew what the global experience was, and knew what they needed to do in order to get on the right side of the AIDS epidemic.

The only USAID money in China was for AIDS, which was a huge amount of money and required civil society representation. I can’t remember how many rounds of Global Fund money came into China, but it all had an explicit requirement for civil society. The China Society for AIDS Prevention and Control — or whatever the para-statal NGO was — acted as the umbrella agency to receive the money, and then distributed it to the smaller, “real” NGOs. It worked to some degree.

There were other organisations I worked closely with, including a group called Friends Exchange, started by a doctor in Qingdao, Shandong province. It was a magazine for gay men that had been mimeographed and distributed since before the AIDS epidemic. It was the only organising body for gay men in China, and it had a lot of HIV prevention information in it.

An outside organisation that funded a lot of work on HIV for men who had sex with men, called Barry and Martin’s Trust, also came into China and started supporting the Friends Exchange network. Then Ford Foundation took it up and it became an official publication. In a way it was embraced by the government, because it became an important access point for an important community that needed to be reached.

It was a golden period before the NGO law came. Since the political leadership started evolving around 2012 or so, there has been much more of a reflective process of the role and risk of civil society in funding the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe.

The current leadership in China reasserted its distrust for civil society and its potential for peaceful evolution. It came out with a set of don’ts, which included civil society and rule of law and many other buzzwords that closed down the space for the kinds of rich activity that happened with the HIV/AIDS organizations during the late ‘90s and the early 2000s.

A gaping void in global health aid

Ruby: I wanted to build on that — this changing global health/international development landscape. In my last podcast episode, I spoke with Sid Chatterjee, who’s the UNRCO for China. He talked about how the U.N. engages with China today, which is different from when you started with UNFPA, or later with the Ford Foundation. How do you reflect on your past and think about this current engagement?

I do think that the China of the 1980s that I arrived in working for the UNFPA is a completely different country than the China of 2025. You can no longer do any of the stuff we did. It’s a changed political environment. Many of those organisations still exist, but they don’t have the foreign partners and they certainly don’t have foreign funding. Many of the donors exited China, because they felt that Africa or other places needed donor assistance more than China did.

China has come up. It is middle-income, with lots of cash reserves, and it is a development donor itself. China has adequate resources to fund its own health and development programmes. But that doesn’t mean China doesn’t need technical assistance to improve what it’s doing and how that money is delivered.

I regretted what I saw happen in the early 2000s, when all the donors either reframed their programmes as “China for the world.” The U.N. agencies, the Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation all reframed their own portfolios so that it wasn’t about “China for China,” but about what China could do for the world. Yet there are a lot of unfinished agendas in China to say the least, including in the HIV/AIDS world.

China is an active global donor through the Belt and Road, especially during the COVID pandemic, making its vaccines available to many countries in the world. It has a lot of really educated public health professionals who’ve been educated abroad, educated in China — Tsinghua, Beida (Peking University), Fudan — who’ve worked at global agencies like the WHO and come back. China has a lot of its own health expertise, and is extending its own power out there in the world, especially to Africa.

But I do think there are continuing challenges — the NGO law, the weakening of the U.N. system in this current geopolitical moment. The U.N. is engaged with China, but the global system has changed so much in the last ten years. It’s harder to collaborate on global issues.

To some degree, the U.N. and the multilateral system are engaged with China, but the U.S. certainly isn’t, and Europe less so as well, as the world aligns around big powers and new conflicts. It’s harder to get the collaboration we need globally for pandemics or anything else.

With the demise of USAID, I worry deeply about a resurgent HIV/AIDS epidemic. Many foundations and big donors have stepped up to fill some of the gaps on the most important issues, like immunisation and parts of the PEPFAR program. But USAID was the biggest donor. It provided $12 billion of global development assistance for health. The next biggest donor was the Gates Foundation with $1.2 billion — it’s an order of ten at least. The absence of that money in the global space is hugely impactful.

I worry about what this means in sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the organisations have been dismantled that are the frontline of providing HIV/AIDS care — prevention of mother-to-child transmission, antiretroviral treatment, and working with young women who are at risk of AIDS because of the social determinants of health and the lack of an enabling environment that supports them refusing risky sex.

I just worry about the world right now.

Leo: You mentioned the dismantling of the American aid system under the current administration. Trump complains that it hasn’t been good for American soft power, and so we might as well just dismantle aid because it’s not bringing in political perks.

As China looks at this, I can see them thinking: given all that’s happened, maybe it’s not a good idea to do humanitarian aid; better to just focus on the soft power piece. The U.S. is stepping away, but is China going to step in and take the same role that was once filled by Western development aid and development professionals? What would a China-led global development landscape look like?

I don’t think China is going to fill the void in the global space. It’s transactional to some degree.

The term “soft power” has many meanings. People look at the PEPFAR program, in particular, as an extension of American soft power because it was providing a huge amount of money for AIDS relief for sub-Saharan Africa. You could say it was in the U.S.’s interest to prevent the explosion of AIDS in Africa in terms of global stability. But that was kind of a secondary issue. It was still much more of a humanitarian effort.

Global health assistance is unlike other soft power — like Hollywood or the transmission of ideas and values through the media. Global health assistance is humanitarian aid first and foremost, and I come to it in my career very much as a health social justice person. I’m not an international relations realist person who’s looking at “what do you get in return from the geopolitical point of view?”

But this does to some degree shape the way governments approach it. Certainly, Trump doesn’t see any value in it. But that’s wrong. China is playing a role on the humanitarian side. But it is also building up its own credibility and importance in the global space, especially as the U.S. recedes, providing money to U.N. agencies like the WHO. It’s not making up for the U.S. shortfall, but making a significant contribution, and also trying to play a role in bilateral development assistance on key issues like with the Africa CDC or malaria — always with the interest of China in the first place.

We’re in a complicated world. A lot of development assistance money has gone into defense because of the potential for war in Europe. Many of the big donors — Great Brittain, France, other places — are all shifting funding from health, education, charity programmes, or humanitarian programmes into defense budgets. USAID has gone away, and the U.N. system is taxed, so there’s just a lot less money available for development assistance. The golden age of global health is over. There’s no question about it.

I watched not enough money go into global health for much of my career. And then the HIV/AIDS epidemic shifted the donor space in a massive way so that much more attention was paid to global health and it spilled over into things like immunisation programmes and maternal and child health. Those days are over, and that money is going to have to come from somewhere else.

The foundations are stepping up to some degree to fund GAVI — the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations — and putting money into some of the other key assistance programmes. But the money that we saw over the last decades is never going to be the same, in my opinion. Governments are being pressured to fund more of that out of their own domestic health budgets. It’s a changed world.

The missing civil society

Ruby: You mentioned that you’re deeply worried about the resurgence of a new HIV epidemic. Could you talk about HIV in China today? Because it’s not solved. What parts of the issues are enduring, whether that’s stigma, financing, data? Which responses and solutions have endured? And because diseases have no borders, what does this mean for the rest of the world?

The HIV/AIDS response in China is a success story in many ways, because once the policy changed in 2003, in the post-SARS period, you had these advocates waiting in the wing to make the case for transparency and direct action — and it happened. The government put in place a free testing and treatment programme — and included a certain amount of poverty alleviation and care for orphans — that has endured.

The treatment is not optimal. It’s not the most advanced medication, or the easiest to tolerate, but it is life-saving. China can do that. They can negotiate with the drug companies and get better medicines and medications.

But where’s the new wave of the epidemic coming from? It’s the young gay men. Everywhere in the world, there’s a certain complacency among young gay men about HIV/AIDS, because they’ve grown up in a world where there is treatment, and they can say they don’t think they’re going to die of AIDS. But you don’t want people getting infected with HIV.

There are things that China should be doing: rolling out full-scale actions to prevent people getting infected, but this isn’t happening effectively. There’s been a loss of attention away from HIV. China has the resources and the capacity and is providing the drugs, but they need more people to get tested and into treatment.

Globally, we’re looking at the possibility of a resurgence, especially in Africa, because of the weakening of the organisations there with the loss of development aid — and, probably, the reluctance of African countries to put the necessary resources into it through their own national health budgets.

Ruby: You’ve worked in the field in China, and you’ve gone back home to the U.S., teaching as well as running programmes. How did people back in the U.S. view your work in China? Were there any different perspectives or biases?

The moment for me was post-COVID, in April 2023, when I was planning to go back to China after three years of Zoom life with my colleagues at Tsinghua. The geopolitics of the relationship with China and the U.S. had changed so much that people said, “Aren’t you scared to go back? Aren’t you worried?”

Over my career since 1980, I’ve lived in China for probably fifteen-plus years and gone back probably two, three, four, five times a year, every year. It’s my second home. Beijing is so familiar to me.

I wasn’t the least bit scared! I was looking forward to it. And it was so normal when I got there. But the whole environment has changed. Whereas before it was kind of cool that I was working on China, now it’s weird, because there’s so much anti-China sentiment in the United States. The view of China has changed so dramatically. Now there is much more suspicion and distrust.

Ruby: Yes, suspicion, even on global health technical collaborations.

Colleagues are more reluctant to engage with China, because they feel the risks that it brings to their institutions in the United States, or potentially to their professional careers in terms of being able to work with the U.S. government. That’s less so since Trump came to office than during the Biden administration. Things are softening, but there is still a reluctance to engage with China in any area of science and technology, because the security overlay is so intense and people fear the risk to future funding.

Leo: Despite the one-party state, China today looks a lot like America. It is a market-based system; China’s CDC is modelled after the American CDC; China’s National Medical Product Administration is modeled after the FDA; the lawyers are trained in the American legal tradition; Tsinghua was founded by Americans; and the stock market comes from the New York Stock Exchange.

This process of transformation from a Soviet model to an American model happened during the span of your career, one step, one grant, one project at a time. How much of China today is the product of American efforts?

The U.S. — the CDC, the NIH — trained up the Chinese health science side of things to an enormous degree: A lot of collaborative research grants, a lot of CDC-supported programmes such as the US CDC GAP (Global AIDS Programme). We trained up the China CDC and the Epidemic Intelligence Service programme. The Chinese system looks a lot like the American health agencies in important and good ways. The U.S. has been at the apex of health and medical research for decades. China has benefited from that.

We partnered with China to make China’s global health system better, and they’re probably going to just leave us in the dust because of all the science and technology funding that China provides now, and which we’re not providing at the moment. We’re giving up our lead position if the lack of funding continues.

Leo: Earlier you mentioned that there is an “unfinished agenda” that many the global health professionals feel out of China over the past ten to fifteen years. What is the unfinished agenda, the parts China still hasn’t gotten to, and would it be in their own interest to get to them?

It’s the civil society piece. The contributions of the community groups and voices in the governance process are not optional. It’s a requirement for doing better, more targeted work, and for getting support from the communities that you need to reach. We saw it with the COVID response: the protests, the pushback against the Shanghai lockdowns and things like that. That piece needs to be part and parcel of the way we approach global health.

There should be a real acknowledgement of the enabling environment issues, which comes from more multi-sectoral engagement. Those are instrumental for lasting and effective health interventions. The important role of NGOs in civil society — I have seen it in my work, especially in the HIV/AIDS space.

The other part of it is the global collaboration agenda, especially between the U.S. and China. You can have a certain amount of global collaboration without the U.S., but the two biggest actors in the world, with the biggest influence and reach at this point, need to be working together on the next pandemic, for example, or dealing with other types of risks that are going to spill over into the health area.

We need to find a way to get back to the table on these key humanitarian issues for which the whole world is potentially at risk. COVID was the prime example of why we need to be working together on emerging infectious diseases. We need to be working together with China, with the leading virologists in the world, on the One Health agenda. We have to find a way to get past the geopolitical tension. My hope for the future is that we can move to more collaboration on global health risks between the U.S., China, and the rest of the world.

Ruby: One final question for the 1st of December 2025. The first ever World AIDS Day was in 1987 — 38 years ago. You’ve worked through many World AIDS Days! Can you share any memories of how you celebrated this day, wherever you were — whether in China, the U.S., or somewhere else in the world?

It’s always been a big deal. In my professional career, I’ve participated in many programmes on World AIDS Day, with lots of different people at different tables. In China, in the early 2000s heyday of donor collaborations on AIDS, everybody would convene. We would have a huge public event in Zhongshan Park or someplace like that, with posters and activities, which everybody participated in. And I feel that these days it has way less visibility and prominence than it used to.

It’s become more routine. It’s become more just like any other disease. That “exceptionalism” of AIDS — it’s good that it’s not exceptional anymore, more mainstream. But I feel that within the public consciousness, even if it’s not a global calamity, we still have to pay attention to it and be aware of it.

Ruby: The paradox of public health — when you’re healthy and well, it’s silence. But when you’re ill, there’s noise. That is the difficulty with prevention in health care.

In my earliest days working with the UNAIDS office in China, in the late 1990s, I was close with the two people who were fabulous conveners of the donor community in China: Emil Fox and Sun Gang. We would regularly go off for beers and unpack the AIDS response in China — all the different actors, missteps, and things that weren’t happening before the AIDS response took off in 2003.

My most memorable recollections are of sitting around a table with those beers, just trying to spitball what needed to happen. And to the credit of them and to others, many of those things mobilised over the next 10 years to put in place an effective AIDS response in China.

I would like to finish by saying that what I’m doing now — educating the next generation — is just as important, or more important, than anything I’ve done in my life. I’m going to exit the scene. But it’s people like you, Ruby and Liu, who are going to take forward this important work in global health and U.S.-China relations in China and the world, including through our programme, the Schwarzman Scholars Programme. We need to build up the next generation of activists who understand history and can engage on their own social justice paths.

Recommended reads

• Jennifer Ryan, Lincoln C. Chen and Anthony J. Saich, 2014, Philanthropy for Health in China, Indiana University Bloomington

• Interview with Dr. Gao Yaojie, Asia Society on YouTube

• Dr. Wang Shuping on “What Happened to People who Spoke Out About HIV/AIDS in China” via David Cowhig on Substack

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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To some, it is the defensive backbone of Western security and civilisation, the agency that quietly but effectively safeguards the liberal world order against the encroaching threat of totalitarianism. To others, it is the clandestine conspirator that sabotages, disrupts, and overthrows foreign governments, turning their countries into failed states and right-wing dictatorships. Yes, I’m talking about none other than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the mere utterance of which sends shivers down many a spine.

For most of the Cold War, the CIA focused on the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Yet, China gradually attained greater attention as the country exited its Maoist isolation under Deng’s Reform and Opening-Up. One of the CIA analysts tasked with following Chinese elite politics in the 1980s was Dr. Alice Miller, now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University. She previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Between 1974 and 1990, Dr. Miller worked at the CIA as a senior analyst in Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics and as division chief, supervising analysis on China, North Korea, Indochina, and Soviet policy in East Asia. She has edited and contributed to China Leadership Monitor at Hoover Institution since 2001. She was formerly H. Lyman Miller before her transition in 2006.

In this interview excerpt, which was edited for clarity and brevity, we cover her educational and professional life before and during her tenure at the CIA. Widely regarded as one of the most astute observers of Chinese elite politics in the United States, Dr. Miller struck me as humble, curious, and studious. She often goes into impressive detail describing events and her work, which is a real treat for the interviewer. I hope you will feel the same.

Enjoy.

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• ‘I’m pretty sure people watched where I went’

• ‘Everybody spies on everybody’

• How the CIA dissected Chinese state media

• Old-school open-source intelligence

• Decoding China’s fast-changing ‘80s

‘I’m pretty sure people watched where I went’

Could you talk about your first trip to China?

I’ve only had one trip to the People’s Republic of China, in 1981. I worked for the better part of a summer in the U.S. Embassy. There was a program that rotated people from other parts of the U.S. government into the embassy so their foreign service officers could go on home leave. I was a political counselor for a couple of months. I got to talk to Chinese officials, but also got to just go around Beijing and visit other cities.

It was fascinating. In 1981, the country had just begun the agricultural reforms that gave families the right to lease out tracts of land. They could make their own planting decisions and then sell a lot of their produce in open markets.

People were starting to do things that had been suppressed for a long time. I remember colleagues in the embassy would find that their western fashion magazines would disappear for short periods of time. The Chinese would copy the fashions in the magazines and then quietly return them. Deng Xiaoping had authorized light industries to produce sewing machines. So people were starting to make their own clothes and no longer wear the old drab Mao suits.

It was a place that was coming alive. It was fun to watch.

Before you went to China, you already had experience researching Chinese history and politics.

I started learning Chinese in 1962, in my freshman year in college. I had spent a year in Taiwan, some time in Hong Kong, and a year in Japan, but had never gotten to the mainland. I spent 19 years studying a country that I couldn’t get to. It was quite moving to get to finally go.

At the time, your regular job was working for the CIA as a China analyst. Were there any sensitivities around going to Beijing? Was the government afraid, watching you?

No, there was an understanding between the two governments that a certain number of people from the CIA could go, and Beijing knew who we all were. On my first day, they searched my room and went through all my belongings. I expected that. I didn’t have anything sensitive anyway. I didn’t care. And I’m pretty sure people watched where I went in the city. Beijing in those days had, at all the major intersections, kiosks with policemen, and they could record who was going which way. But there wasn’t ever any real trouble. It was a good time in U.S.-China relations.

What kind of Chinese officials did you talk to?

I talked to people in the propaganda department and in the party school. I presented American positions at the foreign ministry, and talked to people at People’s Daily. In late June 1981, the sixth plenum of the 11th party congress was held, where the Central Committee passed a long reevaluation of Mao.

A colleague at the embassy and I asked to talk to People’s Daily about it after the communiqué came out. We got an appointment with the head of the theory section and we were prepared for a rather short and not very informative discussion, but instead we spent two hours there and blow by blow he went through how the resolution was put together and the meaning of certain parts. We were just shocked.

Gary, the guy I was with, said, “Do you mind if we take notes?” The theory section head said, “Oh, sure. Take notes.” So we took extensive notes. We were going to go back to the embassy and write up a cable to send to Washington on what we’d learned. But it was funny. The next day People’s Daily had a full page article that laid out all the same stuff. So he was just giving us a preview.

‘Everybody spies on everybody’

Were there any pivotal childhood experiences that foreshadowed your interest in politics, in international relations, in China?

My father got called up during the Korean War. In our backyard there was this patch of sand where the grass wouldn’t grow. When my father was around, he told my brother and me not to dig in there. But we were little kids and wanted to dig. So when he went away for the war, naturally my brother and I would go and play in the sand pit. My grandfather came by one day and said, “You know, if you dig a hole deep enough, you can get to China.” I thought that was a wonderful idea.

There was a TV show called “Terry and The Pirates,” which was about two American commercial pilots who worked for a Chinese company flying airplanes. Their boss was a Chinese, whom I thought was the most fascinating figure because he was dressed in a traditional gown. This would’ve been in the 1930s or maybe ‘40s. The best part was that he would use a writing brush when keeping accounts. The show was essentially racist in its undertones. But it was fascinating.

And my parents had an encyclopedia. One of the first entries was for alphabets and different writing systems. They’d show examples of Chinese characters, and I said, “Gee, how do you get meaning out of that?”

Your father wanted you to study physics, ideally at MIT. You ended up going to Princeton and majored in Chinese history. Did you enjoy Princeton?

Yes, I did. I was a bit of an outsider — I didn’t go to a prep school. But intellectually it was just a fabulous place. There were great courses on almost everything taught by really good people.

Everybody had to satisfy two years of language requirement. I looked through the course catalog and said, “Oh, elementary Chinese, that’s interesting. I’ll try that.” That’s how I got started in Chinese — just curiosity.

By the end of my sophomore year, it was time to pick a major. I’d satisfied enough requirements to major in physics as I had originally planned, but I’d also been taking courses in Chinese history and language. It was so interesting that I decided, “I’m just going to do that.”

My father was disappointed I didn’t go to MIT, now he was disappointed I was going to study Chinese history. I would call my parents up once a month to tell them I’m still alive. My father would usually answer the telephone and say, “Chinese studies, what are you going to do with that?” I had no good answer for him. When I finally finished graduate school in 1974, I called up my parents and told them, “I finished and I got a job as an analyst for the CIA and it paid this amount of money.” My dad said, “Gee, China studies, great field. How’d you get into it?”

What was it like to be in college during the Vietnam War?

That time was tense. The call-ups for the army began in 1965. In our senior year, everybody had to think hard about what they’re going to do. Many people went to graduate school or law school or medical school, because they’d get a deferment. I thought I would probably go into the Navy to get my military service over. I figured I wouldn’t be fighting in Vietnam. I’d probably be sitting on a boat off the China shore listening to PLA radio broadcasts.

But I had injured my knees playing sports. I was rejected by the military. I knew I wasn’t going to be drafted about six weeks before graduation. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t applied to any graduate schools — I didn’t have the money. I went to talk to [Princeton professor Frederick] Mote and he said, “Well, let me talk to some people. How’d you like to work in Washington?”

A little while later I went down to Philadelphia and into an office building up on the eighth floor in a nondescript office with no name plaque, and it turned out I was meeting a CIA recruiter. For two years between my undergraduate years and graduate school I worked for the CIA as a translator.

Did you have reservations about joining the CIA? Now the CIA has the reputation of subverting foreign governments and destabilizing countries.

Not much of that was known in those days. There was a positive view of the CIA.

When did it become controversial?

After the mid-‘70s, at the end of the Vietnam War. There was a lot of national criticism of the American involvement in Vietnam and a broader evaluation of American policies that got us into the war, and with that, criticism of the CIA. And, in 1975, there were Senate hearings which looked into what the CIA had done. It brought attention to coups in Iran and Guatemala and other activities, and gave the agency a much more negative reputation.

Some of it I don’t really apologize for. It’s a competition in international affairs. The basic rule of thumb is everybody spies on everybody. The U.S. and the Israelis have an agreement: we won’t spy on each other. Do you think the Israelis don’t spy on the United States? Don’t bet on it.

There are all sorts of things that I wouldn’t have favored — overthrowing the Iranian Shah, the coup in Guatemala in 1954. But on the other hand, there are things where, if the U.S. had power to change things in a positive direction, I don’t have a problem with it. And certainly China is trying to do things to influence the United States in subversive ways. It’s the real world.

And so after graduation, you worked for the CIA translating Chinese newspapers.

Red Guard newspapers, dazibao (posters with political messages), and things like that.

How did you get those?

Chinese people would collect all the newspapers into bundles and smuggle them into Hong Kong, and the agency’s agents in Hong Kong would buy them.

Did your work touch on the Vietnam War?

China was regarded as one of the big backers of North Vietnam. Also, this was still a period of containment against China. China was a ferocious enemy, and we had to understand what China was up to. They spent money to get any information they could. You have to remember that, at the time, there were no Americans in China to speak of. There were no diplomatic relations. American law said it was illegal for Americans to go to China.

There was the Hinton family.

Yeah, you can count those on one hand. William Hinton, Carmelita, and so forth. Edgar Snow went once in a while. But that’s pretty much it. So to understand what was going on in China, what the United States had was China’s media. There was a certain amount of diplomatic gossip that we could get in places like Japan and other countries who did have some people in China. And the main station was in Hong Kong, which was British in those days. They could talk to people who came into Hong Kong from the mainland to ask about what’s going on. And that’s pretty much it.

How the CIA dissected Chinese state media

You then went to graduate school, and afterward returned to the CIA to become a China analyst.

I finished my graduate work. My dissertation was on Manchu politics in the 1660s and ‘70s. And in those days the academic job market had dried up. I could find one-year jobs replacing professors on leave, but those would be in places that didn’t have a Chinese library. I was in Washington, I still had friends in the CIA, so I called up one friend, and he said, “Let me check out and see what’s available.” And I got hired, this time, to be an analyst.

Was it difficult transitioning from academia to intelligence analysis?

No. I knew what it was like to work there. I had to learn the particular methods that we used to analyze, in my case, the Chinese media.

What’s the key methodological difference?

Because Chinese media are controlled by the party, the basic assumption is that what’s expressed in the media reflects the policies, attitudes, and approaches of the Communist Party leadership. By comparing what they say in one instance with similar instances in the past, you can see whether or not their treatment of that topic has changed. Then you figure out why it changed, and try to infer backwards, from what they say to what they think.

It was the method used to analyze Soviet politics from the ‘20s, then during World War II to analyze German and Italian and Japanese media, and then, during the Cold War, all of the communist countries.

What are the techniques, essentially? What are the tricks?

You need big files in order to compare how the treatment of any given topic changes over time. You need to know what they said before, and you need to know it accurately and comprehensively. You can’t just do it occasionally because you need to know the steps in between. We had files of leadership speeches of everybody down to provincial secretaries going back to 1949, and of People’s Daily editorials.

I can give you an example. In 1978, Guangming Ribao (Guangming Daily) published a special commentator article on the question of, “Practice is the sole criterion for truth.” It was a theoretical article that had no obvious application. But there it was on the front page, arguing on why practice has to be the criterion we use to sort out correct ideas from false ones. There was no obvious implication of that.

But then about three weeks later, Deng Xiaoping gave a speech at a conference, and he said, “How do we sort out good ideas from bad ones? We test them in practice, we take ’em out and try ’em out. And if they give good results, obviously it’s a good theory. And if they don’t, that’s a wrong theory and we discard it.” And he said, “We should apply this to Mao Zedong Thought.”

Hua Guofeng got up a couple days later and gave a different speech, and said, “Mao Zedong Thought can’t be cut up into pieces, keeping some parts and throwing the rest away. It has to be understood comprehensively and systematically.” So here we had the number one and number three leaders arguing opposite positions.

Over the rest of the months, down through the third plenum, which was in December ‘78, you could see different leaders publishing commentaries. You had this powerful split in the leadership.

Then finally, the third plenum met in December ‘78 and the plenum communiqué said that the central committee put a high premium on the discussion of practice as a sole criterion for testing truth, and said something like, “Mao Zedong never said he himself was entirely correct all the time.” That opened the way for a very different transformation of the party’s ideology that was the basis for reform. If you didn’t pay attention to the speeches and to the original articles that raised these things, you’d miss the entire argument. It could really tell you things.

That strikes me as quite similar to how the Chinese understand their own politics — analysis based on texts and tiny changes in speeches.

We always assumed that politically aware Chinese — or Russians in the Soviet Union, or East Germans in Germany — were aware how that system worked and read the media the same way. It’s a technique that transfers easily into reading your own media. Even in this country, the media are not state-controlled, but they do reflect particular interests and outlooks. It’s a method that can be broadened and it’s quite useful.

Alexander George, a Stanford political scientist during World War II, worked in that same unit. He wrote a book afterward comparing the analysis that he and others had done during the war with the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda czar, and discovered a quite high correlation between what the analysts thought and what the Germans were thinking about.

Did anyone ever check the analysis against diaries and memoirs of Chinese officials?

Yes, I used to do that. Often it would affirm what we thought, but it would supply more details, which you couldn’t possibly know by reading the newspaper.

Old-school open-source intelligence

So nowadays this would be called open-source intelligence.

That’s exactly what it was. It’s a method that has been used for decades. People don’t do it so much these days in government. The unit that I worked in doesn’t exist anymore.

State Department lawyers in the mid-‘90s said that because China had joined the Berne Convention on copyright protection in 1993, we could no longer publicly circulate information from Chinese media because it was copyrighted now and protected. That was one problem. We could still do it internally.

And policymakers decided that this is something that anybody can do. You don’t have to be rigorous about it and we don’t need translators, because we have Google Translate and so forth. It’s a mistake in my opinion.

At the time there were also scholars who were reading Chinese newspapers.

Everybody who was studying contemporary China used pretty much the same methods. The big advantage was that the institution that I worked for, part of the agency called Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS, translated virtually anything that was of interest to American policy and so forth, and published it in a daily publication called The Daily Report. There were eight of these for different regions of the world, and they were usually 70 or 80 pages long, five days a week, that had translations of anything that might conceivably be of interest. We also transcribed transmissions from China in Xinhua English, for example, or Beijing radio broadcasts in English.

It was comprehensive and it was publicly available, and so all the people in universities used it. If you go back and read the footnotes in academic works on Chinese politics and foreign policy, you’ll see they constantly cited Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, such and such a date, page such and such.

What was considered of interest? I presume the FBIS did not translate everything in newspapers.

Anything that was of foreign policy or military interest; Chinese political affairs down to even local levels, depending on the situation; economic information; not so much cultural information, it didn’t seem to be that politically relevant unless there was a controversy, like Hai Rui Baguan. People would be interested not so much in the play itself, but rather why people were arguing about it.

What was the curation process?

That was the biggest part of FBIS. We had about 10 or 12 field bureaus around the world that collected media information from virtually every part of the world. Those bureaus had a staff of linguists who translated the languages that we were receiving back into English, a staff of editors who would go through to make sure the translations were smooth enough, and then it would all come back and be published in The Daily Report.

The unit I was in was called the analysis group, and it was a much smaller unit of 30 to 35 people total who analyzed all of the communist countries. There were four or five of us on China, a lot more on the Soviet Union.

There were central main analytical offices. Their work was to analyze Chinese politics or Chinese foreign policy using all the available sources. And that would be not just propaganda analysis, but also diplomatic gossip, whatever spies could find out, and other means such as electronic and satellite surveillance pictures. We were one component.

The curators were really the editors, who assembled The Daily Report or monitored the selection of stuff that got translated in the field bureaus. We provided regular input on what was important and what wasn’t from the broader interests of Washington.

Where was the field bureau? In Taiwan?

No, there were three that monitored China: One in Okinawa, Japan, one in Seoul, Korea, and one in Bangkok, Thailand. Okinawa did most of the stuff on China. The one in Bangkok did some of the broadcasts to Southeast Asian insurgencies that were supported by China — the Voice of the People of Thailand, the Voice of the Malayan Revolution, things like that.

We eventually had a bureau in Hong Kong. They would listen to the radio and TV broadcasts and so forth, and translate what was interesting or useful, and then telegraph it back into Washington.

These field offices, I presume, are embedded within the consulates?

Not necessarily. But they were there under agreement with the host government. And there was also a division of labor with the BBC. That went back to World War II and just continued all the way through the Cold War. They had a translation unit.

When China opened up, did that sort of material gathering job then move to the Beijing Embassy?

None of it was done in China.

It seems easier to do it in China.

Maybe. But it was already established in those places. It would be expensive to move and the same degree of cooperation couldn’t necessarily be counted on with Beijing.

Would The Daily Report be sent to your department?

No. We got the copies of the original transmitted material before The Daily Report was assembled. The Daily Report went out to anybody who wanted it. You could subscribe publicly to it, but it also went all across the government.

So you guys got it quicker than everyone else. And you made an analysis of it. And then who was the audience?

Everybody in the government who wanted it. It went to the State Department, it went to the Pentagon, it went to NSC, everybody who’s interested.

How important overall was the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service?

It’s critical. A very high percentage of what we actually knew about what was going on in China was the open source intelligence. That’s still true, I’m pretty sure.

One of the problems today is there’s no more FBIS. So people have lost touch with this very basic stream of information that can tell you a lot if you pay attention.

Did the CIA try to recruit Chinese sources?

Oh, sure. And the Chinese try to recruit American sources. Everybody spies on everybody. It’s silly to think they don’t.

Because for a Chinese person, maybe you would go to dinner and lunch with whoever and this sort of thing is always in the background, the names and the suspicions. They’re not necessarily right, but you have a hunch. But if you’re just getting all of this purely from texts and reports, it’s hard to make sense of it all.

But all that background information, rumors, and so forth, this xiaodao xiaoxi (unofficial news), was available. It was collected by diplomats. And, in 1977 or ‘78, Hong Kong began to publish journals on Chinese affairs, Zhengming (Testimonial) and Qishi Niandai (The Seventies). The reporters would go to China to collect all those rumors and publish them. Most of it you couldn’t do much with.

Most of it’s probably rubbish.

It was. It took a while for people to discover that and some people never really did.

Could you describe the culture at the CIA?

Our office was very liberal. The ‘72 election was Nixon versus McGovern, a liberal candidate. In an office of about 35 people, I think 33 voted for McGovern.

I talked to the Soviet analysts all the time, because I thought the Soviet experience was really useful in understanding how China worked, and they were interested in what we were doing. We’d collaborate on articles on relations between Moscow and Beijing.

It was a wonderful place to work, and it was intense, because we got this steady stream of information coming in to work with, and you tried to keep up. It made it hard to take vacations because if you went away for a week, you had to read all that material.

Decoding China’s fast-changing ‘80s

It must have been an eventful time: Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, the rise of Hua Guofeng, the purge of Hua Guofeng, normalization of relations with Jimmy Carter. What were you doing and looking at during that period?

Just what Chinese leaders and Xinhua, People’s Daily said about trends in U.S.-China relations. Leaders would give speeches and it was important to take those speeches apart and figure out what was new and what they are reaffirming, those kinds of things. It was exciting. Those were really interesting times.

Did you ever look back and see how well the analysis at the time stood up?

Not systematically. But we got a lot of things right. It was, and I think was for a long time, the best source of information. There wasn’t any question about the authenticity of it. The Chinese themselves were putting it out. So you didn’t have to wonder, “Why are they telling us this? Why is this person passing on sensitive information? Can you believe them?” There were no questions like that. In the case of Chinese media, they’re their media. It was a method that was quite productive and often accurate.

Did you play any role in the normalization of relations during the Jimmy Carter administration?

Very indirectly, our office produced a stream of analysis on trends in U.S.-China relations that was fed into the NSC.

Did the NSC give you assignments?

They would tell us, “We’re interested in anything you find about this or that.” I recall Mike Oksenberg, the China person at NSC, used to come out to the headquarters of the agency and several of us would all have lunch with him and he’d talk about stuff they were interested in and what we should look for.

Did your work change after the normalization of relations?

Not very much. China and its leadership and the direction of its foreign policy was still something we were very interested in. There was a period of strong convergence of the U.S. and China on international affairs. But in the spring of 1981, the foreign minister, Huang Hua, gave a speech in which he no longer talked about all the areas in common with the United States. He talked about all the areas in conflict, and where we disagreed.

It was a shift in tone. Soon after that, Beijing began to move a little bit away from the United States, and move a little bit toward the Soviet Union. They announced the independent foreign policy line, which was a fundamental change in orientation in foreign policy, and it was signaled by these differences that we could analyze in Chinese speeches.

Did you spend the entire ‘80s working for the agency?

From ‘87 to ‘89 I was on a sabbatical. The agency had a program for what they called exceptional analysts to take some time off and work on a special project. I applied for that and got a two-year sabbatical. I was interested in the tension between Chinese scientists and the regime. This was before Fang Lizhi and people like him began to emerge, but I could already see some of these tensions arising. I used to read a journal that nobody in his right mind would read, called Ziran Bianzhengfa Tongxun — the Bulletin on Natural Dialectics.

That sounds so boring.

It was terribly boring. Guangming Ribao used to publish the tables of contents of academic journals, and I noticed they published the table of contents for the newest issue of Ziran Bianzhengfa Tongxun and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

I could just fill out a form, and it would go to the embassy’s publication procurement officer, and they would start sending it in. This was ‘87 or ‘86. It published every two months. In my spare time I started looking through it and started noticing articles that were implicitly critical of the regime, and that discussed the need for science to be free to explore without intrusion of party doctrines. Marxism claims to be the science of human affairs, and the queen of sciences that should guide everybody else in their research. But some scientists began to say, “That’s not right. Science should be free to explore.” More and more articles started to appear about this.

I applied for this sabbatical to work on that. I spent two years, until the spring of ‘89, and produced a long report that I submitted as part of the project that later became the basis for my first book, published in ‘96, called Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China.

What was your reaction when students began to protest in Tiananmen?

I was on sabbatical writing my book. I’d have CNN on all day long and they would have regular reports from Tiananmen Square. I’d go work for a while and come and look at CNN to find out what was going on. It seemed pretty obvious to me after a while that the regime would order the PLA to impose order. And so when they finally did on June 3rd, 4th, I wasn’t surprised. It was appalling, just horrible. But you could see it coming.

The whole ‘80s in China was such a dynamic, liberal era.

It was a fascinating time. I was a historian and so naturally I got all the history journals that I could from China. I noticed that journals began to publish articles on the Qin Shi Huang emperor. They would argue that while Qin Shi Huang unified China, he also made mistakes. (Qin Shi Huang was China’s first emperor. He was widely considered a tyrant.)

And then, what really got me interested: People’s Daily, on page two, which was the op-ed page in those days, had a little article that says, “We need to take a ‘one divides into two’ approach to Qin Shi Huangdi.”

Now, why in the world would the Communist Party Central Committee newspaper carry an article about Qin Shi Huang? Anybody would know they’re talking about Mao Zedong. So I wrote an analysis report on these historical articles that were preparing the ground for the party’s explicit discussion of Mao’s contributions and his mistakes that came into the 1981 history resolution.

It was all tremendously exciting. And the most challenging part was, you just have to have a solid background on what happened before to understand what’s happening now, especially in that transitional period from the death of Mao down to say, the 1982 12th party congress. Because so many people were brought back from earlier times, and if you didn’t know who they were or why they were purged to begin with…

When they launched the household responsibility system in ‘78, it was very useful to know — and a lot of people didn’t know — that same system had been used in 1961, ‘62 to try to recover from the Great Leap Forward. There was a political history to that kind of a policy. If you weren’t aware of that, you couldn’t understand what was going on, and you had to spend a lot of time reading material from earlier periods.

To me that sounds like an incredibly difficult thing to do.

For me, the Chinese leadership and also relations with the Soviet Union, those were the two topics that I was focused on. There was a division of labor among people who worked on China, and those were the areas that I worked on.

Relations with the Soviet Union were always really interesting. For me, intellectually, it was fascinating because you have two secretive systems interacting with each other in the ‘80s that were antagonistic, but they were working toward some kind of improvement in relations. And one of the enlightened policies of the agency was that if you could get permission from your supervisor, they’d give you free Russian lessons. I went and took Russian lessons so I could read Pravda, Izvestia, and Krasnaya Zvezda.

You got that good?

I needed a dictionary ready. So I could read both sides, and I talked to the Soviet analysts a lot. I shared an office with one who worked on Soviet leadership. That was really interesting, especially after Gorbachev came to power in March ‘85. It was just fascinating. It was a good job.

I resigned in June 1990 because I applied for and was given Doak Barnett’s job at Johns Hopkins SAIS. I originally thought I wanted to be an academic when I was in graduate school, so this was a chance. It was a good position.

It wasn’t an easy decision to become a full-time academic. I was going to be teaching about contemporary China based on all the work I’d done in the agency and the stuff I’d learned there. But I went to the school library to see what sort of Chinese publications they had. They did have a subscription to People’s Daily, but it came after six months by mail. It was going to be very different trying to understand what was going on in China now compared to what I was doing in the agency.

Recommended reads

• Alexander George, 1973, Propaganda Analysis, Greenwood Press

• Deng Xiaoping, 1978, Practice Is The Only Criterion For Testing Truth

• Alice Miller, 1996, Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China, University of Washington Press

• The Stanford Pride Oral History Project’s interview with Alice Miller

• China Leadership Monitor

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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Decades of Maoist communism decimated China’s spiritual life. Embodied in a personality cult, monist ideological fervor, organised political violence against non-believers, physical destruction of religious spaces and texts, and an environment of taboo and fear, the doctrine and practice of Maoism saw an unprecedented cleansing of religion in China, whether it is Islam, Christianity, Daoism, Buddhism or everything else in between and beyond.

Yet, decades of crackdown failed to eradicate religion. Rising from the ruins of Cultural Revolution, China’s religious spiritual life saw a rewakening from the 1980s onwards. Mosques, churches, temples and dagobas were rebuilt; families resumed tomb-sweeping of the deceased in traditional ceremonies; a new history was being researched and written. Observing and writing about this spiritual revival was Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specialises in the grassroots society of China. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, covering the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history.

Ian has written several renowned books, including Wildgrass, A Mosque in Munich, The Souls of China, and Sparks. He is also the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China, Stanford University’s Shorenstein prize, the Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news writing, and grants from the Open Society Foundation and Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

Today, we trace Ian’s observations of China’s spiritual revival through his book-writing from The Souls of China and Sparks, two books that I enjoyed very much last year, and would definitely recommend to anyone hoping to understand China’s grassroots movements to define and practice its own identity. We also package juicy little book-writing tips in this piece for the benefits of other aspiring writers.

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• “Couldn’t there have been one person that succeeded?”

• Writing The Souls of China

• Uncovering China’s hidden past through Sparks

• Expulsion, the ultimate fate of a China reporter

• Archiving a different China, one PDF at a time

“Couldn’t there have been one person that succeeded?”

Last time we spoke about your Pulitzer Prize-winning Falun Gong reporting. How did that and other experiences change your views on China throughout the ’90s?

The crackdown on Falun Gong made me realize that the party was still willing to use strong violence to crush a movement. That informed how I wrote my book about the 1990s, Wild Grass.

In each of the book’s three storylines, the people failed. The book was not meant to be negative. I remember Marcus Brauchli, the China editor at the Wall Street Journal, asking me, “Couldn’t there have been one person that succeeded?” I said, “This is what the reporting led me to.”

It doesn’t read negative really, despite that they all failed.

Wild Grass has three main stories. One is about farmers who sue the government to stop illegal taxation. One is about urban dwellers who sue the government to stop tearing down old Beijing. And the other is about Falun Gong, which is also about trying to petition and redress a wrong. The last line of the book is [Falun Gong practitioner] Ms. Zhang saying, “China is still trustworthy, we’re still waiting”, even though she had all these setbacks.

You could see in some ways that these people did affect policy. In the case of the farmers, the government really did eliminate those illegal taxes that the farmers argued against.

As for urban protection, of course, Chinese cities still ended up tearing down most of their old cities. But the urban preservation movement took hold, and the destruction of old Beijing has completely stopped under Xi Jinping. Maybe in that sense, the people succeeded.

In the case of Falun Gong, although it was brutally suppressed, the government ended up changing its policy toward folk religious groups, and supporting them with intangible cultural heritage — not Falun Gong, of course, because that’s totally taboo.

You could say that some of these movements succeeded, even though the cost was terribly high.

After this stint in China, you became the Wall Street Journal’s Berlin bureau chief, and following 9/11 you reported on Islamic extremism in Germany. Why did you move to Germany?

I’d been in China for seven years, and I wanted to get away for a little while. I’d lived in Germany before, and thought of Germany as my long-term home and base.

It was exciting to be there for 9/11 because three of those four pilots were radicalized in Germany. So, we were at the center, and I was in charge of much of that terrorism coverage. I had nine people that I was managing. If I had wanted to make a career in daily journalism, that was a good job, and I could have continued on.

But I realized after a while that this is not what I wanted to do. When I got to Berlin, we were staying with a friend in her apartment, and I remember sitting on the sofa writing Wild Grass there. The process of that was really satisfying. I was friends with Peter Hessler, and I was on this crash course of writing nonfiction and reading John McPhee and all these classics, and I thought, gosh, this is really what I want to do. I want to write books. I want to write magazine-style articles. But I had just accepted this big promotion to be the Germany bureau chief. So I did that, but I wanted to get out of it pretty quickly.

When did you eventually return to China?

In ‘07, the Journal applied for me to get a Chinese visa. The foreign ministry rejected it emphatically and said, “This person will never get back to China because of what he wrote about Falun Gong.”

Our editor asked them, “Is it possible for him to come in temporarily and cover something?” They said they would consider a J2 visa. A J1 is a renewable multi-entry visa; this is the one you want. With J2 visas, you come in for a limited time.

So we began this dance, which took effort on our part. The strategy was that, at the right moment, we’d have a high-level figure to speak on my behalf, and then they do it as a favor to that person. But we had to set it up ahead of time.

I remember I got my first three-day J2 visa for the Summer Davos in China, in Dalian. Then I got a five-day visa, a 10-day visa, and a two-week visa. By then, we’re already into 2008. The Olympics are coming up. China doesn’t want to look like they’re keeping foreign reporters out. They gave me almost a four-week visa to cover the Summer Olympics.

Meanwhile, I wrote a self-criticism. I remember talking about it to [China correspondent expelled after Tiananmen] John Pomfret. He said, “Imagine that your self-criticism could be printed on the front page of People’s Daily. Don’t say anything that you’re going to regret. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I apologize for this or that.’” So I wrote 10 pages on why I got interested in China back in college.

A personal biography.

Yeah. When I got to Falun Gong, I said, “Of course, in hindsight, being more mature now, I would do things a lot differently.” Maybe I was thinking I would stick the dagger in even further. But you could also read that to mean, “I wouldn’t believe those guys.” That was what they needed.

My door-opener was none other than Rupert Murdoch. I can’t remember whom he met. He went into the meeting and just said, “give this guy a chance.” At the end of ‘08, I got the full J1 visa, and I was back as a correspondent.

I knew that I did not want to stay at the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t just because of Murdoch. The paper was changing. It was becoming less investigative, less feature-y, more conventional. Also, I was changing. I wanted to write magazine pieces and then my own book on China.

Writing The Souls of China

You still wrote a lot for the New York Times.

The most fruitful relationship I had all through the 2010s was perhaps with the New York Review of Books. Every year for the past 15 years, I have written about three full-length articles for NYRB.

In 2010, I started a Q&A series with public intellectuals in China. That was important in shaping my thinking. I was talking to some people about China’s spiritual dimension, and the historical dimension came up — history as a kind of religion. So I knew early on in the 2010s that I wanted to write a book on the uses of history in China.

But the religion book [The Souls of China] took shape early. I knew I wanted to write on different faith groups. My first decision was to only write about Han Chinese, because it would be infeasible to write about all the different ethnic groups in China and their faiths. Tibetans and Uyghurs are really different subjects. It’s often about ethnicity, independence, and the struggle against Han domination. It would be too complicated, and I don’t speak their languages.

China is basically a multi-ethnic empire, and if you think of it in terms of colonial studies, you have the colonies and you have the metropole. I thought that if I focused on the Han, I would still be covering 1.3 billion people. It’s already enormous.

What did you want to achieve with The Souls of China when you began?

I wanted to show that there was this spiritual and religious revival in China. I believed that religion was undercovered in China.

When did you have the idea of writing the book?

I came back to China with the goal of writing the book. Even in the ‘90s, I wanted to write a book on religion in China and especially on Daoism. That became the Falun Gong part of Wild Grass. But then I thought, no, I want to do a proper book just on religion in China.

The Souls of China has five different storylines. How did you pick your main protagonists of the book?

I knew I wanted to cover different faith groups. I only wanted one of the stories to be Christian. I ruled out Catholicism because it had been largely stagnant since 1949. The Protestants seemed more interesting and dynamic. I wanted to go to an urban church, because China was urbanizing, so I picked Wang Yi’s church in Chengdu.

Somebody introduced me to him. Of all the people I wrote about in The Souls of China, I had the most qualms about him, because I wanted everybody to be representative. He’s very well-known so he was an outlier, but the overall trend of big urban churches with their own ecosystem was a valid macro trend. He’d already been in trouble with the government. Most pastors don’t challenge the government. So in some ways, I was playing into the stereotype of the brave fighting against the government-type religious figure.

Which you did not want to report on, but then you got pulled into his charisma.

He was a charismatic figure, and a great speaker. There was so much about this church that was interesting, and which was reflected nationally in other churches that I was like, “Okay, we’ll go with him.”

The Daoist musicians, the Li family in Shanxi, were in New York City. This Englishman, Stephen Jones, one of the foremost ethnomusicologists in China, brought them out to participate in this concert at Carnegie Hall. I thought the Li family was the most interesting of the people up on stage, but I didn’t see the spiritual side. They had Daoist stuff on, but they weren’t ordained Daoist priests. I went back and talked to them, and I met Li Bin, the son, and he said, “If you’re ever in China again, come on by.”

I went to Datong and called up Li Bin. He said, “Come see us. We’ve got a concert this afternoon.” I’m like, “You do? Wow, that’s cool.” I immediately got in the cab. When I arrived, they were in somebody’s courtyard home, and there was a casket and a dead body. People were dressed in white. I was like, “What are you guys doing? This is a funeral. I thought you guys were Carnegie Hall musicians.” He says, “That’s this weird thing that Steve has us do every five years. The rest of the time, we’re doing this.” That’s how I got to meet them. They represented Daoism, of course, but also rural China, which at that point was emptying out. The Li family reflected faith in those changing circumstances.

For the folk religion chapter, I chose Miaofengshan, which I had visited in the 1990s. I was fascinated by the mountain and by its history, and I went back there in 2011 when I was still evaluating subjects for the book. I met the old Mr. Ni. Over that summer, I went to their home and got to know the Ni family, and I thought, “This is the real deal, this is perfect.”

The government chapters were about trying to show the rituals of CCP rule. They have these religious rituals, just like in the United States with all those patriotic holidays and so on. And for the internal alchemy chapters, I was introduced to him through Nan Huai-chin, who I wrote about.

What was the reporting process for Souls of China?

I structured it around one lunar year. I did all the reporting in one year, 2012, because I wanted to show direct parallels in these faith groups.

So for example in April of 2012, I first went to the Babaoshan [cemetery] for a government story: a Tiananmen mother who tries to lay wreaths at her husband and son’s tomb every year. She wanted to pay respects during the Qingming (Tomb-sweeping) Festival, but they never let her. They always make her go a week or two ahead of time.

That worked out perfectly for me, because then for Qingming, I could go to Shanxi and spend Qingming with the Li family while they were working at funerals. That allowed me to understand their family history.

From there I went directly to Chengdu for Easter. Religions have this perfect synchronicity sometimes. There’s clearly something about death and rebirth in the springtime. It made for neat parallelisms in the book. But it only really worked because it was happening in real time. That gave the book dynamism. It was a crazy year.

The Souls of China is a book that has its flaws, and like any non-fiction book, it begins to date after time because you’re writing about events in the past. But it does capture an overall trend in China that was valid, and is still valid — this search for meaning.

How long did it take for you to write The Souls of China?

About a year. I had a writing schedule where I would wake up every morning, and I would make myself tea, and then, ideally, I wouldn’t even look at my email. I would turn off the router, I would go to a sofa, I would sit there with my laptop, and I would write. I would have to have my 500 to 1,000 words down.

Some people write best while drinking whiskey at midnight, but I’m a morning person. Probably for most people, their minds are fresher in the morning. Don’t waste your time on email. Once you get going — “Oh, I just have to answer that” — before you know it, two hours have gone by. Then your brain is starting to get a little fried. Have a second cup of coffee and now I’m going to write. That’s a slippery slope. It’s better not to do that.

What I would normally do is something like this: I’m working on a chapter. I get up, read the chapter through to where I am and just start writing, and try to not fixate on sources and quotes. Instead, just put in, “quote by so-and-so saying blah, blah, blah.” Keep writing.

How did you find your book deals and publishers?

I had an agent named Chris Calhoun. He pitched Wild Grass to the editor Dan Frank of Pantheon, which is part of Random House. When I handed in the manuscript for Wild Grass, it was just at the time of 9/11. They said, “Wait on it.” They published Wild Grass in ‘04.

Then I came up with the A Mosque in Munich book. Chris offered it to Dan. Dan said yes, but then the paperback guy said, “No, there’s another book coming out on Islam in Europe from another part of Random House. Both would come out in paperback at the same time. I can’t take this.” So, he killed it.

I then went with Harcourt, which was an okay experience, but the editor at Harcourt who bought it left. So I was left with another editor who inherited this book and didn’t know whether they did or did not like it. They didn’t buy it, it wasn’t not their baby.

For The Souls of China, Chris went back to Dan, and Dan said, “Oh, this is going to be great.” He did a good job editing it, and they gave it a beautiful cover. He came up with the title.

Unfortunately my relationship with Dan was damaged due to a blog piece that I wrote for the Review. It was assigned to me by an editor, who said, Timothy Snyder, a well-known American academic on the Holocaust: “he wrote a piece for us called ‘Who Killed More, Stalin or Hitler?’ How does Mao fit into this?”

Refer a friend

I wrote a blog piece for them. It’s interesting in a morbid way. I cited Jung Chang who wrote a biography of Mao with her husband, Jon Halliday, and she said Mao was responsible for 100 million deaths. In the piece, I said, “Few historians take their work seriously.” She was Dan Frank’s author. With the Sparks pitch, Dan didn’t even think about it. He rejected it with one line, “No, I’m not interested.” And then he wrote paragraphs saying, “How could you have impugned the reputation of excellent archival research?”

That’s why I ended up going with Oxford University Press.

Uncovering China’s hidden past through Sparks

How did you get the idea for writing Sparks?

It goes back to the Q&A series I did for The New York Review of Books. The first person I talked to was Yang Jisheng, and he made me realize the different ways that people tried to solve China’s authoritarian malaise.

Some looked at it as a spiritual quest — China has to have a spiritual revolution before it can have a political revolution. Quite a few people converted to Christianity after June 4th.

But other people I talked to felt that history was the cause of the problem, that the party’s control of history was something that had to be broken up. I began to think this would be a great topic for a book. While I was writing The Souls of China, I was starting to do the reporting for Sparks.

I continued to work on this through the 2010s. The book suffered slightly because I was expelled from China in 2020. If COVID and the Trump administration’s suicidal policies on China hadn’t intervened, I would have probably stayed. I never went to [Mao-era activist writer] Lin Zhao’s grave; that’s the place I really wanted to go.

The filmmaker Ai Xiaoming is one of the main characters of your book. How did you come to know Ai Xiaoming and what was your impression of her?

This was a trip that [photographer and now wife] Chi Yin and I took to Wuhan in 2017. We interviewed novelist Hu Fayun and Ai Xiaoming. She was already a well-known public intellectual. She was helpful and willing to let us come into her home and talk, and have her portrait taken. She’s almost intimidating, because she’s so smart, knows so much, and has done so many things. You can’t just wing it going into the interview, “So, what are you up to?”

Why did you decide to make her one of the central figures?

Because of her personal biography. It’s important that you have somebody who can go from the beginning to the end of the book. Ai was born in ‘53, so her biography is a biography of the PRC. She was a sent-down youth, took part in the Cultural Revolution, and in the 2000s she was involved in the civil society movement. Ai Xiaoming’s films cover the gamut of topics, especially current issues.

When you sit down with the material you have, and begin to think, okay, I want somebody who I can put in this chapter, in this section, in every section. Do I have enough material to do that? I have enough of Ai Xiaoming for sure. She pops up again and again in the book, because she has talked to all these people.

What did you want to achieve with Sparks?

When you’re starting a project like this, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. With Sparks, I wanted to describe the scene. It was opening up new horizons for me in understanding independent intellectuals in China. I didn’t realize how much they had done over the decades.

My attitude toward the intellectuals in the ‘90s — “I’m going to write on grassroots stuff because intellectuals aren’t doing anything” — was not only stupid, but arrogant.

I was pissed off that people like me had that attitude. The broader public in the West was so familiar with these Central and Eastern European intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Václav Havel, filmmakers like Miloš Forman. People who read The New York Review of Books would know who these people are. But I can’t say the same for their Chinese counterparts. I thought, here’s a chance to introduce readers to these people.

Many Americans think that nothing’s happening in China, that independent voices have been completely eradicated — it’s all Xi Jinping all the time. This book shows that you can’t completely write off the country.

Expulsion, the ultimate fate of a China reporter

You touched on being expelled from China. What happened?

The context was that, in 2020, during the election campaign, the Trump administration made four big policy decisions to bash China that were part of Trump’s re-election bid. They closed the consulate in Houston, killed the Fulbright program, the Peace Corps program, and kicked out 58 Chinese journalists.

China responded by closing the Chengdu consulate and by kicking out roughly 15 U.S. journalists from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and one other publication.

I got in during a period of bipartisanship when everybody was working to help get more journalists into China. And I left because of a policy that was essentially aimed at cutting off ties with China. That was a symbolic ending.

It’s a great shame that you’re not in Beijing anymore. Many still remember fondly your debate at the closing of the bookstore.

At the Bookworm?

Yeah, where you dressed up in an emperor’s gown and debated whether the Ming or Qing was better.

And I lost. I took the Ming dynasty and Jeremiah Jenne — a very well-spoken guy and has a PhD in Qing history — argued that Qing was better and he won.

Was that the motivation for you doing a PhD?

Yes, to get back at Jeremiah (laughing).

Archiving a different China, one PDF at a time

Sparks is about underground historians, whose work stands in opposition to the Communist Party, which spins history to show that it deserves to rule. What do you think the consequences are of the party distorting history?

One consequence is that the party is caught in this never-ending struggle to have to justify itself by performance. If they have 9% economic growth, then nobody cares about your historical claims. Your justification is clear: The economy is doing great. But if that fails then this matters more. People then say, “Wait a minute, why are they running the country if they’re not doing a good job?”

Was your motivation for founding the China Unofficial Archives, the Zhongguo Minjian Danganguan, to preserve that different diverse understanding of history?

There’s no place to go where you could find all this material. So I thought, “Why not try to set this up?” I ended up underestimating how hard it would be because there’s so much of it. As I began to work on it, I began to even more fervently believe that it was necessary because I thought, “Gosh, I don’t think Westerners understand.”

What are your future plans?

I’ll move to Berlin. I’ll be writing a book, which will be an outgrowth of my PhD thesis on pilgrimage associations in Beijing, which is one of the groups I wrote about in The Souls of China. The more general-interest book from that is how religion and faith are being instrumentalized and used by the CCP in China. These groups are all being co-opted as part of a government program to build legitimacy by embracing traditional values.

I want to keep the Archive going and expand it. I hope to do more fundraising. I’d like to write a regular column based on the material in the Archive. Possibly at some point, I want to go back to China but I’m not entirely sure. I doubt I’ll be able to after Sparks and especially after the Archive.

The Archive got some unwanted attention because of some foolish person who came and visited me earlier this year. I showed her the Archive website and showed the curator’s letter that I wrote on us going to the Association of Asian Studies meeting in Seattle in March. She took a picture and sent it to some well-known public intellectuals via WeChat, which is the stupidest thing possible, and said, “The Archive is going to have a meeting with thousands of people in Seattle.” That was completely wrong. The Association of Asian Studies has thousands of people going, and we had one little panel with four people from the Archive. The panel had an audience of 30 people.

Then the Public Security Bureau began calling people up, including somebody’s family in China, and said that if they went to the meeting in Seattle, they’re going to get in trouble, that the Archive was anti-party. They’ve completely overestimated the Archive. I don’t think it has that kind of impact in China. I wish it did.

Looking back, how did your views on China change over the years?

I went to China always as an observer, and I didn’t have a plan or think “I hope this happens to China.” Like a lot of people in the ‘90s, despite Tiananmen, I was optimistic. I thought that the country would become more open. I didn’t think that China would never reform.

I still don’t know that it never will. We’re looking at things now and we think things will never change, but they could change by the time somebody is looking at this five, 10, 20 years from now. They may say, “It turned out that, after Xi Jinping, things changed radically in China.” Who knows?

The very last line of Wild Grass I kept cautious and optimistic. Everybody failed in Wild Grass. But Ms. Zhang said, “China is still trustworthy, we’re still waiting.”

Recommended readings

Ian Johnson, 2004, Wild Grass, Pantheon

Ian Johnson, 2010, A Mosque in Munich, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Ian Johnson, 2017, Souls of China, Knopf Doubleday

Ian Johnson, 2023, Sparks, Oxford University Press

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What’s Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

China hands are often writers. They are foreign correspondents racing to send drafts via telegram, economists launching one of the earliest email newsletters, intelligence officers preparing reports for D.C. policymakers, and others. So with hundreds of hours of tapes under our belt, we made a compilation of writing tips from our fellow China hands.

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• Sticking to a formula - or not?

• Before the first word of a book

• Day in the life of a book writer

• “Think of your pension”

Not everyone has an innate way with words. The veteran journalist Orville Schell says that, as a student, he was a terrible writer:

I’m living proof that the craft of writing is like any craft. Some people are just naturally gifted, but very few. You have to learn. You have to learn how to think, how to write. And to write well, you have to know how to edit well. And just keep at it.

For Schell, it helps to know whom you’re writing for:

I didn’t actually begin to learn how to write until I was writing for someone — not just some stupid professor. [...] The added awareness of writing for an audience always made it different from academic writing, where you’re basically writing for no one.

As he’s more experienced and, in his own words, ‘older’, he began to write for an audience of one: himself.

The older I get, the more I want to write to be truthful and to not please anybody. I try to figure out what I want to say that’s worth saying — and maybe, at least for me, worth putting out there.

Sticking to a formula - or not?

In the 1960s, Fox Butterfield — who would later become the first post-1949 China correspondent for The New York Times — got a fellowship in Taiwan to work on his dissertation. He was interested in writing about the place but had zero journalistic experience at the time.

All he had were two books on journalism that helped him with the basics of daily news-writing:

I had some understanding of what the media was, but I realized I didn’t know anything about how to write a newspaper story. So I went to the United States Information Service Library in Taipei. They had English-language books. It was mostly for students in Taiwan. I asked them if they had any books on how to be a journalist. And they said, “We have one. It’s an elementary book written by some American journalist on how to write a story for a newspaper.” I immediately took it out and memorized it. It said how to write the lede on a story, how to write the main paragraph, and how to pick the subjects.

In a bookstore in Taiwan, I found a collection of dispatches by American journalists, mostly from during World War II. And it showed what a newspaper story should look like.

I had these two models. When I came to write my first story, I was just using the formula that I found in the textbook. I had very little journalistic training.

The news article formula can help, but for Wall Street Journal and New York Times China correspondent Ian Johnson, it can also bury your own voice:

It’s like if you spend your whole time learning to paint by numbers, and on some level you learn what colors work together well, but you never learn to paint for yourself. You can learn different techniques for writing, but you don’t have your own voice.

When he wanted to switch from news articles to books, Johnson realised his writer’s voice was already buried too deep:

There’s almost no long-term professional journalist who’s also a legendary nonfiction writer. If you think of the legendary narrative nonfiction writers, they are not daily journalists. And I was already too far gone. I’d already spent the first 20 years of my career in daily journalism, so I was never going to have my own voice as much as somebody like Peter Hessler did.

News-writing can be formulaic, and that can be limiting, but when you’re a young reporter, it’s still nice to have something to hold onto. Butterfield’s first story for The New York Times, on the potential successor to Chiang Kai-shek, was published on the front page.

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Before the first word of a book

Before anyone starts putting words together for a book, there are plenty of administrative steps, such as finding an agent, securing a publisher, and sometimes even obtaining approval from a vetting committee.

Professor and Political scientist Susan Shirk and her husband once spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. There, she decided to write a book on domestic politics and foreign policy in China, her first book for a broader audience, which brought new experiences. It began with persuading an agent:

You have to write a prospectus for the agent, persuade a good agent to take you on, then the agent has to try to get a publisher for you.

I organized a little group with other fellows at the center. And the group had a very good editor. We met to try to help one another write a prospectus, so we could get a contract for a book for the general audience. [...]

You have to develop an argument. The more personal you can make the book, the more anecdotes make it vivid. Narrative is very important, to have a story to tell.

Economist Stephen Roach went in-depth on his book proposal writing process:

I start with a structural outline and then I write a fairly detailed proposal that I will submit to the publisher, editor, whoever, to see if it’s worth pursuing. So, my typical book proposal is maybe a 3,000 or 5,000-word essay in terms of overview, then a one-pager on each of the chapters that fit into that structure, and then a long essay drawing it together.

Different publishing houses will have different approval procedures, as Roach says:

If you use a university press, especially one of the caliber of Yale, there’s a pretty formal submission process. The editor can’t just say, “Yeah, it’s great, get to work.” It’s got to be approved by a vetting committee of academics. So, they’ll review that and give you comments and sometimes you’ll make changes. Sometimes your submission will get rejected.

One of the hardest parts of a book can be its structure. If you struggle to envision it, learn from the work of others. Ian Johnson created a case study for himself:

That’s something I got from reading John McPhee. He’s a well-known nonfiction writer, maybe one of the greatest. I would dissect his books. I would write out the structure on the inside of the cover. So page one to three is the introductory scene. Page three to four is a background thing, and so on. I could see how he did it.

You want to give the reader [a story that’s] a bit like a novel: you have an opening scene with something still to come. And then you can get in the background information, and then go back to the narrative later.

Day in the life of a book writer

When all preliminary steps are sorted, the actual writing begins. Persistence is key, Ian Johnson explains his daily routines:

Ideally, I wouldn’t even look at my email. I would often turn off the router in the room, and I would go to a sofa, sit there with my laptop, and write. And I wouldn’t let myself take a break until I had my 500 to 1,000 words down.

The best thing is to do it when you’re fresh. For me, I’m a morning person. Probably most people, their mind is fresher in the morning. Don’t waste your time on email and all that shit.

And so, you want to get your 500 words of new, fresh material when your mind is fresh. It’s the hardest stuff to write. Then you can go back and re-read and edit and correct. But what I would normally do is: I’m working on a chapter. I would get up. I would then read the chapter through to where I am and just start writing, and try to not fixate on, do I have the source? Do I have the quote right? Just put in, “quote by so-and-so saying blah, blah, blah.”

Keep writing. You want to keep going. It’s like you’re a scout in a military unit, and you’re supposed to be scouting out the territory ahead of the main army. You don’t want to stop.

And then I would go swimming around 11:00. Come back, have lunch, take a nap for 15 minutes or something like that, drink some tea, and then I would go back, do one little bit more just to make sure, “Oh, I forgot to put that in.” And then I would do all the bullshit stuff, answering all the emails and all the other stuff and you’re a little bit tired anyways. Mid-afternoon and stuff like that. So that would be like an ideal day for me.

Professor Roach would meticulously prepare every chapter:

I usually aim for a first draft manuscript that maybe has between 130,000 and 150,000 words. I’m pretty obsessed about sitting down and writing a chapter straight through, rather than writing a word and trying to think about it.

By the time I’m ready to write a chapter, I will have done all the research and stashed all the sources in a chapter file, absorbed the research, have an understanding of where I want to go in the chapter, and then I will just write the chapter.

A typical chapter can take me just a week to write. A chapter has, for me, 7,500 to 10,000 words. I can write pretty fast. I can write 3,000 words a day, sometimes more. I’ll write the chapter, and then I’ll go back and revise the chapter and annotate it with footnotes or endnotes.

But even with the best preparation, new insights can require a significant rethink, Roach says:

Most of the time I write chapters sequentially in order that are tied to the structure of the proposal. But sometimes I’ll get into it and I will find that the structure is not holding up as strongly as I envisioned, and I’ll make some big changes.

The last book, Accidental Conflict, is an example of that. I probably wrote four or five chapters on America’s false narratives of China. And I just said, “This isn’t going to work, unless I have a sort of a companion section that says China does the same thing, if not even more, through a system of censorship.”

I researched the history of censorship in China and how the role of the propaganda department has changed and, in particular, how it’s changed under Xi Jinping. I wrote about the profusion of false narratives that exist in China with respect to America. And then added a few more about the fact that the leadership, especially Xi Jinping, now believes that America is in decline.

I took that apart and, as I was doing this, came up with the idea that, okay, you’ve got four or five chapters on America’s false narratives of China, an equal amount of material on China’s false narratives of the U.S. How does it work together? That’s when it struck me that these two great superpowers, through different values but increasingly focused on paranoia over national security, have concocted these politically expedient fables about each other that, you put them together, they’re high octane fuel — very combustible.

After writing comes editing. Ernest Hemingway once referred to the editing process as killing your babies, something Ian Johnson cannot agree with:

In other words, you have to be willing to sacrifice your best stuff. That’s stupid advice. You don’t sacrifice your best stuff. You have to be willing to sacrifice. You should sacrifice your worst stuff though, right?

The truth is that you have to be willing to cut, you have to be willing to say, “I wrote that, I thought it was good, but actually, you know what? It’s not anything near.”

“Think of your pension”

Writing a book takes great sacrifice. Once you weigh the publishing advance against the cost of time and efficiency, it becomes clear: you can’t afford to spend too long on a single book.

Ian Johnson left his fulltime job so he would have the time for writing books. It was a decision with consequences:

My agent at the time, when I told him I wanted to quit The Wall Street Journal, he said to me, “Ian, don’t you have a corporate Amex card from Dow Jones?” I said, “Yeah, I do. I have a car…” He says, “You can take me out to lunch and no one will know.” He said, “They’re not going to question a $50 or $60 lunch, right?” I said, “Yeah, that’s probably true.” He said, “You’ll never have that again if you quit.” He says, “Think of your pension, think of your health insurance. How are you going to do all this stuff? You’ll never make this.”

“You want to know how people make their money? Let me tell you.” And then he went through like all the names of the people at The New Yorker. It was like 20 names. And he said, “That person is independently wealthy. That person is married to somebody who has a really great job. That person is independently wealthy. That person is married to somebody who has a really good job.” Either they’re independently wealthy or a few of them, like Peter Hessler, just write really bestselling books. But almost nobody does it like that.

So if you really want to write a book, you need to be independently wealthy. That’s my advice to you. Win the lottery.

Recommended readings

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What’s Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

Peking Hotel is and has always been a project of self-indulgence, so I never expected an audience. Who on earth would want to read these transcripts of retired China hands talking about shaking hands with Zhou Enlai in the 70s, standing on Tiananmen Square in 1989, or monitoring rural elections in China in the 90s and 2000s, right? Well, turns out I was wrong. Luckily, there are now 3000 (actually, 3105 of you by today’s count!) who share my interest in the fine details of personal stories in the history of US-China engagement.

To all of you, I say a big thank-you.

Goes without saying that this channel will be nothing without you; what is Peking Hotel if not its people, right? I won’t say which one my favorite is, but as I look back to the 17 pieces we ran since our founding in May last year, your favorites by view counts have been:

It’s been a fun journey for me. I’ve grown, made friends, built relationships, crossed swords, and been humbled by my interactions on Substack. This is becoming a spiritual digital home for me where people can engage in heated discussions on issues of shared curiosities. In some sense, Substack represents the original fundamentalist promise of the internet - where truly like-minded people meet and become friends. This all the more precious in an age of mega-mass media where, on X and YouTube, individuals disappear into statistics of magnitudes my brain struggles to make sense of.

I’m grateful for what Peking Hotel has become, and would be pretty happy even if it stops here. But, we are not stopping. We still have lots and lots and lots of unprocessed tapes and transcripts that are incredibly fun to share with the world, stories that traverse the contours of the past decades of US-China history in which exciting things happened, mistakes were made, serendipities and disasters were struck, and which ultimately shaped the world as we know it. I’ll keep doing this as long as the history of US-China engagement remains an indulgence of mine, and will hopefully make it an indulgence of yours too (of course you should care about what I care about, right?).

A big shoutout to my team. I can’t say enough how much I appreciate the support I’ve received from Kevin and Aorui, as well as many others who have contributed in their own ways over past year, for attending weekly check-ins, taking on the drudgery of transcription and podcast-editing, powering through the tedious processes of reimbursement, patiently putting up with my procrastination and missed deadlines, and accepting me as someone who tells dumb jokes. Peking Hotel won’t be possible without you! You’re all awesome. Everyone is working remotely for this, but for the few moments that we do spend physically together, it’s always been magical. Hope we can see each other more this year!

At any rate, here’s to more fun stuff from Peking Hotel.

Yours truly,

Leo

Subscribe now

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What's Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

Today marks the 24th anniversary of 9/11, an event that shook the world, changed lives, and shaped our collective path. The impact of 9/11 attacks on US-China relations is often overlooked. After a short chill following Tiananmen, by 2001, the two countries had gotten cooperation back on track. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 happened, China’s long-awaited entry into WTO was finally approved by the US Congress, and President Jiang Zemin offered China’s support in the War on Terror, cultivating ever closer ties with the West in the political, economic, and security realms. Two decades on, the legacy of 9/11 continues to unfold in unanticipated ways, especially as we re-examine the path of U.S.-China engagement over the past decades.

An old friend of this channel, Dr. Thomas Fingar was among those directly impacted by 9/11. A Stanford scholar of Chinese elite politics, Dr. Fingar first joined the State Department’s Office of Analysis in 1986 as the chief of its China Division. He soon joined the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and rose up in its ranks, eventually becoming the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research in 2004. The next year, Dr. Fingar left the State Department for the newly established Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and became the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He returned to Stanford in 2008, and is now a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Dr. Fingar personally experienced the chaos in DC following the attacks. In its aftermath, the INR, under his directorship, was the only American intelligence agency at the time to call out one of the greatest intelligence failures in American history, namely the national intelligence estimate that concluded that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which led to the war in Iraq. Dr. Fingar was consequently tasked to reform the American intelligence system.

Today’s excerpt from the interviews with Dr. Fingar, which was edited for brevity and clarity, weaves together our long-running theme of U.S.-China history with the event of 9/11. It shows how China specialists can have a different side to their careers. Observers neglect the dynamism in the lives of our China specialists and the fact that China specialists often work on non-China fields in significant capacities too. Those lives eventually come into contact with and feedback into each other, and create the world as we know it today.

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• “Put your career where your mouth is”

• Amending US-China relationship after Tiananmen

• When the Pentagon was set aflame, the State Department evacuated

• Cleaning up America’s intelligence system during the Iraq War

• Year 16 of a three-year Stanford commitment

“Put your career where your mouth is”

Last time we talked about your early career at Stanford as a China scholar, and your involvement with bringing Chinese students and scholars to the U.S. during the Carter administration. In 1986, you began working for the State Department as the chief of the China Division. How did you enter the government at such a senior level?

Because of McCarthyism, not many China types had gone into the national security apparatus. That was not a career-making track. You didn’t go in as a junior foreign service officer and say, “I want to have a China career.” And, because of the Vietnam War, there was reticence to go work for the “oppressive government.” There was a real dearth of people.

By the mid-‘80s, the number of China-related issues was growing rapidly and needed people. By then I’d been a consultant contractor to the State Department among other government agencies for a decade, so I was a known entity.

How did you feel when the State Department came calling?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it. After I’d spent a full day talking to people, I met with the assistant secretary, Morton Abramowitz. He said, “When do you want to start?” I said, “I’m not sure I want to do this.”

We talked some more. He asked questions and after one of my answers, he said, “You’re pretty critical, smartass. Do you think you can do a better job?” I said, “That’s not a fair question, who can answer ‘no’ to that? Of course I think I can do a better job.” He said, “Put your career where your mouth is. Give me two years.” I said, “Okay, I’ll give you two years.”

What did you do at the China Division?

The China Division does analysis. The idea is to live in the heads of the Chinese. What are they doing? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they responding to what we want to do? In that case, it’s much closer to an academic job, except you’re not teaching, raising money for the university, or grading papers.

We covered Chinese involvement with all parts of the world, domestic policies, security policies. I was integrating across all of these topics. There were people working for me who were doing the narrower, deeper cuts.

What I did was more collaborative than what most academics do. There’s too much to go through by yourself. You need help from your friends. You need to support what others are doing.

And you could call on all the scholars in the world for help.

Yes, and you had the resources of the United States government to chase something that you wanted, as opposed to applying to a foundation in the hope that you get a grant.

There was also the informal China group that had been started by [political scientist] Doak Barnett in the early ‘60s, which was where a lot of China policy got hammered out. There were about 20 of us, and nobody represented anything. We were Americans that cared about our country, national security, the relationship with China, and knew something. The group had four people who eventually became ambassadors to China, multiple assistant secretaries, multiple National Security Council China folk.

We met once a month at somebody’s house. We argued and figured it out, and often, the next day, we put on our official hats during, for example, an NSC meeting, and we’d say, “Okay, how do we do what we thought we wanted to do? How do we get it through the bureaucratic obstacles?”

When somebody became the Assistant Secretary for East Asia, or the Deputy Assistant Secretary for China, or the China guy at the NSC, they would come in during the time they were in that position. That group continues to exist.

It’s an aspect of the United States that’s not that different from what is often disparagingly characterized as guanxi (connections) for the Chinese way of doing things. This informal stuff was pretty important to the way policies evolved.

What was the division of labor on China analysis within the U.S. government?

Each of the components of government has different missions and goals, and needs different kinds of information. China is one of the subjects that no matter where you are, you need to know something about it, because we touch it everywhere around the globe. And in the United States, there’s a Chinese American community that is concerned because there was an earthquake in their home province, a company that wants to invest somewhere in China, or a state government that has been approached about a joint venture.

One size fits nobody. You can’t write one analysis that is useful for the Secretary of Defense, for Commander of the Pacific Command, for the Attorney General, for the Secretary of State. They have different responsibilities, they have different questions. So, the analytic community is structured to support their primary customers.

Information done for other customers is shared, mostly. The system wants the Defense Department to know what’s being told to the Secretary of State, who wants to know what’s being turned over to the Commerce Department, because a lot of the issues overlap.

You’re going to try and harmonize, integrate, fight out what one piece of the bureaucracy wants to achieve with what others want to achieve. Some might be unhappy about a Chinese action, and want action taken, and others will say, “No, no, no, that would disrupt the economic deal we’re working on, or the ship visit that’s scheduled, or somebody is coming from the National People’s Congress. So let’s not pick a fight this week.”

How Bush and Deng didn’t blow up the relationship after Tiananmen

You were at the China Division at a pretty momentous moment in Chinese history, with reform and opening, political changes, and Tiananmen. What kinds of issues occupied your time during those years?

One topic was reform and opening, and what that meant, and how that played out domestically and internationally. Chinese arms sales during the Iran-Iraq War were important because China was selling weapons to both sides. Nuclear proliferation issues were big early on. We paid attention to Tiananmen, and the run-up to Tiananmen.

How did you react to Tiananmen at the time?

We tracked the demonstrations that began in different parts of China — “There’s a demonstration here. What do we know about that place? What do we know about the issues? What do we know about the leadership that is there?” As it began to build in 1988, it was clear this was about inflation, corruption, and how the local government was responding to it or not.

When it got to Beijing, it fell into an entirely different category. It stopped everywhere else, for all intents and purposes. Some of those people went to Beijing, “Okay, that’s where the action is.” I couldn’t understand why Beijing had not shut down CNN, why they hadn’t cut off all of the communications. They weren’t going to let these demonstrations persist.

If my memory is right, it was a Saturday. I was in on a weekend. I didn’t go home much during those weeks. We had gotten information that said the military is moving — actually moving as opposed to disregarding instructions to move.

I walked from my office to the Assistant Secretary that I reported to, and said, “The crackdown is now, it’s coming.” By the time I got there, it had started. We didn’t have much of an advance on that.

Then we immediately shifted to answering, “What the hell are the Americans going to do? What’s the proper response to this? When the crackdown plays out, what’s next? Is reform and opening over? For how long? And how will power balances shift?”

At the time, a fellow named Jeff Bader was the deputy on the China desk. We were up in the State Department’s operations center one evening, probably the third evening of eating pizza for dinner and lunch. One of the [media] commentators said, “This is all very confused. We don’t know what’s going on, but I’m sure the experts in the State Department know what’s going on.” I turned to Jeff and said, “Well, State Department expert, what the hell is going on here?” He said, “You tell me.”

Just after Tiananmen, in July, Bush sent Scowcroft on a secret trip to Beijing. Did you take part in the strategizing around that?

No. There were actually two trips. Very few people knew about them. It never leaked on the U.S. side, it leaked on the Chinese side.

I learned about them through friendships and the informal China group connections with people whose administrative positions meant they did know about them, and who were looking for ideas, for sanity checks. But I had no role or influence.

Did you expect China to become a democracy?

No. Supporting modernization, supporting development, engaging China in the free world system to make it stronger as a partner against the Soviet Union, that was the goal. The judgment was: “You can’t get off this tiger — the reform transformation. You ride it. You stay on the tiger’s back, or you fall off and the tiger eats you, and China stops developing.” Eventually you have to modernize the political system. You can’t run a 21st century economy with a 19th century system. But I don’t think any of us expected to see it.

And of course, during that secret trip of Scowcroft to Beijing to meet Deng Xiaoping, Deng was fully committed to the idea that the U.S. was the black hand behind the Tiananmen protests.

I am quite confident that, whether explicitly or tacitly, Bush and Deng and the close folks around them had effectively made a decision. There were things that both had to do. You couldn’t pretend Tiananmen didn’t happen. We saw pretty quickly that we’re going to have to pull back, that they’re going to pull back. But both Deng and Bush put limits on that. Both imposed sanctions, but within a year, all of the sanctions imposed by both sides except one had been lifted. It was: protect the relationship.

I think both sides handled it remarkably well. By early ’92, the economic situation had gotten dire enough that Deng was able to remake the argument for engagement, and Bush was ready to be responsive. Clinton was highly critical, but it didn’t take very long after the election before he got with the program.

When the Pentagon was set aflame, the State Department evacuated

Promotions put you in charge of, first, analysis of East Asia and the Pacific, and later, all analysis. In 2000, you went to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, the intelligence agency within the State Department, and from there, you rose to a senior role at the State Department and then the whole of intelligence community. How did 9/11 play a role in your professional progression?

Before 9/11, I was the last Clinton-appointed Assistant Secretary for INR. In that capacity, I delivered a worldwide threat briefing. At the time, CIA, DIA, INR, and FBI all presented separate views of the priority issues as part of the budget process, so Congress could decide if the budget requests from the executive fit with the national security challenges identified by the intelligence community.

Refer a friend

In my testimony, in early 2001, I identified the terrorist threat, and specifically the threat from Al-Qaeda, as the most dangerous security challenge to the United States. I was not the only one. George Tenet, in the CIA’s testimony, identified it as well. Because it’s linked to the budget cycle, this testimony was given at the very beginning of the Bush administration. So, they had nothing to do with it.

When the 9/11 Commission was established and holding hearings, the Bush administration and my friend Colin Powell used my testimony and construed my continued presence before a replacement was confirmed as evidence that the new administration took terrorism seriously. I was used as evidence of the wise judgment of the incoming administration.

I’d been in Washington long enough to not be surprised. It didn’t bother me. But the fact is, the position I was in was a carryover position that had to be filled for legal reasons, so I didn’t resign on January 20th as happens for most positions in government.

On 9/11, we were watching it play out on television, looking out the window and seeing the smoke on the other side of the river, at the Pentagon. Then the whole State Department was evacuated. I was one of the last ones out of the building because Carl Ford — who by that time had been confirmed as the Assistant Secretary; I reverted to Principal Deputy — and I went to every office to make sure all of our people were out.

By the time we came out and went to the rendezvous point that was established for fire drills and the like, there was nobody there because there was an erroneous report that a car bomb had gone off at an entrance to the State Department. There was fear that there would be more attacks on government buildings. Everybody was told to disperse.

We knew all of our people were out of the building, but we didn’t have a clue where they were. Carl and I, and our secretary, sat on a bench in a little park across from the State Department, trying to figure out what was going on, when we could get back into the building to see what we could do to determine what had happened, who was responsible.

For whatever flukish reasons, my cell phone continued to work. Almost nobody else had a working cell phone. People would come through and then use my phone to contact their families. I had a reasonably good idea what was going on, but not from the government. My son worked for CNN in Washington. He’d call me up and tell me or ask me about things.

The building security people wouldn’t let Carl and myself go back into the building. Some of my people ignored the instruction to leave and were down in the Ops Center and had started immediately on the analysis of who was responsible.

The attack was on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, responsibility was assigned to do a thorough analysis of what had happened. It was assigned to another agency, and our people, my people, participated.

By Friday the White House decided that what was being done was not adequate, and it was reassigned to INR — which meant me, the guy in charge of analysis — to pull together the law enforcement and the intelligence community information.

It was really rather astonishing, the things that were known to the law enforcement world that were not known to the intelligence world, and vice versa. Law enforcement didn’t want to share information with other parts of the government because, if they did, they’d have to share it with defendants, which would undermine their prosecution. The intelligence community didn’t want to share with law enforcement because they were going to use it in court, and then sources and methods would be jeopardized. These things were all addressed later.

A multi-agency group worked to pull all of the information together. On Saturday, we had a pretty solid judgment about what had happened, what was known, who the players were. And on Sunday, we produced five versions of that report at different levels of classification — from unclassified for law enforcement and the public, confidential, secret, top secret, and code word versions.

The only continuing aspect that affected me was pressure on INR to move analysts from whatever they were doing to have more terrorism analysts. We refused to do that. We couldn’t. INR was so small — is so small — that when you take somebody off the account they’re on, that account’s uncovered. There’s little redundancy. What we did was add terrorism to everybody’s portfolio. So, if you’re working on Malaysia, you’re now looking for terrorism-related stuff on Malaysia.

Over the next year or so, as the government sorted itself out, the big intelligence agencies added units and people. INR looked for a niche. We’re not going to be a fifth wheel doing the same thing that others were doing. We dubbed it “Thugs ‘R’ Us.”

We focused on specific functions that needed to be performed in order to prepare for and conduct a terrorist attack: moving money internationally, smuggling explosives, moving people. The assumption was they were not going to reinvent capabilities that already existed, such as smuggling drugs or trafficking women. We decided to try and identify, “Who do you go to if you want to move people from A to B? If you want to move money internationally and not get caught, how do you do that?”

And INR built something based on lessons learned from the post-mortem we did in the first week after 9/11. We set up a place where we had a number of computer terminals next to one another: intelligence computers, high-end classification intelligence, State Department, consular traffic, law enforcement traffic, Customs Border Protection traffic, no-fly lists. They weren’t connected to one another because they couldn’t be legally, but they sat next to one another. We put people in front of them that could get information on one, and check it out on another.

This was also around the time when the negotiations for China to enter the WTO took place. Did that affect your work at all?

Not really. That was a negotiating exercise handled by the U.S. Trade Representative and supported by the Economic and Business Bureau in the State Department, which was supported by INR’s economic analysis. It was mostly broad-based judgments about China’s will and ability to do certain things.

You wrote in your CV that, during your time in government, you were responsible for analytic work of all countries and all issues, and personally reviewed, revised, and approved approximately 14,000 analytical papers for the President, Secretary of State, and other senior officials. How do you keep track of so much information about so many places around the world?

You learn to rely on and trust people. I didn’t pretend to be an expert on Haiti or the Philippines, or even China. There were a few subjects of which I could claim real expertise and experience. Everything else, I’m going to be exactly as useful and as good as the people I rely on.

It’s daunting when you realize that the United States — the big, powerful, clumsy puppy dog power — may act or not act on the basis of what you say. That’s a big incentive to not to blow smoke, to not pretend you know something that you don’t know.

I suppose the weight of such decisions became even heavier after 9/11, when the CIA’s intelligence said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and all the other intelligence agencies concurred, except for your agency. What were you thinking at the time?

INR often was the dissenter. We seldom were the only piece of the intelligence establishment that held the positions we did. But those holding that position often lost the debate within the CIA, within the Defense Intelligence, within the Treasury Department.

The default across government is an agency position. We never had it at INR. If I had two analysts that had different views, we’d put them both out there. This smart guy thinks this. That smart gal who’s got access to exactly the same information thinks that. So, before you commit your personal prestige and the power of the U.S. government, you’ve got to understand it’s a “this is the best we can do for now” judgment.

Why did we come out differently? Honesty and integrity. Partly, it’s because INR had the most experienced analysts in the government. When I became the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, the average time on account in the intelligence community was less than three years. In INR, it was more than 15 years average.

Part of it was our analytical approach. We stuck with “most likely” — what’s the most likely explanation here? Others went into “worst casing” — could be, can’t rule out. You don’t need any evidence at all for “worst case, could be, can’t rule out.” You can’t rule out that the Martians are not going to attack us tomorrow with some secret weapon. But it doesn’t help you very much. That stuff is almost always going to be wrong.

We just thought there were better explanations for the facts that we did have.

Such as for the Iraqi aluminum tubes, which other agencies said were for uranium enrichment?

Yeah. They could not be centrifuge tubes for enriching uranium. They were the wrong size.

We had to deal with, “What the hell do the State Department striped-pants cookie pushers know about aluminum tubes for enrichment?” Well, we don’t know a lot about it ourselves. But we went to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA intercepted the shipment of these tubes, and they looked at them. And they said, “They’re not for centrifuges. These are rocket tubes.”

We went to the Battelle National Laboratories, which runs the only comparable cyclotron enrichment facility in the United States. They said, “It won’t work.” And we went to the Brits. Because the blueprint that Iraq has is from a British facility. And we said, “Could you use these?” And they said, “No, they’ll fly apart.”

We went to people who knew more than we did. And others didn’t. The Department of Energy weighed in on that one. They were with us. We weren’t the only ones dissenting. And a piece of the argument was that nobody would use aluminum to make rocket tubes. Well, it turns out that the U.S. military uses it. And the Italians use it. And Saddam had reverse-engineered the Italian weapons system.

But there’s this expression, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This train had left the station. It had an effect on Powell. But it didn’t have an effect on policy.

There were other errors. We had a circular argument. The guys researching biological weapons said Iraq had biological weapons because they had dispersal drones. The other guys doing remotely piloted vehicles said they had dispersal drones. “How do you know they’re not simply reconnaissance and surveillance drones?” “Well, they’re not because they’ve got biological weapons.” You step back and look at that and say, “That’s ridiculous.”

Cleaning up America’s intelligence system during the Iraq War

As I understand, the failures of the intelligence community for 9/11 and for Iraq laid the foundation for the package of intelligence reforms under the Reform Act. You were tasked to lead that reform. What was your experience? Was it somewhat a strange assignment for you, given the majority of intelligence was done by the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies, yet it’s the small INR that was commissioned to carry out the reforms?

The big agencies are collection agencies — CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, they collect. INR is not a collection agency. But INR basically receives everything. INR produced less volume, but we covered the full range of topics.

The big agencies are to some extent — and I don’t mean to be pejorative — like six-year-olds playing soccer. They’re chasing the ball. Whatever the big issues are this month, they throw a lot of people at it, and let other things have a much lower priority. INR doesn’t have that luxury because it can get a phone call at any time, day or night, from an embassy anywhere around the world that wants to know something.

I put 9/11 “intelligence failure” in quotes, because there was a total systemic failure. My favorite illustration of that is: Whatever the intelligence community got right or wrong, if we hadn’t stopped locking the door to the cockpit — which we used to do because there were so many hijackings to Cuba in the ’70s — the hijackers couldn’t have gotten into the cockpit, and they couldn’t have stolen the airplane. There were lots of shortcomings like that.

On 9/11, we weren’t any more accurate than anybody else. But because of the way that Powell and the administration called attention to my testimony, we had an image of having been better at that. On the WMD in Iraq, we were less wrong. Intelligence reform was in some significant measure a political action. You couldn’t not do anything in response to 9/11 and the extreme dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the failure to find WMD. Something had to be done.

So, there was a certain propensity. If you’re going to find somebody, find somebody that isn’t as tainted by high-profile failure. I wasn’t a champion of [establishing the Office of the National Director of Intelligence, which integrates intelligence from across agencies]. I wasn’t looking for the position [of ODNI’s Deputy Director and chair of the National Intelligence Council]. I didn’t have ambitions to put another title on my CV. But as it played out, I had a reputation that was useful to trade on in reassuring analysts. I was not a vocal critic of the performance of people in other agencies. I was a safe pick.

How different was the work compared to what you did in the State Department?

The analytical portion of it, the NIC chair, was not fundamentally different. But I had to build the office of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. I had to rebuild the President’s Daily Brief from an entirely CIA operation into a community operation. Integrating 16 agencies, reassuring the analysts who had been tarred with the brush of failure for 9/11 and WMD — even though most of them had absolutely nothing to do with those assessments — rebuilding confidence in the products that were produced, all of that was new and required decisions pretty quick.

I was constantly asked to produce a plan. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board wanted a plan. Oversight committees on the Hill wanted a plan, and I wouldn’t do it. It was a conscious decision that I didn’t want to be defending a plan. I wanted to be demonstrating progress. One of my deputies, Mike Wertheimer, came up with a bumper sticker, a guide to what we did, which was, “Think big, start small, fail cheap, and fix fast.”

We continuously told people what we were doing. Telling our analysts, so they would get buy-in and understanding; and telling the Hill what we were doing, because if you’re not telling them, they’ll either think you’re doing nothing, or they’ll determine that they know better than you. So, I bombarded them with what we called Good News Grams. I wanted them to understand that this was a work in progress, that we were going to tweak as we went along.

I want to touch on the issue of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which denied that they had an active nuclear program, citing Iranian hardliners. What was the thinking behind that piece of intelligence? Did it have echoes from the Iraq WMD experience?

The National Intelligence Officer for WMD and I had decided that we needed to redo our last estimate on Iran’s nuclear program, because it had been a few years. Other analysts were not comfortable briefing stuff a couple of years old. I was acutely aware that this was the first WMD estimate since the big hoo-ha about the Iraq WMD. So we were going to be scrutinized very closely on this.

The first iteration really hadn’t changed much from the last time we had done it. But as we’re finishing up, we started to get new information from multiple sources. It took a while to go through. We had to go back to the Hill and tell them we’re not going to deliver on their deadline. We grudgingly got a few more months to do this.

It became the basis for the joint comprehensive plan of action, the agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program that Trump walked away from. And when he walked away from it, it collapsed. But it did a good thing as far as I’m concerned. And it manifests the kinds of analytically responsible high quality trade craft that the intelligence reform was supposed to produce.

Year 16 of a three-year Stanford commitment

How did you leave Washington and end up back at Stanford?

I had promised the people that took the risk of coming to work for me in a brand-new organization that I would stay until the end of 2008 — unless I was fired before.

But I’d also made a commitment to my wife that by the time I hit 63, I was going to leave Washington. I was exhausted. I’d had 19 years in senior positions of a level that most people don’t make it three years. It was taking a toll on my health.

And somebody at Stanford would ask every few years, “Are you ready to come back yet?” In 2006, I said, “Yes, I am. I’ll be ready when I finish this commitment.”

When I came back, the desire was for me to do Chinese foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. I didn’t know how long I was going to stay. My initial commitment was for three years. Now, this is year 16. I don’t know how much longer I’ll do this. I’ll be 80 at the end of this academic year. So, maybe it’s time to pack it in. But I still have fun and I still get asked to do more things than I can accept.

You still look well. And you’re still writing and speaking and thinking.

Knock on wood that will continue.

Recommended readings

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About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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Stephen Roach was not pleased when he was snubbed to speak at the China Development Forum (CDF) last year, for the first time in 24 year. An annual gathering of top western experts and businesses in Beijing organized by the State Council, the CDF offers a rare occasion for foreign elite intellectuals and business leaders to debate China’s policy in front of a Chinese government audience, with a closing reception typically hosted by the premier (though this did not happen last year). And as the former chief economist of Morgan Stanley and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, Stephen Roach ranks among the most recognized foreign experts in China.

The reason for China’s sudden snub is unclear, though some suspect the censure comes from his article two months earlier when he argued “Hong Kong is over” in a Financial Times op-ed. Once among the most China-bullish senior economists on Wall Street, Stephen Roach has traveled a remarkable journey of course correction. He now regularly sounds alarm bells about China’s economy through his media op-eds and his Substack, . He left Morgan Stanley over ten years ago and is now a Senior Fellow at Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, teaching the popular course The Next China.

Last autumn, I sat down with Prof. Roach at his spacious Cape Cod-style house surrounded by lush greenery in Connecticut. We chatted about his life, from the Anti-Vietnam War protests in his undergraduate years, to his time at the Federal Reserve, his pivot to China at Morgan Stanley, and his switch from Wall Street to Yale. We traced the evolution of his views on China. Since then, he is back in the good graces of Beijing and spoke at this year’s CDF. His views on Hong Kong have also moderated. Much can happen in a year’s time, so I was pleased that the transcripts of our conversations — which have here been edited for brevity and clarity — have stood the test of time well, and remain a truthful representation of Prof. Roach’s personal journey, and the story of Wall Street and China over the past decades of engagement.

Enjoy.

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• “Now you need to learn how to be an economist.”

• From the Fed to “fat cat”

• A pivot to China after the Asian Financial Crisis

• “The Next China” stymied

“Now you need to learn how to be an economist.”

You studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During your time there, the campus was the site of one of the most well-known anti-Vietnam War protests, which was violently put down by police officers. Could you talk about that experience?

There was a growing outcry of college students not wanting to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. It all broke out into the open during my final semester, in October of 1967, on what became a very famous day of anti-war protest. Dow Chemical was coming to campus to interview students for jobs after college. Dow Chemical was also making a product called napalm, which was used in bombing villages in Vietnam and inflicting horrific injury and death on innocent civilians.

A group of students announced they were going to block the interviewers. When the police came to remove them, it immediately became a pretty violent incident. Those of us that were standing on the outside as curious observers got swept into the melee. One thing led to another and the entire campus erupted — thousands of students, tear gas, police dogs. Students were clubbed and beaten — though I was not.

Fast forward a few months: To avoid the draft, I had enrolled in grad school at NYU. There were two more major demonstrations there. It was a period of protest and, for me, of beginning to think about the role of government in society and the fact that it’s appropriate to stand up and voice criticism if you believe in it and it is well-founded.

Those were the seeds by which I have looked at or I dared to question government policies in dealing with economic or other social issues.

What was it like to do a PhD at NYU?

I enjoyed it. I made it through the courses, written exams, and oral exams. But then I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to write about for my dissertation. I worked for nine months thinking I wanted to do something on economic development, but it just didn’t work.

A young professor had just been recruited from Columbia, M. Ishaq Nadiri. He was building cutting-edge models, and he suggested where I might look to apply some of his models. I developed a system of equations that linked the labor market to other markets.

Of all the things I’ve written over the years, it’s probably the thing I’m least proud of. But I poured my heart into it.

By the time of my defense, I’d already started working at the Federal Reserve. So I took the train up. And before I went back, Oskar Morgenstern, the esteemed game theorist and a member of my dissertation committee, said, “Do you have a second? I would love to just chat with you in my office.” He poured me a glass of sherry and poured one for himself, and he said, “Congratulations, I want to drink a toast to the newest doctorate of economics in our profession.” Then he said, “I just have one question. What’s the gross national product of the United States?” I said, “Well, it’s the sum of goods and services produced in the United States.” He said, “No, what’s the number?” I went, “I don’t know.”

He went down a list of well-known economic concepts, all of which I knew the definitions of but none of which I knew the actual numbers for. He said, “Okay. You’ve completed your coursework. You’ve completed your dissertation. You have great knowledge of all the tools of modern economics, but you’re now working for the Federal Reserve. Now you need to learn how to be an economist.”

I’ve never forgotten that. That was a focusing aspect of my life, of trying to use economic tools to really understand and deepen my knowledge of my clients and of real substantive economic issues, rather than going off and doing abstract theory.

From the Fed to “fat cat”

Did you want to work on Wall Street after your PhD?

I had no interest in doing that. Wall Street finance, those were the fat-cat enemies that I had no desire to associate with. I just dug in and went to work at the Fed, and I loved it.

What did you do at the Fed? Which part of the economic forecasting did you contribute to?

I specialized in business capital spending. The existing forecast was pretty primitive. Rather than utilize one model to provide the input, I built a system that was able to produce four to five alternative answers to the capital spending forecast based on leading models.

I had been there for about three years when the research director wanted to see me and a colleague. The overall forecast of the U.S. economy was pulled together mechanically every month by this old-timer. He had an old-fashioned Monroe calculator on his desk, and somehow he produced a full-blown forecast of the U.S. economy based on the input from the sector analysts like me and others.

It was a horribly obsolete and primitive way to do it. So the research director asked us to create a different approach using a computer. The old-timer went on vacation one summer for two weeks. And the director said, “By the time he comes back, you guys have this done.” We created a forecasting tool for the whole economy that to some extent is still in place today.

Did you enjoy working at the Fed?

I loved it. I almost didn’t want to leave. I was approached by a headhunter to go to a place called Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, a predecessor of JP Morgan. I was torn, but at the Fed the financial opportunities for me and my soon-to-be family were limited.

I took that job at Morgan Guaranty, and I hated it. It was a stodgy institution. I lasted three years. A former colleague from the Fed had been recruited by Morgan Stanley to start an economics operation. I was the first guy he called. I picked up the framework that I had developed at the Fed and put it to work at Morgan Stanley.

Why did Morgan Stanley want a team of economic researchers?

Wall Street’s a very competitive place, and all the firms do trades, banking, and underwriting the same way. Research enabled them to differentiate. If you had a provocative and correct call on the economy that was different from the competitors’ and made clients think about their companies, their investments, their strategy, you’d get more business.

Were there big contrarian calls that you made?

In the ‘90s I changed my optimistic view on U.S. productivity largely because I felt too much productivity was being driven by cost-cutting — firing people, closing plants — rather than by creative and thoughtful applications of new technologies. I argued there would be a backlash from American workers if productivity gains were largely due to the pressures that companies were placing on their job security and wages.

There was one CEO, Al Dunlap, who was the poster child for the excesses of corporate power squeezing workers — he was known as “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap. I was critical of him on a television program. It turned out he was a client of Morgan Stanley. He demanded to see the CEO and have me fired on the spot for having the audacity to be critical of him. But the CEO stood by me.

Refer a friend

After a few years at Morgan Stanley, you became their Chief Economist. What was it like being in charge of the MS research team?

In 1995, email and the internet were becoming an important tool of the business. I had this thought: Wouldn’t it be great if everybody were to write something briefly every day about their economy, a market, a policy development, data, whatever interesting, and that we would assemble that information to know what’s going on in the world every day?

I asked the whole team to write 150 to 200 words a day. I said, “I want to know what’s going on in your part of the world every day, five days a week.” So, when I got up in the morning, I would have a note from my Japan guy, my China guy, my Hong Kong guy, my Germany guy. Morgan Stanley is such an entrepreneurial place that their sales force got hold of this daily briefing, and they started sending it to clients. The clients loved it. So I knew I had gotten onto something big.

I remember I made the pitch to the senior management of Morgan Stanley when I needed them to commit to building a website — something Morgan Stanley had never heard of. I said, “Last night while you were sleeping, the Mexican peso was devalued, there was a debt default in Argentina, and consumer sentiment collapsed in Brazil. None of this was in the newspaper today, but here’s what your team said about it that you could have read when you came to work in the morning.” I slapped it on the table, and they all immediately jumped and said, “Yeah, we want this.”

The first web address that Morgan Stanley had was www.ms.com. But MS was also Microsoft, and that was a client of Morgan Stanley, so they asked us to drop the name. It’s now www.morganstanley.com.

I did this for a decade, five days a week. I used it to bring the team together to look at the global financial crisis, the dot-com crisis, inflation, deflation. We would use this for thematic insights into what was making the world work. There was no team that was organized around these types of insights and developments like ours. I was very proud of that.

A pivot to China after the Asian Financial Crisis

What were some big moments in the ‘90s and 2000s for you?

The late ‘90s was pivotal for me professionally because that’s when the Asian Financial Crisis erupted. It got me attracted to China.

Our economics team on Wall Street probably had the worst forecast of any economics group as to what this crisis meant for Asia and the world economy. We were lowering our forecast every few weeks. I was embarrassed by this and felt that I needed to get a better handle on it. I had a hunch at that time that China would be decisive in shaping the endgame of the Asian Financial Crisis.

I decided I would do a Kissinger-like shuttle diplomacy and go to China almost every month until I could figure out if this hunch was correct. It was deeply held in the West that China would be the next shoe to fall, or, as a now famous cover story in The Economist had it, the next ship to get sucked into the whirlpool of financial market contagion.

I had a series of meetings in late ‘97 before I dared to reach any conclusion. Then I wrote an article for the Financial Times called The Land of the Rising Dragon. The basic argument was: Don’t paint Asia with the same brush. China is very different and here’s why.

The response from my clients in the West was incredulous. They accused me of being a Wall Street shill for Morgan Stanley’s nascent Chinese businesses. This was just after we’d entered into a joint venture with the China Construction Bank to establish CICC, and just before we were getting some pretty juicy assignments to take state-owned enterprises public. So my views were dismissed as having the classic Wall Street sell side biases.

A couple of months later I got a message from the China team at the World Bank telling me that they had read the article and had passed it along to then-Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng. He was coming to the United States, including to Seattle to visit Boeing. Would I have time to meet with him and discuss the article?

I said, “Sure.” I dropped everything and flew to Seattle. We just hit it off, and he became my guide in laying out what he felt was the new China, the China that the West, from his point of view, didn’t understand. I remember he told me about quasi-private small companies called Township Village Enterprises, and I knew nothing about that. He said, “You come back, and I’ll make sure that we’ll set up a tour.” A few months later I took him up on that. I was going to Shanghai, and I visited a few TVEs.

I kept writing and learning more about what was going on in China. The Asian Financial Crisis came to an end in late ‘98. China did not devalue its currency as the Western view had held it. I stayed pretty consistent with my point of view that, coming out of this crisis, China would emerge as the new leader of the pan-Asian economy, replacing Japan, which was widely thought to recover. I felt that would not happen, and it didn’t.

So I made a pivotal macro call on Asia based on my early days of learning about China and my long-standing understanding of Japan, and spoke of a new China-centric Asia.

The next pivotal moment for me came around the year 2000. Minister Xiang had introduced me to Premier Zhu Rongji, and Zhu Rongji was in the process of setting up what has now become China’s most important international conference, the China Development Forum. I went, starting in 2001, to every one since then. I’ve been 24 years in a row. I’m probably the longest-serving foreign delegate to this conference.

At the 2001 conference, I was the keynote speaker at lunch and I laid out a view for the global economy that was negative. I said the global economy was going to be weak and bordering on a global recession, and that China needed to prepare for that. I was challenged afterwards by a well-known Western economist, Fred Bergsten.

The China Development Forum always ended with a small private audience with the premier. The way that usually goes is, the chairman of the China Development Forum, an international CEO, gives a formal report. The former CEO of HSBC John Bond was the chairman that year. He stood up in his elegant British attire and started to give this report and Zhu Rongji just cut him off and said, “You can send it to me. I hear there was a debate between Roach and Bergsten. I want to hear the debate.” I gave a brief summary. Bergsten gave his point of view.

As we were leaving that room, the premier came over, shook my hand, thanked me for coming in perfect English. He said, “I hope you’re wrong but we’re going to plan as if you’re right.” And I did turn out to be right. The next year he came up to me and thanked me for my advice, and made some humorous comment about, “you’ll notice that Mr. Bergsten has not been invited back.”

So those two officials, Finance Minister Xiang, Premier Zhu Rongji, they welcomed me as somebody from Wall Street who was able to articulate a different view about China than what had become conventional wisdom in the West.

The West has always clung to a view of doubt, suspicion about China — the books about the coming collapse of China and all that. The West has always been skeptical of China. I had a different approach and stayed with it consistently and until about a few years ago, when I did turn more cautious.

You just mentioned Morgan Stanley set up a joint venture with the China Construction Bank, creating China International Capital Corporation. Could you talk about that?

The deal was signed around 1995. From the Chinese side, the key participants were Zhu Rongji and Wang Qishan. Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the China Construction Bank at the time, was also closely involved.

The idea of taking state-owned enterprises public sounds pretty straightforward. But to conduct a listing in international capital markets under the regulatory purview of U.S. or other authorities was particularly challenging. These SOEs in large part did not exist in the corporate form that was required of underwriting regulatory oversight.

So our bankers were charged with the task of looking at these entities that were under the auspices of the state, and going through the records of the companies, the warehouses of filing cabinets, to create companies on paper that would be consistent with those regulatory needs to conduct a successful listing. And that was a hugely demanding, labor-intensive job, but we were able to do that on several occasions.

Reportedly Morgan Stanley gradually lost control over CICC. The first few CEOs were appointed by Morgan Stanley, but later the firm was taken over by the businessman Fang Fenglei and then Zhu Rongji’s son Zhu Yunlai, and Morgan Stanley ended up selling its stake.

It was more complex than that. By investing in a joint venture, there were a lot of short-term opportunities that would be hugely beneficial to Morgan Stanley and helping the Chinese government create an investment banking function in a country where there was none.

Yet we knew that, if it was going to work out, the success of the new company would challenge the sustainability of that relationship, that the joint venture itself would become more autonomous, more independent, more willing to chart its own course. And it did. That was a consideration as to why we ended up terminating that relationship and moving on to a new platform where we had complete control.

You soon became Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, though you weren’t specialised in Asia per se. Were you surprised to be offered that role?

Yes and no. At that point I was spending a lot of time going back and forth in Asia. I was the firm’s senior research person and had made a pretty good name for myself in focusing on Asia and China. I sensed that the Morgan Stanley senior management might be looking to change the management structure of the Asia platform.

I continued to write and speak on broad global economic issues with financial market implications and, in particular, expressing my views on China. That was a source of enormous intellectual satisfaction for me because during that period, I was a real leader in driving macro thought and debate in Asia. I had access to almost any prime minister or political leader that I wanted to. The card that said Chairman Morgan Stanley Asia was a real entrée into pretty rare circles in the policy and political debate in Asia, and I took advantage of that.

Now you’re at Yale. Why did you leave Morgan Stanley?

I had a long career. Toward the end, a Yale professor I’d known for years, Jeffrey Garten, was bringing a class of students through Asia, and he wanted me to speak to them as the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia about the Asian economy and financial businesses. He was going to be setting up a new course at the Yale School of Management and wanted to know if I could give a few lectures.

I said I could do it, and I enjoyed it. Then I got a call from the president of Yale saying that they were setting up a new Global Affairs Institute at Yale, and if I ever wanted to stop working at Morgan Stanley, they would want to offer me a job on the faculty.

Was this to be the Jackson Institute?

Yeah. I thought about it, and agreed to do that but continue in my capacity at Morgan Stanley and reduce my role from chairman to non-executive chairman. I did both for about a year. And then, as I was reaching my 30-year anniversary at Morgan Stanley, I decided that I couldn’t effectively do both at the same time and that it was a good time for me to stop. I wanted to be back with my family on a full-time basis, and I felt it was appropriate to end my relationship at Morgan Stanley on good terms after 30 years.

In my discussions with the president of Yale, Rick Levin, we talked about what I might teach, and he said, “Well, it’s up to you what you want to teach. This is a global affairs institute, but you clearly know an awful lot about China, and about the U.S. and global economy, so I would think that you would be interested in teaching that.” I initially laid out a syllabus for an economics class on China that I called The Next China, to look back and draw inferences on the reforms and opening-up to figure out what that meant for China’s future.

“The Next China” stymied

Looking back over the past two decades of being bullish on China, has China turned into The Next China the way you thought it would?

No, it’s been stymied. To me, The Next China, as I taught it at Yale, would be a consumer-led China. I raised questions on whether or not China would be able to make it to the promised land. I warned and worried about the aspirational aspects of a consumer society being compatible with how Xi Jinping viewed the China Dream through his ideological lens. I recognize that that is an unresolved issue.

What would it take for China to get its economic momentum back?

I wrote about that in the Financial Times, where I said that China is at risk of falling into a Japanese-like quagmire — stagnation, deflation, and a growth trajectory that will fall short of what the party and its leader has laid out for 2049. China is not Japan, but it’s close enough to make it a legitimate comparison.

The structural similarities between Japan and China are striking. Different systems, but both facing rapid aging, a shrinking working age population, and problematic prospects for productivity. When your workforce declines, the only way you can keep growing is to get more output out of the surviving workers through higher productivity. Japan was unable to do that, and I worry about China being able to do that as well. Especially with so much of the Chinese economy having shifted back into low-productivity state-owned enterprises, and the once-dynamic and high-productivity private sector being restricted.

What factors or events were most critical in shifting your views on China?

A big development in the China debate was when, in May of 2016, there was an interview with an “authoritative person” published on the front page of the People’s Daily. This was a big event in senior circles in the Chinese policy structure. And the authoritative person, always rumored to be a person very close to Xi Jinping, warned of a Japanese-like disease with asset bubbles and debt that could lead to stagnation and an “L-shaped” trajectory for China.

I made a note of that, and wrote and warned about it myself. A few years ago, I expressed my views openly that these risks were now in growing danger of coming to pass. I marked down my prognosis for the Chinese economy on the basis of those concerns.

It was an evolutionary process. The demographic issues have become acute as the population has been declining more quickly than any of us expected. The productivity issues have become acute. And the unwillingness on the part of the government to provide a meaningful stimulus to consumer demand has become serious. And the property crisis has deepened.

So what John Maynard Keynes purportedly said, when questioned about his shifting views on the British economy by the House of Commons, is appropriate: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I think the China story has changed, so I have become more cautious as a result.

I am not in the “China disaster, China crisis, China collapse” camp, but I subscribe to the view that the prognosis has darkened, and the urgency by which Beijing needs to address the growth challenge has grown. The government is starting to understand that.

And it seems even that much critical thinking was too much for the Chinese government. When you attended the China Development Forum this year [editor’s note: this interview was done in 2024], you weren’t given a chance to speak for the first time.

The government has let it be known that criticism is not welcome. Xi Jinping has described this as saying that he only wants to hear the good stories about China. Well, good stories are great. But when the facts change, you sometimes need to hear the tougher stories.

When I pushed the leadership of the China Development Forum for what my speaking assignment would be — as someone who had attended every single one of the China Development Forums, except the first one, from 2001 to 2023; as someone who had given keynote addresses, spoken on panels, and always had a role — they were silent.

Finally, the week before, they said that “We don’t feel it is appropriate for you to speak this year. Your views are too sensitive, and they are likely to be sensationalized by domestic and foreign media. We think it is in your best interest, and our best interest that you do not speak. You can attend, but you can’t speak.”

And they said, “You will have the opportunity to speak the day after the Forum’s over, there’s something called the Bozhi Macro Forum, still held at Diaoyutai, but it’s a closed session, and you can speak there.”

I still went, knowing that I was not going to be able to speak. I took the opportunity the day after at the Bozhi Forum to be very direct in telling them what I thought of that decision. And then on the way back, I wrote a piece that is now on my Substack, called, What’s the Point?

The message was, why did I go? And why should I ever go back? The point is: Show up and stay focused on trying to provide constructive feedback. Sometimes it may be criticism, sometimes encouragement, but engaging in debate is what you would hope that “an old friend of China” — which is how I’ve been described for decades — would be allowed to do. That’s why I went, and that’s why I will go again.

Recommended readings

Stephen Roach, 2009, The Next Asia, Wiley

Stephen Roach, 2014, Unbalanced, Yale University Press

Stephen Roach, 2022, Accidental Conflict, Yale University Press

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

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Doing oral history is a potentially dangerous delight. It catapults you into the past, where we project our hopes, aspirations and optimism backwards so we can retell a history and perhaps a future. Whereas the present is a definite moment, the past contains wild, fascinating, and often pleasant possibilities. This in turn helps us maintain hope for a better future, just as the past once was, despite a less-than-satisfactory present. I do not reject the use of history this way; in fact, I embrace it, knowing the faults and fantasies that one may inevitably run into on this course. Still, it is nice to experience hope from truth. And if oral history helps in this way, even in ways that are imprecise and even implausible as a projection into the future, so be it.

Today, we have another episode with the wonderful David Moser, who holds a Master’s and a PhD in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan, with a major in Chinese Linguistics and Philosophy. Our last episode with David was truly entertaining and fun stuff. He was one of the first foreigners to perform on Chunwan, the annual Spring Festival Gala watched by over a billion Chinese people around the world each year. He has performed Xiangsheng, promoted jazz, hosted shows on Chinese national TV, written books, and spoken on lots of leading media channels. To me, he is Lao Mo, who is a jolly, thoughtful, musical, idealistic, and kind romanticist thinker, who loves and critiques China for all the right reasons.

We covered mostly his time in Beijing up to his Chunwan performance. Today’s excerpt, which was edited for brevity and clarity, covers the rest of his China stories — the post-Tiananmen life in Beijing, his experience in hosting Chinese TV shows, bringing jazz to China, and crossing the U.S. and China borders for decades. He says China is his “drug of choice.” I cannot completely relate as I had no choice to be born in and involved with China, but I get it. This is a fascinating place with never a boring day, with endless possibilities to ponder upon. In this spirit of exploration and rumination, I hope you like this piece.

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• The Tankman video in a Chinese museum

• Jamming on guitar with rockstar Cui Jian and jazzing inside a PLA army base

• Walking onto Chinese national TV (with censors)

• The ebb and flow of Chinese attitudes towards America

• The mutual decay of China and America today

• China, my drug of choice

Podcast music: Mélodie, Kobi Salomon, Artlist Classics, Edvard Grieg, Ezequiel Jait, Artlist Original Music

The Tankman video in a Chinese museum

Last time we talked about your earliest experiences in China, including how you went to Beijing in 1986 to help translate Gödel, Esher, Bach, a book about AI by Douglas Hofstadter. That process took eight years. During that time, Tiananmen happened.

That was so sad. I remember being in my dorm room in ‘87, ‘88, watching the documentary Heshang (River Elegy) on TV, thinking, “Whoa, this is really breaking the boundaries.” It was critical of the government and very much an advertisement for gaige kaifang, the economic reforms.

I was actually in China in ‘89, but just as the protests started, I was going home. I had no idea what was going to happen. And I wasn’t in any danger or anything. Then it happened when I was back in Bloomington with Doug. One morning we got the news and just, oh, it was horrible. I thought I’d never be able to go back.

Because you thought you would be shut out?

I thought China would just be closed off, or it would be in chaos for years, or Americans wouldn’t be allowed in, or who knows what. And yet, Wang Jingshou was still there and lobbying to get me a visa so I could do more research on quyi and crosstalk.

And lo and behold, fall of 1989, I got my visa and was back in Beijing just after the massacre. And I thought, “This is really weird.” It was a changed Beijing. It looked the same, but you could still see bullet holes on the apartment buildings on Changanjie.

It was during that time also that we got some of the translators of the book out (to the U.S.). Anyone who could get out would get an automatic green card. So I went through Doug at Indiana University, and sent these letters to the embassy saying, “I want to invite so-and-so to be in my research group. The research is artificial intelligence, and here’s a biology student.” They knew this was fake. But we got several people out, which was good. It really changed their lives.

I remember going to the military history museum. They had an exhibition about the crackdown. It was glorifying the soldiers for crushing a counter-revolutionary rebellion.

I was going through the exhibit and in one room being projected on the wall is the Tank Man video. And I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. Why is this being shown?” Then I listened to the voiceover, and it said, “This video is proof that the soldiers were not indiscriminately slaughtering people. Look at this one man. The tanks are all stopping for his safety.” So they were twisting the meaning of that video. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

They haven’t put that on TV for a while. They had a choice of telling an alternative version or not saying anything at all. And in the end, they weren’t going to say anything at all. But there was this brief moment when the Tank Man video was shown.

Lots of weird things happened then. But the reforms kept going and things came back to some kind of normalcy pretty fast. What happened was the economic plot went way up fast, and then the political aspect went down. People were still really focused on getting rich. Getting out of the danwei (work unit) system, tiaohai (jumping into the sea — of opportunity).

And as a foreigner navigating these waters, did you have any idea where you were heading to?

I was under pressure from people that said, “You’re really crazy. You’ve got to go back home and get a job in academia. Because the longer you’re stuck in China, the more you can’t go back.” But I thought, “Let’s try this for a few years.”

I taught graduate students translation theory and some other things. I learned more from them than they learned from me because their English was already good. They’d already done translation. Mostly we would talk about examples and they would get English advice from me. But I was getting a lot of Chinese advice from them. Because we were coming at it from two sides, it became more like a seminar where we’re all just solving translation problems together. That was wonderful.

Jamming on guitar with rockstar Cui Jian and jazzing inside a PLA army base

Before coming to China, you probably never thought you would be part of China’s jazz revival. Could you talk about your jazz story in China?

I do all these different things, music was one of them. I don’t think I ever had enough talent to really be a jazz star. I just didn’t have the technique, or the motivation. But I did love it. I wanted to do music, and I still do. So it was a big decision to give up music professionally and go into the China field.

But as one of those serendipities, I happened to be in China at the exact moment that it was opening up, when you began to have Chinese musicians — mostly rock musicians or pop musicians — that were intensely curious about this thing called “jazz.”

They could tell that there was something special about jazz that was different from pop music, that it was a musical form where you could never reach perfection or even anything like completion. There was always a process. No matter how well you play, you’re never there. You’re always moving forward and making advances. And that’s not something that you really get in pop music. You play the tune the same way each time. But with jazz, each solo is a new attempt at something.

The Chinese musicians were aware of that, because they could hear and feel it. But they didn’t have the technique and the repertoire to get a foothold in it. I said [in the previous episode] that I love being a bridge, and jazz was the perfect place for that. Because, at my mediocre level, I was still at a higher level than they were, at least knowledge-wise. They respected me because it was like, “He’s an emissary from this country” — as if anyone who comes from the U.S. must know jazz.

I taught part-time at a place called the MIDI School that had a lot of guitar players. I was teaching these students about improvisation and the swing feel in the music. I was doing some work with the PLA army band that wanted to set up…

They were interested in jazz too?

The army brass were not interested, but the musicians were really interested. I met this guy at a jam session and he was a soldier with the jiefangjun junyuetuan (People’s Liberation Army Band). He played saxophone. They have all these players, and they’re bored — how many times can you play the national anthem? So he wanted something more interesting. He wanted to do a big band. And he learned by listening to Benny Goodman on the radio, on the VOA.

On the Voice of America? The enemy’s radio?

They still had shortwave VOA broadcasts, which were technically blocked. The army band was on a PLA base. I couldn’t go in as a foreigner. So they would sneak me in; I would get down in the car. I bought some charts and wrote some songs and directed and then taught them how to do it. And that was the first jazz big band.

Refer a friend

Once they got repertoire, then they started getting jobs on New Year’s Eve. Foreign hotels wanted to have a big band for New Year’s Eve. Once they started to make money, the generals and the army officers said, “Hey, what are these people…?” They took over the band after that because it became a money-making machine. But things like that were just so wonderful.

I saw this generation going from zero to beginning to understand the music. For the new generation, now born in the late 1990s or early 2000s, it’s their native language. They grew up hearing that music. If you’re 25, 30 years old and it’s the first time you hear jazz, you’re already a mature musician. It’s like learning a foreign language. You’ll never get it. But if you grow up hearing it then you’ll speak it like a native. Some young players now that are just awesome.

How did you meet [Chinese rock star] Cui Jian?

That was the very first time I did any jazz at all. It was this very special night. So I was at Beida (Peking University)…

This was ‘96? ‘97?

Not that late. ‘93, ‘94 probably. This graduate student said, “What do you miss about the United States?” I said, “Not much. Jazz. I miss jazz because it’s not on the radio.” She said, “Oh, I know someone who’s a jazz pianist, and they have informal performances. You want me to put it in touch with him?” She gave me his telephone number. I called him up, “I hear you have jam sessions.” He said, “Yeah, come.”

I didn’t even have a trumpet. I borrowed one from a Japanese guy. The night that I went, it just so happens Cui Jian was there, plus other jazz players that I would later know better and work with. The jazz scene was very small.

That night they were all there and they said, “This is David. He’s from the U.S.” “Oh, wow. From the U.S. Oh, cool.” I got the trumpet and we were playing a little bit, and I was thinking, “These people, they play okay, but this doesn’t sound like jazz. The language is not pure. There’s something weird about it.”

But this guy came up in a tie-dye t-shirt and a flugelhorn, and I said, “Ah, this guy has a style. It sounds pretty good.” And actually I knew who Cui Jian was and I’d heard his music.

But you couldn’t match the person.

Yeah, I’d never seen many photos of him.

And you didn’t expect the Michael Jackson of Chinese music to just be there.

No. Exactly. During the break, the piano player said, “Mo Dawei, you should meet this guy.” He goes, “He plays pretty well. This is Cui Jian.” What! My mouth dropped.

We had a little conversation. He’s not shy, but modest, soft-spoken, and also just very serious about the music. He doesn’t act like a star. He’s just concentrated on the music. But he said, “I really want to play jazz.” He actually invited me to his house, and a few times I gave him some harmony lessons and we played a little bit.

Walking onto Chinese national TV (with censors)

You were increasingly plugged into the world of entertainment. Beijing TV asked you to do a show for them. You became a presenter on CCTV. What were those years like?

I got this offer to work at the CCTV educational channel for an English program. It paid well. And so I said, “Maybe I’ll take a break from academia and do this.”

I was doing translation, hosting, everything, mostly revising scripts and things like that. I would propose things that I knew worked well on American network TV, and I would try to explain it to them, and they said, “No, that would never work.”

For example, most talk shows have a regular bit that they do every single night. They said, “Nah, that would get old. No, you don’t understand Chinese audiences. They’d start getting bored. You have to do something different each time.” They never believed me.

It was fun. But if you know anything about TV, it is so fake and it’s all about appearances and you have to put on a happy face. It’s so shallow. But the people in the program were very nice people, very likable, very funny. And they were having a good time. They felt very proud to be working for CCTV. They were very dedicated. And I just had great fun, I learned a lot from them, really.

There were some interesting censorship things. I found out that, on CCTV, every show has a party official whose job it is to monitor what you do. They don’t actually take part in planning the shows.

Like a political commissar.

Yeah. We did skits for kids. Back then it was Finding Nemo. So they were doing a little skit on that. It was a murder mystery with Zorro, the swordsman. One of the kids said, “Oh, look at this. There's this mark on a pillow. This might be a clue.” And instead of holding it up like a Z he held it wrong. So it looked like an N. He said, “Oh, the killer’s name must begin with N. Who could it be? It could be Nemo, Finding Nemo,” he said. “No, Nemo’s a fish. How about, Newton?” He said, “No, Newton is a physicist. He lived hundreds of years ago. He couldn’t have done it.” He said, “Oh, Nixon. Maybe it’s him.” He said, “No, he was the president.”

So we did the skit. A few days later, they said we have to refilm the skit. I said, “Why?” He said, “You can’t make fun of an American president.”

This was a silly skit, it didn’t mean anything whatsoever. It just had to start with an N. It wasn’t about Nixon. This is when I first realized, “Boy, are they ever overly cautious.” Who would care? But then I thought, “Oh yeah, Nixon is like a heroic president to the Chinese people because he’s the one that brought them together.” So it must be that. I thought, “Oh, this is just so ridiculous.”

You’ve had your share of censorship in China. from the ‘99 New Year Gala, doing TV skits, and doing interviews. I presume by this point nothing is really strange to you anymore.

It’s still strange, but it’s a strange that I got used to.

The ebb and flow of Chinese attitudes towards America

You’ve been teaching in China for 30 years now. Do you notice changes over the years in the education system, in how you teach and how students respond?

A lot of things happened. Young people, and Chinese people in general, began to learn a lot about the West and the U.S. There were no longer these naive questions. By the 2000s, a taxi cab driver knew more than I did about America.

The students also became very knowledgeable about the United States and English literature and all sorts of things, because they could actually directly watch the movie or read the book or listen to the podcast. And they could actually go there, or their friends could go there and come back and forth. So this enormous surge of information flowing in and out of China was a huge difference. It was like night and day.

Is there some sense in which China’s inferiority complex became a superiority complex over the years? Because it feels like it’s different now, right?

It’s different now, but I would say it took a little longer. Because even into the early 2000s, people were happier and they were certainly prouder of their own country than they had been before, but there was still a sense that, “We’re still second fiddle. We’re not as advanced as you are.”

But there was a turnaround. Nationalism surged in the late 1990s. There was this hit series of nationalist books, China Can Say No — Zhongguo Keyi Shuo Bu.

And then, before and after the Olympics, there was pushback against Western countries, especially the United States. But that didn’t necessarily mean pride, a feeling of superiority. They still felt like, “We’re being bullied and we should at least stand up for our own country.”

But later there was a turnaround. Nowadays, even I have the same feeling when I land at Chicago Airport. “God, what a dreary, old-fashioned, dilapidated airport we have here.” And I’m going to Terminal 3 or 4 in Beijing, and it’s like a science-fiction movie. It’s so amazing. For Chinese people, I think, it’s “Hey, we’re not second place now,” in many ways.

This is the world you grew up in, right?

Yeah, exactly. Every few years we moved into a bigger house, we ate at more expensive restaurants, and then we began to travel to more destinations. It was unheard of to go abroad when I was little. And now everyone’s going to all kinds of exotic destinations.

The reality of this takeoff is undeniable. But, for me, there are lingering questions. Is it sustainable? How equitable is it? Whose lives are really taking off? I genuinely think China has a façade underneath which there are a lot of cracks and potholes.

I can’t speak for the Chinese, but Deng Xiaoping’s slogan, fazhan shi yingdaoli — development is the ironclad principle — still lingers today. The kind of development that’s material, visible, and easy to feel. “Gosh, this wasn’t this way 10 years ago. Now look at it. They’re really performing.”

But I think what’s really obvious to a lot of people, and especially the people of your generation and people who are just more aware and maybe more educated, is that there’s more to life than that. They’re still failing in the spiritual sphere, the freedom to expand consciousness and to do things that go against the grain. People feel constrained by that, and they can feel that’s something that places like the United States have more of. But for a lot of people, the material benefits are good enough.

The mutual decay of China and America today

It’s been a good deal. But I’m always hesitant to join this chorus of praising China for how great it has become. Those who can speak are those who have been the beneficiaries of this good ride. The people who have been left out don’t have the channels to speak.

China and the U.S. are not that dissimilar in that, if you go out and just interact with ordinary people, their minds are not on these issues. They’re thinking, “I wonder if I can get a pizza tonight,” or how they can get a better job.

Americans are so privileged. They don’t even have an inkling of knowledge about what’s happening anywhere else in the world. Keep in mind also that we have a president right now in the United States who’s getting pretty busy trying to crush dissent and to make anyone who says anything bad about him shut up, shutting down Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

I would say right now America is almost undergoing as big a change as China was undergoing during the gaige kaifang era, but in the wrong direction. It’s going to a dark place that we thought America was immune to. We thought that our democracy was so resilient that no one could possibly reach that pinnacle. And yet here he is, doing exactly what any autocrat will do, and there’s not much we can do to stop him. Maybe come back in another 10 years and let’s compare China and the U.S. at that point. They may be both dystopias.

For me it’s distressing. Because the China that I was hoping for didn’t really materialize the way we thought it should and could have. But then I’m also looking at my own country, which I thought was going to be a stable, unchanging fact, a reality that was always going to be there — America wouldn’t change all that much in terms of its political system.

But now, both of these countries that I’m so invested in, and spiritually and intellectually tied to, are in very unstable, problematic, chaotic conditions. It’s very distressing.

You’ve basically lived half your life in America and half in China. What is America to you now? Is it still home, a place that you go back to? Is it distant?

I’d say I’m spiritually attached to America, but I don’t feel any need to be physically there. I’m still American. I still have the mindset and the attitudes of an American. I wouldn’t say I’m patriotic, but I’m still at least disposed well to a country which I think has some very good aspects, historically.

China is another matter. It’s more the country that I feel drawn to for various reasons, for self-improvement and self-actualization. You go to China, and you think you’re going to learn a lot about China, but for the first few years, you’re really going to learn a lot about yourself.

One of the advantages of going overseas, especially to a place like China, is that it challenges all of your assumptions. For me it was not just that I was curious about China, but it was also a learning experience. It was a transformational decision that made me make great changes in myself that I wouldn’t have made otherwise, or I wouldn’t have even thought about.

And now, being married to a Chinese woman, and then having a daughter who’s in the middle there and seeing how she’s grappling with these issues — all I can say is, at this stage I’m so invested in both worlds that I can’t get rid of either of them. I get lots of gratification, excitement, and inspiration from both cultures in different ways. And I don’t want to see either of those cultures collapse as they seem sometimes to be on the verge of doing. So it’s a hard time for me. It’s a little depressing.

In the same way I see Trump chipping away at all these democratic norms, China’s chipping away at some of the freedoms and expansions that were in process during the gaige kaifang in the early 2000s.

That took so long and so much effort to build.

And seemed to be on such a solid trajectory. You can have the highest tech and the best internet and still have a closed-off system that’s spiritually and emotionally in its own little bubble. They figured out how to do that. This is all very distressing. And for me, at the age I’m at, I may not get to see how this all turns out.

China, my drug of choice

You stayed in Beijing all these years. It’s become your home. It’s where your family is. It’s where you’ve spent most of your life. Is Beijing still the Beijing you loved?

Yes and no. It’s changed in so many ways for the better, in terms of convenience. But it’s so big now, it’s gradually becoming unlivable. It’s not really one city. Most people spend their whole lives in one section of Beijing. The traffic is horrible in some places. It’s huge. It’s a little bit inhuman.

But I have to say, the Beijingers, the ones who lived there their whole life, who are just the average people, I don’t think they’ve changed a bit. They still talk the same way. They still act the same way. They’re still funny in the same way. They’re still fearless. They’ll come up and say anything to you. And a lot of them still live in the hutongs (traditional neighborhoods). That part of Beijing still seems to be there, the beating human heart of Beijing.

I’m so used to Beijing. I don’t know why. I just feel nostalgic about it and all the history. When I look at remnants of the Beijing City Wall, they’re so romantic still to this day. All the glory and tragedy of Beijing, the Qing Dynasty and all stuff, is right there in front of your nose.

Then what’s changed? Why are foreigners leaving?

One big reason is that it ceased to be a career choice. They began to localize as the gaige kaifang matured, and you didn’t need the presence of these foreigners. The middle rank workers and executives decided, “I could probably do as well elsewhere.” The package wasn’t as attractive as it used to be.

And then the horrible pollution of 2010, ‘11, ‘12. Those few years were terrible. It was dangerously polluted. To their credit, they’ve solved that in less time than you thought. But any foreigner with kids thought, “We’ve got to get our kids out of here. They can’t live in a polluted environment like this.”

And the U.S.-China relationship soured so badly that people began to feel like they weren’t quite welcome. There was suddenly this political tension that spilled into every aspect of daily life. And then Covid.

But in another sense, we’re not really sure why the numbers of American students willing to go to China and study Chinese language just dropped precipitously after 2008, after the Olympics.

It dropped after 2008, that early?

Yep, right away. The pinnacle was 2008.

Interesting. I would’ve thought it’s Covid.

No it was before then. Covid was just the death knell, the nail in the coffin. People in education had constant meetings about this — “What’s going on?” It is true that gradually Americans probably began to think less of China as a lifetime employment opportunity. Because they lost interest in that, then the language was less important to them. So people stopped opting to take Chinese in college.

But we’re not really sure why exactly. The magic kind of just went away. It was pre-Xi Jinping. So it wasn’t him. Maybe it was a bubble that had to burst at some point.

All the things that made China and Beijing interesting and worth exploring and considering either evaporated or people became disenchanted with it. I’m not quite sure exactly.

I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. and China have been drifting apart. China has been more enclosed than in the past. How much do you think back to the examples of Americans who stayed in China after 1949. Do you see yourself in that image at all?

No. It’s different. They were enamored, living this dream about the Communist Party.

They were diehard Maoists.

Yeah. They were ideological. They were in favor of that. For me, that has nothing to do with it whatsoever. If nothing else, that was a turnoff. I’m very interested in it and like to study it and think about it, but it wasn’t any reason I would want to stay in China.

The fact that China is going back to some of that, for admission into the society, and that in the U.S., at least for the time being, Trump is moving in that same autocratic style of leadership — I don’t know where I’d rather be at this point. For me, there’s something about the culture in China that just attracts me.

What is it?

There’s a joke that I’ve made — but in some sense this is true — China is my drug of choice. And it’s much less harmful to my body than cocaine or ketamine. I’m of the ‘60s generation. You want to have an acid trip, experience some transcendental enlightenment, right? For me, China was like that. I’m the type of person who likes stimulation.

If I’m in the U.S. and let’s say the water heater breaks and I need a plumber to come and fix it, and he comes and he does — that’s the most boring thing in the world. But if it happens in China and the guy comes, he’s speaking with an accent. “Hey, he’s not from Beijing, where is he from?” And I try to talk to him, he talks and he asks me lots of questions and he has some strange ideas I’ve never heard before. It’s a little bit Alice in Wonderland. Everything’s a little bit off. It’s not very comfortable, but that’s what I like.

Recommended readings

David Moser, 2016, A billion voices: China’s search for a common language, Penguin Books

Douglas Hofstadter, 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books

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About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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As a foreigner in China, what is it like to perform Xiangsheng - a crosstalk-style standup comedy, with billions of Chinese people watching, at the most anticipated annual event in the Sinophone world - the Chunwan (Spring Festival Gala)?

In 1999, China Central Television allowed such a feat. So, out came an American, a Canadian, a Beninese and a Yugoslav, telling jokes in Chinese in front of a live audience of - perhaps quite literally - every Chinese family in China who had a TV.

Among the performers was David Moser, who holds a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan, with a major in Chinese Linguistics and Philosophy. By the time he stepped onto the Chunwan stage, David had been living in China for a decade, learning Xiangsheng under Master Ding Guangquan, translating books, seeding the rise of jazz in China through underground bands. As one of the first foreigners to ever appear on Chunwan, David earned fame and opportunities on Chinese TV, and regularly hosted a number of popular English-language shows since 1999 - including the annual teenager English speech contest 希望之星 (Hope Star Talent Competition), which many of us grew up watching.

David has accomplished many things in life. He is author of the Penguin-published book A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language, a regular commentator and host on global media, jazz pianist, ex-director of the CET Chinese Studies program, ex-Associate Dean of Yenching Academy, co-host of the podcast Barbarians at the Gate & Sinica Podcast.

Yet, despite his intimidating list of talents, when you meet him, you can’t help but call him ‘Lao Mo’ (老莫). I got to know David at the AAS gathering this year in Columbus, OH, and what a pleasure to connect with the man himself. He’s a jolly, funny, dynamic friend to spend time with. David wraps his seriousness and sense of humanity in his good humor, light-heartedness and a certain temperamental shield from the madness of reality that I suspect comes partially from his lifelong pursuit of music.

I will say no more than that this is the most entertaining chat I’ve done for Peking Hotel. I hope you feel the same too.

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• What is it like to perform Xiangsheng in front of a billion Chinese people?

• A musician wanders into the Sinophone world through tongue-twisters and translation

• Translating one of the first books on AI in China with half-baked Chinese

• When Ancient Greek meets Ancient Chinese

• Apprenticing under Ding Guangquan, a Xiangsheng Master

Podcast music: High Rollin, Stefano Mastronardi, Artlist Original Music

What is it like to perform Xiangsheng in front of a billion Chinese people?

Let’s start at the Spring Festival Gala in 1999, the biggest annual event in the Chinese-speaking world. The military band just finished performing. Four of you, all foreigners, were waiting to get on stage for the third act of the night. A billion viewers were watching. How were you feeling at that moment?

How could you feel but nervous? We had rehearsed the script so many times that we could probably do it in our sleep, because the chunwan is a really serious event. We didn’t realize what we were getting into when we agreed to do it. But we thought, “This is a good opportunity.” One of the people in the group was [locally famous Canadian personality Mark Rowswell, who goes by] Dashan, and just being on a stage with him would boost our visibility quite a lot.

I thought we would just rehearse a few times, maybe at somebody’s house, and then do some dress rehearsals. But they want you there every week, many times for a month. You spend all day long just waiting for your turn, sitting there. It’s very boring. Everyone’s smoking and waiting and eating, and you can’t leave.

We rehearsed it several times every week. So I wasn’t nervous that I might miss my lines or something like that. What I was more nervous about is that there’d be a technical problem, like a microphone quitting.

Have you ever been in any of those CCTV buildings?

I’ve been there as a kid. There was a show that needed an audience and who else to fill the audience other than little primary school kids in Beijing.

It’s guarded by soldiers like an army base. It’s not easy to go in and out. You’ve got to have a pass. That process was pretty tiring, this was all new to me. I’d been on TV shows before but not on such a big one.

You rehearse and rehearse, and then they do a backup recording. They want a full performance timed down to the second so that if something happens on the night of the live broadcast — somebody breaks their leg or pulls out a banner that says “Free Tibet” — they could plug in the recording from the previous night. You therefore have to do it twice and do it for real, because that might be the actual one that they use.

Also — and I didn’t know this either — it’s not as simple as writing the script and then it’s approved and then you rehearse. Each time we rehearsed the script and would memorize it and work it out pretty well. My crosstalk — xiangsheng — teacher, Ding Guangquan, was the director, because all four of us were his students.

Then we would have to perform it for the shenchabu (censorship department) in a little auditorium with 10 or so people, all party members. Then they contribute their comments or objections — “You shouldn’t say that.” “Don’t stress this.” “This is not funny.” These are not television experts. They’re just party ideologues.

At least five times we had to do this, and each time we had to revise the script. We came to realize that each time, it became less funny. I wish I’d kept the original script because it was actually funny, creative, and interesting. But every time we revised, it became more and more four foreigners competing with each other to say how much they loved China. It was literally, “No, I love China more than you do — No, I love China,” by the time we got to the fifth iteration.

By this point, the director and the scriptwriter were frustrated. We put so much work into it and they just kept changing it, and it was no longer very funny. The ending is very important for xiangsheng, so we came up with something. There has to be a resolution. What they thought was, let’s have these four foreigners, because they love Chinese culture and everything, perform a dance. The old ladies in the hutongs (old neighborhoods) would do this niuyangge that usually had drums.

Like a guangchangwu (square dance).

Yes. It’s the original guangchangwu. Usually it’s women that do it, right? So we did this, and of course, we did it badly. But everyone said, “That is funny. The audience will love that because it’s so incongruous. It’s weird, but silly. Why would four foreigners, four men, do this dance? That’s a great ending.”

Then we went through the final shencha (censorship session). We overheard an old woman saying, “Sige laowai, niuyangge, zhege bu hao, bu haokan, bu didao” — “four foreigners doing niuyangge, this is not good, doesn’t look good and not authentic.”

But that’s the whole point!

Right. The joke is that it’s not authentic. This woman knew nothing about entertainment. Maybe she thought the yangge is a sacred dance and you shouldn’t let people make fun of it.

So now, what are we going to do? We no longer had that funny ending. I think they just gave up. I don’t even remember how it ended, but we had to all recite some kind of poem. Because they just, “Couhe ba” — “whatever”, just get an ending.

When it aired live and we finished and I went out, waiting for the taxi, my friends started to call me. They said, “Ei, Dawei, wo kan ni yan chunwan” (Hey David, I saw you on the New Year Gala show). Then, they would say, “Ni zhidao ma, ni zhege jiemu, bu tai hao, bu haowan’r” (you know, your act wasn’t funny).

That’s harsh.

They were brutally honest with me. These are good friends, they wouldn’t lie to me. They said, “nide nage jiemu shi zuichade” (Your act was the worst.) I would say, “Yeah, I know, I know.”

That was my first experience. The next year, they wanted to invite us on again. We all said, “No. Absolutely not. We went through it once, it was fun, but we don’t want to do that again.”

The audience was pretty positive. Everyone was clapping and laughing.

But they would clap at anything, I don’t know whether they really liked it or not.

I guess the idea behind this xiangsheng, in some sense, is that the ideologues, the censors, the propagandists have a conception of “the good foreigner,” who learns Chinese properly, who loves Chinese culture, who has a Chinese wife, who dresses up in a Chinese gown. In some sense that is the role they assigned you guys.

That’s exactly right. We knew that of course. It’s obvious. Almost everything you do has something of that flavor in it. Even when they invite you on a show to talk about something, you’ll always get some question like, “How do you like China? What do you think?” It’s a propaganda thing, but it’s understandable. They want to present foreigners who are well disposed to China. And it’s easy for us, because we in fact did like China and we did enjoy Chinese culture.

A musician wanders into the Sinophone world through tongue-twisters and translation

And you have a long history of studying Chinese. But you actually started as a music major. You spent a few years in Boston playing the trumpet and recording music, and doing many different things. Until you hit on this thing called the Chinese language. And somehow it overtook you.

That’s right. Have you been talking to my mother? How do you know all this?

I spoke to the propaganda department and they shared your file with me.

My time’s about up now. I think I have to leave. (Jokes)

I was a music major and I was so sure my future was going to be in music. Since high school, I played guitar, I was in a rock band, and I wanted to be a composer. But it’s a funny thing. You never know what it is you are really passionate about. Sometimes you discover something, but you may not think, “I could make a career out of this. This could be my life occupation.” I was always interested in language. I spent a lot of time on my own just studying it.

I was also curious about China. There were not many foreigners in our small town. But my mother was just the sweetest person in the world. At the church she went to, a dean of the local college said, “Every year, all the American students go home for Christmas. And the foreign students that can’t go home are stuck in their dorm rooms and they’re lonely.” And so they said, “If you could, invite some of these students into your home for Christmas dinner, just so they’re not so lonely.”

So my mother did that. She was wonderful. I’m not objective, but she really was an unusually generous person. She invited them into her home, and this included two women from Taiwan, who were studying there. And she liked them so much that she said, “We have an empty room. Why don’t you just live in our house?” So there were two Taiwanese graduate students living in our home when I was in high school — in 1970, something like that.

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I thought, “I’ll learn a little bit of Chinese.” They thought this was funny. And so I said, “Teach me some Chinese.” The first Chinese I ever learned was not nihao or chile ma? (have you eaten?), or anything like that. The first Chinese I ever learned was, “Chi putao bu tu putaopi…” (“east grapes without spitting out the skin”) They thought it’d be so funny to have a novice foreigner who’d never spoken any Chinese learn this tongue twister.

I must have said it really badly. They recorded it on a cassette tape. And it was so funny to them, they actually sent this cassette tape to Taibei to someone they knew who had a radio show. I never heard this, but they played this tape of me doing chi putao bu tu putaopi on Taiwan radio.

Wow. It was like TikTok before TikTok. A short clip going viral.

That was the first time I learned it. I was always interested in this, but, for me it was a hobby. I was still going to be a musician.

I was at Indiana University in the music department, and there was a professor there named Doug Hofstadter, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on AI — the first one, a very important book. He found out from his colleagues that a Beida (Peking University) team was working on translating his book into Chinese, and he said, “I don't trust them. The book is too complicated. I’m sure they’re missing some things, and it’s gonna be a lousy translation.”

He knew I was studying Chinese on my own. I was meeting up with Chinese people, speaking Chinese in my spare time. He said, “I want you to go to Beida and work on the translation project.” I said, “What a weird opportunity. Why not?” I thought it would be like a semester, a year, and I’d have an interesting life and then come back home. That was where my real involvement in China and Chinese began.

Translating one of the first books on AI in China with half-baked Chinese

It turned into a 40-year journey.

I got there in 1986, the gaige kaifang (reform and opening-up) period, the most exciting time. By then, I had known a bit more about China. But even if you didn’t know anything about China, you just could just feel it. Everyone was so optimistic.

I had time to prepare and I read Orville Schell’s books In the People’s Republic and To Get Rich is Glorious. That was a great preparation because he introduced you to a lot of very important cultural aspects such as [communist hero] Lei Feng. And he also was very linguistically oriented, so he was my role model. “Maybe I could be something like that.”

Going to China in 1986, did you sense there was a general curiosity about the world outside China from the Chinese folks on campus and in society?

Absolutely. They were totally obsessed. They had such curiosity. And they also did actually know quite a bit. There was a mania for famous books from outside China, like this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, that my friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote. Intellectuals were intensely curious about the newest things, and AI was one of them.

I would get naive questions, like, “In America when children finish high school and then they leave home to go to college and they create a life for themselves, when they go back home, do the parents charge them rent?” And they really believed this, that in American culture, parents say, “Okay, you can come home, but you have to give us rent.”

My grandma always said that Americans charge their kids rent.

Really? Somehow, that piece of bullshit was in the air at the time.

One of the things I would tell them is that, “If you don’t understand religion, you don’t really understand the U.S.” That was something they had no idea about. They’d never seen a movie that talked about that, or read an American book.

Religion had been deliberately erased from public life in China.

That’s right.

I was translating this book that had very American references. And, it was funny what they would know and wouldn’t know. One of the translators said he was reading Kafka. And then I said something, “You might as well be Santa Claus.” He asked, “Who?” How could you know Kafka, and you don’t know Santa Claus?

In another book he was translating, a father gives his daughter his Visa to take to the mall. And of course, it’s a Visa credit card. But my friend was asking me, “Why in the United States does a daughter have to take a visa to the mall to buy things?” Some of them were very funny, like a fortune cookie that you get in a Chinese restaurant. They had no idea what that was. It doesn’t exist in mainland China.

You can imagine how I became hooked on this.

Two dislocated universes, even though you’re speaking Chinese, they speak English. And 1986 was quite a year, not least because of the student movement for democracy. And Fang Lizhi was making speeches in Anhui. Did you see any of that?

I never met Fang Lizhi. I did meet with these graduate students at Beida and Renmin and Tsinghua universities who attended his lectures. I met Perry Link but that was later. I didn’t meet him until ‘88 or ‘89. We met up many times in Beijing.

It was really exciting — very open. Everyone was optimistic. But they were Western-oriented, especially the young people. And they were also negative toward China. There was a sense of cultural inferiority, to the point where, if I said anything good about China, they would say, “No, we suck. We want to learn from you.”

They would have these wenhua shalong (cultural salons) at Beida. It’s hard to imagine this now, but they were talking about democracy and they were talking about making changes. A big topic was, “What happened to us? How did China fall so far?” The same kind of May Fourth debates were still going on at Beida — the same place, and the same question. “What did we do wrong? And how can we get out of this?” This was just amazing to me.

People were so open with you. They would talk to you about anything you wanted to talk about. Everything was passionate, but also optimistic. Although they were down on China, in some ways, it was only going to get better. It was really, really exciting.

The translation took much longer than we thought it was going to take. For me, at that point, I said, “Maybe I’ll just quit my music career, and just get a PhD and do this.” So I did. I suddenly realized, “Wow, this is something that can really grab my attention, my full devotion. I can put my life into it.”

Also, I felt back then very strongly that I liked the feeling of being a bridge. I thought that’s what I was born to do, to explain the U.S. to these enthusiastic Chinese people, and then also to explain China to my friends and people back home. To this day, that’s probably the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that I really passionately care about.

I’m a very American person, but on the other hand, I’m also typical for my age group in that I have a kind of distaste and disappointment and hatred of America from this rebellious, sixties hippie generation. So I felt these are two cultures that needed each other, and I could be in the middle there, intensify it or augment it.

You spent some time in China and then came back to the U.S. for a Master’s and PhD.

Yeah. At that time, the woman I was living with got a promotion. She was Douglas Hofstadter’s graduate student. Hofstadter was going to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. So then I did too. I ended up getting my Master’s and PhD at Ann Arbor.

The Chinese studies department was very liberal. They said I could go back and forth, whatever I wanted. I ended up getting my Master’s there, ‘87, ‘88, but going back and forth the whole time.

While doing the translation?

Yeah. Because the translation was more complicated than any of us had thought. And they actually had to ditch the original and start all over again.

They had all kinds of different translators in charge of different parts. And you’re supposed to piece them together.

That’s right. You had five different translators all with totally different styles. There was no unity to the book, and some of the translations were very literal. The reason that Doug Hofstadter had wanted me to go there was that he didn’t want that kind of a translation. He wanted a translation that would be accessible to the average Chinese reader and feel natural. So he told us to revise the whole thing, and instead of using only American cultural examples, use Chinese cultural examples.

So you needed to help him rewrite parts of it.

It was like translating Alice in Wonderland or something. You can’t just do a literal translation. You have to reconstruct the jokes or reconstruct the wordplay in the native language. We spent a lot of time doing that.

We were working with Commercial Press, one of the most prestigious publishers in China. As far as I know the book was the first book to be typeset on a computer, Which is appropriate since it was a book about AI.

A lot of people had read the Zouxiang Weilai booklet [that summarized parts of Gödel, Escher, Bach], so they were very interested in the translation.

No pressure there.

This is before digital technology. We now have [translation app] Pleco and different digital Chinese dictionaries. There was nothing like that. Everything was books. You had to look up characters by doing the radical lookup. I had only been studying myself for several years and not full-time, but I picked it up pretty fast. And my tones were pretty good, because I was a musician; I could always hear the tones fairly well.

But when the work started they would plop this stack of pages in front of me with squared lines and characters in each little square, handwritten. Even now, it’s hard for me to read handwritten Chinese script. I guess it was a good opportunity because I got better than most people in being able to read Chinese people’s handwriting.

It helped that I had the original text. So it said, “Computers will take the role of…” Okay, so computers, there must be the word jisuanji in here. And so I searched, “Ah, this looks like it.”

That’s a great way to learn a language.

It was the best possible way to learn the language. First of all, I’m getting shumianyu [written Chinese], plus the handwriting, and then plus translated back into oral speech, because I would be talking about it. I was getting all three of these things, and that’s a kind of a crash course in Chinese that most people don’t get.

When Ancient Greek meets Ancient Chinese

If you can get it, that’s marvelous. And back in Michigan, that was the time of the so-called Michigan Mafia, right? What’s the magic of Michigan? Why Michigan?

I don’t know. I’m not sure why. It might be their library. I’m sure that [Kenneth] Lieberthal and [Mike] Oksenberg had a lot to do with it.

Of course.

They were very tolerant, loose, experimental. They were willing to let you do a project that was unorthodox. I was taking courses in psycholinguistics and psychology and in ancient classical Chinese, and other kinds of things that would help me with this book. And my thesis was multidisciplinary, it had to do with linguistics and psycholinguistics and Ancient Greek.

What’s your thesis about?

It was a philosophy thesis, really. But it was about how the Greek philosophical focus had a lot to do with the Greek language, and that their emphasis on abstractions and logic and stuff like that just fell out of the language. Whereas there were no marked forms in the Chinese language to call attention to things like abstractions.

That’s interesting.

Here’s just a simple example. The Greeks have suffixes to indicate abstract nouns. So you say, “This is good” — “This goodness.” Good is an adjective, and “goodness” is an abstract noun, because it’s “-ness.” So then I can do, “This movie has a lot of Americanness about it.” You can use that “-ness” to create abstract nouns and you see it as a different word. But if you don’t have that suffix, then you might not even notice that you had a word class difference.

So if you say, “He is good, his goodness knows no bounds,” that’s a different word. But if you say, “He is evil, his evil knows no bounds.” There’s no morphology. It doesn’t change. So if you just are focusing on a folk kind of understanding of language, there’s no reason why you would say, “Hey, I wonder what this other word really means.”

So for the Greeks, they were trying to figure out the ontology of the universe and logic and all this stuff, and where do you go when you don’t have a slightest idea? You go to your language. So the Greeks said, “Aha, we know that this is white, but what is this thing called whiteness?” So then go to the Chinese world. They would also ask these questions and talk about it, but there was nothing in their language that could clue them in that there was a difference there. This is the kind of thing my thesis was about.

Apprenticing under Ding Guangquan, a Xiangsheng Master

What I’m hearing is that by the late eighties and the early nineties, a certain image of the great learned American was emerging in your life. You are good at music, reading Chinese classics and doing multidisciplinary linguistic studies on Chinese and Greek classics, and you’re talking to Chinese.

And starting to learn xiangsheng.

How did xiangsheng land on your desk?

All this time I was trying to improve my Chinese, because my Chinese was terrible. I was looking for something that could be a teaching aid. Back then all the Chinese textbooks for foreigners were unbelievably stupid and boring. I never bought a single one.

I wanted something that was real and interesting. One of the translators said, “You should listen to xiangsheng because it’s very challenging, but it’s also interesting and it’s filled with Chinese cultural aspects and languages and dialects and history and all this kind of stuff. I think you’d enjoy it.”

So I did. I bought some cassette tapes, and I would ask one of the students, “Could you transcribe this xiangsheng dialogue for me?” I absolutely had to have the text to look at, because otherwise I’d only understand maybe 50% of it.

So I taught myself using this while I was at Beida. And at that time, Dashan was already famous. And the person who had discovered him or recommended him to the TV station was a professor in the Chinese department at Beida named Wang Jingshou. He was an expert in quyi (oral performing arts) and had written books about it. He knew all the xiangsheng people. He was so funny.

I met him and he was so excited that a foreign scholar wanted to learn about xiangsheng. I said, “I’d like to interview some xiangsheng performers.” “No problem.” So the next week, I had people like Jiang Kun, Tang Jiezhong, Li Jindou, and Ma Ji in my dorm room.

These are household names in China.

But I had no idea. In fact, I was surprised. They would come in their limousine and would go up to my dorm room. And the fuwuyuan (service worker) in the hallway would go, “Aaah, Ma Ji!” And I was, “Who, what?”

I still have lots of cassette tapes with recordings. Some of them were telling me about performing xiangsheng for Chairman Mao at Zhongnanhai.

That’s really cool.

Anyway, you can see I was pretty busy. I was doing 10 things at once, writing a thesis and doing all this, and the translation.

Learning Chinese from xiangsheng is not too different from Chinese trying to learn English by watching Big Bang Theory and Friends. When did it occur to you that you could actually perform xiangsheng?

It was the same professor, Wang Jingshou. I had already met Dashan. Wang Jingshou said, “Dawei, ni ye keyi” (David, you can do it too.) I said “No” many times. He said, “No, you can do it.” So he started recommending me to TV stations.

The first skit I ever did was with [xiangsheng performer] Hou Yaohua, and somehow I did it. I didn’t understand the script, but I worked really hard on it.

It is really funny. I watched it just now.

That was the first time I performed, and then after that, I got more into this xiangsheng world. I only later on met Ding Guangquan.

How did you meet him?

Ding Guangquan needed another foreigner for a skit. So he called me up. We did the skit. And then after that he knew who I was. I formally took him as my teacher in 1997, maybe 1996.

This was after your PhD?

Yes. I think I’d just gotten it. Up until 1994, we were still working on the book, believe it or not.

Oh really? Eight years on.

Yeah, because we started from scratch in ‘86. And there was all kinds of trouble. The book was so complicated that Commercial Press didn’t really want to do it. There was some editor there who just thought this was crazy, it was too complicated. So we had to bribe people to get the book published, finally. And it’s a good thing we did, because, to this day, it sells. It’s a classic book in China.

Recommended readings

David Moser, 2016, A billion voices : China's search for a common language, Penguin Books

Douglas Hofstadter, 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books

央视春节联欢晚会, 1999, 相声《同喜同乐》

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The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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It is that day again: June 4th. Every year, I ask myself: what new things could I possibly still say about June 4th, given all that has been published? One would expect ideas to dry up. Yet, they don’t. Each year, China brings a new set of happenings under the same themes: civic spirit, economic turmoil, state repression, the dissolution of hope, the possibility of new beginnings. 36 years on, June 4th remains an occasion of immense moral power, an automatically scheduled prompt (yes, like an AI prompt) into our consciousness that forces reflection, reckoning, resilience, and resolution.

This year, I found myself wondering about the journey of the democracy movement post-June 4th, so I dug into my oral history conversations and found another piece from Prof. Perry Link. He is a repeat guest of this channel. A refresher: Perry Link is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. His research has spanned across areas of modern Chinese literature and language, but he is perhaps most well-known for his support for China’s democracy and human rights movement. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, he helped Fang Lizhi, a prominent astrophysicist and elder leader of the pro-democracy movement in the ‘80s, into the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Perry has also been involved in overseas human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, and regularly translates articles by Chinese overseas intellectuals.

Today’s excerpt — which has been translated from Chinese, as well as edited for brevity and clarity — focuses on Perry’s experience as the translator-in-chief of the overseas democracy and human rights movement. He translated the The Tiananmen Papers in 2001, Fang Lizhi’s autobiography The Most Wanted Man in China in 2013, and helped many Chinese dissident writers publish in major English media outlets. In 2008, he became acquainted with Liu Xiaobo and became the English translator of Charter 08. Last year, he co-wrote Liu Xiaobo’s biography I Have No Enemies. On this occasion of June 4th, we visit Perry’s experience supporting the democracy movement through his literary and translational work since 1989.

Enjoy!

Leo

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• Becoming the translator-in-chief of Chinese dissident movement

• Encountering Liu Xiaobo through Charter 08

• Turning smuggled documents into Tiananmen Papers

Peking Hotel is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Becoming the translator-in-chief of Chinese dissident movement

You’re most well-known for your role in helping dissident Fang Lizhi take refuge in the American embassy in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, but you’ve paid attention to the issue of democracy in China for longer than that. How did that start?

My early interest in so-called dissident culture was mainly through literary works. Liu Binyan’s Between Human and Demon and other reportage literature influenced me greatly. At that time, living in China, I already felt that daily life was not the ideal socialism. Reading these literary works reinforced that feeling.

Then in the 1980s, I noticed through literature that people had begun to criticize the Communist Party’s methods. Liu Binyan was probably the earliest person I had gotten to know who people called a dissident.

You’ve long played the role of writer and translator for the Chinese democracy movement and human rights organizations. You translated Fang Lizhi’s memoir, The Most Wanted Man in China, and wrote Liu Xiaobo’s biography, I Have No Enemies.

And two collections of Liu Binyan’s writings.

And you translated for Wang Lixiong, another famous dissident writer. What are your methods and criteria for translation?

I definitely make choices. It mainly depends on whether the person’s writing reflects ideals I share, whether it expresses a vision I agree with. I have turned people down, who I’d rather not name. Some of them are quite well-known. I coordinated with them, but there were things — stories about their behavior — that I wasn’t comfortable with. I’m not saying I oppose them. There was someone very well known who asked me to translate their autobiography. Money wasn’t an issue, and the publisher was already lined up. But there were gaps in the story — crucial gaps, in my view. He didn’t want to fill them in, and I myself knew a bit about that past, which he wasn’t willing to disclose. So he was self-censoring for the sake of his own image. I can’t really blame him.

Another case also involved a fairly famous person, who was critical of Liu Xiaobo. At that time, I was very interested in Liu Xiaobo, and had started writing his biography. I disagreed strongly with this person’s criticism of Liu Xiaobo, and for that reason, I also declined.

When Wang Lixiong approached you for translation work, how did that come about?

I first met Wang Lixiong at a seminar arranged by Xiao Qiang in the late 1990s. I liked Wang Lixiong a lot. I’d also read his wife Tsering Woeser’s poetry, and admired her independent spirit immensely. He had written an essay about his and Tsering Woeser’s return to Tibet. It was a story about being investigated.

My West China, Your East Turkestan, his most famous book.

Right, although this was a short essay he wanted to publish in an American newspaper. I translated it, and The Wall Street Journal published it. I wasn’t that close with Wang Lixiong but immediately felt a sense of friendship. I liked him. His essay was sharp, really well written. It was short, but precisely tackled a key issue. That’s the kind of article I like to translate.

I’ve also translated for Hu Ping. In fact, the last op-ed I translated was his (editor’s note: this was March, 2024). He sent me a very long article, asking me to share it with Matt Pottinger. The topic was how the Chinese government and Taiwan’s government, despite not having formal diplomatic relations, still conduct extensive interactions. The PRC has created legally civilian bodies that in reality handle government-to-government business. He listed many examples. His point was: Look, over the years, the CCP has treated the Taiwanese government as a real government in practice, even though it refuses to recognize it formally.

He gave many examples. I thought the point was excellent, very interesting. Hu Ping’s argument was: if you strip away the formalities, the CCP has no real obstacle to recognizing Taiwan’s government. They’re already working together. But the piece was too long. I like Hu Ping very much, but I told him it was imprecise and wordy. So I cut it down a lot and made it concise.

The Wall Street Journal ended up publishing it. Sometimes I do editorial work, not just translation. For example, I edited the 2013 English collection of Liu Xiaobo’s essays, published by Harvard. Some essays were repetitive, so I shortened and improved them.

So you’re not only a translator but an editor too.

Yes, I definitely have editorial standards. If something doesn’t meet those standards, I’ll help improve it. Ai Weiwei once sent me an article — The New York Times had already accepted it in principle. It lacked structure. If you translated it straight, The New York Times wouldn’t have accepted it. So I reorganized and rethought it, sent it back to him — and it went through.

Encountering Liu Xiaobo through Charter 08

You were also involved in Charter 08, a manifesto, organized by Liu Xiaobo, that criticized the rule of the Communist Party.

I did the English translation, but that was at the very last moment.

Liu Xiaobo was actually not in favor of it at first. The initiative was started by Zhang Zuhua and Wen Kejian, a pseudonym. There were about a dozen people in Beijing who came up with this plan. They divided it into sections on politics, economics, environment, education — a comprehensive blueprint for China’s future. Over thirty people contributed.

Liu Xiaobo wasn’t supportive because he had already decided on a bottom-up approach. Back in the 1980s, from when Wei Jingsheng wrote “The Fifth Modernization” echoing Deng Xiaoping’s ideas, to the student movement, people were calling for dialogue, hoping reform-minded leaders like Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Tian Jiyun, and others could bring change from the top down.

After the massacre, those leaders who might have cooperated disappeared. So change from the top down wasn’t possible anymore. When Charter 08 came up, Liu thought it was a return to a method that had already failed, so he didn’t join initially. At the end of September, Liu Xiaobo agreed to join mainly because Ding Zilin persuaded him.

Xiaobo greatly admired Ding Zilin. Ever since her son was killed, she had organized the Tiananmen Mothers. You could say he almost revered her. She told him, “There are a few problems with Charter 08 that you could help fix” — two main ones. First, it had many contributors and felt disjointed in tone and style — she asked him to edit and unify it.

Second, Ding told him, “You have connections in different sectors of society. Your civic activism has brought you into contact with farmers, workers, all kinds of people. Use your network to spread Charter 08 and collect signatures. We don’t just want the usual intellectuals — we want signatories from all walks of life. You can help with that.”

After thinking it over, he agreed. Although he didn’t draft it, he did a lot of editing and worked hard on getting signatures.

Refer a friend

Once it was edited and finalized, Li Xiaorong, the director of China Rights Forum, sent me the draft. She asked, “What do you think of this? We hope you’ll translate it.” I had just arrived at University of California Riverside, loaded it onto my computer but didn’t pay much attention — I was busy settling in, starting classes and teaching. Then Xiaorong emailed again, asking if I’d take it on or not — otherwise, they’d find someone else.

So I started reading, and I immediately realized this was something very significant. I knew I had to translate it seriously. I translated chapter by chapter and sent it back to them. But then an issue came up. Xiaobo collected signatures from over 300 people across many sectors. But then revisions started coming in — some he did himself, some were suggested by the signers.

Everyone had their own opinion.

Yes, and changes were made. From my perspective, that was dangerous. Over 300 people had already signed. Now you’re making edits without consulting them. So I made a few small edits. That was one of the few times I spoke with him by phone. We coordinated: “Add here,” “Cut there.” But when it became too much, I raised my concern: “Do people know you’re changing things?”

Eventually I said, “Alright, I won’t make any more changes.” The English version was ready, and the Chinese one had a path forward. If you compare the English and Chinese now, you’ll see some differences, mainly because later edits to the Chinese weren’t reflected in the English.

The plan was to publish it on December 10, International Human Rights Day. But in early December, Zhang Zuhua, Wen Kejian, and Liu Junning had gone to Germany and were flying back. After deciding what to do on the plane, they landed and announced the plan. Xiaobo objected as he was not consulted.

Around then, the authorities had caught wind that Charter 08 was coming. On December 6 and 7, there was a heavy police presence outside the homes of Zhang Zuhua and Liu Xiaobo — plainclothes officers, uniformed ones, 24/7. There was a sense of a gathering storm, a looming crackdown. The fear was they might say: “You can’t release this.”

If they banned it before the 10th, and we still published, it would clearly be defiance. So they decided to release it early, on December 8, before any hard orders came down. My English version was published in the New York Review of Books at the same time. But that very night, the police came to Xiaobo’s home and took him away. He never returned.

While he was in detention, his lawyers could occasionally visit him. During one visit, Xiaobo said, “If the authorities want to pursue accountability, just say I did it.” He had already been arrested, so he said, “I’ll take the blame,” hoping others would face lighter consequences.

Zhang Zuhua was detained but released after about three days. Some speculated it was because Zhang had connections — he and Hu Jintao were classmates or friends, maybe that gave him some protection.

Some of Xiaobo’s friends, including Cui Weiping — whom I know best — felt it was unjust. Xiaobo got eleven years, while Zhang Zuhua only got three days. Personally, I’ve met Zhang, know him somewhat. I don’t think he deliberately shifted blame to protect himself. But from the authorities’ perspective, Liu Xiaobo was the main figure.

Liu Xiaobo was just too well-known.

Far too well-known. They thought if they cut off the head, the rest would be easier to deal with. Everyone who signed Charter 08 got “invited to tea” by the authorities in December and January.

That was the first wave of signatories. There were over a thousand in total.

Yes, eventually there were over ten thousand. The initial public release had 303, to be exact. Then it went online and spread. It became hard to tell who signed — were they inside China or overseas? Were some names fake? But the number of people who sympathized with Charter 08 was definitely far more than the 303.

Turning smuggled documents into Tiananmen Papers

Other than Charter 08, one of the most famous works you’ve translated — perhaps the most famous — is The Tiananmen Papers. Could you tell us about its background and aftermath?

The Tiananmen Papers came about because my friend Andy Nathan called me. He said someone from inside China had arrived with a large batch of documents related to the handling of the Tiananmen protests, from the central authorities all the way down to the provincial level.

They planned a Chinese edition. Andy’s idea was for me to work with him to compile it into an English collection. I agreed. I’d known Andy Nathan since our time as students, and on issues like democracy in China we saw eye to eye. So in New York, I also met Zhang Liang, the Chinese official who brought out the documents.

That’s a pseudonym, right?

Yes, a pseudonym.

Has his real identity still not been made public?

It hasn’t. I know who he is but promised not to reveal it. In fact, our publishing contract included a clause saying we couldn’t disclose his real name.

I liked him. He was meticulous with the documents. Some people doubted whether they were fabricated. But I never believed that. Zhang Liang wasn’t nervous at all. He could jump from one document to another, answer questions fluidly, never gave off the vibe of someone hiding something.

Walter Scott once said, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Very smart words. The point is, when you start lying, you have to remember all the lies you told before and keep them consistent. I never got that feeling from Zhang Liang. Never.

I believe these documents were, or at least mostly were, authentic. I say “mostly” because a few of them — conversations between Yang Shangkun and someone else — took place in cars or over the phone and were reconstructed from notes or memories. So, it’s hard to say whether those are word-for-word accurate. A few documents fall into that category. But for the most part, I don’t doubt their authenticity.

Andy and I collaborated. We didn’t do all the translation work ourselves. We hired several people to translate different parts. My job was to review translations, edit, correct errors, and smooth out the tone so the style didn’t vary too much from one piece to the next. That was my main work — line editing.

Andy’s critical contribution was this: the original documents were just a pile, narrators would come in and out, then a document, then a narrator again, all without clear boundaries. Andy spent a lot of time very carefully going over things with Zhang Liang, asking: “Where does this document start? Where does it end? This part is the narrator, this part is the document.” The original Chinese text didn’t have these distinctions, but Andy clarified it.

Before each section, he wrote a short editor’s note, “The following is a record of a meeting held at such-and-such place with the following participants.” Andy also wrote the introduction to the book that explained the context.

When you first read the The Tiananmen Papers, what was your personal reaction?

I found it detailed. There was a lot in it that could be used to analyze the event and Chinese society. I was disappointed by the foreign response. The main question everyone kept asking was: Are the documents authentic? Even if a few parts aren’t entirely authentic, the bulk of it is. And it can be used as research material to derive meaningful analysis.

For example, when the army was ordered to clear the square, they were given machine guns. And at the same time, Deng Xiaoping said, “Don’t shed blood.”

That contradiction I’ve seen in literary controls as well. In ‘79, they told writers: Free your minds. Don’t be afraid. But at the same time: Don’t forget the Four Cardinal Principles: Marxism, Party leadership, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Maoism. As a Chinese writer, which instruction do I follow? It’s contradictory.

It was the same for Deng’s soldiers. They had to navigate contradictory orders. That’s dangerous too. These contradictions, these patterns — in such a rich record, you can find many clues for studying Chinese society. That’s the value I see in it.

How do you understand this phenomenon in Chinese politics — on the one hand, “reform and opening,” and on the other, “uphold the Four Cardinal Principles”; on one hand, clear the square, and on the other, “don’t shed blood.” These impossible, contradictory demands, how do you understand that?

It’s about shifting responsibility onto others. If you’re Deng Xiaoping telling soldiers what to do, or telling writers what to do, when mistakes are made, the fault is yours, not mine. Deng did the same with Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, his two key assistants in the ’80s. He wanted reform, openness. But that carried risks. If he took the wrong step, his own position wouldn’t be secure. Rivals could attack him. So, he pushed Hu and Zhao out in front to take the lead. He stayed in the background. “Go ahead, you lead.” If they hit a wall, they paid the price, not him. I think this mindset was quite common. The Communist Party — especially Deng — was very good at this.

Once The Tiananmen Papers was published, it had a huge impact. It caused a big stir. What was that like at the time?

Back then, the major newspapers all ran stories — the Washington Post, The New York Times, and others. I was invited to speak at Princeton about The Tiananmen Papers, and the room was too small. They had to move it to a much larger hall, which filled with hundreds of people. The public reaction was very enthusiastic. As for within the U.S. government or other Western governments — it’s harder to say.

Why is that? Do you think government officials didn’t really pay attention?

I think they did — there’s no doubt they paid attention. But whether the book made any difference in policy or changed their approach, that’s hard to know.

Why do you think the book caused such a stir at the time? So many people paid attention, all the major newspapers covered it.

This was ten or eleven years after the Tiananmen protests. The memory of the massacre was still vivid in the minds of many Westerners. And of course, there was deep disillusionment with the Communist Party. In the 1980s, there had been hope that gradual reforms would bring China closer to the West and more aligned with democratic norms. But the massacre shattered those hopes. And that disillusionment deepened through the 1990s. By the time the book came out, people were still asking: How did it happen? They were very interested.

In your view, now looking back, how would you explain why June Fourth happened?

Why the massacre? My view is: Deng Xiaoping was surrounded by elders whose opinions differed. Some elders wanted to reconcile with the students. Others wanted to crack down — people like Wang Zhen. Deng made the final decision, there’s no question about that. And he was willing to crack down, I believe, because he wanted to send a warning to other parts of China and to future generations: Don’t do this.

The massacre instilled national fear, and it worked. The 1990s were subdued. Even now, Chinese politics is deadened, and I think that traces back to the massacre. It had an impact across time and place.

I often say Deng wanted to crack down. He had cracked down in Tiananmen in April 1976 as well. Back then, they used wooden sticks, beat some people. Maybe a few were killed, maybe not, but there was no massacre. And they still managed to clear the square. This time, they used machine guns and tanks — not just sticks or water cannons.

I believe Deng could have cleared the square without a massacre. But he decided the massacre was worth it. I think he calculated that it would send a chilling message. That’s my judgment. I can’t prove it. I don’t have insider access to Deng’s thinking. But from the outside, I think that’s most likely what he had in mind.

Recommended readings

Liu Binyan, 1983, People or Monsters?, Indiana University Press

Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, and Perry Link, 2002, The Tiananmen Papers, PublicAffairs

Wang Lixiong, 2007, My West China, Your East Turkestan

Liu Xiaobo, 2013, No Enemies, No Hatred, Belknap Press

Fang Lizhi, 2016, The Most Wanted Man in China, Henry Hold and Co.

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi, 2024, I Have No Enemies, Columbia University Press

Subscribe now

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What's Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

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Following the first part of Prof. Judith Shapiro’s oral history exploring her experiences in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in this piece, we dive into her academic life as a scholar of environmental politics.

Prof. Shapiro is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Environment, Development, & Health at Washington D.C.’s American University. Her research focuses on environmental politics and Chinese politics under Mao. As stellar as her academic credentials and publications are, she had an equally mesmerising life before entering academia. She taught English in Changsha in 1979, as China began to open up to the world. She became the first American to marry a Chinese person in the People’s Republic, a marriage that required the personal approval of Deng Xiaoping and was ultimately instrumental in the pro-democracy movement in Hunan in 1981. Prof. Shapiro and her then-husband Liang Heng became a high-flying writer couple in the ‘80s, publishing multiple best-sellers on life inside China that earned them great fame. In the ‘90s, she oversaw projects on China at the National Endowment for Democracy to help build China’s nascent civil society. Since the late ‘90s, she has immersed herself in the study of Asia’s environmental politics with a focus on China, which we discuss today.

Xi is often contrasted with Mao in political authority, ideology, style, and policy. As a student of China’s environment from Mao to now, Prof. Shapiro is the perfect person to address their similarities and distinctions, and guide us in understanding the mysterious party politics behind China’s environmental policies, as well as the civil society activism that erupted in the past three decades in the environment space. We will traverse China’s environment through her personal experience as a scholar and China watcher.

Enjoy!

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• A vegetarian’s journey into Mao’s war against nature

• “You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?”

• Xi vs. Mao, ver. environment

Peking Hotel is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A vegetarian’s journey into Mao’s war against nature

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. After that, you made a switch to focusing on the environment, and China’s environment in particular. Could you talk about that?

When I left the NED I hoped to work on the environment. I’d applied for jobs at some environmental groups, but didn’t have the experience and the background. I went back to the idea of getting a PhD, as some people had urged me to. I’d been more or less in the academic world, teaching at Penn, Villanova, or the New School. People always assumed I had a PhD.

And so, getting the PhD was less a question of getting a qualification and more for me an opportunity 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. Not everybody’s dissertation gets published, but I knew that I had this fear of the blank screen and that I’d always collaborated with other people. I was trying to outsmart myself and do that single-authored thing that I was going to have to do with a dissertation.

What made you decide, “I want to focus on China’s environment”?

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 21. And I’ve always been an animal lover. So it comes out of this reverence for life, if you will. A lot of environmentalists are environmentalists because they’re worried about climate change and the effect on future generations, and I care about those things as well. But my intellectual and emotional interest is primarily in the non-human world. I could watch another non-human creature for hours.

When I learned that American University had 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.

Who were your mentors on your journey of studying the environment in China?

There was nobody who knew about the environment and China. In fact, that’s why Mao’s War Against Nature, my PhD dissertation, is considered a seminal work. A few people had written about China’s environment before, but there was nothing that systematically looked at the Mao period with the environmental lens.

How about on the Chinese side? Did you know Liang Congjie, the founder of the Friends of Nature and grandson of Liang Qichao?

Yes, very well. That’s why I went back to China in ‘83. 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 dance camp together.

Her father wrote a review of Son of the Revolution in The New York Review of Books. Holly — the daughter, my friend — had never been to China. Her parents sent her and me together to China so I could help her. And because of the Fairbanks’ relationship to Liang Sicheng, we met Liang Congjie for the first time. We actually carried Liang Sicheng’s drawings of Chinese architecture that he was trying to save back to the U.S., where Wilma was able to turn them into a book.

Later, as I started to do environmental work, and Liang Congjie started Ziran Zhiyou (Friends of Nature), he and I continued to see each other. The book reflects some things that I learned from him.

I enjoyed reading your framework of the Maoist environmental approach in terms of the four pillars: political repression, utopian urgency, dogmatic uniformity, and state-ordered relocations. How did you develop this framework?

That’s why I say that this book was the hardest book I’ve ever written. It took so long to work out this framework. But it was a neat framework. Whether it’s the Great Leap Forward, the Educated Youth Campaign, the Third Front Campaign, or the Grain First Campaign, I was able to work through the chronology of the Mao period while foregrounding one of these core dynamics. Coming up with that structure took months and months.

The idea was not so much to say, “Oh, the environment was so terrible during the Mao period” — even though a lot of bad things happened to the environment during the Mao period — but more this conceptualization of humans and nature being in opposition to one another, and somehow by conquering nature, you could improve yourself and conquer any reactionary tendencies you might have. Of course, the environmental degradation became 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.

I really didn’t set out to write a book about Mao. The fashionable thread in historiography now is to focus on the experience of the grassroots. 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 make sense of this system? You do have a supreme leader and key decisions go through him, and he’s often the one that drives initiatives. But you also have a system that complies, that puts decisions into practice, sometimes even in more extreme forms than what the leader initially set out.

That’s the Chinese system, right? Because the top may be rather vague. They just give you some guidance, guidelines, core principles, but actually how you interpret them and implement them, that depends on the lower-ranking officials.

In many cases, they want to overachieve. That’s what happened with the Great Famine, where each tiny village is competing with the other to claim that they’re producing more grain. Then the center doesn’t know, actually, how much grain is being produced, and they’re taking it all, even exporting it overseas. Meanwhile, the people are starving.

What was your process for writing Mao’s War Against Nature?

A writing trick that I tell my students is that 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.

I knew that I had some nice newspaper articles — I think I got them in a bookstore in Kunming — about this weihu zaotian (围湖造田, “encircling lakes to create fields”) campaign to conquer Dianchi Lake. In 1970, they stopped the factories and the schools, everybody went to Dianchi, 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. It was insane. From an ecological point of view, it was doomed to failure. It was a huge waste of effort.

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 there, even though it’s probably two-thirds of the way into the book, just to get something done that I could understand.

I must have been in China often enough during this period to also just be able to talk to a lot of people about a lot of different things. I had a chance to talk to some scholars who knew that these campaigns, from an ecological point of view, were a disaster, but didn’t dare to speak out because they were undergoing thought reform in these May 7th cadre schools during that time.

So it’s a real mix — mixed methods, as they say. But I was never in an archive. I don’t know how to find an archive. I don’t know what an archive looks like.

Once I had the contract with Cambridge University Press, I stopped trying to be academic and went on to write a more narrative, story-based book. When writing about, say, the Great Leap Forward and the sparrow-killing campaign, 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?” It was unscientific. And they, of course, all had participated and had memories of it. What surprised me about the reviews was that people would use the phrase, “meticulously researched.” I’m like, “Really?”

That’s very modest of you.

I don’t think of myself so much as a researcher as I do as a storyteller.

What’s your process of writing in general?

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 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. Yeah, never stop.

“You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?”

Just around when you began working on China’s environment, there was a blossoming of the environmental NGO and civil society space in China. Could you talk about that period of environmental activism?

It was exciting. After I finished Mao’s War Against Nature, and American University figured out a way to keep me at the school, I started teaching environment courses. I was approached by a publisher to write a textbook about China’s environmental challenges.

I had already been thinking about how to teach environmental challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective. When I teach my course Environment and Politics, I teach political science, environmental law, sociology, anthropology, environmental philosophy, and all of these different strands. To then think about, “How then would we understand China’s environmental issues through all these different strands?”, that made for a natural textbook.

Civil society is, of course, one big strand. The textbook is organized also around core ideas of governance, civil society, national identity, environmental justice. The latest version also has extraction and extractivism in it.

Between the first and the second editions of this book, my thinking on Chinese civil society evolved a lot. Within international relations, there’s a debate about whether civil society matters or whether only the state matters. And if civil society matters, how does it matter? How does it shape public behavior? I’d read a bunch of those theoretical things, and I then created a typology of my own that included some of theirs but added some based on what the Chinese civil society groups were doing.

It was, as you say, an exciting time in the ‘90s. Activists in China were able to do all this naming and shaming, symbolic politics, accountability politics, information politics, and all these different ways of exerting power, including not necessarily influencing the state, but maybe through the internet going directly to consumers across borders.

Unfortunately, by the time the third edition of my textbook needed to be published, the whole civil society chapter had to become very pessimistic.

From my understanding, in the early days of civil society activism, there were individuals but no major organizations. Yes, Ziran Ziyou and foreign NGOs and foundations were there. Soon, the Chinese space prospered, and people like Xi Zhinong and Liang Congjie became the leaders in the field. There are others, who…

Yeah, like Ma Jun, for example.

But after the Foreign NGO Law, foreign NGOs either left or shifted focus. Greenpeace began doing corporate campaigns rather than public shaming campaigns against companies and government officials. That’s quite a different approach. How do you make sense of this whole history, of the early days, the booming, the gradual die-down, and whatever is left of environmental space?

That change in the law in some ways simplified things for some Chinese groups, because even though the foreign groups had a much more difficult time registering and giving money in China and often had to just close down and leave, the Chinese groups no longer had to have a Chinese mother-in-law. They could register directly with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, I believe…

Refer a friend

Only for a year or two.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, and then they had the Chinese version of the NGO law — the charity law.

Alright, then you’re more up on it than I am. But for a long time, the civil society space for environmental activism was much bigger than for human rights, democracy, religion, or even women’s rights or gay rights. The environmental space was the “okay” space. It became a home for many people who were smart and wanted to do something.

It’s a terrible shame that the Chinese state feels that they can’t trust their own people. That’s the bottom line. The Chinese state says, “Don’t worry, we’re doing the environment. Don’t think about it. Just trust us. And when we do a new recycling law, just do what we say.” 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. 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 love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?” — often these people have nothing but good intentions for China. They love China.

There was a fantasy from some Westerners, who thought that if the environmental movement can blossom, it will mean that democracy will come to China. That’s ridiculous. 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 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 great place to be.

When I was teaching at Tsinghua University, at Schwarzman College, there was a little birdwatching group. I went one day — there was some rare bird 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. 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 bird.

It’s not as if they’re short of plainclothes policemen in China.

At Ziran Zhiyou, there were four founders: Liang Congjie, Liang Xiaoyan, Yang Dongping, and Wang Lixiong. Did you know them?

No. I recognize the name Yang Dongping because of their green yearbook, but I don’t think I’ve ever met. I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman even. Yeah. No.

Because Wang Lixiong is the last known figure as the founder of Ziran Zhiyou. He later wrote pretty influential books about Tibet. He’s a banned writer in China now.

No, I don’t know.

Did you work with Greenpeace or WWF?

Greenpeace I know well because I know the Greenpeace here in Washington very well. And I knew people who worked at Greenpeace in China also. They were doing great work in China for a long time. A lot of people really admired their work. They were courageous, and still have a nice office. I was there this summer. A former student works there.

Who were the key individuals back then, when it was most prosperous?

There’s Li Shuo. Li Shuo is here in Washington now for the Asia Society. He was a good spokesperson on climate and energy issues.

I don’t see that history written very well anywhere, except on what’s now Dialogue Earth, which used to be China Dialogue. They had some interesting pieces from the 2000s and the early 2010s. Otherwise, there is so much censorship around the topic of environmentalism and foreign supported activism that I feel like this is a history that’s just been actively suppressed before it ever saw the light of day.

Greenpeace is a very decentralized organization. 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 Greenpeaces decides which issues to focus on and which campaigns to run.

And they have a Hong Kong office?

They have a Hong Kong office. So there was always the idea that if they couldn’t continue to work out of Beijing, they could retreat to Hong Kong.

And did you connect with Liang Congjie later in your studies?

I used to see him pretty regularly. If I was in Beijing, I would go see him and his wife, Liang Fang. I saw Liang Fang once, even after he died. I think she’s dead now. And they have a daughter who works in publishing.

Did you ever witness any environment-related street activism?

I never really saw it. There are many wonderful films that show different kinds of street activism. But I think it’s not really appropriate for a foreigner to be there.

It gives the party an excuse to say, “This is foreign orchestrated.”

Foreign influence, yeah. I have seen lots of images of demonstrations. When I do public speaking about civil society, I have images of the PX demonstrations in Dalian. There are demonstrations about the incinerators in Guangzhou. I was never personally 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 from the Mao era.

Xi vs. Mao, ver. environment

What was the global environmental impact of China when you first started working on the environment?

There was not much of that, as the focus was on domestic problems — stopping a dam or trying to conserve the Tibetan antelope or dealing with air pollution.

The first international focus was on trying to help the Chinese state understand why some of their international investments were not being welcomed. Groups like the Global Environmental Institute had close relationships with the government to help them see why some of the dams they were building in Southeast Asia were meeting resistance. It was all within this patriotic framing.

Unfortunately, the Belt and Road investments are often in big infrastructure projects with huge biodiversity implications. When you carve up a landscape with a high-speed rail or a superhighway, or build a deep-water port or an airport, ultimately you’re promoting fragmentation of landscape and biodiversity collapse. I don’t think the Chinese state has any understanding of that science.

There’s a belief in these conventions of neoclassical economics that, if everybody trades, everybody’s going to get rich. 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.” So this notion that we can all just grow our way out of this environmental crisis is a myth.

Unfortunately, that’s part and parcel of what ecological civilization is all about. This notion of “blue waters and green mountains are silver waters and gold mountains” — whatever Xi Jinping says about that — unfortunately, that’s a fantasy in environmental terms and ecological terms, because you can’t really have that degree of wealth and at the same time that degree of environmental protection. It’s postponing the inevitable reckoning. We’re at a stage already with climate change. We’re not dealing with it.

When did the paradigm of climate change take over as the main orienting theme of environmental research?

It’s intertwined with these other issues, but it’s not the only issue, and I think you make a great point here. Some people have said that we do need to pay attention to the fact that we have a biodiversity crisis even without respect to climate change. We’re in a sixth extinction, the Anthropocene, the age of the human impact on the Earth that is driving enormous extinction rates.

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, toxic waste, and questions about what to do with nuclear waste. But unless you deal with climate change all the rest of the issues are gone anyway.

As a scholar of Mao living in the period of Xi and observing their environmental practices, could you compare Maoist environmentalism to Xi-ist environmentalism?

They’re really different. For Mao, nature was something to be conquered because he was leading a poor country. Nature was something to be feared. People were still feeling cold at night. As China became much wealthier and there were more shields between people and nature, nature became less feared.

But Xi’s version of environmentalism is still very much tied in with prosperity and China’s greatness. I think it’s not going to be possible to keep globalization humming at the rate it’s going because there are so many people in the world who are still poor, who are still aspiring to have their basic needs met. So if everybody wants to live like Shanghai, that’s not realistic and it’s not ecologically wise.

The academic field of China’s environment was tiny when you first began, but now it’s such a substantial field with people from all over the world. Could you talk a bit about the development of the field of Chinese environmental studies?

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 20 years ago. China is everywhere in the development field, and 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, right? 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.

In terms of scholarship, I know that environmental history has become a field within China. It’s mostly done at Renmin University. There are people who are working on Chinese history as environmental history that never did that before, understanding how climate change might’ve played a role in the rise and fall of dynasties and this kind of thing.

There’s a debate that I got involved with through one of my books, called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet, which I wrote together with Yifei Li from NYU Shanghai. We were trying to understand how China’s ecological civilization actually translates into the lives of ordinary people. We found it has very authoritarian kinds of impacts, and that often the Chinese state dresses itself in a cloak of ecological civilization in order to, say, force nomads into settlements or to create great big national parks but exclude people from those parks, etc. That is part of a debate around “environmental authoritarianism.” There’s an environmental authoritarianism debate out there, and there are 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.

Now that lots of scholars find their access to China increasingly restricted, do you have advice for people who are doing that sort of research?

It depends on what kinds of questions people are asking. There’s a lot of focus on what they call environmental governance, on officials and how they implement directives, and on corruption and the failure to implement or achieve targets. That kind of research is not banned by the Chinese government. If anything, they might want to understand how they can implement their laws and regulations better.

The Convention on Biological Diversity 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 Global Biodiversity Framework. So the effort for the world to achieve a certain level of biodiversity protection is something that China’s reputation is on the line with. That should be a space where people should be able to work.

The Chinese have sent pandas back to the U.S. 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. There are spaces for doing this kind of thing. It’s just that the space for NGOs has gotten smaller.

A new development for the past ten years, one that’s hard to ignore, is the rise of Xi Jinping and his new leadership and new way of doing things. Did the fact that Xi became the leader impact your research at all?

It didn’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 taught in Schwarzman College three times. This past summer, I went back after the pandemic. I have to say that I was shocked because at one point, I was in an academic meeting, and some PhD students were presenting, and some of their work was about the glorious theoretical contribution of Xi Jinping. To me, that’s just terrifying. It’s almost brainwashing, that in order to get ahead in China, this is what you have to do. That was the first time I really felt the chill in academic life.

Did you see it coming?

I just couldn’t believe myself. “Really? You’re going to get a PhD on the glorious theoretical contribution of Xi Jinping?” That’s horrible.

Yeah. Did you have expectations for Xi Jinping when he first came to power?

When he first came to power, at least he seemed young and bright and vigorous, and I didn’t think anything bad necessarily when he came in. It seemed he wasn’t like Li Peng or something.

Did China turn out quite how you expected when you began studying and visiting the country?

No. It’s amazing what China has done. It’s not the transformation I would have sought for the Chinese people. For a foreigner to visit China in the ‘80s was really interesting. For a foreigner to visit China now — not so interesting. But the Chinese people definitely enjoy a better standard of living than they did in the ‘80s. 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 improvement in material conditions is actually worth it, if you have to give up that much freedom.

It was pretty clear, maybe even before Xi Jinping got quite so autocratic, that they were going to be able to clean up the pollution a bit and have a good standard of living and have greater personal freedoms. But now, they’ve lost all that farmland, they’ve lost their personal freedoms. It’s not a beautiful place to 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. But what was interesting for me is not the same as what was good for the Chinese people.

Recommended readings

Judith Shapiro, 2001, Mao’s War Against Nature, Cambridge University Press

Yifei Li and Judish Shapiro, 2020, China Goes Green, Polity

Subscribe now

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Shoutout!

We would like to say thank-you to our supporters, especially to the following people who referred us to great many friends, colleagues and acquaintances:

• China Books Review

• Initium

• Bill Bishop & Sinocism

• Jordan Schneider & ChinaTalk

• PC & What's Happening in China

• 《人文中国》Humanities China

• The Goldkorn Newsletter

• 擦星星事务所

• 不如读书

• Matt Turpin & China Articles

• Career China Newsletter

• The China Week

• The China-MENA Newsletter

Kudos to you, our network now has more awesome people like yourselves. Please keep spreading the word for us :) I appreciate it.

Share

When Prof. Shapiro told me she was once trained as a dancer, it all made sense. She has an artful demeanor when she walks, and moves with a bodily unison only possible after years of training. Her elegance comes across not just in the way she moves around her office and house and sits cross-legged with ease, but in her verbal expressions and her warm, keen gaze into your eyes. You feel an attentiveness as she listens, but also a hint of her lively mental energy swirling through her mind.

Prof. Shapiro is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Environment, Development, & Health at Washington D.C.’s American University. Her research focuses on environmental politics and Chinese politics under Mao. As stellar as her academic credentials and publications are, she had an equally mesmerising life before entering academia. She taught English in Changsha in 1979, as China began to open up to the world. She became the first American to marry a Chinese person in the People’s Republic, a marriage that required the personal approval of Deng Xiaoping and was ultimately instrumental in the pro-democracy movement in Hunan in 1981. Prof. Shapiro and her then-husband Liang Heng became a high-flying writer couple in the ‘80s, publishing multiple best-sellers on life inside China that earned them great fame. In the ‘90s, she oversaw projects on China at the National Endowment for Democracy to help build China’s nascent civil society. Since the late ‘90s, she has immersed herself in the study of Asia’s environmental politics with a focus on China, which we will discuss in a future episode.

Fantasies are often a fraught business, for once confronted with reality, they tend to fade away. However, the more I speak with people who lived through China’s ‘80s, the more my fantasies about that decade — its openness, freedom, curiosity, a sense of possibility, a daring taste for transformation — stood up to the test of reality. As China, the U.S., and other countries enter dangerous and narrowing territories, we are increasingly constrained in our imaginative ability — to contemplate a good, worthy, collective future. Amid conflicts, turmoil, reshaping, and overlapping nostalgia, humanity as a whole is now tasked to envision new possibilities. But the treasure trove of China’s ‘80s is only beginning to be taken seriously. Prof. Shapiro’s story — which was edited for brevity and clarity — is yet another great piece of oral history for that time of imagination. So I invite you to enjoy this one.

Leo

Refer a friend

For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• A ‘sent-down youth’ from Berkeley to Changsha

• A Hunan democracy movement catalysed by a Deng Xiaoping-approved marriage

• ‘What does life want to get out of us?’

• The China burnout

A ‘sent-down youth’ from Berkeley to Changsha

Could you talk about your first trip to China?

It was 1977, and I was a member of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.

I was in Shanghai when Deng Xiaoping came back to power. There was a lot of noise, symbols, flags. I said to our guide, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Deng Xiaoping came back.” I said, “Who’s Deng Xiaoping?” She said, “Deng Xiaoping was a good comrade.” That’s all she could say. So I didn’t know I was there at a really historic moment.

I was moved by how eager people were for our help. People said, “You have to come back and help us, we need you.” At that time, the women all wore long braids, everybody was on bicycles and looked very slender and strong. The women and the men seemed very equal.

For us, as critics of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, we had a romantic notion that Chairman Mao had done something wonderful for China and that the people’s communes were good, as he said. We were particularly interested in women holding up half the sky. It was very appealing in 1977, at the very beginning of the spread of feminism in the U.S.

Were you a good student of Mao at the time?

I don’t think I was a deep student of Mao. We had our own cultural revolution in America. The civil rights movement, the hippie movement, and the anti-war movement. Young people in America were experimenting with communes. It was a very different kind of commune than they had in China. But there was a feeling that perhaps there were some good answers in China. And, of course, the information coming out of China was extremely limited — almost nonexistent. It was easy to have those romantic ideas.

Did you find China quite what you expected?

For the first trip, my positive impression was reinforced. Even though there were some indications that things were not what I imagined them to be, I didn’t have the context to interpret what I saw.

At one point, our train stopped for about 15 minutes in Xi’an. Our guide got off and stayed off for a while. When she came back, she was crying. I said, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I just saw my son for the first time since he was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.” I didn’t have any context for that. But I could have guessed that things maybe were not so wonderful.

Later on you studied Chinese at Princeton. What was that like?

Princeton was one of the few schools in America at that time that had a really good Chinese language program. Most of the teachers were from Taiwan. I was an anthropology major with a minor in East Asian Studies. I started Chinese in my sophomore year.

Sinology in those days was all about how the Ming Dynasty was so wonderful, Confucianism was so great. My interest in contemporary China, Mao, and all that — I didn’t have any mentors for that at Princeton. Nobody was interested in what was going on inside the mainland at that time.

After I graduated from Princeton, I went to the Midwest to study dance for a year, and I did a literature degree at the University of Illinois.

I went to China in July 1977. I was scheduled to go to Berkeley to do a PhD in comparative literature. But I became so interested in China as a result of that trip that I switched from comparative literature to Asian studies at Berkeley.

Then I was halfway — or most of the way — through my master’s at Berkeley when the Chinese government decided, as a result of the Four Modernisations program, that they needed to have English teachers.

Those first 40 English teachers were all people who had gone to China as part of the U.S.-China Friendship Association. I arrived in China as a teacher in March of 1979. And I was assigned to Hunan, Changsha, to the Teacher’s College. I was the only foreigner there.

How did you get the opportunity to teach?

Oh, they called me up — the Chinese liaison office. They just said, “Get ready. When can you be there?”

They were treating you as a “sent-down youth” from America.

Yeah. At the time, I was like, “What does that mean? Hunan?” I had to look on the map. Maybe I was disappointed it wasn’t Beijing or Shanghai. But now I know how lucky I was to be in a more remote area.

And why Hunan Teacher’s College?

Because it was the biggest (in the province). It was training English teachers for the whole province. There were like 400 English majors in that department. All those students were supposed to stay in Hunan to teach English. So they really needed a native speaker.

But when I first got there, they weren’t letting me teach the students. They wanted me to teach all those old Russian professors because they were supposed to…

Be turned into English teachers?

And they couldn’t learn it, right? They were in their 50s and 60s and set in their ways. I taught the last of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier students when I got there. Then came the people through the gaokao examinations. Those old Russian teachers couldn’t teach them, so they had no choice but to give that very precious “foreign expert” to the students.

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What was life like in Changsha at the time?

They gave me what they thought was a fancy professor’s room, but someone had to carry the water up in pole buckets. There was no flush toilet. And they gave me an air conditioner because it’s so hot there, but the electricity wasn’t good enough to run it. If I turned it on, everything would shut down.

I was up on the hill, walked down to the classroom, and taught a lot of classes. I gradually combined my students into bigger groups so they could all listen to me; getting to listen to a native speaker was the most important thing.

The students were so good. They were smart, and had experienced so much hardship. To come to school was so precious for them. It was a great time.

How did that experience of teaching change your views on China?

As I got to know my students, they would tell me more about what they had experienced. We would have conversation class, and I would say, “Tell me about how wonderful it was to go to the countryside to learn from the peasants.” And they would say, “Actually, it wasn’t wonderful at all.” That gradually educated me.

A Hunan democracy movement catalysed by a Deng Xiaoping-approved marriage

When you went to Hunan, it was the perfect time because in 1980, a democracy movement erupted in the Hunan Teachers College, and some even say that was the precursor to the whole period of liberalisation in the ‘80s in China. What do you think?

That’s not the way it unfolded, though. It only unfolded like that because I had married Liang Heng, and if he weren’t married to me, he wouldn’t have run for the local People’s Congress, and the movement would not have broken out.

Could you elaborate?

I got married to Liang Heng in 1980. And we came briefly to the U.S. in the summer for him to look around. He was struck by our free speech. I remember I was with some friends at Berkeley, and they were complaining, “Ronald Reagan is such a bad president.” He was like, “Oh my God, can you say that?”

And then, when we went back to China for him to finish up his degree, there were elections for the local People’s Congress. He ran as a candidate, even though the local party had picked their own people. So, he was running as an independent candidate.

But he would not have done that if he wasn’t married to me. He wouldn’t have been protected. So it wasn’t like I got there just at the right time. No. I was actually instrumental — not me personally, but a U.S. person being there enabled that democracy movement to happen.

Tao Sen was a classmate of Liang Heng. He got in much more trouble. After they shut down the movement, they basically said to Liang Heng, “We’re going to let you graduate, and you get out of here. Go to America.” But some of the other student leaders were given bad job assignments or actually put in prison for a while.

What do you think about your marriage with Liang Heng now?

It was wonderful while it lasted, about seven or eight years. It was an interesting, rewarding time. We wrote three books together and became a writing duo, a speaking duo; we spoke at so many universities and did so many TV shows.

We were involved with interesting people in New York City, in Human Rights Watch and other places. It was a fruitful time. And sometimes, certain marriages will survive in one cultural context but maybe not so much in another one. Maybe, had we stayed in China, we would have stayed together.

But for him, in the U.S., with his English not being so good, he felt pressure, and he was ambitious. Ultimately, we decided to split up. But our lawyer, when we were doing it, said, “I never saw two people more friendly when they’re doing a divorce.”

That’s wonderful.

People sometimes think he used me, I used him, or something like that. It was a good marriage while it lasted.

And it’s amazing reading about how you wrote directly to Deng Xiaoping to get your marriage approved. Why did you have to write to the supreme leader?

Because after we started to work on Son of the Revolution, that was also when Wei Jingsheng was arrested for talking about the Fifth Modernisation. We became afraid for Liang Heng that it would be dangerous for him to continue and for us to be together.

So then we decided, let’s get married. That way, we’ll protect him. So we said to the school leaders, “We’re going to get married.” And the leaders said, “No, you can’t.” They gave the excuse that he was a college student, and college students are not allowed to get married. But I think, really, they were completely afraid.

Liang Heng wrote a bunch of letters to local offices, and I guess he also wrote to Deng Xiaoping or the Zhongyang (Central Committee). I don’t know, but somehow the story came to us that Deng Xiaoping saw this letter and said, “Yes, it’s a symbol of U.S.-China friendship. It’s a good thing.” And so all those people, all of a sudden, they’re like, “Yay, U.S.-China friendship!”

I believe I was the first American to marry a Chinese in China. There had been a French person before that. Of course, once Deng Xiaoping approved it, everybody was like, “Congratulations.” We got the marriage license with all those flags on it and everything. The local officials had a party for us at a hotel.

Did it impact your work as a teacher?

Yeah, it impacted my work, because once we were married, we had a whole other year in China together as a married couple. The assumption was then that nobody needed to be in charge of me because Liang Heng was in charge of me. That way, we could travel anywhere we wanted. Before, there had been certain leaders who were in charge of me.

In charge of the foreigner?

Yeah. But now Liang Heng was in charge — I was China’s daughter-in-law, right? We travelled a lot. We would go to places that were technically not open to foreigners, but because I was married to him, we could go there.

Fortunately, because I’m short and I spoke Chinese, and my hair was pretty dark then — now it’s more grey — and people wore those kouzhao (facemasks), people didn’t notice that I was a foreigner. I went to lots and lots of places that no foreigners had ever been to, and people didn’t even realise that a foreigner was there.

And how did you find the Chinese family?

Liang Heng had come from a broken family because of the Cultural Revolution. His mother had been labeled as a rightist, and his father was really sick from mistreatment in the countryside. His two sisters had been sent to the countryside and were still there. So his family was pretty spread out. That’s what we wrote about in Son of the Revolution.

After we got married, Liang Hong was able to get his father returned from the countryside to some housing in the Hunan Daily. But his father was crippled by a lack of medical care. It’s not like we had dinner every night. I don’t think I met the family very much.

It was much more writing Son of the Revolution that helped me understand the pattern that so many people in China had experienced. Anybody who had been born around the early ‘50s had roughly that same pattern. They’d been a Red Guard; their parents had been criticised; they’d been sent to the countryside as an educated youth; they had become disillusioned at a certain moment, perhaps at the Lin Biao incident; they had become the awakened young people; and at some moment, they realised, “Wait a minute, everything that we gave to the revolution was basically a lie.” That’s why that book has had such a long history, even though many other books have been written, because in so many ways, that story is typical.

As a feminist scholar, what do you think about that dynamic where the man tells the story and the woman writes it?

In a way, initially I was surprised because we chose to make Son of the Revolution completely in his voice. There wasn’t a male-female decision at all, it was because it was his story. But I remember sometimes being surprised when people would say, “Oh, I read your husband’s book,” Then I would be a little offended — “Who do you think wrote it?” But it’s really his story.

I don’t feel in any way that there was any kind of gender inequality between us. Each of us got a lot out of that relationship.

‘What does life want to get out of us?’

The whole period of the ‘80s in China is remembered as a period of liberalisation, freedom, opening-up.

It was amazing. It was such an exciting time for the Chinese people.

What was your life like in China during the ‘80s?

We came back in ‘81. Liang Heng applied for an expedited U.S. passport. So we were able to go back, and he didn’t feel unsafe.

We wrote another book called After the Nightmare — we had some friends among the leadership who had helped us to get married. And they would say, “Okay, you wrote about the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t untrue. But why don’t you write about some of the good things that are happening in China now?”

So we said, “Okay, we’ll come back.” So we did this other book called After the Nightmare. We just travelled around. Each chapter chronicled a different kind of experience of Chinese life.

People say the ‘80s was amazing. Why? What was amazing about it?

People felt these new freedoms all the time. People were publishing things, and were able to see films that they hadn’t been able to see. The door was opening. Foreign artists and symphonies and ideas were coming in.

People began to feel, for the first time, as if they could decide their own careers after graduation. Maybe you don’t take the assignment that your school gives you, and take the risk and go off to Shenzhen and start your own business.

So it was a moment when people felt free and excited about ideas, as if maybe this economic liberalisation might eventually lead to political liberalisation as well — which, of course, didn’t happen. But there was a notion in the ‘80s, leading up to Tiananmen, that first perestroika and then glasnost was going to come.

And as an American going to China in the ‘80s, how did you feel? For the Chinese, it would be like unshackling your chains and gaining new freedom, but those freedoms would be quite familiar to you.

Yeah, but I was interested in the Chinese people’s experience. It wasn’t about my experience.

But what was your experience? Were you inspired?

I never wanted to be a writer. That was never my ambition. But sometimes, because of the experiences that I’d had, I felt certain obligations to tell people’s stories because there wasn’t somebody else who could tell them. People would come to me with their stories, and I would feel like, “I guess nobody else is going to do it. I guess I have to do it.” So that was a responsibility.

There’s a famous book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And he says, “Our question should not be what do we want to get out of life, but rather what does life want to get out of us?” We should rise to the occasion. And in many ways, China — not consistently, because I took big breaks from it — has asked me to deliver something, has pulled out something, a contribution that I could make.

One pretty influential thing that you and Liang Heng started was The Intellectual magazine, Zhishi Fenzi, which influenced not just Chinese students abroad, but many in China too. Could you talk about that experience of starting this magazine and getting the Chinese intellectuals to contribute?

That was more Liang Heng’s project than mine, although I was certainly there when he was putting it together. His model for it was a kind of Chinese New York Review of Books. He would approach Chinese intellectuals overseas to write articles.

In those days, it was really very much about “What is civil society?” There was a lot of curiosity. People didn’t know what that term meant. There was no such thing, and so there was a lot of intellectual work involved with explaining the roots of civil society and what that could mean.

I don’t remember how long that magazine went on. It was once a month or once every two months for maybe a couple of years. And there was always a question of how to get it back into China.

The China burnout

You’re not the first person who told me they got tired of China. What is it about China that got you tired?

Perry Link has a great book called Evening Chats in Beijing. And in it, he talks a great deal about the sort of burden of the Chinese intellectual and how the Chinese intellectual can never stop trying to figure out, “You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?” — in the words of that play, Bitter Love, Ku Lian.

In my marriage to Liang Heng, I was tired of constantly trying to figure out, “What can we do about China?” — that burden. And ultimately, a feeling like, “this is not ultimately my burden. This is your burden.” That was a big factor in our deciding to split up, being tired of China. I don’t have to work on China. Right now, I’m really interested in working on Norway. Nobody says I have to work on China. I like working on China, but many courses I teach right now have nothing to do with China. I’m talking to you because you’re asking me to, but I wouldn’t have this conversation every day of the week. It’s exhausting in a way, to think about these things.

In the ‘90s, your attention moved away from China. How did you start working for the National Endowment for Democracy?

They were looking for a new senior program officer for Asia. Even though they were attracted to my China background, what appealed to me about the job was that it had a broader Asia focus. I had a chance to work on Indonesia. I spent a lot of time working on Burma and Cambodia. We were able to support some communities overseas from Tibet.

It was a great chance to explore, and that’s been very helpful to me now in my teaching. It’s very important to be able to say to students that, “Yeah, I went to Indonesia. I was in Cambodia. I visited these places. I understand them.”

Did you support any Chinese groups? And what were your interactions with them like?

We did support Tibetan groups. I was not a fan of [Chinese human rights activist and former labor camp inmate] Harry Wu, but there was a congressperson that loved Harry Wu, so we had to keep supporting him. My assistant traveled with Harry Wu at some point to Russia, and Harry Wu had the effrontery to tell people who had survived Russian prison camps that they were lucky because the Chinese camps were so much worse. We don’t need that. First of all, how could he know? And how could he say that?

There are some people that have been so wounded by China that their only goal is to hurt China back, and nothing China can do could ever be good. That’s why I was not a fan of Harry Wu. I know we did support some other Chinese groups. I just don’t remember what they were.

The good is that you get to support some civil society groups that are really good. The bad is that certain Congress people will come in and interfere and say, “You have to support this or that.” It does have that very strong anti-communist tone to it, and the understanding of democracy is formulaic and Westernised. There’s a lot of focus on elections, and much less of a human rights and intellectual freedom orientation, which is more what I feel comfortable with.

I was there for just two years, and I learned a lot. And then I really felt that it was time for me to do something completely different.

Recommended readings

Viktor Frankl, 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press

Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, 1984, Son of the Revolution, Knopf Doubleday

Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, 1986, After the Nightmare, Knopf

Perry Link, 1993, Evening Chats in Beijing, W. W. Norton & Company

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The phrase “Chinese village elections” sounds like an oxymoron. As the political heartland of the Chinese Communist Party, the countryside is supposed to be the saintly land of revolution that had rooted out all capitalist elements. Yet, in the post-Cultural Revolution and post-Tiananmen reform period, such “bourgeois” political instruments as popular elections gradually made their way into Chinese villages. Even more unlikely, the party had, to support these elections, invited a “foreign force” as symbolic as the former head of the free world, U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Current politics make every element of this story almost unthinkable today. Yet, for more than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party did welcome an American president to help China build its grassroots elections, and appeared interested in fostering political change from the bottom up. Carter, who passed away on Dec. 29, was an enthusiastic advocate.

When I learned of the story, I knew I had to dig into it. Few are better suited to tell it than Dr. Liu Yawei, the Senior Advisor on China at the Carter Center and an adjunct professor of political science at Emory University. He was involved in the Carter Center’s China Program from 1997, directed it since 2005, and spearheaded its projects on rural democracy in China. Dr. Liu has written extensively on China’s political developments and grassroots democracy, including three edited book series: Rural Election and Governance in Contemporary China (Northwestern University Press, Xi’an, 2002 and 2004), The Political Readers (China Central Translation Bureau Press, Beijing, 2006), and Elections & Governance (Northwestern University Press, Xi’an, 2009).

In this interview excerpt, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, Dr. Liu Yawei shares his experience working at the Carter Center on rural democracy in China, and offers observations from his unique vantage point about the evolution of U.S.-China relations. And as we remember the legacy of President Carter, besides his efforts to bring the U.S. and China closer, it is worth remembering his deep commitment to democracy around the world.

Enjoy!

Leo

(This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

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For quick navigation to the specific sections:

• ‘How could a rising, hopeful China ever establish relations with the imperialistic, capitalistic, filthy US?’

• When Carter calls, Deng picks up the phone

• Wang Zhenyao, Zeng Jianhui, and the same-bed-different-dreams of rural electoral reforms

• When China shut out Carter

• The death of village electoral reforms

‘How could a rising, hopeful China ever establish relations with the imperialistic, capitalistic, filthy US?’

Where were you when China and the United States first established diplomatic relations?

I was a university freshman, and I remember clearly that on December 16, 1978, as we got up for morning exercises, we heard from the loudspeakers on campus about the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States. For our generation, it was a bolt from the blue. How could the U.S., which was deteriorating, filthy, imperialistic, and controlled by Wall Street billionaires, establish diplomatic relations with a China that was rising and full of vitality? It was unbelievable.

In 1979, during Chinese New Year, Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. His visit allowed us to see America for the first time on our 9-inch black-and-white televisions: towering skyscrapers, smiling people, and streets full of cars. It made us realise our ignorance. Our media had completely distorted our understanding of the United States.

Deng visited the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Johnson Space Center, the Boeing aircraft manufacturing plant in Seattle, and a Ford car assembly line in Atlanta. All of these made Chinese people realise that the United States had long achieved the “Four Modernisations” that China had just begun discussing. After Deng’s visit to the United States, the need for reform and opening became a consensus that no political force could reverse.

How did you join the Carter Center?

The first time I met President Carter was when I was studying at Emory University, where he taught after leaving the White House. He would meet with international students every fall semester. I asked him a question about Taiwan. When addressing the Taiwan issue, Carter would always say, “Nixon was the first American president to recognise ‘One China,’ but I was the first president to say that ‘One China’ means the People’s Republic of China.”

During my PhD, I took a course on U.S. foreign policy decision making, taught by Robert Pastor. He had worked in Carter’s National Security Council on Latin American issues. After Carter lost the 1980 election, Pastor became a professor at Emory University, and later joined the Carter Center to lead its Latin American projects.

After finishing my PhD, I taught U.S. history at a local university. One day in 1996, I received an email from Pastor, saying, “The Carter Center is going to observe elections in China. Since you’re from China, I hope you can help me.” He was an expert on Latin American issues but knew little about Chinese politics, culture, and history. I replied, “But China doesn’t have elections, at least none that I know of.” He told me, “There are elections in China now. Go look it up.” That’s when I learned that China had been conducting village elections for some time. I told Pastor that I could help but had no expertise in elections. He replied, “I can make you an elections expert.”

From 1996 to 1998, I volunteered at the Carter Center. In October 1996, I joined the Carter Center’s election monitoring trip to Nicaragua, which was my first face-to-face opportunity with President Carter.

In the fall of 1998, Pastor became the Vice President of American University and moved to Washington D.C. He asked me to take over the China Village Elections Project at the Carter Center. It’s been 26 years now. In 2008, when the Carter Center turned its China Village Elections Project into the China Program, I resigned from my university job and joined the Carter Center full-time. Teaching in academia was to make a living, but participating in changing the country where I was born and raised is my lifelong dream.

When Carter calls, Deng picks up the phone

Before joining the Carter Center, you volunteered for the Carter Center’s disability program, which partnered with the China Disability Foundation headed by Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s son. Could you tell us about the Carter Center’s early connections with China?

After Carter left the White House, Deng Xiaoping let it be known to him, through the embassy and other channels, that the Chinese government would welcome him to China at any time.

During a 1987 visit to China, Carter was eager to visit Tibet. But the medical check-up in Chengdu found that Carter had high blood pressure and a fast heart rate. Worried about political repercussions if something were to happen [due to Tibet’s high altitude] to such an important foreign figure, the Sichuan Foreign Affairs Office stopped him from going.

Carter said, “Let me call Deng Xiaoping.” Deng asked him, “Do you think your health is okay?” Carter said, “I’m totally fine.” Deng replied, “If something happens, you are responsible for it.” Carter assured him, “Of course, I’m responsible.” Deng said, “Then we will make an exception,” and Carter went. That’s what the relationship between him and Deng Xiaoping was like.

In the late 1980s or early 1990s, during a visit, Carter told Deng that the Carter Center had projects around the world, and that he was interested in working in China. Shortly after, a Chinese government department asked if the Carter Center could partner with the China Disabled Persons’ Federation, of which Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, was the chairman.

Back then, there were inconsistencies in sign languages across China, while American sign language had been standardised. The Carter Center invited teachers from Chinese deaf schools to the United States for training. I did the simultaneous translation, my first time volunteering for the Carter Center. The Carter Center also helped the Beijing Disabled Persons’ Federation set up a German prosthetics production line. Before the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations, the Chinese government wrote to Carter, telling him that it was still producing prosthetics. This was the Carter Center’s earliest project in China.

Wang Zhenyao, Zeng Jianhui, and the same-bed-different-dreams of rural electoral reforms

In the mid-1990s, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs worked to promote popular elections in rural areas. Wang Zhenyao, the senior official responsible for this task, met with Anne Thurston, an American China expert, and asked if there were any U.S.-based non-governmental organisations willing to get involved. Through Thurston, the Carter Center established contact with the ministry, which in 1996 formally invited it to send a delegation to monitor rural elections in China. At the time, the Carter Center was a globally recognised election monitoring body, regularly monitoring presidential or parliamentary elections in transitioning democracies. Although it was a lower-level election in China, President Carter and senior Carter Center leaders thought the project had immense potential, and quickly approved it.

The collaboration was definitely not Wang Zhenyao’s personal decision; it had to be reviewed by the foreign affairs and public security ministries, and approved by the top leadership. The formal cooperation between the Carter Center and the Ministry of Civil Affairs began in 1998 with a three-year agreement.

What prompted the Ministry of Civil Affairs to promote rural elections in China? Was it a PR stunt to smoothen China’s entry into the WTO, or a sincere preparation for gradual democratic reforms?

We should not doubt the motivations of the Ministry of Civil Affairs officials. In the civil affairs system, the grassroots governance section has little money and had to ask lower levels to conduct elections without resources. So the solution is to seek foreign support. Website and IT system development required funding, so if the Ford Foundation or the Carter Center were willing to participate, why not take advantage of that?

Without Chinese village committee elections, there would not have been a resurgence of Chinese political science after the Cultural Revolution. They finally provided a research subject, and universities’ political science departments flourished. Scholars and ministry officials were convinced that this was the “third rural revolution” — the first being land collectivisation when the Communist Party seized power, and the second being economic liberalisation in rural China in the 1980s.

A ministry official told me, “Elections are a process, a culture. With village committee elections, the vast majority of Chinese citizens can participate in elections.” The first step was to get the Chinese people to break free from thousands of years of feudal culture and institutional limitations, to no longer feel they had no right to participate in democratic elections, and to learn to make independent judgments and choices.

Later, vote-buying emerged in rural areas, and those opposed to village elections said, “Look at rural elections, there’s vote-buying, and it’s controlled by family clans and organized crime.” A ministry official told me, “If a candidate wants to win through vote buying, they have to bribe 2,000 voters. But without elections, they would only need to bribe a township head or a party secretary, just one or two people. Even from the negative perspective, vote-buying still marked progress.”

Around 2008, at a National People’s Congress press conference, Premier Wen Jiabao stated that China would embrace “democratisation with Chinese characteristics,” with rule of law, looser media supervision, and grassroots elections that would gradually move toward direct elections of township and county leaders.

When direct elections began in Buyun Township in 1998, it stirred the world. Unfortunately, the election was later deemed “unconstitutional” because, according to regulations, township heads must be elected by the township people’s congress representatives, not by direct vote. But at that time, direct elections of township heads were tolerable because China wanted to experiment. So, it’s incorrect to say the Ministry of Civil Affairs was just putting on a show.

However, some argued that it’s more credible for outsiders to tell China’s story. The director of the National People’s Congress Foreign Affairs Committee at that time was Zeng Jianhui, who had been the deputy director of Xinhua News Agency. In one of our meetings, he said, “We know that when we say we have democracy, no one believes us. But when the Carter Center says China has democracy, people believe them.”

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I would like to specifically mention two officials: Zeng Jianhui, whom you just mentioned and was the head of the National People’s Congress Foreign Affairs Committee, and Doje Cering, Minister of Civil Affairs and former chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region. These two were the main contacts for the Carter Center’s rural election work in China.

Zeng Jianhui was the author of the “April 26” Editorial during the Tiananmen protests, which defined student demonstrations as a “riot.” Doje Cering, a Tibetan, served as the chairman of Tibet — under then-local party secretary Hu Jintao — and suppressed the March 1989 demonstrations in Tibet.

How should we view Chinese Communist officials, who experienced the 1980s, Tiananmen, and the end of political reform, and later took responsibility for promoting grassroots elections?

Zeng Jianhui had worked for Xinhua for many years and served as the director of the State Council Information Office, so he understood the power of the media and was aware that Chinese media had little credibility overseas. He believed that presenting China’s story through overseas channels would better shape China’s image. The National People’s Congress invited the Carter Center to observe elections for grassroots representatives and participate in training programs for these representatives and sent foreign committee officials to the Carter Center as visiting scholars. Without his push, this would not have been possible. He was effective in advancing China’s integration with the international community beyond the economic and trade sectors.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs is another story. Although Doje Cering was the minister, it was middle-ranking officials in the grassroots governance section like Wang Zhenyao who primarily pushed for democratic elections. Wang later left for Beijing Normal University, where he founded the China Philanthropy Research Institute with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Gates Foundation.

In China, any reform requires a breakthrough point. I suspect that reform-minded officials like Wang Zhenyao, who “touched the stones to cross the river,” would go wherever they saw possibility and change course when things didn’t work out. When the election route did not work, he turned to nurturing China’s philanthropy sector. With China’s economic development and the rise of the middle class, there were many wealthy people. If the culture of the wealthy class could be changed to foster a sense of public welfare, it could also help promote progress in China’s political culture. These officials have their ideals and courage but are also aware of the risks in China’s political environment, so they proceeded cautiously.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Carter Center invited foreign observers to Chinese rural elections, including The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and political scientists like Stanford’s Larry Diamond and Jean Oi. What role did these foreign experts play, and what were the criteria for invitations?

Initially, my professor Robert Pastor decided which scholars or media representatives would participate. After I took over, we mainly invited well-known China scholars, especially those who worked on village elections. We also invited representatives from American media and staff from the U.S. State Department, the American embassy, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Did they play the role of monitoring and evaluating the elections?

Not really, they just observed. Friedman is a famous columnist for The New York Times. After participating in our observation, he wrote three opinion pieces, one of which was titled “Here Comes the Sun.” In his bestselling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he describes observing the election in a village outside Dalian. I was his translator. When one of the candidates mentioned in his campaign speech that, if elected, he would bring fibre optic cable to the village, Friedman said, “That’s it, fibre optics. Globalisation has penetrated Chinese villages.” Then he left to play tennis. His opinion pieces were impactful. They changed the perception of China in American political and academic circles.

The invited scholars had all done deep research into Chinese politics. For example, Ohio State University’s Kevin O’Brien and his former student professor Li Lianjiang co-wrote articles mainly focusing on grassroots governance and the People’s Congress system.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs later cooperated with the European Union, which invested a lot of resources and established the China-EU Training Programme on Village Governance at the Civil Affairs College in Hebei’s Yanjiao. Their budget was around 9 million euros. We were pretty envious. The Carter Center’s “China Village Committee Elections Project” had been my sole responsibility for a long time, and at most there were only three people working on it. Later, Chinese authorities began to view the Carter Center as a threatening beast, which I felt was exaggeration and flattery. They made us look much bigger than we were.

Then the Taishi Village incident happened. The villagers in Taishi wanted to remove their village committee head, but the local civil affairs department disagreed, so the villagers went on a hunger strike. At that time, I was leading a study group of Duke University students in China. Someone from the Ministry of Civil Affairs called me, saying they heard the Carter Center was paying villagers in Taishi to go on a hunger strike. I told them I had no idea where Taishi Village even was. They asked, “Are you sure?” I said, “It’s impossible, I am in Beijing with students, and I just read about it in the newspaper.”

After that came the Wukan protests in Guangdong province. This incident was even bigger. Professor Ai Xiaoming from Sun Yat-sen University received funding from the Ford Foundation and was accused of being an external hostile force intervening in China’s internal affairs. People claimed that foreign forces had incited the Wukan villagers, similar to the Chinese narrative about Hong Kong protesters being funded and controlled by the CIA. In their view, Chinese people never have any agency; whenever they try to achieve their demands, they are accused of collaborating with foreign forces. Local governments always blame foreigners to shirk responsibility.

I would never have thought that such grassroots democratic social events ended up being linked to the Carter Center. Besides inviting American experts to observe elections in China, you also organised trips for Chinese officials and scholars to observe elections in the U.S. How did this start?

Before 2020, the Carter Center never observed U.S. elections. Now that America’s own democracy is facing issues, observing and participating in U.S. elections has become a major task for the Carter Center. In 2024, the Carter Center had projects in all the battleground states.

To reciprocate the Carter Center being invited to observe Chinese elections, we invited Chinese officials to observe elections abroad. We hoped they would visit elections in developing countries where the Carter Center had projects. However, for various reasons, we were never able to.

For example, I once tried to get them to join the Carter Center’s election observations in Nepal, but India did not want Chinese officials there, fearing infiltration. We invited the ministry to Jamaica, but the ministry didn’t send anyone; only a few Chinese scholars participated. We also tried to organise a visit for ministry officials to study Taiwan’s grassroots governance. Some Taiwanese universities were eager to host, but it was harder for Chinese officials to visit Taiwan than the U.S.

In the end, all their trips were in the U.S. From 1998 to 2012, we arranged for them to observe every midterm and presidential elections. They invited officials and scholars, and we invited scholars too.

When China shut out Carter

The Carter Center created three websites, including the China Elections and Governance website (选举与治理网), which was influential among a generation of Chinese liberal intellectuals. Could you talk about its history?

The first project was actually building the Chinese Grassroots Democracy website for the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which it used to publish information. It was managed by them; we had no editorial control.

Because reports on elections drew a lot of attention, especially after the Buyun Township case, the need for an online hub of information became apparent. At the time, search engines were not very powerful, so I decided to create a website specifically to aggregate information on grassroots elections and governance for the use of officials, scholars, and ordinary citizens.

On July 1, 2002, the China Elections and Governance website went online. In 2012, the Beijing Internet Information Office blocked it. We then kept changing the domain name and publishing articles until March 2023. The website remained accessible until 2024. After [the Carter Center’s] U.S.-China Perception Monitor published an article by [political scientist] Hu Wei, which provoked controversy, the Carter Center realised that our websites had been designed by Chinese companies with backdoor access to readers’ IP addresses. To protect their privacy and security, we took the website offline.

I had maintained the website almost daily. It had nearly 300,000 articles, 90% of which were reposted from elsewhere. 2008 to 2012 were the website’s best years. It had many contributors, Chinese partners, and nearly ten editors. We are looking for an institution interested in bringing it back online, at least as a database for scholars. I firmly believe that political reform will return to China one day, and when that happens, the website will still have a role to play.

By the end of 2012, the Chinese government clearly stated that the Carter Center could only work on U.S.-China relations and no longer on political reform. The Center had to pivot. In 2014, we launched the U.S.-China Perception Monitor, which is still online, though constantly blocked in China. Each time it is blocked, we change the domain name and lose many readers. Recently, we changed the domain name again, and while the Internet Information Office hasn’t blocked it, WeChat has.

The Carter Center collaborated with the Institute of International Political Economy at Renmin University to build the website. Can you talk about how the collaboration with Chinese partners worked at the time?

Our cooperation with the International Relations College at Renmin University was with Professor Zhang Xiaojin. For a website in China, we needed a domestic partner. We got in touch with Zhang and he agreed right away. Later, he moved to a new position at Tsinghua, but Renmin University wouldn’t let him. There was an internal report about the Carter Center and the China Elections and Governance website. Renmin told Zhang he had to sever Renmin University’s connection with the China Elections and Governance website before he was permitted to leave. At that point, Tsinghua University’s Department of Political Science became our partner, and the issue was resolved.

In April, 2012, the China Elections and Governance website was blocked in April that year. During President Carter’s 2012 visit to China, we didn’t ask President Carter to bring it up but he told Premier Li, “I hope you can help me with something.” Li Keqiang replied, “Anything.” He said, “We have a Chinese website that has been blocked. Could you look into it?” Li Keqiang inquired, and then our center’s president and I were summoned to the Cyberspace Administration Office, where we were told the website was illegal; to operate in China, we would have to clean the database and remove any articles criticising the Chinese government.

Overall, the China Elections and Governance website was the Carter Center’s most influential project in China. It survived for more than 20 years and was widely known in China and abroad. I keep telling people at the Carter Center that we should retain its database and relaunch it when the time is right. No matter how unlikely, political reform remains an eternal topic for China that is closely related to the country’s future and its ability to achieve modernisation.

I’m unsure why the Ministry of Civil Affairs decided to sever ties with us. At the time, I contacted the official in charge of the cooperation. He said, “This wasn’t our decision, and there’s nothing you can do.” Our cooperation with the ministry fizzled out without any formal ceremony or communication.

Later, a friend at the ministry told me, “We’re involved in something I can’t tell you about right now, but after it’s over, it will have a significant impact on your projects in China.” I eventually learned that this was the drafting and passage of the Foreign NGO Law.

Looking at it now, it’s astonishing to imagine a former U.S. president touring China’s rural areas, chatting with scholars, officials, and village leaders about democracy, even holding essay contests and awarding prizes for rural democratic ideas. Did President Carter have any expectations for rural elections in China?

President Carter had a few firm principles regarding U.S.-China relations. First, he was most concerned about Chinese students coming to the U.S., which he had pushed for early on. Everyone knows the story of the “3 a.m. phone call.”

Second, he believed that establishing diplomatic relations with China was the right decision. After normalisation, East Asia became peaceful and stable, and powered the world economy.

Third, President Carter believed that as the world’s two largest economies, China and the U.S., should coexist peacefully and contribute to global development and peace. He believed China’s reform and opening-up had improved the living conditions and freedoms enjoyed by the Chinese people.

Regarding village committee elections, he said the principles of democracy were the same everywhere: voters should hold politicians accountable. He said, “I saw a villager during an election speech holding a recorder and saying, ‘This is your promise from last year’s campaign. Let’s see which of these promises you’ve fulfilled.’ The procedures and forms of democracy might differ worldwide, but the purpose is the same: a candidate must fulfil their promises, or someone else will take their place.” President Carter said. He had high expectations for democracy, hoping that all countries could allow their citizens the freedom to choose and hold officials accountable according to their own conditions and culture.

How did the election projects raise funds back then?

Fundraising wasn’t easy, because American corporations knew that the Carter Center, as a non-profit, published annual financial statements. If they donated to China-related projects, it could be seen as “interfering in internal affairs.” We went to the AT&T office in Beijing, and the person in charge said he admired what we were doing, but if they donated money, the Chinese government would punish them. For projects related to disabilities or cultural exchange, fundraising was easier.

Previously, businesses and charitable organisations worried about the Chinese government. Now, they are more worried about attacks from the U.S. government and conservative groups. You can see from tax forms whether a U.S. organisation spent money in China, and to these people any spending means support for the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. today is almost like the McCarthy era. If you’re associated with China, you’re pro-Communist, and pro-Communist means anti-American.

The China Elections and Governance website officially went offline and the Carter Center’s projects in China essentially ceased in 2012. President Carter made his last visit to China in 2014. What prompted this major shift in the Carter Center’s work in China? What political changes did this reflect?

When Carter visited China, the Chinese side said, “We hope you no longer engage in domestic Chinese projects. You were the president who established diplomatic relations, and we hope you can spend more time and resources on improving U.S.-China relations, fostering mutual understanding between our peoples and elites.”

Before that, we could already sense difficulties with our projects. After [Tunisia’s] Jasmine Revolution, there was growing momentum in China to counter so-called “color revolutions.” The Ministry of Civil Affairs had cut off communication with us, and the signal was clear. In that context, we had to change. Carter was the president who established diplomatic relations, so we started planning work on U.S.-China relations. Our broad organisational focus has been on Africa. So, starting in 2012, we began looking for opportunities for U.S.-China cooperation in Africa.

The death of village electoral reforms

In 2009, President Carter said that China had credible rural elections. However, some Chinese scholars believe that village autonomy had already ended by 2007. How would you draw the timeline of grassroots elections in China?

Grassroots governance and elections began with the dissolution of the communes. After the communes dissolved, chaos ensued in rural areas. During the tenure of Peng Zhen, the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the NPC passed the trial version of the Organic Law of Village Committees. This marked the beginning of elections, which were later stipulated to be held every 3 years.

At first, the public didn’t believe in it. Who would believe in elections in China? They must be manipulated. The key to an election is candidate selection. If nominations are controlled, as happens for township- and county-level People’s Congresses, an election is meaningless.

Later, Jilin implemented elections with unrestricted nominations and many other innovations. People thought this was the way China would move toward political reform. But as things evolved, the power of the village committees was curbed. Originally, village committees were responsible for taxation, fees, and family planning, but these duties were gradually removed. Resources were controlled by the county civil affairs and finance departments. If we say that village elections ended in 2007, it would be because village committees lost their power.

Why did the Chinese government’s attitude toward village democratic reform change so drastically?

My guess is that, for the Communist Party, village democracy ultimately pointed to what Premier Wen Jiabao called “local regimes” (基层政权). If people participated in the elections of township and county-level governments, they would start holding higher levels of government accountable. This would challenge the power of the state and threaten the party’s total control.

The party’s assessment of political security also changed. Corruption and migrant workers became bigger issues for the party. And as urbanisation increased, young and capable working-aged people left villages for cities, and some began regarding village committee elections as games for women, children, and the elderly. This made elections increasingly toothless. Besides, it is true that in some places, especially where village-run enterprises exist, vote-buying, gang interference, and family clan-controlled elections became commonplace.

Does China’s experience with rural elections prove that the Chinese people are unfit for democracy, and that democracy is doomed to fail in China?

As a Chinese person, hearing people say that Chinese people have these inherent flaws and therefore can’t have democracy feels like an insult. However, many people in China, especially the middle and upper class people who have benefitted from the reform and opening-up policies, now seem to think that “democracy” causes governance failures. They even feel that democracy poses a threat to them and believe the current system is the best because they can rely on ties with the government to get rich.

I’m optimistic about the capabilities of the Chinese people. As long as the government is willing to seriously consider systemic reform and set up appropriate laws and procedures, chaos can be managed. The problems with gangs and family clans are relatively small in scale. But if there’s no space for experimentation and innovation, and if we keep reinforcing the self-fulfilling prophecy that “Chinese people can’t handle democracy,” then China’s political reform will forever be stagnant.

Recommended readings

Friedman, 1999, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

O’Brien & Li, 2006, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, Cambridge University Press

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The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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