Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, talks to Rob Johnson about the future of Chinese relations with the West, and how the former victim of Western imperialism is trying to get its revenge.
Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics & Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Speaker 1:
(singing).
Rob Johnson:
I’m here today with my friend, Orville Schell, who’s the head of the U.S-China Program at the Asia Society. He’s the author, along with John Delury, of Wealth and Power, a wonderful book about China. And I would encourage you to go to the INET website and revisit the interview that we did on video together when that book was released. Orville is also working on a new novel, which will come out by Alfred Knopf, probably around the turn of the year on China called My Old Home. Orville has recently written an article called The End of Engagement, about the U.S-China relationship. And reading that article inspired me to call you and thank you for joining me today. I think our listeners have a lot to learn from the kind of thoughts that you’ve been creating.
Orville Schell:
It will be fun.
Rob Johnson:
So Orville, it’s near the end of June, 2020. The pandemic is here, we’re watching all kinds of stresses in economy, stresses with regard to health, concerned about whether collaboration and climate change will be, how do I say, made more difficult by these things. And you, a specialist, in understanding China and its relationship to the United States, and I know you’ve done work with the governor of California on climate change, I just want to open wide up, what are you seeing? What is really going on inside China itself? And how are we going to address the kind of challenges that you wrote about with The End of Engagement?
Orville Schell:
Well, what’s so striking to me, Rob, is that after all of these decades of following the U.S-China relationship, at this time, when we have this confluence of a whole stream of other extraordinarily stressful problems assaulting us, we also find that we are at the end of a period of almost a half a century of a framework that did manage to keep the U.S. and China in a reasonably constructive and increasingly engaged mode. And that was very striking and quite extraordinary given the fact that China is a Marxist-Leninist system with a completely different political structure and value system. And yet since 1972, when Kissinger and Nixon went to China and forged that partnership with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the two countries have managed to coexist and even to become much more interconnected. And that was, I think looking back on it, a rather extraordinary accomplishment.
Orville Schell:
So we are left to ask at this point now, when I think it’s fair to say that engagement is essentially over as a framework, and it happens precisely when we’re being hit by a pandemic, an economic depression, and whole myriad other things, why did that happen? And who’s responsible for that sorry end? I would have to say that as you look back over the decades before which I did in writing this article, The Death of Engagement, I went back into a lot of archives, read a lot of books, papers, whatnot, the thing that really, really impressed me was the degree to which the United States over a period of eight presidential administrations, almost every single president, didn’t matter if they came in raging against the butchers for Beijing to Baghdad or against communism, they all came out trying to support engagement, trying to steady the course, and to keep the United States committed to interacting with China under the supposition that China would slowly change, it would slowly become integrated into the global marketplace, and it might even become more comfortable within the whole outside world of liberal democratic values.
Orville Schell:
So why did that end? And even more important, what’s going to replace it? Now that question, of course, is the most critical question of all, because we see that as China drifts into a much more aggressive and assertive posture places like in India and Australia, and around the world, we’re left to ask, how are we going to get along with the second largest economy, the most populous nation in the world without any real, kind of a clear framework and an operating system?
Rob Johnson:
Well, this breakdown is quite daunting. And I guess my tendency would be to go inside each of the countries and understand what were the forces that are tearing it apart. You have a much more experience, a deeper lens into the inner workings of China, what are some of the clues? What are some of the elements that you see that, what you might call illuminate the stresses that are bringing this breakdown to the surface?
Orville Schell:
Well, that really is the question of questions. And I think one might sort of analyze it this way. That, of course, when China began its whole developmental process back in the late 1970s, as it came out of the Mao’s period and Deng Xiaoping started the period of openness and reform, the key elements were economic reform, and secondarily, people also around the world hoped that political reform would also follow. And as that evolution continued through the ’80s, there were some extraordinary changes that did in fact grip China and did transform it in very significant ways, but then what happened 1989 in the Beijing massacre? And that really sadly in retrospect, I have to say, and I was there during most of it, and I felt in many ways it was completely justified what people were asking for, but it did put a stake through the heart of the Communist Party’s comfort level with the idea of reform, because suddenly they thought, if you let reform go, this is what you get, a million people in the center of your capital city embarrassing you, humiliating you, and bringing everything to a grinding hall.
Orville Schell:
So that put a huge break on the whole process of reform within China. And that meant that as China developed economically, it was much less inclined to actually change the structures of its economy and certainly not its body politic. And it created a situation where the playing field with countries like the United States and the EU, particularly in markets, became more and more out of level as China developed. So the inequities rose, China continued to act as if it were developing country, it was very protectionist, excluded foreign companies from many parts of its markets, where it was welcomed almost around the full compass rose and outside of China. But this created an inequity, a lack of reciprocity, an unlevel playing field that became increasingly less tolerable.
Orville Schell:
And of course, Obama recognized this, and that’s what the pivot to Asia was all about under him. The people like Kurt Campbell sort of wrote that kind of document. And then along came Trump who in his very sort of animal way always knows when he’s being taken or when he’s being deceived or not being treated right. And he looked at the relationship, and in many ways, he got it wrong, but in certain ways, he got it right. And he said, “This isn’t working. It’s not fair, it’s not reciprocal, it’s not level, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” And so then you’ve got both sides in a state of antagonism over how to level the playing field. And that’s where we are today. So that really, I think puts most of the burden on China for not recognizing that to play this game, to be in the engagement process required that it keep reforming and that as it muled out of its developmental phases as a country that was not advanced, it had to also be more reciprocal.
Orville Schell:
I mean, just look at certain things like the whole areas in China, where American companies or European companies are completely excluded, information technology. There isn’t an IT company in America that can actually operate openly in China. You can’t have websites, you can’t have platforms, you can’t have this, you can’t have that. I mean, they’ve myriad others, of course, where the playing field is not level. And so we are reaping that bitter harvest now. And then we got President Trump as a president who recognized the problem and said about trying to do something about it, but in many ways, quite ineptly, I think.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, well, I look at the many people acted like at some level, Trump created this, and I think that’s a little too convenient. My own look at the United States, I could see Silicon Valley companies feeling blocked, I could see knowledge intensive companies engaging in foreign direct investment in China and thinking they would have access to an enormous economies of scale through a market, and then they watched, what you might call, the transfer of technology to domestic firms who became favored, and they lost out. I saw Wall Street anticipating a deepening and modernization of the capital markets in China, and then global integration of the renminbi into the foreign exchange system. And that was thwarted. And then finally the traditional companies, the Nikes, the Walmarts, and others started to experience profit compression because the Chinese, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, started to want to raise the wages of their people and improve the environmental standards.
Rob Johnson:
So some of these things are good, some of things are not. And when people saw the China 2025 design, which was about displacing things at the upper end of the value chain, I just think what you might call that raw hard political economy within the United States said, “This doesn’t look like comparative advantage. This doesn’t look like us working together and making people better off here and there, and what they would call the gains from trade.” And you’d mentioned Kurt Campbell and another gentleman named Blackwell at the CFR. We were writing about this in late 2014, early 2015, which is before Donald Trump’s campaign took off. So I think the forces were mounting, and the only place where I would agree with Chinese leaders who I’ve met with is that they say China is large scale. It’s not the size of Tonga. It’s four or five times the size of the United States.
Rob Johnson:
And so, as they begin to develop, globalization is going to create substantial adjustment and displacement everywhere else in the world, primarily meaning the advanced countries of Europe and the United States and Japan. And when they say that, they’re saying essentially who was guilty, was American political economy, which used the power of the new profits of the winning sectors to lobby Washington, to keep their money offshore, to limit infrastructure, to not pay trade adjustment assistance or retraining on an adequate scale, and then when the many people in America were in despair, which contributed to Trump’s selection, they wanted to blame China. And the Chinese leaders say we were powerless in the adjustment assistance process, but we understand it was coming because of the scale and the intensity of China’s development. So I can see pressures on both sides and failures on both sides, but that’s where we are now.
Orville Schell:
Yes. And I think the striking thing, Rob, is that if you look at the goodwill, that really was all a around the compass rose in, let’s say, the 1980s, and even in the 1990s under Jiang Zemin and Clinton came. I remember Clinton came into power talking about the butchers of Baghdad, the Beijing, and he came out a really close ally of Jiang Zemin. And I went on that trip in 1998 to China with him. And I’d never seen such a kind of a close sort of friendly accord between a U.S. and Chinese leader. But what happened after that was quite striking. One by one, China managed to alienate constituencies within the United States. I mean, it lost the church, it lost the military, it lost academics by harassing them and not giving them visas, not letting them into archives, it lost journalists, and then the last group that it lost as consequence was the one group in America that really was the heart and soul of the engagement process as functional, and that was the businessman.
Orville Schell:
And I remember three or four years ago, you began to hear all the chambers of commerce starting to be increasingly negative about reporting the sentiments of their members within China. And that continued to become much more sort of critical. And when the businessmen were lost, then China really had no one in the United States supporting the idea that engagement was a functional, ongoing process that would ultimately make us more convergent rather than divergent. So that was the tragedy, and that’s where we are now. We are very closely intertwined in terms of supply chains and in terms of sort of economics and trade, and yet, increasingly we feel divided in every other way. And moreover, we don’t have any of the kind of big timber leadership that might wrench this thing around in some fundamental ways through some dramatic readjustment or recalibration. And so we find ourselves in a very dangerous spiral downward that is being reinforced by economic forces, political forces, military forces, human rights forces, and geopolitical forces around the globe.
Rob Johnson:
What’s interesting to me is when I’ve met… I’ve never met Xi Jinping, but I’ve met most of the other top people in China repeatedly, is that these are not unstudied, uneducated, unaware people. They were very sophisticated people. Why are they behaving this way as a country? What is going on that’s driving their leadership and particularly Xi Jinping in this aggressive direction?
Orville Schell:
So this is a really important question to pose, because if you look around the world, you find a very striking tableau of countries which once were seemingly unimaginable in terms of being in some state of antagonism with China, and are now been pushed to a position where they’re very skeptical about China and increasingly view it as a threat. I mean, look at a country like Sweden, the sort of ne plus ultra of neutralism. Well, the Chinese have hectored and bullied Sweden at the point where they are very alienated. They did this to Norway over Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize winner, and they sort of penalized Norway and salmon imports and whatnot. Look at what’s happened in Australia. This country is very dependent on Chinese markets on grain, beef, iron ore, and yet because of inept Chinese diplomacy and intrusiveness into Australian politics, et cetera, we now find the Australian government in a very sort of antagonistic relationship with China.
Orville Schell:
And there are many other examples, India. Just of late with the Aksai Chin and Ladakh border feuds, India now is being sort of driven out of any kind of state of being a non-aligned country. So you have to ask yourself, why is China doing this? What does it gain? The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the way they treated Korea after the THAAD missile of Guahan. Well, I think two things suggests themselves as answers. One, is that the sense that China’s current leaders have that the U.S. is in decline has given them a kind of an unrealistic sense of their own omnipotence and their own power, almost like a Greek tragedy in which the hero overweening ambition and hubris overreaches and comes a grapho.
Orville Schell:
So there’s that element. And there’s also, I think in someone like Xi Jinping, you have to remember that he is a quite able leader and you see that in the way he’s managed to inculcate such an incredible state of sort of line and this discipline within China, but he is not a very cosmopolitan man. He has never been abroad, does not speak a foreign language, and I think fundamentally doesn’t feel particularly comfortable in global company. And we now live in a global world. He goes to Davaos, but he doesn’t mix. And if you look at other leaders, there was much more sort of spontaneity and openness. Jiang Zemin and Clinton I’ve alluded to, but Deng Xiaoping, who had been to France, and Jimmy Carter and Zhou Enlai, who had also been to France and Russia with Kissinger and Nixon, but not Xi Jinping.
Orville Schell:
So I think in a certain sense, she is a person who is rather hermetically raised in China and is probably someone who does not feel very comfortable and secure in dealing with sort of global leadership circles in a way that outside leaders are accustomed to, and thus he relies on ritual, on formality, and sort of structured ceremony. And that of course makes it very difficult to wrench fundamental problems back into a state of equilibrium.
Rob Johnson:
Wow. Well, the interesting thing from my perspective is I would’ve thought as China and the United States were at logger heads, that various other places, Africa, Europe, other countries in Asia, India, in particular, and Australia, they would seeking to fortify their relations with, but isn’t it, at least as I’m following the news, it seems like those frontiers are antagonistic as well.
Orville Schell:
Yeah, I think it’s very important to kind of do an assay of sort of major players around the world, and what are the trendlines in terms of their relations with China. Despite the fact that Trump is quite inept and is leaving a tremendous leadership vacuum in the world, the striking thing is the degree to which Xi Jinping in China are nonetheless alienating one country after another. So it’s almost as if Trump and she are in a race to see who can do the worst job in terms of weaving a global fabric of allies together in their own national interest. I mean, I’ve mentioned a few of the countries around the world where China has been alienating people, but if you look at Europe, which remember Europe has no security issue in Asia the way the U.S. does. It doesn’t have a Seventh Fleet, it doesn’t have an Alliance structure, and we have that with Japan, Korea, Australia. To some degree, with the Philippines, there are technical treaty ally, and we have an increasingly close relationship with countries like Vietnam, even Singapore, but Europe does not have that.
Orville Schell:
There’s no boats out there, there’s no responsibilities. Their relationship with China is pretty much strict trade, and yet one country after another, you see them looking increasingly at China as some kind of a threat. And you notice this particularly in their relation to the issue of 5G and Huawei, and whether they feel comfortable with their countries adopting Huawei 5G infrastructure. And we see now, even people like Boris Johnson, I mean, remember in Britain, the golden era and Cameron, when Britain and China were going to waltz off into the future, that’s gone. And you find people like Boris Johnson initiating what he’s called the 10D, the 10 democracies to get together to figure out a way to meet the China challenge.
Orville Schell:
You see in the EC, the EU, Josep Borrell, who’s the head of the China Committee, increasingly looking at China as something that needs to be countered, not just embraced and collaborated with, even Merkel and Germany. You see this at the Czech Republic, a quite interesting turn of the worm there, and you have the prime minister of Denmark saying we shouldn’t take Huawei 5G in Denmark. We should take it from a friendly country. This doesn’t make sense to deal with a country that has a different political system and different values on such a fundamental technological level. So it’s really interesting to look at the way the lights are turning on all around the world in terms of a greater awareness and a greater sense of caution about being too deeply involved with China, particularly on matters of national security such as 5G.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I see, I mentioned earlier the vision of economies of scale. I remember in the ’70s people talking about Pepsi and Coke having a billion two customers, and things like that. What I’m hearing now from people I know in the tech sector is China’s playing a hand of cards where Huawei gets to be building the infrastructure all over the world, but the Chinese market is closed to just them, so they can cross subsidize with the profits they make with monopoly power at home in order to what you might call undermine competition and the other parts of the world. I can’t imagine why other countries would stand for that.
Orville Schell:
Well, I think that’s precisely the plan, that if you can shut IT companies out of China and give their national champions like Huawei the run of the pen, then they can build up tremendous amounts of profit and R&D and then go abroad and occupy key technological sectors, and then in a certain sense, the world will be Chinese. You logically have asked why would this be sustainable or acceptable? And I think the answer is it shouldn’t be, and it isn’t. And what is so interesting to me as I watch this now is to see one country after another asking the very question that you’ve asked and coming up with an answer to that question, which is we need another sort of way forward. So, where does that leave them? Well, not with tremendously much.
Orville Schell:
There’s Ericsson, there’s Nokia in Europe, Qualcomm makes the chips in this country. What we really need, if we are serious about competing with China and not letting China into sectors where national security might be threatened such as IT, we need some sort of a collaboration among these companies, which I think will take some sort of state to state subsidy, because if we are going to have an answer to Huawei, which does bay stations, it does the works, we’ve got to really get with it, or Huawei is going to win. So this is a kind of a metaphor for the competition that is building between China and other countries, particularly the U.S, particularly in the areas where security really matters like IT.
Rob Johnson:
And I guess we always, in the United States, hear about the Asian region and military confrontation around various islands and so forth. What’s happening in the explicit military realm? Is China acting in an aggressive manner there, or is it more commercially aggressive rather than militarily aggressive in this context?
Orville Schell:
Well, sad to say that if it was just a commercial, just a market competition dilemma between China and the world, that might be manageable, where we really have danger zones are in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, to some degree, although it’s doubtful that that could be caused for any military intervention, but certainly Taiwan and the East China Sea, where the Japanese have administrative control over the Senkaku Islands, the Chinese column, the Diaoyutai. And they’re not about to give them up, and China is very aggressively sort of challenging Japanese control there. Those three areas are the areas where we could very, very easily have a military dust up, which could lead to some larger conflict. So if it was just a question of technology and market competition and et cetera, et cetera, that would be one thing, but you add an overlay of this very assertive, aggressive forward military posture of China in these other areas, and you have a very inflammatory situation.
Orville Schell:
And remember, in the South China Sea, the so-called nine-dash line, China basically claims the entire South China Sea as its own. It goes, it’s like a giant cow water that comes down from South China and Henan island, all the way down to Indonesian, to the Natuna islands off Indonesia, sweeps down the Vietnamese coast, down the Malaysian coast to Singapore, up Borneo, all right skirts along the Philippines. And these are some of the most important fishing grounds and possibly petroleum tracks in the region. So this is really dangerous stuff. And China’s built islands, built military bases, and shows no sign of willing to trim its jib or make any kind of accommodation to anybody.
Rob Johnson:
So if you were advising, we’ll call it the next American administration, we’ll call it the Biden Administration, we have this whole constellation of difficulties and yet on the horizon, we have a dangerous challenge related to climate. How would you advise an administration incoming I guess on January of next year to approach necessary collaboration with China on environmental issues?
Orville Schell:
Well, it’s interesting you raised the question of the environmental challenge because that is in fact the great common interest that whether we care to acknowledge it or not, binds us to China. And it is infinitely more compelling, in my view, than the challenge The Soviet Union posed the two countries in 1972 when Kissinger and Nixon went and they buried the hatchet in order to lie against The Soviet Union. It’s also interesting to note that right now there is a real threat to the three gorgeous dam on the Yangtze River. There’s a very torrential reigns and very high levels of river flow in the area of South China that is putting the three gorgeous dam in enormous jeopardy. If that dam were to ever go, it would wipe out many cities downstream, including Shanghai. And it would be one of the great, great sort of disasters of history.
Orville Schell:
So that highlights the importance of climate change. So is it possible to get together around these areas where we do have a common just like the pandemic? But we’ve shown no evidence whatsoever of being able to collaborate on this recent COVID-19 pandemic. So what should Biden do? Well, I mean, in many ways, Biden is well suited to try to have a major new sort of global initiative to recalibrate the operating system between China, the U.S, and the world, because when he was vice president, it was he who hosted Xi Jinping in America when he came here on a trip. And I went on that trip and watched them interact. And in many ways, Biden was the perfect antidote to Xi Jinping’s very formal ritualistic, ceremonial manner, never giving away much, no backs laughing, no glad handing. And then Xi Jinping invited Biden to China, and he went back. And I thought it was one of Obama’s great mistakes that he didn’t appoint Biden thought China guy at a high level as vice president, but he didn’t do it.
Orville Schell:
So anyway, if he were to come into office, I think he would be in a very good position to say, listen, this is one of the truly dangerous moments in history. When two great powers are sliding ineluctably toward an increasingly adversarial relationship, we must do some big power effort to arrest that whole downward slide and try to create some other way of interacting, particularly around the questions that you’ve just noted, like climate change, like pandemics, like nuclear proliferation. Would it work? I’m not particularly optimistic, but I do think it is definitely worth a try. And I think, I don’t know whether China is at this point capable of responding in a spontaneous enough, open enough, innovative enough way. I don’t see that particularly in Xi Jinping’s MO, but I think it is something that Biden would know how to do, he should do. He might even appoint someone like Bill Clinton to try to go and kick this thing around into a different frame.
Orville Schell:
Who would try to appoint to match Clinton? That’s the question. There isn’t anyone besides Xi Jinping. So I don’t know what will happen, but I do think that if Biden gets elected, that’s essential, and I think it probably is on his agenda.
Rob Johnson:
So I want to go back a little bit to your book, Wealth and Power, because it seems to me, at least in my own way of seeing that that book described a woundedness that derived from being a middle kingdom, a great leader of civilization, and then being humiliated. And as a result, first of the Opium Wars used to be great Britain and then the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. What would free Xi Jinping or his ruling coalition to feel like they experienced national, what I’ll call resurrection and dignity in the context of collaboration? Because if they’re fighting what you might call those scar tissues, those ghosts, it makes it even harder to see the benefits of collaboration that seem to be potentially right in front of us.
Orville Schell:
Yes. I mean, I think you’ve used a very apt metaphor here, scar tissue. And I think we have to remember that an essential element in the whole Chinese communist ideology, which began back in the 1920s, was China as a victim, China as a hapless, helpless supine power that had broken down and collapsed being preyed upon by the great powers. And they had this notion of 100 of humiliation. And that is very deeply ingrained I think in the sort of genetic code of China as a culture and the way it looks on the world. And of course, this is what Xi Jinping’s China dream is all about rectifying, and his notion of a rejuvenation of China, this word in Chinese, [foreign 00:40:45], that to rejuvenate China. This is the heart and soul of what he wants to bring about.
Orville Schell:
And in many ways, I think it’s fair to say that China has accomplished this rejuvenation. It’s extraordinary what the Chinese people, and one would have to say, to give credit where credit’s due, the Chinese Communist Party has accomplished by way of development in China. But what is so striking about that success is that it hasn’t translated into any less of a sense of victimhood. And in fact, the old ideology of anti-imperialism and victimization and humiliation continues on to be the predominant party ideology, even as they have this incredibly startling, historic, never equaled in the history of the world success. And the tragedy of that is that you cannot be successful and a victim at the same time. So in a certain sense, China’s insistence on maintaining its victim call tour denies the very sense of successfulness and accomplishment that it deserves.
Orville Schell:
And this is a real problem, and this is where history is so important. You just can’t erase history. It’s very hard to get rid of history, and history keeps barking and biting in China in ways that really, I think, distort and corrupt China’s ability to see itself in a new way as a successful great power, rather than as a still victimized… It used to be known as the poor man of Asia, right? And sort of humiliating moniker. So this is a dilemma. History is still sort of making Chinese see themselves in a way that doesn’t comport with the actual state of grace of their country.
Rob Johnson:
Well, now the other side of what I’ll call the narcissist pool, you see the United States, which has been the world leader of the principle architect for many, many years, and China, very large and growing increasingly powerful country is not emulating all aspects of the American system and folding into our world system design. So I guess I’d say from the pride of having been number one, America may have some digestive difficulties with the need to express national identity. It’s so important to the Chinese.
Orville Schell:
I know. Isn’t it strange that you have both of these great, great accomplished powers competing in a way to see who can be the biggest victim? Trump blaming the virus on the Chinese, okay, fair enough, but I mean, why not just beat the virus at home and show them what a superior country we are, because we can do it instead of blaming someone? So we’re in a kind of a weird historical period where all of the great powers are feeling victimized filled with grievances. I mean, look at Russia, that’s another grievance culture. And it’s very odd that nobody’s able to enjoy their own accomplishments instead insisting on blaming someone else for the things that they haven’t been able to do. And we’re into this very masochistic world of self-flagellation, and it’s all quite extraordinary because it throws the whole global compact off into the world of psychology and puts it right on Freud’s couch, rather than in the World Trade Organization or the UN. And it’s a psychological issue in some deeply fundamental way that we are completely unprepared to analyze or deal with.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, I think we need to go back to the spirits of Joseph Campbell and C. G. Jung to help us unravel this puzzle.
Orville Schell:
Well, I mean, I think, Rob, this is why when you get right down to it, it’s all well and good to be a policy specialist and to be in a think tank and walk away. But actually a lot of these issues that we’re dealing with are ones that are all too human. And this is why I constantly go back to Greek tragedy because in many ways, but I think what we see acting out, being acted out today is the kind of a tragedy of human weakness and human frailty rather than a bad policy or lack of rational insight.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I remember, I think it was your son, Ali, that suggested to me watching a movie that he said was growing in leaps and bounds in China and people were singing the national anthem on the closing credits called Wolf Warrior 2.
Orville Schell:
Oh boy. I mean, hasn’t that become the text of the moment?
Rob Johnson:
Yes, and especially as it pertains to Africa.
Orville Schell:
Yes. And what’s the Wolf Warrior all about? It’s about the most simple minded antidote to being a victim. You turn into it’s opposite, you turn into a belligerent bully.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But I remember that film and the energy that it generated the Box Office energy. I think it’s like the third or fourth highest Box Office film ever, largely because of the enthusiasm inside of China. But I found it just the whole storyline, how would I say, the victim’s revenge and turning into a superhero.
Orville Schell:
Yes. I mean, I think you could say if you’re trying to understand why China is acting as assertively aggressively and belligerently as it is, and in a kind of a very sad and tragic way, its own era of being bullied by superpowers taught it, that when you become a superpower yourself, one of the hallmarks of that arrival is that you get to bully too, you get to have some colonial people, some Tibetan, some Negros, and you throw your weight around the world just as British gunboat diplomacy did back in the Opium War. And so we may be in a period where strangely we’re reaping a bitter harvest of our own great power malfeasance that China is now acting out that script itself.
Rob Johnson:
It’s something that Freud, explicitly Sigmund Freud referred to as identification with the aggressor.
Orville Schell:
Yes.
Rob Johnson:
Meaning when someone has pushed you down, the way you feel good is by doing to others what made you feel humiliated.
Orville Schell:
Yes. I mean, the great Chinese writer, Lu Xun, always said that the relationship between slave and master was not a contradiction or opposite, it was two sides of the same proposition. And that when the slave becomes the master, it’s all too easy to adopt the master’s predatory behavior. And there is a bit of that going on, I think, right now.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s a whole lot that sits on the horizon before us, and a lot of what you’ve unpacked today should give people insight into the complexity, the degree, and the difficulty of the challenges that are on the horizon. And I hope after a few months pass, maybe after a presidential election, you and I can get back together again, take stock of where things have evolved to, and provide another chapter to this podcast. But for now, I really just want to thank you for being here today and for helping us all dig in and understand. And I want to encourage everybody to watch the work that you do in the U.S-China Program at the Asia Society, and obviously to pre-order your novel, as soon as we can find it at Knopf’s website or Amazon or wherever. But thanks, Orville. It’s always great to talk with you.
Rob Johnson:
And as I mentioned, when Wealth and Power came out, we did a video together on the INET websites that people can… I’ll put that link up on associated with our podcast. But my best to you and your family. I wish I could see you out in Bolinas, but I’m stuck here in New York, but I’m not stuck when I get to talk to great people like you. Thank you.
Orville Schell:
Well, thank you, Rob. It was a lot of fun.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, as always. Thanks.
Orville Schell:
All right, cheers.
Rob Johnson:
Bye-bye.
Orville Schell:
Bye-bye.
Rob Johnson:
And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
