Adam Tooze

“The Confucius Institutes may have this fearsome reputation as, like, outposts of, you know, zealous CCP ideology. But in fact, it's a curriculum that's utterly deprived of any kind of politics. It's totally depoliticized. It's all about health and relationships and work and women telling other women not to flirt with their husbands and complaining about the fact they don't have enough time with their children. And it's and, you know, people getting ill and scolding each other in rather direct, and I'm told quite Chinese terms about getting too fat and needing to take exercise.”

“We may literally, these last eighteen to twin eighteen months, two years, be living through the peaking of c o two emissions in China. And with that, global peaking. Because everyone else is gonna come down and the Chinese will take this down faster.”

“We need to talk about the party. We need we need to talk because that is the anchoring institution here. And it's a fascinating and important intervention which places China in comparative terms. But the one thing they are not willing to say is what it is that gives China the capacity both to have a regime deeply embedded in the social structure, profoundly knowledgeable in the about the currents and movements of society and able to fully mobilize them, and to a degree able to discipline those flows.”

“History of humanity divides into three phases as far as coal is concerned. Before coal, classic coal, and China coal. And China coal is bigger than anything anyone's ever done before. But then look at Chinese coal industry in detail, and what you see is that employment peaked around 2015 or rather re repeat. Then from '15, they they shut down more coal capacity and steel producing capacity than America has in operation in China between 2015 and the early twenty twenties.”

“VW have this Cupra brand, which is very sexy electric. They're not sold in The US, American market. But really fancy Chinese style, super sexy. They look like a cross between, like, a Lamborghini and a Porsche and a Ferrari. But they're SUVs. They wanna sell those in Europe really badly, but they make them in China. And VW has taken the lead in negotiating a deal with Brussels over access for its own China made vehicles in the European market. And this, to my mind, is the, some would say, Trojan horse, other would say, model template for the sort of deals that might be possible for a BYD.”

“The World Bank, the African Development Bank have a program they call something like, Future 300, and it's about bringing microgrids to 300,000,000 people. There's 600,000,000 people in Africa without electricity. So half of them will be occupied by microgrids, which basically is sort of like a a soccer field less than a soccer field of cheap solar panels, a an inverter station, and a battery. And you can provide a community of about 300 households with cheap totally I mean, really, abundantly cheap, reasonably reliable basic electricity. And everything else follows.”

“I never really bought the demographic story. Now my problem is the demographic story doesn't add up. Because if you look at the Chinese labor force, the problem is not that they don't have enough people of working age. The problem is that the skill level of a very large number of the Chinese workforce is not no. The mid level is really low. So if you look at the averages for China, they're at, like, sub Mexican levels. Because the vast bulk of the Chinese population is still in provincial small towns and rural areas and not anywhere near the glittering, fabulous, amazing, world class universities.”

“On the back of an envelope, you can draw up a five point plan for Chinese hegemony at this moment. They offer to provide financial assistance to anyone that's in, you know, payments trouble. They share the safety of their own flag in the Strait Of Hormuz. They pitch into a global oil stabilization pool. They launch a global green energy initiative, Sainte Paris, and actually say, look, here's the future. And then they actually say, right, enough's enough. In the interest of global stability, all Chinese exports, if anything relevant to both zones of war, will cease henceforth until you negotiate. Now that would be the moment everything would turn.”

“Had a very memorable moment with a Chinese journalist from state TV who is, you know, widely traveled in the West. She asked me, then in good faith, like, so, you know, what's what are the protests like in The US right now? And I had to stop her and say, no, you don't understand. The horror is the true horror, from the point of view of anyone that's interested in democratic politics and statecraft, is there is nothing going on in The United States. Not in Congress, barely really in the media. This interview stopped dead. She put the mic down.”

“The thing we need to explain is not China becoming capitalist, but why capitalism in China produce development. And development is the thing which blows the carbon budget up because that's where all the heavy stuff is. It isn't making cheap goods for global export as part of global capitalism that turns China into a carbon monster. It's a project of urbanization and the remaking of China as a as a nation that does. And that is the ongoing project, and that's the one that the the CPC continues to manage and drive.”