STUDY CHINA

“I actually think that the bottleneck will be the production of humanoid robots. It won't be the fact that plumbing is too difficult, because if you think about it, there's 5,000 humanoid robots, and they all plumb for one year. Instead of having one year of experience of plumbing, they're all going to have 5,000 years of experience because they're all going to know everything that every other humanoid robot knows.”

“So to start on that point, of course, they could, right? There's been a PLA Navy Task Group operating in the Gulf of Aden or a series of task groups for 18 years now. They've shown the capability to operate naval assets wherever they want to. If they chose they wanted to join such a thing, they could. I don't believe that that would be the choice that will be made in Beijing. I don't believe that they want to shoulder that burden should that come along. Yes, Iran is an important partner to China, but so is UAE and so is Saudi Arabia. And they've been very careful to spread out their level of risk in different ways.”

“AI, I think, is going to be tremendously deflationary. It's going to drive the cost of goods down, the cost of service down. I actually think that AI will potentially drive interest rates negative. Whereas if you have $100 in a bank account, you will be paying 1% to the bank to keep that money in the bank account.”

“I mean, I think this is really uncharitable, but I'm gonna say this because, like, my parents thought this way. Right? They were just thought, like, you could get you know, you could do well on the SAT potentially by just knowing some root words. Like, they just thought that it was, like, you might give you some advantage. They they made me do Latin, and at the time, I didn't question it. Tiger yeah. Just this is just the tiger mom approach.”

“I think it's first of all, I think it's just a reminder that the discourses are very porous between China and The US. And it's not just porous, because of the Internet. It's porous because so many Chinese people study in The US. We have 320,000 Chinese international students that go to The US every year. And, you know, guess what they're doing over the winter breaks? They're going back to China. And and that's not a that's that's not just a physical movement. Like that's a constant exchange of ideas.”

“My thought is here because President Trump is so distracted. He has so many things to take care of. And I think his instinct, sometimes he has some instinct thoughts about certain things in our bilateral relations, which is very good. But he does not have people to implement. So just like President Nixon has Dr. Kissinger. But I haven't seen here who is the Dr. Kissinger for President Trump. So if you need to have some grand bargain, you have to have people on the table to discuss.”

“Well, there will be some nice pictures, you know, and some handshakes. I think that the pomp and the circumstance is like at a minimum, I think, for both these leaders. Reportedly, there's less preparation for some of these kinds of kind of substantive details. I certainly think I agree that on the Chinese side, there's actually a pretty dim assessment of just how much can be done with an administration that is so mercurial and that might not be, you know, might not stick to its own positions from a given week to the next.”

“Xi writes to the Greek scholars in early twenty twenty three. I mean, he congratulates them on the opening of their joint center. And the letter contains this remarkable formulation that China and Greece glittering at each other from opposite ends of the Eurasian continent should work together to promote mutual learning. And what strikes me about that framing is not what it includes. But what it leaves out, right, it it's not China and the West. It's it's not China and Europe. It's China and Greece.”

“If you are a poor seven-year-old in Peru, milking your cows on your dad's farm, AI is going to change your life so much for the better. That boy is going to have access to an education level greater than a Harvard PhD can now experience. He'll have access to that free education, a free AI tutor, and internet via satellite for near free.”

“There are definitely some requirements for domestic companies to buy domestic chips in order to keep the domestic industry going. And there is an active gray or black market in these chips, which evade the export controls and the Chinese import controls all together. And this is kind of tacitly agreed to by pretty much all of the parties in the transaction. So it's kind of a messy compromise, and I think that's going to characterize a lot of the technology debate in China in the years ahead.”

“In the second half of the first millennium, the church in Europe took a deliberate decision to dismantle tribal traditions and reduce the importance of extended families and facilitate the emergence of nuclear families. The Church did this in part for ideological cultural reasons, to emphasize the importance of universalistic values and being fair and good towards everybody, not just towards your friends and relatives. Perhaps in part also for material reasons, having smaller families made it more likely that if there was no heir, the Church would appropriate the inheritance of the rich families. They did so by emphasizing, discouraging second-cousin marriage, by accepting celibacy, by discouraging adoptions.”

“Wage labor was the dominant form of production in agriculture in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. If you think about an entrepreneur who pays wages and who decides on how and on what to invest, clearly he has strong incentives to invest in labor-saving innovations, because if he can enact these labor-saving innovations, he can substitute workers with machine and produce at a lower cost. In China, instead, the production was organized not through farms, but often through within extended families. Because if I introduce a machine that replaces workers, I still have to take care of the survival of these family members that are employed as workers.”

“The United States has hundreds of sinologists. We don't typically ask what strategic calculation drives American scholars to spend their careers studying the 100 schools of thought from the Warring States period, right, right, or or studying Tang poetry. We tend to assume that intellectual curiosity is self explanatory, that that falling in love with the civilization's texts, its foundational works, its ideas, That's that's something that happens to people and doesn't require a geopolitical alibi.”

“If I can just ask you on freedom from coercion, I mean, last year when China said to the US, you're putting all these tariffs on us, we are going to introduce a fairly draconian export control regime for rare earths. As someone told me recently, Deng Xiaoping first talked about rare earths in 1964, which I thought was stunning. I think they felt that they had sufficient, not only physical control over the rare earth supply chain, but also legal control through the export control regime that they had developed to put that on the table. And my assessment is that in Beijing, they now think that they have gotten to a point of you could call a strategic stalemate with the United States.”

“I think Tesla is the best positioned to dominate AI and robotics. But I still also believe that those types of things that are human in nature and that can't be produced by artificial intelligence will be what's valuable. The flex might be a Honus Wagner card or human art because rarity will come down to human culture.”

“It performs a very particular double operation. It claims difference and distinctiveness internationally, insisting, you know, on the irreducible uniqueness of one's own civilization against others while simultaneously enforcing unity and homogeneity domestically using civilizational identity to, you know, delegitimize internal dissent to to marginalize minority voices or alternative traditions.”

“After his death, you see a re-emergence of clans, a re-emergence of ancestor worship. And in fact, clans were instrumental in helping China to grow in an environment of weak property rights protection. Nevertheless, despite the weaker property rights, after the death of Mao, China was able to function as a market system and in part as a capitalist system, because it exploited the clan structure, the re-emerging clans that involved the often local politicians to make sure that the new enterprises would not be abused by local politicians. In Europe, we are used to think of politically run enterprises as inefficient. In China, the enterprises that somehow could be linked to local politicians were actually doing better than others.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if we see within 10 years, 50 percent of the jobs in America gone. AI will replace all intellectual capital. Robotics combined with AI will replace all human physical labor. Within 20 years, it is probably 90 percent.”

“So, like, basically, for for for, like, a disillusioned PhD, classics PhD who is graduating from The United States, they might actually find opportunities in China. Right? Which is quite which is quite an amazing story. So so I think that that's that's one. But ten years from now, I mean, so we don't know, like, because because a lot of like, China is very much like a leadership based system.”

“So the legal system in Europe emerged very much bottom up. The new state in force emerge when they're still very weak, in an environment in which corporations already existed, and conventions and norms had already emerged, as part of these private arrangements. And so the legal system in Europe codify and systematize a system of civil rules that had already emerged the spontaneously within European society. And so that explains why the principle of the rule of law emerges so naturally in Europe, because the rule of law does not arrive in a vacuum, but emerges in a society that has already a tradition that has to be respected.”

“And this is particularly true under Xi Jinping. I think before the emergence of Xi Jinping as a leader, China was not as hierarchical, not as closed. The choice of leadership was really meritocratic, also at the very top level. Now the system has become much more personalized. There will be a succession problem when Xi Jinping has to give up, and for age-related reasons, his control over China. And in a system where control remains so personalized, the possibility of mistakes becomes higher, and the visibility of radical innovation, of course, is diminished.”

“But I think that the projection thing is that what I detect in DC is a tendency to think that the Chinese must have the same concept of international power that the United States has. So if they are challenging the US in certain ways, what that must mean is that they are trying to replace the US system with their own system. And I just think that that's wrong. What they have is more narrowly defined objectives of freedom. And if you burden yourself with alliances, for example, or the cost of underwriting formal systems, that actually is a limitation on your sovereignty and freedom.”

“I think broadly, there's a pretty consistent desire for, under the sovereignty rubric, freedom of action and freedom from coercion. So they invest a lot in doing things that prevent them from being coerced basically by the United States, and they've got increasingly effective at that. What they want to be able to do is act freely in their own interests wherever they need to. That is very different, I think, as both Jessica and Dan suggested, from an ambition to create a whole new structure that they then have to bear the costs of supervising.”

“We add to this perspective of a unitary state versus a fragmented society by arguing in our book that a key difference between Europe and China is also the internal organization of society. In China, these local arrangements were mostly within clan-like structure, dynastic organizations defined by patrilineal descent. Whereas in Europe, because of the role of the church, dynastic ties had been weakened and the cooperation took the form of associations between unrelated individuals who got together for a purpose, like monasteries or in universities or eventually in self-governing towns.”

“I'd say that what China wants in the world is sort of defined by a sort of a set of minimal objectives, sovereignty, security, and development. But what that means in the context of a shifting global order isn't exactly clear. They certainly want to feel safe and secure and prosperous in a world that the United States has long dominated. If anything, I think that Chinese leadership and experts that I've spoken with have a far greater sense of the domestic constraints that have in fact inhibited America's global leadership. And China's not eager to kind of repeat those mistakes of being an overextended global superpower while not attending to some of the more pressing challenges at home.”

“The accumulation of knowledge was controlled by the state, not only because it was a unitary state, but also because it had chosen a very meritocratic procedure for selecting public administrators, the bureaucracy, which is a good thing. But the meritocracy took the form of a centralized exam. The state tested you on your knowledge of classical Confucian doctrine. So the knowledge that was diffused and accumulated in China was not useful scientific knowledge. It was really produced in order to pass this exam.”

“If you are a Chinese scholar and you're studying at, let's say Yale. And you go into like a par like a cocktail party and you say, who is Shakespeare or who is Plato? You'd be laughed out of the room. Like, that's just unacceptable. But if you're an American scholar and you're a beta and you ask who Du Fu or Sima Chen is, that's completely fine. Like, that's not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. So there's a cultural asymmetry and just, like, the global expectations.”

“There's a 10 to 30 percent chance it kills us all, but there's a 70 percent chance that we live in an age of abundance that you couldn't even have contemplated 10 years ago. I'm incredibly optimistic about AI, but I'm being kind when I say it is a one in three chance of being wiped out by the end of the century.”

“Chinese society became organized in clans, in large lineages, which performed the same functions as the European corporation, but they were different in that the same organization produced sustained cooperation in many domains. So, you had a single clan that settled disputes, organized the religious ceremonies to honor your ancestors. It provided this settlement of disputes, it facilitated trade, and provided a variety of public goods. Whereas in Europe, you had a plethora of different corporations, once one for each purpose.”

“I mean, I think the latent interest is there, but I think in terms of numbers, we are certainly down, and I don't think it helps that sort of the kind of funding for the study of Chinese language at traditional centers of excellence throughout the United States has been way cut. And to add it to that is the concern that if you go to China, what kinds of positions in the United States government could you get in the future? And apparently, I hear it so bad that even in the embassy in Beijing, they don't have enough kind of qualified Americans with the language expertise to staff this kind of a visit. So we're in dire straits here, right?”

“Strauss and the Chinese intellectuals who come out of Tiananmen have a very similar approach to the world. Like they think about the world in very similar ways. Primarily, they see quote unquote modernity in crisis. So so Strauss thinks that the modern West has sort of like lost faith in itself. And not just Liu Xiaofeng, a lot of scholars who come out of the 1989, Tiananmen movement feel like China is in a period of crisis, because the movement that animated 1989, the new enlightenment, the belief that China would sort of progress into this liberal democracy and become, you know, join the the civilized world failed.”

“It's very reminiscent of the Manhattan Project. If it was just America that was a hegemonic power and there was no Germany during World War II, maybe we would have taken more time and been a little bit more thoughtful from a philosophical moral perspective. But we didn't. It was a race. We were racing full steam ahead because we don't want China to get there before us.”