#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Oracle for cloud computing, Tax Network USA for taxes, Shopify for selling stuff online, LMNT for electrolytes, and AG one for a daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. Let me make the public service announcement that I've done a few times about these ad reads. I do them on RSS. I do them on Apple Podcasts on Spotify based on the feedback I've gotten in the, survey a
the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, you know, there was tremendous outpouring of grief even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you you might have thought that's sort of w
So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let's go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So, the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived twenty five hundred years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?
First of all, we we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's he's around the same time as, you know, figures like Socrates. And, like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed it to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So, you know, you can have a lot of you can have a lot of fun with these sort of axial age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to
stable hierarchy Yeah. Was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything, including politics.
Yeah. And he and there was even a sense that it it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non personified day deity like the emperor was to the ministers, so all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And, you know, for Confucius, he said, so we should study the text. We should study how the sages of old, behaved, that there that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative
that's the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and China today is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism where communism, Marxism is supposed to, you know, let go of history. And Confucianism, there's a real veneration of history that's happening in China of today. So they're able to wear both hats and balance it.
Yeah. You could say that in many points in the twentieth century, there was a kind of a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious monkey king tradition, which was what Mao connected to? Xi Jinping and before him, to some extent, but, y
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