Wang Huning: The World‘s Most Dangerous Thinker?

[MUSIC] Welcome back to the Pacific Century, a Hoover Institution podcast on China, America, the Indo-Pacific, and the Fate of the World. My name is Michelson, I'm a fellow at Hoover and your host on the podcast. And today I am very pleased to welcome two extraordinary scholars of modern China who are going to be talking about some of their work translating the important works that people in the West need to read about China as well as talking about the most important thinker you have never heard of. So I'm very pleased to welcome David Onbi and Matt Johnson to the Pacific Century. David is a professor of history at the University of Montreal. And Matt is a principal of the Alta Silva LLC, which is a consulting group. Matt and David, welcome to the Pacific Century. Thanks for having us. Thanks very much. Well, it's really great to have you both. Oh, and I have to mention, of course, how could I forget that in addition to Matt's professional work, he is also a Hoover Fellow now visiting at Hoover. So we're really thrilled to have Matt join and become part of our Asia and China Studies community at Hoover, which is growing by leaps and bounds. And I think given the work that both of you are doing is really going to be taking an even more serious and intellectual turn. And that's that's really what I want to start off by talking about is actually David, your work on a website that everybody who I'm assuming everyone who studies China knows about the website. If they don't, they better go to it right away. And the name of the website is reading the China Dream. Can you tell us a little bit about the website? When did you start it? And we'll go from there because I think it's really one of the most unique resources out there on modern Chinese thought. Well, thank you. It started maybe 10 years ago. When almost by chance, I read a book on airplane by Shujin. And it was so good that it was like I discovered a new food group, you know, literally meeting apples and bananas and thinking that was fruit your entire life and someone left your mango. And I thought it was it was off what the hell is this experience? And I won't say why. I mean, I've been reading books in Chinese for 25 years by that point, but I had never read one that was just sit down and read it good. And it was about the May 4th period. It was one of his books on intellectual history. It was a long flight, so I read a lot of it. And in addition to the sheer pleasure of discovering a new food group, I said to myself, why didn't I know about this? Could I show it up? I'm the kind of person I should have known. And then I said, if I didn't know, probably no one else does either. So I started to think about that. And it took a while for the idea to germinate. We've Mr. Gettig Brandt, me and Tim G, and Josh Fobo. I started working on it. The website came as part of that. I had translated stuff from Sujilane and made a book of it. And then read through sort of his footnotes and got a sense of what he had been reading and talking about. And my goal sort of was to try to find who are and where are the David Prams and the Paul Krugman's and the Ross, what's his name, but can't pronounce from New York Times. Yeah, him. These standard guys and girls that we read all the time that must exist in China, or that I thought they did after having read the book, but no one knows anything about. So that's what I decided to do, just to find not the dissidents. I mean, I'm all for the dissidents I think when. But it's important to know what the non-dissidents, or the people who can live with the regime are saying. And it turned out there are tons of them. And they're saying tons of stuff all the time. And it's endlessly interesting. So I set up the website so I could do that. And I update the website every two weeks with three or four articles. If I can do it, there are almost always full texts. I think you have to have the full thing. I understand when people excerpt things out because life is complicated and don't want to read that much. But if you want to take somebody seriously, their idea seriously, you have to do the whole thing. And it's just become I had no idea what we're doing. I started, I mean, I had a little bit of funding and I just had a graduate student set up a website. But then I just went from there. And how long does it take you to translate a piece? These are many pieces. These are not blog posts. The average is I would say 30 pages. They're very long. It just kind of depends. On a good day if I really like the thing. And it's written in a accessible Chinese. I can do 25 pages a day. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who said if you can do, if you do something 10,000 times, get good at it. Well, I'm in there by now. I've done this 10,000 times. And there are all sorts of tricks that I want for your listeners way of about actually how to translate. I mean, one is, for instance, you know, how we always will say, you're trying to translate something. You don't, the word doesn't come to you. So you put, you know, beige, egg white, you know, six, six variations of that thing and say, I'll come back to it. The first thing is don't do that. Take one. Just pick one and go on. It saves you, and over time, they're not to tricks like that. Taking the guys and girls is probably the hardest part of it because there's so much out there. Even in a Xi Jinping era where they're constrained by what the party wants to do, which it discipline needs people, I never have any trouble finding something interesting on my WeChat feed every time. The problem is, is narrowing it down to something that's interesting. And what I try to do is I'm contrarian enough not to do what everyone's doing. So I rebuild Bishop and know what he's talking about. And sometimes it takes stuff from him that's representative. But if it's, I don't want to do translate another Xi Jinping thought piece because there's a whole institution out there doing that. So I try to pick just the title that looks, or headline that looks interesting, although that's hard. Headlines are like humor. The last thing you can learn in language, they're just awful. But God knows what I miss. I don't want to know. And then I just do it. I just power through it. And it's actually fun. Translating is not like reading. You have to translate. You have to be a sympathetic reader. When we're taught to be, you know, critical readers, and aren't interrogate the text. So that's all good. But when you're doing what I'm doing, you have to take their side because you have to get every sentence, right? You have no idea if they have to say. And I'm saying aesthetically, when? No, so what I wanted to ask them on something you'd mentioned before, before I forget that. So there is a sort of Republic of Letters in China today is what you're saying. And as opposed to probably what a lot of people think, which is that there is very little opportunity and no venues for expression of ideas and many very thoughtful ideas. Again, not blog posts, not tweeting, but really thoughtful media, sort of essays of the type that we used to have here. And in a few venues, we still do. Very well put. That is the central insight of what I found that that exists. Now, there are red zones where you can't go. This is not free speech. You can't talk about Xinjiang, you can't talk about Tibet, you can't talk about Taiwan very much. No one talks about Hong Kong. So a lot of the things we think they should be talking about, you can't talk about. So I'm not, this is not an apology for the regime at all. What I'm looking at is what they can say in spite of all that. You're right. A Republic of Letters is a good way to put that. Some people won't buy it. So one of the great drawbacks, and I speak as someone who started with Soviet studies back at the end of the Cold War, is our relative lack of access to direct sources in Chinese. We don't have resources like the two of you, to be quite frank, with extraordinary Chinese language skills, to the number that we had those who could do Soviet studies and could reach into the Soviet Republic of Letters, whether they were dissidents or they were officials. As David, as you sit there at the university, and I want to ask Matt as well to come in on the conversation, but as you sit at a major university, how do you assess our ability to understand China with what seemed to be limitations linguistically and the base of materials that we have, the very type of thing that you're trying to address through the website. I'll be quick, because Matt's been very patient. I think we're doing not very good job. The sources were there. It's out there and open. Part of the problem is that you cannot get tenure if you translate. This is just, it just doesn't work. If I had done this as a 35-year-old, I would be selling furniture by now. And you'd just think it's not scholarship. So, what's the problem? only a full professor with nothing to lose can decide to do this or someone else who is independently wealthy say. So Matt, your turn to chime in. Sorry, I've been blabbing on. No, no, we've what I wanted to ask Matt about, of course, Matt is as I mentioned, ad Hoover, also in the business world. And I hope I I am characterized Alta Silva correctly as a, you know, to a professional organization that you're able to draw on your your deep knowledge. But what I really wanted to shift to, I don't know if there's a great transition or or not. But on the site, and again, this is reading the China dream.com. It's a dot com, not a dot org. So reading the China dream dot com, David site, an enormous number of translated essays. But three that have leapt out. And I think are are garnering attention or certainly should be garnering more attention. And those are three essays that you collaboratively worked on. I think David, you did a lot of the translations, Matt, you did introductions and worked on them together by Wang Huning. Matt, who is Wang? Why did you translate this? David, David translate. Why did you guys choose this? What do we need to know about him and what are we missing? Right. So I want to jump off from one point, which is that I also started as an academic and all of the translation skill. So to speak that I have I owe to funding from our federal government basically. And to the University of California, San Diego, and to my advisors. And so that's just a pitch for keeping those sources of funding and those kind of institutions strong in these in these areas because they really are what allow us to understand what counterparts in other countries and other societies are saying. So starting from there, Wang is a figure who is first of all right now the fifth ranking party member in China. He is China's ideologue in chief, which is to say that he is responsible for maintaining theoretical and political consistency basically across the party as an organization. And also for driving ideological change and in recent years we've seen a lot of that change moving in the direction of building more political loyalty if not a kind of quasi-called around the figure of Xi Jinping. And he is also important because he is a kind of window on the I guess we could call it deep thinking that is behind a lot of the policies that are you know I think coming out on an increasingly frequent basis with impact on anything from global markets to US China competition. And this is because Wang also actually started as an intellectual one who was very close to the party, one who was also very close it seems to the party's security apparatus. So he's always thought about security, the security of the party, the future of the party. But he did so first as an academic. And so these were the works that David and I began with. And there's an interesting backstory there which the very brief version of goes roughly like this. I think that David was getting a lot of requests for more Wang-Huening content for his blog. And he had mentioned Timothy Cheek who is a scholar who both of us know who I would say you know is basically one of the foremost authorities anywhere on Chinese intellectuals and modern Chinese intellectual history. And Tim mentioned to David that I had also been interested in Wang-Huening although I was coming more from a perspective of this idea of cultural security. So Wang as an interlocutor for understanding how the party thinks about protecting its political system from ideological or cultural change. And so anyway Tim put us together and the partnership took off from there. It's been fantastic working with David. I think that one of the things that's amazing about his translations is that there is a real tendency I think when reading in Chinese and particularly when reading party documents to flatten the parts that are different or the parts that we don't understand very well because they don't map easily onto our own system. And so I thought you know just as we talked through the translations as David was doing them and it's true I mean the speed and accuracy is just humbling. That was really captured I think by those translations. When Wang talks about you know how China needs to recreate its political culture to keep the party strong to make the country stronger economically to sort of integrate the leadership with society lower down. That those ideas are not ideas that I think translate easily into a lot of political debates. Wang is not a liberal but I think that what David really captured was the ways in which Wang who needs illiberalism is actually quite intellectually sophisticated and comes from a lot of different sources both Chinese you know the experience of the culture revolution, Mao etc but also as we discovered along the way a lot of Western political science also. You mentioned Huntington and your introduction I want to get to that in a second let me ask you though we had John Mirschimer on the show just just before you guys and my discussion with him was as you would expect from someone who is a realist and approaches international relations and the understanding of great power competition you know what he calls the inevitable rivalry and the tragedy of great power relations from that perspective and I pushed him on the question of ideology and he thinks it's not important he thinks that you know states will act in same ways to maximize power and maximize interests and protect those interests. What strikes me about your introduction map to Wang's thought is and there's been a little boom lit of Wang writing lately and in some other venues online and a good piece in palladium and a piece of law and liberty trying to explain Wang but you stress the importance or seem to of ideology how do you respond to the sort of realist argument that what China is doing is what any state would do is that correct or is there something unique about Wang and his understanding and what and his influence on the party and then I want to actually get to that question of his influence on the party and David bring you back in as well to talk about that and some of the translations that you were doing. Sure um well so let me take the first part then and and we can open up the second but uh I mean obviously you're never going to convince a committed realist of anything other than realist first principles being true right so I I can't push back against you know a robust offensive realism but I think what I would say is that the realism of China's socialist system is not necessarily the realism of a Western liberal democratic system and you know that's one way maybe of splitting the the difference I think that one reason why intellectual history and looking carefully at ideological writing so to speak is important is it doesn't mean we have to take it at face value but it's sort of through a process of careful reading and accretion and understanding how the system itself produces these documents and what it's trying to say as it's producing them you know to its own members right uh that's that's how we gradually begin to understand for example China's realism you know because there is a human dimension in there and again that's that's not going to convince a realist when I say that but you know that that would be at least my pitch for why Wang Huning is important is he he exposes something very critical about how China's Communist Party has evolved you know because his his his writing and his political career has covered now many decades and many leaders and he somehow managed to remain in in in favor starting with Jiang Zemin and all the way down to the present day so we have him as as a window on the party and how its ideology has changed um we have him as somebody who tells us how that party thinks of its future uh what its concerns are and there there are other sources Wang is not the only source here but he's a very important one for understanding um or at least beginning to approximate answers to some of these questions and now here you get the politics people who would say that the party you know China is not um monolithic you know fine that's absolutely fine as a counterpoint but yet it is a leninist system and so in a sense it aims to be somewhat monolithic and you know it part of Wang's role basically is to make it ideologically monolithic, but also flexible, which was something that we really, I think, got from the translations, especially from his early writing on what kind of political culture China should have. He talks about democracy. He talks about, he's trying to capture information and activity and energy from the grassroots and channel that toward these grander political objectives. So that's important to understand also when we talk about what China's authoritarian is it looks like. So David, let me ask you then, is there, and again, Matt's introduction to the pieces is extremely rich? And there's a lot that we could just be doing seminar like discussions of this for hours here for those who hopefully will read the pieces, but are not political scientists and they're not political theorists. Is there a way that you can encapsulate Wang's thinking or the core of his thinking in a few sentences? Is there a Wang for dummies or a, you know, the essential Wang that we need to understand because after that, I'd like to then talk to you guys about his role in policymaking, which Matt mentions in introduction. But is there the essential Wang? What is it? I don't know about that. Matt probably can give a better answer than I can. I translate those three pieces, which is not that much. And then I read America, I guess America. Yeah, I want to get to that. It's a very different kind of thing. I don't think there's a central vision that emerges from those four things that I read. In fact, I don't want to get us off track here, but from the point of view of someone who's been doing what I've been doing for the last decade, Wang who is in no way exceptional. He does not stand out at all. He's the return of the quality of arguments or anything else, really. Now he might have got there before anybody else. He may be really prescient or he may have been a vanguard. I have no idea. But nothing he says, I was completely when I did the translations I was expecting insights and this, that, and the other. I mean, he's clearly a smart guy. But he was much of a muchness. That's what the Chinese do. And if you want to find a central theme, I think he's Samuel Huntington in Chinese, is the class of civilizations. Samuel Huntington in Chinese. Yeah. His book, "American's America" is Ezra Volkow's Japan's number one. That's what he's writing right there. Can you actually talk a little bit? I wanted to move to that. And because one of the things that's unique about Wang, I mean, first of all, there's obviously going to be a Wang biography at some point in time. And it'll be like many of these, which will be a lot of speculation and supposition precisely because he started off as Matt, you know, in your introduction. And I think the palladium piece was pretty good on this. He started off, as he said in academic. He traveled to the United States. He was writing publicly. And then when he went into government, he essentially cut off all contact with outside speakers, thinkers, groups of no one's, he hasn't talked to foreigners in years apparently. And so there's sort of the Wang outside and the Wang inside. But he did go to America in the late 80s and he wrote a book called "America Against America." And so this is not a person who's just talking about Mao and talking about the party. He talked about us. And what did he discover about us that he wrote up in the, I think, the early 90s? Published early 1980s. Published in the early 90s, right. And he was here in the mid to late 80s. So what did he discover? And he traveled. He traveled around. He talked to a ton of people. Be fascinated. Did he meet Huntington? By the way, do we know that? I don't know. Matt, do you know? I don't think so. That would be fascinating to find out. So can you tell us a little bit about Wang's view of America, at least at that time? I would like to take that. Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to lead off. And you should definitely fill in, David. So the recent writing on Wang, the boom lit of Wang writing, I think. And one, I do want to, I think, or I definitely do want to acknowledge the work of some of these younger, I suppose, or newer voices who are writing on Chinese elite politics and ideology and other kind of deep issues in ways that I think are really grounded in sources and are exposing a much wider audience to these ideas than academics might be able to accomplish on their own. So there's been a kind of burst of intellectual and intellectually engaged and focused writing in general. And I think the interest in Wang comes out of that. So what those writers have picked up on is the fact that in America versus America, Wang obviously has some very critical things to say about the United States that are almost preseant, which is to say, they accurately diagnose structural issues in America's society that existed then and exist now around race, around inequality, around the vappiness of consumer culture. These are things that really turned Wang off. And so people have picked up on that and I'm sort of paraphrasing from his observations. On the other hand, when he wrote the book, there's a whole other side to it, which is about him finding America absolutely fascinating. He's really trying to understand what American civilization is about. And he is, I think, particularly interested in the energy of American society, in the free flow of information. He mentioned Stanic Doetz, like you could just walk into a local library and apply for a library card. This kind of thing would not have been as thinkable in China during the 80s, although it wasn't unthinkable. But it's just the fact that the United States is already so far along down this track. But then at the end, he gets to the point, which I think people have found most compelling, which is that somehow Wang's conclusion is that the American center can't hold. Because there's just too much energy, spilling out in all of these different directions. And there's no single homogenous identity to hold people together. Now these are not the conclusions that everyone would draw from visiting the United States. But they're the conclusions that Wang draws. And then what I think is left out of the discussion is that his model, and this is very much important. It's Error also, is having concluded that the American model is not the right model for China. The model that he proposes much be that might be much closer to the right model for China is the model of Japan. Because Japan, which is almost like sacrilege in China to say today. But what Japan has is it has a fast growing economy and it has cultural and political homogeneity in Wang's view. So that's my read of what the book says, basically. I think there are other pieces. But it's that one, it's what captivates him about America that's positive, it gets left out. And two, it's the second part of the conclusion, which is not the United States, but actually there are other models. And the most compelling one is probably that of Japan. Right. And we should note that, of course, he's saying that before the Japanese bubble bursts, he's saying that's right. That's right. That's right. He's going to overtake the US, which of course, and that's when I started getting involved in Japan. So in retrospect, there were multiple reasons that we should have questioned that. And we should also note that America against America has not been translated into English, correct? You can find a machine language translation, which is pretty good. It's pretty good. Okay. Because it's a mission. It's all right. Yeah. They messed up some things. Are you going to do it? David? No, I don't want it. It's a book. And it's kind of updated. But that's right. What's cool about the book? It's hard for us to remember this. This was a long time ago in China time. But when Wang went to the US and ADA, I think it was, he's 155. So he lived with cultural revolution and all the nonsense that followed. And so his view of America, before he got there, was thoroughly negative, right? So there were chapters in the book where he's saying, guys, markets really work. Just allocate resources. It's amazing. They did that. The prices go up. The prices go down. It's just like, it's just a puppy finding a new food source again. And then this was a big part of the book, like Matt said. At the end, I think there was a whole flurry of books like this in the end of the 1980s. David Shamball treats them in his book, Beautiful Imperialist. So this was part of that badge. But it's a good one. I read it all the others, but it was just travel literature and commentary on the rest of the world. And it's sort of hit or miss. He ends on a negative note. But it's pretty well divided, really, you know? And when he hits the edges, we can do that too. We can have markets, but we can avoid this other. Well, it's interesting. I mean, and I also appreciate that you guys are giving a more even handed critique. I think again in the little Wang boom that that we're seeing, he is sort of portrayed as the new Tokvill in terms of his views of America. In fact, I was going to say that, you know, is this should we put this in the pantheon of Tokvill's democracy in America and James Bryce's, you know, the American Constitution or I forget the title, but you know, these are really insightful foreign views of the country. And it sounds like you're saying, yeah, but you know, it's not necessarily Earth shaking. I'm more interested a little bit before we get to the policy implications of the Huntington analysis or an analysis with the Huntington references that you've made and I don't know, Matt, maybe you want to jump in here on what exactly is that? And again, you know, Huntington, of course, has gone through cycles and American thought of being out of favor and in favor. And of course, with a very hard core of supporters. But so what is it that when you say in effect, you have a line in one of the introductions that I can find in the second. And again, if you're not a political theorist, it's one of those where you sort of scratch your head. But the Huntington-esque structural functionalism has become indistinguishable from the dominant ideology of the party itself. And since I'm just a knuckle-dragging historian, you're really going to have to unpack that for me. But maybe more broadly, you know, talk about Samuel Huntington's influence on on Wong and then we can move to policy. It sounds much worse when it's when it's red. So what I was trying to say there was that Wong, via Huntington and others is engaging deeply with modernization theory, which is to say that his understanding of I think politics and the economy and how these are linked and, you know, where society, which is, you know, to say people outside of the political center, fits into this, is that he, like modernization theorists coming out of the Cold War, is deeply interested in questions of how to make China's economy strong while also keeping China's political system strong, not losing, you know, the party state in the process of economic, rapid economic growth, which I think he sort of understands on some level means economic liberalization. And so that idea that all, you know, all all questions about how the political system and the economy, et cetera, should should be organized as kind of bending toward those goals, I think is extremely important for understanding who he is and how he thinks. And I also think it's important to understand that where he's getting these ideas in part is from sources that were prescribing some of the same solutions to developing economies during the, you know, like basically from from the Cold War onward or from from the beginning of the Cold War onward. And so he is engaging with Huntington because I think especially, you know, for China coming out of the cultural revolution, there's a real appeal to Western thought, you know, it legitimates ideas that one might have had already anyway, but, you know, that was kind of part of the intellectual milieu of the 1980s. But also American social scientists like Samuel Huntington had thought long and hard about issues of political and economic development. And so, you know, those ideas, I think, are seen by Wang as valid and insightful sort of in their own right, you know, not just as like Western gloss to put on some kind of beliefs that he already holds. So what is fascinating then though is that he does not remain, whether, you know, to David's point, he really is as insightful a thinker as people are currently claiming or not, he does not remain a hot house intellectual, but in fact, he's sort of the dream of many American intellectuals, right, which is that you suddenly now find yourself at the core of power and not only just under Xi Jinping, but under two of his predecessors, Zhang Zemin and Hu Jintao. And more significantly mad as you note that he is central in helping frame the intellectual and ideological programs that each of them adopted during their time in office for Zhang Zemin, it was the three represents and Hu Jintao, the new development concept. And maybe the apotheosis is under Xi Jinping again, moving dramatically away, let's say, from his earlier views of the Huntingtonian, well, maybe not away from the Huntingtonian model, but certainly in the sense of representation of what America, the positive side of the American system, for Xi Jinping, it's of course what we all are talking about, the China dream, the great revival of the Chinese nation. And that's the reference in terms of David's website. And then the Xi Jinping thought, which we're all still sort of wrapping our heads around. So how significant is Wang in terms of Chinese policy as a policy influencer, if not a policy maker, David, I don't know if that's something you on China, in honor, of that other one. I'll just say two or three things, because Matt, no more than I do. Policy is huge. There's lots of intellectuals and lots of ideas. So the Venn diagram leaves you with all this stuff. And it's very hard, I would say it's almost impossible to accept we're causing a fake relationship between what somebody thought and wrote down as an intellectual that what a government did before or after. So I don't know, I really, I have a hard time with that argument. It's natural to think China has done these things on the basis of such ideas, one who needs an idea guy, and he's in there, some he's in the mix, right? So let's look at him. But who knows? I mean, I think of him more as kind of a link between the Central Committee or the Central political culture of China and the intellectual world. Because it matters to the Central Committee, we would, from the, the Cold War heritage, we didn't think of commoners to thugs, right? Right. Unsurprisingly, they don't see themselves that way. They see themselves in very different ways. It has a veneer of intellectualism, which may or may not be true. I don't know. If you read his, his collected works, most are speeches that he gave, right? You know, dump speeches, but they almost always start with some intellectual reference, especially abroad. He's very proud to talk about what Shakespeare and he's in England or about the old derbies and friends or whoever. So I think it's very hard to be a statesman in China and not a manager in the intellectual. So they would like to be part of the intellectual world. And the intellectual world would like to be part of the policy world. But how that actually works out in practice, I think Matt probably could give us answers that I can't. Well, Matt, is he, is, is Wang, David mentioned and not to cause, you know, a, a, a fracas between you two, you know, but David said he's in, he's in, he's in the mix. But he's a little bit more than just in the mix, right? I mean, he's on the stand in committee. He's one of the seven most powerful people in China. So whether or not he's a, a unique thinker, he's a thinker again in the style, you know, get without going to the, to the right comparison. But, you know, everyone trots out Henry Kissinger, right, as the, as the thinker who made his way to the, to the center of power. Is that, is that a good way to understand Wang or is David right? He's just, he's just sort of around that, that whole swirling constellation. Yeah, I would have to at least punt for a minute on the Kissinger comparison. Although that's, that's very interesting. It's, it's, it's quite a, you know, there, there, there may be some, some truth to that. I think that the big question around Wang, which in some ways was sparked by this recent wave of writing about him is whether he's some kind of puppeteer who has been, you know, behind the curtain, like a Rasputin, you know, telling junks, I mean, what to say, you know, telling Hu Jintao what to say and now telling Xi Jinping what to say. And so it's, it's, it's all Wang or is he, in essence, a kind of speech writer and somebody who can take the goals of general secretaries like Xi and, you know, sort of turn them into the language of party ideology so that those, those goals, you know, those, those broad strategies, those objectives are translated into something that is, more like a kind of doctrine that can be applied broadly across the party as a whole, because obviously she has a lot of decisions that he has to make. This isn't getting to the question of his educational level, which I know that some people have questioned, but he's too busy to write everything down in a way that adheres to all of the party's own rules about internal about internal communication. In addition to his role on the Polaroa Standard Committee, Wang is also head of the party's secretary, which means that he's responsible for the day-to-day affairs of the party, which again, my own take would be that he's more of a coordinator, he's a flywheel, he's an interlocutor, and his particular genius to speak comes from his ability to infallibly translate the goals of the very top leadership, which could potentially include not just she, but those around him, including the military, which is a complete black box in China's political system still, but into something that can then be broadcast out to the rest of the members of the party, and then also to the rest of Chinese society and then to a certain extent to international society. I don't want to stretch the analogy too much or really get too far beyond, but in a way it reminds me of Joseph Stalin's early role with the Bolsheviks and that, Lenin, of course, wrote everything and wrote his stuff, but Stalin, number one, became the coordinator within the party. He ran the party departments for personnel and was able, of course, in that way, to place his own loyal lists throughout the system, but he did write, and of course he wrote more when he became the primary, the paramount leader, but in a way he did take some of Lenin's ideas and thoughts and popularize them. Is there any danger of Wang making a bid for the top position after she steps down? I mean, if he's running the day-to-day relations, if he knows how the party's working and the skeletons and the closet, and he's obviously outlasted or lasted through three, well, they used to be, you know, first among equals, and now you have she who's the first among firsts, but are we going to see Wang move up? Let me answer first, then that never answer. Wang never ran a province for a city. He cannot possibly have all those factional folks that other people do. I would tend to think and that can disagree completely. Language is really important in China and the Limeless Party. If you watch leaders give their speeches, they never, ever, ever improvise. They always read what's on the paper. And that's because if you take a flight of fancy and go somewhere else, you mess it up. Wang, to my mind is there because he's really good at language. He's really good at what Chinese called Tifa. Tifa means the way you present things. The language that described policy or ideology, but I'm just guessing. I mean, that's what intellectuals do. They are sensitive to language. And then the stuff we translate, I thought there was a great sense of the language. I saw that, but Wang as a usurper, I don't know, you're turning that. No, I think that's good. An analogy from China's own history might have been Huchiao Mu, who was Mao's secretary, basically, but in a sense, who was one of the people. And there wasn't just one who made Mao a good Marxist-Leninist theorist. Right. So she also needs people around him like that. And arguably Wang is not the only one, but he is the most important. And he's both a a key organizational figure, but also his domain is the ideological domain, both within the party and within China as a whole. But that's not the only domain that the party governs. So there are other key figures who are responsible for the political legal systems, the various subsystems, like state security, etc. From a realist perspective, probably more important to ensuring the party's political future than is Wang. Yeah, I had to ask because I mean, Washington, and that's all we do, is we try to crystal all this stuff. So let me finish. I mean, I could keep talking all day about this and actually try to get in deeper into the thought. And again, what I think is so important about this particular set of translations, but everything, David, that you're doing on the site is, you know, again, how far behind we are in really reading the Chinese in their own words to themselves, not what they say to us. So this is, again, reading the Chinese dream site is extraordinary. So let me wind up then with asking each of you simple question, which is for Americans who want to understand China and the challenge and the people's Republic and the party today, what should they read? And again, it's a problem of time. You can't read everything. And David, you're, you know, you're paid to do this for a lifetime and teach and the like, but most folks, if they're lucky, will read one or two things. What is it that they should read? What's going to be most helpful? And I understand that's spinning in the ocean, but you got to start somewhere. What should they read? If they're interested, they should send me an email. I'll send them four links. That's awesome. Maybe, maybe Chen Wei, who's a fantastic intellectual who writes about what globalization means, saying that we completely misunderstand it in China is the problem of globalization. There's Jiang Shigong, who's a brilliant apologist for the regime, then no one that listens to us will like. But he's trying to provide sort of a Marxism 2.0 or 3.0 and upgrade of Marxism that makes sense in a rich society. There's Shuji Lin, who's trying to figure out what cultural civilization means in China and the rest of the world. I'll stop with three. That's enough. You know, David, in fact, if what tell us what your email is, and then if you send those to me, we'll actually try to put them on our site when we post this podcast so that people can go to the site and then see the links. But what your email for folks to reach out to is this is a dangerous thing to do, but it's on [email protected]. Great. I thought it was on the site somewhere too. Yeah. Thank you for those. And Matt, and you're a policy-focused guy, you're advising and you're at Hoover. What are the things, the short list that we need to read? Sure. Well, one, if you really want to start with the basics, I would say you have to start with Franz Schermann's ideology and organization in Communist China, which would really, I think, get in a kind of primary way at how ideology and organization it's right there in the title or intertwined, and also names a part of the system, names all the different parts of the system in a way that I think would be very helpful for intellectuals, policymakers, others trying to get their heads around. What a loneliness system is in the context of China, how it works, etc. The book is obviously quite dated, but as a kind of basic introduction, and it's a hard read, it's a hard slog, but at the same time, it's, I think, perhaps maybe signal some of the disciplines that's required in order to really get one's head around these topics. And then I think, as Revolgul's book on Deng Xiaoping is great, maybe, for understanding the reform era that Xi Jinping is coming out of, basically. And you could argue that the party's most recent historical resolution basically marked the end of the reform era, but that's the backdrop against which we need to understand the present. I'm enough of a historian still that I believe that all of that is quite important. And also completely wonkish, but I will just throw it in there. Still a big fan when understanding issues of ideology and propaganda, of Robert Jarvis' "The Logic of Images in International Relations." For the sole purpose being that it's a book that teaches us all of the different ways in which we shouldn't take statements at face value, but how to still understand them from meaningful perspectives. So what does all this noise mean? How do we understand it? How do we begin to talk about what propaganda is? Because ultimately, when we talk about ideology, we're talking about propaganda. And I think that's going to be a huge debate in Washington and elsewhere going forward as we do, you know, I can see. signs of it already, people are starting to go back to sources, are starting to take politics seriously when talking about China. And they're going to have to encounter all of this stuff again as they did, you know, when the US was competing with the Soviet Union. And they're going to have to decide how to interpret it and how to think about it. And there's going to be one group. And because this is already what's happening that says, we really need to understand what these words say and what is meant. And there's going to be another group that says, this is all sort of dross. This is propaganda that is empty. It doesn't have any real meaning. And, you know, what we really need to be able to understand is something that lies behind it. I think what David and I have both been trying to say, maybe in different ways is that the truth is probably somewhere closer to the middle where you have to be able to understand what these documents are saying. But you have to understand their internal logic and the system that they come out of, not just, you know, skin the surface and say, okay, you know, that's what they've said. That must be what they mean. Right. Well, that bell you heard is signaling the end of our interview. That was brilliant, by the way. I don't know if you guys planned it, but we had three recommendations for Chinese authors and Chinese thinkers from David and three recommendations of Western authors from from Madden. I'll get those from you. We'll put them on the site so people can go and look for them. Again, the site, David site is reading the China dream.com, an incredible collection of translations, Matt again, being part of that and now at Hoover. This is just a wonderful conversation. And I think really sort of scratching the surface of getting smarter to China, which is something we desperately need to do. And hopefully have you guys back to talk more as we move into an important year next year with the next party Congress with not necessarily clarity on the post Xi Jinping era, but clarity on where the Xi Jinping era is going from here. So David only of the University of Montreal and at Johnson of the Hoover institution, thank you so much for joining us on the Pacific Century. Thank you. That was great. Yeah, thanks very much. It was a fantastic conversation. So I'm Michelle Oslin thanking you again for joining us and we will see you next time on the Pacific Century. This podcast is a production of the Hoover institution where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit Hoover.org.