Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Neysun Mahboubi.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access — access to not only our great daily newsletter, the Daily Dispatch, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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If you’ve listened to the show recently, you’ll know that I’ve chatted with a couple of people who’ve come back from visits to China since the end of the COVID-zero policy and the onerous quarantines. Deborah Seligsohn, actually, was there from October to January and was in China during the about-face in the policy, and she talked about her experience there at some length. I also spoke with David Ownby after he’d spent three weeks in Beijing and Shanghai about his impressions. I’ve also talked, not on this podcast, but to many others who have spent time in China since then. Many of us who work on China haven’t actually been there for years. I haven’t been since October 2019, and though I was originally supposed to have been there last week for a conference in Tianjin, coming back right around now, I had things to do on either side of that trip here in the States. And it was going to make the trip very, very short and probably not worth the arduous travel on either end.
But my dear friend, Neysun Mahboubi, a scholar at the UPenn Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Penn Law School, just got back from a trip a couple of days ago, and he has kindly agreed to talk about how it went for him — his impressions, and all that. Neysun, if you don’t already know, hosts the fantastic Center for the Study of Contemporary China Podcast. And while it’s often kind of a long wait between shows, they are very much worth listening to and therefore worth the wait. All through the pandemic, Neysun fought hard to keep channels of conversation open with scholars in China, and he held a number of online video conversations with Chinese academics in law and other fields like international relations on YouTube and on other social media.
He’s also convened fantastic conversations among China scholars like Mary Gallagher, Victor Xue, Alex Wong, Maggie Lewis, and many others on Twitter spaces. That gang of smart folks who were called the 政法委 (Zhèngfǎ wěi) after the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Neysun Mahboubi, welcome back to Sinica, man.
Neysun Mahboubi: Thanks, man. It is really, really a delight to be back on, and I’d love to have you introduce me to everything I speak at from here going on. That was really wonderful. Thank you.
Kaiser: I can do that. Yeah, sure. Fly me in, especially if it’s in China.
Neysun: Perfect.
Kaiser: Let’s start with something obvious to somebody like me who’s also itching to get back, but perhaps not so obvious to all the listeners, why were you so eager to get back to China?
Neysun: I have been a scholar of Chinese law, and in particular, Chinese administrative law for a long time, for a few decades. I think a lot of my strength as a scholar, a lot of my insights are derived from having spent a lot of time on the ground in China cultivating long-term relationships that are really meaningful to me and also have been really productive sources of knowledge. So, the last couple of years not being able to go was really difficult. I felt as if I was deprived of a certain kind of oxygen that I’ve relied on for a long time. It was really essential for me as a scholar to go back to talk to my longtime friends and interlocutors. Beyond that, given the nature of the spiraling U.S.-China relationship, it has occurred to me in recent years that one contributing factor, not the main factor, but a contributing factor has been the degree to which we have been separated.
We’ve been unable to travel back and forth. And that has, I think, contributed a lot to a lot of the downturn in relations. It’s not the only factor, but it is a contributing factor. And so, beyond any intrinsic benefit to me as an individual scholar, it was really important to me to model that we can get back to the kinds of exchanges that have been so important in the relationship for the last 40 years, really.
Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. And like I said, during that period of oxygen deprivation, you were still trying, you had a lifeline, and I think it’s really important you did these two YouTube-based initiatives. One was with Chén Dìngdìng 陈定定 and focused on U.S.-China relations. The other was with the 北大 (Běidà) scholar, 沈岿 Shěn Kuī. Can you tell us more about those two ideas and some of the difficulties that you might have encountered in creating this?
Neysun: Sure, of course. I think it’s important to emphasize something that all of us know from the pandemic, which is that you can make certain efforts to make up for the loss of in-person exchange through virtual modalities, but especially once you get back to in-person exchange, you really do see how much you missed by simply relying on the virtual. But at the height of the pandemic, when really there was very little way to have those kinds of conversations, first, I worked with Peking University Law Professor Shen Kui, a dear friend of mine, to convene these occasional meetings over Zoom. Those were not recorded. They were essentially private meetings, but I think productive and at least making sure that some degree of connectivity was maintained between similarly situated scholars in the U.S. and China.
But then more publicly was my collaboration with Chen Dingding, which we turned into something that we kind of called like a TV show, tongue in cheek a bit, but we recorded on Zoom and then we put these videos on YouTube. We tried to pick topics that were of real importance in the U.S.-China debates, and we would pick some Chinese scholars, some American scholars, and we wanted to model that it was still possible to do public recorded conversation about difficult topics between the two sides. There wasn’t a lot of, let’s say, easiness to it. Doing something like that does take a lot of effort, but we did manage to pull off six episodes, and I think we were both quite proud of that. One note that I want to mention about that is that I have had this collaboration with Chen Dingding for about two years.
I had never met him in person. On this trip to Beijing was the first time I actually got to meet him in person. And it so happened that a few of our friends, our mutual friends, like Deb Seligsohn and Graham Webster were in town. So, we were able to convene, in Chen Dingding’s new offices in Beijing, something like a real U.S.-China dialogue between myself, Graham, and Deb, and then on the other side, Chen Dingding and some Chinese scholars. We think it’s one of the very first, if not the first in-person scholarly exchange since the pandemic. We were very proud of that, and it built on the YouTube show that we did together.
Kaiser: I’ll ask you to talk a little bit about what came out of that and what you talked about and what some of the attitudes were. But first, let’s get you actually to China. What was your itinerary while you were there? What were the activities that actually brought you there?
Neysun: I was formerly visiting at Peking University Law School, which is a place that I’ve had really strong and deep connections for decades now. I went into the trip not sure how much I was going to do my usual routine of traveling to lots of different cities. It’s been almost four years since I’ve been there. I was a little bit worried about how much I could get back into the swing of things, but it turned out that after a couple of days, I felt fairly comfortable. Even within the contours of a relatively short visit, I was able to set up a trip to Shanghai to also visit Shanghai University’s law school, Shanghai Jiaotong University Law School, and give a lecture there.
Beyond that, in both cities, in both Beijing and Shanghai, I’d say that my overall itinerary was mostly similar to that that I’ve had in the past, which is connecting with different people within the Chinese legal community in particular, who I’ve been talking to about shared research for years now, decades really. But because of the downturn in relations and I guess my growing voice on U.S.-China relations more generally, this trip in particular was the first time that I had quite a bit of sort of U.S.-China relations discussion as well, including conversations with the IR scholars at places like Peking University and Tsinghua University, who are often part of those dialogues. This was sort of a dual mission on my part, both to do the kinds of dialogues that I’ve always done that have to do with Chinese law and Chinese administrative law, but also to tap in more robustly into the U.S.-China relations discussion.
One note I’ll mention here is that, in some ways, I don’t want to make this seem as if they were completely separate conversations because even my friends in the Chinese legal community are very interested now to talk about the U.S.-China relations given the ways in which that impacts their landscape as well. So, the U.S.-China relations discussion really pervaded throughout, even on the things that were more kind of my traditional research focus.
Kaiser: Before we plunge into a discussion of those actual conversations and what came out of them, I want to ask you, what did Beijing feel like? I keep hearing that just even visually, the city’s different than it was pre-pandemic — more sanitized, more orderly — but with much more obvious surveillance as some people have told me. Overall, a very different vibe. As somebody like you who’s seen the city across different decades, multiple decades now, what was your sense? How would you characterize the changes that you saw?
Neysun: Over the course of the conversation, I’m sure we’ll get to some of the, maybe more negative things that I perceived on my trip, but just in terms of the everyday life in terms of, what was the atmosphere like, what was the sky like, what was my ability to get around like, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to get back to the way that I was comfortable with Beijing before, and appreciate that it is a lot cleaner; that the sky was blue pretty much every day that I was there. For example, Peking University, for years, when I would visit, there were all these construction projects throughout the campus.
All of that’s been completed over the course of the pandemic. The campus is absolutely beautiful. Again, I do want to get to some things that I thought were more negative that I perceived during the trip. But in terms of just this quality of life, it was really pleasant. It was really pleasant, and it didn’t take very long to get back into the swing of things. I think mostly, for those of us who haven’t been around for a few years, what we have to get used to is that no one uses cash anymore. That everything is mobile payments and things like that. Once you get used to that, for those of us, like yourself and myself, who have been there a lot for many years, you really do start to feel like you’re back in a place that you know quite well.
Kaiser: Oh, good. That’s really comforting. And payments, were you able to link an American bank account?
Neysun: Yeah, it’s funny. This issue is one that everybody is focused on. Any scholar I know who’s going, everyone is thinking about this issue. I think by now the word has gone forth that Alipay in particular has allowed the easy linking of foreign credit cards. While I was there, WeChat Pay announced that they were going to do the same thing. It’s sort of a funny issue to talk about, but it had been something that made it very difficult for foreigners to kind of get around in China if they didn’t have a Chinese bank account, which I don’t have. It’s an ordinary life thing that makes a big difference in the ability of foreigners to get around. I think the bigger point to emphasize here is that there haven’t been a lot of foreigners in recent years.
This was a theme that came up a lot in a lot of conversations, that it’s noticeable that you don’t have the same level of students, you don’t have the same level of business people or tourists. A lot of the people who lived in Beijing, and particularly that I was there, had left. There was this palpable sense that there weren’t many foreigners around. And you often heard people saying, “It would be better for more foreigners to come back.” Well, if you want foreigners to come back, life can’t be really difficult for them to manage everyday life. Something as small as this mobile payments issue really does mean a lot in terms of the ability of foreigners to basically get around when they’re in China.
Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely. We’re all hearing about a much tighter constricted space for conversations. Many people have told me anecdotally about the reticence of many of their ordinarily quite open, quite fearless interlocutors, their reticence to say anything that they think might get them into trouble. Did you sense much of that?
Neysun: I very much sensed that in the last few years there has been a tightening of political space. The shadows of that were very clear to me. They weren’t manifested in the reticence of my longtime friends and interlocutors to talk to me. Partly, I think that is based on the fact that I have really deep relationships going back decades, and people know me well, they trust me. So, I wouldn’t say that people were reticent to talk to me directly, but I could still perceive the shadows. And that’s a concern. That’s a concern, I think, for people within China who are hoping that China can become a more fair, a more just, a more open society. That constricting space is very, very troubling. I like to think that getting people like ourselves back to China may play some small role in helping to open things up a little bit.
Lots of different types of examples I could give of that, but even just having kinds of conferences between Chinese and international participants has some kind of pressure effect back on that political space. I’m known as an optimist. And so maybe that is an optimistic take, but it is part of why I thought being there mattered in some broader sense beyond just my own particular research; that I was giving some kind of chance for people to think about the nature of the political space they were within and whether or not there would be some ways to push back against the new boundaries.
Kaiser: Yeah. The issues that people were tiptoeing around Xi Jinping himself is the norm-breaking third term, the canonization of Xi Jinping thought, maybe the restructuring that’s taken place at the 20th Party Congress of the relationship between the party and the state. What else? The Ukraine War probably.
Neysun: Sure. All of those. All of those, I think, also…
Kaiser: Taiwan.
Neysun: You might want to throw it into that list, even though, in some ways, people were speaking, even with less caution about it, is the economy. I think that’s something that was very clear that the economy’s not doing great, and that has become noticeable throughout. The COVID-19 pandemic is now a politically sensitive topic as well. I think because there’s so much recognition that maybe last year, the pandemic response wasted some time. Then the way in which the COVID controls came down was messy. That’s sort of a sensitive topic as well.
Kaiser: So, Neysun, I wanted to talk about that last point about the COVID-19 pandemic which was so important and it’s really very much on people’s minds. David Ownby talked about how many people were sort of shell-shocked. They kind of were in a state of PTSD over it. From conversations you’ve had with people in the administrative law community, what’s their sense of how the administration’s handling of the pandemic has affected the Chinese public’s trust in their legal and administrative systems? And then maybe also how has the community itself, that legal community, its own trust in the leadership been affected?
Neysun: Sure. Before I speak specifically about the administrative law dimension, I want to pick up on the point you mentioned that you referenced your conversation with David Ownby, the PTSD. The place where that was clearest to me was Shanghai.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah. They had it bad.
Neysun: Wow, they really had it bad. I think we all, for those of us who are watching it from abroad, we obviously had a sense of that. But then when you talk to people who lived through it and they want to tell you their stories, wow, like, that was very, very traumatic for people to live through. The PTSD is very clear. In terms of the administrative law community, I actually talked with your colleague, close collaborator, Jeremy Goldkorn, Jīn Yùmí 金玉米, right?
Kaiser: Uh-huh.
Neysun: … about a year ago in the interview series that he does for The China Project. And we talked, he especially reached out to me at that time because there were some people in the administrative law community who had written some commentaries recently about some of the illegalities that they perceived in some of the pandemic response to that point. And so we had a nice conversation about that. To kind of recap it a little bit, at the very beginning of the pandemic, when it was I think a little bit more political space to critique the local government response in Wuhan, a number of members of the administrative law community and the legal reform committee more generally had written commentaries pointing out how the local authority’s response did not accord with the legal framework that had been set up in the aftermath of SARS. There was quite a lot of commentary of that nature.
As China’s pandemic response moved forward, that kind of commentary had less space, but what was really interesting for me, and in some ways heartening, was that at the height of things like the Shanghai lockdown, back in April of last year, there were still people in the administrative law community, including friends of mine, who were willing to write publicly on their critiques of some of the aspects of those very strong responses, including things like taking keys away from people and locking them in their homes and forcing them to do nucleic acid tests. I sort of cited that in my conversation with Jeremy last year as an example of how, even within this much more tight political space, there was still room for people who wanted to take up whatever space they thought was still there to make fairly technical points that were referencing particular legal standards, but still critiquing aspects of the government’s response.
I think that goes back to when you were asking me earlier about political space. I’ve thought a lot about this because just about every conversation I had with people there was about this notion of space. Space is a dynamic concept, and it depends on who you are. Some people are more sensitive. If someone is more sensitive than someone else, then maybe they can’t say something, but someone else who’s not as sensitive can say something. How you craft it, whether you craft it as an incrementalist point or a maximalist point matters. The boundaries are not as clear as they used to be. Some people may just feel like, you know what? I’m just not even going to bother with risking anything. And of course, I don’t think it’s going to be any surprise for you to hear that the people I respect the most, who I really admire in a very deep sense are the people, including in the administrative law community, who say, “Okay, I think this is the space I can use. These are the points I can make. If there’s some trouble with it, I’ll find out, but it’s probably not going to get me in serious trouble, so I’m going to go ahead and do it.” I have lots of examples of that, and those people are really heroes to me.
Kaiser: A year on, have they had to pay any price? Have there been repercussions politically, professionally?
Neysun: I think there’s such a wide range of different kinds of repercussions that it really depends on what you qualify as a repercussion. For some people who maybe published some things, maybe there was a conversation somewhere. Is that really a repercussion or is that well within the acceptable range of cost? That’s a personal decision. But of the people that I’ve listed, at least I can say for a fact that none of them are in prison. None of them are fired. They all still operate within the system, maybe with some greater degree of scrutiny than before, but still within an acceptable range. And so, them taking the chances that they take to play that role and to have that kind of voice and that system, I think is incredibly admirable.
Kaiser: That’s a very useful and relevant tangent. But let’s get back to this question that I asked you about how it’s affected trust in the legal administrative systems.
Neysun: Yeah. Whether it’s the pandemic per se or just the broader dynamics, there is clearly some erosion of trust in the government and its approaches in general. I don’t know that I could tease out the pandemic part of it outside of all the other things, including most relevance to the legal community like rolling back certain kinds of legal reforms. One of the things that a lot of us are noticing right now, both outside of China and in China, is that lots of aspects of the legal reform program, the court reform program that was associated with the prior Supreme People’s Court President Zhōu Qiáng 周强, are being rolled back right now, including the publication of cases online. So, a lot of those cases have been taken down.
Kaiser: You might recall that I did a big interview with Rachel Stern and with other legal scholars about that. And yeah, that’s really a pity.
Neysun: Yeah, that was a great episode, also with Ben Liebman.
Kaiser: Ben Liebman.
Neysun: Ben and Rachel had been working a lot with the database of these cases that were really remarkably open for the last few years. Ben is, I think it’s fine to say, currently in China talking to colleagues. I think a lot of his research is met with great interest. But it could be that if he’s going to say empirical things about the Chinese legal system, it’ll be based on cases that were available until recently, but not cases going forward because they aren’t online. And part of that I think is, the fact that they are taking the cases offline, may be because of reasons that we could put a charitable gloss on reasons like maybe they were concerned about certain private information in the cases, or maybe some of the legal judgments were incorrect. But it does seem like part of what drove that decision was that they noticed all these foreigners were looking at the cases and maybe telling the story about the Chinese court system that wasn’t exactly what the authorities wanted to hear.
And that’s troubling. That’s very troubling and consistent with lots of other things we’re saying about restrictions on information. All of that is to say, to go back to your essential earlier question, yes, there is a decline in trust among the intellectuals who look at the legal system. I think part of that is rooted in the pandemic, of course, but a lot of that is rooted in broader things, including things that are specific to the legal system.
Kaiser: Neysun, you mentioned that pretty much every conversation that you had kept circling around the issue of the U.S.-China relations even though that’s not really your wheelhouse, but now it has sort of become your wheelhouse. Let me ask first, what were the views of your colleagues about this general shift in public opinion in the U.S. toward China over the past few years? How has it affected their work, their perspectives? What do they chalk it up to? I mean, these are a lot of, often, quite self-critical liberal intellectuals that you’re talking about, so I imagine that they see some of the blame as resting in Chinese behavior. I wonder if that has shifted, I wonder if they see the U.S. sort of having more culpability in the downturn in relations just in recent years.
Neysun: It’s a great question. It came up, I think, just about in every conversation. It was very hard for it not to. Let me start with one anecdote, which as soon as this conversation happened, it just occurred to me it was something that I would want to talk about publicly. I was with one friend who is a very well-trained legal scholar and has done extensive trading in the United States who is very, very clearly part of the liberal intelligentsia, who has all sorts of concerns about his own government and things that they’re doing, including the rise of ideological sort of valence within legal education. As we talked about the U.S.-China relations in particular, it was clear to me that he also felt that the U.S. was doing things that seemed unfair and that were affecting the prospects for flourishing in China in ways that he did not like. He had a sentence to me that really etched in my memory, he said, “Neysun, if you guys start losing people like me, you’re in a lot of trouble.”
Kaiser: Wow.
Neysun: That really landed with me because I think so much of our discussion about China here in the U.S. has sort of fallen into unfortunately a kind of a trope of thinking of China as kind of a monolithic entity or of thinking of China as sort of this distinct separation between the CCP, which we sort of put all these negative feelings on, and then the Chinese people, right? These are ways that our discourse here has been fumbling towards trying to make sense of a really complex and nuanced picture. I feel like we don’t really have almost capacity in our discourse to take into account someone like the person I just mentioned, who, again, is as critical, if not more critical than me because he lives it every day, of aspects of the Chinese system. At the very same time is feeling alienated by the rhetoric he hears from the U.S. about China and some of the steps that the U.S. is taking to limit flourishing in China.
I really wish we could do better in our own discourse here to understand that duality in the perspectives of Chinese intellectuals and Chinese liberal intelligentsia, and maybe Chinese people more broadly. And then to maybe try to have a rhetoric better account for that reality on the ground.
Kaiser: That’s a gut punch, and it’s an amazing anecdote. It also tallies very much with what I am hearing from a lot of my friends in China, whether they’re just sort of rock ’n rollers or whether they’re scholars, they feel very much the same. I mean, their sympathies toward the United States, their very natural political sympathies toward the United States have been wearing thin because of this. But let me shift to even more recent months. You just got back. In your opinion, have the Biden administration’s recent efforts to thaw the U.S.-China relations been well received by your Chinese colleagues? And if not, what kinds of reservations or concerns might they have expressed?
Neysun: I was there about a week before Secretary Blinken arrived, so a lot of the conversation in the week leading up to Secretary Blinker’s visit was about how would that visit go, and would it be successful? A metric that everyone liked to joke about was whether or not he would get to meet with Xi Jinping. And then if he did meet with Xi Jinping, how that would be portrayed in the press. Would there be a photo or would there just be a couple of lines in a Xinhua report? At the time of the visit, it seemed like it went well, and a number of the IR specialists that I was talking to really seemed almost taken aback by how well the meeting had gone.
We saw that the rhetoric in both readouts seemed quite positive. There was this emphasis on the resumption of people that people exchanged in both readouts, which I was very happy to see because that’s been the main issue that I’ve been kind of harping on in recent years. I think, over the course of my visit there, there was also an incident where President Biden said something offhand at a fundraiser about how Xi Jinping was a dictator. I guess that you can read that a little in different ways that he was maybe not making that a direct point, but it was sort of a side point.
Kaiser: Yeah. It wasn’t a direct point. I mean, yeah.
Neysun: It was something that came up after that.
Kaiser: The broader context was sort of a dismissal of the balloon thing. I mean, the broader context was it was trying to deflate some of the hype from the balloon incident.
Neysun: Let me say something about that because I think in my comments so far, I have sort of made it seem one-sided; that I put all the blame on the U.S. side. I actually think a lot of the problems are based on things that both sides are doing. The perspectives of the Chinese intellectuals or liberal intelligentsia that I’m talking to are not always ones that I totally agree with. For example, the meaning of the comment was one that I kind of tried to explain as, to the extent that people have concerns about it, I tried to explain the same way as you’re doing, but then to the extent that the balloon came up, a general point that sometimes would come up would be that, oh, the U.S. government, the nefarious U.S. government played up the balloon incident to harm U.S.-China relations.
I would always push back in those conversations and say, “Well, listen, if this big American balloon showed up in the skies of Hunan Province and a bunch of Chinese farmers saw the balloon, it would be a big problem for China too.” I sort of felt like, as much as I understood some of the concerns that people were stating about things that the U.S. had done, it was important to kind of push back a little bit as well and point out that it isn’t a one-sided thing, and just to add a kind of important valence to all of this, that’s the advantage of in-person exchange. That’s what you can do when you’re on the ground.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Neysun: You can actually have those conversations. You can listen to critiques that people have. You can think about that, and then you can come back with your own counters. That’s what we’ve been missing for the last few years. I think so much of the fraught nature of the relationship is because so many of those conversations, which happened so much across all these different dimensions in all these prior years and decades, were missing for the last four years.
Kaiser: Amen. Amen. You’ve been preaching this message. Your intervention in one of those ChinaFile conversations about the future of China studies in the U.S. that you wrote during the pandemic, you really hit that note really well. You emphasized the importance of on-the-ground research and that kind of exchange. What do you think, what’s your prognosis of the future of such exchanges and that ability to have our scholars on one another’s ground in light of the pandemic and escalating political tensions? Because given the complexities of the, I mean, I’m speaking very euphemistically here, of both the domestic Chinese and American political landscapes, neither of us has exactly covered ourselves in glory in the way that we treat the other side, and we’ve not made the scholars from the other side feel exactly welcome and appreciated of late.
Right? I mean, for every difficulty that we have in getting visas and stuff like that to China, I don’t envy Chinese scholars coming to the U.S. being subjected to strip-searches, having their social media port over, and then possibly worse once in the U.S. What’s going on?
Neysun: I think the first point to emphasize is that scholars on both sides, on both the U.S. and the Chinese side have an opportunity now to get exchanges restarted, both because the COVID controls have been relaxed, lifted in China, and because the top leadership of both countries, and most recently very clearly expressed in the readouts after the Blinken visit, on both sides, have emphasized the resumption of people-to-people exchange, and especially scholars, scholarly exchange. So, we have an opportunity that we can push through with. On both sides, there are concerns about visa issues, about being harassed at the border, about what kind of experience they might have in the other country. We could have a conversation that descends into these are the things that have happened to scholars from our side, and these are the things that have happened to scholars on the other side.
I think it would be best if instead of getting locked in a tit-for-tat cycle on those issues, we really tried to speak to both governments about how they really do mean what they say about the resumption of scholarly exchange. Then they have to knock it out in both senses. And I say that as clearly to the Chinese government as to the U.S. government, which has done a lot of damaging questioning of really prominent Chinese scholars in recent years. That has circulated with the Chinese scholarly community just as much as the stories of American scholars having faced similar things has circulated among our scholarly community. At the end of the day, in both countries, there is a rising security apparatus, which is putting pressure on the ability of us to do this kind of work.
On both sides, we have to try our best to push back against it. Probably here in the States, we have a little bit more ability to push back against ours, but ideally both sides are pushing back. Oftentimes, I think like the hawks in China against the U.S. and the hawks in the U.S. against China, they have no better friend than each other because they always kind of play off of the things that they see and the way that they see the world. Whereas those of us who are more moderate on both sides, and especially scholars, we can think about our common interest and try to kind of create a virtuous cycle out of that.
That’s not to say that any of this is easy, especially when we talk about scholarly exchange, it’s going to put a lot of pressure on universities to think about what kind of risks they’re willing to take. But if we believe in this, if we believe that the scholarly exchange is important, and it’s important both intrinsically and for the relationship more broadly, we’re going to have to be bold. Like, this is the time to be bold and try to get something that has been really important for a really long time started again.
Kaiser: One piece of rather low-hanging fruit, I would think, is one of the gigantic impediments to travel in either direction, the damn cost of air travel right now. I mean, I understand, right? The Ukraine War which I do want to ask you about, but the Ukraine War has made it so we can’t fly over the top of that Delta flight from Detroit to Beijing that I used to love. Nope. The one from the UA flight from Newark over the top. Nope. Now, I would’ve had to fly from here to Newark, and then Newark to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Beijing, and it was like a flight of 30 hours in total. It’s crazy. Secretary Blinken talked about that. I can’t remember whose readout it was in, but there was mention of working to increase the number of routes and to bring the cost of travel down. That would be fantastic.
Neysun: Yeah, I mean; obviously, we are all hoping that the direct flights can come back and the cost can get back to what we were used to. This is a real issue, not just in terms of your personal calculations or my personal calculations, but if you think about these exchange programs like Schwarzman College in Beijing or the Yenching Academy at Peking University, if they’re paying for their students to come over, and those prices are double what they had sort of budgeted in their initial budget.
Kaiser: That’s just double. Oh my God.
Neysun: That’s a big problem for them. There’s all sorts of ways in which this flight issue is difficult. I understand that’s something that comes up in the dialogue between the two sides. As far as I know, and you probably know this too, the Chinese airlines are more ready to get those roots going. Some of the pushback is coming from U.S. airlines, which have to both think about the competitive disadvantage because they’re not going to fly over Russia and they have to think about where the demand side is going to be. I don’t know how long that’s going to take to resolve itself, but I will say that I am a very happy customer of Asiana Airlines because even though it cost way more than I’m used to paying, and even more, it took a lot longer than it used to, they do serve the most delightful Korean food that I’ve ever had a meal of that nature on a 13-hour flight to China. I will say at least that one aspect was some small sort of, I don’t know, positive to otherwise what is a much more arduous journey than it used to be.
Kaiser: Asiana Airlines is not a sponsor.
Neysun: No, not at all. They may not exist much longer because I think they’re going to merge with KAL. So, even if this was a plug, it’s a plug with a very short time-
Kaiser: Limited expiration date.
Neysun: Limited expiration date.
Kaiser: Hey, so I said the Ukraine war, is it something that came up in conversation? Because this is something very much on the minds of Americans as we look at China these days.
Neysun: Oh, absolutely. I think among the liberal intellectuals who I’m spending most of my time talking to, there is not a lot of positive sentiment towards Putin or Russia. There is, I think, quite a lot of common sentiment with how you or I might think about the war, certainly, the suffering of the Ukrainian people is something that comes up a lot in conversation. I did ask around, I said, “What do you think most people in China, ordinary people think about this? Is there a more common perspective with maybe the official rhetoric still that’s coming out of China about Putin and the causes of the war?” Generally, people did seem to suggest that maybe the wider landscape is still more probably pro-Putin, pro-Russia, skeptical of the West than… the people I was talking to.
But certainly, among the people that I was talking to, it was very clear that we are all kind of thinking about this in similar ways. What that means in terms of Chinese policy is hard to say, but I do think that one thing that we saw happen in the last few weeks, and that was clearly being looked at carefully within Beijing, was the aborted coup. That does not make your partner with no limits seem like such a great bet. I’m sure that there’s a lot of thinking in Beijing about how to recalibrate based on that. As you well know, this is not the deepest scholarly insight, but it does seem to me that there may be an opening on this particular issue for the U.S. and China to work together, especially as the bad bet that was made on Putin becomes more and more clear going forward.
Of all the various kinds of issues where I think the U.S. and China can find some common cause, I like to think that this may be one of them, more so than some other things that are more difficult.
Kaiser: Amen. Yeah, let’s hope so. Neysun Mahboubi, thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and to tell us what you heard and what you saw on this latest trip. When are you planning on going back?
Neysun: I’m hoping to go back as soon as I can. I may go back as soon as August for a trip that Iza Ding, who you know as well, professor from Northwestern University is organizing a conference in Zhejiang University. If not that, then probably in the fall sometime, but I’m very eager to go back and keep up the kinds of conversations that I was having with longtime friends who I already miss dearly being back in the States.
Kaiser: Iza was just in Asia. I mean, we were talking to her at that Schwarzman event, and she was in Ulaanbaatar.
Neysun: Oh, that’s right. We should just say by the way that we were able to see each other, at least virtually, during that time because we were, thanks to you, you invited me to be one of the judges for the Schwarzman College Capstone program. I think, just to put one point on that, those kids are really smart. They’re really smart, they’re really talented, and I hope that program continues to flourish in the years ahead. It does a really important work of getting really smart, talented kids from both the West, and other parts of the world, and from China together in a really beautiful space.
Kaiser: I was, frankly, blown away by the quality of those presentations. They were so good. We had a really tough task to judge that. Anyway, let’s move on to recommendations. First, a quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is part of The China Project, and if you like the work that we’re doing with Sinica and with the other shows in the network, or with The China Project more generally, then the very best thing you can do to help us keep going is to subscribe to Access from The China Project. Access gets you, well, access to this show on Monday’s East Coast time, and, of course, our daily Dispatch newsletter, you don’t have to deal with a paywall, and all the great stories that we run on the website. So, do your part, pitch in, help us out, become a member. All right, recommendations. Neysun, what’ve you got for us, man?
Neysun: I’m going to put in my bucket here a movie that I watched early on when I first started studying Chinese and studying China in the mid-’90 that just sort of captivated me at the time and that I come back to every so often in following years, the movie To Live.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah.
Neysun: Which, of course, is based on the novel by the author, Yu Hua.
Kaiser: By Yu Hua.
Neysun: I think our friend, Michael Berry, has translated the novel into English. I think that’s right. And if that is right, one, kudos to Michael Berry, and two, people could also read the novel. But that movie, I think, does such a good job of showing the complexity of the modern Chinese experience. And that’s really been the lodestar of the way that I’ve approached China and, now almost 30 years that I’ve been studying it, trying to understand that lots of things can be true at the same time. Lots of things are happening at the same time. At the end of the day, anything that we want to analyze about China ideally will take all that complexity into account as well as the basic humanity that exists amongst all of us but that is also reflected so deeply in a story like To Live and in that movie. That’s something that I just really hope that all of our conversations that can sometimes feel like they’re very much othering the other side can maybe take more account of in the years ahead.
Kaiser: Plus, it’s got Ge You in it, and any movie with Ge You in it is worth watching. Hey, yeah, Michael did translate that Yu Hua novel, To Live. Yeah.
Neysun: Good job, Michael. Kudos to Michael.
Kaiser: Yeah, kudos. Actually, Michael was in the area not too long ago, and we spent a day just jamming. He’s a killer bass player, and so I was playing drums at the time.
Neysun: A man of many talents.
Kaiser: He’s a killer, killer bass player. Anyway, I am going to make a slightly nepotistic recommendation here and suggest that you subscribe to my brother Jay’s Substack. It’s called The Status Kuo. I don’t get the pun, but it’s The Status Kuo. He says Kuo. It’s weird. I can’t bring myself to pronounce my surname, Kuo. I don’t think I would say “Wayng” if my surname were Wang.
Neysun: Kaiser, I got to say that’s a great name. The Status Kuo is really, really good.
Kaiser: Come on. It’s not exactly original. I mean, people have been making that joke since I was a kid. But anyway, the Substack though is incredible. It’s really, really good. It’s also free. You can make a voluntary donation. But it’s a very in-depth daily newsletter on American politics. It really rides the line between mainstream democrats and the progressive wing, but it’s always very anchored in the pragmatic, and you’ll like this Neysun because my brother was a lawyer.
Neysun: My people.
Kaiser: Yeah, he’s your tribe. With his legal training, his knowledge of American law and the legislative process, he gets into the weeds a bit. It’s pretty nitty-gritty, but it’s actually quite accessible. I think that, as far as I can tell, most of the subscribers are sort of the old members of pantsuit nation. But it’s just fantastic. He writes on court decisions. He’s got actually a whole series right now on this recent Supreme Court spate of decisions. Anyway, the Substack is at statuskuo.substack.com. So, check it out. It’s really, really good. I think his writing, he’s quite a good writer, so check it out. I mean, he’s my brother, but, hey. Anyway, Neysun, man, thank you once again. What a delight.
Neysun: Thanks, Kaiser. It is always a delight to talk to, whether or not it’s being recorded and for public dissemination, but this time it was, and I’m really grateful that you had me on the show.
Kaiser: Well, I am glad you could make the time. Thank you so much, brother.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows on the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week. Take care.
