The Rise and Fall of the EAST

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Yasheng Huang.

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 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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Back before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I embarked on a series of podcasts that I was calling “Thinking about thinking about China.” I wanted to do some shows that explored some of the deeper issues on how we look at China and bring in issues of moral philosophy, epistemology, historiography, psychology, and much else. My feeling has long been that we don’t think deeply enough about how we approach China, how we think we know what we think we know about the very questions that we ask about our priors, our blind spots, our sources of cognitive bias. After February 24th, that got derailed a bit. I’ve always meant to get back to it and do some more shows that go beneath the surface, not just dealing superficially with the latest twists in the U.S.-China relationship or the breaking news.

When I cracked Yasheng Huang’s new book — The Rise and Fall of the EAST — I immediately realized that having him on the show to talk about that book would scratch this itch of mine that I have long had and allow me to get back into some of these deeper topics that I have set aside for too long. The Rise and Fall of the EAST, and you should know that EAST here is an acronym that stands for Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology, it’s one of those lamentably rare books that ask the really big questions, and that offer pretty bold original ideas about how and why China is the way that it is. I have no doubt that it’s going to engender quite a bit of controversy. There are going to be a lot of historians who are going to question some of the methods. But I’m also confident that it’s going to be talked about and cited for many years to come.

After all, it sets out, among many things, to identify the forces that formed the mind of contemporary China, the political culture, and the many features of Chinese politics that defy easy explanation. It also takes things all the way up to the present and offers its own prognosis for China under Xi Jinping. In some ways, it takes its place in the growing literature on authoritarian resilience, but to my mind, it does actually a lot more than just that. It also reaches quite far back into history. It tries to draw actual data from history to support its conclusions. I haven’t come across a book with this level of ambition in quite some time. It’s out on August 29th, so make sure to pick up a copy. Yasheng Huang is the International Program Professor in Chinese Economy and Business and Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He’s just moved to D.C. to take up a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. I am not only excited to have him on the show to talk about this incredibly thought-provoking book, but I am just as excited that he’s going to be our keynote speaker at the upcoming Next China Conference on November 2nd in New York City. Yasheng, welcome back to Sinica. It has been a long time.

Yasheng Huang: Thank you, Kaiser. I think the last time we talked, the world was almost totally different from the world today.

Kaiser: It sure was. And not for the worse for sure.

Yasheng: Yeah.

Kaiser: In my introduction to you, I talked about some of the things that your book tries to do, but I think it would be better if people heard it directly from you. What would you say are the really big questions that your book sets out to answer?

Yasheng: Thank you so much, Kaiser, for hosting me on your podcast. I very much agree with you that the writings and musings about China often are driven by current events. They don’t go deep enough, and there are really good books and articles that go deep, but those are rare and far in between. In my book, I try to go beyond current events, but I don’t leave current events. As you pointed out, I go all the way to the Xi Jinping era. In terms of the claims that I made in my book, so EAST, the first letter is an Exam. Specifically, I refer to the Civil Service Exam system that was established in the 6th century. The basic point of my book is that if you look at the three other components of the EAST, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology – and technology here is about technology, but also economic growth and things like that – you could kind of trace these three dynamics to the exam system.

That’s the causal framework that I proposed in my book. And I agree with many social scientists and historians. Today’s China is shaped by its past. What I don’t do is define the past as Confucianism, values in those terms. I define the past in terms of mechanism, this kind of specific practice of cultivating human capital, of shaping the minds of the Chinese people. You’ve talked about epistemology, right? There’s a particular way that we approach the world without questioning that methodology. I trace that to the civil service exam system, known in Chinese as the Keju system. It is going beyond the people who do work on the Keju system. They tend to look at the gaokao system today, the higher education exam today, and the civil service exam system in the Chinese system today.

Definitely, those are the contemporary versions of the Keju. But I go a little bit, well, quite a bit beyond that. I talk about the norms, and about the way that people approach the world around us, the way that people approach the political system as a product of the Keju system in addition to these specific institutional and practice manifestations.

Kaiser: That’s a fantastic overview. We will get into each of these four elements of this acronym EAST, of course, beginning and focusing on the Keju system in just a bit. But before we do that, you have a really great framing device that you use that spans the whole book, these ideas of scale and scope. These are really the anchoring ideas. It makes sense for us to talk a bit about what these are, to make sure that our listeners really grasp what you mean when you talk about scale versus scope because I’ll be using these in the conversation, and I’m sure you’ll be too. Let’s make sure that everyone understands what you mean by scale and scope and how these relate to homogeneity and heterogeneity, how they relate to authoritarianism and pluralism.

Yasheng: Yeah, thank you Kaiser so much for bringing up this topic. By the way, we’ll come back to this, but my current book is about the scale and scope, and applies that framework to democracies and autocracies. That’s my current book. Let’s go back to this framework. The one potential criticism is that I tackle four big topics — exam, autocracy, stability, and technology — that’s true, but I don’t tackle these things randomly. I tie them up with a pretty tight framework, which is what I call scale and scope. That may not be the most catchy name that we can come up with, but that’s the one that I use in my book. Basically, scale means homogeneity. Think about factories. You produce bridges, you produce nails, you produce automobile engines.

You produce 1 million units of those, 100 millions of those, 1 billion units of those; exactly the same thing, you can scale that, right? We can also use that to refer to government policy. Industrial policy, the organizational apparatus that the government has to organize the economy, organize science, organize technology, the financial commitment the government provides to the economy, to technology. $2 billion, $100 billion. China now spends somewhere, I may not get it exactly right, but in terms of the R&D expenditure, it is second only to the United States. China, relative to its GDP, is very high so the scale is very big.

Scope basically means differences. Differences in opinions, ethnicities, ideologies, and differences in values. My overall claim is that for a country to succeed, you define success in political terms, economic terms, to succeed, you need both. You need the right balance between the two. If you are too much on the scale side, you succeed in some ways, but you fail in others. I would argue that Imperial China scaled, but at the expense of scope, and therefore they couldn’t develop the economy. Then if you are excessive on the scope side, you also have problems, right? Now we’re witnessing this in the United States. People can’t agree on climate change, people cannot agree on gun control. People cannot agree on the imperative to wear masks during the pandemic, and that’s extremely damaging and detrimental to a society’s development.

The failure of the United States to provide basic health and to strengthen its basic education, that’s because of lack of scale. That’s not good either. We have plenty of scope, but if we don’t have the necessary scale, a society can also have problems. That’s the idea behind these two concepts. Exactly where you end up is a bit of a guesswork.

Kaiser: Right.

Yasheng: But conceptually, I think it’s straightforward. You need both. And the tension is that often they are in contradiction with each other. Some societies overachieve on scope, I’ll put India there. Some societies overachieve on scale, and I will put China today in that category.

Kaiser: Very much so. Very much so. Just now, in talking about scale, you use the example of a factory that enjoys economies of scale, its ability to produce a lot of the same product, the widget or the car engine or what-have-you. I suppose you could extend that analogy and talk about scope in terms of different product lines in entirely different business areas, different business models, right? And again, one has to find the balance. There’s another sort of analogy, perhaps not surprising, you are, after all, a professor at Sloan. It comes from the business world from organizational economics to be specific. You talk about M-form and U-form economies.

This comes up a bit in your book. Maybe it’d be a good idea for us to just unpack that a little bit now. What is an M-form economy? Why is China actually an M-form rather than a U-form economy as so many people imagine it to be?

Yasheng: The idea originated from two China economists, Yingyi Qian and Cheng Gang. They base their analysis on Williamson’s great book on this topic on the M-form economy and organization. To some extent, the U-form is about scale. The Soviet Union had a U-form economy, a very detailed division of labor. Why does a republic produce zillion units of widgets, and then other republics don’t produce any, right? It is a classic example of very detailed division of labor. The Soviet Union excelled in scale, and that’s called the U-form economy. The term comes from business historians, and Alfred Chandler is the other scholar who came up with this idea, that historically speaking, corporations evolve from U-form to M-form. U-form corporation has very, very specialized divisions: finance department, marketing department, product development, R&D department, right?

They have these very detailed divisions all the way in their organization. There’s one R&D department, there’s one finance department. What the business historians and Oliver Williamson observed is that in the early part of the 20th century, American corporations moved away from U-form type to M-form type. M-form, one way to think about it is duplication. You have group one, group two, and group one has a finance department and product development department. Group two also has similar divisions. Sometimes they compete with each other. And the headquarters don’t really get themselves involved in the detailed decision-making. They look out for strategies and overall development. And that’s the Chinese economy during the better part of the reform era, which I define in my book as ’78 to 2018, we can come back to that later.

Kaiser: Right.

Yasheng: Basically, it operated under this M-form economy. It moved from a central planning, the U-form, to a M-form economy. And reaping the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship because the U-form economy was not very good at encouraging competition. The M-form economy is very good at encouraging competition. To me, this is a very convincing explanation why China outperformed the Soviet Union and Russia by a long shot. Even though China operated under autocracy. That’s another element of my book, which is that Cheng Gang and Yingyi, as good as they were when they wrote about the M-form economy, they didn’t really touch on the political aspect. You had a scope, the economic scope, but that economic scope operated under the political scale. In my book, I provided narration and explanations to argue that the M-form economies succeeded not just because of themselves, but also because they operated under appropriate political control by the center.

Kaiser: Right. So that despite China’s overbalancing in favor of scale over scope, it still had sufficient scope conditions to be able to be relatively successful through the end of the reform period.

Yasheng: Yeah.

Kaiser: That’s really what you’ve argued. The central argument of the first four sections of your book are really about how despite this absence of so many of the scope conditions that prevailed in Europe and in its colonial lawsuits, despite, or maybe actually to extent because of the autocratic politics of both Imperial China and on the PRC, it’s been able to endure and even thrive. It strikes me that reading this, you are tackling a lot of the same fundamental questions that Francis Fukuyama set out to answer in The Origins of Political Order, and maybe less so in the second volume of that two-volume series, Political Order and Political Decay. There are definitely some areas of congruence between what you argue and what he did, although it’s been some years, I have to say, since I read his book.

But what I remember is that he’s really talking about these institutions of political constraint. Like the rule of law, checks and balances, strong parliaments, a peerage, and probably most importantly, just like a separate universal church, a sort of source of natural law or whatever that’s existed outside of secular authority. When I was reading Fukuyama’s book, the whole time I believed that what he was really trying to get at was explaining China. It felt like the whole book was really Hermetics. Maybe it’s my bias, but I definitely saw ideas of scope conditions that he talked about. He didn’t call them that, this pluralistic habit of the Western mind, and how this developed and how it never took hold in China because China developed such efficient bureaucracy so early on. Do you see your ideas as broadly compatible with his, or do you think he diverge in really important ways?

Yasheng: I think that, as you pointed out, there are areas of congruence between my book and his work recognizing the really remarkable institution that Imperial China created. I believe Fukuyama is among the first scholars in the West that really credit China with political modernization. The traditional prejudice is that the Chinese system was backward and primitive. Fukuyama really argued that China invented bureaucracy, impersonalization, and bureaucratic routine. In my book I basically said that China invented the Weberian system before Max Weber, right? On that, I totally agree with Francis Fukuyama. I think that one area I probably disagree with him is that, but maybe to be fair to him he doesn’t say that, but he sort of hinted that the political path China undertook and the political path the West undertook are in some ways equivalent with each other.

As you pointed out, he didn’t use the scale and scope of a framework. One way to put it is that Imperial China excelled in scale. The West excelled in scope. I think there I disagree, not in terms of the observation, but in terms of the implications. I think China excelled at scale, and paid the price. Historically speaking, and anybody who read the book would also remember that, China used to have plenty of scope, right? The Warring States period and this period, which I call the Han-Sui interregnum, between 220 and 580, for 360 years, China basically had a European kind of a system. A situation, I shouldn’t say system, a European situation in which different kingdoms competed with each other and different ideas thrived.

I think the issue is twofold. One is how China evolved toward a different system after the Sui dynasty, after the 6th/7th century? The other is, what are the implications? The implication is that China paid a dear price, and this is the key component of my framework. I was able to show that before the Sui Dynasty, China was actually quite inventive. And after that, not overnight, but gradually over a period of a few hundred years, it began to stagnate and deteriorate in terms of technological innovations. I would argue that China didn’t balance the scale and scope right after the 6th century, and it’s not equivalent with the West. It was Europe, England specifically that came up with the Industrial Revolution and came up with GDP growth and wonderful medicines that we have benefited — not China, right? It’s hard to argue that those two situations are equivalent in terms of their economic implications, scientific implications.

Kaiser: It’s interesting, it’s almost a sort of throwaway paragraph that probably anticipates this next book that you’re writing. You talk about how democracy sort of dialed in this good balance in that there are scale elements, there are things that insist our uniform to be in a democratic society, you have to believe in elections, in rule of law, in a separation of power. There are only a few things, but everything else, it’s just whatever you want. Whether it’s gender or religion. I thought that was a fantastically interesting observation. I hope that you expand on that in your next book. But let’s go back to the exams and the Keju system, the civil service examination system. You deal quite a bit with Imperial China from 221 BC, really through the end of the Qing in 1912. In particular, you single out three rulers, three emperors, Sui Wendi who unified China in the 6th century.

As you said, Sui is very, very important. I was joking with somebody who said, your book is very “Sui generous.”

Yasheng: That was excellent, by the way. Yeah.

Kaiser: Thanks. Zhu Yuanzhang, of course, who’s the founder of the Ming. Well, first, Wu Zetian, who rises a century after Sui Wendi. Wu Zetian who was the first and only female emperor of China. These three are all bound together though because of this amazing scaling tool, right? This is what you call it. Another thing that really stuck with me is the Keju system as a scaling tool. I doubt that anyone listening is completely unfamiliar with the Keju system, but your book goes into wonderful detail. What made it such a powerful scaling tool, and how did it develop into such a tool? How was Sui Wendi’s innovation so different? Because the civil service examination system, in some form, existed during the Han, during Han Wudi’s time, they implemented something like that.

Yasheng: Yeah.

Kaiser: What was so different?

Yasheng: Sui Wendi, Sui Dynasty as a whole made it, I would say that it dramatically innovated on the prior practices, exam as a system, as a practice. Let me distinguish between practice and system. Exam as a practice was there, but a lot of it was ad hoc, during the Han Dynasty, there was an ad hoc oral exam, and it was not implemented on a large scale. It was not regularly held, and a lot of it was like an interview, oral interview. The curriculum was not terribly developed, pretty haphazard. So, you can just imagine that when you have an exam system that doesn’t have a consistent set of questions and answers. That’s not the kind of exam system that we usually associate with an exam system, right?

A math test that’s consistent in terms of its questions and answers. Sui Wendi really made a difference. In my book, I said he invented the country system rather than crediting it to the previous dynasties. He made it systematic, and he made it open to many, many people. By the way, let me just say that throughout the life of the Keju System, it was only open to the male population, to the male gender. It was never open to the female gender. But Sui made it more open. And also, one thing that he changed was that previously you’d take an exam, oral exam after the recommendation. He kind of got rid of that. Just imagine that we as professors write recommendation letters, but only for the people we know.

That’s going to be limited to the people that you know if the system starts with a recommendation rather than an open-ended exam system. He made it open-ended. Again, when I talk about these things, some historians may say, “Oh, no, no, no, it was not completely open-ended. They were still recommended.” That’s all true. But, the issue is really the balance, right? The portion that is open-ended relative to the portion that is based on recommendation increased dramatically during the Sui Dynasty.

Kaiser: And even more so during the rule of Wu Zetian.

Yasheng: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, the three emperors that I profiled are really fascinating. To some extent they’re misfits in one way or the other. One was a woman, the only female emperor in the history of China. Wu Zetian, by the way, some historians have argued that Wu Zetian was a proto-feminist, a Buddhist by religion, very, very strong-willed woman, very brutal as well. She killed the daughter of the empress on her way to climb up the system. What she did was she opened up the exam system even more. And she began to systematically cultivate the pipeline from lower socioeconomic groups. Moved away from the nobility. She also created, or at least systematized, the practice of being an examiner herself. She would interview the examinees, and that later on evolved to be the palace examiner.

The Keju system has three tiers, the provincial, the metropolitan, and the palace. Wu Zetian might not have invented the palace exam. She systematized the palace exam, raising the profile of the Keju. So now the ordinary people can know, okay, even the emperor gave the exam, so it must be something very good. What Zhu Yuanzhang did was, in the modern language, he provided the basic education. He funded the basic education. He created a preparatory system, a nationwide preparatory system that young boys participated in and prepared for the exam. That was incredible. The equivalent to a modern version of basic education, and all paid for by the Imperial government. They didn’t charge tuition. And the demand for these preparatory schools was very, very high. It was a very, very extensive system.

Because when you take the exam, you need to prepare. If you don’t have that, then even if the nominally exam is open to everybody, it was not really open to the people from poor families, right? The Song Dynasty also began to do some of that, but Zhu Yuanzhang really increased the provision of the preparation. That was really remarkable. We talked about Fukuyama. I came away even more impressed with China in Imperial China in terms of how systematic the system was. We can talk about implications in China. That even Francis Fukuyama, and it was not just kind of a general bureaucracy, it was very well designed, very systematic, penetrating very deeply into the society. There were something like 2300 preparatory schools scattered in the country. China then had about 2,400 administrative units.

Kaiser: That’s pretty good coverage.

Yasheng: It’s pretty good coverage, right? I think China deserves a lot of credit for coming up with universal education. We can criticize it on other grounds, but let’s acknowledge how substantial that achievement was.

Kaiser: Yeah. It was universal in another sense too, I mean, by the time of Zhu Yuanzhang, they fixed this Song Dynasty-style, Neo-Confucianism. The Confucianism of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi as the standard. It was the four books and the five classics. And again, to your point about it being a scaling tool, that imposed this orthodoxy. It’s funny, you kind of toss out this idea that Confucianism was a good basis for the examination system, precisely because it was so ridiculously wordy and difficult to master. It made me think of this principle from biology where there are certain displays for mating, they’re so ridiculously, biologically costly, they’re so elaborate. They serve so little function outside of that, that it’s just the sheer difficulty of them, the sheer expense of themselves that sort of signals fitness as a mate.

It’s kind of funny. Your idea was that it sort of drained off any excess energy, or time that might have been put into dissident activities, destabilizing purposes, right?

Yasheng: Yeah. But Kaiser ridiculous is your term. It’s a hypothesis. It’s a conjecture, right? Essentially, I model Confucianism as a selection mechanism for human capital, and you need to come up with a stringent threshold, high threshold for human capital if you want to scale the system. Think about Christianity. I don’t really know as much about Christianity, but the 10 Commandments. If you kind of memorize those, that’s a pretty low threshold.

Kaiser: Nobody does.

Yasheng: Okay, nobody does, but that’s a pretty low threshold, right? You can’t really use that to select human capital, whereas Confucianism is such a wordy ideology. 300,000 characters, 400,000 characters, and essentially, if you want the people in the pipeline, in the bureaucracy, who can memorize and who can commit to one idea only, you want that ideology to be the curriculum, right? Rather than legalism and Daoism and Buddhism. Those other ideologies, especially Daoism and Buddhism, are ambiguous, they’re kind of this and that on one hand. On the other hand, when you do the standardized test, you don’t want that. You want straightforward answers, right?

This is where the new Confucianism can be more straightforward, more narrow as compared with classical Confucianism, technically speaking, that was put in place by the Yuan Dynasty before Ming. But Ming really scaled it.

Kaiser: We talked about the Ming Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang. There’s another Ming Emperor that you talk about quite a bit who ruled toward the end of the 16th century, the Wanli Emperor. You make various points in the book, a fascinating comparison between him and his near contemporary on the other side of the Eurasian Landmass, in England, Tudor England, Henry VIII. They are just so different. One, Wanli Emperor is so completely unconstrained compared to even this most autocratic British monarch, right? I thought it was really illuminating. Again, it put me in mind of Fukuyama because of his whole argument about institutions of political constraint because the church figures so strongly in this argument that you make. It’s the church that he has to battle so that he can divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, and then he goes to war with this. He’s excommunicated.

And mind you, he’s not like a Lutheran. This is sort of sitting alongside in parallel to the Protestant Reformation. Really fascinating. But China never had these religious institutions that challenged secular authority. In fact, you go on to make the assertion that China basically had a congenitally weak civil society all around. Can you explain what you mean by that? I mean, you go far as to say that Imperial China and its communist successors are states without society. Can you talk a little bit about that? That seems like a pretty bold claim.

Yasheng: Sure. Yes and no. Maybe in the way that I put it is bold, but the idea is there. I think it’s important to distinguish between organized society and a society that is just there. You always have households, right? For sure. You always have commerce in China, and you have a Buddhist religion, right? In Imperial China. But the key thing is that those were not organized. That’s the distinction that I make between Europe and China. Imperial China never really had, at least as far as I know, any kind of organized religion with its own organizations and finance and divisions. The Vatican used to have its army. It was an incredibly organized apparatus. It had its own independent finance. Universities in the West had their own operational independence, financial independence.

China had religions, China had intellectuals, but China didn’t have organized intelligentsia, didn’t have organized religions. So, I really emphasized that organized rather than just the scattered elements. And I think that’s true of China today. I know there are Chinese in China who believe in Christianity, or who believe in Buddhism, but do you see them organized?

Kaiser: Only by the state, right?

Yasheng: Only by the state. Yeah, so there’s an office in the state council.

Kaiser: Right, exactly.

Yasheng: It’s called something like Administration of Religious Affairs. By the way, this is a little bit on the side to contrast China with Vietnam. When I was in Vietnam last time, I saw a Catholic church, the church goers lining up outside of the Catholic church on the streets with the candles, lit candles, praying. You never see that in China. Catholic priests in China are not appointed by the Vatican. So, that’s the claim that I make. I hope it’s not terribly controversial because I think it’s a pretty factually valid observation.

Kaiser: Sure. I mean, China had merchants, but it didn’t have powerful guilds, right?

Yasheng: They didn’t have guilds. Western Europe had a lot of merchant guilds. I even contrasted China with Russia. China had intellectuals. The whole thing about the Keju system was to create educated, knowledgeable people. You can argue about the things they’re knowledgeable about, but in terms of literacy, it was an incredibly substantial achievement. But China didn’t have independent intellectuals, and even Russia had that. I would argue that China is the most autocratic country in the world in that sense. It’s a state prevailing without any society and generations of Chinese rulers ensured that outcome, but also created a system that would demolish these alternative paths of mobility.

Kaiser: I would say that, even within that system, while the emperors surely still had final say, there was this informal way by which intellectuals within the state, the ministers, they had kind of tacit access to channels of consultation and even remonstrants that were sort of codified culturally, but never formally. I mean, the norms had some weight, so it was possible to push back. I mean, we have Hǎi Ruì 海瑞 and people like that, right?

Yasheng: Yeah. Kaiser, I agree with you completely, but I would argue formalism matters. Institutions matter. So, you had the norm.

Kaiser: I agree with that.

Yasheng: Because the problem with just having the norm is that it really depends on the emperors. In the contemporary situation, it really makes a difference whether the ruler is Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, or Xi Jinping. But because of lack of formalism, because of lack of institutional safeguards. And the outcome can be very, very different depending on the preferences of the rulers. I would actually go even further than what I just said. I would argue that when you have only the norms of remonstrances without the institutions, essentially, it matters where it is least important. Because you can remonstrate against the emperor who’s most tolerant, right? They don’t kill you instantaneously. That situation is actually least necessary in terms of having that system. You need remonstrances when you really have a bad emperor. You need remonstrances today.

Kaiser: And then you don’t have it.

Yasheng: And you don’t have it, right? Whereas in the 1980s, and I hope we get into that, in the 1980s, you actually needed it less precisely because the rulers then were more tolerant.

Kaiser: Let’s try to do that. Let’s try to move forward in time a little bit. I mean, we’ve been bogged down between the Sui and the Ming. We’ll actually have to come back to this when we revisit your database of Chinese inventions. You have this interesting idea that the modern equivalent of the Keju is the GDP metric. A million years ago when I was a graduate student, I was working on the emergence of technocracy in post-Mao China. I was looking at a lot of historical antecedents for this. And I also lighted on the Keju system as being really important, sort of the old bottles into which the wine was poured. Now, there were these new bottles. But for me, it was the technocrats. That you had to sort of prove your belief in the prevailing orthodoxy. Back then it was Confucianism. Now it was scientism and a need to have demonstrable mastery — in this case it was by having an advanced degree in engineering, or in physics, or in chemistry from a top tier university. I thought that was maybe where you were going to go when you were talking about, and I saw the title of your book. You went in a different direction. I thought it was really fascinating. How is the GDP metric sort of equivalent to Keju?

Yasheng: It is equivalent only in the performance measurement sense. I think the idea is that when you run a small system, that doesn’t really matter, but when you have a large organization, the imperative is to come up with a consistent set of metrics. This is not a terribly revolutionary idea. Look at the modern organization, profit maximization, shareholder value, we can criticize those, but the imperative of a large organization is to have consistency in the metrics and in the performance measurements that you have. In the Keju System, it was the exam score. And it was objective. You either succeed on the test or you’ll fail. And also, we show in the book as well as in the paper that I published with my co-author, Clair Yang, that the Keju System really worked in terms of being our objective.

Having consistency is very important because you promote the right people, you promote the right human capital. But the other element of it is that consistency also gives you legitimacy. If you and I work for the same organization, I see Kaiser being promoted, simply because you have long hair, and then I say, “Well, I cannot have long hair.” It has to be something that both you and I can do, right? Maybe getting a client and convening conferences that are successful and things like that. So, it also has this legitimizing effect. Legitimizing effect is important because of incentives. If you don’t believe in the system, you don’t participate in that. There are a lot of criticisms of GDP. I also used to criticize the GDP system until you see the alternatives. Let’s throw away the GDP as the metric. Now, what do you have? You have loyalty to the ruler. You have ideological commitment.

Kaiser: Mass campaigns and class struggle.

Yasheng: Mass campaign, class struggles, right? I think that’s my bottom line. If you accept autocracy as it is, you also have to accept that an autocracy or a big organization has to pursue some sort of consistent metric. And GDP gives you the best consistency you can ever have because everything else is a crapshoot, right? GDP is much better than these other things. Look at what’s happening in China today. Once the GDP as a metric is thrown out of the window, look at all these incredible misconduct and really just undesirable behavior on the part of the local officials. I miss the days when GDP was held as the king. Once we shift the system from autocracy to democracy, we can have a separate discussion. My larger premise is that once you have autocracy, then an autocracy that presumes a more consistent metric is a better autocracy than an autocracy that presumes inconsistent metric. And better yet, it is a metric that incidentally or intentionally benefits the ordinary citizens. And I would say GDP, by and large, benefits the ordinary citizen.

Kaiser: I don’t know if you’ve read Jeremy Wallace’s book yet, but I think he makes broadly a similar argument.

Yasheng: Yeah. Cornell, yeah. Yeah.

Kaiser: One thing I found really compelling was your explanation of a phenomenon. I’ve actually had a difficult time explaining, which is why the Chinese leadership is so technocratic except at the very top. It comes down to the fact that regional power trumps ministerial power. That is a really interesting argument that you make, and you show the data. You just almost never see promotion into the Politburo Standing Committee from ministerial level, from the central level. It’s always quite the norm to see promotion from leading provinces or autonomous regions into the party secretariat. Now, is there any evidence that this is done by design? Is this something that the CCP has sort of built in, the organization department built in? This granting of non-executive pilot bureau seats, especially to provincial party secretaries?

Yasheng: I have to say that I don’t have immediate direct evidence on the intention of the CCP in terms of the design of that system.

Kaiser: It’s so consistent, though.

Yasheng: That’s the key point, right? Because the data are so overwhelmingly consistent, there’s the other side of the argument, which is that the system rewards these regional leaders. Look at the Soviet system. It’s almost the opposite, right? So, the system rewards the regional leaders rather than ministerial leaders who we usually think of as kind of technical technocrats. My hypothesis, and it is only a hypothesis and a conjecture rather than a kind of documentary evidence, is that this is a system that motivates the regional leaders to perform. Because they are far away. And you could argue that it came from many, many years ago, or even many centuries ago, when the system to monitor their conduct was very underdeveloped.

I mean, Kaiser, if you are my boss, there are two ways you can control me. One is that you monitor my behavior. You say, “Yasheng, come in, give me your report. What did you do yesterday? What did you do last week?” That’s one way. And you say, “Okay, you’ll get $5,000 more because you did this.” The other way is that you created a system that I automatically behave in ways that are consistent with what you want me to do. Economics, they’re like stock options. I don’t really evaluate you on a daily basis, but if you can sell a million products, well, our stock prices are going to increase and you’ll get a benefit from it, right? I don’t really need to evaluate you on a daily basis. That, in and of itself, is sufficient to motivate you.

In a system that is large, complex, and informationally challenged, you’ll see more use of incentives rather than the use of information collection. I will put China in that category. That’s why you need to have a system where regional leaders, even without central officials looking down on you, over your shoulders. You say to yourself, “Gee, if I perform, then I would get promoted to the Politburo. So, maybe that should be the way for me to do it,” rather than kind of just seeking and maximizing your own self-interest.

Kaiser: I’m wondering if you looked at historical antecedents for this, if you looked at imperial dynasties, whether there was some system in place to co-opt regional leaders to get buy-in. Because China perennially suffered from this. Look at the Tang before the An Lushan Rebellion. But this system of military governors is always problematic. How do you get them, sort of buying into and have their interests aligned with the center?

Yasheng: Yeah, that’s an excellent suggestion. I have not. I definitely didn’t in my book. There may be other historical social scientists who have. Definitely, that gave me an idea. I should look into it. I’m sure there were historical antecedents to that because the CCP doesn’t get the system out of the blue. As far as I know, it was not a conscious design, at least from what I have read. If you look at people like Chen Yun, who was really in charge of personnel, he wasn’t really talking about the design issue. He was talking about the specific practices, moving people around, right? That system did exist.

Kaiser: That’s old.

Yasheng: That’s definitely real old, right? As a way to motivate and to reduce the incentive to misbehave. There’s a branch of economics called organizational economics. A lot of these practices can be readily explained in terms of basic tenets in organizational economics. Organizational economics is concerned with firms and business organizations, but you can apply their insights to running a country, a top-down country. You cannot really apply that to a democracy. Because in democracy, there are elections and elections of governors. So, it doesn’t really apply. But when you have a top-down system like a corporation, the insides of organization and economics can apply. And this is exactly what I did in that chapter. Do I have direct evidence? No, I don’t. I have to be very honest.

Kaiser: One of the really interesting findings that you came up with was how wealth doesn’t just fail to correlate with Keju outcomes. It actually seems to correlate negatively with Keju outcomes. What do you think explains that? That was fascinating. Maybe unpack a little bit. I think there will be some people who will quibble with, for example, your proxy measure for wealth, which is the number of wives, right?

Yasheng: Yeah. That’s a good challenge and pushback. The problem with the historical data is that you work with what you have. You don’t work with what you want to have. My philosophy is: “Okay, so this is what we have. Let’s see what we can make of it until the critics have different data.” Maybe our work can be validated or can be refuted, but I’m not very happy with people who say, oh, this is just the wealth measure, which is the number of wives. It’s not the right measure. Same thing that applies to the historical database on technology. People dismiss it not because they have their own data, it’s just somehow they dismiss it.

Kaiser: My theory was that if you have multiple wives, you’ve got other things to do besides study for the Keju.

Yasheng: Well, there are historical accounts of having multiple wives. Multiple wives may not be the right way to think about it. It’s really wife and concubines, right? Concubinage is an economic phenomenon. We know that from historical research. It’s not all those possibilities to say that multiple wives do indicate some sort of level of wealth. That’s one data point that we have in the data on Keju examinees. We don’t really have data on landholding, on those things. But let me explain the idea. The Keju system performed two functions, one traditional function, and the function that many people are familiar with selecting human capital for the imperial bureaucracy. I think that’s a very important function.

But what Clair and I provided in our paper is an additional function. It is not to select certain people. From an emperor’s perspective, who are the people you don’t want to be in the system? People who have independent wealth, who can challenge you, who are powerful, right? Unlike the European system, the European system had troubles with nobility. Henry VIII, you know Catherine, the Aragon, she came from a very prominent family. Anne Boleyn came from a very prominent family.

Kaiser: I’ve seen The Tudors.

Yasheng: You don’t see that in the Chinese imperial system. What the Chinese emperors wanted to do was to maximize the status difference between him and the rest. The argument we provided is that the Keju system also systematically deselected those people who could potentially pose a threat to the emperor. And those are the rich people, the landlords, etc. That’s, again, a hypothesis. It is consistent with the statistical evidence that we looked at, but I’m definitely open to other interpretations and to other datasets.

Kaiser: You’re also probably familiar with that argument that the whole sort of burgeoning bourgeois was bought off, because what you did if you were a young salt merchant and you had any money was you spent that money to educate your son because ultimately you wanted him to climb that one available ladder of success in Imperial China.

Yasheng: That’s the lure of the Keju system, right?

Kaiser: Exactly. Exactly.

Yasheng: Going back to our earlier discussion, the Keju system monopolized your time, your energy, your attention, and your life goals.

Kaiser: Your ambition. Yeah, exactly.

Yasheng: Your ambition. I challenge anybody to think of a system anywhere else in the world that can do that on a consistent basis with such a large number of people and for so long. The Church at one point in the West probably did that.

Kaiser: Yeah, I was going to say.

Yasheng: But it gave away to other things, right? It gave away to commerce, universities, politicians. I find it difficult to come up with a system elsewhere in the world that rivals the power and the allure of the Keju system.

Kaiser: Absolutely. One argument that you make in the book is that the sequence of politics and bureaucracy, the development of politics and bureaucracy really matters. You argue that China developed bureaucracy first, whereas in the West, there was already a very robust politics before the creation of civil service bureaucracies, and that they were thus very constrained by politics. Now, that doesn’t strike, I think, all readers as a good thing, prima facie, right? Make the case then, why, in fact, was it a blessing that bureaucracy came after politics in the West?

Yasheng: Well, I don’t really know why. I’m observing the difference. And there, let me credit Fukuyama. I think other scholars made a similar point, but maybe I spent more paragraphs on this than they did. I think it matters in the following sense. When a bureaucracy happened in the middle of other contending forces, they were just one of those forces. Essentially, either by design or by default, you’ll have a bureaucracy that is competing for intention, money, talents with other forces in the society, with other institutions. That is a definition of pluralism.

Essentially, you are dealt with a deck that you have. And the bureaucracy is not able to overwhelm the political system. We often complain about bureaucracy, when you go and register for your automobile, you just don’t like the experience. Bureaucracy has a tendency of being very rigid, very stiff, very unfriendly, very dictatorial and things like that. All of that, that’s true. But imagine a bureaucracy that has all these elements, but there’s nothing else that constrains the bureaucracy, and that’s China. Whereas as much as you don’t like R&D, it is one piece of your life that you have to put up with a bureaucracy, but everything else, you don’t really have to put up with it. So, it matters in that sense. And it matters because bureaucracy in the West added to the plurality, whereas bureaucracy in China subtracted plurality, and the economic consequences, the political consequences of that difference are incredibly large. And we are still feeling it today.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Yasheng: I personally favor the Western system. Let me be very clear. I want to be transparent about my priors, but I also admire the Chinese system. Any system that is so powerful in the ancient times without modern communication, modern systems, you really have to admire it. So, I admire it in a technical sense. I don’t admire it for the effects, the stagnations, and repressions that it produced.

Kaiser: Well, I mean, it was so effective that it was bound to outlive its usefulness and cast a very, very long shadow. I think the essence of your book is that these things, the things you talk about in EAST, worked so well that they continue to exert a lot of influence. There’s a couple of sections in your book where you go into stuff that I find delightful, but I think other readers… it’s going to give them pause. You’d introduce, for example, Joseph Henrich’s theory about how literacy actually rewires our brains, and changes the neurobiology of people in the West. Part of what turned them WEIRD, which has always been one of my favorite acronyms — Western-Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. There’s another bit where you talk about Nisbett, about The Geography of Thought, which I thought was a marvelous book as well.

There are people who are pretty dismissive of this kind of stuff. It’s too speculative. I mean, there is, of course, a lot of speculation. Still, it seems to me like a very interesting place to look. But you talk about this, the question of why literacy. We’re talking about Henrich here, why literacy seems to have made this change to Westerners, but not to highly literate Chinese people preparing for the Keju exams. Can you talk about why you see literacy within the state, that’s literacy in the service of the state as quite different from literacy or numeracy that exists outside the state, or even in opposition to the state? Because Henrich just says literacy basically was the foundation for this sort of oppositional democratic adversarial politics.

Yasheng: Kaiser, first of all, I do not dismiss that kind of research. I actually have tremendous respect for Richard Nisbett and Joseph Henrich.

Kaiser: I love that stuff too, just to be clear. I love that.

Yasheng: Yeah, I love that stuff. You can quibble, right? Because it’s based on experimental research rather than real-life research. The beauty of experimental research is that it zeros in on the essence because you can have many, many controls. The factor that you want to really understand can be isolated from these other things. Whereas in real life, real history, you can’t really do that because everything is moving simultaneously. You don’t really know what’s going on. If there’s one thing that I regret is not having studied more of that stuff in graduate school. But what’s interesting is that Joseph Henrich, he was talking about literacy, having this biological effect on human brains, liberalizing, inquisitive, challenging authority, but we don’t see that in China at all, right?

I quoted work by Evelyn Rawski that shows that China actually had decent literacy, not at the same level as Europe, but it was pretty impressive during the Qing Dynasty. And yet, you don’t really see this liberalizing effect. One piece of evidence that you don’t see the liberalizing effect is the country system itself. It was never reformed to extend suffrage to the female gender. By definition, it never became liberal. How come that Chinese literacy didn’t have this liberalizing effect? I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so I cannot quibble with the claim that literacy changed human brains. I suspect that cursory literacy also changed Chinese brains. But I added a condition to Henrich’s claim. Henrich was talking about literacy in a liberalizing, pluralistic society that is Europe.

In that sense, I quibble with his claim. In WEIRD, W represents the plurality, pluralism, west. That was a key contextual condition that he took as a result, whereas I took that as a condition and a cause. So, if you don’t have this W, right? He meant West, but we could interpret it not as a Western Europe, but the set of conditions that Western Europe had. Political competition, economic competition, ideological competition. Without that, the changing brains don’t produce these other effects such as economic growth, such as cognitive revolutions. That’s how I reinterpreted Henrich’s insight. But then look at what happened in China and look at what happened in East Asia after the Second World War. Kaiser, you are familiar with the pessimism expressed by Max Weber about Confucianism and Confucianist countries, that a culture cannot outgrow the economy. That’s just manifestly.

Kaiser: Nonsense, right?

Yasheng: It’s nonsense. But the thing is that East Asia only began to grow when East Asia had the right conditions. Entrepreneurship, globalization, and in the case of China, economic reforms. Then the brain wiring probability began to produce the effect. That’s how I kind of reconciled Joseph Henrich’s observation with the observation of East Asia.

Kaiser: With all due respect to him, he’s talking about a change. This is not purely experimental. He’s making an historical argument because this is situated in the 16th and 17th centuries, right? This is what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the Gutenberg revolution, and he’s talking about the Protestant Reformation, which they go hand in hand in Europe. And on top of that, look, this is a period of endemic religious war of the cataclysmic Thirty Years War. There’s so many other threads to look at that are happening at the same time as we’re seeing literacy take off. I think that he’s maybe over attributing it to just literacy itself, something that had maybe multiple causes.

Yasheng: Yeah. But I’m willing to defend him a little bit. You are right that the specific observation about the Protestant Reformation was not based on experimental research, but the idea that being repeatedly exposed to reading rewired your brain, that was experimental research. He applied that insight backward in history to reformation. I’m willing to go along with that. He’s a biologist. I’m not. You are right that there are other things going on that reinforce that biological change, but that’s not that different from what I argued in my book, which is that there were other things going on in China that counteracted a biological change in the human brain induced by Keju literacy. I take experimental research seriously. I do believe that he’s right about that. But again, I’m not a biologist.

Kaiser: I don’t think you need to subscribe to ideas about cognitive rewiring, that literacy numeracy changed us psychologically, or physiologically rather. You don’t need to subscribe to that in order for your argument to work, though.

Yasheng: That’s true.

Kaiser: You go on, and you can say, you’re right, things like work ethic and memory are the results of biology. Let me go back a little bit to Keju and scale and scope, I mean, this is another thing that occurred to me, as I was reading it, I just thought of it just now. When you’re looking at the pressure to create scaling tools as Keju, rather than just start with the creation of these tools and say, “Okay, this is why China was able to scale,” I think there are other variables we could look at. Like, just simply the geography of the North China Plain, right? You have to have large territory under control because there are not natural boundaries like you would have. No major mountain ranges or gigantic impassable forests like you would have in Europe.

It was just one large, extremely fertile plain that was going to sustain a large population with no natural barriers. There’s sort of a natural size to that polity that would make necessary scaling tools rather than the other way around. In other words, you don’t need Keju in order to have a large polity under one central control, but to have one polity under central control, it helps to have something like Keju.

Yasheng: No, I agree. Kaiser, I agree. I think it’s not just a quantitative observation, but a qualitative observation, right? To govern such a large policy in such a consistent manner and retain the essential features of the autocracy for such a long time, I would argue that those have something to do with the scaling power of the Keju System. Otherwise, you ended up like India, right? It’s also a large continental size country, but you have all these differences here and there because there’s not one unifying mechanism. Or the United States. It’s also a large country, but then you have federalism, you have very different religions, and you have an incredible level of diversity. You can have a large country, but you can have a large country with such single-mindedness, homogeneity. That’s what China is, right? So, it’s not just the fact that it is a large political system.

Kaiser: I want to talk a little bit about the 1980s and the movement toward more scope and more pluralism that you talk about that ends really with Tiananmen in 1989. This is something that’s debated endlessly, how pluralistic was China between ’78 and ’89? What’s your take on that? Do you think that this was really a period where scope conditions were developed that really kind of helped China along after 92, after the revival of reforms?

Yasheng: I think that my own thinking has also evolved over a period of time. You may or may not know my last book, Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics. I talked about the 1980s and 1990, the Shanghai model, and all of that. I have to say that I find it surprising this time around to identify sources of political and institutional heterogeneities that existed in the 1980s to a level that I previously didn’t recognize. Not just ideologies. And the freedom of expressions. But without social media. Social media, obviously, but that’s a technological thing because they allow people to post ideas that are different from official ideology.

But in a pre-internet era, China was quite impressive in the 1980s, in terms of different ideas, contending with each other, and calling for political reforms. I was impressed with that before, but this time around, I’m even more impressed with the political diversity. If you look at the political system, you have five different individuals occupying five centers of power, the secretary of the CCP, the premier, the president of the country, the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, and the Chairman of the…

Kaiser: Central Advisory.

Yasheng: Central advisory. Hopefully, we can get into that. I actually think that’s a critical-

Kaiser: Yeah, it no longer exists.

Yasheng: No longer exists, right? And then you look at the political landscape after 1993, it became much more centralized. Basically, it was a rule of two people, the Party Secretary and the Premier. That’s it. Rather than divided among five, now you have some division between the two. And then over a period of time, under Xi Jinping, obviously you have a premier, but, as we know, that premier is not terribly powerful. I have to say, even though this is pretty obvious, I didn’t think about that issue before I wrote this book, and how Tiananmen basically demolished that level of political plurality. How real that plurality was, we can have a debate in the 1980s and early 1990s. But I would make the following argument, going back to our early discussion about formalism, if the institutions persisted over time, the five centers of power, if that persisted, I bet China would be very, very different from it is today. Just imagine if you have a powerful central advisory commission. Think about 2012, people like Zhu Rongji were on it, Zhang Zemin, Hu Jintao, right? And think about after the 20th Party Congress, Li Keqiang and all these people on it, exercising legitimate voices and says.

China would probably still be an autocracy, but it would not be the kind of one man unconstrained rule by one leader. I’m willing to make that counterfactual point. In my book, I argue that China really changed everything politically. Economically, we can have a debate. In my 2008 book, I was quite negative on the economic aspects, but I begin to see it was more of a balance. The leaders in the 1990s did globalize the Chinese economy, but they retrenched on rural reforms, rural entrepreneurship. So, it’s kind of a wash rather than a unidirectional effect.

Kaiser: Globalization, international scientific exchange, a whole bunch of these other things persisted after ‘89, or even took off after ’89.

Yasheng: Yeah, they persisted. They actually accelerated.

Kaiser: Accelerated after. And so these provide sufficient scope conditions so that at least up until five years ago, China still continues to have these. This is a major argument of your book.

Yasheng: That’s right.

Kaiser: In the interest of time, though, I do want to skip forward a little bit. I don’t want to talk about absolutely everything in your book. I want to talk about Tullock’s curse, the great Achilles heel, the vulnerability of the system that you talk about because you spend a good amount of time on this succession, the succession issue. Can you talk about Gordon Tullock, his ideas about the succession problem and how that is endemic to authoritarian regimes, and then maybe how China has thus far been able to stave it off?

Yasheng: Gordon Tullock was a very interesting academic. I think he was a lawyer by training, but he wrote about economics and political science. One of his least-known books is succession issues in autocracy. His basic argument is that autocracies do not get successions right because of wrong incentives. Once you nominate somebody, then the loyalty goes to that person. As an autocrat, you don’t like it. And also the nominated person has this constant fear of being denominated. I don’t know if that’s the word, but because autocrat has such a power. The other problem in that situation is that the current leader has an incentive to observe the performance of the nominated person. He has to do it early because otherwise, the person doesn’t have a track history. But once you do that, you reduce your own power, right?

So, you are in a very kind of perilous situation. You nominate early, then you reduce your own power. You don’t nominate, well, then maybe somebody who succeeds you is not the person you want, right? He’s dealing with these dilemmas and problematic situations. And his argument is that autocracies tend to fail most likely when they don’t handle successions right.

Kaiser: Very little argument you’ll get from me on that.

Yasheng: I take that insight to look at China. There, I made a distinction between other political practices that we talked about, rotation and those things that the CCP has learned from history. But the problem here is that succession is not something they can learn from history. Because Imperial China had hereditary successions. CCP, at least so far, although North Korea has done it, so far, they don’t have it.

Kaiser: No, indeed.

Yasheng: This is perilous because you have to invent the method as you go, and you don’t have prior experiences to borrow from. Look at the history of Communist China. It’s a pretty dismal record, I would argue. Under Mao and under Deng Xiaoping.

Kaiser: We’re all put in mind of Lin Biao by Prigozhin’s –

Yasheng: Lin Biao, yeah. Prigozhin, exactly. The plane crash. And Liu Shaoqi, poor Liu Shaoqi…

Kaiser: Yeah, died in prison.

Yasheng: And poor Hua Guofeng, Zhao Ziyang. It’s additional record, I have to say. Until they figured out that the term limit is the way to do it. I have to give that to Deng Xiaoping and the term limit, the age, and the mandatory age requirement.

Kaiser: Again, unfortunately, these were just norms and not actual…

Yasheng: Well, no, no, no. That was in the constant. Well, retirement age is the norm, but the term limit is in the constitution.

Kaiser: For the presidency, but not for the chairmanship.

Yasheng: Correct. And also, Chinese constitution, you can rewrite it pretty easily.

Kaiser: Apparently, you can. One thing they did learn from history, though, I mean, they learned this from the An Lushan Rebellion, and they learned this from the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty is how to subordinate the military, right? This is something you talk about as well.

Yasheng: Yeah. The military has inferior status. Part of it is because you elevated the mental power over military power, but part of it is the history, the lesson from the history. And the Chinese military is firmly under the control of the CCP.

Kaiser: So far, yeah.

Yasheng: So far, right? And this is why the succession failures have not translated into catastrophe. My worry, though, is, to some extent, the military now is more powerful than before and also under a leader who has elevated the importance of war, and that elevates the importance of the military. My worry is that as ideology is declining, as economic growth is slowing down, my fear is that China is moving toward a more militaristic autocracy, similar to Latin America, and coupled with succession difficulties. I don’t really know how to think about that. When you have a more powerful military, when you have economic difficulties, when you have succession complications, they’re going to have to deal with the successions sooner and later. You can’t really avoid that issue. I think it’s going to become a very complicated situation going down the road.

Kaiser: Yeah, I fear it will.

Yasheng: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I fear for that scenario.

Kaiser: Let’s talk about the T in EAST, about technology. You set out to answer, in your own way, the famous Needham question. I think most of our listeners will be familiar with Joseph Needham. We can briefly ID him here for those who don’t. He was a British biochemist. He had a romantic dalliance with a Chinese graduate student who used to visit him, Lu Gui-zhen. I think her name was Lu Gui-zhen. Then he became fascinated with the Chinese language and then with science in China. Before his death in 1995, he actually oversaw the publication of some six volumes, most of them in multiple parts, of this magisterial science and civilization in China, which you are now intimately familiar with. The Needham question is really why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place, not in China, but in Europe? Why despite China’s quite prodigious advances in science up till the late medieval period?

Let’s talk about this. You created a database of inventions, which was just enormous, and you did it in the most interesting way. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you wanted to do this in the first place?

Yasheng: Well, first of all, I’m collaborating with a number of Chinese professors on the book project. We have finished about two out of six chapters. It’s under contract with Princeton University Press. Just on the Needham question. We don’t deal with each exam and autocracies. I think by being a professor at MIT, I got very interested in… I’m not a tech person, unlike you, I’m not a tech person. I’m not an entrepreneur.

Kaiser: Neither am I really.

Yasheng: Well, you have a history. And technology and science have played such a large role. So, I got interested in that topic, but my previous interest was understanding the science and technology in CCP. But I began to really think historically about why China was once so advanced in technology and why it simply disappeared as a technological power. So that’s a Needham question. Needham asked that question very forcefully in 1969. And I began to reveal the literature, began to read. I mean, I wasn’t impressed with the answers. Mostly, not because the answers themselves are right or wrong, it’s because I don’t really know whether they’re right or wrong. It is just all kind of speculative, it’s all very vague and broad generalizations about Chinese culture, about lack of scientific attitude and this and that.

All of that can be correct, except there’s no proof of that. There’s no evidence whether or not any of that really explains anything. The other thing is when you look into this literature a little bit deeper, even the ones written by Needham himself, exactly when Chinese technology began to decline is very fussy. Needham said, “Oh, it began to decline in the 17th century, 16th century.” If you look at the empirical graph he constructed, it wasn’t constructed on the basis of data. It was constructed out of his own mind. It was really a mental graph rather than an empirical graph.

Kaiser: Sure.

Yasheng: He’s a biochemist but his pronouncements are not data-driven. It’s totally understandable because he’s a towering figure. I have enormous respect for him, the collections that he managed to create. It’s just unbelievable. Don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely enormous respect for Joseph Needham, but I think we can do better. Let me put it in a different way. We can build on the work by Needham and others and take it to the next level, which is data-driven. But then how do you do it? So, six years, well, actually, more than six years ago, I got money. By the way, our applications from the National Science Foundation, both in the U.S. and China were rejected, so I raised money from the private sector to support digitization of the entries recorded by Needham and by Chinese historians of science. And the result is this database of over 10,000 entries, spanning 5th century BCE, all the way to the end of the 19th century.

This is the basis of our claim that Chinese science and technology were most advanced when China had more plurality. Before the Sui Dynasty. That is 1000 years earlier than what historians commonly believe the timing of Chinese technological decline. They usually say 17th century, 16th century. If you actually look at Needham’s dating of that, it’s really based on the rise of Western signs rather than the decline of the Chinese signs.

Kaiser: That’s what I suspect.

Yasheng: That made him argue further that the Chinese failed to develop science, and that was the reason why they couldn’t develop the Industrial Revolution. That argument in itself is problematic. And the empirical basis on which to make that argument is, at least if we go with our dataset, not correct.

Kaiser: Your dataset, though, is a list of actual inventions that are listed in Needham and in other sources, and your criterion for why they are worth calling an invention is simply because Needham says so.

Yasheng: I have no independent capability to second-guess Needham. People push back on that. All I can say is, as academics, all we can do is rebuild the work of the prior generations of scholars, right?

Kaiser: Yeah. I have no objection to that. Here’s where I would push back a little bit though. You demonstrate a really strong correlation between periods of maximum inventiveness in China with periods of decentralization of political fragmentation of fracture. We have the Spring and Autumn period. Actually, that starts a little before. So, that’s 771 to 580/570 BC. But the Warring States period. Then the three kingdoms and The Southern and Northern Dynasties, 南北朝 (Nán-Běi Cháo). These are also periods of endemic warfare. I suspect that we’d see a pretty strong correlation in Europe also between technological inventiveness and the prevalence of warfare. Is warfare just another scope condition to you? Because look, you do grant that the Han-Sui interregnum, as you call it, was a period that had maybe too damn many scope conditions. I mean, it was violent. It was extremely violent.

Yasheng: Yeah.

Kaiser: I wonder if you have a way to include warfare as a driver or to deal with that in some way.

Yasheng: That’s an excellent question and excellent pushback. The correlation is there, I’m not going to deny it, but let me sort of acknowledge that and then add a number of other points. Why is it that there was a later period when China also fell into disunity? It’s called the 五代十国 （Wǔdài shí guó) (Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period).

Kaiser: It’s only 60 years, though.

Yasheng: Yeah, that’s true.

Kaiser: 53 years.

Yasheng: It was shorter than the Han-Sui interregnum. First of all, you don’t see this burst of inventiveness during that period of time. Maybe it’s so short, maybe that’s the reason. But the 五代十国 （Wǔdài shí guó) era already had ideological closure as compared with the Han-Sui interregnum. But that’s a weaker defense. By the way, we are working on these issues now, in our current book. In the book that you read, I didn’t go into that. There are other points that I want to make. The other is that war definitely makes a country, period, more inventive by demanding military technology. That’s true. But think about that statement. That’s all on the demand side, right? It’s not automatic that the supply will be there.

As we all know, from technology, the simple existence of demand doesn’t always translate into supply. When you have the right conditions, like coming up with new ideas and things like that. Think about the Manhattan Project. Just imagine that Hitler didn’t prosecute Jewish scientists, and you don’t have those people coming to the United States, right? Just the fact that you have the war may not have some lead to the success of the Manhattan program. So, the human creativity, the scientific power. We need both. We need the supply conditions. And the supply conditions, I would argue, are one government support, Manhattan Project, right? Government support. The other is the scope.

I’m reading Oppenheimer’s book, and it was just fascinating how these scientists debated with each other and contested each other in terms of their different ideas. Demand conditions do not translate automatically into supply conditions. Supply conditions require human ingenuity, creativity, and those things. The other thing that we can do, and we’re planning to do that, is to categorize technology into military technology and non-military technology. If the Han-Sui interregnum was as inventive in non-war-related technologies, then it cannot be totally explained by war, right? So, Kaiser, I agree with you 100%. There are people who made that point about Europe because Europe was divided, they constantly fought with each other, and therefore they needed military technology. I agree 100% with that. But there are other non-military technologies that Europe also pioneered. And that capability to come up with those technologies is a function of something else.

This is probably not a very clear explanation. It’s kind of clear in my mind, but maybe I didn’t express it clearly enough.

Kaiser: Clear enough. In any case, we both agree that the Tang, which, of course, follows on the Sui, strikes a very nice balance where you have both scope conditions, but sufficient political control. It’s a nice balance between scale and scope. I guess you asked the tantalizing question, which is the driver for the balance of the book, is the reform era, CCP, like the Tang in that respect? Was it autocratic and repressive, but still managed to have scope conditions? I, obviously, thought so. I mean, during that reform period, that’s what I named my band, Tang Dynasty. And it was sort of for that exact reason without evoking scale and scope. I thought this is another period of hopefully cultural efflorescence that was driven by a spirit of cosmopolitanism and openness.

Because you make this argument. I think a lot of people would probably be surprised. I certainly agree that China’s technological progress under the CCP during the reform period was not just a matter of scale and scale alone. That it’s actually in the blurred line between the state and private sector. You argue instead that during this period of reform and opening, China had scope conditions that were different than the ones we ordinarily envisioned. So, walk us through, what were the scope conditions of China during the reform and opening period?

Yasheng: We do come back to this definition of the Reform Era. I believe that era to be from 1978 to 2018. When I talk about the Reformation period, I was talking specifically about those years rather than since 2018.

Kaiser: 2018, obviously, is the year that Xi Jinping abolished the term limits. That’s why the end of reform era.

Yasheng: Yeah. That was almost like the operational definition of the end of the reform era.

Kaiser: Sure.

Yasheng: I think there were several elements. One was critically academic collaboration. When I was doing the research for that chapter, I was really genuinely surprised to find out that China began to engage in scientific collaborations before economic reforms, before economic opening to FDI, to foreign trade.

Kaiser: That’s right.

Yasheng: Very early on. It was probably not something that people pay attention to, but I did. Just the sequencing of it was so striking. China began to send students to America before the two countries established diplomatic relations or re-established a relationship. China signed agreements with France on scientific agreements before China promulgated joint venture laws. That was like head on the very forefront of Deng Xiaoping’s reform agenda. Most people think about that as a human capital way, right? Training the students and things like that. Getting foreign education. I agree with that. But think about the implication of that. When you move a scientist from Tsinghua University to MIT, she is going to have the academic freedom of MIT. She gets trained at MIT, probably a more powerful scientific institution. Definitely, there’s that human capital effect.

But she gets to enjoy the academic freedom of the West, right? This is an argument that I made in that chapter, which is that China succeeded because China, even though it didn’t have academic freedom itself, it could borrow part of it by collaboration. And then I can extend that analogy to commerce and technology. Think about Huawei. The success of Huawei was a result of collaboration. It collaborated with French companies, British companies, and American companies. Its mobile phone has an excellent camera. It collaborated with the German, is it Leica or Zeiss? I forgot.

Kaiser: It’s Zeiss.

Yasheng: Zeiss, right? So, it is a result of collaboration rather than going alone. This kind of insularity idea — “Oh, China succeeded because of the whole government abroad.” There’s that. I’m not going to say that’s not important, but the scale only succeeded in areas where you also had the scope. If you look at the high-tech sectors, high-tech startups, they borrowed the legal and financial autonomy of Hong Kong and other overseas territories. This is very, very different from the view that China succeeded only because of government support. They succeeded in the context of globalization. They succeeded in the context of academic, commercial, globalization and institutional globalization, and in the context of government support. It is not the opposite of conventional argument. It is adding an extra layer of explanation as compared with the conventional explanation. And the issue now is you only have the government support left. Can you carry on the same rate of success as before? My conjecture is no.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, there are some people who would say that they’ve kind of passed a critical mass already where they’ve enjoyed those scope conditions for long enough that the foundations are in place that maybe it can sort of run on fumes for a while still and continue to deliver.

Yasheng: Well, I mean, how do you do that with semiconductors? I don’t get it. It is a highly collaborative industry.

Kaiser: Speaking of collaboration, I’m glad to see that the Biden administration at least decided to provisionally renew the U.S.-China’s science and technology agreement for six months. But gosh, I mean, it’s imperiled again. I’m very worried. And I’m doing a show about that very, very soon.

Yasheng: I applaud the decision. I think doing science is an open activity. It benefits mankind, it benefits everybody. There’s no reason that we cannot collaborate with China on scientific research. Technology, sensitive technology, we can have a debate, but in terms of open science, we should collaborate with anybody because that’s beneficial.

Kaiser: You talk about how China has this knack for scaling up, scaling over, and scaling fast. And you offer some really interesting examples of projects that embody this ability. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yasheng: Yeah. So, I gave a number of examples. One is the health code, right?

Kaiser: Right, sure. COVID health codes.

Yasheng: COVID health code. Some people are wary of a negative on that. But during the early days of the pandemic, it really, really worked in terms of more targeted quarantine. It was a classic example of being able to scale, but also being able to collaborate. One of the things that people don’t mention very often is that the technological solutions were provided by the private sector.

Kaiser: That’s right. Tencent and Alibaba.

Yasheng: By Tencent and Alibaba. It was not provided by the government. Usually, we think about that. We celebrate that as a successful example of private-public sector collaboration, right? Well, but Xi Jinping may have a different idea. The other example I gave is 5G, and that, again, is a collaboration. Huawei is a private-sector company, and government policy obviously is public, right? So, that’s a collaboration. I have fundamental problems with the claim that Chinese successes are all a result of scale. If you look at these examples in great detail, scale is there, but scope is there as well. I don’t want to say government support doesn’t matter, or even counterproductive. I’m not a kind of a hierarchy believer. I do believe in the power of the government, but the power of the government is important and effective only in the context of collaborations and scope conditions.

Historically speaking, that’s also true. We have a measure of government support for inventions by looking at the proportion of inventors being on the government payroll. And that has been very substantial. But then China began to decline when the scope conditions disappeared.

Kaiser: I want to leave most of the rest of the book, the conclusions that you draw about where China is right now, and the precarious future of the whole EAST system that you talk about because of Xi Jinping’s virtual illumination of scope conditions. I want to encourage you to talk about that when you deliver your keynote address at our conference and leave something for that. Meanwhile, though, there is one issue that I want to push back on, and then one issue that I want to ask you about. When you talk about Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, you argue that he’s painted himself into a corner by pursuing anti-corruption to the extent that he has. He’s made it basically impossible for him to step down.

After having purged 4 million party members, or investigated at least 4 million party members, he’s now got too many enemies that stepping down is basically impossible. But was a rebalancing, favoring scale over scope made necessary just by the sheer extent of corruption in 2012 when he took office? It seems to me like a surgical approach, like the one that prevailed during Xi’s predecessors, where they would do occasional anti-corruption drives instead of this now, seven or eight year-long campaign. Gosh, no — more. It’s 10 years now.

Yasheng: That’s a 10 year; 10-year campaign.

Kaiser: 10-year campaign. Would that even have been close to sufficient to put a dent in the problem? I feel like, sure, he painted himself in a corner, but what else could he have done?

Yasheng: Oh, I think there are other things that he could have done while minimizing the political liabilities. First of all, we all know that if you have to purge 4 million officials, it is a systemic problem, not an individual problem, right?

Kaiser: Oh, yeah.

Yasheng: Is there anything that he has done that suggests a systemic approach? I would argue no. He’s going after these individuals, right? Just think about 4 million people. Behind these 4 million people, there are spouses, children, and supporters. You multiply that 4 million by four or five – you antagonize 20 million people, 16 million people. And these are powerful people too. I would argue a rational autocrat has to do things taking into account both the positive effects of his actions as well as the potential liabilities. You want to be smart about that. You don’t want to antagonize 20 million people. What I think should have been done is you are absolutely right that by 2012, the corruption was endemic, pervasive, and many people applauded the anti-corruption campaign at that time.

What I think would have been a better approach is to declare some sort of amnesty. So, you return the assets by February, whatever, 16th of 2013. And that’s it. I don’t really punish you as a person.

Kaiser: That requires quite a bit of trust.

Yasheng: Well, true. But by doing that, you can create trust. And this is a Singaporean system, by the way.

Kaiser: Sure.

Yasheng: I mean, essentially, if you don’t comply, I go after you, right? And that’s what they did anyway. They went after 4 million people. It doesn’t actually require trust, it requires the belief that if you don’t do it, I have a way of knowing that you lied, that you cheated. Very few people believed that Xi Jinping could really purge 4 million people at the beginning of his leadership, but he proved that he could do it. There’s no reason why I think you could improve yourself to be effective in discovering these problems exposed. I would argue that doing that both gets to the issue of corruption. So, from now on, you cannot do this anymore, right? But I don’t really punish you for your past behavior. That’s one.

The other, maybe that’s too much to ask, is to reform the system. Disclosure, asset disclosure, transparency. But that requires a belief that the system is problematic. I do want to say that this is different from the traditional methods, and there are two traditional methods. One is killing the chicken to show to the monkey.

Kaiser: 杀鸡儆猴 (Shājījìnghóu).

Yasheng: That was basically Zhang Zemin, Hu Jintao’s approach. They went after two or three people, but clearly, that didn’t scare off the monkey. There were so many monkeys that emerged. So that didn’t quite work. And the other is killing the chickens and the monkeys. That’s Xi Jinping’s approach.

Kaiser: Tigers and flies both, right?

Yasheng: Tigers and flies. I think the problem with that approach is like riding the bicycle, you cannot stop.

Kaiser: That’s right. Got the tiger by the tail.

Yasheng: We’re seeing that now. I mean, one idea is, “oh, after the 20th Party Congress, that’s the end of it.” No, now they’re looking into the medical hospitals and doctors. It is riding a bicycle, it cannot stop. Once you stop, you’re viewed as weak, and you invite challenges. So, you always want to get ahead of your challenges. It is not a very good method.

Kaiser: Well, you’ll hear a lot more from Yasheng Huang at our conference, which I really hope a lot of you’ll be able to attend in New York on November 2nd. Of course, for the listeners to read for themselves, the book is going to be out on August 29th. It’s called The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. Thank you so much for your time, Yasheng. This has just been fantastic. I have so many more questions I would love to ask you, but we’ll save it for another time.

Let’s move on now to recommendations. First, a quick reminder, again, of our upcoming Next China Conference, which is November 2nd in New York. It’s a wonderful event space that we’ve got on the East River in Midtown East. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, not just today’s guest, Yasheng Huang, but also highly interactive breakout sessions where there’s bound to be just all sorts of topics that listeners will be keen to dig into with the speakers that we’ve invited. I’m really looking forward to this. There’s even going to be a game show to wrap up the day. So, get your tickets now. Just click on events from our page at thechinaproject.com. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. I’ve kept you for so long, I feel that bad, but Yasheng, what do you have for us?

Yasheng: Well, I’m going to be boring as a professor. I’m going to recommend a book. I’m reading the biography of Oppenheimer, the American Prometheus. I haven’t seen the movie because I want to finish the book before I see the movie. So, there’s one tidbit on the book that I thought inspired me to think about these issues that way, and it’s related to my current project. If you look at Oppenheimer and others in the Manhattan Project, these were the path breakers. The father, mostly father, but there’s actually also female scientists of the atom bomb. These were original creators. Many of them were left-wing, communists, right? Or sympathizers with communism. Whereas if you look at the Soviet Union and China, who also followed the footsteps, created their own atom bomb, I bet the scientists there were communists as well.

Rebels create, conformists replicate. The book didn’t make the argument at all. The book is not about the Soviet Union, it’s about China, but I’m going to work that into my current book. And so, replication actually requires conformity. Peter Thiel’s idea about zero to one requires breaking the current methods and breaking out of the current mode. And that requires a rebel, right? A communist in the capitalist system is a rebel. There’s a book by the title of something like Hippies and Physics, and I’m going to reread the book. I read it a while ago. So, kind of like a similar idea. I recommend the book both because Oppenheimer is a fascinating individual, but it also gave me, at least this particular insight, which I’m going to build up for my next book.

Kaiser: Fascinating. I have seen the movie. The movie is quite good. I mean, I didn’t bother to recommend it just because everyone’s seen it along with Barbie.

Yasheng: I’m now recommending the movie, I mean, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m recommending the movie.

Kaiser: Well, I think you’ll enjoy the movie. It’s quite good. And it’s based very much on American Prometheus, yeah. That’s a great recommendation. All right, so my recommendation is something much more frivolous. It’s a YouTube channel by this guy named Drew Durnil, D-U-R-N-I-L, who publishes pretty much every day. It’s just focused on global geography, on history and economics. It just makes it extraordinarily accessible for young people. My daughter, actually, I kept seeing her watching this YouTube guy, and she got me hooked on it. He’s got like 900 plus videos, and they’re all, I mean, he’s constantly looking at statistics, at graphs, at charts, at maps, just showing different rankings of different geographies on different issues. It’s a fun and pretty enriching overview constantly of facts and stats about our world. He’s very clever. All sorts of just interesting tidbits from current social science studies and polling and so forth. He’s doing his part, I think, to combat the well-known ignorance of Americans about geography. Definitely check it out, especially if you are a younger listener or you have younger children or siblings that you want to show this to.

Yasheng: Oh, I’ll look into it. Yeah.

Kaiser: Yasheng, what a pleasure. And congratulations on an excellent, excellent book. I know you’re going to have lots of people talking about it both positively and critically, but I’m sure you’re very well prepared for that.

Yasheng: Thank you, Kaiser. It has been such a pleasure to have such an extensive conversation that I really enjoyed from the very beginning to the end.

Kaiser: Thank you. I am really looking forward to seeing you in New York in November.

Yasheng: Yeah, I’ll see you. Thank you.

Kaiser: 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 review at Apple Podcasts as that really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Xitter, as it’s now called, or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.