This was a superb episode. I have only one nit to pick: You said that you can say anything in America without being punished by the government. While it’s true that we won’t be shot, we are being threatened with criminal prosecution if we talk about “woke” topics like DEI. Lawyers are advising companies and universities to watch what you say, for fear that the Justice Department will come after you. I am currently trying to figure out if I can talk about environmental justice in the Climate Law class I teach. It’s much more authoritarian than in the first Trump Administration.
I came here from Robert Wrights podcast. You should engage more with people who disagree with you. It was a very good conversation where the pushback clarified my own thinking on the issue.
Great discussion! The section early on about ‘revolutionary justice’ reminded me of the book ‘State Formation in China and Taiwan’ by Julia C. Strauss. The way in which Leninist systems demand internal change and seek constant transformation of society makes them so much harder to evade and avoids institutionalisation. The system can never really coagulate.
Strauss compares the way the new PRC and ROC regimes established themselves in East China and on Taiwan after 1949 using campaign style governance, based on the belief that bureaucrats should not just be technocrats.
It was the CCP’s ‘revolutionary’ use of the people as a bloc against the enemy and mobilisation campaigns for transforming both victim and participant that set it apart from the rebuilt KMT. The KMT sought to mobilise cadres to construct a ‘legal’ to discipline individuals. In the end, once the system was there, it could solidify and even ossify as the democratisation movement played with its fixed target. The target in Beijing was ever-changing.
Loved the deep dive into dissident literature. Both Sinyavsky and Daniel were new to me.
China's own "dissident" literature space seems to have less restrictions on it as long as the party is not directly mentioned. In fact, a rather scathing critique of the current authoritarian and societal hierarchies - and the ethics that they produce - "Ten Days of Doom"《十日终焉》 has won first prize in the 2025 Beijing Online Literature Contest (organized by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department, China Writers Association, and the Beijing Writers Association). It was selected as one of the top 10 best online novels of 2024 by the China Fiction Association and even currently being made into a TV adaption. The book is one of the most read works on the Tomato Novel app (番茄小说) having over 22 million readers.
As long as you are creative enough in making your dictator a humanoid-dragon and your bureaucrats Daoist infused zodiac animals, you can get away with quite a lot!
Less recently, Hao Jingfang 郝景芳 won a Hugo in 2016 for her novelette "Folding Beijing", a critique of the stark social inequality that can be found all over first-tier cities.
On the topic of the decline in systemic legitimacy that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I wonder how much was the result of the self-interest that took hold across the population as a result of the regime's attempts to protect itself from uprisings.
In reading Solzhenitsyn, he paints a picture of how completely the bonds of community and civilization were destroyed over decades as a result of the intelligence and police agencies. Perhaps the fraying of these bonds became so extensive that there was really nothing uniting the country when push came to shove. And by implication, the Soviet state only had a nominal, skin-deep legitimacy by that point.
Naturally this presents an ironic paradox to the Chinese interpretations of the failure of the Soviet Union; the more the CCP tries to reinforce itself to preserve its legitimacy, the more likely it will destroy the social fabric that its continuation rests upon.
Wow, this is an amazing topic choice, one that I’ve long dreamed of! Nathan’s book is one of my favorites in the past year
incredible book
This was a superb episode. I have only one nit to pick: You said that you can say anything in America without being punished by the government. While it’s true that we won’t be shot, we are being threatened with criminal prosecution if we talk about “woke” topics like DEI. Lawyers are advising companies and universities to watch what you say, for fear that the Justice Department will come after you. I am currently trying to figure out if I can talk about environmental justice in the Climate Law class I teach. It’s much more authoritarian than in the first Trump Administration.
https://www.dorsey.com/newsresources/publications/client-alerts/2025/2/dojs-new-memoranda
I came here from Robert Wrights podcast. You should engage more with people who disagree with you. It was a very good conversation where the pushback clarified my own thinking on the issue.
Great discussion! The section early on about ‘revolutionary justice’ reminded me of the book ‘State Formation in China and Taiwan’ by Julia C. Strauss. The way in which Leninist systems demand internal change and seek constant transformation of society makes them so much harder to evade and avoids institutionalisation. The system can never really coagulate.
Strauss compares the way the new PRC and ROC regimes established themselves in East China and on Taiwan after 1949 using campaign style governance, based on the belief that bureaucrats should not just be technocrats.
It was the CCP’s ‘revolutionary’ use of the people as a bloc against the enemy and mobilisation campaigns for transforming both victim and participant that set it apart from the rebuilt KMT. The KMT sought to mobilise cadres to construct a ‘legal’ to discipline individuals. In the end, once the system was there, it could solidify and even ossify as the democratisation movement played with its fixed target. The target in Beijing was ever-changing.
Loved the deep dive into dissident literature. Both Sinyavsky and Daniel were new to me.
China's own "dissident" literature space seems to have less restrictions on it as long as the party is not directly mentioned. In fact, a rather scathing critique of the current authoritarian and societal hierarchies - and the ethics that they produce - "Ten Days of Doom"《十日终焉》 has won first prize in the 2025 Beijing Online Literature Contest (organized by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department, China Writers Association, and the Beijing Writers Association). It was selected as one of the top 10 best online novels of 2024 by the China Fiction Association and even currently being made into a TV adaption. The book is one of the most read works on the Tomato Novel app (番茄小说) having over 22 million readers.
As long as you are creative enough in making your dictator a humanoid-dragon and your bureaucrats Daoist infused zodiac animals, you can get away with quite a lot!
Less recently, Hao Jingfang 郝景芳 won a Hugo in 2016 for her novelette "Folding Beijing", a critique of the stark social inequality that can be found all over first-tier cities.
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/
On the topic of the decline in systemic legitimacy that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I wonder how much was the result of the self-interest that took hold across the population as a result of the regime's attempts to protect itself from uprisings.
In reading Solzhenitsyn, he paints a picture of how completely the bonds of community and civilization were destroyed over decades as a result of the intelligence and police agencies. Perhaps the fraying of these bonds became so extensive that there was really nothing uniting the country when push came to shove. And by implication, the Soviet state only had a nominal, skin-deep legitimacy by that point.
Naturally this presents an ironic paradox to the Chinese interpretations of the failure of the Soviet Union; the more the CCP tries to reinforce itself to preserve its legitimacy, the more likely it will destroy the social fabric that its continuation rests upon.