Chris Arnade: commitment

Transcript context

…I don’t think that’s their goal, but I think they want China to be happy enough. I don’t think they’re not altruists. I just think it’s a very nationalistic view of altruism where Chinese lexically come before other considerations. Anyone who’s ethnic Chinese ultimately falls under their purview, which is also different than, say, an American view. I’m going back again because I find it so fascinating, because I don’t understand it to the degree I feel like I understand other places. Other places, I come away with a pretty quick sense of describing a town in some ways. But both Beijing and Shanghai felt a little bit . . . Maybe it’s the scale because, again, they’re not really smart places to walk. Right. I find it’s oddly like America in a number of ways. I think you’ve written about this, too. Inward-looking, large, self-confident, business-oriented, pretty friendly, pragmatic. I think a lot of the CCP plan is improvised rather than planned. Something like the fertility crisis, I think they were not expecting. Really no one was. They don’t know what to do. They’ll try different things, and the larger the scale at which you operate, the more the so-called plan just becomes improvisation.…

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