Sarah Paine: recommendation

Transcript context

…hina. You want all your neighbors quarreling over their borders so that Russia can then set the terms and that it can nibble them away a bite at a time, or if it can take a whole thing, good for them. So Russian national identity is not only about empire, territorial extent. It also has some big ideas attached to it, an ideology that somehow this territorial expansion is either progressive, beneficial or positive. It’s a myth. Under the czars, the ideology was this Third Rome, of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Third Rome was in Moscow. I know this is news to you. I’ll explain how it works. There’s the Rome we all know about, the “Rome” Rome. That was Rome number one. The one where the Pope is. Rome number two, according to the Russians, has to do with the Byzantine Empire. That was Constantinople, or Istanbul. When that falls, the Russians go, “Ta-da, it’s Moscow.” Not really, but they used this Russian Orthodoxy and spread the Russian Orthodox Church back in the day deep into Eastern Europe. When the Communists get in, they’re not spreading Russian Orthodoxy, they’re spreading communism. The problem for Putin is that today neither communism nor Russian Orthodoxy are marketable ideologies. He’s just stuck with being a really big place. That’s where his little focus is. Russia has a nightmare scenario. They don’t always win these wars. They lose quite often. The Mongol yoke or the Yellow Peril, their terminology, not mine, is the 13th century when the Mongols just swept in and the Russian elites became tax collectors for the Mongols, an extractive role that has endured. You think about Russians, they extract resources, their own, other peoples, but they’re not known for producing wealth. It’s just resource extraction. This is some of the legacy of all of that. The Russians have also suffered devastating defeats, to Napoleon, in World War I and World War II, that just devastated Western Russia. So they’ve had bad times. In our own time, Putin is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to China’s ambitions. So if he keeps the game up, he may well wind up with a Chinese yoke, and his nightmare will be there for him. is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to China’s ambitions. So if he keeps the game up, he may well wind up with a Chinese yoke, and his nightmare will be there for him. The Chinese also have their own big ideas, not religious ideas or empire, but about civilization itself. Traditionally, the Chinese believe there’s only one civilization, that would be theirs. It’s based on Confucianism. That would be a world order unto itself. That worked for them for a couple thousand years. There are certain pillars of legitimacy that have endured, probably originating from this, but enduring ones. One is ethical rule. Well, that’s gone for the Communist Party. Let’s try the next one. Economic prosperity. Whoops, going fast. That leaves the Communists today with territorial expansion. That’s ongoing with territory incursions into India, South China Sea island building, and then all these gathering threats to Taiwan. In part, what’s going on is that the Communist Party wants to play the nationalism card the same way Putin is. If you haven’t got anything else for you, play jingoistic nationalism, because we human beings seem to be particularly attentive to that one. So if you focus on that, maybe the Chinese people won’t look at the ethical lapses of the Communist Party or the fact that their paychecks aren’t going anywhere anymore. Good old Xi, he doesn’t have a marketable ideology anymore. What’s really scary is that Confucianism had just been this enduring feature of China—dynasties came and went, but Confucianism stayed—until China was unable to fend off Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War that I told you about and the Europeans in the Opium Wars, when all of a sudden Confucianism just seemed totally inadequate. When enough Chinese cease believing in Confucianism, that’s when you get the 1911 Revolution and it just vanishes as an organizing principle for running your government. This is the total nightmare. One of the frightening things for the Communist Party is when people cease believing in communism. China’s nightmare scenario is these horrible periods of chaos. They’re afraid that if the Communists go, that China’s going to devolve into these civil wars, these periods of Luàn (乱). A second one is that maybe the Soviet Union when it’s shattered, that may well be their fate, that maybe these communist regimes can’t last forever. So Russia’s nightmare scenario is other people invading Russia. China’s nightmare scenario is the collapse of China. It’s two different ways, two different things to worry about. The Chinese face a conundrum. If you no longer believe the economic theories on which communism is based, how do you justify one-party rule? The Communist Party has tried to soldier on without solving that problem. The Chinese have learned a great deal from watching Russians as they play around with big ideas. They learned a great deal from Mikhail Gorbachev when he tries to fix communism, but he winds up killing the patient. The Chinese, I think, their takeaways from what Gorbachev did is don’t hesitate to deploy the tanks. If you’ve got unrest in the streets, you just send tanks, tanks against civilians. ing the patient. The Chinese, I think, their takeaways from what Gorbachev did is don’t hesitate to deploy the tanks. If you’ve got unrest in the streets, you just send tanks, tanks against civilians. It’s a really quick fix. You want to focus on economic reforms to the extent you can, certainly not political reforms. You also really want to sinify your minorities. Why? In the Soviet Union, the Russians had had this fiction that all these occupied minority people wanted to be there and had equal rights. So they would sponsor all the nice folk dances and the language classes, and they’d have a bunch of token minorities in traditional dress and various political institutions. But basically they had no power. It meant when the Soviet Union shattered, there were plausible divisions already set up on an ethnic basis. That is how you get places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, et cetera. China’s like, “No way.” This helps explain the genocide of the Uyghurs that’s ongoing now. This is their rationale for doing it. Then what you want to do, you can see Xi Jinping doing it, is prioritize maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party over economic efficiency when those two things run at cross purposes. That helps explain some of Xi Jinping’s growth-depressing choices that he’s making. Gorbachev discovered when he tried to reform communism that democracy and communism just don’t mix. If you give people elections, they’re going to support multiple parties. When the communist track record becomes known—their incompetent economic management, summary executions, famines, just all the things that they’ve been up to—it’s very hard for them to remain in power. Also, as Gorbachev discovered, democracy and empire don’t mix. When you give different minorities a choice, or occupied places a choice to leave or stay, they bolt. There’s a consensus among the Han, the preponderant ethnic group in China, that they want to maintain the empire. So they don’t care how many Tibetans immolate themselves. That’s no longer going on now because the mortar has descended into Tibet. They don’t care how many Mongols complain about lost lands. The Han want to keep it. Also for the generation that survived the Cultural Revolution, which would be Xi Jinping, he’s precisely that age group, they do not ever want to go back to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. It was horrendous. So expect them to prioritize stability over liberty. This brings a third problem. Democracy and communism don’t mix and democracy and empire don’t mix. In an Internet cell phone age, where people are much more interconnected, how does a government maintain legitimacy to rule? Because elections are an incredibly powerful way to give authority to a government. This is where nationalism comes in. The Chinese Communist Party and the Russians likewise are trying to use jingoistic nationalism to stoke up popular loyalties, to deflect people from domestic problems and go, “Look at the hated outsiders.” They aren’t the only country to do this sort of thing, blaming outsiders. It’s all the immigrants’ fault or whatever.…

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