Dan Wang: commitment

Transcript context

…How has knowing classical music helped you to understand China better? I think a lot about the Communist Party as a Leninist technocracy with grand opera characteristics. If you watch some of these proceedings from the party congresses held by the Communist Party, which take place every five years, it really feels like watching a Wagnerian opera by other means, in which there’s less noise, but much greater drama. The last party congress was, of course, the party congress in which Xi Jinping more or less forcibly removed his predecessor, Hu Jintao, after Hu Jintao tugged away at some papers. Now, I still don’t understand what exactly happened there. I wonder if we will ever have a good answer of what Hu Jintao was looking at, and what he was objecting to, and why Xi Jinping decided to humiliate an elder in that way. What I am much keener for is to avoid these Wagnerian excesses, in which every so often it really feels like the Communist Party is ready to march the entire country into Valhalla with them. I would love it if the Chinese had a little bit of a better sense of the comic operas of Rossini, or Mozart, or Donizetti, who have smiling optimism, who have a sense of irony, who have a sense of humor. China’s Politburo is totally po-faced. There’s no humor among them, but there is just so much wonderful irony, especially in Mozart, in which, take a look at a lot of the love songs, almost none of them are meant to be very sincere, and meant to really declare love for the intended target. What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?…

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