A great deal about our lives in the coming years will be determined by the conduct of the United States, the conduct of China, and, no less, the nature of their encounter. It behooves us to understand what exactly this encounter consists of. Is this a race to superintend the world? Is this a battle royale of democracy and tyranny? Is this a story of two revolutions with very different lessons about how to achieve a good society?
Few people are more qualified to understand the inner life of this vital relationship as Evan Osnos. Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker (it’s like a Substack but printed out), a longtime China-based correspondent, and now someone who reports deeply about American life in this age of tempests.
From Osnos’s book “Age of Ambition,” on China, to his more recent work digging into the roots of American rage and the lives of America’s oligarchs, Osnos has always concerned himself with the individual-, human-level happenings that are the stuff of any nation’s rise, fall, or muddling through.
It’s a perspective I found sorely lacking when absorbing much of the recent commentary about President Trump’s visit to China. So many commentators on foreign policy are focused on the question of who will be more powerful — the dominance frame. But this frame, while useful in certain ways, misses so much of what is really going inside China — and, therefore, of what drives its behavior.
So I was thrilled to be able to have this extended conversation with Osnos about China, America, and their ties — and to discuss with him the kinds of things you can’t always explore in a three-minute cable hit:
— How does China view Trump and the era of American chaos he presides over?
— What does the dominance frame miss about what China as a government and the Chinese people as a people aspire to?
— What kinds of world power is China indeed interested in — and which less so? Is China interested in American-style policing of the world and unrivaled hegemony, or rather in the removal of constraints on it?
— What does the Chinese socioeconomic experience of the last generation prove or disprove about democracy and prosperity? And is a successful run now curdling?
— Why does China not listen to its billionaires the way the United States does? And what does that tell us about our democracy?
— What do public aspirations to “freedom” look like in China today? Electoral democracy? The elimination of want? Accountability? Unfettered speech?
— How can everyday Americans educate themselves to understand the real China and the aspirations of the people who make it up, and not be limited by the international-relations types’ obsession with who will run the world in the twenty-first century?
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