Adam Tooze

by liberal japonicus

I’ve mentioned my frustration with Klein a few times, but I was grateful to hear his talk with Adam Tooze. I think the title is rather misleading which continues to hang on to the idea that the US is central, because most of the podcast is about China.

Here is the transcript (thanks GftNC!)though I find this one particularly hard to follow because it bounces around. Some observations out of order.

One thing that I didn’t realize (and I think it is indicative of a US/Western centric bent of my thinking) was that the Chinese were in Davos. (18:48) Perhaps it was just me, but I wonder how many people thought the same way that I did, that the Chinese were not at Davos and they just don’t participate in these things. He mentions a “Summer Davos, which alternates between Dalian and Tianjin.” A little more digging reveals this is this is formally called ‘The annual meeting of the New Champions‘. Gemini (there is no wikipedia entry) notes that Dalian, a port city in northeast China and Tianjin (the wikipedia entry is quite interesting, noting that it is the 15th largest city in the world and has the highest scientific research outputs in the world) are the two sites and has been rotating between them since 2007.

Tooze points out one particularly pungent irony, which is that the “Chinese play down their wolf warrior position to do the lovely multilateralist thing at Davos.” (from 20:05), noting that the Chinese are basically arguing for a multilateral world.

I’ll dig in a bit with the ‘wolf warrior’ reference. It was originally a reference to a Chinese film, 战狼 (Zhàn Láng) and its follow up Wolf Warrior 2, and it is basically what one might get if you tossed Rambo, Missing in Action, Commando and any of their lesser copies in a blender. Muscular, interventionist sort of stuff and there are some pretty interesting themes, but what is fascinating to me is 1)this comes from publically consumed culture and 2)the Chinese were initially at pains to say they weren’t, but then leaned into it. The wikipedia entry says “Wolf warrior diplomacy is a confrontational form of public diplomacy adopted by diplomats of the People’s Republic of China in the late 2010s and early 2020s” yet fails to note that the name was from Western commentators, not Chinese, but the Chinese then took to it. Reading the wikipedia summary, it’s difficult to figure out how much is put on the Chinese and how much they took on, but the timeline makes it clear that it was the West’s idea, and only later taken on by Chinese, making it seem like linguistic reappropriation, the kind that we often see with minority groups. Funny how that works.

A second point that Tooze makes is this (and I want to quote it so I don’t add spin)

I think it’s truly difficult for any of us — and I absolutely include myself, coming from the West — to steady a stable, analytical position on China.

We are torn between a fascination and, indeed, infatuation with it. It is, after all, the single most dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, bar none, full stop.

On the other hand, a kind of “Oh, but it can’t possibly work, because, because, because.” I can sit with my liberal colleagues at Columbia, and we can all make the list, right? I think we basically need to check all our prejudices at the door, and on an even deeper level, we need to recognize the fact that what’s happening in China, one way or the other, is the big N. All of our history today is small n, in terms of sample size by comparison with what they’re doing there.

I feel like this is a frightening, but important (and correct) conclusion.

There are tons of interesting thing, so I hope you’ll listen/read it rather than asking your local AI to summarize it for you, but this one popped out.

What Carney himself argued, back in 2019 in this very interesting Jackson Hole paper — you should maybe link it in the show notes or something, it’s really worth going back to — is that it could be the case that a multipolar order, which isn’t a single order but is multiple different orders that are overlapping, very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a mesh — could have stability properties that a bipolar order doesn’t have. He argues in that paper that the interests of the future will be best served not by looking for a new unipolar actor or perpetuating a bipolar system but in the proliferation of networks of stability and ordering.

This paper is here and Tooze is right, it’s the same core idea that he gave in the Davos speech, minus the hair on fire quality it has when being juxtaposed with Orange Shitstain’s unhinged word vomit. In fact, one of the interesting things is that after listening to Tooze, I imagine I have an idea of how historians will view this, something baked in to the progression of events rather than some sort of sui generis event loosed on us by Trump.

Have at it. It certainly has me thinking I need to take yet another run at studying Chinese.