Towards war with China? w/ Adam Tooze
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Adam Tooze. In today's episode I spoke with Adam about the extent to which war with China is increasingly being treated as a serious prospect in Washington and the Pentagon.

We also talked about how successful or otherwise the Biden administration has been in constructing regional alliances against China during the last four years. And we went on to talk about why the Chinese Communist Party leadership's decisions over climate policy dwarfed the US presidential election in significance. Finally, we discussed the economic slowdown in the country and Adam explained why he disagrees with analysts who see China's economic problems as primarily a consequence of increasing authoritarianism.

Adam Tooze is the Shelby Cullum Davis Chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He's the author of many books including Crashed, How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World, The Wages of Destruction, The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, and The Deluge, The Great War and the Making of the Global Order, 1916-1931. His most recent book is Shut Down, How Covid Shook the World's Economy.

So Adam, you've argued that the United States did not actively seek the wars in either Ukraine or in the Middle East. But you do make the case that the Biden administration has nevertheless very much sought to take advantage of both conflicts and treated them as windows of opportunity for

to advance US goals. In the case of Ukraine, the policy has been to bog down Russia in a war of attrition that would sap Russian military and economic strength. And we can talk, of course, about the extent to which that may or may not have succeeded, and to use the war to reinvigorate the NATO alliance.

In the Middle East, the US seems to view Israel's actions as offering a chance to reorder the region in US interests by degrading US enemies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iran. Although we have seen notably a greater degree of caution regarding the latter because Iran, of course, is a more capable adversary than those non-state actors.

In the background to all of this is, of course, China, viewed as the number one threat by the Biden administration, although hostility to China is very much a bipartisan affair. And there seem to be two things going on at the same time, which together appear to increase the odds of the US, whether deliberately or accidentally, embroiling itself in an armed conflict with the PRC.

Firstly, we've seen, of course, the gradual erosion and the breakdown of the widely held perception in America that the economic relationship between China and the United States was mutually beneficial and a shift into this zero-sum competition where the success of the United States and its ability to maintain primacy depends on defeating or containing China and blunting the technological edge of the Chinese economy.

And the second thing is the relative increase in China's military strength, which, as you pointed out repeatedly, increases even if the Chinese leadership does nothing. Because as a share of GDP, Chinese military spending has basically been stable for decades. But the speed of growth of the economy has meant that Chinese military power kept rising nonetheless.

And I just wanted to get your sense of just how dark and apocalyptic the thinking may be in Washington and the Pentagon vis-a-vis China. Is it your sense that the concept of war with the PRC is now viewed more as an inevitability than something to prepare for as something possible?

This is a fascinating question. I mean, it goes to a subtle distinction that I think is very important to make also with regard to all of the wars that we're facing right now, which is the distinction between an analytic of geopolitical tension and stress. One could even use the word conflict.

which I think is relatively easy to delineate. In other words, it's easy to see why there is a clash or a struggle, for instance, between a resentful Russia and the advancing program of Western integration around the EU and NATO in Ukraine. That's easy to see why that's a struggle. Likewise, in South China Sea and the expansion of China.

But to my mind, and this is, I don't know, rooted as much as anything, I guess, in thinking a lot about earlier moments of conflict and war. There is a qualitative leap from there to claiming that we understand or can really, you know, diagnose the decision to launch a large scale military operation and then to carry through with that and actually for the shooting to start.

And these for me, and it's important to say this, because this is where, for instance, very much differ from Mersheimer's analysis of Ukraine, that I wholly agree with him on the overall geoeconomic geopolitical tension. And I wrote about this in Crashed, and I actually think it does have some economic elements to which are important. But to my mind, that's wholly insufficient to explain the decision taken in the Kremlin sometime in 2021-21.

that this time they were for real and the troop buildup on the borders of Ukraine, as they were then, was the preliminary to actually the beginning of the invasion in February 2022. To me, that's a logical step that just doesn't follow through. And so this goes to your question, say, about the confrontation with China. I think, you know, the geoeconomics, the structural conflict between the US and China is now obvious.

You know, it's just staring us all in the face. Everyone understands it. It frames everything that goes on all the time. And it frames America's policy towards the Middle East and Russia. And if I, as you quite rightly said, if I argue that America, the Biden administration, was not looking for conflict in the Middle East and Russia, that's not because they're benign and herbivorous. It's because they were wanting to concentrate on the Chinese confrontation. It was a matter of priorities. But what I do think has happened, and it's a hugely significant shift, is that...

The prospect of war has now actually also become much more real. So the conflict is, you know, is a sort of just a structural given and influences everything all the way from, you know, academic, you know, fellowships and hosting of Chinese visitors and vice versa through to trade policy and industrial policy and everything else. But alarmingly, at the same time, there has also been a shift and this is more a qualitative shift

from the purely hypothetical to something which is more like, you know, a concrete fantasy of something that people actually could maybe imagine doing in the dimension of war. And I think there are different elements here, and they're kind of slightly paradoxical in their relationship to each other. One is banalization. You know, a lot of people in Washington, I can't speak about Beijing, but a lot of people in Washington right now spend their time thinking

in this extended sense, war gaming, imagining actual shooting conflicts between the United States and China. And there's only so much you can do with that before it, I think, banalization is the right phrase. So there's that going on. And it's been remarkable that it involves extraordinary coalitions of people. Like Congress actually engaged a bunch of Wall Street bankers in a war game. That kind of move, like where you hybridize and you bring different collections of people together

to get bankers to think about war. And then on the other hand, rather in the other direction, the shock of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I think also changed minds in Washington, because we know from very good, and I find extremely compelling and convincing, you know, on the ground immediate reporting, how difficult it was for the key decision makers in Washington from October 2021 to wrap their heads around the

the fact that we were going to move from a state of acknowledged tension to one in which that troop build-up actually indicated that sometime early in 2022, they were actually going to invade with tanks and rockets and airplanes and do the whole thing. But once you've gone through that, of course, it's really difficult to unthink that and to bury that experience. And rather the opposite has happened, I think, which is that now...

On the American side, at least, there is, as it were, the experience of having moved from fantasy and dark imagining to reality. And I think that's changed a lot of different things. And for me, the key moment to come back to China is the winter of 22 to 23, where there's the balloon incident. And then there are all these leaks coming out of the American military apparatus that

There's those famous memos from that bizarre general in the Pacific who's like a logistics guy and is getting his basically container teams and everything else onto a war footing because, quote unquote, his gut tells him that our next fight. Right. So there's a series of fights and you expect the next one and the next one was going to be with China and it's going to be in 2025.

And I know from inside sources, I won't elaborate on too much, but like very, very well connected people that this wasn't just, you know, it was in the Guardian, everyone read it, I think. But this wasn't a one off that that actually it wasn't just some crazy individual general. In fact, there was a very wide perception on the part of the top brass on the US side that.

that war sooner rather than later and proper war was quite likely. So at that level, yeah, I think something quite powerful has shifted. And then, of course, this accumulates, right? And so more and more conflicts like this, you start thinking in terms of hammers and then everything looks like a nail.

So, yes, I think there is a qualitative shift and it's very dramatic. And its most dark edge now is the nuclear rearmament, which is, you know, really gathering pace on the US side. Yeah, I mean, just this morning I was reading, I think it was a paper from the Atlantic Council, which was arguing that Washington needs to prepare for a simultaneous conflict on the Korean Peninsula and in the Taiwan Straits at the same time. And it's sort of like, you know, did you appreciate the horrificness of what you're...

what you're describing. They even want a three front one. Like if you, if the, the U S military, the U S army, I mean, you see this stuff like, you know, sort of percolating down through the military. There's a major organizational, you know, reworking of the U S army going on to build these combat units that are kind of modular and have this very long range strike capacity, but also capacity to fight close up.

And that is motivated, I think, even by a three-front war scenario, where they, in fact, envision two in Asia or one in Middle East Asia and Europe. I mean, like, it's exactly as you say, it's staggering conversations about nuclear deterrence, which are explicitly saying that the current American policy of only targeting nuclear

installations, which I think is called, it's very technical stuff, this deterrence jargon, but I think it's called counterforce or something like that, where you target your missiles at their military installations. This isn't adequate to supply deterrence. And so America is actually not doing itself or anyone else a favor in not targeting Beijing. Like what they should actually be doing is just threatening to blow up tens of millions of Chinese people. That's the way to go. So we really are back in full force

in full mutually assured destruction madness, right? Yes, yeah. And we've seen them move away from the no first use policy. Well, they've abandoned that. They dropped that, even though that used to be a Biden talking point. That was something that he was keen on and that somehow... I just think, I guess for me, I feel, you know, it's always so difficult to track this stuff, right? And I just, I guess right now I'm under a little bit of a mission to kind of sensitize people to...

the ways in which these things are shifting. Like I discovered that one of the lesser heralded achievements of the Biden administration was the Pentagon's first national... It was an industrial policy, but it was specifically a Pentagon industrial policy, right? Like not the nice stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act, but literally a program for building, and not just the individual factories for shelves, but an entire ramp up in the Pentagon's capacity to think about those kind of... So...

So it's, yeah, it's kind of creating a little bit of a matrix or something to catch these stories in, because I think that's the way that we're going to track this. Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of, I forget what it was exactly, but it was some sort of discussion around welfare in America and various sort of health indicators and

And sort of an example whereby everything starts to become seen through the lens of geopolitics. And the argument was not, oh, you know, we need healthier Americans because healthier Americans is a good thing. It's no, we need our people to be tough and strong and resilient because we might be going toe to toe with the Chinese at times.

No, really? Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, it is shocking. I mean, after all, it is true that Chinese life expectancy overtook that of the United States, and it's not all down to COVID. So, and like West, this is my killer factoid, is that North Korea's life expectancy, insofar as you're willing to believe the numbers, is greater than that of West Virginia. So, you know, there is a shift here. I mean, it's, as you say, it's not an unreasonable preoccupation for Americans, but...

Wow. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, that'll be the next thing will be. And what was it? The AstroTurf, you know, plastic turf for sports fields was invented by the Pentagon, I think, in the 60s because they were worried about youth health and they thought that people were deterred from playing basketball on excessively hot tarmac courts. And so they came up with AstroTurf. So maybe we're sliding back into that kind of reality. Yeah.

Do you think that part of the dynamic here is that with the US being aware of its relative position in the world declining, that there's a sense of, you know, we must exploit the one area where we are still unquestionably the unchallenged world leader being military force? I mean, after all, China's military has advanced, but it remains a regional power. It doesn't have a real counterpart to America's carrier battlegroups.

You mentioned the nuclear issue. And for the moment, it has a far smaller nuclear arsenal than either the United States or Russia. They have one overseas military base. The PLA hasn't fought a war since 1979. Although, of course, we talk about how relevant US military experience since then has been. But yeah, the logic might be let's make use of our superiority now while we still have that military edge.

Well, I think there are two. I mean, I think the Americans would insist there are two other dimensions. One is the dollar, which of course they amply use for coercive purposes. And the other one is tech, big tech and AI. I don't think anyone in China would claim that they're close yet to where America's at. And that isn't an autonomous supply chain because it depends so crucially on Taiwan, South Korea and so on. But nevertheless, it gives America...

key area of dominance. If you look at data centers, this was a factoid I came across recently that, you know, if you look at the global distribution of data centers, America's in a completely different league. But those, it goes to your point, which is the, it doesn't in any way disagree with you. It's just, I think it's a multi-pronged offensive, which, you know, takes different forms depending on which antagonists you're dealing with. But with the Russians now, it's pretty comprehensive. Everything short of the actual boots on the ground in the case of Russia. And,

And in the Chinese case, it's this, the big push is strategic rearmament, alliance construction, this latticework, they like to call it, of alliances around China, and then tech, tech, tech, tech, tech. That's where the push is really on. And yeah, I mean, I think it's very self-conscious. I just don't, it doesn't seem to me, this is why, you know, because when you say revisionism with regard to Ukraine and Middle East, you kind of flinch a little bit. Because after all, to my mind, it's very obvious that the

aggression that triggers, you know, the Ukraine crisis is Russia's. And I'm very unpersuaded by arguments that say that that's some sort of reflection of an American grand strategy. So, you know, you want flinches from saying this is a revisionist American strategy. But if you start with China, then it's not even it's not even debatable. They'll tell you to your face. The aim of the game is the aim of the game is to restore America's dominance.

after a long period of slide, largely self-inflicted because the liberal elites of the day were just negligent and also I think self-interested would be the claim. And it's time to reorganize that and redirect American power. And if that requires breaking up the world trading order or everything else, small yard, high fence is the argument, right? You know, you've got to let us do our thing because in this area we absolutely demand dominance. And if you challenge us there, you know, all bets are off. Just watch us and see what we do.

And if you start from there, and then you think of the other domains, the other's arenas as sequential, opportunistically coordinated with that, then, and you actually give some credence to at least to the idea that people in Washington believe that there's an axis of opponents, you know, in which Iran and Russia are very tightly coupled and China and Russia are coupled and China is a significant player increasingly in the Gulf because it's the biggest buyer ultimately of oil and gas. Yeah.

It's the key swing variable in the global fossil fuel market. Then what initially seemed like an incredibly kind of, you know, I think in some level implausible kind of contention, I think becomes it's hard to escape, really. So, yeah. On the point about alliance building, how successful do you think the Biden administration has been during their term in office? Because

When they came in, it was clear that this was the path they were going to pursue. And we saw, you know, the Orcas deal and the build up of the Quad and all this kind of stuff. But what was said commonly at the time was that the economic links between particularly states in Asia with China were so strong and important that it would be very hard to construct these kinds of alliances. How do you think they've done on that front, you know, just in their own terms? Yeah, I think it's important to emphasise this alliance point because, you know,

It's the thing the Biden people insist makes a them different from the Trump people and also America different from China. And it goes to an, you know, an important element of their self-conception, which is as specious and as hypocritical and absurd as this may sound, they believe they are exponents of universal values. Right. And, and,

I think they sincerely believe it, actually. And that, of course, needs a stage, right? You can't just kind of have your own universalism. I mean, of course, in sports, the Americans do with the Super Bowl, believe it or not, is the world championship of American football. But of course, that isn't going to really work as a geopolitical logic. So the alliances are the matrix, are the stage on which this universalism has to be realized. So that's, I think, a key element. It is also functional, they think.

And they believe that the odds are stacked in their favor because they believe, and this isn't unreasonable on the basis of Asia's history, that everyone in Asia wants to balance against China. And so America is, you know, welcome as a balancing force.

But yes, there's a strong version of this would obviously walk on two legs. It would have a security dimension and it would have an economic dimension. And it's been pretty clear from the beginning that America is just not able to provide that economic dimension. Why? Again, it's not the it's not the desires and dreams of the people in the White House, because they are a bunch of folks that like in some version, at least of the grand hegemonic history of the United States going back to the Marshall Plan.

But it's Congress, it's the political complexion of American society. And that, you know, this 50-50 presidential election is reflected in a very, very precarious balance in Congress, where they just don't have the votes for large scale, hegemonic trade or financial policy. And so what this means is they can't do big trade deals because the mood is so protectionist, and Congress won't vote.

more than a few billion really single digits for bold initiatives say to reform the World Bank and the IMF so as to be able to compete with the Chinese. They say it in so many words we're going to instrumentalize the World Bank and the IMF

for the purpose of countering China's lending. And all that gets you, that stark acknowledgement of what you're going to do is like, you know, fundamentally suborn the Bretton Woods institutions is a billion or two from Congress. So the payoff from amping up the ideological stakes is tiny. This is one of the real surprises. If it was larger, you could say from the point of view of, I don't know, even development, sustainable development, there was some sort of trade-off to be made here.

This is true, say, in Europe after 45. But it's just not there right now. And so there's been this embarrassing gap between the activism at the security policy level and the...

paper tiger dimension. I've been writing about this in various different forms, but the characteristic feature of the current moment seems to be a big, bold design, which is transparently American hegemonic neoliberal, the whole thing, and then it gives birth to a mouse. So you can kind of see the grand design of American power, and actually it's kind of pathetic in its

actual manifestation in all dimensions other than tech and military power. They just no longer have the capacity to really articulate the pieces. So there's a big disjuncture. If you talk to people close to the Quad process or something like that, it's clear that Washington is very invested in it. And I think it really was one of Biden's great achievements.

hopes, dreams that he could end the presidency with a big quad conference in Washington and you know they are, you know American liberalism is profoundly narcissistic they want to believe that they are a force for good and they're organising the world and this may sound especially to your listeners like entirely insane but they are profoundly convinced of this and so being able to convene that kind of grouping in Washington makes Biden feel he's going out on a

on a high in a way, right, that this is a new vision of American power. And above all, because it's they talk about lattice, because they all obviously extremely conscious of the Trump risk. And so they want to build widely embedded, multifarious networks of alliances, which because they hope they'll be more resilient in the event of a Trump presidency.

On that point about the way in which they may sincerely believe themselves to be upholders of universal values and so on, I mean, you know, I think that if one is on sort of the radical left, you're commonly accused of sort of hating liberals more than you hate the right. And I don't think that's true, but it is the case that the incredible hypocrisy just does just stick in the core, right? Like Trump at some level doesn't pretend to be anything else than he is. But for, yeah, for these people to be presenting themselves, as you say, as hypocrites,

you know, the avatars of, you know, human rights and universalism whilst supporting the genocide in Gaza. It's just, you know, it's just horrendous to witness really. Yeah, I mean, Trump, it may be the opposite in that he pretends really hard to be something we probably would hate even more than what he actually is. You know, Trump falls short of the truly demonic character that he would like to be.

Because in the end, I think he's just a white boy from the 70s and 80s and likes to get it off. I really don't think he's that substantial, whereas I actually think at the heart of Joe Biden is a really steely neocon. And you see it when he's put under pressure on Israel, the way he hammers the podium and says, no one, no one, no one has supported Israel like me. There's this, and he genuinely, clearly is passionately engaged on that issue, whereas Trump just has this cynical attitude.

whatever, like kind of a flavor, which makes it easier to deal with. I agree. No, there's no question that that's... And it's important to understand it's functional logic, right? So this is the thing about liberalism that a left critique that just stops with the hypocrisy element too easily underestimates, which is that it does in fact, that hypocrisy is a structure,

So it repeatedly will impose various types of requirement on the folks that articulate it. And to be obviously very clear, I mean, somebody who self-identifies as a liberal, this for me is the worst kind of liberal. This discredits what the sort of politics that I would like to stand for, which would be an honest and realistic version of this. And it's...

And it's horrifying, absolutely horrifying to watch. But it is important analytically to understand the constraints that this kind of logic can serially impose.

So since April of last year, you've been writing this series of posts for your chart book, Substack, under the title With a China. And I very much recommend that people check it out. And in one of those pieces, you describe the way in which the Western narrative around the Chinese economy has shifted from one of awe at the country's extraordinary economic development and success in pulling huge numbers of people out of poverty

But now towards this narrative of China is embroiled in an economic crisis, the idea that we've reached peak China, and even that the rule of the CCP is perhaps more fragile than had been foreseen.

thought. And you go on to write about the different diagnoses for the economic malaise in China that have been offered by some Western observers. But before we get into those diagnoses and where you take issue with them, can you explain what your view of the severity of the economic situation is and whether you think the very bleak picture that's often painted is somewhat overdrawn? What is the scale of the crisis in your view?

It's been, I mean, it's very serious. That isn't, I think, really in dispute. And the moves by the party leadership in recent months indicate, I think, how this summer was something of a turning point. And I was in China early in the summer. It doesn't surprise me that they reached this point because there was an awful lot of very open talk about just how this couldn't carry on.

But I think really for me the question is how we frame our reading interpretation of that. And it's been, for me, an ongoing process of thinking about this. And it's been quite clarifying actually with regard to what it means to approach this as somebody who takes historicity and history seriously as opposed to somebody who reads this in purely economic terms. Because the purely economic reading is this is a growth process with overinvestment, with a housing bubble,

Third has crashed, and now we have all the familiar problems of a housing bubble. And so the scenarios that are invoked are Japan or something like that. And, you know, at a superficial level, it's not easy to argue with that. But I think it is a superficial diagnosis, a description of what's happened. And it's the difference between saying you have a housing bubble that's burst and saying China is a place where in the space of a single generation...

Half a billion people were urbanized and hundreds of millions of more were moved into entirely rebuilt cities. This is the largest single process of modernization, of development, of urbanization in the history of our species, accomplished at a greater space than ever in our humanity's history, at gigantic ecological cost. The huge acceleration of CO2 emissions in the early 2000s is directly driven by this.

And then to capital and it is the largest wealth creation process we've ever seen deliberate like China didn't have a private housing market in the early 1990s and now Chinese families have a higher rate of private ownership of homes than practically anywhere else in the world and the vast majority of China's household wealth is tied up in those assets.

And anyone who's been to China knows that the cities they've built are, on the one hand, utterly awesome in their scale and their modernity, and on the other hand, also stark in the way in which they have erased literally thousands of years of urban culture in China in a matter of 30 years, 30 to 40 years. Which is why, you know, Chinese tourists are so enamored of a place like Europe, where there is so much of history left. There are very few places in China...

with as much residual history as any European town, even more than, you know, even there's very few places in China which have as much residual history as Manhattan, which now looks by the standards of Chinese and Asian cities, you know, like a 20th century Disney world.

And then to cap all of this, this doesn't die of natural causes. The regime in the 2010s becomes increasingly concerned about the tensions this is creating, the social transformation it's inducing. It's almost an NEP style moment where they say, look, or a counter NEP moment where they say, look, housing is for living and not for speculating with.

And then they take the advice of every international expert in sight, plus loads of people within China, that says you'd stop this. And in an unprecedented action, no one has ever in the Western world stopped a housing boom, let alone one that has this scale, because no one has ever confronted a wave, a tsunami of development like this before. Deliberately, utterly deliberately, explicitly deliberately stop it in its tracks.

And that's what's going on, right? And sure, you could describe this as a housing bubble that's burst and think that's the appropriate analytic. But I think once you've heard that other narrative, it's really difficult to think of anything else. And so this then becomes a very different kind of test. It becomes a very different kind of proposition. They are engaged in an effort to assert control over arguably one of the largest socioeconomic processes our species has ever seen.

And if they succeed, it will be consequently the most dramatic act of whatever you call it, government intervention, Keynesianism, macro prudential management, ever, full stop. And so far, though, of course, it's a crunching slowdown and several major developers have gone bust. The house hasn't come down. This is not 2008. They're not facing an uncontrolled meltdown.

The question now is, you know, can they restart the growth engine? Do they want to restart the growth engine? What does a new growth engine look like? But that's the kind of, that's the, for me, the historic framing that's appropriate. And it's, of course, it's closely linked, therefore, with social policy rather than just purely economic policy. It's very closely linked to the energy transition, the green transformation of China's political economy. So it's this multifarious sort of challenge, the scale of which,

No one in the West has ever even remotely contemplated and has direct knock-on effects because if we wonder why the Chinese are good at all things to do with electrification, and it turns out the green energy transition is all about electrification, it has to do with the fact that they built, not from scratch, but from a low level in the 1980s, an electricity system which is twice the size of that of the United States for a population which is four times the size of that of the United States. So there's still some way to go.

But that gives them this awesome momentum, right? They're just used to building on a scale at a space. And they've shifted gear on that development process. And that's what we're seeing. So that's how I kind of, you know, I can you could do the conventional macro on this if you want. And then you can project a bunch of liberal stories onto this about how this is bound to come down, middle income trap, whatever incentives, private sector, you can do all of that, of course.

But it seems to me to miss the real grandeur of this process. And so that's kind of what I feel needs to be said and restated. And it's an open-ended. It doesn't tell you what happens next. We don't know whether this experiment will work. But first of all, I think we have to appreciate what kind of an experiment it is. And why do you think it isn't...

Why do you think that scale and the grandeur you described, why do you think that isn't recognised? Is it something to do with the comparative lack of cultural heft that China seems to have in the world in terms of soft power and so on? Given the size of the economy and the society, is China in some ways less legible to the West than the Soviet Union was, which was still a European power after all? Well, I mean, if you're comparing it to the 30s that isn't now...

There isn't today the network of fellow travellers and communist parties around the world, nor is it as original as the Stalinist project was, which was after all absolutely the first of its type. Nor are we living in an age of fascism quite as we were in the 30s. So you can see, I think, why. And nor have the Chinese gone through the Bolshevik Revolution. So there's none of the set up, if you like.

The closest, you know, I mean, I'm I kind of I mean, I always kick myself because I missed the first phase of the China boom, really, in every respect. But after all, in the 90s and the early 2000s, what you're saying isn't true. I mean, like then like China was hip. It was very cool, certainly in the US, less so in Europe. But then Europe really is so remote from the Chinese story. It was not true of New York or the west coast of the US, which is really preoccupied with Chinese issues in a way that Europeans don't understand anymore.

And then I think in the current moment, it's almost as though Seoul and Korea is acting as a surrogate because the other place you can go to see this is South Korea, whose growth rate is even higher than that of China, actually. And the transformation, I don't know if you've been to Seoul, but I find it completely. I've had to go twice quickly in succession to even just be able to cope with the emotions it unleashes in me. It's so overwhelming. Yeah.

And like I have to proceed very slowly. I lived in Seoul for a few years. I used to be an English language teacher. You know what I mean then, right? I found like downtown Seoul just staggering. Like not in a positive way. I just feel totally lost on the scale of it. Anyway, so I do think there is a cultural reflection in the West on East Asian modernism. But right now it's through South Korea rather more than it is through China.

But in the policy wonk zone that I operate in mainly, I think it's just transparently wishful thinking on the part of, you know, people want to think the problem and the challenge smaller than it is. And there's two responses. One is a hawkish response, a Cold War response. We said, look at the Chinese nukes, look at the scale of China's growth. We've got to react, right? There's kind of a tendency almost to exaggerate.

And then the other stance, which in some ways of politics I'm more congenial to, like in Adam Posen, the true 1990s people, they believe ultimately that, of course, America will win just by the logic inherent in the philosophy of history that they adhere to, which in the end, America comes out in front. So they have this weird belief in convergence and yet American triumph. And

They tend to downplay the challenge from China as a way of de-escalating the intensity of the politics in the U.S.,

And then, in a sense, want to diminish the scale of the challenge. And so, you know, those are the two rather unattractive kind of options that you have right now. Presumably, you would see the way India is depicted as part of this, right? That India is presented as if it is a viable counterweight to China when the economy is a bit bigger than the UK economy at this point. That's not to say it may not go down a path similar to China, but it's an extremely long way away from that right now.

Yes, and by contrast with China, the cohorts of Indians themselves are urging this argument who are very vocal and very influential, notably in the US now, is non-trivial. It's a very interesting shift in the balance of ethnic minority influence power presence in American society with a shift from Asian American used to mean Chinese American or Korean,

And increasingly, it's come to mean South Asian American and extraordinarily successful and prominent in the Biden administration in many, many roles and in corporate America and even more prominent roles. And so there is a kind of synthesis emerging there of and in the American, the Indian diaspora in the United States, it's, you know, heavily BJP. You know, there was that amazing Modi visit a couple of years ago.

I don't want to generalize excessively, but I think the statistics, the opinion polling bears this out quite heavily. And so, yeah, no, there is a bit if you think about, say, the meme about Chinese debt imperialism, it came out of a North Indian think tank and was then picked up in the US and then went global. Yeah.

And it took some, you know, some serious number crunching by analysts around the world, including in Germany, to like essentially debunk that claim that One Belt, One Road was like a concerted strategy of Chinese imperialism. And the debts were, you know, being used in a highly systematic way to exchange leverage over. It turned out essentially naval bases uncomfortably close to India. That was actually the kind of where this originated. So...

So, yeah, absolutely. And one shouldn't underestimate the way in which, you know, this is playing quite strategically. So, yes, I totally agree. The India story does serve as a kind of comfort blanket.

And that goes a long way back, right? It's interesting. It's one of the underestimated features of Bush's foreign policy in the early 2000s. I can kind of remember it happening. Yeah. Where people identified India as the greatest democracy on earth and the largest democracy on earth. And it's fascinating. If you hear Indian diplomats down to this day, like they will not back away from that at all.

So it's, you know, people always say India is never going to be a, what is it? It's never going to be an ally. It will be a partner. And in the Indian military hierarchy, the affinity and commitment to the relationship with formerly the Soviet Union and now Russia is very, very strong.

So you've mentioned the American economist Adam Posen, and I wonder if you could talk a bit more about the diagnosis he gives for China's economic slowdown, which is basically a political one. And he points to creeping authoritarianism as the driver of China's economic crisis. Can you sort of outline that a little bit and explain a bit more about why you find his analysis so unconvincing? Well, yeah, I mean, Adam Posen is a, you know, just a thoroughgoing economist.

90s neoliberal and he's also opposed to you know he and I actually on the same page in many respects say on the gung-ho celebration of Biden's industrial policy so and he's a very very loud opponent of protectionism and so unsurprisingly his basic diagnosis of of China is a kind of Asim Moghlu and Robinson sophisticated institutional economics kind of argument that says this can't work like you know a mixed economy like this ultimately and

is in various ways doomed. And then, interestingly, he draws the conclusion that the optimal American strategy is not to push China off, but to basically open the doors. It's kind of like a Cuba model, where you basically welcome the Chinese bourgeoisie to engage in large-scale capital flight and to withdraw their human capital themselves and their kids, their talented kids, from the Chinese system.

And build up a kind of Chinese diasporic counterweight in the US. I mean, it's totally overt. So it's that kind of a read. The payoff in the immediate policy prescription is, you know, backpedal on especially overall protectionism and, you know, visas and so on.

And I think Posen is down with tech sanctions because in the American liberal mind, there is this division now. It's called the small yard high fence thesis. So there are certain things which are strategic, their national security. You can't argue with those. You wouldn't want to do that. That would be unpatriotic. You'd want to be that.

So it's this kind of, you know, this bordered liberal internationalism. But beyond that, obviously, rationality would dictate that you should offer the Chinese bourgeoisie an escape hatch if this system is doomed. And it's ultimately quite a personalistic interpretation. Well, it comes in different shades, but one version is quite personalistic and ties it to Xi Jinping.

There are other more sophisticated versions of the same structural diagnosis. And, you know, anyone who's in China and all of the Chinese experts you talk to say the regime is changing. So you don't have to be a kind of crude analyst to think something is quite fundamentally changing in the Chinese system. So that's the kind of the Pozen line, I think.

And you mentioned that there's no real role in his analysis for the housing crisis. And is that partly because a dysfunctional relationship with the real estate sector is something that is shared by the United States and by China? Yeah.

That's a really nice way of putting it. Yeah, exactly. If you think about the American real estate sector is a public-private monster, right? Because the vast majority of mortgages in the US are actually taxpayer backstopped. It's quite incomprehensible to a Brit or any other European. But yes, the home of private market capitalism has its largest asset class, which is domestic real estate, backed by taxpayer backstop.

Ultimately, taxpayer-backstopped mortgage institutions found in May, Freddie Mac, the so-called GSEs. So...

Yeah, that's a very high level to add to that. I think that's an extremely, extremely well put. I mean, in general, it's just that Adam, Adam Posen takes his sort of macro economist hat off at the moment that he makes this diagnosis and goes to this sort of, you know, fundamental institutional economics type story. Bourgeois revolution is on its way or rather the aborted bourgeois revolution in China is therefore going to produce stagnation.

And there I'm kind of more in some sympathy with a hard nosed macro person like Michael Pettis, who says, no, no, no, no, this is all just, you know, forget all that. Sure, it might not help. But the basic problem here is overinvestment and diminishing returns and unrealistic growth expectations, which lock you into this cycle.

Overinvestment, which is the counterpart of which is excessive saving. And the counterpart to that is the repression of the households. You can even give this a class struggle dimension. It's as it were the repression of the Chinese working class and middle class to favor the elite and the party. And that then produces this giant kind of overhang of excess saving over.

which vents in the form of investment. And ultimately, the unbalanced model then also has to rely on exports to keep the growth engine going because the party insists on delivering these high growth rates. And that works well so long as society needs a lot of basic infrastructure built quick. And China's done that like no one else in the world. And then it reaches its limit when...

that that margin of extra investment just generates progressively diminishing returns. And then you end up with this huge financial overhang. So this, to me, is a story that gives us a macroanalytic which is compatible with my kind of story. But Michael just doesn't believe in the possibility of a politically mediated CCP-led workout, I think.

or he constantly is pushing on the question of can they rebalance towards households, whereas I would be more optimistic about new growth policies, possibilities in the investment area, and notably the green energy space, because I'm so interested in the energy transition, and Michael Pettis, I think with all due respect, is not terribly interested in that dimension. So...

Whereas I see this huge avenue, like in China, I see an engine of exactly the kind of levels of investment that we collectively need to get us through this. Insofar as we have any hope of delivering this energy transition, it depends on this investment surge. And China has that and to spare. And so I find it hard to be pessimistic about a society that's been able to generate the huge leap forward in renewable energy.

tech and then, you know, kit that we're going to need. And do you think the gains from industry centered on the energy transition can be relatively equitably shared? Because one of the things that is obviously said about China's high tech sector is that, sure, they're pouring huge resources into it, and it's having very impressive effects. But is it really just concentrating wealth where it already is? Would you say that's not that wouldn't be the case with the energy transition, or at least not necessarily? Yeah.

I'm not sure. I mean, I'm in general a little careful, not to say sceptical, about linking green energy transition as a project of industrial transformation and, of course, also of climate politics to promises of social transformation. The Green New Deal...

was in the US was a powerful and promising strategy of social transformation, but not as an industrial policy, but as a policy directed towards care, right? So it wasn't a degrowth strategy. It was a strategy that said that growth had to, and there's so much scope for it in the US, growth should be in the direction of human services and care, right? And that's because it addresses the vast bulk of the actual workforce, which is a service sector workforce, is a very, very promising strategy for social transformation. I'm like that,

I don't think of industry in China or anywhere else like the PV, the photovoltaic panels are built in almost entirely automated factories. There's hardly any workers there in China or anywhere else. That's how you get the cost down. Chinese things are not cheap because labor in China is cheap. Labor in China isn't cheap anymore.

There's very little premium there once you adjust for productivity difference. And their wages are actually quite high. And this is part of the problem for the Pettis argument is actually there's been very substantial real wage growth in China. People in China are a lot better off than they were 20 years ago, like vastly better off.

So I don't think that's the argument, right? The argument is not that the green energy model offers a better, at the level of production at that point, I'm not sure it offers a better or more equitable social bargain. And one of the big questions, of course, for China, as for everywhere else, is what you do with relatively unskilled manual labor. And

And that, of course, was hugely employed in construction. This is where the, you know, the shift from the countryside to the cities was not just people moving to live in the cities, but people, you know, workers, manual workers shifted to do the construction work. And they, the Chinese, like everyone else, has a huge question about essentially education and its fit with the labor market. I mean, that's not all that education does anywhere, but that's one of the things it does everywhere.

And, again, one of the reasons I find it hard to be pessimistic about China's growth chances, and I'm skeptical about the analogy to Japan, is that Japan stagnates and continues to stagnate at a level of extraordinarily collective sophistication. It's just a very low growth, highly affluent country.

in some ways extraordinarily effective society and that's China's a million miles away removed from that like it's still a society which in the countryside is poor and it's not abjectly poor they've abolished absolute poverty but it's not developed it's not rich and part of that is human capital like Chinese elementary schools in the rural areas and minor cities is rubbish and everyone knows it and and being fluently literate in Chinese is an incredible task

And, you know, the Chinese upper middle class do brilliantly out of their education system. But hundreds of millions of people have relatively low qualifications. And so when you end the construction boom, they're certainly not all going to get jobs in manufacturing.

Some of them will, but there really is a major transition. And this is where I think, you know, there's real legs in the, it's more even Brad Setzer than Michael Pettis, but everyone who's arguing that really what China needs for its own sake is an expansion of high-end human services is

I think that's exactly where it needs more nurses, more teachers, more social workers, more therapists. They need all of that, which we so easily discount in a kind of productivist mode of thinking about economic policy. But that's what increasingly rich, affluent, well-managed societies actually need more of.

And, yeah, anyway, so that's where I kind of find that you say this society can't grow, you don't get it. Like, I mean, Michael knows China as well as any Western. I mean, like, it's like there's huge opportunities for growth.

Just going back to Adam Posen and his argument around authoritarianism as being the cause for the economic slowdown. So the key example he gives is the so-called zero COVID strategy that the regime adopted. Can you explain why you think that the way we've come to talk about zero COVID in China is really quite extreme variance with what actually...

And when I say the way we talk about it, it really is, I think, right across the political spectrum. I mean, I see people on the radical left, the sort of anti-lockdown left who, you know, describe what occurred as China as if everyone was just simply imprisoned in their houses, you know, endlessly. And it's, yeah. But yeah, could you could you talk about that?

Yeah, it's really a telling, it's a telling, utterly counterfactual post-truth kind of moment of history, widely shared, as you say, not a populist thing. Everyone seems to believe it, especially liberals, because it fits so nicely. And basically, what you're avoiding is the bitter truth that China won COVID round one. In fact, overall, China appears to have won COVID in general, like overall mortality was much, much lower, because by the time they screwed up at the end, the variant was much less lethal.

And in the most lethal phase, China was actually highly, you know, highly successful in containing. So yes, the myth is that China. Sorry, when you say that, do you mean in comparison to just the United States or just mortality in general? It's not a, it's, we don't believe that China is a high mortality state in COVID terms. No. Um,

I don't think there's any plausible evidence that suggests that proportionally speaking it's because if it were it would be the whole story right it's 1.4 billion people so if it had been a super high mortality state it would totally shape this entire story and it isn't if it had American style mortality it would be millions and millions of people who died and they didn't it's quite clear so and that's the bitter truth that's really difficult to deal with because it fits very ill with our kind of analysis and

And what the actual circumstance was that by the summer of 2020, when the West was entirely in panic, they were literally partying in Wuhan and not because they were irresponsible, because there was no COVID. And for the following 18 months or so, China lived almost entirely innocent, really, of the whole drama going on in the rest of the world.

And then as the variants developed that became threatening, it was clear that the transmission was just happening and China was importing cases. The regime adopted a kind of excessively technocratic approach, which was precisely to avoid total lockdowns of the whole society. But they did something they called dynamic optimizing, where they tried to do whack-a-mole. And whenever there was a big outbreak in a big city, they would shut that city down with real ferocity.

And that was all very well until it happened in Shanghai. And then it happened in Shanghai. In Shanghai, you know, because China has, you know, there's Beijing and Shanghai and they're this polarity. But Shanghai is the most westernized, most bourgeois, most thrusting city in China. And they really did lock it down hard in the spring of 22. And bourgeois Chinese were worried about where their next meal was coming from. And you really can't do that to Chinese society, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's like a death knell of legitimacy. And then after Shanghai, they threatened to do it to several other cities. And this dynamic optimization strategy, which was an effort to minimize the impact, becomes this terroristic system where on any given day, you don't know whether you're going to be able to go back to your dormitory or your housing block. So it was kind of technocratic optimization gone wrong on the back of the huge confidence they gained from managing Shanghai.

crisis so well and effectively in 2020, that in the end blows them up. And so what we've done is we've compressed the entire history of which was for us a more or less continuous history of screw ups, cock ups, disaster, mass death, vaccination, and so on and so forth. We've projected our protracted history of COVID onto their spasmodic history, which is a first shock, stabilisation, and then this disastrous phase in 2022.

And it serves a clear ideological purpose in the West, right? Because it paints China as this consistently repressive regime that eventually got its comeuppance. But it's profoundly misleading. It's profoundly misleading as to the actual legitimacy dynamics that operate in China.

And you don't grasp the specific rupture that happened in the spring of 22 around Shanghai and then the aftermath, which is the unpredictability. It's all very well for the regime to be whatever it is, but for it to be capricious in the way it was then and ineffective is like, that's a killer. And it also just misleads us because there's all sorts of things we then can't understand. And one of the things the West has been really taken by surprise in regard to is the Chinese electric vehicles boom.

And we just didn't see that coming. And everyone's saying, where did this come from? And the answer is it came from this period, which was the black hole of COVID in the West. But in China was actually normality between 2020 and 2021. If you look at the breakthrough for BYD, all of the firms, which are this, you know, industrial policy, the second China shock.

It starts in China whilst we were doing the struggle with COVID. And that period of history in China can't exist for us because we have this false narrative of what COVID in China was like, which was an initial shock, which was horrendous. Recovery, growth, 18 months of something like normality, followed by this brief hiatus at the end, which was really rapidly undone because they realized they just couldn't do this.

And it's in that interval that this great leap forward in Chinese green energy happened. That's where the solar boom takes off. And that's where the EV boom takes off in the big, rich Chinese cities, because then they were living it up. And so that's, yeah, it's an interesting instance of the way in which our own

It's partly clearly just comforting to think this way about China, but it's also really disorientating because then a bunch of other things are really going to surprise you. If you're so, so oblivious to the actual timeline, there is a reality that's going to intrude at some point. And this time it's in the form of a highly sophisticated Chinese EV that no one in Europe can understand how they're making it. Because in 2019, they weren't making Ks like this. And now in 2024, they are. What happened? Well, the answer is they had history in between whilst we were strategizing

struggling with COVID for most of that time. Yeah, and I suppose when respect is extended towards China, whether it's China's economic development or whether it's the initial successful phase of containing

COVID, it's always begrudging, right? Because China stands as a repudiation of free market values. And, you know, it's the Chinese Communist Party as well. And it also messes with our conventional understanding of, you know, what communist societies are like, which for so long, you know, communism had been a byword for economic failure, the late Cold War in the 1990s. You can push that even further. I think, you know, there's obviously a popular narrative with good reason of the Maoist and Stalinist era as one of

that life is cheap, right? Yes. That communist regimes are the sorts of ones which engage in grand bargains of wages of history, that a couple of 10 million, who cares? Whereas in fact, the reality of the Chinese regime in that period was a combination. Sure, there's plenty of cynicism. They got factory workers back to work as quickly as they possibly could. They operated these barbarous closed loop systems where factory workers weren't allowed to leave the factory.

But in part, because on the other side, the other face of the regime is this almost obsessive biopolitical protectiveness, which is life first. And they kind of meant it. They certainly meant it far more seriously than Boris Johnson ever did. Like, you know, they actually were kind of serious about ensuring that people didn't die. And they went about it in a terrible way. And they didn't. And the vaccination, the real question about all of this is the vaccinization, the failure of vaccines.

Failure A, to be more open to importing Western vaccines, which is a really unusual case of sort of Chinese science denial. And then the failure to systematically vaccinate the vulnerable elderly population. They got very lucky in that the variant they ultimately faced was much less lethal than the earlier variants.

But after all, I mean, another way of reading this is that, you know, why did they face this successive wave of, you know, wave after wave of variants? Well, it's because everyone else had failed. And they like, and they, and they... Because Britain or somewhere was incubating Omicron. Yeah, no, well, specifically, we know many of them were coming out of like the under-vaccinated populations of Africa. And yeah, exactly. We, like the rest of the world, let this thing, I mean, obviously incubated in China. They contained it. No one else did the job of containing it.

And so then China faced a consequence, which was a wave of pandemic, which they really just their mode of coping in the first round would not work in the third round. And they were slow to understand that. And they didn't do the vaccination in between. But I think it's born of hubris. I mean, many of these decisions. So this goes back to the housing question. Why did they make this decision to deliberately stop the housing boom? Like,

They crack down on Hong Kong at the same time. They move against the oligarchs at the same moment. My view is that there was this, and it's just a speculation, but, you know, trying to read China from the outside in a coherent way. And, you know, my view is they came through COVID out and to the summer of 2020 and they thought we've won, like really won, civilizationally won. Look at the rest of the world. They just can't cope.

And this is the moment when we make the move. So we move on Hong Kong, we move on Jack Ma, we move on housing. And so, you know, from the point of view of the regime, disastrously, they're dealing with a housing crisis again.

As as the as the third wave of COVID or whatever breaks over them, you could add in the dual circulation model, which also comes to the fore in 2020. Right. So there's this sort of there's this quite muscular self-assertion. I think at that party meeting in May, whenever it was 2020, the deferred two meetings where she presents this report of the party on how they won the people's war against the pandemic.

If I had to venture what was going on there, I would say, right, they felt very good about themselves. They had the checklist. They worked their way down that checklist. And it was Hong Kong, oligarchs, housing, dual circulation to face off with the Americans. And America, think about it, in 2020, meltdown, Trump, loose command chain. At that point, Beijing must surely have been convinced history is handing us the game. And then, of course, things have proved to be much, much more complicated. Yeah.

So elsewhere in the With a China series, you write extensively about China's climate politics and the energy transition. And you say that China's climate policy is the single most important political factor deciding the future of the global environment and climate.

obviously, we're talking a few days out from the US presidential election. And you say how there were these two crucial cliffhangers in global climate policy, one of them being the US election. And the other one, and crucially, you say the one that matters more is Beijing's decision on the next phase of its decarbonisation programme. So could you could you talk a little bit about the stakes and why China's decisions on climate are now just so much more significant than those of

of the US or any other state in the in the global system, which which obviously can be hard to hear, because one wants to have the sense that one has more agency than might be the case. Yeah, this is part of my like multifaceted campaign to, you know, query that assumption, which I think is is a huge challenge for progressives in the West that they're

You know, the very least we used to think of the climate problem as it was our bad guys. You know, we might not be able to win, but it was the old struggle, essentially directly nearly descended from the 19th century and was progressive forces squared off within the matrix of the rule of law, so-called, and democracy against capitalist forces. And Exxon was the, you know, the great Satan of global climate politics.

And I don't in any way want to take the steam out of Western environmental or climate policy. We need it. But there is a particular blindness to history in that. It's effectively, at this point, it's an anachronism to make that kind of claim. And it came to the fore again and again in lots of different ways. And it's, to me, a kind of constant work of undoing that Western-centric understanding, which is now anachronistic.

But say in the celebrations of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act, which my newspaper FT celebrated, is now the planet has a chance. And it's like, what? Why what? Because America accounts for 14% of global emissions currently. According to some estimates of a think tank associated with Colombia over the coming, until the end of the century, the next 80 years,

On current growth trends, and these are sort of crazy predictions, but nevertheless, if you project those out, if you project the current world out, its current trends mean that America will be, it's such a, I mean, the serious people, 5% of global emissions over the next 80 years are likely to be attributed to the United States. If you project out the current world, now that may not happen, but that's the world we're in is one whose trends point in that direction.

China's emissions currently are 30%, so twice the size of the United States. China's emissions are more than that of the entire, not just the US or the EU, but all of the OECD, all of the rich countries together. And sorry, Adam, just on US emissions, that includes emissions from production overseas. Aha, interesting. So that to me is a really telling interjection because that is the next interjection. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But we've exported it all.

At a rough calculation, I don't have the figure precisely in my head, but I think 15% of the growth of Chinese emissions since the late 1990s had to do with exports. So the fact that importing stuff from China is a significant share of our emissions doesn't mean, because China's so flipping big...

that exporting stuff to us is a significant fraction of their emissions. Maom has this essay from the early 2000s, which I think is really symptomatic of that. He characterizes China as like the smokestack of the world. And so we think of China as essentially the subordinate part of a global capitalist system in which essentially we've just exported Western capital under pressure from politics or labor costs or whatever else has exported emissions. This is the standard fear.

That goes back to the point I was making earlier on. What is the most significant economic development in China in the early 2000s and the 2010s? Is it the export boom? No, it's the urbanization of 500 million people, which is hugely carbon intensive. So you see these pieces of this argument fit together to say that we are...

When we describe China as having a housing bubble that burst, when we make that move to say, oh, but Chinese emissions are exported to us, we're again and again and again avoiding the reality that no, in the late 90s, under the CCP and contributing to its legitimacy, China engaged in an epic, world-historically unique growth phase, which has transformed the largest state, most powerful state on Earth into

in a period of a single generation, and that changes all of the other variables, and we have very, very little control over it. And my basic position of my entire politics right now is the sooner we start thinking about this in the West, in every single political camp, and the more quickly we can detach ourselves from inherited Cold War models for thinking about this, the better.

And the climate is the zone where this is most spectacularly and dramatically evident and undeniable. China is not catching the United States. Its electricity system is twice the size of that of the United States and its emissions are to match.

And so that's why its decisions matter, proportionally speaking, more. Furthermore, the US, like Europe, is on the downward slope with regard to emissions. Whether Trump or not, American emissions are going down, not because they're good or bad people.

or because they're green or they're not, but because coal sucks as a way of generating electricity and all sorts of other ways of doing it better, and they're all less carbon intensive. And that's why emissions are going down and have been going down in Europe and the United States over a series of decades. Policy also makes a difference, but it's at the margin on a process that is, broadly speaking, an exit from coal. And the UK, of course...

is the amongst big economies, the one of the remarkable cases of this, and it has a big complex and very ambiguous political economy was asked to do with the destruction of the countervailing power of one of the most important bastions of organized labor, right? So that's that story that's going on. But in China, you're talking about a hepin bend. So in the West, it's about tilting that curve of decarbonization down more aggressively.

In China, it's literally a hairpin bend. So they have to go from a society which regularly was increasing its emissions by significant percentage pointage every single year because they are basically digging coal out of the ground like no one else has in the whole world. And they make half of the world's steel. So you put those two things together and you have this just epic surge in emissions. And they now have to break that and literally like a hairpin, bend it back the other way.

And they've committed to neutrality by 2060, which is a staggeringly ambitious goal. You do all this in terms of per capita, you end up with a slightly different story because the Americans are so excessively, we in America, so excessively carbon intensive. But if you think about the overall, the scale of what China has to do in terms of investment, the transition, the number of people involved, the number of urban communities that have to be changed, it's just like nothing anyone else has on their agenda. And furthermore,

Xi Jinping says they're going to do it. And his word really does count for something. And if you look at his biography, it's not hagiography or just silly propaganda to say the guy has been preoccupied with this question for a long time. He's seen it as one of the ways of making his regime distinctive from its predecessors. He understands the huge damage to CCP legitimacy done by the air apocalypse, these nightmarish smogs that the big Chinese cities were having in the 2010s.

And he's actually really quite seriously committed to this. And it's quite deep in CCP ideology at this point. This ecological civilization idea is a mainstay of CCP ideology. If you look at their propaganda, if you look at Chinese state TV, I always say, I want to have a really quiet night in a hotel and just like chill and like fantasize. It's ridiculous. Like it's this candy coated version of sustainability and balance.

That has become really key to what they're offering. It's not just a richer and more powerful China. It's a more beautiful China. It's a China that reappreciates its nature. It's quite German feeling like it's very Freiburg, like, you know, very, very, very nice Dolce Vita kind of, you know, bits of Europe. And so it's this double. And then the end of this long sentence is.

And look at what they're doing. Like they are the clean energy revolution, whether it's photovoltaics, electric vehicles, ultra high voltage transmission, the whole works. It's China. And we say, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's a geopolitical strategy. But sure, at some level it is. And it's largely defensive, I think, on the Chinese part in the first instance, because they don't want to be subordinated to an American controlled oil supply.

But it's massive. So this is the three pongs. A, they're the problem. B, they appear to have a political intent that's quite real. And C, they actually seem to be doing something about it. And that kind of shakes Western assumptions about where this... Because I think you're right. The ecological story...

Western progressive politics in the aftermath of the Cold War and with the decline, a seeming decline of the relevance of certain sorts of class politics and certain versions of socialism made for a kind of a configuration at the center, not just the left, but center liberals as well. It made whether or not we could master the climate problem into the acid test of the rationality of whatever we're going to call it, democratic capitalism, democratic politics, so on.

And to discover that it's still a huge challenge for us, but somebody else is more important is really, and maybe more serious about it, and we've failed, and they actually may be making a more earnest effort to address this issue for a variety of complicated reasons, is disorientating.

So it seems to me in your writing on this, that seeing the climate problem through a sort of Western centric lens is seen at the same time as viewing the climate problem as caused by capitalism per se. And, you know, you're somewhat critical of the notion of the term capitalocene.

because it ignores, obviously, the contribution of China to the climate crisis. But also you write very interestingly about the way in which in the late 1980s, the climate problem was perceived as being caused not just by the United States and US allies, but also by the Soviet bloc and the Eastern bloc. They were very major contributors when it came to carbon emissions and were actually on track to become bigger emitters than the United States. Obviously, that doesn't happen because you have the collapse of the Soviet Union and that crushes emissions. Yeah.

But I wonder if that could be a somewhat narrow reading of the term capitalocene, because sure, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc and now China also bear heavy responsibility for the climate crisis. But what was called really existing socialism was shaped by the necessity of competing economically with the much stronger West. It was industrialized and urbanized or die. And so any sort of more, you know, gradualist path was foreclosed by the geopolitics.

And furthermore, in the case of China, it's the turn to the market that matters on the climate front, right? It's China's integration with global capital. It's the, you know, the Chimerica moment. That marks the point where carbon emissions massively ramp up. But, you know, it's not 1960s China when its major sort of European ally was Albania, right? I like this. I like this angle you're developing, especially the counterfactual of a Soviet Union that would have been greener,

That's a new variant of the defend the revolution. And it's the lurking enemies that resulted in the, you know, I mean, clearly, obviously, I mean, some level engaged here in an argument with, you know, Trotskyism and how we interpret what's going on. Because Andreas Malm just does the state capitalist thing. Plus, he's got a couple of footnotes to say, I don't really quite know what to make of China anymore.

But he just defers it to that, right? So if you read Stalinism and Soviet system as basically just state capitalist, then you can brush this question aside. Or if you run the argument that you're running, that essentially it was a deformed version of actual socialism and the actual socialism would have been different. You know, you can neutralize this point that I'm making. I don't buy it. I don't buy it at all. I think what we need to do is differentiate between development and capitalism. Yeah.

And awful lots of capitalism exists, which, as we perfectly well know, don't result in any substantial amount of development. And the extraordinary thing about the Chinese regime is that it managed to take bits of market economy and market economic integration and fashion them into a development model. But like the Chinese are not like anything else. Like they're this radical exception, right? Saying they're like, it's like, you know, if it were true,

that China is with capitalism, we'd have to rethink what capitalism is and ask ourselves whether anyone in Europe or the United States ever experienced fossil capitalism. That's how intense the Chinese burst in the early 2000s is. If that's what actual fossil capitalism looks like, then nothing anywhere previously is fossil capitalism. It's that intense. So it doesn't make sense to me. The burst in China is sui generis and it defines the current moment.

And another way of putting this would be that this argument about the boom in China being when it's market driven is okay as far as it goes, but that's the demand side of the energy equation. And the Chinese economy from the 80s onwards suffered chronic energy shortages. Its most recent one was in the 2020s. And so you have to ask yourself, where did the energy come from that fixed those? What was it that enabled the growth in the Chinese energy system that underpinned this?

And then if you came here with a market argument, you'd look, it's just silly. That's not what happened, right? So there was a Chinese Communist Party instruction in the mid-1980s to double and then double again coal output. So it was planned, planned in inverted commas, and it was an instruction to double this. That then unleashes the typical free-for-all in the Chinese system where you get an order from Beijing and everyone goes out with maximum energy and does it. So then you get this massive ramp up.

And then they have these, you know, you can't have it both ways. If Isabel Weber's right and there wasn't shock therapy, then you need to look at how the Chinese coal market operates. And it's not a market system. It's a brokered thing between the coal producers, the energy users. It doesn't work terribly well. But one of the things it does do is to produce a huge surge in energy output. So no, China's is a mixed economy through and through with a major role for the party specifically in the energy sector.

And the state grid will be the prime example of this. It's much closer to Daniela Gabor's kind of vision of the big green state. I mean, it's not. It's a big dark state. It's a big cold state.

And so this story just doesn't, I just find it. I understand where comrades are coming from in making this kind of argument. And if you're interested in tracing this all the way back to the colonial period, the early modern period, you can do this. But just look at the CO2 numbers and tell me how relevant that period is to anything that's going on here. Even if you do the accumulation, it just doesn't figure. This is a story about 20th century urbanization and industrialization.

And it was a story that was understood at such in the 50s and 60s by the developing world. And that promise was never delivered, which is why the emissions are as lopsided as they are in the 90s when global climate politics kicks in. Africa is not the party. India is not the party because they haven't had any growth. China already is because Maoism actually developed, produced development.

at all sorts of different levels, and what the CCP-led regime has done since the early 2000s. It's really that sudden, it's just super generous and unlike anything anywhere else. So yes, I don't think that capitalism gets us very far. And I think it's part of this kind of escapism. That isn't our problem. And if you think about who are the major emitters right now,

They are, broadly speaking, in their local political economy. Of course, like oil producers feed into a global market. But in their local political economy, they're almost all state-owned enterprises in emerging markets. And you'll say, oh, well, they just subordinate to the market. Well, go try telling that to Saudi Aramco. Yeah, all you are is subordinate to the market or Pemex.

or any of them. Petrobras, none of them are just subordinate to the market. It's silly. Now, then people will say, well, capitalism always has a state. Fine, well, keep watering this argument down and we'll end up with lots of state and less capitalism. And then we're on the same page. But then I'll still come with a sui generis nature of the Chinese case. And with Stalinism, which I just find that analytic...

It's just reductive. I mean, reduction has its place and it serves a particular political purpose. But in this particular conjuncture, I just find it unhelpful. Maybe that's the best way to put it. It's an unhelpful reductionism. It's a flattening and I ultimately think a kind of escapist reductionism because the sort of politics that works against an Exxon is frankly relatively easy politics. You try doing that to China coal and like or Saudi Aramco, any of the tactics that have been used against Exxon.

Like, of course, they won't work against players like that, because they're not in liberal systems with something like the rule of law, where you can at least bring a case or influence a shareholder meeting. They're in a very, very different world. And it's it has elements of the market about it. And they care about their profit. And of course, at various levels, they intersect with Western capitalist systems, of

But you are really barking up the wrong tree if you think that that's ultimately what drives them. I really think that's a, it's just a super unhelpful simplification. You've been listening to Politics Theory Other. If you've been enjoying PTO and finding it useful, please do consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to bring in new listeners. The show's music and graphic design is produced by Planet B Productions. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week.