Two years ago I ran a small reading group that met over zoom. Our reading topic: Leninism. Curious about the claims that modern Chinese politics are an outgrowth of Marxist ideas and practice yet feeling insufficiently familiar with the Leninist political tradition to properly judge its influence on contemporary Chinese politics, I organized a group of China-watching politicos to read both classic Marxist texts and historical studies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
Category Archives: Small and Simple Things
Why Chinese Culture Has Not Conquered Us All
Xi Jinping regularly exhorts Chinaâs diplomats, propagandists, journalists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural figures to âtell Chinaâs story well.âThe slogan flows naturally from the operating assumptions of Party state strategists: in their telling, a central pillar of any nationâs âcomprehensive national powerâ (çťźĺĺ˝ĺ) is what these Chinese have labeled âdiscourse powerâ (čŻčŻć).
Discourse power is the ability to mold the assumptions, conceptions, and values of foreign princes and peoples. The concept sits midway between Beltway talk of âsoft powerâ and the sort of influence leftists describe with the phrase âcultural hegemony.â Discourse mirrors the instrumentalism of the first termâdiscourse power is not just a set of static social relationships or societal norms, but a tool to be wieldedâbut is far less associated with happy-go-lucky rhetoric about admiration, emulation, and attraction so closely bound up in American conceptions of soft power.
Triumphant victors of the Cold War would conceptualize the issue in such terms: Â the victors of any given cultural conflict always believe they have won through the wide appeal of their vision and the free choice of those attracted to it.
The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course
A Scholarâs Stage forum member reports that he and a friend recently finished reading John Darwinâs After Tamerlane. Enraptured by Darwinâs account of flourish and fall, they ask what else they might read to understand the rise and decline of peoples and powers over the course of human history.
             In my mind there are four central parts to this tale:
Learning From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vulcans
The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, Americaâs most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials⌠were the exact same set of people. The authors of Americaâs Cold War victory were the architects of Americaâs 21st century defeats. There lies the mystery! With more collective experience under their belts than any foreign policy team since the Founding Era, with a greater list of accomplishments than any group of national security elites since the creation of the modern national security state, the statesmen-officials of the second Bush administration should have accomplished glorious deeds. They should have lived up to their track records. Instead, they delivered failure and catastrophe. How could this have happened?
As the Generations Churn: The Strategic Consequences of Cultural Change in Communist Russia… and China?
Vladislav M. Zubokâs A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, âCulture Wars are Long Wars.â That essay proposed a general theory of cultural change. Key to its thesis was the observation that most cultural change does not occur because people change their ideas, but because people with new ideas replace people with old ones. As most people form their essential political worldview by the time they are 30 and only adapt it on the edges to new circumstances, only the most earth shaking events have the power to fundamentally shift the frameworks and values that the majority filter their politics through. Large scale cultural shift is largely a story of generational churn.
While the focus of that piece was on American domestic politics, this is a general phenomena that applies across cultures and time periods. Vladislav Zubok understands this. The generational nature of political change is a recurring theme of Failed Empire, which chronicles the ups and downs of Soviet diplomacy from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While we often describe Soviet history in terms of the leader reigning at the top of the system, Zubok argues that shifts in Soviet strategic behavior reflected not only the differing leadership styles of the various CPSU General Secretaries, but broader transitions from one generation of leaders to another.
In Favor of Bad Takes
Over at the Duck of Minerva Daniel Nexon has posted a reflective essay on the way the political science blogosphere has changed over the last two decades. Nexonâs IR-themed group blog was one of the first âpolitical science blogs” of the aughts; at the old blogosphereâs height it was the largest academic-IR themed blog on the internet. I first encountered it around that time, when debates from the âstrategy sphereâ were spilling into the larger online conversation. America was debating the wisdom of the surge and our path forward in the Middle East, and blogs like Duck of Minerva dove into the controversy.
Though he couches his disappointment in diplomatic language, Nexon is bummed about the state of online poli-sci…
Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf LivesâBut Why?
Image Source Several months ago someone on twitter asked the following question: which public thinker did you idolize ten or fifteen years ago but have little intellectual respect for today? [1] A surprising number of people responded with “all of them.” These tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in […]
On the American Football Game
I dieâbut first I have possessâd, And come what may, I have been blest. âLord Byron This clip has been played 87 million times on Facebook and another seven million times on Youtube. It’s inspirational. It’s powerful. I get why it has as many hits as it does. But there is something more to it, […]
Tradition is Smarter Than You Are
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, âI donât see the use of this; let us clear it away.â To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: âIf you donât see the use of it, I certainly wonât let you clear it away. […]
Why Didn’t China Give Birth to Democracy?
“The nominal form of [China’s] government… is an irresponsible autocracy; its institutions are likewise autocratic in form, but democratic in operation.” âHerbet Giles, The Civilization of China (1919) Yuhua Wang and Mark Dincecco have an interesting paper out in the Annual Review of Political Science. The paper offers and tests a new hypothesis for why […]