Full Transcript

Nathan Labenz: (00:00) Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share a fascinating crossover episode from the China Talk podcast hosted by Jordan Schneider and Ilari Makela of the On Humans podcast and featuring David C. Kang, professor of international relations at USC and author of Beyond Power Transitions, The Long Peace in East Asia. While the topic of artificial intelligence never comes up in this conversation, a notable first for this feed, Professor Kang's approach echoes one of my core principles for studying AI. Things are best understood on their own terms, and analogies can all too easily lead us astray. Taking a ground up or you might say first principles approach, Professor Kang questions the approach that Western scholars have historically taken in their study of East Asian international relations, arguing that if we were to ground our analysis in East Asian history itself instead of in European paradigms, we might well develop dramatically different theories of how states interact and arrive at very different conclusions about how the Chinese state should be expected to project its power going forward. Considering the fact that so much AI analysis treats a US China Thucydides trap dynamic as inevitable and therefore US China AI Competition as existential, this, in my opinion, is an extremely valuable alternative perspective. Professor Kang's core observation that from around the year 1000 until the nineteenth century, while Europe was locked in near constant warfare between competing powers, East Asia experienced remarkable geopolitical stability is for those who've not studied Asian history in-depth, myself included, a real eye opener. Professor Kang describes East Asia as a unipolar, largely hegemonic system with one massive power and several smaller states. China, despite its internal ups and downs, was practically always the dominant power in the region, and yet it did not seek to conquer Korea, Japan, or Vietnam. Instead, these neighbors maintained consistent peace through a system built on compatible cultures, mutual understanding, and a recognition of China's centrality. An approach Professor Kang thinks might still be available to Taiwan today were it not for the conceptual dominance of the Westphalian system. I was particularly interested to hear Professor Kang note that most East Asian dynasties have ended due to internal collapse, not external pressure or invasion, and argue that internal challenges remain most important for China today. Certainly, from my perspective, the same is true about The United States. Of course, the future is unwritten, and professor Kang's paradigm may or may not yield correct predictions going forward. As you'll hear, Jordan, who knows far more about China than I do and is also far more confident that we do in fact need a containment style policy toward China, pushes back at several points along the way. Especially considering that disagreement, I really appreciate Jordan for engaging so deeply and publicly with alternative views, and thank him for allowing me to cross post this conversation, thereby giving all of us a chance to reexamine our assumptions. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends or colleagues who might be interested in how these big geopolitical questions interact with AI developments. And we welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now I hope you enjoy this thought provoking conversation with professor David C. Kang, considering Asian history and international relations on their own terms. From the China Talk podcast with Jordan Schneider and Ilari Makela.

Jordan Schneider: (03:31) How do great power transitions work in East Asia, and what lessons from the foreign relations of imperial China can we take to understanding East Asia today? To discuss, we have on David Kang. He's a professor at USC and recently coauthored alongside Xinru Ma, who's currently out on maternity leave, Beyond Power Transitions, the Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of US China Relations. Continuing on our Imperial China series, Ilari Makela of the On Humans podcast is cohosting. Welcome to China Talk, everyone.

Ilari Makela: (04:03) Professor Kang, what do you think people who are not familiar with the East Asian history get wrong when they think about international relations and war?

David C. Kang: (04:11) You know, the biggest thing that came to us from starting to research this book was how many times great power stumbled for internal reasons and not because of great power war or challenges from the outside. I mean, to me, that's the biggest lesson. And when we take the history and we look to the present, we think we see both US and China with considerable internal challenges that are probably more important than their relations to each other. So that's what I'd say is probably the biggest lesson that I would have people take away.

Ilari Makela: (04:42) You say that the countries we're familiar with, the proper state of China, proper state of Japan, of Korea, or Vietnam. This forms towards the end of the first millennium. And from that time on that you start having these clear states, it's only a handful of times that there is a kind of land grab, a war in the kind of thing that's so familiar from European history. And that they at least if you look at their dynamics with each other, it's remarkably peaceful.

David C. Kang: (05:09) Well, this is the thing that I've, you know, I've sort of spent my career trying to make that argument, and it doesn't mean that Asian countries don't ever fight. They fight a lot sometimes. But the way that wars worked and the types of land grabs, and in this case, the type of power transition that we think are universal as part of the inevitable human condition actually seem to be pretty European in nature. Right? And so one of the main points of the book is we started by asking, what do power transitions look like in Asia? Because everybody tries to take the European experience and squish it onto Asia. So it's like, is China today like Athens? Is it like Sparta? Is it like Bismarckian Germany? And we said, why would we try and figure out what European analogy fits with Asia? Why wouldn't we start with Asian history first and see what lessons we would learn? And if you had actually started studying international relations and you didn't start with Europe and you started with Asia, you would never come up with a theory of power transitions, of rising and falling powers grabbing land and, you know, tiny advantages being exploited. You just would never come up with that theory. Instead, you'd come up with a theory of a bunch of really stable countries that have very clear conceptions of their own, for lack of a better word, national identity or some conception there that Korea was clearly not China and clearly not Japan. Clearly differences in their power and how big they are, but also very clear recognition that they can work out these types of relations that are unequal. And so instead, what you look at is what happened internally. And almost every single dynastic transition in East Asia came from internal reasons. When one of the dynasties collapsed or decayed or there was a rebellion, remarkably few changed because of external invasion.

Jordan Schneider: (07:07) I guess we'll start at the Song because you decided to start at the Song. How did they drop the ball?

David C. Kang: (07:14) So what we did was, look at the various dynasties. We just tried to see. We didn't necessarily Xinru and I didn't start out trying to make this larger argument. We started out just saying, I don't think it worked that way. Let's find the power transitions in East Asia. And then we ended up not finding them. So what we did then is start to take the individual ones that might have looked that way and try and come up with, did they actually fit? And one of the one time in the last, say, 2000 years that China has been conquered from the outside was when the Mongols conquered the Song dynasty in, you know, over the thirteenth century, the beginning you know, it took about 50 years till about 1279 or so when the Mongols declared themselves the Yuan dynasty. So we looked it looks like a classic power transition. There, you've got all these Mongol hordes, and they come over and they attack, and Song is falling, and then they end up winning. So it looks like the classic rising power and declining power. But you would actually have to look very closely to realize that Song dynasty, Song China at its height had, like, 50,000,000 people and was the richest, had a 3,000,000 men in its army. It was an incredibly powerful country that had come up with all this flourishing of internal and, you know, paper money and a canal system and more. This is an incredibly well run dynamic country. The Mongols at their height had 1,000,000 people, they think. We don't really know. So there's just no way that this was a rising power and a falling power. Instead, what happened a lot was a lot of bad decisions within the Song. Eventually, they the Song in many ways were more focused. They actually tried to ally with the Mongols at one point because they were more focused on reclaiming some territory that the Jin and other countries on the side that had grabbed from them the 16 prefectures to the north. So they actually tried to ally with the Mongols to get back to what they considered to be old Song dynasty land, and were totally unprepared for what actually happened. So in many ways, the Song-Mongol transition doesn't look anything like what we would expect a power transition to look like. Instead, what we see is a Song China, which is focused on what it believes is its own inherent territory and not paying attention to the actual threats that were coming towards it.

Jordan Schneider: (09:48) The fall of the Song, I think, is an interesting example. Because, basically, your argument is like, these guys had no business losing, but they were just so, like, emotionally bound up in their, you know, connection to these northern territories that they just made a lot of dumb decisions, that opened them up to being rolled by the Yuan. And, you know, my first thought there is, like, Europeans are emotional too, and they make a lot of, like, dumb, you know, not necessarily, like, cold calculating strategic, you know, balance of forces things. And I think also sort of, you know, to give the Yuan some credit. Right? Like, it wasn't just the Song that they were able to defeat and sort of doing that, like, comparison of, you know, adding up how many soldiers you have when the Yuan are almost more like, you know, they're coming to the battlefield with assault rifles and everyone else is playing with bows and arrows, particularly when you have the sort of other cases of them basically, like, destroying every functional civilization on the planet seems like it would make a little I don't know. Kinda complicates the narrative a little bit.

David C. Kang: (11:04) Yes. No. Absolutely. And, you know, the argument isn't that the Song just screwed up and the Mongols got lucky. Right? I mean, the Mongols were and Genghis Khan was, you know, like, what do you say about the greatest general in history who conquered more land than anyone ever has done before or since? So this isn't to take away from the Mongols per se. It's really to think about when we get to the Song dynasty. First of all, did this look like a power transition? And, no, it probably didn't. Right? The Song had already been divided into two because they were so focused on fighting to get back the prefectures that they had lost to the Jin that they were now the Southern Song had already been pushed back. And so in many ways, when we look at what the Song was doing and their focus, it was still on this internal return or what did they call the honorable reclamation of lost land and stuff like that. They weren't sitting around saying, what are the external threats? What's going on? How do we prepare for them? And that's where I say they even tried to align with the Mongols at first to get back and to get those territories back without realizing they were actually letting the fox into the henhouse and things like that. So even the Song way, way, way too late realized that that was the real threat. The Song had decades of evidence that the Mongols were the real threat, but they worked with them because they were trying to get this territory back. And that's what I mean by a sense of I don't know. I forget what we used in the book because we tried to avoid national identity because that's way too modern. But there is some conception of what Song China should be, and it was longer and older than the Song itself. And that's what they were focused on until way too late. And they're like, uh-oh. What's going on? And then they had to try and adjust. And that's what we think is so important to know. Right? Is, like, how do you resolve this territory and what is civilization? What does it need to be Chinese? Oh, these guys are attacking us. And that's where we focused on it.

Ilari Makela: (13:37) I mean, there's another interesting thing about the Mongols, which is that there's a big difference, right, in what happens to the East of China and what happens to the West of China. And, I mean, the Mongols are just one of the examples of trouble on the Western frontier. The reason why...

David C. Kang: (13:54) One of the things that I find so interesting is how the ways that we think about the world get sort of codified. They become conventional wisdoms, and then we stop even questioning it. So first of all, you know, the lessons of history are always the gladiators or, you know, Athens or things like the crusades. It's always European. I get it. Right? But it's still, it's always European. And secondly, even when conventional or mainstream historians talk about China, again and again and again, they talk about the threats to China came from the Western Steppe, from the semi-nomadic peoples that lived, you know, along the Great Plains, whether it was Mongols or the Xiongnu thousands of years ago. And we just take that for granted. That's as you said, that's why they built the Great Wall, all these threats to China.

Ilari Makela: (14:45) I mean, even people who know Chinese history just from Disney films will know that there are some really wicked people there in the West who wanna attack, and Mulan has to go and fight.

David C. Kang: (14:55) Mulan. Right? The one thing we know about Chinese history is Mulan. Protecting China from the barbarians. Right? But what's so fascinating when you start with that is any Western IR theory, the game of Risk, all of the ways that we think about international relations say that the bigger countries threaten and bully the smaller countries. But we simply talk about, oh, China was facing threats from these tiny semi-nomadic peoples. There's no way that should work. If you just start with a massive country with 50,000,000 people and a bunch of smaller polities to its side, whether east or west, they're the ones who should be afraid of China. China shouldn't be building walls. Everyone else should be building walls against China. But this is not the way that it should work. And especially if we look to the East and to the South where these were recognizably kingdoms, these are recognizably sort of nascent, I call them nascent states. Right? They were governments. They had territory. They were bureaucratically administered. These weren't semi-nomadic tribes, you know, moving around from various agrarian region to, you know, up the mountains and depths. These were settled agrarian states, bureaucratically administered with long standing bureaucracies. They had written language. They used Chinese script, etcetera. These were clearly governments. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, should have been terrified of China, and yet nobody's building walls to defend themselves against any of this. So on the Eastern side and the Southern side, these countries managed to craft remarkably stable relationships with each other. Now in a way, this shouldn't be surprising. If we can move away from what we think should happen from Europe and we just start with, well, there's a bunch of countries. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but all of these countries that are trying to do the same things could literally understand each other. Literally. And when I say that, I mean, they use sinic script. Every alphabet in Japanese is borrowed or modified from Chinese characters. The Koreans use it. The Vietnamese use it. 60 to 70% of the vocabulary in these countries is Chinese borrowed words. They were consciously trying to be like Chinese. The Chinese could recognize them literally, see something they understood. They could talk, and they crafted relations. And these smaller countries in many ways tried to emulate the Chinese experience. They often even borrowed the same governmental form, 6 ministries, etcetera, etcetera. A written examination to hire civil servants. So in a way, if we start from that, it's not surprising that these countries could craft stable relations with each other. They had what I call what we call in the book a common conjecture. Both sides, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Chinese, had a common vocabulary literally and an understanding of what mattered, what didn't matter, how to interact with each other. Doesn't mean they always got along. There's a lots of pushing and shoving. But it was within a shared understanding of what the world meant and how we should handle it. And that's very different from Chinese or even Korean relations with the semi-nomadic peoples, whether they be Mongols or Xiongnu or whatever else on their West who didn't want those same things. The Mongols didn't want necessarily to have written bureaucratic systems, etcetera, etcetera, until the part of them conquered China, and then they did for about 100 years. But it fell apart because that culture was very, very different, and it never really became settled. So you have very different types of patterns here between countries that understand each other, that literally use the same vocabulary and talk to each other, and then peoples that don't want the same things. So in many ways, what we came back to was this when we talk about international relations, that it's not simply power differentials. It's not simply who's stronger and bullies everyone else. It's do we understand each other? Do we have a common culture or vocabulary or are we part of a great conversation where we're like, okay. We should do this. We shouldn't do that. And you see very different patterns of stability and war in East Asia than you did in Europe or other places.

Ilari Makela: (19:08) And I think one really interesting thing to notice in the history is that it's not that this system was always just rolling along with them having bureaucracies, etcetera. Actually, with Jordan, we interviewed Yasheng Huang earlier for a whole thing where we talked a lot about the way that the civil service exam shapes China. And it's really I think it's a nice link to your work where you show not only China, but it's then also Japan, it's Korea, it's Vietnam emulating that civil service exam. And also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's the Sui dynasty, which is the dynasty that really institutionalizes it. But I mean, they attacked Korea several times, there were like skirmishes between them and Korea, but it's really after that kind of civil service era, especially when it reaches all the places that you start seeing this peace. And I think why that's so important is the case of Vietnam, because a lot of Vietnamese would say, hold on a second. China was constantly bullying us. And your pushback, if I'm right, is that, well, there was a time when there were a lot of things happening but if you look at the Vietnam with the civil service exam and the proper state from the year 1000 roughly onwards, you don't have that anymore. And so there really is a kind of time before and the time after, and it is once these cultures start to really kind of work in the same, roughly similar way that you get this remarkable stability.

David C. Kang: (20:30) Absolutely.

Nathan Labenz: (20:36) In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick 2. But what if you could have all 3 at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have found since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. Cheaper? OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. And better, in test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all of your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com/cognitive. That's oracle.com/cognitive.

Nathan Labenz: (21:46) Being an entrepreneur, I can say from personal experience, can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one, and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one, and you might find yourself fighting fires alone. In the ecommerce space, of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all ecommerce in The United States, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, just as if you had your own design studio. With helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography, it's like you have your own content team. And with the ability to easily create email and social media campaigns, you can reach your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling, just as if you had a full marketing department behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping, processing returns, and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into cha ching with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/cognitive. Visit shopify.com/cognitive. Once more, that's shopify.com/cognitive.

David C. Kang: (23:42) I mean, one of the ways in which Vietnam, for example, has maintained its independence was by instantly engaging in tribute relations with China. At the time, Song, right, when they became independent around 968. And they entered into tributary relationships. And I'm currently doing some research right now where I'm trying to go back through the Ming Shilu and the Qing Shilu, which are the veritable records of the Ming and the Qing dynasties in China, which are about, yeah, 1400 to 1900. And I'm really interested to see how the elites in Beijing in the Ming government talked about Vietnam. Because the Vietnamese would tell you, and this is very much a twentieth century perspective back on time, which didn't exist at the time. Right? Well, they're always bullying us. They're always trying to invade. But if you look back at what actually the Vietnamese were saying to the Chinese, often they were saying things like, there would be a debate in Vietnam as to which you know, there's some rebellion and there's a faction, and both sides would appeal to the Ming court or the Qing court and say, we're the legitimate rulers. Recognize us. And the Chinese that you can see these debates in China among the elites where they say, we gotta figure out who we recognize here, but there is almost no discussion in the Qing historical records. There's no mention of, should we invade this time? Is this our chance to take over Vietnam? It's all who's the legitimate ruler? How do we stabilize our relation? And on the Vietnamese side, often it was, if we have recognition from China, then we're the legitimate ruler. We're the ones. And it was this very much an aspirational type of relationships. That border between Vietnam and China was formally negotiated, and I think that I should look I think it's 1084 that it was formally negotiated, and that border is literally in the same place today. That is what? That's almost 1000 years where that border has not changed. Right? They put down 2 bronze pillars. There's a great book by Liam Kelly called Beyond the Bronze Pillars. Right? They put down these gates, and here's where Vietnam starts, and here's where China starts. And that's what it's been ever since. That's remarkable stability.

Jordan Schneider: (25:54) Let's push back a little bit. So I think, like, the sort of the key difference that Ilari and I came to with sort of comparing the East Asian experience with the European experience is, as you pointed out, at the end of the day, there's China and there's some gnats. And like some of the gnats figure out how to not get squished and some of the gnats don't. And so, you know, we don't have any kingdoms in Yunnan anymore. Like, Tibet had a rough time of it. Xinjiang had a rough time of it. I mean, just all these, like, ethnic minorities who used to do their own thing get sort of agglomerated. And, you know, you also go north with, like, you know, taking over, you know, big chunks of Northeastern China. But, like, you know, it just so happened that there was enough sort of historical happenstance that, you know, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan woke up early enough, were sort of far enough away, were not important enough to create this sort of, like, understanding where there was there wasn't enough of a payoff from a Chinese leader perspective if they're already basically, like, getting all that they want and they get to feel good that these foreigners are bringing them, you know, cows and inscriptions or whatever. The thing that I thought was what really sort of, like, brought this home to me was, think this was a quote from a scholar you have, that said, over the centuries, Korean elites as stakeholders rather than outsiders helped shape the imperial tradition. The palpable irony of all of this is the myth of China's moral empire persisted even until today, partly because generations of diplomats had been repeating it to China's imperial forefathers for centuries. But to come away with the conclusion is to forget why Korean envoys and memorial drafters use this notion of the moral empire in the first place. It was to convince empires and their agents that behaving according to Korean expectations was the best way to be imperial. And, we're recording this a few weeks after Yom Kippur, and this, like, resonated really dramatically with me, like, the Jewish prayer book where basically, like, all the prayers are trying to convince God to let you live another year. And, you know, what it does is, like, it quotes back different parts of the bible where God promises the Israeli people, I'm gonna be nice to you and I forgive you. And right. It sort of feels like the same thing where they're just like, alright. Like, we have no choice because, you know, from your national power calculation perspective, China is just, like, 100x bigger than we are. This is not the sort of thing where you've got, you know, a Holy Roman Empire and you got a French king and you got some city states in Italy trying to work out who's top dog or whatever. So I don't know. Thoughts, reflections. That was a lot to say.

David C. Kang: (28:53) No. Absolutely. Because you've said in a different way one of the key arguments about the book, which is that it's not about the relative power. It's about the shared understanding of how you should behave and how you should interact with each other. And almost none of us actually go through life always ready, you know, with a shiv, ready to push back when people no. We have a basic understanding. You should do this. You should do that. And that's what I mean about the great conversation. Right? I love that book, by the way. Shout out to Sixiang Wang, s-i-x-i-a-n-g Wang. We should put links to all these books. They're so good. Right? But this is the conversation. It's not that somehow under the Sui dynasty in 600, they came up with a bunch of rules, and then everybody just followed them for the next 1500 years. No. It's constantly being adjudicated, adjusted, things change. I mean, the difference in the Korean state, you know, with Silla dynasty in 668 versus, you know, 1600 is 1000 years of history and stuff like that. Right? So

Jordan Schneider: (30:05) Yeah. My argument would be, like, the only reason you can have this conversation in the first place is because that relative balance of power doesn't change, of China just being the 1000 times more powerful than everyone else and these other 3 polities just trying to survive. And that is the constant you see from 600 to, I don't know, 1870, which allows this to even manifest in the first place.

David C. Kang: (30:36) You're absolutely right. So one of the other things that I probably should have said, one of the ways that I do this if I sort of give a talk is I say, look. Europe was a balance of power system. It was a multipolar system. And it still is today. Asia has and is a hegemonic system. It's got one massive power and a bunch of smaller countries. They're not gonna behave the same way. The way that we think that multipolar balance of power systems behave doesn't track or analogize to East Asia. It's a very different system, and it's developed that way over 1500 years or so. You know? Actually, from the first time China was unified, let's call it 2000 years, everybody had to figure out not how do we expand and become stronger, blah blah blah. It's how do we survive and exist and grow and pursue what we want in the shadow of an enormous, enormously central power that is not going away. You're not moving away. They're not moving away. Right? You are stuck. You have to work out this unequal relationship. And to just hint about the future a little bit, that is what's going on today. The one thing I just wanna say, I you know, every aspirational quote I hear or every time I read from somebody in the DC blob about Asia's going to balance China, I say, no. No. They're not. No. They're not. That is never going to happen. The countries in Asia are not going to join a US containment coalition against China. That's not how it's gonna work. They have to live with China. They don't have to like it, but they have to craft a relationship with this massive country, and that's what they did back then.

Nathan Labenz: (32:20) It is an interesting time for business. Tariff and trade policies are dynamic, supply chains squeezed, and cash flow tighter than ever. If your business can't adapt in real time, you are in a world of hurt. You need total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real time cash flow, and that's NetSuite by Oracle, your AI powered business management suite trusted by over 42,000 businesses. NetSuite is the number 1 cloud ERP for many reasons. It brings accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR all together into one suite. That gives you one source of truth, giving you visibility and the control you need to make quick decisions. And with real time forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. Plus with AI embedded throughout, you can automate a lot of those everyday tasks, letting your teams stay strategic. NetSuite helps you know what's stuck, what it's costing you, and how to pivot fast. Because in the AI era, there is nothing more important than speed of execution. It's one system, giving you full control and the ability to tame the chaos. That is NetSuite by Oracle. If your revenues are at least in the 7 figures, download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade, 3 Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com/cognitive. That's netsuite.com/cognitive.

Ilari Makela: (33:45) So I think would it be right then to say that the European model, you know, you assume kind of billiard ball table, you have these equally sized balls very hard as themselves, but then they, you know, bump into each other. And when you look at East Asia, what you see instead is that you see things crumbling from the inside. So it's not that there's no violence, there is the internal rebellions, there is the Western frontier with the steppe nomads. But the logic of Europe is not the logic that you would see, especially not between these 4 countries. I think Korea is kind of poster boy for that kind of relationship with China. Vietnam, many Vietnamese would push back and say, no, no, no, Chinese were always trying to come. And then they talk about the dynasties and you say, yeah, but those were before this whole, you know, sinicification of the Vietnamese culture. What about Japan? Japan not only, of course, has the famous wars in the late 1800s, early twentieth century, but even the really things go wild in East Asia in the late 1500s, the Imjin war, which I think most listeners won't even have heard about. I didn't register that this war ever happened before I read your book and it sounds like things really went wild. Why don't you tell the quick story of the Imjin war and also think how much do you think that Japan is actually a little bit more Europe-like than the rest of these examples?

David C. Kang: (35:10) What's made this so fun over, what, almost, you know, 2 decades now that I've been doing this stuff has been how many things I think we should do differently when we teach international relations in The United States or in Europe. Right? Like, I grew up my father's, you know, my father's from Northern Korea. He actually, you know, from North of Pyongyang. And when I'm growing up, I wasn't paying attention. You know, how your parents always say it. He's telling me some story about, oh, well, the Japanese tried to invade. They kept trying to invade Korea all the time, and we fought them off with these turtle boats. Right? I heard about this turtle boat guy. That's all I knew about Korean history until I started this. Right? You know? Yay for the turtle boat guy who's Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who, by the way, should be studied in every international relations course because he's an extraordinary admiral, an unbelievable admiral who won these phenomenal battles with, like, 13 of his ships against 300 Japanese ships during this war. And the other thing that I thought we should all learn is we should be studying the Imjin War because it doesn't work the way we think it works. Who's heard of the Spanish Armada? Right? Everybody's heard of that. You know? I'm gonna contrast that because 1588, the Spanish Armada, the Spaniards tried to invade London, and they sent I think it was, like, 130 ships and 20,000 troops. The biggest force in Renaissance Europe ever seen. 4 years later, on the other side of the globe, in 1592, the Japanese tried to conquer China, and they started by invading Korea to get to China. So exact contemporaneous with the Spanish armada. 300,000 Japanese troops, 700 ships. The scale of the war was 5 to 10 times what you could even think. You couldn't even think of that in Europe at that time. That's the ability of these countries to fight war when they wanted to. The scale they could fight, the logistical, organizational capacity of these Asian countries dwarfed anything you can think. Why, by the way? Why?

Ilari Makela: (37:19) Is that because of their civil service, their bureaucracy being more centralized, more complicated?

David C. Kang: (37:27) Yes. And this will get back to briefly what Japan is or is not. In 702, the Japanese ministry had, like, 7,000 people working in its bureaucracy. 500 years later, the Catholic Curia had around 500 people working in it, and it was the most organized thing in all of Europe. Right? The Japanese who are widely considered less organized, less sophisticated, less educated, etcetera, than Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese. Japan was considered the barbarian with a less developed system. Its organization and its bureaucrats and its civil service exam, which they used, like, 400 years, dwarfed what you could imagine in Europe. All these countries had the capacity to do that. They just didn't choose to do it that way. China did because they always China always had a big army because they had, again, the Western steppe and all those kind of things. Right? So when they decided to fight, the capacity of these countries to create a massive army and ships and organization and logistics and supply was unthinkable in Europe at the time. So that's the context why we should study this war. It's one of the great wars, and it doesn't work the way we think it should work. Because number 1, China was always bigger as we pointed out, China was bigger than Japan. If anybody should be invading, China should be invading Japan. But this Japanese general, Hideyoshi, had unified there had been a breakdown for about 100 years. There was a breakdown of central rule in Japan. So Hideyoshi unified Japan, and then nobody is I have not yet heard a definitive argument for why he decided to invade China. Ego and hubris is certainly one. There is a large argument that it was domestic politics, and it's because he had united a bunch of warring different factions, daimyo and stuff like that in order to both get their soldiers out of Japan so they couldn't revolt against him and to keep them happy and get them more gold and stuff like that, send them out. What's pretty clear, though, is that he didn't actually do a whole lot of scouting and measuring of the relative balance of power between him and China or even him and Korea. There's almost no record that they were sitting there saying, they're weaker. We're stronger. Any of these calculations of balance of power that we say occurs when wars start. There's almost no evidence that he did any of that. Oh, the other interesting thing about this is, if you just get 1 big country and 2 small countries, like Korea and Japan and China, 1 big country, China, 2 small countries, all IR theory would say the 2 small countries should ally together and form an alliance against the big country.

Ilari Makela: (40:10) And it's very modern, by the way, with those 2 countries. There's a lot of people who think, why are they not more friendly with each other?

David C. Kang: (40:18) And they're still saying that. Right? That's what I mean. There's so much. There's so much that tracks to today as well. Like, why don't they, you know, anyone would say that small countries should all ally together and huddle together against the big country, but that's not what happened. Instead, Japan invaded Korea who was not expecting it because they it was again, it was like, you must be kidding. The Koreans had word that there was a buildup for a couple years, and they were like, refused to believe it. Went to the Chinese and said, we need help, China. Even the Chinese didn't believe it at first. Thought, you're kidding me. So it took a while for the Chinese to actually take it seriously. And then the Chinese sent troops and essentially along with Admiral Yi Sun-sin cutting their supply lines because he was a great admiral. The Japanese advance got pushed all the way back to Pusan. They spent a couple years negotiating. Hideyoshi died, and then they invaded again a second time, and then got crushed and went back to Japan in 1598. Now the other amazing thing about this is, obviously, the Korean government would not have survived without the Chinese military. The Chinese troops were completely in charge of the Korean Peninsula after this war in 1598. All they had to do was say, okay. We're in charge. You guys are you know, this is now the 33rd province or whatever. That's all the Chinese had to do is stay. But within about a year, they all went home. They're like, this isn't our country. This is Korea. Okay. Good luck with that. And then they took off. The Koreans were actually trying to get them to stay because they thought the Japanese might come a third time. So none of this tracks to the way we think it should happen. The Chinese could have just stayed there like this isn't our country. That goes to not power. That goes to a conception of who we are and who we aren't. And do we care about this, and do we not? It's not a simple, endless expansion, you know, like gas that expands to fill the space available. Countries don't. Empirically, they don't simply expand as much as they can. And so much of this war doesn't act at all the way we think that war should act. Interesting enough, Japanese slink home, form the Tokugawa Shogunate. For 200 years, they don't do anything. Actually, almost 300 years up until 300 years, 1598 to, like, 1870. For 300 years, these countries then just sort of interacted with each other. So it's a very interesting war, and it doesn't track at all with the way we expect wars should track. But it does track with China's a big country. Korea had good relations with it. Japan had this one guy who, for very interesting domestic reasons, decided he was gonna try and invade everyone else. But the system sort of snaps back to stability in ways that we simply do not see in the European experience. It's the only war between Japan, Korea, and China in 600 years from, like, you know, 1200 to 1800. So it's the only war in 600 years between these countries. And they clearly had the capacity to fight, which is the thing. It's not that they weren't able to. It's not that they're a bunch of tribes running around. You know? These were countries with massive capacities that simply chose not to fight. And I think that it...

Ilari Makela: (43:30) is easy to see the Imjin war as the kind of weird exception that almost proves the rule of the stability because, like you said, the reaction was, like, mate, you gotta be kidding. Like, that's obviously not gonna happen. Oh, okay. It is happening. But the same, it does not hold for the much more familiar Japan attacks China in the late 1800s and then, of course, with the world wars. And I think that that's one of the kind of key things that we wanted to push back when talking with Jordan earlier is that one of the kind of major IR theories that you feel based in the book is too Eurocentric is the so called Thucydides Trap, which is, you know, the rising power and the declining power and whenever that happens, they're almost what was the famous number was in 12 out of 16 cases where you have this...

David C. Kang: (44:20) There's a war.

Ilari Makela: (44:20) Yeah. There's a war. And then you say that you just don't see that in the East Asian history, which is okay, fair enough. But there is a much more Thucydides-like way of reading that, which is that yes, because you just don't have any power able to challenge China. I think this is also what Jordan was getting at earlier. Lo and behold, the moment when Japan, due to industrialization, is able to challenge the hegemon, they immediately do. So in what sense do you think that East Asia is a counterexample to a Thucydides trap, which excites a lot of attention nowadays because of the China US dynamic versus actually, it's one of those cases where well, you know, you have like a sample size of 1 in the whole East Asian history of this event and lo and behold, Japan behaves exactly like the Western IR theorists, international relations theorists would predict Japan to behave.

David C. Kang: (45:15) That's great. Right? I mean, and this is where I think it's so interesting because you have a traditional or whatever you wanna call it, East Asian world order. And that world order had its own set of principles and values and expectations, and it was, as we've been talking, remarkably stable. The arrival of the Western imperial powers in the nineteenth century blew that all apart. And I think in some ways, this is one of I haven't done research on this. I'm still I'm going back farther in time as opposed to up closer. But to me, this era is if there are IR scholars out there who wanna talk about how do we understand a change of world orders. This is the time people should be studying. Because there's examples of, like, the Japanese learned first Western theory, and they learned French to speak French. And they come and they're arguing with the Chinese in 1879 over Taiwan and the status of other things. And the Chinese wanted to use the tribute system way of interacting, speaking in Chinese and the same principles and the norms. And the Japanese were like, what are you talking about? We write in French. We write down a contract. And they're like, what's a contract? I mean, literally different worldviews. How do you sort that out? What does it mean? Right? So there's as much questions of what is modernity or what does this mean to have an international system as well as just simply who's stronger or not. They didn't understand each other anymore. They were using different languages to argue about stuff. And some of the most fascinating research is why Japan responded better than China. And in many ways, it makes sense that, you know, my quick and dirty explanation is, you know, China was the hegemon. They were like, why should we change? Whereas the Japanese were happy to and so rapidly learned, you know, borrowed German military training and English business practices and everything else. Right? So you do get a very different set of world views. And when we get back to the actual war, right, the way I would call it is I'm not so sure I would call it a power transition war per se because this was as much about Japan defending its own survival as it was about expanding into China. And the Japanese were lucky in some ways because they weren't as valuable a resource as China, so they had more time to adjust. And then the question for the Japanese is, how do we become a great power? And I think it's more that question that was motivating the Japanese than a Thucydides power transition trap. It was like, how do we become recognized and survive as a country? Well, what do great powers do? They have a flag. I mean, we'll get to the other stuff, but this is not super they have a flag. I have this great photo of, like, the Japanese emperor, like, 2 years apart, like, 1870. In 1, he's dressed in the traditional garb, and then he's dressed like Bismarck. He's got a sword and a mustache and a bunch of medals. I mean, they're like, this is how we do it. If we're gonna survive in a similar way to how do we make ourselves recognizable. But on top of that, we get a military, we become a colonial power, we take possessions, and then we say we're just like you. So what Japan was doing was actually aimed from the racial equality clause at the League of Nations in 1919 to simply being an imperial power was aimed at the European countries as well as then half of it focused on China and readjusting that relationship. So, I mean, it sort of fits. Again, if you don't look too closely, it fits. But if I look at the Japanese motivations, I see as much survival compared to the Western powers as I do a simple transition of power with respect to China itself.

Ilari Makela: (49:12) Fair enough. But I think that because I mean, your whole book is titled Beyond Power Transitions. I think we can't let you off the hook so easily.

David C. Kang: (49:21) Go ahead. Yes. Keep my feet to the fire.

Ilari Makela: (49:23) It might be the case that you have an alternative explanation to the kind of power transition explanation. But it's another thing to say that yeah. Okay. You can explain away this one case. It's another thing to say that East Asia does not support a kind of power transition theory because again, the pushback would be like, either it kind of positively supports or it's kind of neutral because you just don't have a moment with any power transition happening in East Asia, which then the kind of traditional IR scholars would say, well, if we do have a genuine power transition happening somewhere, for example, with US China, well, we have to go look at the only cases where this has happened and whether we exclude the Japan case or not. It still looks like, well, we are back in the classical 12 out of 16 cases. Because the whole East Asian history, although it's fascinating and it shows this remarkable capacity of countries to live peacefully with each other, well, it doesn't show that you can have a power transition without war.

David C. Kang: (50:19) Well okay. So two things. So is that in some ways, I would say, fair enough. Right? We are getting to the question that we get to today. We're getting to that question, which is, is the entire world now Westphalian? Right? Has the European Westphalian model of international relations, you know, nation states, balance of power, as I said, flag. You know? Are we all that way now? And so none of the other stuff has any impact. And in some ways, if that's the case that, yes, we are always Westphalian, then we do then have a debate about does this apply? Does this not apply? Etcetera, etcetera. The question, though, is how deeply did we actually make this transition to a Western country, so to speak. Right? And my argument there is that I don't I think it's extremely thin. I think it's very superficial. One of my big critiques of power transition theory is that it should be universal. That's what they claim. This is a universal theory. Our argument, we are trying to regionalize power transitions to Europe, so to speak. Right? That it wasn't simply inevitable, that it was based on some ideas and beliefs about how we behave, etcetera, etcetera, happened in Europe and not anywhere else. If we go to Asia, we don't see those same beliefs. We also don't see that same behavior. The argument then is that, okay, if it is the same set of ideas, then if the entire world is now that way, do we still see power transitions or not? And our question is, how much has Asia really changed? Right? Because 2 things I would say about that actual back to Japan, and then we can talk a little more broadly. The thing about Japan is that number 1, I don't think they were ever as strong as China measurably in the nineteenth century anyway. So I'm not sure the conditions fit. It sort of looks like because Japan was rising and China was falling. But the minute we try to actually say, okay. They have to be getting bigger. What is the percentage? When does the war start? I think you lose that because I don't think Japan was ever as strong as China was. And so I'm still not convinced you had a power transition. So it might have been a war, but I'm not sure it's a power transition war at all. Looks sort of that way. Again, because we've sort of said, oh, sick man of Asia is China. But China was never as weak as or small as Japan was. It always had more people and more guns and stuff.

Ilari Makela: (52:36) Yeah. But hold on a second. Without US support, do you think that they would have won a war against Japan?

David C. Kang: (52:42) Here's what I think. The Princess Bride, what's the first law of whatever never get involved in a land war in Asia. You've made one of the fundamental errors. Never get involved in a land war in Asia. And the Japanese were already bogged down long before The US got deeply involved in the war. Right? I'm not sure that they ever were going to be able to conquer China. You know, 1930, 1937, etcetera, etcetera. But even more than that, the question would be, was that actually, in some ways, a disproving case? I'm not sure that it was. I see this much more as an imperial project aimed at protecting or surviving the Japanese homeland than a China's weak, let's go for it kind of a thing. But I will say and this is true. I will say what's amazing about Japan, and I always do this in my classes, Japan is the first non-Western country to industrialize, first non-Western country to beat a European power in a war in 1904. So I don't wanna diminish their accomplishments or how strong this country was, how dangerous it was. Right. I know that might not be a satisfying answer.

Jordan Schneider: (53:56) So, you know, for all those civilizations out there who didn't, like, sinicize fast enough, you know, how do you think about, you know, how do you think about Western imperial expansion over the course of, you know, the thousand years we're talking about? It's hard to sort of generalize over 1000 years of history and lots of different you know, there's lots of different particularities with, like, Xinjiang versus Tibet versus Yunnan and whatnot. But, you know, you have people and what have you. But basically, like, did they just decide not to run the, you know, South Korea, Vietnam playbook? Like, what or was the farmland too good? Like, what's the explanatory variable here?

David C. Kang: (54:42) Well, there's two possible explanations, and I lean towards the cultural one as opposed to the material one. Right? The material one would be, well, the farmland was better and the horses were you know, it was better to have horses this way, etcetera, etcetera. So they just fought and, you know, they couldn't agree on what they wanted to do and things like that. I suspect and I have a great quote in one of the books from somebody who does much more on the Western steppe than I do. But he said, you know, the nomads and the Chinese had very clear conceptions of who they were and what they wanted, and the nomads did not want to change. They didn't wanna change their way of life. Right? And this is you know, sometimes you even see it now with sort of Mongolians. Every now and then on, like, Twitter or whatever else, someone will show the Mongolians, yes, living in the yurts and riding the horses and being semi-nomadic, moving up the hills during the summer and things like that. Moving down and then moving back up. And so part of the answer is they didn't want what the Chinese wanted. These are incompatible worldviews, and they knew it.

Ilari Makela: (55:44) Let me try to push back on that. So there is a third or an in-between explanation, which is that there's actually 2 Western frontiers. One is the Himalayas, and you do see some stability in the Tibetan statehood, etcetera. Then the other one is this famous steppe. And if you live on the steppe, you basically decided to live on grass. Humans don't eat grass. You need to have animals that eat grass and transfer and turn it into an energy that humans can use, but grass is a very not energy dense thing, which means that you have to move around a large area. So immediately, if you've decided this lifestyle, which is that you're gonna live from grass energy, you are just gonna fundamentally want to have a nomadic lifestyle. And once you have a nomadic lifestyle, it's almost like the energy demands will dictate the culture to be one where horse riding around a large plane is cool and that's what you do to survive and you can't have people cramming Confucian Classics for a civil service exam which then runs large granaries where you have rice stored for a famine because that's just not how life on the Steppe works. So I think that if you just look at the steppe experience, I think it's quite understandable why they don't suddenly become a Korean. I think that it is quite materialistic in a sense, even if, of course, culture funnels that material demand. So that's my suggestion on the energy history of the steppe, but either one of you take it down.

David C. Kang: (57:18) I'll say one thing, which, again, there are material explanations for it. I think there's also a way in which they liked the way they lived. And you could imagine a bargain if they were going to be, you know, willing to play the game halfway where they could figure out something where they trade for this, they do that, etcetera, etcetera. And they did that a little bit, but they didn't fundamentally wanna change their way of life. And I think that that's what it came down to, which isn't a necessary pushback on the cultural explanation. I've been more focused on the Eastern side, which is relatively understudied. And so I will admit, I have not I am not a steppe scholar. I have not been spending a lot of time thinking about China's steppe relations as much as I've been trying to explain because everybody focuses on that. That's where all the fighting was. I'm trying to explain the stability on the Eastern side, which is not an excuse for not knowing it. But to me, in many ways, the stability on the Eastern side is in many ways more interesting because that's we don't ever expect that to happen.

Jordan Schneider: (58:17) Like, the thing I'm thinking about in particular is less Tibet and less the steppe and more like that swath of Yunnan and Sichuan that got taken over from 1000 to 1500.

Ilari Makela: (58:32) Fair enough. Fair enough.

Jordan Schneider: (58:34) That, you know, kinda has a normal landscape. It's not a particularly dramatic place that imperial China for whatever reason was able to just like wash over. You know, like you had like dozens of these little kingdoms and cultures and the vast majority I mean, basically every single one of them, if you're looking West, is no longer, you know, is no longer able to do their own thing.

David C. Kang: (58:58) Well, imagine a country that starts out with a populated, urbanized, sophisticated Eastern Seaboard that slowly moves out to a largely unorganized, uninstitutionalized frontier to its West, expanding outward, tending to slaughter all of the indigenous peoples who were there while they pushed until they couldn't expand any longer. I know you have 2 countries that did that. China and The United States. Right? It's a that to me is very similar because those are frontiers. And what happened is China expanded as we turned frontiers into borders up until they met Russia or up until they met the Himalayas or whatever else. And that's a very similar project to what goes on around the world. You know, my one sentence history of the world is it's turning frontiers into borders, right, over 20,000 years and 10,000. Either that's what we've done. And so those countries those peoples, you know, they had been sort of sparring with Tibet for 1000 years. I mean, the first Chinese that took or first whatever was like Tang was, you know, fighting and sparring with the Tibetans. Then they get free, then they get taken over. They had these constant troubles, which is why the Chinese expanded westward. Right? It was they tried defense with the Great Wall. They tried bribery with trying to give goods and stuff like that. They tried all that. Eventually, they incorporated these as they move farther and farther out, and the nomads retreated farther and farther back until there's nowhere to go. That is absolutely a in some ways, a I'm not sure I wanna put a moral judgment on it. Mean, we did this in The United States as well. That's sort of what happened.

Ilari Makela: (1:00:52) Okay. Well, I think it's time. Let's make this all about our time. You know, you meet someone who's, oh, this is all cool. I like history, but what the heck does this have to do with, like, whether there's an American ship bumping into a Chinese ship on the Taiwan Strait and all hell breaks loose.

David C. Kang: (1:01:13) Yeah. Yeah. To me, the first, the most important lesson, the most important lesson from looking at all this history is that we should ask and not simply assume whether this power transition dynamic is the most important dynamic to be looking at. In other words, it is just taken for granted now in Washington DC, and probably, you know, around the world, whatever else, that rising and declining power and US is declining and it's gonna get weak and China's rising, so they have rising ambitions. That's the key dynamic that's going on today in Asia. And if anything, our book should cause us to pause and ask, is that really the most important dynamic? And our answer would be, no. It's not. It's not at all. And what do we mean by that? The most important dynamic, we still go back to the other lesson which we've avoided. We haven't really talked about it that much. Right? Which was that if you look at the Korean dynasties right next to China, every single one of them fell for internal reasons. The Silla dynasty, the Koryo dynasty, and then Chosun was in the twentieth century, which is different. Every one of the Japanese, you know, Kamakura, whatever, they all fell internally. Same thing in Vietnam. Even the Chinese, they all fell. Song was conquered, but Tang internal, Ming internal, Qing internal, frankly. Right? These internal dynamics are, in many ways, way more consequential than external. I read somewhere, and I'm probably stealing this quote. So I forget who said it, but what? Empires die from suicide, not murder is a way to think about it. Right? And so if we look at the big debate about China today, one is, is there gonna be a power transition? Do they wanna take over the world? But the other one is, at the same time, are they gonna collapse? Right? They have so many problems internally. What's you know, I have spent my adult life hearing about the impending real estate crash in China. When Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, is he more concerned with what's going on internally, or is he itching to make land grabs and things like that? Right? So to me, the biggest point of the book would be to ask that question, and we would end up probably coming down on the dynamics of what goes on in East Asia are gonna be much more internal than they are external. Then there's a second. Let me just say the second one, and then let's talk about whatever you want. The second one is this question of the shared understanding or the common conjecture. Yeah. There was a viewed in the long arc of history, 1841, you know, the opium wars, sometime in the mid nineteenth century for up until 1979 or 1949, whatever. For about 100 years, China was going through one of its periodic internal chaos. It's not a rise. It's a return. And every country in Asia has dealt with a large, huge China, and now they're doing it again. And so every country in the region has to craft some type of working, living relationship with China because nobody's going away. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that American policymakers are making is in trying to get these countries to choose The US sort of completely in a very American style. I'm not even sure if it's European, but certainly in America's not like, you're with us or against us. You're in our alliance, etcetera, etcetera. And Asian countries do not want to do that. Vietnam just joined the BRICS. Thailand just joined. You know? These are not yeah. They don't get along with China on everything. Nobody does. We're always arguing with Mexico about stuff. But are these countries going to unequivocally contain and move away from China and derisk and decouple? There is no evidence that I see of that. I don't see any evidence of that. They have to live with China, and they have a, in some ways, a shared conjecture still about what China is. And the biggest the most important one for our purposes is I don't think any realistic Korean or Vietnamese or, frankly, Japanese, any responsible policymaker or scholar says, I think China wants to invade and conquer our country. So they're not acting as if they did. Doesn't mean they love them. That doesn't mean they get along well. But I do not think that Koreans or Vietnamese wake up saying, okay. Do we need to go to the trenches to fight China? They're gonna come over the border. I don't think that's the case.

Jordan Schneider: (1:05:54) So I guess, like, the modern PRC has some imperial legacies. Clearly, it's on the same geography, roughly the same landmass. You know? Script changed. You know? Still basically the same. But we were talking earlier about just how much Imperial Japan changed, where one day you're wearing I don't know what you call it one day you're wearing traditional clothes, the next day you're cosplaying as Bismarck. And, you know, we've got a Marxist Leninist system that has Marx, Lenin, and Engels as their 3 poster boys, not like Han Feizi or whatever. So how do you sort of how do you interpret this question of to what extent is the modern PRC keying off of this historical tradition versus going off something new? Because, of course, like, Mao. Right? Like, he wanted global revolution, funding revolutions in South America and Angola and what have you, threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union. So, you know, we have at least 1 really dramatic case study in our sample size of 4 CCP leaders who are, you know, very much out there on the spectrum of, like, let's just live in sort of peaceful harmony under this old system that we had a great time under since 600.

David C. Kang: (1:07:32) This is the question, and I don't think we answer this question enough. Is China today still the China of 2 centuries ago? Meaning, the answer almost ever a lot of my scholar friends who are sinologists, who know way more about China than me, answer the question without thinking, of course, it's different. It's the CCP. It's Xi Jinping. Right? It's a and they'll use these modern contemporary social science phrases like, it's a one party authoritarian system with a blah blah blah. Right? And that is the main driver of how Chinese foreign policy will go, perceptions and foreign relations and everything else. Right? It's the communist party that's trying to maintain power. The Xi dynasty, the Xi Jinping dynasty. I'm not so sure. There are but this is the question we should ask because there are some ways in which, of course, we're all modern now. I do this as a fun thing. When I'm teaching intro to IR, I got a bunch of international kids as well as Americans, I was like, how many of us have a passport? Everybody raises their hand. To the Americans that don't have a passport, I yell at them. But I'll say, look. Nobody in China is questioning that this is what matters, that you are a nation state, that this little book tells you who you belong to, that this is how we're gonna that's all modernity. That's all the modern world, whether we call it Westphalian or whatever. Nobody questions that. If you listen to the Chinese national anthem, they get it. Sounds like it was written in 1870s Vienna. It's not Beijing opera. Right? What you'd think if it's Chinese, it would have this Beijing opera music or something else. But, no, it's not. It's a Western thing. So in many ways, China, like everybody else, is living in a modern world. And the main thing that I would say that is not modernity, is not new. And I'm actually working on this as well. And at some point, hopefully, I will get this to a point where I can try and publish it. But I think almost every single main Chinese foreign policy interest or agenda or purpose is what I'm calling transdynastic. None of it is new, and that is what I think is really important. Because what I don't yes. Mao had this sort of thing about global stuff, and he devoted some money to it. But in general, if we go through the Chinese interests, what we see is they're not even just Xi Jinping's interests. They're not even CCP interests from the 1940s. Most of them were inherited from the KMT in the thirties and go back to the Qing dynasty if not more. And the most exact the clearest example that I'll give is Taiwan. This is not a new interest. It's not a KMT interest. The Qing explicitly were saying, don't take this Japan or else our relations will be poisoned forever. This is not new. This is old. Hong Kong. That's 1841 or, you know, 1839, let's say. Right? These are not new interests in sort of unifying what is China. And as of yet, I have not seen new. We have people who are credible. Let me put it differently. We have important scholarly books written in English by top sinologists or whatever, you know, China relations, who claim that Taiwan is just the starting point. And then after that, it'll be a nice jump to The Philippines, or it'll be a nice jump to Vietnam. And I'm just flabbergasted because that's how if you have a one perspective, you can make that argument. But I've never seen that's one reason I'm going back to see what the Chinese wrote and ran the Vietnamese talked about each other 500 years ago, but you do not see that now. You know that Vietnam and China now conduct joint naval patrols in Hai Phong Bay and stuff like that. They do this. They disagree about some things, but they cooperate on everything else. So I have a very different perspective on how much China's interests have expanded as its power has grown. I don't see that. I see its ability to try and get its historic or its very long enduring interests, its ability to try and affect those to be better. But I don't see a whole lot of thought of, well, once we get Taiwan, then let's take Japan.

Jordan Schneider: (1:12:16) Yeah. So we'll grant you that, but I think this is the rub, right, is that Taiwan in a sort of Westphalian sense is basically as close to a state as you can possibly be. And you have these treaties with The US and Japan, with The US and South Korea, with The US and Vietnam, with The US and The Philippines. And, you know, however much you wanna say, like, yes, they have to understand that they need to live with China. Like, you don't see politicians in Japan running saying, like, we need to let go of our treaty with The US. And, you know, maybe Trump is president and those treaties just disappear or something. But the fact of the matter is, right, the world has decided that it is not cool to invade and take over states. And after 1945, like, there have been a lot of awful terrible conflicts. But by and large, they've been civil wars or civil war adjacent and Ukraine is an exception, and you've seen a really dramatic response from a lot of countries around the world who have said that this is not the sort of universe we wanna live in where countries can just take over countries. And all of a sudden, half the world is giving them artillery. You know? South Korea is giving them artillery shells. Right? So, I don't know. What do we do?

David C. Kang: (1:13:42) Here's the question, and this is why it's such a rub. I agree with you a 100%. Right? One thing I point out is that when we all try start saying, well, you know, China's getting bigger, so it's gonna try and take Taiwan, then it's gonna try and take Philippines and blah blah blah. I say that's the European model of last 500 years, if not more. Do you know where they're doing it right now? In Europe, Ukraine. You know? They're not doing it in Asia. That's happening still in Europe. Right? These old massive armies, entrenched warfare and thousands of tanks and stuff like that. That's going on in Europe. It's not going on in Asia. So I think the Taiwan issue is, in so many ways, an exact encapsulation of what I'm talking about. Because the first question is, if it wasn't a Westphalian world, the issue of Taiwan would be very easy to figure out. The only reason Taiwan is an issue is that we have decided that there's only one legitimate type of polity, which is called a nation state that gets recognition and has a seat on the blah blah blah blah blah. That is a very unique way of thinking about the world. Even in Europe, historically, there were kingdoms and principalities and duchies and stuff like that. And certainly, historically, in Asia, there were nomadic kingdoms and then centralized Confucian kingdoms and all these other kinds of things. So the easiest way to sort this out is to simply not be Westphalian and say they can be this thing. Right? But that's not gonna happen because the world doesn't exist that way. And we are stuck with this very incompatible way of thinking about the world. So I have 2 thoughts about this. Look. If there was an answer, we would have found it by now. There are 2 thoughts about this. And the first one is when we talk about China taking over Taiwan, I don't think the Chinese talk about it this way. Everyone in America is talking about it. And the amount of money being made in DC right now as people run these wargaming simulations again and again and again and again. Right? We're all salivating. Okay. If they do this by 2027, they're gonna invade. I don't think anyone in China is actually thinking that way. Everything I know about the CCP and what Xi Jinping says is we reserve the right to use force because it's ours blah blah blah blah blah for all this recently. No. But it's not a we will invade kind of a thing. And I think the answer has been so far to kick the can down the road. And you know what? That answer has been really successful. I do not understand why we are trying to change the status quo in Taiwan. Because the status quo of the Americans not saying we agree with you, China, that it's yours. We say we understand that you think that. It's very different. Isn't it? We're not saying we agree with the One China policy. We're saying we understand the Chinese think that. Just don't use force to change it. And the Chinese saying, I'm glad you understand it. We reserve the right to use force. Taiwan, don't you change your status? And the Taiwanese basically saying, okay. Sort of. We'll have a flag. We'll have our own currency. We can have our own government. We can have a capitalist system, etcetera, etcetera, but we just won't call ourselves independent. That has allowed Taiwan to make a transition from being a brutal authoritarian government to a flourishing, thriving democracy. Taiwan has gotten rich. China has gotten rich. We have bought lots of cheap, really well produced goods. So the status quo actually works. It's not perfect, but it works. And that's point number 1. Point number 2 is when we talk about the Asian countries, they're not saying, oh, we're gonna abandon the alliance with The United States. You're absolutely right. But you know what I say? Do you remember when Pelosi visited 2 years ago in the summer? Within a week, every single Asian country, including ASEAN, including The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, came out and publicly endorsed the One China policy. They all reaffirmed it. You know who didn't? South Korea. But do you remember that kerfuffle with South Korea after Pelosi visited? Pelosi went to Korea after Taiwan. Not a single official government official met her at the airport. President Yoon Suk-yeol didn't even talk to her even on a phone call, and it was a massive kerfuffle in Korea because he was like, I'm on vacation, and there were photos of him drinking beer and stuff like that. Right? He did not want to get anywhere near this. When I was in and this is gonna sound like name dropping, but it's not. So I was in what we call the Yongsan presidential office, the YPO, the new presidential thing. I was talking to one of the top national security advisers last year in Korea, so in the presidential office. And I say to him, does Korea still you know, what's Korea's stance on the One China policy? And he said, we made our policy when we normalized relations with China back in 1992. It's One China policy. We haven't changed it. What we won't do is reaffirm it every time China wants us to reaffirm it. And they did affirm that they're not gonna allow US bases to be used in event of a Taiwan war. So I think it's a very I think if there is some kind of war, I think many Asian countries are gonna back slowly away.

Jordan Schneider: (1:19:08) Well, you know, what's fascinating, right, is the One China policy is basically a weird version of this imperial common understanding thing where no one's super happy with it, but it means you don't get war. And I think the scary thing, right, is sort of what the CCP has done with autonomous regions and with Hong Kong. Right? Where the question is whether or not this sort of fudge it, okay, we'll give you respect and not embarrass you and you leave us alone is going to be enough going forward where I mean, you saw what Mao did to Tibet and Xinjiang, then you had 30 years of it being kind of okay. And then, you know, since 2008, really, we've had a different story. And obviously with Hong Kong where that was going to be the poster child of what a sort of enlightened imperial style ruler relationship with Beijing would look like and that didn't end to anyone's satisfaction. So The Xi dynasty. So, you know, like, you wanna play this out a little more? Like, the parallels between One China policy and Korea writing nice letters to Beijing?

David C. Kang: (1:20:32) Well, I think there's 2. The main distinction would be what's internal and what's external. To me, that's the main distinction. Right? Now, again, we as you said, we don't have to like it, and we don't even necessarily have to agree with it. But the Chinese say this is all internal. And they say this, and I think they've got a point that Xinjiang and Hong Kong, they consider that to be internal, and that's very different than their relations with Vietnam or Korea or whatever else. And I think that we too easily say how they act here would be the same as they we sort of analogize or whatever else. But I think there's not yeah. You wanna say something?

Jordan Schneider: (1:21:10) Yeah. But what I mean, like, is Korea internal in, like, 1100?

David C. Kang: (1:21:15) I don't think so. They had formal tribute relations. Right? In fact, that's how do you know here's one interesting thing. Did we put this in the book? I can't remember. But the Koryo dynasty, the Korean dynasty at the time, was never conquered by the Mongols. They suffered unbelievably, but they never gave, and the Mongols were unable to actually conquer them. The king survived. He had to keep moving around and stuff like that. Do you know how they actually sorted out their relations? Is when Kublai Khan decided he was gonna use these Chinese ways of doing things, and then they entered into tribute relations. And, yes, the Koreans had to give princesses and all this kind of stuff, but Korea remained as an independent country under a tribute relationship with the Mongols, under the Yuan dynasty. But back to contemporary.

Ilari Makela: (1:22:04) Yeah. I guess what...

Jordan Schneider: (1:22:05) I'm saying is, like, that's the rub. Right? Is because if you can get to a tributary relationship where you basically get to live like Korea did for 1000 years and do whatever you want, but you have to, on an international stage, play nice and send some gifts and say Chinese Taipei at your Olympic team or maybe have a joint Olympic team. I mean, whatever. Who cares? Then, you know, that's a trade off that Taiwan and Taiwan's allies would be open to accepting. Right? But if Taiwan is just Xinjiang or just Tibet, you know, things get a lot more complicated.

David C. Kang: (1:22:51) Yeah. No. Absolutely. Right? This is I so part of the rub is what's internal and external. Do we think they're gonna treat Korea different than they would Xinjiang? Taiwan is this interesting case because it is very, very, very, very rare and not clear what it is. It's not clear. And the Chinese say, well, we took it over in 1683 or whenever. You know, it's always been part of China, blah blah blah. And everyone else says, no. It's not. But this is the question. What is very clear about Taiwan? And I'm not fudging, nobody has a good answer to these questions. Right? So it's not me. Nobody else has a better answer. Is this, what is very clear is that the Koreans don't think it's Korean. The Filipinos and the Vietnamese, the Japanese don't think it's Japanese. It might not be Chinese, but it's certainly nobody is saying, well, this is also ours. And that's one reason they say, well, this is all some kind of a Chinese issue, broadly defined civilization. That's you guys' issue. The other interesting thing about Taiwan that's very important to note is similar to the Western Steppes. The peoples the here's actually a great I was thinking about this. There are 3 islands in the nineteenth century that got taken over of which there's only one where there's a debate. And it's interesting because the one in which there's a debate probably has the least historical claim to it. Let me tell you. Right? The peoples on the island of Taiwan historically never organized themselves into the kind of government or political system that was capable of engaging in formal diplomatic relations with China or other states. They just didn't do it. Right? The peoples of Ryukyu did. They had formal tribute relations with China and Japan and Korea. And they were conquered in 1879, and it's never going back. There was a kingdom in Hawaii that got taken over in 1893 or something like that, and it's never going back. Right? There's a lot of these types of issue areas. What is clear about Taiwan is that it was one of them, and the argument there has as much to do with the larger political situation than it does about the details of, well, they have a legitimate claim or they don't. Because I would make an argument that the people in Okinawa are talking about we should be you know, there's a sort of remnant Hawaiian independence faction that'll never work. But people are saying we should be independent. Right? And everyone laughs, and they're like, that's never happening. Right? I mean, the people in Taiwan are independent, but it's much more because of the larger political context than it is their argument, their claim that they should have a legitimate government. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. That's politics. That's the world. Right.

Ilari Makela: (1:25:37) I mean, you have a great line in the book, which is despite decades of Western predictions to the contrary, it is by now widely admitted that East Asian states are not forming a balancing coalition against China out of fear of its rise. There's 2 ways to read that. One is the kind of, well, they don't see a need. And actually, I think you point this out that the military spending as a percentage of GDP has just been declining and declining and declining in all East Asian and Southeast Asian states, whether they are US allies or not. But then there's another way of reading this, which is that, well, US is the kind of gray eminence, the elephant in the room or whatever, and a lot of people in The US would want to believe that it is only because of their benevolence and their fleet that such reductions in military spending can happen and that people don't feel like they have to really worry about China. So...

David C. Kang: (1:26:37) Yeah. This is what I've heard that argument for decades. Right? I'm not quite convinced it's true. And I'll tell you why for a couple reasons. Right? We mentioned it briefly at the beginning when I think Jordan said, Korea and Japan should be natural allies. I mean, the amount of hectoring I've heard over the decades about, come on, Koreans. Stop being dumb. Don't you realize Japan's your friend and China's your enemy? It doesn't work. It does not play. Those are not arguments that are going to work. Koreans don't love China. They don't hate Japan as much as we think they do, but most of the region is not functioning the way we think it should in a good, realist sense. So a lot of American policymakers or policy wonks are hectoring Asia, don't you realize you're supposed to balance China? And they're like, what are you talking about? So I wanna start with that notion that it's not acting the same way. So we go to these type of arguments. And you already hinted at one of the first things I wanna say. Sure. The US is keeping the peace or blah blah blah. But if you're Vietnam or Malaysia, US isn't defending you. And you're closer to China than, say, The Philippines is, which is a US ally. So you should see difference. If The US is the cause of why countries aren't afraid, you should see a difference in the countries that do not have a US guarantee, and you don't see that. Right? That's number 1. The second thing that I would say is in terms of The US, what we wanna see is what is the type of commitment. I'm often asked in the last couple years, what is China learning from the Ukraine war? And my answer is usually I actually think the lesson should be what is Taiwan learning from the Ukraine war, which is that The United States, for all of its talk, is very, very, very cautious about getting involved in a war, in an actual shooting war with a nuclear armed superpower far from US borders on the border of the superpower, which is not central to US survival. To me, that's the lesson of the Ukraine war. Are we really gonna get in a war over The Philippines or something like that? Might. I really think that's a hard argument to make to the American people. Are we really going to be involved? And that is one of the key questions that all these countries constantly ask themselves. Can we trust The United States if we get in a war? And I don't think necessarily that answer is yes per se despite what the alliance you know, what's written on the paper.

Ilari Makela: (1:29:28) Professor David Kang, thank you so much for your time today. And final question I always ask my guests is how has your research shaped your outlook on humanity?

David C. Kang: (1:29:39) Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be part of this. Truly. Probably the biggest way that my research has changed the way I think about the world and my view on humanity is that the more that I've done scholarship, whether it's the original stuff I was doing on economic growth and political economy and corruption in East Asia and now, obviously, for decades on history, it's that our values and our beliefs are far more central to our behavior than a simple cost benefit analysis. I see this again and again and again. And I think we as scholars, as social scientists, we're much more comfortable with cost benefit. Well, they're doing it for this reason, but I think people are motivated by what their values are and what they believe in so much more than just are they gonna benefit or not. And I see that across individual behavior and then the way countries behave.

Jordan Schneider: (1:30:38) Less exciting. Alright.

Ilari Makela: (1:30:41) Thank you, by the way.

Jordan Schneider: (1:30:42) Not quite as profound a question, but the Imjin war, are there any good books about it?

David C. Kang: (1:30:48) In no particular order and just ones that come up, Liam Kelly's Beyond the Bronze Pillars about China Vietnam historical relations is eye opening. Eye opening in how Vietnam viewed China. I would say Sixiang Wang's book, which is the one that you quoted, Boundless Winds of Empire, Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosun Diplomacy with Ming China that just came out. That's a great book. That's a great book. I really like for reasons that are you know, I don't agree with everything at all, but I like Wang Yuhua's book. Yuhua Wang wrote a book about state formation in China. It's much more material and cost benefit than my work, but he's getting to questions of how China grew, how it became centralized. And there's a book by Bin Wang. I can't find it now. But also on China over the centuries and how the Chinese experience is very different about its growth than the European one. Those are some of my favorite books.

Ilari Makela: (1:31:50) Is it China Transformed?

David C. Kang: (1:31:52) Yes. China Transformed. Yes. That's the one. Elizabeth Berry wrote a biography of Hideyoshi, which is really insightful.

Jordan Schneider: (1:31:59) And since we brought up Hawaii, I just wanna shout out The Shoal of Time, a history of the Hawaiian Islands by Gavan Daws. It is one of the more beautifully written books I've ever come across. I've probably read 10 Hawaii books at this point and it's just like far and away the best one. And in particular, it does a great job of telling that story of the transition between being this kingdom and having America ultimately end up in possession. Alright, folks. Well, thanks so much for being a part of China Talk, everyone.

David C. Kang: (1:32:36) Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ilari Makela: (1:32:39) Yeah. Okay. This was great. Thank you.

Nathan Labenz: (1:37:10) It is both energizing and enlightening to hear why people listen and learn what they value about the show. So please don't hesitate to reach out via email at tcr@turpentine.co, or you can DM me on the social media platform of your choice.