The Duran Podcast - How China Escaped Banker Shock Therapy w/ Cynthia Chung

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

How China Escaped Banker Shock Therapy w/ Cynthia Chung

All right, Alexander, we are here with Cynthia Chung. Once again, joining us on the Duran. Cynthia, thank you for joining us. Where can people follow your work? Yeah, they can follow my work at Through a Glass Darkly, Cynthia Chung. And we also have the Rising Tide Foundation website.net. All right. I will have those links in the description box down below, as well as a pinned comment.

Alexander, Cynthia, we've got lots to talk about. and we are going to focus on China. So, Alexander, over to you. We certainly are. Can I just say Cynthia writes wonderfully well about China. If you want to read the commentaries that she makes about China, she's somebody who explains things very, very well, I think, to a Western audience and debunks lots of things, lots of stories and ideas about China that are circulating around

in the West and which when you examine them in the way that Cynthia does, you find out that they're usually completely wrong, or if not completely wrong, profoundly misunderstood. So today we're going to discuss all sorts of things. We're going to discuss the enormous economic pressures that China has been under and certain developments within the economic and social politics within China. itself. And one of the topics we are inevitably going to discuss whenever these kind of subjects arise is China's famous or infamous social credit score, which whenever I've spoken to people who live in China, they're somewhat bewildered when I talk about it because they never encounter

it in the way that people in the West imagine that it works. So Cynthia, I hope that. that's a proper introduction of our discussions. Where exactly, and I'm talking about timelines, would you like to begin? Because of course, China's economic history is incredibly interesting, going all the way back to, well, arguably 1949, 1979, the changes that started to happen, then the further changes that happened in the 1980s. But I think, if I've understood you correct, the period of the 2008 crisis was an important moment in China too. So, anyway, I leave it to you. Yeah, and that was a great introduction.

Thank you so much and so happy to be on again. You're correct, and actually part three, I will be going over a further historical review of the 1970s, 1980s, and onward in how China escaped shock therapy when so many other countries had undergone this. you know, kind of Milton Friedman type of economical reform that they were pushing on people. In the case of the 2008 crash, I think a lot of people are familiar with the inside job documentary. I think that's a good kind of starting point for people to kind of remember that that was a really

excellently done documentary showcasing that this wasn't just recklessness, this wasn't just pure greed, but it was an actual operation in the sense that there were derivatives that were created as weapons of mass destruction, especially by investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, but all of the investment banks were in it, but Goldman Sachs was very much at the forefront of creating derivatives that they had also fought along with people like Allen Greenspan and so forth to not be regulated at all. And this allowed for a weaponization where it was essentially the largest bank heist in history. And they were allowed to create a lot of profits off of things that were not creating anything. It wasn't real money. They paid their CEOs, the bonuses, the high salaries.

That was taken out of the system so that when the system crashed, this was not money that could be used in any way to try to help. correct the situation. And what a lot of people, I think, don't realize is that Henry Paulson, Hank Paulson, was the CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1999 to 2006. And right after that, he was the U.S. Treasury Secretary from 2006 to 2009. And after that was Tim Geithner, who was the president of the Federal Reserve during the 2008 crash and was very much working with Paulson. In what Inside Job also clearly shows to have been a known situation. There was basically a purposeful crash of the system. And Hank Paulson also has a history when he was working with Goldman Sachs since the 70s

of going to China about 70 times he had developed a lot of relationships with certain Chinese elites there. And he was among many who were trying to push heavily radical free. market reform, you know, deregulation, derivatives, that this was a form of liberation that was going to occur for these countries that were so-called backwards and didn't know how to properly, you know, create economical tools to uplift the standard of their people. So Hank Paulson is very central in this because as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he was literally in charge of creating derivatives that were weapons of mass destruction, then becoming Treasury Secretary, denying that

anything wrong was happening in the economic system. And then when it was too late and there was an actual crash, he is the one that decided the complete overhaul, the complete reform of not just the U.S. financial system, but he was also in charge largely of a global reform. And he says it as well in his like blueprint for for monetizing whatever it's a dry name but he called it a blueprint that was a global blueprint and you know during his time as treasury secretary he continued to push hard for China to adopt deregulation in the midst of the economic crash before it peaked in 2008 so this is um I think a lot of people would be wondering like why am I starting off with this on the topic of social credit. And what's interesting is when you look at social

credit, it is actually mostly around predatory loaning. So in China, in terms of the legal social credit and all that, as you mentioned, it's hot air. It's like it's a normal legal system. And like you can be fined and like you can get demerits if you're driving. Like these are very normal things. that all countries have as part of their legal system. And there isn't anything that really stands out as like Orwellian in that. But there's this other social credit system, which was actually being started by Alibaba and Tencent big tech companies. And this wasn't anything also like terribly bad, but you could see that they were starting something that could eventually become quite monstrous if China hadn't actually. shut it down and intervened. And so what was coming out of this was that Alibaba and Tencent

were at the forefront of something that you can see people like Hank Paulson wanted to see come about, which is they were big tech companies that, for instance, Goldman Sachs is totally the one that gave Alibaba its start. It basically organized for it to get that first 25 million, with a close alignment with Japan's soft bank. And these papers are very long, so I won't be able to go through all of the details. But if people want to know more, they can go to my substack through Glass Darkly for a great amount of detail on this. So Goldman Sachs is involved from the very origin story of Alibaba.

If you look at where it's registered, it's in the Cayman Islands. And it has a president right now that is also a former Goldman Sachs CEO. China itself does not have, the government doesn't have any major stakeholder in the company. And Tencent also is registered in the Cayman Islands, and it is run by Martin Lau, who used to work for McKinsey Company, which is notorious for the opioid epidemic, and a very distinguished firm,

responsible for the opioid epidemic, as it always goes, right? And then he worked for Goldman Sachs. And I don't think that this is a coincidence that you have Goldman Sachs that is very much at the center of both of these companies who were starting to become quasi-banks. And because China is still, you know, dealing with a lot, they didn't have the same kind of regulation as the United States. However, to be fair, the United States also didn't have it. So the timing of what these things are called P2P loans, peer to peer loans, is very suspicious because it was coming pretty much right out of the 2008 crash, like during the period of the crash from 2006 to 2009. These predatory loans come out, and they're also quite complex.

Can I, before we continue, just to make clear, can you just explain, loans from whom to whom? Just if you can just explain that. So the way that peer-to-peer works is that anyone can put out, like can offer to lend out money and that person can agree to borrow that money. And so you have a platform that is a fintech financial technology platform that facilitates this relationship and it will take a piece out of it. But and so this originated in the UK. under Zopa, which was a branch off of Prudential, another Opa bank. And then within that same year, it starts in the United States in San Francisco with Prosper and then the year after with Lending Club. And these are huge, you know, P2P platforms.

I think Prosper is still involved in P2P. Right now, as of now China has pretty much made it impossible. for these to continue as loans, which I'll get to in a moment, whereas it's still, it's still functioning in Europe and the United States and so forth as predatory loaning. So these complex algorithms, very much like derivatives, right, they're so complex that anyone who would be looking at these things mathematically, it would be very hard to understand perhaps the intention, right? Because Goldman Sachs was found out, you know, through the inside job documentary, that they had purposely created derivatives where they would make a profit if their clients lost money. And the more money their clients lost, the bigger the profit they would make.

They create derivatives to facilitate these things, right? But they're quite complex, and it's not easy to see right away what it is. And these P2P loans are also a very complex algorithm. And so they were coming out in 2006 during the whole economic crash when people are going to need a lot of money because of, you know, the economy being bad. And so these predatory loans were set up, a perfect timing. And part of these, especially prosper, was a social credit system within them. So they were going to be giving, and they were giving out loans. but they were also creating a rewards punishment system trying to monitor, you know,

people's consumer behaviorism and this sort of thing. And they're both tied to huge companies like Google. They've been contracted to work for Google for eBay. So right now in the United States, there is still regulation where like Google can't own its own bank, Apple can't own its own bank, this sort of thing. But you have things like Prosper and Lending Club that could facilitate. a kind of pairing so that these companies could have a kind of quasi-bank function, because especially Lending Club at this point, has an actual bank. So this is a phenomenon that's going on in Europe as well. You have neobanks where you have fintech companies that are basically becoming the function of a bank.

And the problem with this is that they were in a situation where they weren't being regulated, like a bank. So they were giving out loans, but there was no repercussion. There was no skin in the game. And so even the United States regulation had to catch up with this. This also then was sent to China very quickly right after it starts in the UK, America, and then China. So again, very suspicious timing. And China was also hit very hard from the 2008 crash. you know, that globally the repercussions of the 2008 crash were horrific.

And so the Chinese also individuals, but companies were going to need loans, and these P2P loans were coming into China as these complex algorithms. Alibaba and Tencent were among the most prominent later on. And they were also, like, it became the largest part of their revenue was these kinds of loans. and they were originally also starting to do a kind of social credit rewards punishment thing. China actually intervened and they said you're not allowed to do that anymore. And for people who don't know, Alibaba and Tencent are basically, you know, it controls the entire communication space and consumer space pretty much.

It's like Amazon on steroids and Google on steroids. And so China was the first situation. where you have big tech that was actually, they did kind of have a banking function for a few years until China under Xi Jinping started to increase regulations such that they ultimately had to stop in that sense of Alibaba and Tanzan. That was the infamous time that Jack Ma was taken down a few pegs. He was like not heard of for a few months because he made some very, you know, a pusatory critical talk against the Chinese government's banking system.

And one of a good author I was reading on the subject was saying it was likely that he knew that it was going to be shut down because, you know, Ant, which is a branch off of Alibaba, was going to set up the biggest IPO in history. Their company was going to go public. But if they were going to go public with this kind of predatory. lending becoming like a Frankenstein monster, you could see how this was going to really threaten, this was going to really stabilize the financial banking sector of China. And so in the like, you know, 11th hour kind of thing, China was able to regulate it. It had to be shut down because of the

regulation, because they had to now hold 30% reserve on their lending and they couldn't afford to do that. So China didn't say, you know, you cannot do this. They basically just said you are responsible for, if the loans go bad, you're responsible for paying a certain amount. That was a lot, but I don't know if that was. No, it's actually, it's actually very clear. I mean, it's essentially, and I remember this, I was in, I was working in London. I was right at the center of all of this from the London side, that we were increasingly seeing in Britain to tech companies working increasingly in lending, and not just tech companies, a company in the United States, which used to make aircraft engines, started to get involved in this, exactly, exactly this kind of thing as well, and it was all

operating outside the regulatory system. And 2008 was, in fact, indeed used in exactly the way that you described in order to expand the footprint of certain financial institutions. This happened a lot in the West. It certainly happened in Britain. I know for a fact, because I was studying at the time all about this, that it was also happening a lot in Russia too. And Russia, its economy came very close to collapse in 2008, much closer than people realized,

about the Chinese side of the story. I was not aware. And it's interesting again that the Chinese government added preemptively and stepped in and stopped it. Now, where out of all of this does the legend, if you like, of the social credit score system that exists or supposedly exists in China come from? I mean, I can, based on what you've told me, I can make certain shrewd guesses. But perhaps you can elaborate it a little bit further. Is it partly because of frustration on the part of certain Western financial institutions that China was not playing the game that they wanted it to play? I mean, putting it the question as simply as that.

Yeah, I think you are correct. And I mean, if you want to take a look at even just how the West has unfortunately been acting. in the last like several years to decades due politically. And like, for instance, Gladio, I don't know if your audience is aware of Gladio, which was NATO's secret army. And, you know, there's a bunch of declassification at the end of the 90s. We now know that there were paramilitary terrorist groupings that were working for NATO and was set up originally, you know, out of the World War II situation, where they were

creating political instability in order to get political figures in that they wanted. And Operation Condor is also a part of this of like what was going on in South America with the terrorist operations, the death squads, the torture centers that were occurring. And oftentimes the line that the Western people are told is that it's the opposite. It's switched on its head. And it's like, no, it's this other gray, vague, dark thing, this scary thing that is threatening your liberty. It's threatening your freedom. And this has been a line that has been just constantly used for all for several people.

It's not just Russia and China in terms of countries that get this kind of, you know, flip. And that's part of what sciops are. It's part of what psychological warfare is. is you get people to doubt what they're seeing, what is reality, and so forth. And with China, it's easy to create these sorts of things because most people have no idea what China even looks like right now. Like in terms of what even the major cities in China, what do they look like right now? And they would be, I think, shocked.

Or like when TikTok was temporarily banned for Americans, and they went on to Red Note, and they about, allowed actually to see much more clearly how the average Chinese person was living. And they could see that the groceries were actually quite affordable. There are so many restaurants, coffee shops, like it actually looks quite Western, the level of luxury and, you know, it's pretty and all of this sort of stuff. It's not actually a whole bunch of concrete gray and, you know, the sky's blackened, you know, kind of thing.

So I think that the other element too is that the Chinese government has the culture for the Chinese government is quite different in the sense that they don't do this. They don't really talk to the outside worlds. It's been a historical thing with China. And that's why you have phrases like China's first opening up to the world. And it wasn't that China didn't do trading. the Silk Road. But in terms of like a more opening up in terms of like talking diplomatically or over political matters and not just business, because Silk Road was mostly business, China has always been,

I think, rather closed off. And it's a it's a kind of cultural thing. And Xi Jinping has said, you know, in a recent enough speech that China does need to open up. more, it needs to participate and have more of a, of a, you know, a relationship with the rest of the world. And I think because there has been a bit of that kind of wall, Westerners also feel very intimidated by that, because China doesn't talk about its internal debates, right? Like the economic question, if you actually study this question, it's amazing how there's a lot of debate over what direction China was supposed to take because there was a lot of pro-free marketers in China that were like in in high positions. And but China doesn't offer that, you know, so publicly in a news headline or something like that. And the United States also doesn't share, you know, a lot of stuff as well.

they're just much better at creating narratives. One of the things that I've come to learn from Western business people who worked in China, and I've known a few, including people who work mostly in the banking world, is the extraordinary stress that the Chinese state system, political class, government, call it whatever you like. And the Chinese legal system places on stability. And stability is, I mean, it's not just a social policy. It's also an economic policy too that you maintain stability.

And stability also reflects the way in which employers are supposed to work and treat employees, how companies are supposed to interact with each other. It deals with lending practices. It deals with administration of companies. It deals with all of these various things taken together. And yet, at the same time as you have this great emphasis on stability, there is a very, very high level of competition. within China. China tends to be much more decentralized in terms of its economic actors than you

tend to find in the West. So instead of, you know, big, giant companies that, you know, do tech things, you will have a lot of people doing all kinds of things in all sorts of places, all working both against each other, in competing with each other, but also, operating with each other in ways that people find very difficult to understand. It's a different economic model, profoundly different altogether, but its overall objective seems to be to maintain a kind of degree of stability. Is this, I mean, would you agree with this? By the way, as there's Westerners who's spoken to me about this? No, I think that you're right on, you know, that that's exactly it. And there's a book I'm reading right now that's that's well done. That's

going over how China escaped shock therapy. And it's basically being brought up that the conversations there were there were a few times where China was very close to agreeing to go ahead with it. But ultimately they stopped because they knew and it wasn't denied that shock therapy, you know, the whole line of shock therapy is you're going to have a bit of pain for long-term gain, short-term pain for long-term gain. And the Chinese ultimately were like, we don't want to risk political or social instability for something that we're not certain is going to have any kind of benefit or the level of benefit. And ultimately, you know, they're very smart because like the Chinese have always been,

I think, like this for all of the 20s. century when you look at how they were making decisions, it's very much the opposite of how Westerners think of them as just like drone like, ant like, and they just follow orders. Whereas what they have done is they very much emphasize that you need to have a practical, it's not just theory, right? You can't just spout theory. You need to do an experiment. So before they even adapt it for like the entire system, they're going to try to do an experiment and say like, on the small town, we'll practice, you know, this way of doing pricing, for instance. So we'll practice this certain thing and we'll see how it works. And if it doesn't work, we're not going to, we're not

going to put it onto the entire system. So they're very much, they say that it's like it's, it's grappling, grappling on stones to cross a river. Like you're constantly feeling your way. And so it's actually not dogmatic at all. And what they do is they listen to all of the sides. of a story, all of like the, you know, they had many discussions on economics from Westerners, which tended to mostly be shock therapists that they were being pushed towards. But they listened to the details and then they work it out for themselves. So it's never, that's why also there is no term to really describe what China has made as an economic or political system. Because as this author that I'm reading has made the point, it's like Jenga. Instead of trying to build up a whole

new system anew, you're constantly removing things that you think are going to not create too much instability and then, you know, you do certain things and you're going to just create slowly a new system where it's going to be unrecognizable from the old system in terms of evolving, but it's through constant, you know, feedback of how is this affecting the people? people, how is this affecting the larger scale of things? And so it's their own kind of hodgepodge creation, you could say. The other thing that, again, and I'm talking, this is from Westerners, by the way, and as I said, people who were working mostly in financial services.

One of the other things they said was, again, and I'm always quoting, is that one imagines in the West the Chinese government to be a sort of ubiquitous, omnipresent thing. And in China, it actually isn't, at least not in the way that people imagine. It plays a much smaller role in people's day-to-day lives than people in the West believe that it does. And in some ways, less than some governments, many governments do with the West itself, that a lot of these constant changes that you've just been talking about happen organically. Just as, you know, the competition, which can be very intense, but also happens within a kind

of community system. That it is, it is not, it is not a top-down thing. And it's not as if there is somebody there keeping control, tight control over everything that happens. Is this also your impression? Yeah, and I'm very much enjoying your questions and your observations. I think you have very much the same outlook that I do on how it is in China. And I realized I didn't address part of your previous question on the decentralization issue, which I'll do first. That's a good point, too.

You know, Peter Thiel has recently said that, you know, we, we are past competition now. We don't really need competition. And now we need to just have like monopolies, you know, on things. And that was the thing for free market, right, was that it was supposed to encourage competition so that you would have the best come out. But what we have seen in reality with how the United States has set up its system is that the larger you were, the more influential you were, you could buy up your competition.

competition and cut it up into pieces and destroy it. And there wasn't any kind of regulation to protect actually from actual proper competition happening. And the competition never happened. And now we have these huge monolith type big tech companies that are just getting bigger and bigger who are now even saying we don't need competition anymore. And ironically, China is the opposite, as you've mentioned, where the competition is crazy. A lot of people heard about Deepseek, for the AI success that it made in 2025. But there are over eight top AI competitors. And then there's even more than that.

And they're constantly beating each other with the latest innovation, the latest discovery. And the competition is fierce. It's unfortunate because in some ways it's a lot of pressure on people. but at the same time, you know, there is a huge amount of pressure for China to kind of speed up and get to a point where it can, you know, it can feel. The thing is that people have to realize is that big tech is a huge weapon right now and you have to be on top of it and you have to understand it in order to thwart it. And then the other thing you mentioned about how people live day to day, that is also what I've heard as well from people who are living in China. that, you know, people who live day to day, they don't feel the presence at all of the government, just like, you know, on top of you. And also the government takes surveys and polls very seriously,

and they will ask people constantly, you know, are you happy with these things? Are you happy with this? And they take it very seriously if there's like a bunch of people that say they're not happy with something. that's very interesting compared to the West where we have like a day of voting and then it's like it's over for like four years and there isn't really like how many times have we had a political candidate make all of these promises and then as soon as they get elected there's there's no there's nothing that's causing that person to fulfill the promises and the people don't have a voice the news isn't you know talking about hey you're not addressing this anymore. Yeah. Can I ask you about, since we're talking about, some of the things we've been talking about, because again, this is now more from Western academics, and I know two academics, heavily involved in Chinese affairs, who, by the way, find it extremely frustrating

to get their ideas listened to in Britain. They're both British. And they've both spoken to me a lot about. a Chinese official who was a revolutionary, important figure in the party in the Mao era, and then afterwards called Chen Yun. I don't know whether you are aware of him, but that he supposedly was at least as important and as influential as Deng Xiaoping in shaping the China that developed in the 1980s and thereafter.

And that his idea was that the economy should work like it was the cage within which the bird is allowed to fly. In other words, the bird can fly anywhere it wants, it can do anything it wants within the overall framework of the system. In effect, it's a fairly liberating system. It says that there should not be constant control. Are you aware of this? And are you aware of this person? I mean, because until I've been told about, they might have heard very little about him. I'm recently going into a lot of detail.

I know about Chen Yun, and it's true. Like, Denchial Ping is not like a one-man show. No. Just a big name that everybody knows. But there was a constant, there's many people, and there was constant debates about how things should be done and certain specifics. But I think that what you, again, are describing about, like, maybe a cage isn't the best word, but, like, this is, I think the problem is that people in the West have, I think,

idealized too much the freedom to do anything. Whereas, like, you know, just think of yourself for a moment in that kind of concept. Do you think it's the best thing for yourself to have the freedom to literally do anything? Or aren't there healthy boundaries that you should be, you know, putting on yourself in terms of actions that you're doing or standards that moral and, and also just, you know, business wise, like common sense, right? And when you live in a world where there is not a healthy idea of what is a good boundary to have, but that all boundaries are bad, this is a society that's going to continue to degenerate and, be corrupted. So in the Chinese way, it's true. Like there is a, I think that, you know, this is very much how, you know, Western philosophy

or even better aspects of Christianity always understood this. But even just philosophy in general, that you have to have, like, proper boundaries. And the Chinese share this kind of recognition very clearly. And so if you have, like, for instance, in a bank, banking system, right? If you have proper regulation, then there is a lot of freedom for you to be as creative and as innovative as you want, but you can't be predatory. Or you've got to have skin in the game if you're doing these loans. Like, they're reasonable boundaries. And yeah, I think that that's very much like the theme, the center of what you're seeing is that China ironically

has a greater deal of freedom because they regulate. And because you can't just be this kind of huge corporation that starts to do predatory actions and starts to attack the vulnerable, for instance. Whereas in the West, we are increasingly feeling the divide of, you know, the have-nots and the halves. This has clearly increased since the 2008 crash. It's only getting worse. And now with FinTech coming online in the West, they're taking advantage. They're monetizing poor people, as Tim Geithner was. accused of towing with this Warburg-Pinkus side company, they're creating these loans like

DoorDash where people like buy now pay later with a Swedish fintech Klarna. But this is just one example where a whole bunch of fintech companies are now going into the United States because the American people increasingly cannot afford even homes. So they're going to create all of these kinds of lending programs so that people go into debt to just like squeeze the last little pit that they can from these people. And there's no oversight. Yes, because this is, this is, I mean, one of the things that has been well understood historically, but is little discussed today, which is that some of these, what you call predatory systems are ultimately extractive.

systems, they are designed to extract wealth and concentrate it rather than to basically spread it. And are you saying that in China this is less possible? And is this perhaps a cultural thing? Because of course, China has its massive history, which people always always forget this. It is the world's oldest state and it is also a civilization state and it is a civilization with a continuous history longer than any other. So is this a cultural development in China that somehow China has become more resistant to what one might call extractive capitalism than you know we are in the West.

Yeah, I think, well, definitely China is very family-oriented and, you know, the treatment of the elders is definitely much in China than in the West. Or unfortunately, you know, people just forget about the elders in the community and send them off to a center or whatnot. But it's been centuries of Confucianism. And Confucianism is still a huge part of Chinese culture. today. So again, people might think that it's, you know, just about Marx and praying to Marx or something. Whereas actually China, like most Chinese people don't even necessarily identify with Marx, by the way. So that's also another thing people have to realize is that a lot of Chinese people don't even identify as a communist. And there's the Communist Party, but like

most people, as you were seeing, they go about their day-to-day thing. And Confucianism is a huge part. Even within the Chinese government itself, studying their economic practices, they're drawing from long ago lessons from the beginning of the Han dynasty in terms of sound economic practice. So that's another very interesting point, is that they're still studying this long history of how they have done economics, what has worked. to bring it into today's world, despite all of the complexity. So it's too complicated to call them communist,

but it's like a mixture of communism and capitalism and meritocracy, but it's them doing these things through experiment. Why do we find it so difficult to understand all of this? Is this because of what you were saying before, the China doesn't speak very much to the outside? outside world, or is it because a lot of this makes us very uncomfortable? And when I say us, I mean, you know, people who wield power in the West find this extremely uncomfortable because it suggests an alternative.

And going to some of the points that Matt Ehret, your husband, says, I mean, that there are aspects, especially of our cultural, of the culture of our elite. which would make them, frankly, not just concerned about some of this, but frankly antagonistic to it. Because Confucianism, which I read a lot about, I used to read a lot of this philosophy, is a very humanistic philosophy indeed, if you read it properly. And if you read, you know, the analects and the Menkeus and all of this. So if you could just comment a bit about that. Yeah, I think it was Eric Schmidt who said it recently, you know, former Google director that, you know, China is still like doing their own thing and we need to intervene.

And this is like a typical line you hear from the West. And it's like people should maybe stop to think like, are we doing, are we are we on the right path? And I think a huge difference with the Chinese way is that they are willing to listen to a different perspective. The West, I don't know how it got to this point. I think that there was a bit more of a debate within, you know, Western culture in previous centuries where there were scholars, there were intellectuals that were pushing back on a, somewhat colonial view of other places in the world. And there were a lot of scientists and philosophers who actually saw China as a very interesting, you know, country civilization to reach out to and something to learn from and share in exchange ideas. Gottfried Leibniz was one of those people.

Benjamin Franklin was actually another person who also was, you know, reading Confucianism and saying, like, there is a lot, you know, that we have in Congress. in terms of a philosophical outlook. But for some reason, you know, we've closed the walls on ourselves. As China is opening up, we ironically are getting closed off from, I think, a lot of the world. And there's a lot that we can learn for them. I think academia, unfortunately, has been corrupted too much by the funding and where the funding is coming from so that they very much bulldog like protect certain ways, certain narratives and certain thoughts, and there isn't a healthy form of discussion or debate that is really allowed in most academic institutions at this point.

And, you know, the academics are supposed to be the ones to help challenge, you know, the direction we're in and, you know, notice problems before they hit us in the face sort of thing. So, yeah, I don't really, I would just suggest that people maybe, you know, look at, there's so many Chinese shows that are actually quite good on Netflix or just look at, you know, some of the Red Note YouTube stuff to get an idea of how people are living in China. And it's really not that scary. China has developed quickly. So it was not like this, you know, in the 90s. But it's like, it's developing at a very. very rapid pace. And it's good because people are coming out of poverty and the living standard is much better. So I think that there is a lot to learn. I think people find it maybe scary that China is developing so fast and must think something is up and there's something wrong. But I think that should actually speak to our system. We've done a lot to actually curb our development, to hurt the kind of pace that we were developing to increase the standard of living,

where we have the high standard of living in the world a few decades ago. And we've been doing everything in terms of the banking and the financial activities to actually hurt not just individuals' life savings and ability to afford a house, for instance, but even businesses. It's very hard for businesses to get the funding. need for projects that ultimately are going to greatly contribute to society. So we should, instead of getting scared of what China is doing, maybe a question like, well, why are all of these things happening in our society that are not natural?

I think you are you anticipated what was going to be my last question, which is should we be afraid of China? So I'm tempted to leave it there, but inevitably, geopolitics come. I mean, is the China that you've been describing? Is it really out to conquer and dominate in the way that some people imagine? I mean, I read every day in the news media here. I mean, just a shortish answer to that one, so it's a huge question, of course. I will say that people should look into what Black Rock is doing, which is also closely tied to Goldman Sachs,

in terms of buying up infrastructure around the world to counter China's Belt and Road Initiative, right? So BlackRock and Microsoft have been hired by G7 and we're broading very directly with the American government as well to do this. That's what the whole Panama Canal scandal was about as well. And their priority is to oppose China's Belt and Road Initiative,

which is something that has been investing in essential infrastructure all around, the world, people can look at, you know, my work on my substack for debunking that there are predatory loans happening with this. And people should wonder, why is that considered the biggest threat is that China is investing in essential infrastructure around the world, whereas we've been literally bombing countries and creating a massive refugee crisis and then freaking out over refugees, you know, a situation. I feel like, you know, it should be obvious at this point.

And the Iran war is just another element of this pushing the game higher because this form of resistance, which is being called the Global South, is actually despite all of the amount of power that, especially the Anglo-American establishment along with Sweden and so forth, they're successfully creating an economic resistance to this. And economic sovereignty is the priority with this. Cynthia, thank you very much for joining us today. This has been absolutely stimulating discussion, one I've enjoyed greatly, as I'm sure you've realized.

And let's have further discussions about China in the future. It's a terrific discussion. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Cynthia. Before you go, one more time, where can people follow your work? Through glass darkly, Cynthiacheng.substack.com. All right.

Thank you very much, Cynthia. Take care.