The History of China - #191 - Special: "Superpower Interrupted," an Interview with Author Michael Schuman

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

My interview with Beijing-based author and journalist Michael Schuman about China's history, present, future, and food... and of course about his upcoming book, "Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World," available on June 9th, 2020. Find Michael on Twitter under the handle @michaelschuman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 191, Superpower Interrupted, an interview with Michael Schumann. Podcasting, at least history podcasting, can often be a pretty solo and even lonely endeavor. Now, that of course is not always the case. There's plenty of great shows out there with multiple hosts, but not mine. And I've got no problem with that at all. But maybe chalk it up to months and months and months and months of isolation, and even I get rather jumpy at the chance of talking directly to someone, especially about something as niche and nerdy as Chinese history. And so, as luck would have it, who should reach out but author Michael Schumann, author and journalist at large, who's based out of Beijing. It turned out that he

was in the process of publishing just such a book, and wondered if I'd be interested in getting an advanced copy and then telling him what I thought of it. And so, after burning through the pages, I was only too happy to invite him on to discuss all things China, from its ancient past to what's best to eat today and what the future might have in store. Standard disclaimer, you'll no doubt quickly hear that this is conducted via Zoom and it has all the audio quality and little lags and drags that we've all just come to expect in such things. Nevertheless, it was a great conversation that I most certainly enjoyed, and I hope you will too. Without further ado, my conversation with author Michael Schumann.

So today we are joined by author Michael Schumann, who is in the process and just about to release his new book, Superpower Interrupted, The Chinese History of the World, which will be coming out in June of this year. Hi, Michael. Welcome. Hey, thanks so much for inviting me on. My pleasure. So for my listeners who maybe haven't experienced your work yet, why don't you start off by introducing yourself a little more and some of the things you've done? Okay, thanks. This book is actually my third book. I've done two other books on Asia.

One is called The Miracle, The epic story of Asia's quest for wealth. And that's kind of a history of Asia's big economic boom over the last 50 years. And then I wrote a book called Confucius and the World He Created, which is kind of a history of Confucius's influence on the world. But in my real life, I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist since 1992, and I've been a foreign correspondent in Asia since 1996. I've worked for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine as a correspondent. Now I'm freelance.

I contribute to The Atlantic, and I'm a Bloomberg opinion columnist, among other things. That's quite a resume. And you definitely beat me up in terms of living in Asia. You said 1996 is how long you've been here? I've been in Asia since 1996 in various cities. And I learned yesterday that right now you're in Beijing. Is that right? I'm in Beijing right now you're in Beijing. Is that right? I'm in Beijing right now. That's right.

Yes. Yeah. I'd made a mistake. I thought you were in New York because that's where your publishing company sent me the copy of your book from. And so I was scheduling as though we were going to be on 12 hour time differences. And so I felt pretty silly. Well, it's not a bad, it's not a bad guess.

I'm actually from the New york area i grew up in new jersey and i lived in new york for a while as well so it's it was a it was actually a pretty good guess okay well pure luck on my part so since you're up in beijing right now and since we live in such strange times i guess i'll first ask first ask you, how's life going for you up in the North Capitol? Things are actually returning to kind of normal. I wouldn't say 100% because there's still all these controls in place. But it's actually almost becoming too normal too quickly. I don't know how you feel, but after really not being in crowds of course

in china you're used to being in crowds right all the time but after kind of not being in crowds since early january being back in very crowded spaces in a coffee shop where people are hanging all over you and this kind of thing it's it's actually it's slightly unnerving in some ways it's more stressful than it was when everybody was was locked down and you were kind of you almost feel that you're in some a bit of more a bit more risk maybe with now that everyone's being packed together again oh i very much agree it's it's quite the same here in shanghai it's that that feeling of kind of being sardine compacted all together again, but everybody's still wearing masks and it's still very visible that there are checkpoints and temperature and

all that stuff. So it's, it doesn't feel safe, but you have to go back to pretending like it is. I figured it would be much the same in Beijing. So 20 plus years in Asia, what got you interested in Asia and I guess more specifically China in general? And like, how did your life kind of come to intersect with that in such a way? It's funny, I actually kind of fell into it somewhat academically. I always have a lot of interest in history going back to high school. But like most high schools, I went to a pretty good high school. But, you know, you have a very limited range of options studying history in high school, which in my high school was mainly even a choice of American history and American history. So when I got to university, you could take classes on anything you would really want.

I started basically dabbling in Indian, Chinese history, other parts of the world, and just kind of became hooked. And that's how it actually started very academically. And later, it kind of merged with an interest in economics and especially economic development. And that's what brought me out to Asia to write. Because if you want to learn about how poor countries can become wealthy, then Asia is the place to be. So I've been writing mainly about economics in Asia for the time I've been here. And China itself was a bit of a late addition in my interest. I originally came to China with Time Magazine and had been

in and out of the country quite a bit before I moved here permanently in 2011. And, you know, the more I was here, the more interested I became. And, you know, the more the interest around the world has grown in China and everything about China. So I just became more and more involved in China studies and wanted to write more and more and learn more and more about it. So I just became more and more involved in China studies and wanted to write more and more and learn more and more about it. Yeah, the economic point there that you kind of get sucked into being fascinated by that, I relate to that a lot as well. I started this show pretty much as just sort of a political history, but especially as I got into some of the middle imperial dynasties, like the Song, for instance, it became more and more fascinating

just how the economic structures of the empire developed over time. So I definitely can relate to approaching it academically and then getting much more interested in the economic underpinnings as well. Well, you make actually a really good point about that because we being from the U.S it's we we tend to think like generally everybody in the west that you know somehow the global economy started with us you know that it was kind of built started by the portuguese and and the british and these kind of global these east west trading legs but as you said when you look back before that happened

you find that there was already something of an international system, especially by the days of the Song of Yunnan. And China was always one of the main drivers of growth and trade in the global economy. I mean, going back to the Silk Road days. So there's this whole other economic history of the world that a lot of people really don't know that China has had, we've played a really big part in. And when you even think about like where trade and how trade has developed and why trade global trade has developed,

how it has again, China was really at the center of that. People came all from all over the place because they wanted what China was making, whether it was silk, silk and porcelain and tea, whatever it was. So, you know, China was making, whether it was silk and porcelain and tea, whatever it was. So, you know, China was instrumental in kind of creating the global trade and the global economy as it is.

And I think it's a very unknown, unappreciated story how advanced China was economically and in industry for a very long time. Absolutely. In fact, I'm thinking back now, I believe you mentioned it, I think it was chapter maybe four when it came up. I know it was the Han Dynasty,, is that this emperor who reigns for 20 years manages to hoard so much gold that it almost bankrupts the Roman Empire of Augustus at the time. And so the effects of this one economy is not just now that it's come to be this global dominant force. And this is one of the central premises of your book, but it almost has been.

Well, a little later on, there's some estimates that three-fourths of all the silver that the Spanish found in their colonies in America eventually ended up in China because the Europeans were using silver to buy the porcelain tea and other things that they wanted from China. And the Chinese weren't interested in a whole lot in other kinds of trade goods except for silver.

So from all the silver that would dug up in the Americas and made Spain rich and flooded all through Europe, eventually somehow found its way to China, where it generally stayed. So China has a long history of vacuuming up wealth from the West. Absolutely. Yeah. With mixed results as well. I mean, it has a tendency to debase its own currency from time to time as a result as well, doesn't it? So on that similar note, then one of the things I liked when reading your book is that it's information dense. Like I can't think of too much that I've covered in my show that you didn't cover in some fashion in your book. And yet you made it really

accessible and really easy to read. I was able to, yeah, I was able to get through it very quickly and there was no, it wasn't a chore at all, which sometimes very dense academic books can be, you know, especially on a subject that is as information target rich as, you know, the history of China or of Asia. So I guess you'd be a pretty good person to ask then. Now, again, I don't think that the people who already listen to my show necessarily need to be hard sold on the idea of China is interesting. But in a broader sense, what makes China worth not only writing about on your or my case, but also for somebody who walks into a bookstore and through the nonfiction section and sees a book like yours, what makes it worth them picking it up?

Why should we care? Well, I think when you look at the world around us, what's going on right now, you know, it's pretty easy to answer your question, which is, you know, look at the impact China has on the world. Whether you believe that China is responsible for the pandemic or not, it's China obviously played a huge role in what's happening in everybody's lives right now. And that's just going to be more and more true as China grows in power and influence.

China's already affected the U.S. economy in very fundamental ways in where we work and what we buy. In the future, China's going to influence what technology the world is using. It'll influence the balance of power between East and West. There's some riders think that, of course, the U.S. is heading towards some kind of superpower confrontation with China, which is very much going to redirect the history of the United States as well. And because China is playing such a tremendous role in the world,

I think the more that we know about China, the better off that we'll be in the United States in dealing with the rise in China, what it means for the world. And that's what really got me onto this book. I think we tend to, just by nature, right? We tend to kind of see history through our through our own prism through who we are uh what our background is what we studied in school what stories our parents tell us you know this kind of thing that we have so we have a view

of the world that's very much based on on ourselves and when you think about it there's there's other societies china just being one of them that has a very different history and a bit different background. And people learn different things and see the world through a different prism. It's no one prism is more right or wrong. It's just a matter of perception and perspective. And that's really what got me onto writing a book like this. There's an entire kind of Chinese narrative of what's happened in the world and what it means that shapes to a great degree how the Chinese see the world today. And the more that we know about that, I think it can help us all figure out what's going to happen in the future. Absolutely. I mean, whether one sees or anticipates China being a friend or a partner or a rival, it is incredibly obvious and important in this day and age to realize that it's going to impact virtually every other corner of the world, as it already is. And so better to understand it, no matter what one might think of it.

Well, I mean, I was finding, and I think it's, again, I think it's, you know, it's totally natural. I mean, we tend to put the story of China into our own history of the West. You know, what I find when I'm talking to people about this book and Chinese history, a lot of people really started learning about China from, you know, starting from like the opium wars, right? So you're talking about the mid-19th century, which really in Chinese history, it's not very long ago. And that's very often where readers in the West kind of pick up their China history. But, you know, there's, you know,

2,500 years of history before that, that was already kind of affecting the But, you know, there's, you know, 2,500 years of history before that, that was already kind of affecting the world, you know, and that goes to a great degree. And unless you're really interested and you want to know more and you seek it out, you're academically interested, there's this whole other history of China that most people don't really know. And, you know, as you're dealing with one of the world's great civilizations and what's becoming one of the world's great powers, and I think the only way to really get a handle on what that means is to know more about where China's coming from. Yeah, you bring up where a lot of at least baseline Western sort of idea or understanding of China tends to come in, which is the mid-1800s and the Opium Wars.

And so Europeans and Westerners in general, that's kind of the high tide of their civilizational oomph. And yet for China, and you bring this up repeatedly throughout, that's not only one of its darkest periods of time. It's known even today as the century of humiliation. But it's also just a kind of a few off pages in the sum total of its sort of history book. It really is an outlier. And yet in the Western sense, far too often, even today, that's taken to be seen as the normal or where China is, quote unquote, supposed to exist in the world order. But you point out very well that that is historically just a weird off blip, and not at all what the norm has been. Right. I mean, the Western perception of China has always been of this, what the West was

considering a backward society, right right and a place that was poor that had all these weird old ideas and and you know everyone knew that oh china had this great opulent powerful history but you know within the western experience we've been dealing with a different well we think we've been dealing with a different china it's really not even true in the western experience because until the Opium War, the Chinese empires, the Ming and the Qing, really had the upper hand on the Europeans. If you want to go back and read the earliest changes with the Portuguese and the Dutch and the first kind of European seafarers that made it out there, the Chinese were definitely in the driver's seat in these relationships

for a good 300 years or so. But of course, before that, there were many periods in Chinese history where China was a very, very dominant force in East Asia and beyond. But that's not our, that's not the Western experience. And that's given us what's really an incorrect idea about what China is about. I mean, that doesn't mean that China was always, always kind of a super strong, militarily superior state. As you know, there were periods, I've seen you been doing a lot of Mongol history recently. So, you know, there were other periods where the Chinese didn't really fare so well. But, you know, what's amazing about Chinese history is how often they were able to rebuild their power.

That's what I find fascinating. That, yeah, they had their periods of disunion, in some cases quite long periods. They had their civil wars. They had their foreign invasions. I mean, of course, that's going to happen over thousands of years. But then when they had their opportunity, they were able to basically rebuild their power again.

And, you know, you can kind of make the case that you're seeing that again today. Of course, you know, it's not an imperial dynasty and we don't have an emperor. But, you know, when you see what's going on and the way China is rebuilding its economic influence, its political influence, and you read about the old dynasty, you say, hey, this is like, you know, deja vu, basically. Yeah, we don't have an emperor. we just have a president for life totally different um on on that on that i mean you're teeing me up great from for my next um question here but i mean you even start your book out with the the line that classic opening line from the romance of

the three kingdoms which is the empire long divided must unite and when long united it shall surely divide and i think that that became so iconic because it is so very descriptive of the long scale long epochal cycles that we see in chinese history when we take kind of we pan back and take that longer view i'm curious what you have come up with or theorized or what you want to voice here as to why that might be so much of a central aspect to the story of this region of the world. Whereas in some place like Europe, when the Western Roman Empire sort of fell apart, although there were still ideations of it for centuries and even thousands of years after the fact, it never really quite put itself back together again. Why was it a more driving force in China, do you think? That's a really good question, because you could see if you go back to, for example, the Warring States period,

you could very easily make a case that if you were living in the warren states period you could have foreseen china developing the way europe did where you had you know a bunch of independent states that kind of shared certain cultural aspects and history yeah but ended up to gradually going their own way and competing but it didn't happen and uh even in other periods when china broke apart and you had multiple dynasties, somehow they all came back together. And it's a really interesting phenomenon. And I mean, the best answer I can have for it

is actually it gets into the power of ideas. That the idea that China was better off as unified formed very, very early in Chinese political philosophy. And some of that was an outgrowth of the warring states, right? I mean, a lot of Chinese greatest philosophers were writing at that time. And they were looking around them and obviously, you know, kind of like, you know, we have to put an end to this devastation. And they started believing that the only solution was unity. That's what Mencius thought, right?

Stability is in unity. And then when you actually had the first empire, kind of unified empire form under the chin, and that idea kind of held that this is the ideal way that China should be. And that kind of sunk into the brains of the political elite. So that's why whenever China, you know, the dynasties weakened and fell or country was invaded, the political elite had in their mind, well, we have to put the pieces back together

again. That's how China becomes strong. And they weren't, of course, wrong either, right? When they did put the pieces back together again, you ended up with another one of these great, powerful, wealthy, innovative dynasties. That's the best idea that I have put together on it, that it's actually rooted in kind of China's philosophy and view of its own history. Yeah, I think that's a very good answer. It's always been fascinating to me that it was the Qin dynasty that managed to sort of calcify and crystallize that idea of unity under a son of heaven in the imperial sense. Because when you actually stop and you look at the Qin Dynasty, for all of its pomp and splendor, it lasted, I think, what, less than 15 years, if I'm remembering right? Yeah, it lasted 15 years. Yes, you're right.

It's just this incredibly great world. They did a tremendous amount in 15 years. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They built the original Great Wall. They completely reorganized the empire where it became, you know, it's the chin that started this idea of a centralized empire with provinces. They called them something else. But you basically had provincial government.

So they created a national bureaucracy. They standardized lots of things from, you know, the Chinese script was standardized under the Qin, as well as, you know, currency and weights and measures. All that stuff was standardized to try to make it into one empire and i mean there's some thinking that the chin built a more extensive road system than rome in that you know in that period so it's it's a pretty amazing 15 years but yeah we would it was just 15 years but to a certain extent it created the model i mean when you when you look and look at this government today you know as you said, we don't have an emperor.

We have a president for life. But okay. But what is this government? This is still a centralized state where power flows out from the center through a series of provincial governments and a civil service that it controls. In certain respects, you know, and actually when you look at some of the pomp and ceremony that the communist government does, things in many ways don't look all that different from a basic political standpoint from what the Qin Dynasty did back in the 3rd century BC. Yeah, I'm going to pull a particular quote that I earmarked here that I love that you

brought up in the beginning of your book. You said, you know, one Chinese proverb, heaven is high and the emperor is far away is as true today as it ever was. And I mean, that's, it's kind of the perfect statement that describes China even today. The centralized, seemingly overpowering force, but it's almost always so far away that the local bureaucrats are able to do more or less whatever they want unless they get particularly unlucky. The more things change, the more things stay the same, yes.

So I know, that's why when you read about China already back in that ancient period, and you live here and you see what goes on, you're like, okay, yeah, this was 2,000 years ago, but it feels like I'm reading something about today. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire

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everywhere you find your podcasts or go to pod.link slash pax. Yeah, and for myself at least, definitely for the first period of time that I lived here, a lot of things that frustrated me the most about the way that the system operates and the seemingly endemic, either just malaise or corruption on the part of a lot of officials,

it just seemed intolerable. Like how could you as a society tolerate this sort of thing until you realize, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's normal. That's what they've been doing for a few millennia now. This is like how it's supposed to work and then it all kind of makes more sense well you know it's interesting how this civilization has been around a very long time and obviously it's changed dramatically you know over the years and in many ways especially recently because as you know the for the last you know 100 years, 125 years, this country has been kind of at war with its own history, right? I mean, Chinese reformers, whether they were communists or other,

began to believe that this history that we're talking about was China's problem. And if they wanted to be a modern state in a modern world, they had to basically adopt ideas from the outside between the Western ideas i mean where does communism come from right uh right so you've gone through and of course and you know during the cultural revolution and you know especially but but you had these quite aggressive attacks on chinese tradition That was the four old, right? So you had Red Guards going around, you know, destroying Confucian and Buddhist temples. But, you know, despite, you know,

all of that in recent times, you know, you can, it is remarkable how much influence history has on the way things happen, both domestically and also how China sees the world and what China kind of, I think, wants going forward in the world. I guess we're all somehow products of our own history. We don't even realize how influenced we are

about how our societies have developed in the past. Yeah, that's very true. It reminds me of that old great Mark Twain quote, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. But, you know, you could say if Mark Twain had studied more Chinese history, he may not have said that. I mean, Chinese history can be, as we were talking about earlier, amazingly repetitive.

Yes, I think you can. I mean, not that all the dynasties, of course, were the same by any means, but they were remarkably alike. There's a lot of quantity. In their institutions and in their ideology. And, of course, when they talked about themselves, they were always the successor to the old dynasties, right? So they used to refer to the Tang and so itself as the recreation of the Han, right?

And the Ming would see itself as the recreation of the Han and the Tang. And this was kind of, they wanted to recreate the past on a certain level. And of course, things change with time. But the basics of the imperial system that formed in the Qin and then really under the Han, because it's when the Han figured out how to use ideology and how to use administration to actually run an empire the size of the Chinese empire. You know, that basically, it's basically stuck as kind of the main form of government and the main source of governing principles. Basically, you can make a case up into the modern day, even with all the change that's gone on.

Yeah. And I think that that is something that is often difficult, I think, especially for modern Western minds to really quite grasp or fully comprehend. In the post-Enlightenment West, it's all very linear and forward-looking and improvement is possible by breaking off from the shackles of the past. But again, as you say, in some ways, at least, even today, once Mao died and the cultural revolution ended at least there still is that that sort of backward looking philosophy of looking to the past for solutions in the present and I think a lot a lot of times that can sound like negative or derisive

and I don't I don't mean it to be no you don't mean it to be either because I mean it's it's worked uh's worked more often than it hasn't worked. There's a lot to be gained there, trying to take lessons from the solutions of the people who came before. Well, you know, that's a big part of Confucian political thought. I mean, if you read the Analects, you'll see he's constantly referring to earlier periods of history. He was already at an early period of history, being that he was born in the 6th century BC. But he was referring to basic stories of sage kings and

earlier rulers that were already even the historical rulers that he was talking about were already around 500, 600 years before him, when you look at the Duke of Gaul and these people. So it, you know, and that was his message. His message was, these guys got it right. So if you want to figure out how to do things, they're the model. And that's kind of built into Confucian political thinking that, of course, is highly influential on what was going on in imperial courts for the entire dynastic period. So there's a tradition of looking back to history, very, very, very, very early history,

as a way of kind of guiding what you're going to do today and in the future. Yeah, if you believe that your earlier dynasties were descended from literal gods and demigods and the sage kings, I mean, you're not going to do better than that, so you might as well try to emulate them. No, right, that's true. I mean, the earlier dynasties, that's exactly right. But even the historical dynasties,

when you look at the Duke of Zhao and King Wu, King Wen, these guys in that period, they're considered to be ideal rulers, right? That everybody else should model themselves on. These are people that were living in the 11th century BC. So that's when you get into these remarkable aspects of Chinese history about not just how far it goes back, but how educated and literate the society was so far back that you have written stories of these people,

even if they're true, you have documentary records from almost that early period that your later historians and philosophers were reading and relying on. Yeah. And so kind of on that same general idea of looking to the past to try to inform the present and how that can be a good idea. Once again, like I said before, you know, one of the central premises of your book is that more often than it's not been, China has been this regional hegemonic power over much of East Asia. And it seems pretty inevitable, I would say, that it's in the process, well on its way to resuming that role in the 21st century. So what lessons, maybe in a Confucian looking back towards the past way, could even the West potentially draw in order to better meet that

challenge? And in the same respect, is it necessarily negative or is there some kind of potential silver lining to that sea change? Well, I mean, I think as China rises on the world stage, I think it would be helpful if people in Washington and London and Tokyo kind of look at it through that Chinese prison that I was talking about earlier, where right now in the U.S., China is a threat, right? Yeah. a threat to the global order that the U.S. and Europe has put together. And I'm not saying that's not true. That could very well be true. When you flip the prism over and you see this from China's perspective, they're really just restoring what they consider to be the norm.

They believe and have believed in their own self-perception, in their own political ideology, that basically they deserve to be among the great powers of the world, that to a certain extent, it's their right. They have a sense of exceptionalism that's different, obviously, in its substance, but similar to this idea that the U.S. has of this city upon a hill, right? That the U.S. is going to be a guiding light that's going to change the world. But that's how the Chinese actually have historically seen their own civilization. And they believe themselves to be a superior civilization.

Therefore, they to a certain extent had a rightful place at the top of the world. So when you see things from that Chinese perspective, from the way that they look at this, is that we deserve to be here, right? We deserve to be among the great powers. And you can feel that that's threatening, perhaps. And, you know, honestly, the rhetoric out of this government doesn't do a particularly good job of calming people's nerves. But the way the Chinese see it is that this is basically how things should be. Your experience with us is an aberration. of their own role in themselves and where they belong in the world and where they feel they've always always been in the world then what they do and how they act and what they want is suddenly you know it makes a lot more sense i mean i what one thing that i you know we always ask ourselves

what does china want right that's what people in the west have been asking this for you know 40 50 years what what does China want? And to a certain extent, the answer is relatively simple. It's what China always had or what the Chinese think they always had. Yeah. A little respect as I pull on my necktie. Get a little respect. But, you know, the problem with perception, you know, perception is reality to a certain extent.

But it doesn't mean that, you know, perception is reality to a certain extent. But it doesn't mean that, you know, it's always perfectly true. I mean, the other thing that you're dealing with is a China, especially under this government, that's done quite a bit of rewriting of its own history in ways that influence what people think that may not actually be true. You know, I get tons of tweets, pro-China people insisting that China has always been a peaceful power, which we know is simply not true. The Chinese were at war with just about everybody you can be at war with over their history. So, you know, unfortunately, there's a lot of misperceptions. And the danger I had in writing my book and the real one of the real problems I had to deal with was, you know, I didn't want to write a Communist Party history of the world.

Right. I didn't want to write a book of, oh, this is how mainland Chinese today see their history. Because to a certain extent, it's not that that's not important. That's important in and of itself because it influences how people react to the world around them today. But I didn't really want to do a Chinese Communist Party propaganda book about what they think their history is, which was a bit of a tricky element in writing those perceptions of history change over time. But this idea about Chinese exceptionalism is something that when you look

at writers going back to the earliest period that we have writing, so looking at spring and autumn and the warring states periods writing, you already had the Chinese thinking of themselves in this way, the superior civilization. And that's an idea that basically really never went away despite all the as we were talking about all the ebbs and flow and ins and outs of history absolutely no when i was first was um beginning to read i admit i had my own little uh nervousness that is this going to be essentially xinhua rhetoric in english and I'm happy to say it's not. It's very well done. Well, thank you.

I mean, the way around it, I spent a lot of time thinking about how do I get around it? Yeah. Right. And part of it also is not just the Communist Party problem. It's just history itself right i mean i one of my earliest lessons in history i had i had a class at my university on on the nationalist period in india so you know gandhi and they were these guys and you know the professor purposely gave us books about the exact same period of history written by three different people at different times and and often it was hard to tell they were writing about the same thing I mean

it there their their analysis of the events of me and what was what was important or their characterization of the people and it's just like wait a second you know this this isn't the same decade as it I mean it's just so so certain said you have this problem you know generally so i mean what i what i attempted to do was use you know contemporary sources which i use it you know loosely in some cases the most contemporary sources were you know a couple of years later after the events but especially in the early period. But because you have such a tremendous amount of writing from Chinese history that the Chinese were writing at the time, you can almost get kind of a feel for how Chinese were interpreting their own events as they were going on, or at least something close to, or generally close to it. And then, of course, how those historians were

writing about their period had tremendous influence on what later historians were writing as well. So I tried to a certain extent to get the Chinese view in something like real time, or as close to it as you could get. And that's when you see some of these ideas, like this idea of Chinese exceptionalism. This was coming up dynasty after dynasty after dynasty in more or less the same form. And that filtered into how China dealt with the outside world. I mean, that was the whole idea of the Chinese emperor, as you said, you know, being the son of heaven and therefore being above other rulers. You know, this had a direct influence on how the Chinese dealt with other people for, you know for a large part of its history.

Absolutely. So in the modern age then, you also pointed out that even though significant elements of that Chinese exceptionalism, you said it was, still exist in sort of the political mindset of the current iteration of China, it lives in a markedly different world than it once did. And so can that ideology of being the superior civilization, of feeling that one deserves to be at the top of the world stage, can it coexist? Does it have to adapt on a global playing field where I would say it's probably likely to be a multi-polar world rather than yeah china on top well that's a real that's a real question i mean that is that's the heart of of the question facing china right now because the world you know the west remade the world, right? And societies like Korea and Vietnam and elsewhere in East Asia that were originally very, very, very close to China and were their, you know, writing script to

their education system, to legal codes, artistic styles, everything, right? So you had a China that had almost like a Chinese world. I mean, what makes East Asia, East Asia, to a great degree, it's the influence of Chinese civilization that makes it kind of a distinct region from the rest of the world. And that was always true. So through all the kind of ups and downs of the dynasties, that civilizational influence was kind of always there. But that's not true anymore. Because, you know, we were talking about earlier how China was, for a century, was a people in war with their own history, right? So now all these societies around Asia

that used to look to China don't really look to China so much anymore. They like doing business with China, and they're happy to have good relations with China. But, you know, their kids want to go to Harvard, and their are in many cases democratic or even countries that aren't like Vietnam are increasingly looking to relations with the West. So the Chinese entire world has changed in the last 100, 150 years in a way that it hadn't in the past. And I think that presents very different challenges to them. You know, you have a country like, you know, Korea where the dynasties, they weren't always,

but for long stretches of time, they were some of the most loyal partners of the Chinese dynasties. Yeah. Now, you know, being basically having a defense alliance with the United States and being, you know, very, very, at least South Korea, you know, being very, very U.S. looking. And so I think this is the challenge. These societies now look on China somewhat nervously. And I don't see them running to embrace Chinese civilization anytime soon. So in that sense, China has its work cut out for it.

I mean, it is already a major economic force, obviously, and it's becoming more and more of a military power. It's expanding its diplomatic influence. But, you know, it still has work to go to rebuild the foundations of its power. That civilizational influence was always kind of the base of Chinese power through all of this. That one is really struggling. They're trying to kind of reclaim it.

The communist government doesn't do a particularly good job of that, actually. This is where, you know, you get into these open questions. Basically, yeah, China wants what it always had, but is that, can it achieve that? And is that even possible? And as you say, that's still an open question. I guess we'll see.

I'd love to predict the future based on the past, but look, I think you can make the case, let's do that. Let's look at chinese history as to what what's going to go forward i mean if you believe in this you know romance of the three kingdoms you know uh cycle of of chinese history um uh you know divided china is now uniting and this means that they're china is again destined to be a great power. But China also has a tremendous number of false starts.

Like as you mentioned, there was the Qin that lasted a mere 15 years, right? There was the Sui dynasty, the precursor to the Tang that lasted only two emperors but looked tremendously powerful at the time. That's the dynasty that built the Grand Canal. So maybe China is destined to be a great power again, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be under the current group of people running the country. That's a very interesting point. It's still early days as far as any new regime goes in the grand course of China's history, 70 years is not altogether that long in the grand sweep of things. No, and also when you look at it, I mean,

their period of kind of greater influence is one much shorter than that, right? Yeah. I mean, this was still a relatively, you know, my first time in China was 1996. I was just here as a tourist, basically. And, you know, it was almost 25 years ago. But there were hardly any cars on the road in 1996. You know, this was the real beginnings of China's opening to the world and move towards wealth.

It was still a relatively poor place. So when you look at it that way, it's actually been a very short period of time. Yeah. And so I guess we will have to see. So before I let you go, I've got just a couple more questions and more, I guess, just flippant than these last ones have been. But in your time in China, what's a favorite place that you've been to or visited? And what's your favorite type of food here? Favorite place? favorite place that you've been to or or visited and what's your favorite type of food here favorite place well in terms of just kind of like cities uh and kind of city life i'm actually i'm actually a

bit of a hangzhou fan myself um i generally like that part of east china that hangzhou nanjing that suzhou that whole area uh closer to you than to me. I think these cities are really, really interesting. Very old, obviously, and very interesting cities. And it's actually, I find, to be perhaps the friendliest part of China as well.

I think because of their history, I find them to be quite open in that part of the world. I mean, in terms of sites, I mean, though, I mean, God, there's so much, but I'm getting off the beaten track of the obvious sites to see. I don't know if you've ever been out to Dunhuang to see the Buddhist, the Buddhist cave temples there, but it's,

it's because it's kind of between nowhere and nowhere. Right. So you really have to make a trip. It's, it's well worth it if you want to get on a plane. And when I was there a long time ago, I was there 20 years ago, almost 20 years ago, it was a bit of a trek. It's become a lot easier. In terms of food, I'm going to have to go with something a bit of a stereotype i'll apologize to everyone in advance uh but i actually love i actually love the roast duck here in beijing

so there's nothing wrong with beijing duck you don't have to apologize oh no because it's one of those i actually don't like duck that's why I bring this up like I'll never I'll never order duck and you know when I when I got here to Beijing it's a thing to do right you have guests in town you want to bring them for you know your your Peking duck and it's one of those things it's kind of like uh I'm from New York so it's kind of like why can't you get a good bagel outside of New York uh you're gonna get hate mail on that one people are gonna say yes you can no no no actually you can't get a good bagel out outside of New York um I'll redirect them to New York you can't get you can't get a really good cheesesteak out of Philadelphia I went wouldn't call it Philadelphia. Whatever around the world they

call a Philly cheese steak, it's not a Philly cheese steak. You have to go to Philly to get the Philly cheese. I don't know why it's bread with some chopped up meat on it. I don't know what it is, but it's different in Philly. It's very similar on a much more gourmet level with

Peking duck, where even other parts of china don't do it the way they do it here right right no that's a that's a solid answer and a solid defense of that answer well michael thank you so much for your time and for for coming thank you is there any plugs you'd like to make um in terms of the way people can be able to get in touch with you or anything like that? Well, look, if people want to reach me, the easiest way is to send me something on Twitter, which is the fastest. My handle is at Michael Schumann, so it's pretty easy.

And look, I'm happy to, if people do read the book, and they want to interact and they have questions, they want to talk about stuff, I'm open to having these dialogues with people. So I look forward to it. Awesome. So one more time, that is Superpower Interrupted, The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schumann, out on says June 9th of 2020. Alright so get it in any way shape and form you can. Thanks a lot again Michael. Hey Chris I really appreciate you inviting me on in the time this really interesting talk Thank you. Once again, big thanks to Michael Schumann for coming on and chatting with me. You can find him on Twitter at the handle

at Michael Schumann, and his upcoming book, Superpower Interrupted, hits stores June 9th. You can pre-order it on Amazon and other booksellers right now. Next time, we're back to our regularly scheduled late-UN breakdown under the tenure of its final Emperor Khan, Pogon Temur. Thanks for listening.

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