The New Yorker Radio Hour - Ai Weiwei, and Doing Business with China

Episode Date: June 23, 2017

Ai Weiwei reflects on censorship and the refugee crisis, a congressman asks us to reconsider trade with China, and Chinese students explain the country’s Ivanka Trump fever. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. She subconsciously mocks that lineage. So that's happening? It seems like an incredible story here on many crimes. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Staff writer Evan Osnos is sitting in this week for David Remnick. Welcome to the show. I'm Evan Osnos. I first went to work in China in 2005 as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

I was based in Beijing, a young. reporter, still in my 20s, and I stayed for eight years, and over that time, I watched China grow into a much more powerful country. It hosted the Olympics. It put the first Chinese woman into space, and its economy became the world's second largest. Since 2013, I've been back in the United States, based in Washington, and I've watched America grapple with China's new place in the world, not always comfortably, particularly when it comes to its effect on our economy. Today we're going to look at China from a few different angles. We're going to sit down with the dissident artist I Wei Wei Wei. And we're going to hear about a Chinese sci-fi blockbuster, which is the first of its kind.

And we'll meet a young feminist who is struggling with China's Confucian values. But first, I met a journalist named Yuan An Zhang last year at the Republican National Convention. She was covering the convention for Taisin, which is a business magazine in Beijing. And she was listening very closely to what Donald Trump had to say because he'd been talking in very tough terms about China's economic policy. This includes stopping China's outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation.

They are the greatest currency manipulators ever. I interviewed Yuan Anjong at the convention, and now six months into the Trump administration, we met up again in Washington. So we follow all of the twists and turns over here with immense interest. How closely is the Chinese public following our American political drama? They're following very closely. What he does, what he says, what the cabinet does, for example, the testimony of the FBI, former FBI director James Comey's. And many Chinese media translate that testimony into Chinese, including us. We put it. online. And people would say, wow, this is so fascinating. This is even better than House of Cards.

House of Cards is pretty popular in China, is it? Yes, it is very popular among young people. When Donald Trump was a candidate last year, he talked about China in very harsh terms sometimes. He would say that China was, I think the word he used was raping the United States of jobs and so on. Now that he's president, has he been following through on the kinds of policies that China was expecting? or is it something else? I think when he came into the office, Chinese were a little bit nervous. But he said a lot of things, for example, the currency manipulator and also the tariff on Chinese goods. But he doesn't follow through on those and said,

okay, I learned a lot from my meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. and we have important issues that we could work on, for example, North Korea. And he doesn't further push the trade and currency manipulator issues, but rather give China some more time. I think for Chinese some people think he was calculating because if he took some actions, China could react with retaliation. It was not like withdrawing from TPP or paris. accord, those things he might not have immediate consequences. But if you do something to China, China would react. Maybe that is why he backed off from some of the promises on their campaign trail. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met for the first time in Florida. And they had this summit at Donald

Trump's club, Mar-a-Lago. And afterwards, Trump came out of it saying very affectionate things about presidency. He says they have great chemistry. What do you make of these two? two people together, these two leaders. Do they strike you as being very different kinds of people or do you think they have anything in common? They absolutely have different personalities. But this summit between President Xi and President Trump was different from other leader summit as well. President Trump seemed to be very friendly to President Xi and First Lady. His daughter Ivanka and his grandchildren can speak Chinese, which was very appealing to Chinese readers. They were fascinated by how fluent his grandchildren could sing Chinese songs. And it went better than many of the

expectations. What's in common was probably two leaders are seen to be very pragmatic. They can solve issues and do deals. So in some ways, Americans talk about President Trump as a transactional president. Yes. China is a pretty transactional place. Yes, that's what they're in common. So recently Donald Trump, of course, pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Some people look at this and they say, well, this is an opportunity for China to take a greater role in the world as a leader on the global stage.

Is that how it's being described and felt in China? Yes, I think that would be correct. Chinese Premier Li Kuchang just went to Europe. And President Trump just came back from Europe. And I think people have very different feelings about these two countries now. And I also remember that in January, I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum. And that was around the same time of the inauguration day. And I met an executive in advertisement from New York.

We were in the same shuttle bus. And President Xi just did. gave his speech. And he... And in his speech, didn't he say something about the importance of globalization? Yes. Yes. He talked about globalization. And the participants at Davos was so, well, they were impressed. At the same time, they had a mixed feeling that EU and the United States were not the one who's promoting globalization at this stage. So this executive said to me, well, President Xi looked very presidential and he's... Speech was impressive, and he said, we need a leader like that in this era.

I remember a few years ago, the United States used to talk about the need for China to play the role of a, quote, responsible stakeholder. That was the term American diplomacy. Right. Do you get the feeling that China has some ambivalence about being a global leader or being the number one power in the world? I'll tell you exactly what I mean. For years, China has talked about returning to the place that it held for most of history, really, which was the most powerful civilization on Earth. But as we sort of get closer to that moment, to that new phase in history, there is also some hesitation because when you are the number one power in the world, it can be costly. It can come with sense of expectation.

How do you think the Chinese public is feeling about the idea that the United States is quite rapidly, only? almost unexpectedly adopting this America First policy and how that might change the way that people expect things from China in the world. People in China are also seeing the rise of China very rapidly in the past 10 years. And they would expect this growth to continue. So I think for China, it has the aspiration to be a world leader. but it's not there yet because although the country is very powerful and strong, but still if you look at the average GDP per capita, it is still low. So domestically, there are a lot of issues to be solved, like overcapacity, the employment issues,

and to improve the people's living conditions. So I think it wants to be sometime in the future, but it's not ready yet. Tianjiang is a reporter based in Washington for China's Taishin Media Group. Basically, the theory here is pretty simple, which is they said to me, who do you want to have a conversation about China with? And I said, Rick Larson. And they said, who? Is you good? I've known Congressman Rick Larson for a while.

I used to see him when I was based in China and he would come over on government business. Larson represents a district in western Washington state, north of Seattle. Since 2005, he's been the co-chair of something called the U.S.-China Working Group, so he knows as much about China trade issues as anyone in Congress. We're trying, you know, sort of the mantra since 2005, since we started it, is that, you know, we'll take panda huggers, we'll take dragon slayers, and we'll even take panda slayers. So panda huggers and dragon slayers are the two species of relationships that people have with China. And I run into this all the time in Washington.

Those are essentially the categories, right? Yeah, yeah. I try to, because I spend a lot of time on thinking about this, people think I'm a panda hugger, if you will, that, you know, Rick Larsen's a friend of China. Well, I don't mind being a friend of China if it's in the U.S. interest to do that because I think it is in the U.S. interest to engage with China, even on issues that are difficult for us.

When President Trump was on the campaign trail, China featured fairly prominently in his talk about America and about America's place in the world, How much of what he said as a candidate has become what he's doing as president? My assessment would be so far not as much as he said as a candidate. From your perspective, is that good or bad? Oh, yeah. I think that's good. You know, the president as a candidate said he wanted to designate China a currency manipulator.

He threatened tariffs of, you know, 45% on Chinese. goods and so on, which according to one study I saw, my district would have been impacted negatively the most. Why would your district have been impacted so heavily? Yeah, well, we have a small airplane manufacturing facility in the district called Boeing. So 23,000 people a day who live in my district work at that facility, and another 7,000 come to work in my district from outside the district, so 30,000 people plus spouses. build airplanes in my district. And China and the Chinese airlines are major purchasers of those

airplanes. So the point being that the president's threats of tariffs in order to get what he believes America wants out of the Chinese relationship would have had a disastrous negative economic effect. I think, you know, by now, at the moment where we are in our politics, we have a feeling for how China looks to Americans in the Rust Belt, for instance. It's how does it feel to somebody who's in a place where jobs have disappeared and oftentimes the way it's described is that they went to China, whether they actually ended up there or not? But how does it feel to people in your area? It sounds like it's a very different image around China.

Yeah, it is very different. And it shows the breadth and diversity of opinion in the United States. And you're absolutely right in saying. And I hear this from colleagues from the Midwest, you know, every job that it's lost in the U.S. or in their area. went to China, every last one of them. You know, the numbers show that's very different. The numbers show automation and technology have a lot to do with job loss because at the same time we've actually increased jobs in the country.

We've increased productivity. But, you know, where I'm from in the Pacific Northwest, the first steamship that called in the Port of Seattle back in the late 1800s was out of Hong Kong. And we have a very long economic relationship as a state. with the Chinese mainland. And I tell folks, they say, well, you need to come to my district and see what is done. And I said, yeah, and you need to come to my district and see as well.

Have you formed a sense of which relationship with China is, in fact, the more typical one for how it's affecting the United States? Is it your district or is it the district that you hear about from people in the Midwest? Oh, yeah. That's, I think the more typical relationship that's impacting policy has. to do with the more challenging aspects of the relationship. Where people are hurting most, that ends up driving policy. And getting back to your question about the president as a campaigner, I think he was reflecting that anxiety about job loss and finding the boogeyman,

if you will, to point at. And China was the most obvious. And again, I think he's backing off of that as a president. So how would you describe what the administration? is trying to do. As far as you can tell, what are their priorities when it comes to really building the relationship with China? I think on the economic side, I think there's a step backwards a little bit in this administration, whereas the Obama administration and the Bush administration both sort of looked at a more comprehensive and strategic relationship with China.

This administration so far seems to be taking more of a transactional relationship with China on economics. You know, you give us beef and we'll give you this. You give us pork and we'll give us. Literally beef, in the sense, beef exports, literally beef exports, literally pork exports, as opposed to thinking more broadly about market access for non-Chinese companies to get into the Chinese market. Is there something wrong with a transactional approach like that?

I think it leaves a lot on the table for the United States. And there's a lot that the United States can offer on climate change. just point out of the Paris Agreement puts China at the forefront of climate change, but the value of the Paris Agreement for the United States was the opportunity would have given U.S. businesses to go into China and help China solve its environmental problems. You know, look, I'm all, I believe in climate change. I believe it's human cause. I believe the Paris Agreement was a good deal, but it was going to be a great economic deal

for U.S. businesses. And now the opportunity is lost because they pulled out of the Paris Agreement. In April, President Trump, with Xi Jinping for the first time in Mar-a-Lago and came out of it with a very positive impression. He talks about the fact that they had good chemistry and so on. Do you get the sense that the U.S.-China relationship is now in the mode that the president thinks it is? Do you get the sense that the Chinese are looking at President Trump the way that he's looking at them? No, I don't think that they look at each other the same way. I was asked earlier this year

if I thought this, you know, it's important to have a, you know, good relationship between the two leaders. And then they said, yes, it is, but we can't rely on the good relationship of two leaders to have a good relationship. We need to actually have reasons to have a good relationship that go beyond the individual personalities. And I think that the administration, maybe being a little too transactional with the, with the Chinese leadership, I think plays more into the Chinese hands than it does in the U.S. hands. The Chinese leaders, the Chinese leadership wants a transactional relationship because it means they don't need to worry about democracy. We don't have to worry about human rights. I don't have to worry about America talking about these issues that are really have been important to our foreign policy in the past.

I think it is a one more missed opportunity if we don't at least continue talking about human rights in a way that says that we're serious about it. For a lot of our faults, which are our responsibility to own, a lot of these countries, want the United States to continue to stand up for these values that we've always stood up for. They've been part of our foreign policy for well over 100 years. There is sometimes a dramatic cast to the kind of discussion about the U.S.-China relationship. People will compare it to the years before World War I when you had great powers that were intertwined economically and found themselves almost the term is sleepwalking into a conflict with

each other, simply because they weren't alert enough to the risks that could trigger a war. How much do you worry about the idea that the United States and China, even though we have these great interdependencies, could in fact find ourselves in a conflict? Yeah, I believe it's called the Thucydides trap. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, don't ask me who Thucydides is. I think of some Greek guy in the Peloponnesian War. I've been told he was a historian who wrote about the idea that a rising power and an incumbent power will always get into a conflict. Yeah, that's right. And I don't agree that that necessarily applies in this case because it's a rising power. It is a different time. Miscommunication has to be part of the acidity's trap.

China is a rising power. It is investing much more in its military. It's investing in fifth generation aircraft, fighter aircraft. It's investing in intelligence and electronics and so on. It's doing things that you kind of expect a large country to do. I think that we, the United States, needs to be careful about interpret. what that means. So you traveled around the region. The United States has pulled out of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. How is that being received? How is that being felt? Are other countries

looking at the United States differently as a result? Yeah, it hasn't played well. Whether we like it or not, TPP became a symbol. It wasn't just a trade agreement. It became a symbol of the U.S. commitment to the region. Now, there's a strong U.S. commitment to the region, and it continues. It's largely now in our military presence. So what does that leave it? Well, it leaves us with, on TPP specifically, the other 11 countries exploring whether or not to do a TPP 11. TPP 11, meaning essentially the TPP without the United States. Yeah, the 11 other countries that were going to be partners in TPP. So with Japan saying that they want to do that, then it sort of gives it some momentum. China and a few other countries are working on a separate trade agreement called RSEP,

a regional comprehensive economics. And it's a regional trade agreement essentially that China has led, but the standards are much lower than it would have been under TPP. And this is important because it's setting the rules of the road for trade between these countries, rules of the road that if the United States was involved would be much higher standards, would be able to push for labor standards and trade agreements, you'll be able to push for environmental standards and trade agreements. And now those fall by the wayside,

if this RSEP ends up becoming the standard. A lot of the things that Americans build, and we still build a lot of things, end up in the hands of a growing middle class in these Asian countries. Things like what, like high-end electronics and stuff like that? Yeah, and again, it's not just airplanes, but it is high-end electronics.

It's manufacturing equipment, large manufacturing equipment, coming out of the Midwest. It's any number of consumer products, any number of heavy-duty machinery, appliances. The United States represents only about 5% of the total population of the world. We're not going to buy everything that we make, that Americans make. We have to get into these markets. A trade agreement without us is going to give everyone else the opportunity to get ahead of us.

I think the second thing is it gets back to something I really believe, and that's the most – I've heard the most iconic – image in the United States is still the Statue of Liberty. Still is. Everybody knows what it is, and everybody knows what it stands for. And that set of values that it stands for, the United States is really the only country that can get into these other countries and explain what those values are and what they mean. If we're not hanging around with these other countries, they're going to either forget

that or they're going to wonder where we went. And that has a direct impact then on having friends, having friends when you need them, having allies when you need them. Congressman Larson, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks a lot for coming by. I appreciate it. That was Rick Larson, U.S. representative from the 2nd District of Washington. Today's episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour is all about the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China. In a minute, David Remnick sits down with China's most famous artist, I. Wei Wei, who is also perhaps its most famous distance. I'm Evan Osnos. Stick around.

I arrived this morning, like 2 o'clock, so I feel a little bit strange. So you got stuck in Israel? It's a paper saying, you know, when you travel. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Evanosniz. I'm sitting in for David Remnick today. But a couple of weeks ago, David had the chance to meet with the artist Ai Wei Wei. I is a unique figure in Chinese society. He's the most famous Chinese artist, a star in the global art world.

He's also a dissident who's been interrogated and beaten and jailed and he's been under government surveillance. There was a time when the Chinese government was very proud of I Wei Wei Wei. He worked on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But he began to challenge the Communist Party after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, where thousands of children died in schools that collapsed. And he's been struggling with the government ever since. Ai Wei Wei Wei was in New York recently to plan a major public artwork that isn't about China at all. It's an installation at sites all over the city that uses metal security fencing. It's a way of talking about the refugee crisis, and it's a very political piece of work.

It's being planned with the blessing of the mayor, which is a kind of collaboration that it's fair to say you would not see happen in China. Here's David Ramnik with Iwei-Way. Your new project is called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, which is the phrase from Robert Frost. And it's a gigantic public art installation. Can you tell me a little bit about that? That's going to be coming here to New York in the fall. In the autumn, October. And it's a project when I was asked by public art fund in New York to do a project,

and which is not easy decision for me because I love this city. I've been here, spent about 10 years in the 80s, and to come back to do a work, a single work, work is not that easy. So I have so much feeling. I don't want to just make a piece of sculpture. I don't think that the people would respond to it. So first, I will try to do something in relation to the city's landscape.

So it's a work you really have to see it. And even when you see it, you may not immediately recognize it as a so-called piece of art because it's public heart. You know, public art should not be a piece of blow-ups from the little works in the museum place, but rather to relate to daily life. Are you influenced by somebody like Christo when you're doing something like this? No, I never really influenced by him, and we are in very different circumstances or, you know, context.

But, of course, he's a very respectful for artists. You've been spending a lot of time visiting refugee camps all around the world. Why did the refugee crisis grab you so strongly? I went to essence, you know, Les Falls. The Little Island received, yeah, Greece. I received over 500,000 refugees at that moment. And I see them how they come down to the shore and, you know, how they are received in the camps.

and I have a curiosity, who they are, why they have to give up everything to such a foreign place. The condition is so poor, it's beyond understanding. It's not possible to understand. Even in China, that kind of condition cannot be accepted because you don't see children has no food, no light, and it's raining and cold, and nobody care about them. So this is in the heart of Europe.

So that makes me really rethink about our understanding about humanity, about democracy, about freedom of speech, freedom of price. So I think I will start to know more about it, you know, to do some of, we start to make a documentary film. The film will come out in two months, three months, called Human Flow. Human Flow, it's called. Yeah, it's global stuff.

about refugee situation in many aspects. So tell me, you were not permitted to travel outside of China until about two years ago when the Chinese authorities gave you your passport back. Exactly two years ago. So how did you feel about that? Did you feel stuck and then liberated? Or what was your emotional reaction? The whole thing is so ridiculous.

So you don't feel that you don't get that sense. liberated or they shouldn't have my passport at the first place. And they never give me a clear explanation of why they're doing that. And they're shy to even tell me, you know, anything about it. Then they returned to me. Right after I got my passport, I went back because they told me you're free. As I said, free means I can go out and come back. They said, yes.

So I tested it. I'm a person always want to test it. Also, I want telling them I'm not afraid. How does the Chinese government maintain restrictions on your work? Do the authorities make any effort to stop you from being an activist when you're overseas? Do you feel pressure when you're here in New York or you were just in Israel and you're in Europe a lot? Do you feel any pressure? Do you feel any sense of surveillance?

I don't feel that kind of pressure as one I was seen. in China, you know, I feel the compression every second. And because I've been completely not only monitored, but really in their hands, they can take me in or make me disappear any moment. I've been to your house. There are cameras all around. It's not like they hide the cameras. They want you to see them. Yeah, clearly they want you see it. And they never really hide their effort. And they keep coming to talk to you. used to be weekly. Do you think the Chinese government wants you eventually to be gone forever?

Is that part of the strategy? I don't really know. Who is Chinese government? Is anybody responsible for those kind of decisions? Are they going to be celebrating or regret for anything? I don't really know. If you look at the history, there's no clear evidence of any sort of this kind of decision. You don't know who made this kind of decisions.

It's collected wisdom or is somebody responsible for it. Nobody knows it's not only my case, my father's case. His whole generation, you know, those intellectuals have been wiped out. But still, no clear answer. You know, who is responsible for those? As an artist, what's your sense of what the parameters are? What's the limits? What's allowed?

What's not allowed? What can be said? What can't be said? I think this is a game. you can never really be clear. That's the power of the game. You can never be clear. You know, that always can be changed.

Tiananmen is said to be something that is an obvious limit. What are the other obvious limits if there are any? Well, I said that Tianan is a limit, Tibetan situation is limit, Taiwan's limit, Hong Kong. There's so many limits there, but those are not a real limits. Is Ai Wei Wei a limit? Have you been a limit? Yes, Iowa is a limit. You cannot talk about any open social media or state media,

and every media is a state media. So basically, I'm existing only in kind of virtual reality. It's not a, you know, many people see me as a surprise. Oh, this is really a person. You're a non-person. Yeah, I'm a non-person. But those, I don't think it's a real problem. The real problem is the sense of the freedom.

and that is most dangerous. That's the real limit. Do you see any danger in social media? You thrive on social media. You love Instagram, Twitter. Your work goes up on social media. It's the one way it gets distributed. You're taking your phone out of your pocket now

and taking a picture of me even. We have a president who tweets all the time and that seems to ruin our relations with one country after another on a daily basis. Do you think Xi Jinping will ever tweet? I love it. I think, you know, why those relations should not be ruined. I mean, you know, this president tells the truth in his heart,

and, you know, those relations may be fake at the first place. So, you know, this guy just woke up with the middle of night, tell some truth. It's better than some president hiding their truth. Even retired, nobody knows what is, you know, is really true in his mind. Are you sure? I think it makes it a faster, you know, to find out those monuments. monsters or evil spirit.

Rather than hiding somewhere doing the business as a euro. I don't know which one is more dangerous. Some of your critics say that, look, okay, it's true that China is authoritarian, but not as authoritarian as 50 years ago. And in the meantime, millions and millions of people have been brought out of poverty and that you fail to give credit for that simple fact. Those are facts. You know, the culture has some credit should be there.

China can even be better, can contribute more to the world culture or make the world a better place. If you see China as a nation trying to discredit about freedom speech and any independent thinking, then you see a generation of young people with very much. very limited knowledge. All the information has been censored and never encourage them as their imagination and the passion and individual freedom. China, in the next decades, can never really provide anything really meaningful and the corruption are built up by this fast

development. The environmental are ruined. It just cannot continue. Most people, when they talk about the movement of power in the world, say that China is going to be the dominant power of the 21st century and how the United States does or does not accommodate itself to this fact of this rivalry, of this movement in history, is the central question of the 21st century in geopolitics. You're telling me that the Chinese Communist Party is going to crash. The rest of the world is telling me that it's going to rain. I'm so certain. No matter what happens, China or Chinese cannot never, I would say in my lifetime, be dominant as a world power.

It's not possible because China never really have that kind of vision and ego and also structurally is not possible. And the United States also may not be possible if you have a president like today and you have all those, you're not clearly having the vision to understand what's happening. in 21st century, the United States also can be out of question. You consider yourself a capitalist or a socialist or what? I'm an individualist. I think that's the power. Wei Wei, thank you so much.

Thank you. You're so good. Thank you. David Remnick spoke with Ai Wei Wei Wei earlier this month. I'm Evan Osnose, and today's episode of the show is about the relationship between the U.S. and China. Now, Iwei Wei Wei is maybe the most controversial of a generation of Chinese artists who've become successful internationally since the 90s. They're part of China's push for what we call soft power, the kind of cultural exports and prestige that help a nation to exert influence in the world. Two years ago, a novel by Liu Tzu Xin won the Hugo Award, which is like the Pulitzer Prize for science fiction. It's called the Three Body Problem, and it was the first Chinese book to win the

Hugo. Sci-fi is a relatively new thing in China, and the international recognition is a big deal. There's a film in the works, but already people have... put their own fan videos on YouTube. I sent greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship to teach. And you'll also find music inspired by the three-body problem. The New Yorker's Josh Rothman wrote about Leo Tsechen's book, and he talked last week with the translator Ken Liu.

I've read these books and loved them. They're really complicated. I wonder how you would. describe the plot? So the first book, the three-body problem, is a very classical first context story. It imagines an alternate history in which during the Cultural Revolution, the United States and the Soviet Union were both engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, actively sending out messages. And China decided that it needed to participate in this race to reach the stars as well. And amazingly,

enough, the Chinese effort succeeds. One of the engineers who worked on this project, her name is Yewenz-Jia, and her father was an astrophysicist who was persecuted by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and, in fact, killed. And this incident left a huge impact on the young woman, the scientist, Yewun Jia herself. So after establishing contact, Yewenzsche decides to actually invite the aliens to invade the Earth. The Cultural Revolution completely destroyed her faith in humanity and the ability for the species to redeem itself. Then humanity is faced with this invasion by aliens

who live in a star system that's unique because it has three suns. The three suns caused the planet's orbit to be very unstable, leading it to have a very chaotic climate. And so in order to survive on a planet like this, the Trisolarans, that's what aliens are called, developed a highly authoritarian political structure. And their entire purpose in existence really is to find a more stable planet on which to migrate.

What's the success level of these novels in China? It's broken into the mainstream. One thing that you might find interesting is that among Chinese readers and critics, one of the most common ways to describe Ussesian's work is that he doesn't write like a Chinese. They view the grandness of his stories and the way he wants to imagine cataclysmic change all the time to be refreshing and absolutely unique. I would disagree with them, but that is what they say. I mean, I'm a big sci-fi reader and always have been. And there's just a ton of American science fiction books that they're really just about the Wild West, a sort of libertarian frontier. There's tribes of heathens who have to be subdued, like the Klingons or whatever.

Is there a sense in which these three body novels are about China? I will answer that in two parts. One possible reading would be China as a stand-in for Earth civilization as a whole, and to read the Trisolarans as in some way representative of all the colonial powers that have invaded China. Another alternative reading is to read the Trisolarans as a stand-in for China and to read the people of Earth as in some way equivalent. to all the people who believe in Western values. So the second part of my answer is I think none of these political readings are particularly

interesting or, in fact, relevant. And I think a far more interesting reading of the novel is what would happen to our values, what would happen to what we think of as universals under extraordinary circumstances, do ideas about authoritarianism and democracy and freedom and, and universal love and human rights, do these values survive when humanity itself is placed under extraordinary pressures of survival? That was the New Yorker's Josh Rothman speaking with writer Ken Liu, who translated the three-body problem into English.

I'm Evan Osnos. We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Evanosnos. David Remnick is out this week. Donald Trump has had a complicated relationship with China. As a candidate, he was very tough on China. China's economic policies. But Trump himself and the Trump organization, which is now run by his

sons, have made a lot of money doing business with China. Just recently, China approved a number of Trump trademarks that had been held up for years. And Ivanka Trump is involved in a controversy after China's government detained labor activists who were investigating the factory where her line of shoes was made. So the situation of an international business mogul determining foreign policy has raised a lot of questions about potential conflicts of interest. And yet Donald Trump and his family are viewed differently in China than you might expect. My colleague, Jayang Fan, has written about the attention that the Trumps have received there. Jay Yang, is it fair to say that Donald Trump is not unpopular in China?

China is such a vast country that opinions about Trump and the U.S. really do differ depending on where you are and who you are. but it does seem like a great number of people appreciate Trump's unvarnished hot takes and political incorrectness, as it were. And this might seem strange to us, but for many Chinese, the concept of political correctness, even in big cities, is really quite new. Trump's pretty blatant racist and sexist rhetoric may seem offensive. to some of us here in the U.S., but to older Chinese, he can be seen as the only American politician who's not afraid to tell it like it is. So Ivanka Trump is, in fact, sort of a subject of fascination in China. Why is that exactly?

Yes, I mean, Ivanka or Yvanka, as she's known in China, really has a growing fan base since Trump's election, she has been increasingly visible as this golden-haired goddess, I mean, to translate her title literally, and has come to epitomize female success. There's this expression in China, taimao-shuan, and it means to possess great looks and talents. She is seen as not having had to sacrifice this virtue in exchange for her accomplishments. Now, I understand you, You talked recently with some Chinese students in the U.S. about how the cult of Ivanka reflects tensions around the role of women in China. Is that right? So earlier, I talked to Evelyn Hui, a Chinese student at NYU, who being a young woman herself, realizes why so many young women in China are enamored of Ivanka and thinks of her as a role model.

Hi, everyone. I'm Ivanka Trump, and I am really, really excited. She's playing a good role as a woman as a woman. as a wife as mom, as well as like she's succeeding her career, so that it seems like she has achieved a balance between work and family. So, yeah. So I have three kids and one of them is a newborn, so I get very little sleep, and I don't advocate modeling after that.

But I've sort of reconciled myself to the fact that I have so many things I want to do, including spending tons of time with my kids and diving into my work. Is that also? because she looks the part of someone, of kind of the ideal woman. I mean, how do Chinese people also judge her by her appearance? I think so, yeah. I think everyone judges people by their appearance. And it just seems like because someone's always struggling between your personal and professional life,

and she just seems elegant, and she seems well in doing both. She seems to be good with whatever she's doing. So I'll wake up typically around 5.30. Wow. maybe a little bit earlier, and I'll meditate for a few minutes, and I shower, and I put on my makeup. I don't do my hair because I don't know. It's interesting that Evelyn notes that Ivanka doesn't seem anxious or pressured

because there is so much pressure on Evelyn in her generation. Evelyn is a beneficiary of the one-child policy in that her parents have devoted all these resources to allow her to go to these expensive and prestigious schools. But even before she graduates, She's placed on this assembly line where she's expected to repackage herself as the ideal wife and mother. It's weird because women with higher education, like people probably have a diploma of like master degree or a PhD. They're discriminated in the marriage market.

Tell me more about that. Why are they discriminated in the marriage market? Because men would feel like they can't handle girls like that. Because whenever you start a family, the women are expected to fill the character. giving role and the man would be like the, what's that called, the bread earning? The bread winner, yes. The bread winner, right? And then, so, like, there's a subtle balance in between the two. And the women with higher education would feel like maybe they're underrepresented.

There will be conflicts, and the men would know that. So, like, they prefer to have somebody that's not that highly educated, but someone who can play the role of the wife well, then that's enough. In fact, there's so much pressure in China to find a husband that there was even an ad made by a cosmetics company that went viral in China about how much parents pressure their daughters to find a husband. The ad itself shows how excruciating the parents' expectations are.

The ideal age for women is definitely before 30. If you're, you haven't found someone that you think you can have a family with, then you're considered abnormal in that sense. Like, you are leftover. Tell me a little bit more. What is a leftover woman? A leftover woman is those that, like, they're definitely above 25. Maybe they're in their 30s, but haven't found anyone yet.

in their life. Do women feel, you know, a woman who, you know, like me, if she's 32 and still single, you know, in China, how would other people regard her? People would gossip a lot, definitely. People would just, like, chatting around. Like, people would just, oh, what's wrong with that girl? Like, look at her. She's, and then they would educate their child. Like, oh, don't do PhDs. Look at that, like, that girl. Like, she's good. She's so good at her career. But she's, Still not married. She's still single. These values are a really important part of Chinese culture. They're largely passed down from Confucius, the father of Chinese culture,

who really understood society as sculpted by patriarchy. In fact, when I talked to a young feminist activist in China, Xiao Wenliang, she talked about how hard they are to resist and how much they are a part of her world. It's a Confucian teaching that women have three obedience. Like women should obey their fathers as daughter, obey their husbands as wives, obey their sons when their husbands are dead. And do you think those values are still very relevant today? Actually, like in the 60s and 70s, the country encouraged women not to get married so early.

They said that women could spend more time to devote themselves to building the country. The 60s and 70s, or a time of great upheaval in China. This was the period of the Cultural Revolution when Mao led the entire country in rejecting ancient Chinese culture, most emphatically Confucian teachings. Mao famously said that women hold up half the sky, and this was considered very, very new and novel at the time, that woman can be half of anything or equal to men. In China, the problem has always been implementation of these rules

at the local level where traditions, especially ancient traditions, are still very strong. I feel like it's more like today. It's harder and harder for people to work. find a job. So people feel like, oh, it's so difficult for both men and women to find a job. Then women can just go home to be a stay-home mom to take care of the family so that man would be easier to find a job. That's fascinating. So is the thought that if more women remained in domestic sphere and took care of their families, then the available jobs would go

to men? And that should be the natural order of things. Some people would say that. Those people are supporters of reviving the Confucianism ideas. Shao Wen's organization walks a very fine and precarious line. On the one hand, the government does allow them to fight gender discrimination in businesses because that cause is seen as quite apolitical. On the other hand, when Shaoen's organization does work that bleeds, into the political or is seen as bleeding into the political, it can be seen as very dangerous and destabilizing for the state.

In 2015, five of my colleagues were detained for 37 days because they planned to carry out an activity on anti-sexual harassment on public transportation. Why were they detained? The police detained them in the name of causing public disturbance. What do your parents think about your involvement? Right after I graduate from college, they pushed me to date men because they think that feminism would turn me into a lesbian. Well, I would say that what they're afraid is reasonable.

But they were very supportive at first because newspapers reported our activities and they think that it might be something good. But then the police started to go to my parents and told them that I was involved in some very dangerous activities. The police once even talked to my father's employer about my job. So I felt a lot of pressure both from the police and my parents. So I decided maybe I should leave China for a while. That's why I came here.

I mean, what sort of things would the police say to your dad or your dad's employer? First, they said that what I did fighting for women's rights, it's good. The police, they said it's good. But the way we were doing it is wrong because we were using Western ways to fight for rights. Do they believe that grassroots organization is inherently Western? I think this is a way of shifting what's really important to solve. Like, women are suffering from domestic violence. Like, women are discriminated in workplace, in education and everything.

And once people who are from the bottom, who are from a civil society, try to adjust this issue, the government started to say that what you've been doing is being influenced by Western hostile forces. Once the government's starting to use this argument, people, especially nationalists, they will stand with the government and try to attack feminists. And here we come to this really interesting paradox. On the one hand, China wants to modernize and embrace change, and that's very apparent in China's economy.

On the other hand, the Chinese government doesn't want social norms and individual liberty. to be embraced too rapidly. And when it comes to the role of woman, we really see that tension. In most Western media stories, we see Chinese people and the Chinese government as budding heads that they oftentimes do not agree on a variety of issues.

But here, the government and the citizens are on the same page. They share that ambivalence about, where they're going, and there is a great sense that they want to keep China together while moving forward. And the question is how exactly to do that. That's Jay Young fan, my colleague at The New Yorker. She spoke with Evelyn Hui and Xia Wen Liang, two students studying in New York. You can find all of Jia Yang's work for the New Yorker and mine at New Yorker Radio.org. That's it. for this week. I'm Evan Osnos. Next week, David Remnick is back. He'll talk with John Ronson about the new

movie Oakjaw. Till then, find us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio, and you'll find me on there at EOSOS. NOS. Thanks, and have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.