Yeah this is some seriously uhinged shit.

Following along!

The anti-Japan discourse in the 80s still doesn't hold a candle to US anti-China discourse of recent years. Not even close. Not nearly the level of moral panic, a view of it as "existential," a bogeyman invoked to pass almost any legislation. Racialized, absolutely, but not seen as a system threat.

I'm also saying that because people do routinely conflate liberal democratic capitalism with "the West," they've seen the EA developmental states as treading "the Western" path despite their clearly not being "Western" in a geographic sense.

If anything, the rise of the EA developmental states was widely viewed as resulting from their embrace of the Western norm. They might have been authoritarian once; but it was on shedding their authoritarianism, in this telling, that they became "modern."

...due to its complete defeat by the U.S. which literally wrote its constitution. But the idea of a single path to "modernity" through liberal democratic capitalism is still very much alive, and I encounter that mentality with shocking frequency.

Perhaps I could have phrased it better. Of course, no one should have ever believed modernity was the exclusive property of the West. That many still do is clear to me: they see Japan as an anomaly; pre-War Japan's "ascent" was only material, not having imbibed Enlighenment values; post war only...

I assert without reservation that I said none of those things. I say US or America when I mean that, the West when I mean that. I certainly don’t trivialize human rights. And I don’t advocate for Chinese exceptionalism to supplant American. Read again?

Thanks!

Read the piece at the link below. Would love to hear your feedback. www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...

Yes, I've read this — haven't read Feifei Li's autobiography but that's a terrific recommendation. I actually didn't know a lot of the story of Zhu, and Chang's piece was just great!

Thanks, Mike. Really heartening to hear that this resonated with you!

That's an extraordinary poem. Thanks for sharing it, and I'm so sorry to hear that things have been hard for you.

I thought it was outstanding!

I saw that! There is, it turns out, some justice in the world. What an absolutely fantastic album.

Sound like any political situation you're aware of today? Perhaps one even closer to home?

The other thing is this flattening of Mao to one decade of his life — the last decade. No defending him in that decade or even the one previous to that, sure, but he was a revolutionary in politics for his whole adult life, and accomplished much—including in building the Party he went on to wreck.