Alex Wang 0:00
Yeah. All right, good after - good afternoon. Thanks for coming out today. My name is Alex Wang. I'm a professor here at the Law School. I teach Chinese law and politics here at the law school. My own work is on U.S., China relations, Chinese law and governance, and I'm thinking about China's rise and implications for the rest of the world and pathways forward for a more productive kind of global future given these geopolitical tensions. I can think of no better speaker to sort of touch on a lot of these issues that I've just mentioned than Ed Wong.
Alex Wang 0:35
Ed Wong has had a remarkable journalistic career three major phases in his work. He first went, was sent to Iraq to cover the Iraq war for The New York Times. And then spent a number of years in China. We first met in 2008 in Beijing, when I was working there for an American environmental group in Beijing, and Ed covered Chinese, China issues from 2008 to 2016 - is that right? And then, since then, has come back. Is now based in Washington, DC, and has been the diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, where he, among other things, he regularly travels around with the Secretary of State and his folks on American diplomacy. Recently, at the UN General Assembly meeting, he had a chance to interview Zelensky, Netanyahu; went to Ukraine with with Tony Blinken, among other things, right? So he's really interesting and exciting career. He's just written a book, product of many years of work called At the Edge of Empire, a family reckoning with China, right? We have a copy here. As you can see, there are copies of this for sale out front, and Ed will stick around afterwards to sign copies - for those of you who have copies - it's a fascinating book, remarkable book about his own father's experience through many of the seminal events in modern Chinese history, and then, as well, his own experiences in many of those same places. What we're going to do today is Ed's going to talk for about 15 minutes or so, and then we're going to sit here kind of talk show style, and I'll ask some questions and sort of unpack a couple of the things that he's, he's covered, and then we're going to open up for questions from the group here. We have a great group here, looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Alex Wang 2:35
Finally, before we get started, I just want to thank, you know, we are really excited to have Ed here, and a number of our centers at the university have helped to sponsor and support this. So I want to thank the Burkle Institute. So Alex Lieben, director there at the Burkle Institute, has been really invaluable in this entire process. Michael Berry at the Center of Chinese Studies, has supported this. Andrea Goldman and the Asia Pacific Center have supported this. Our own law school, international and comparative law program has co-sponsored this, and as well, the Asian American Studies Center has also supported this because of the sort of themes of Asian American identity, that are also in the book and interested from that, that audience. So without further ado, I want to hand it over to Ed. Let's give him a round of applause, and we're of applause in welcoming
Edward Wong 3:28
Thanks for a generous introduction, Alex. I also want to thank the various centers that are sponsoring this. I see Michael is here in the room, from the Center for Chinese Studies, Alexandra from the Burkle Center. Alex invited me to come speak here at UCLA Law School seven years ago, right after I left China, and in that talk, I was kind of summing up my experiences from reporting in China. And in a way, those the talks I did that year, as well, as you know, some writings I did help set the foundation for the project that would embark on over the next six years, which is writing this book that is a summation of my engagement with China, starting from 1996 - when I first went to Beijing to study - all the way up to today - when I went cover U.S.-China relations. My last trip to Beijing was last year with Secretary Blinken, when he made his first visit to China, I went back to Beijing, and that forms the last chapter in the book. So the book is an arc of my engagement on China, and then paired with my observations and my reporting on China, as well as stories of my life in China, is a story of my father's 12 years in the People's Republic of China - first in a bit of Hong Kong, British colonial Hong Kong under during World War II, and then in the PRC under the first 12 years of Mao's governance of China. And I felt I wanted, as I was thinking through the book, you know, in that period when I started giving my first talks on my time in China, I thought, how can I write a book that can draw the average reader into the history and politics of modern China, keep them interested the entire way, teach them something about China from the Mao era up until today. And, and I thought that I could do this most easily by telling the story of my father in the PRC, because there's a strong narrative arc to his story, and then my own time from to from 1996 to 19 - to Hong, the Hong Kong hand over in '97, and 2008 onward to the protests in Hong Kong, 2019, and my visit with Blinken last year. So there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of timelines packed into the book, but overall, it's a very straight chronology: 19 - 1941 British colonialism and Hong Kong, the Japanese invasion, all the way up until 2023, so. And if you read the book, you'll get that entire arc of, I think, of Chinese history, and you'll get some major themes from it. And I wanted to also, you know, present an idea about China in the book, and the idea is evident from the title, At the Edge of Empire. I wanted to make this argument, which I don't think is, obviously it's not a unique argument - many Chinese historians, including ones in this room, are very familiar with it, but that China is an imperial power. It has been an imperial power, even under the communists, despite their anti-Imperial rhetoric, and that a large part of the communist project is to reconstitute Imperial China, China under the Qing Dynasty, specifically under the Manchus and, and bring that forward into the future. So that's the the essence of the argument in the book and, and in a way, my father's life story in China reflects that. So I'll start off by telling you about that narrative of my father in the PRC, and then we'll go forward and have more open discussions with all of you.
Edward Wong 7:18
So I'll start by reading a couple paragraphs from the very beginning of the book, and this is from the prologue: "When I was in my 20s, Father showed me a small black and white photograph of himself that I'd never seen before. He placed it in the palm of my hand as we sat together in the living room of my childhood home outside Washington, D.C. It had been taken to China in 1953, his eyes glimmered, and his skin had none of the lines of age. He wore a plain military uniform and a cap. I ran a finger over a darkened spot in the center of the cap, a shadow there. Father said that's where the Red Star had been, the symbol of the People's Liberation Army of China. After he mailed the photo to his father in the British colony of Hong Kong, his father rubbed out the star, fearful of what the authorities might do if they saw it. Father got the photo back after he left China and reunited with his parents in Hong Kong. He brought it with him when he moved to America, this keepsake of the revolution. I am the son of two empires. I was born in Washington and grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb along the Potomac River, where there was talk of the Cold War and containing communism and preventing nuclear Armageddon. Those were the years of Nixon to Reagan, an arc when global politics was dominated by titanic struggle between agents of two ideologies, but rather two systems of power. The Berlin Wall fell in my final year of high school. Radio, DJs played Wind of Change by the Scorpions, the Soviet Union dissolved, and America became unrivaled in the world. We talked about these events in my household and in my class and in classrooms and school yards, and read about them in newspapers, which seemed to me with their correspondence in Washington, New York and far flung world capitals, to be chroniclers of the American century. There was a surviving communist power in the world, one that was more obscure to most Americans, but better known to me; China, the motherland. My parents were village children in the South as a nation tried to repel Japanese invaders in the Second World War, but there was no peace after the surrender of Japan. A civil war between the ruling nationalists and the rebellious communists reignited. Mao Zedong and his red army won, forcing the nationalists to retreat to the island of Taiwan. In 1950 father was in the first class from his high school to graduate into China, governed by the Communist Party."
Edward Wong 9:57
So I brought with me, some photos that illustrate the arc of my father's 12 years in China. So this is the photo that I'd mentioned, I just mentioned that my father had take, had taken, and had taken a shop in 1953 in Yining, a city in far northwest China, when he was a member of the PLA in the military occupation out there. As I said, I grew up in a suburb of Washington D.C. This is a very American photo my family at Mount Vernon, George Washington's home, as I was growing up there. My sister is two years younger than me, and during the entire time, my father worked in a Chinese restaurant, Sam Pan Cafe in Franconia. This was this red uniform is the only one associated with them throughout my childhood, and there wasn't until I was in my 20s, going to grad school at Berkeley, and talking to my parents about their past in China that he showed me the photo of him in the PLA uniform. So that was when a new window into my father's life opened up for me. And his earlier start off in Hong Kong, where he was born, he has an older brother, Sam, older by four years. Both of them are still alive. My father is 92 Sam is 96 and they live in the suburbs of, in the Virginia suburbs, but here in Hong Kong, they were children of a merchant family, a mercantile family, their father sold herbal medicine that he imported from China. He had a shop in Hong Kong, and he would export the medicine to Southeast Asia. So the family was part of this class of transnational Cantonese who could move easily between Guangdong Province in southern China, the British colony of Hong Kong, and had business ties to Southeast Asia. And part of what I write about in the book, in the first quarter of the book, is the unique nature I think, of Guangdong province, and particularly of Taishan county, or Toysan county in Cantonese, the place where my family came from, both, both my father's side of the family and my mother's side came from adjacent county. But these areas are unique, I think, in modern Chinese history, because they are the nexus point between China and the outside world, and it was where the Qing dynasty had its most fraught encounters, I think, with European imperial powers. And it was also where, continuing onward into the Republican era, there was much contact with the outside world. Many people from Taishan County, especially, went overseas. They helped build the Trans Pacific Railroad here in California, going out towards the east, and eventually they were the ones that founded Chinatowns around the U.S. and around the world. So the contact point between many Americans and other foreigners with Chinese citizens, were people from Taishan County. It's a unique place in China. A cousin of my family, Ambassador Gary Locke, who would later serve as ambassador in China, while I was the Bureau Chief there from the New York Times also came from Taishan County. So it is really the way that China, in many ways, up until recently, exported much of its culture and its, and its ideas to the rest of the world.
Edward Wong 13:17
But this is them in Hong Kong, and then in 1941, late 1941 December, the Japanese invade Hong Kong. They invade Malaysia and other British colonies in Asia at the same time. And at that time, Hong Kong has many refugees from the war in China, the war between Japan and China, and the Japanese start forcing many Chinese to leave Hong Kong. My father's family decided to send these two boys and some other relatives to back to the village in Guangdong Province anyways, in Taishan County, because they felt they could be safer from the Japanese occupation. In that part of Southern China, there was fierce fighting with the Japanese army in the north of China. But in the south, things were more fluid. The nationalists would vie for control of territory in the south with the Japanese, and would change it would shift, sometimes week by week or month by month. And so there were pockets of Guangdong province that never came under the, the strict rule of the Japanese or under its occupation. So they went back to Taishan County. My father went to school there. It was wartime. Schooling was very difficult, and then eventually he goes off to high school in Guangzhou. That occurs shortly after the defeat of the Japanese, but and at that time, the civil war between the communists and the nationalists starts again after the defeat of Japan. And so the civil war is raging throughout China, especially in Northern China, while they're going to a high school in Guangzhou. Sam and my father go to a boarding school that, at the time, was a fairly prestigious boarding school called Guangya, and they, their family had enough money to send them there. And Sam graduated four years ahead of my father. My father spent time with his cousins and close friends swimming in a pool in Guangzhou that was one of his big hobbies. And they led a fairly sedate life, a life of study during that period, even though there was a war raging. But at that in those years, my father saw the governance of the nationalists in Guangzhou, and he came to the conclusion that the nationalists were a corrupt government, that they were mismanaging China. He saw rampant inflation in the streets. He saw poverty in the streets. He saw homeless people. He saw brothels, gambling dens. And these are all things that he felt that, you know, modern developing nation heading towards an industrial power should not be and so he thought that there must be another power that could help rule China in a better way. And at that time, of course, the ideas of the Communists were starting to filter across parts of China. He learned about it by talking to people in his school. He suspects that there were teachers in his school who were communist sympathizers, and that but they kept it, everything was kept secretive, because the nationalists were on the hunt for either communist sympathizers or secret members of the Communist Party, which had started up a couple decades earlier in Shanghai.
Edward Wong 16:39
And this is my father in 1950 as he - in spring of 1950 - as he's getting ready to graduate from the boarding school in Guangzhou, and he takes a test. He goes to Shanghai, takes an exam, and gets into accepted into Agricultural University in Beijing, because his idea is he wants to, by this time, Mao has taken over China. He, the PRC, was established in October of 1949, so these students are graduating into the PRC, into this new China. And my father and many of his classmates want to work for the betterment of this new China. And they think that the communists are the power that will guide China into a better future. They believe much of what Mao says. They believe the communist pamphlets and tracks that they're reading, and, and my father's decide to go northward to University. His, his brother Sam, had around those same years, taken a scholarship offered by the American government to go to the U.S. to study. So his older brother, Sam ended up in Washington D.C., and started studying engineering at George Washington University. And one of the interesting things about this whole period, adult period in my father's life, is that he and Sam lead, led these two very divergent lives on opposite sides of this geopolitical divide. So Sam had chosen go to the U.S., was about to study and then work for the U.S. government, where my father was ready to embrace the Communist Party, and the government that was centered in Beijing. So he goes off, you know, from the far south in Guangzhou, takes a train up to Beijing. Many of you are familiar with the geography of China. This map, interestingly, was designed by Jeffrey Ward, who designed the Game of Thrones maps in George R Martin's books, and this is the first map of China he's done. But he, my editor commissioned him to do this for the book. So he, my father, goes north of Beijing. Then, he marches on the first anniversary of the founder of the PRC in October 1, 1950, marches in a parade in Tiananmen Square with other students, soldiers, and factory workers in front of Mao. And it's a very inspiring moment for him. He also listens to much of the exhortations from Mao, telling young people that they have to help defend China from the American imperialists, because at this time, the Korean War has started raging on the Korean peninsula that began in the summer of 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, crossing a line in the middle of the Korean Peninsula, and Mao is sending Chinese troops into Korea, not publicly, but sending them into Korea to fight against the American forces and the South Koreans. And Mao's line generally, is that if the Americans defeat the North Koreans on the Korean peninsula, then they will march onward. They will cross the Yalu River and march onward to Beijing, top of the Communist Party, and reinstall Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalists in power. So, and you know, Mao wasn't entirely wrong about that, because, we know from historical records, MacArthur did went in march across the Yalu River with the American troops when they were succeeding on the Korean peninsula. Then Truman pulled him back from doing that, and then the Chinese forces were sent to Korea in such large numbers that they started pushing the Americans and the South Koreans back down the Korean Peninsula, eventually leaving Korea in the state of divide that it is today. But my father listened to all this. He wanted to join this military effort against the Americans, and so he applies for the military is accepted into the Air Force Academy, which is a new thing at the time, the PLA is starting to construct its Air Force. It's sending bomber units into Korea, or wants to do so, and my father gets sent to the far northwest to Dongbei or Manchuria, trains in both Changchun and Harbin, because that's where a lot of the training is taking place for the Korean front. And then in the middle of his training, in the middle of his Air Force training in Harbin, he is told by officers there that he won't be going to Korea, which surprises him, and instead he will be sent into an army unit that would travel to western China. And this is surprising to him, and it's the first inkling in his mind that something is starting to go wrong with this path that he's chosen. He's not sure exactly what, but he's told, he's ordered to go into his army unit, and he goes back to Beijing, takes, joins an army unit in Beijing that gets on a train to Xian, the Tang Dynasty capital, in, at the beginning of Northwest China. And then they take a series of army trucks out to the Northwest, and they go through Gansu Province, which, as many of you know, in throughout much of Chinese history, Gansu, that area of Gansu was considered the limits of interior China. And interior China was demarcated, the end of it was demarcated by the end of the Great Wall in the Ming Dynasty, which is at Jia Yu Guan and Gansu, as well as Yuma, and the Jade gate, which is a little bit further beyond that point. So as my father's going through these Northwest deserts on the on these trucks, he becomes more and more troubled. And then after they leave Lanzhou and reach the these far flung corners of the Great Wall and other fortresses, he realizes that he's being sent into Xinjiang, the far northwest region, which, back before the modern era, was known as the western regions. And it was a place of exile, where dynastic leaders would send officials that they believed had wronged the Imperium, as well as other criminals and others to be, to live out the rest of their lives in exile there. And my father realized this is what was happening to him, that he was being sent out to exile with people in the army that were considered not good enough to be doing work in Korea or in other parts of interior China. And he thinks that this is now he's starting to realize it must be because of his family background that he had come from a merchant family in British colonial Hong Kong that has his brother had gone off to work, study and then work in America, and he had revealed all of these details and talked about them in depth during questioning sessions, interrogation or, you know, just sessions where he met with senior officers when he was at the Air Force Academy. So they had started to compile this file on him.
Edward Wong 23:39
And so he then ends up in different parts of Xinjiang, which is a vast area, as many of you know, with of step mountains, rivers, forests. In total, it comprises 1/6 of the PRC, and, and my father is sent to live in areas with Kazakh nomads. This is one such area near his first posting, Altai. I visited this in 2014. This is from a photographer who traveled with me there. And Altai is currently on the borders of Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan. So that, it's tells you how remote it is and and his mission is to help different army units indoctrinate the various local soldiers, as well as others out there into communist ideology, and also to work to disband the militias that had formed out there - the Kazakh Uyghur and other militias that formed out there as they were fighting the Nationals. Because at that time, there had been an uprising against the nationalists that had been backed by the Soviet Union, and these militias that formed. And while they were, while their partner happened the Soviets, they were still suspicious of, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party centered in Beijing, and many of the militia members or the leaders had these aspirations for independence in Xinjiang. And of course, that still reverberates today through much of the tensions that we hear about out there. And so my father's part of this military occupation, and he goes through these areas with, and then stationed different army units out there. This area, this photo taken in 2016 is of a place called Wenchuan, near the current day border Kazakhstan, where he is put in his final years in Xinjiang - he serves a total of six years out there. In his final years, he has put into an agricultural military garrison out in out in Wenchuan, in the mountains up there, and it's a ranch. Essentially, they're raising sheep and other livestock. But the point of these agricultural garrisons is to help maintain the military occupation of the region, because they're to help feed the military that has been sent out there, but also to establish a footprint, sort of like a settler colonial type of project that took place out there became very widespread and is now huge economic power throughout Xinjiang. Many of their exports end up on grocery store shelves in countries like America or Europe. Tomato paste, for example, ends up in Italy from Xinjiang. So, and there's a lot of debate right now about the export of cotton from state owned enterprises and some of these garrisons in Xinjiang.
Edward Wong 26:39
So my father was among the first soldiers to work in one of these garrisons, which collectively are called Bing Tuan. And then in 1957, the Central Party and the government decide that they need to get talented youth who had been sent out to different parts of China back into universities and educational institutions because they're trying to industrialize rapidly, and they want people, they put out a call for people to take exams and try and come back and finish their education. So my father sees this as an opportunity to try and get back to interior China. He had thought he would end up living the rest of his life, maybe in exile, away from everything he had known in the past, but he seizes on this opportunity to take a test. He is accepted into an aeronautics program in Xian, into one of the main military affiliated universities in Xian, and then he goes back to interior China, to Xian to do his studies there. His dream now is to learn to build military aircraft for the Air Force that he never ended up serving in. At that time, he has won the favor of the officers he was serving under in Winchon, and they also decided to sponsor him for a part - for party membership. So that's another dream of his that he feels is heading towards realization. He wants to be a member of the party, and he struggled this entire time to prove his loyalty out there in Xinjiang. So he takes a train back to Xian. This is one of the, this is the only other surviving photo of him in the PLA uniform, in a summer uniform from 1953, and he goes to school in Xian. This is him on a break Lunar New Year of 1958 in Beijing, where he meets up with the cousin. And he and the cousin write a letter to his older brother, Sam, who at that time has started working for the American military as an engineer in the U.S. So he and his brother took these very diametrically opposite tracks. He wants to work as an engineer building military equipment and aircraft for the PLA, his brother is working for the Army, for the U.S. Army, and he tells his brother, you have to come back to China and help build up the motherland. Like this is your duty as a Chinese citizen and as a son of China. Why are you there in America? You've learned, you've learned your - you've improved your education, you've learned your skills, and now you have to come back to work for for what is rightfully your country. And so he writes this long letter with his cousin, to Sam. They send it to Hong Kong, to his parents in British colonial Hong Kong, who gets it to his brother.
Edward Wong 29:21
But you know, around this time, a lot of changes are happening in China, as we know he, he, Mao starts a Great Leap Forward. At the start of the Great Leap Forward, Mao purges some senior party and military leaders. One of the most famous ones is Peng Dehuai, who was a legendary Commander for the military. And Peng was someone that my father and many other soldiers revered, because he had been instrumental in the Chinese Civil War. He had helped fight the Japanese, but he also led some of the major battles against the nationalists in the Civil War, helped the communists win the Civil War and achieve power. And so when he was purged at the Lushan conference, my father started suspecting that something was wrong at the top ranks of the party. And then, of course, Mao starts the Great Leap Forward, which is a complete disaster economically, the Great Famine results, an estimated 30 to 40 million Chinese died during that famine. My father was on the campus in Xian at that time, they ran out of food. He and his classmates starved. They often lay bedridden in their dorm beds, and he told me that he would go into the marketplaces at night, sometimes there would be nothing in the markets in Xian. So this is him in the early 60s, having survived the famine. He's very emaciated here in Xian. And then, that, combined with the purge of Peng Dehuai, obviously raised many doubts in my father, and at that in those years, he also had a conversation with officials who told him that, oh, you're, you're the application that has been filed for party membership is something we can't move on. Yet we cannot approve that because we need to investigate your family background further. And obviously he had, he knew that, he had gotten a glimpse of his his dossier or his Dangan earlier when he was in Xinjiang, because he worked in a personnel department, and he knew that the the facts of his family background that shadowed him all these years were still ever present there. And he believed that this also wasn't just about him, but it showed that there was a structural problem within the Communist Party, within its, within its Leninist ideas, and the fact that they were constantly looking for subversion and subversives within the country and among people who had served the party. And so he decided at this time that he had to escape to Hong Kong, back to his birthplace, where his parents were living, and he comes up with a complicated scheme to take a leave from university to tell them that he's fallen ill because of the after effects of the Great Famine. Spends time in Guangzhou, and he and family members there call in a favor from a police officer who gets him a travel document to go to the Portuguese colony of Macau, which borders Guangdong. And so this is the travel document that he got from the police officer. He used it to get past Chinese customs in late 1962 and then he, in Macau, he ends up in a hotel room his brother, Uncle Sam - my Uncle Sam, is visiting Okinawa at that time on a mission from the US military, because the military has sent him to Okinawa to work on missile defense that had been put in place in Okinawa as an engineer. And Sam hears from his parents that my father is trying to escape China at this point, and that they arrange a meeting in Macau, and the two brothers meet up in Macau and finalize my my father's plans to get to Hong Kong and eventually, the, the Hong Kong consulate, British run consulate in Macau, decides to let my father go to Hong Kong a few months later, because he's a he's a Hong Kong born resident. And so he ends up in Hong Kong in 1963 he studies, continues to study engineering there, decides to go to America, bring his grandmother to America in 1967 to Washington, where Sam is living. This is him departing flying out of Hong Kong in 1967. This is his grandmother's 90th birthday in a Chinese restaurant, Jade Palace in Washington, right soon after they land, where he ends up working as a waiter. And that's the start of his career in restaurants. He raises us in a suburb of Virginia.
Edward Wong 34:04
And then the story comes full circle when I go back to China, first to study '96 as I mentioned, but then to work at The New York Times, starting from 2008 and eventually I run The New York Times Bureau there. And a lot of my coverage ends up being focused on issues in western China, in Xinjiang, in Tibet, and also in parts of South and Hong Kong. Because I think, you know, obviously, I was heavily influenced by what I learned of my father's story, and was very interested in those regions, so. And then my father visited me twice in China, once from my wedding 2009 and then, when my daughter is born in 2012 - she's the third, 31st, generation of the Wong family. And on that trip, I made a trip; I flew down to Guangzhou with my father, and he met up with some of those same classmates who graduated with him from his boarding school in 1950. And for me, this was one of the most amazing moments I had in China, was sitting at these reunions, in restaurants, in Guangzhou and hearing their stories of all the changes their lives had been through, from the Mao era, from the horrors of the Mao era, through the reform and opening up period under Deng. Sonja had become very wealthy. We visited a marble factory that was run by one of his classmates that has sold marble to the central government for building the Great Hall of the People, are renovating it to, to mass in the United Arab Emirates, for example. So we their stories encapsulated much of the changes to arc of Chinese history that had taken place from the Mao era up through the Deng era. And then, of course, we also talked a lot about the new Xi era, when Xi had just taken power, that at that point, 2012. And I think a lot of people, including my father, had hopes for the direction Xi Jinping might take China. But I think my father and some of the other people had, you know that he knows, have grown much more skeptical of that since then, because of the changes that Xi has imposed on China, including bringing, you know, enacting some policies that have echoes of the Mao era that my father had to flee. And I think that my father sees Xi holding onto his third term in power, Xi emphasizing the importance of State Security and of a national security state over liberalizing economic policy, for example, that These are things that makes him somewhat more skeptical now of the direction that China's heading in. And he and I continue to have conversations about the future China and about my work covering us China relations, but that's we can talk more about all of that in our conversation.
Alex Wang 37:02
Should we leave this photo up?
Alex Wang 37:12
Great. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. So I have a couple of, kind of broader thematic questions. While you get situated. You went to your choice? Yeah. I think we've heard now quite a lot about your father's fascinating story. I wanted to ask you before I get into these broader questions, just to tell us a few stories that you covered during your time in China that made the deepest impression on you, just to kind of ground us in some of the things you saw, because you had an amazing experience just traveling all over the country and seeing things. Tell us a few of those.
Speaker 1 37:57
Yeah. I mean, the range of subjects I covered was very wide in China - included elite politics, for example, the Boshilai scandal that took place in 2012, and the competition for power among Xi Jinping and other people within the party, and to the Hong Kong protests of 2019 - 2014 and 2019, and also to things like the the factory towns in southern China. Like I said, I visited one factory, but many of the issues that were going on with workers and and Chinese executives down there, but I would say the you know, the stories, I think, made the greatest impression on me, where, this, the my coverage of Western China and of, you know, for lack of a better term, these frontier regions of China. Partly, you know, there was extra resonance, I think for me when I went out to Xinjiang or to Tibet, because I knew about my father's, I knew the contours of my father's history out there, and I felt that what I was seeing in these regions was, in many ways, a continuation of the military occupation that he had been part of in Xinjiang. As I said, things like that he took part in, like the founding of the Bing Tuan system in Xinjiang have ballooned into a much more powerful system of control today in these regions in Xinjiang, for instance. And I went out there, for example, in 2009 to cover the greatest, I think, burst of violence that taken place, ethnic violence that taken place in China in decades. And that this was rioting that took place in, mostly in Urumqi, the capitalist Xinjiang, in 2009 that involved Uyghurs, Han, civilians, the security forces, hundreds of people were killed, many of them ethnic Han. And it left a very you know, it left a deep memory on me, like this burst of violence, and then trying to understand why - why there have been, why this had happened, the levels of repression that the state had put in place to cause this, to trigger this. And then following that, other acts of violence that would take place, and the growing imposition of controls across the region that would later result in the internment camp system that we've seen in more recent years. And then very similar issues in Tibet. And in Tibet, I got a better handle on things - how the imposition of, you know, widespread Mandarin language learning to the exclusion of, for example, true bilingual language learning, may had a lasting impact on many Tibetans who wanted to preserve the culture in their language, and that they felt that this was a form of cultural hegemony or colonialism that was imposed being posed by the policies from the center, as well as the locality. One Tibetan man I interviewed, Tashu Wangchuck, ended up being put in prison to five years for trying to raise this issue publicly. All he wanted was to have officials establish schools in Tibet, or in his region of the Tibetan Plateau, where kids could learn Tibetan alongside Mandarin. Throughout much of these regions, almost all of the education is done in Mandarin with, like, maybe a side class of Tibetan or Uy - or the Uyghur language, where it's considered like, almost like a foreign language that you're learning. So for example, my daughter gets a better bilingual education in Spanish and English in her bilingual school in Washington D.C., than a Tibetan or Uyghur might get in their home regions of China, despite the fact that the Chinese constitution calls for true autonomy in these regions. So those are some of the issues I think I covered that left lasting impression on me, and that in many ways, forms the backbone of this book and and the and forms, and became the foundation for my exploration of these ideas of China as a modern day Empire and the party as and that the Imperial project is central to the party's version of China.
Alex Wang 42:17
Yeah. So let me ask you more about about that. You know, obviously empire, the idea of empire, is central to your book. It's in the title. You also talk about your experience just prior to going to China, which is in Iraq, you described as Imperial bloodletting in, in the book, as you're thinking of the U.S. as an empire, and you're talking about China's empire. Just talk more about what work that idea does for you. What are the implications of that for people who are trying to figure out what to think about China's rise?
Speaker 1 42:49
Yeah. I mean, I think the, I mean, they say, I feel like my entire adult career has been documenting imperial powers, because my, you know, after I did a few years as a cub reporter in New York, I my first foreign posting overseas was Iraq, and covering the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007 which is the central years of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq. And what I felt I saw out there was essentially America expressing its imperial ambitions in its starkest and most brutal form. The occupation of sovereign state, the toppling of its government, the efforts to install proxy governments, and then the its attempts To suppress violent insurgency using military force. And, and, and then I thought it made me think about the way that countries exercise power, both within their territories, and then outside of their territories as well. And when I went to China, I felt that my conclusion after having seen the U.S. Imperial project as one foil, and then seeing China's own policies was that the party has very successfully reconstituted the Qing Empire, starting from 1949. And that it is pro - is probably the only government or power that has managed to put together one of the vast Eurasian empires that existed in the 18th and 19th century. And that much of its governance and its forms of control are, revolve around those efforts to hold together such an empire. So for example, the Ottomans crumbled after World War I. Now you have the modern Republic of Turkey, but the Ottoman Empire is many different countries, the same with the Russian Empire. And now we see Putin's efforts to reconstitute part of that empire. And there was a Russian Empire, the Soviet Union was the continuation that, but the Soviet Union fell apart. But the Chinese communists have not gone the way of the Soviets. They've kept on. They kept up their control of this vast land. I think if circumstances were different, than places, there would be independent entities in places like Tibet or Xinjiang or maybe even other parts of China. And, and I think Xi Jinping and his cohort know this. They know this very deeply. This is why we know that Xi has talked about the fall of the Soviet Union, even constantly to people within the party. If I research for the book, I discovered that, Xi had even had mentioned this even earlier than we knew about. We knew he had mentioned, made some famous remarks about the fall of the Soviet Union in early 2012 - or in late 2012, right after he took power in and he talked, made some speeches in Guangdong Province. But, in a meeting with Biden, who was then Vice President in 2011, a meeting in Chengdu, in a hotel, he brought up this subject to Biden and talked about the fall of the Soviet Union, how it was important for him and the Communist Party in China not to let China go the way of the Soviet Union. So we know this dream of empire, I think, is central to Xi's conception of China and to the extension of party power. And I think that we can, you know, there's many ways in which we can approach China's power overseas, but I think a very obvious way in which it is expansionist, territorially, is the South China Sea, and that it's, it's moved, moves within the South China Sea are an obvious effort to extend its territory and its control eastward, which, of course, the Qing Empire had never done. And Taiwan is, of course, has become a central flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. So I think, and when we talk about flashpoints, it's interesting, because many of the things we see in the headlines today, the tensions in Xinjiang, in Tibet, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in South China Sea. These are all a manifestation of the Imperial drive of China. So like, it's not like that these frontier regions are marginal to what's going on with the party, they central to what's going on with the party.
Alex Wang 47:20
So you know now it's interesting. You're the next step after China is you move to D.C., and now you're tracking the way the U.S. is trying to engage with the world, among other things, in dealing with, with China. We've talked in the past about, sort of our reaction to the very hawkish environment in D.C. these days. Given what you've just said and your experiences in China, how are you thinking about China's engagement with the world now, in relation to what we're hearing out of D.C., the kinds of messaging you know, do you agree with that? Are you less hawkish? Do you think that's over - overstating the case, or is it just talk more about what you've learned in your, this phase of your life, as you're covering U.S., engagement with the rest of the world, right, in relation to what you saw previously?
Edward Wong 48:07
Yeah. I mean, I think the conversation D.C. has obviously taken a very hawkish tone. I think starting around 2016 with the Trump administration, but continuing well onward to the Biden administration. And you know, we can unpack all the many reasons for that, I think there's part of it is, because of, the policies that Xi Jinping have adopted, you know, in his the probably the second half of his tenure so far, but also domestic control policies within the first half of his tenure. But his, his bolder foreign policy. But also, I do think that within the U.S., there was a change in thinking on China, starting from, you know, late in the mid 2010s I would say, where American officials, many of them, many of the senior American officials, began rethinking the efforts to, earlier efforts to pull China into the international system of commerce and of institutions that the U.S. has dominated. I think many of them, when you talk to them, they'll say that when they were, for example, in the Obama administration, they thought that the liberalizing of the Chinese economy. The entwinement of trade with America and with Europe, and with Japan, and many other countries would have a gradual effect on the Chinese political system. But instead, that hasn't happened. And I think that officials who are, whether they're Republican or Democratic, believe that they have to adopt a different, you know, approach to China. Now, concurrent with that, has been in China's investment in its military, its expansion smooths, as I say, like the South China Sea the frontier with India up in the Himalayas, the increasing assertiveness around Taiwan itself, where, right now, I think they're doing a military exercise right around Taiwan, where they've established the form of a blockade around Taiwan, if they were actually to undertake a blockade of Taiwan. And I think that military rise in Asia Pacific has gotten American officials very worried. And I think that there is a structural problem in the U.S.-China relationship that cannot be resolved easily or anytime soon, which is that China wants to be the dominant military power in the Asia Pacific region. They want to enact their own version of the Monroe Doctrine that the U.S. has in the Western Hemisphere, whereas the U.S. wants to maintain military primacy in the Asia Pacific region. And so I don't think that that's something that can be easily resolved. I do think that the talk of war over Taiwan is is somewhat overblown right now, because I think that there are some, some officials I know have made the assertion that Xi Jinping has said he will invade Taiwan. Xi hasn't said anything like that. He has made certain remarks about Taiwan that are aggressive, but he has not said outright that he plans to invade Taiwan, but, but some American officials are interpreting his remarks in that manner.
Alex Wang 48:19
Okay, so I'm going to ask one last question, and I want to open the floor to to the audience to ask questions. So I think one of the themes in the book is about hope and disillusionment, right, both on your father's part and then also on your own part. So I want to ask you, on that theme, what is one thing that you saw that actually gave you hope on the positive side, and what's the one thing that left you most disillusioned? And then also with your father? These days, you talk about a little bit at the very end of the book, having a conversation with your father about how he thinks about China. Now, given everything he's been through, where do you think he stands on that those two questions these days?
Edward Wong 52:02
I mean, I would say the anecdote that I told earlier, for example, about the men who are my father's age. When I met them, they were in their late 80s, who had lived through the Mao era and then gone into the reform era under Deng and the fact that they had survived many, you know, terrible events in the Mao era, whether it was a Great Famine or the Cultural Revolution. A cousin of my father is a very close cousin, killed himself during the Cultural Revolution because he was accused. He was a scientist, accused of being a CIA agent. But, you know, they these events arrive, and they imagine prosper in this era that went from 1979 up until, you know, back in 2012, I met them, and it showed that there are these changes that can take place even in the most dire situations, and led by these very misguided leaders, Mao. And Deng, you know himself was is guilty of many horrible acts, including the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the same time, he also put the country on this path of liberalization economically, where many people, many people's living standards rose because of that, and many people became much more engaged with the outside world. So seeing something like that, I think, gives me hope, because it shows that it's not, you know, the path of history is not fixed. There is contingency, especially within the decisions of top leaders, although there's a lot of movement and forces pushing from the bottom up as well, and they have to be responsive to that. And so I think that stories like that give me hope, stories of that of people who have lived through this arc of history. The disillusionment, I would say that, you know, Alex, you and I were living China in the late 2000s when there seemed to be around as much more optimism about the direction China would take. And I think when I went back to China last year, and I talked with many of my you know, Chinese friends, younger including younger Chinese. There was despondency among many of them. I think those who are politically attuned felt that the country was going in the wrong direction, in this more authoritarian direction that Xi has been taking along. But you know, even more importantly to them, they felt that the material success of China, from the late to that, from the 2000s to the two early 2010s, was something that was ebbing. There were less job opportunities. The economic slowdown was very real. They were feeling it. Young people were, or have been, leaving China and looking for employment overseas. Rather when, I think, when we were in China, I felt that there was a wave of people of Chinese coming back to China because they felt that that was where the future was. But now people are looking outward once again, and so I think that leaves me pessimistic. My father, I mentioned, had some hope for Xi because he felt in 2012 that the party had become very corrupt. I think he had felt that their party officials were benefiting illegally, or, you know, out of norms, from their, their control of industries and their relationships with, with business people. And we heard that, as you and I did, we heard that throughout our own time in China, especially people complaining about local officials. And I think my father felt that Xi would come in, bring discipline to the party, help revamp it, and then have a vision for where China and the party go. But instead, he feels that much of Xi's actions have, have gone too far in consolidating the control of the center, and, and that Xi himself has done away with the consensus decision making that existed in the top levels of party. And my father's analysis, or assessment of the Mao era was that this was the downfall of the country under Mao was that power became too concentrated in one person at the top and became, you know, privy, or became like it was under the whims of one person, like we're seen now, to Xi now, and he feels right.
Alex Wang 56:33
Very interesting. Okay, so why don't we open it up to the group? I might suggest is we take groups of questions of, in groups of three, and then have you answer however you like. Go ahead.
Audience Member 1 56:44
My first and obvious question is, what's your advice to the next U.S. President?
Alex Wang 56:50
Okay, so let's, let's take two more questions. Yeah, please.
Audience Member 1 56:53
And I, we met on the phone before, Ed, several months ago.
Edward Wong 56:58
Yeah, I remember.
Audience Member 1 56:59
And I actually email you, because I want, I even thought of an abstract and title for your contribution to the thing that I'm doing. So before that, I just want to say I'm a professor of English, and I specialize on literature politics. But I just came to realization very recently, also from reading A Memoir by Dain called Orphan Bachelor's, which strongly, strongly promoted your heritage, which is the Taishani heritage, heritage. And it really, I call my own paper Surprised by Sin, because, yeah, I spent my whole career at UCLA unveiling, you know, Chicana American literature, Native American literature, African American literature, especially. I taught the GE cluster. I started the interracial dynamics, and had never promoted my own language. So I'm making things up, making things making it up now by editing this really huge book called Canto IE, which is like Canto Fong American heritage, because I think the two best American writers are Maxine Hong Kingston, living treasure got a gold medal from Clinton and from Obama. And fam that Ishmael reads called the globe's finest writers. They both are so powerful because of the toys, unease, Cadence and and so I want to promote the language, not just because it's a different language, the way you talk about Tibet, but it also because I feel that just like there's a very different, diverse USA. There's very diverse China, yeah, and yet, because of the Empire. So my title for you is the Empire and Language that I feel that Cantonese is marginalized by UK Empire, the earlier empire where I grew up. I grew up in the British colony, and then, of course, by the Chinese government -
Edward Wong 59:02
Yeah.
Audience Member 1 59:03
everyone in Hong Kong has to learn Mandarin -
Edward Wong 59:05
Yeah.
Audience Member 1 59:06
- and so the people who are promoting Cantonese is not my peers in Hong Kong, but the Chinese American writers. Yeah, that I feel so moved. So I just want you to think about Empire and Language.
Edward Wong 59:21
Yeah, I have some thoughts on that, so.
Alex Wang 59:24
Maybe just take these last two Yeah. You want to please, maybe just briefly say who you are. Yeah, is
Audience Member 2 59:37
Two points: One is the brilliant strategy of the, of Silk Road projects in Asia, in Africa and South America. That's a brilliant strategy that they have put together the Chinese government with influence. At the same time they have exported their way of, of diplomacy and economics such as the Islamic Republic has completely duplicated that since the 80s. And also listening to the Chinese president and Putin, they openly talk about a different World War, and it seems to me that they are are, these are actually happening in very strict way. So I just wanted to see what you thought.
Alex Wang 1:00:32
We'll take just one last comment
Audience Member 3 1:00:35
So, the, the National Security Law in Hong Kong being implemented in 2020, in your perspective, is there any hope for democracy in China, whether in the Western sense of democracy or the Chinese type of democracy?
Alex Wang 1:00:56
Advice for the U.S. president, language in Cantonese, BRI and Silk Road projects, national security law and democracy, some big questions.
Edward Wong 1:01:05
Yeah, I would say that. I mean, for the next U.S. Pres - I mean, obviously Trump and Harris are very different people. And I think I would my advice would be different depending on who wins the presidency, but I would say, generally speaking, they need to do everything they can to understand the intentions of Xi Jinping, because I think that there is a complete black box right now within the U.S. government about what Xi's intentions are, whether it's on Taiwan, on relations with Europe, on relations to the U.S. I know from reporting on national security in Washington, that the intelligence community, the intelligence agencies have very little information on what's going on in the top ranks of the party, and because the power has become so concentrated, then understanding the mindset of the top leader is more important than ever. So, and that would have, for example, like obviously, the war in Ukraine was entirely something that emerged out of Putin's head, Putin's own personal thinking. It wasn't, we know that it wasn't this thing that was debated among several people at the top of the hierarchy in Russia, that it was, it's a personal project of Putin so I think we need to spend, you know, every effort we can to understand the intentions of the top leader in order to know where to go forward with policy. And at the same time, I think that U.S. leaders need to keep in mind that Chinese citizens have very complex views on their country and on its governments, and that it is not, you know that they can often complain or criticize a certain level of official in China, but at the same time, they can also feel intensely patriotic or nationalistic, as my father and many others have done, and that they want to work for the betterment of their country. And that they want the country to succeed on its own terms. So, for example, I know that there are some U.S. officials, or former officials, who think that if the conditions were right in China, then there would be uprisings that would lead to the, perhaps a toppling of the party, but I don't think that that is actually an accurate way of thinking about China or its citizens. So I think that American leaders need to understand better the complexities and nuances of how Chinese citizens themselves see their country.
Edward Wong 1:03:32
Language. I completely agree that language is central, I think, to the project of empires around the world, and that, you know, the the party and the government in China will make an argument that there has to be a lingua franca across this modern nation state and and that's Mandarin. And so like, for there to be a certain standard of education, of job, of job success, things like that, then people have to have a baseline knowledge of Mandarin. I think that that, you know, we can all accept that - we all learn English in America in order to succeed here. But at the same time, all the policies I've seen in the various places -and, you know, policies change from localities - but much of it seems oriented towards this imposition of Mandarin at all costs, and there's no room, there's no margin, or no room for a flourishing of many of these other types of languages. I think Guangdong is, you know, is in a better place on the use of Cantonese than some other parts of China, because it is still accepted as like a very much a secondary language to greater degree there than Uyghur is, for example, in parts of Xinjiang. But, but while I was I was in China, there were protests in Guangzhou, there were protests Inner Mongolia, there were protests on the Tibetan Plateau against these against the language policies that were taking place. I think it is very central, and it's exactly what you're saying.
Edward Wong 1:05:08
So on the, I assume you're talking about the Belt and Road project that where China has, Chinese companies, and in certain local governments and the central government undertaking infrastructure projects in many parts of the world. But most you know, notably in the Middle East and Central Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and in Africa. And I think that my view on on the Belt and Road project, there will be people who disagree with me, including some of some U.S. officials, is that it's an umbrella term for many, many different kinds of projects that have sprung up under this Chinese economic system, and that there's an encouragement by the central government for SOEs and others to go out there and get contracts with these other governments to build infrastructure. But it's not as closely coordinated by the center as we might think it is. Oftentimes there's competition among Chinese companies in these areas. It definitely helps China diplomatically, in general, because I think that, it, even though it is not a closely coordinated single project of the central government, the advent of these infrastructure projects in these other countries usually ends up promoting goodwill between China and the other countries and the citizens of those countries, though, there are you can point to many examples of projects that have failed in, like after they were built and have become big cost sinks for these governments. I do think that the talk a few years ago of dead trap diplomacy by China was overblown. I don't think that there are many strong examples of that, even though the people in the Trump administration really pushing that as a nefarious plot by the by the central government in China to get different countries, you know, beholden to them around the world. I do think there are examples where countries and governments went into debt, in these projects, and wish they hadn't done that, and were probably hoodwinked into, into these debt terms. But that they but that it was, it's not this like the global coordinated effort by the central government to get many countries around the world in to financial debt to China and then have an established like PLA bases in these other places. I do think that the PLA does want to establish bases in different parts of the world, but that this debt trap diplomacy is not central to that project.
Alex Wang 1:07:43
And the final question was on democracy and national security.
Edward Wong 1:07:47
I don't know that's I mean, the question of democracy is something that I don't talk that I personally don't talk that much about in relation China, because I don't think it, I think that in some ways, you're not looking at China on its own terms if you're constantly thinking about, "Oh, will there be democracy in China future?" I think this was one of the policy mistakes that U.S. officials have made over many decades, to be constantly on the lookout for the implantation of western style democracy in China. I remember in 1997, the Hong Kong handover, which I was reported on as a free as a grad student Berkeley, as a freelance journalist like you know, at that time, many people were opted like they were. They dreaded the the end of, to a certain degree, the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, with its somewhat liberal tendencies, although it was never the Brits never gave Hong Kong a democracy. So Hong Kong's never existed as a democracy, and they were thinking, "Oh, maybe Hong Kong will exist as a speaking that will, you know, imprint liberal values in parts of China and will change the PRC rather than the other way around." But of course, you know, decades later, we see that that wasn't the case and that the opposite has happened. So I don't, like, I try and shy away from either predictions about democracy or political liberalization China or, or, like, an assessment of that on my own.
Alex Wang 1:08:21
We may have time for one more question. Maybe you get the last, last question? Yeah.
Audience Member 4 1:09:21
I was just very interested in your impressions of how, like, the flavor of life and Hong Kong has changed.
Alex Wang 1:09:29
I have not been there since 2019 when the protest took place because of the pandemic, and then, so I don't have a good answer on that. I know that you know, from my, from talking to people who have been there and work there, you know, some businesses, some multinational companies, have left and moved their headquarters elsewhere, including Singapore. But there's still a lot of current commerce going to Hong Kong. Hong Kong still has greater leeway in terms of political discourse, been in the PRC. At the same time, because of the National Security Law that you mentioned, many Hong Kong who are politically engaged feel a lot of anxiety, I think about where those boundaries are, and they feel that the lack of definition of what is considered forbidden and what is considered permit - permitted, leads to great self censorship, I think in Hong Kong right now. Obviously there are some cases that have been brought in the criminal system, like against Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, against certain professors in Hong Kong that have imposed a chilling effect, I think, on, on free speech in Hong Kong. A colleague of mine was saying, who has his kids in school in Hong Kong, was saying that he saw recent - he's seen recently in some of the public schools, you know, at the elementary middle school level or high school level, that, there is a big surge in, in teachers having students sing red songs in the classrooms, which and he thinks, that he lived in Beijing early, and he thinks that it's even more common right now in Hong Kong than in parts of China, because they're trying to really impose a certain ideology about the motherland and about the party on people in Hong Kong, in order to raise some of the their earlier thoughts that they had, their earlier critical thoughts of the party.
Alex Wang 1:11:28
Okay, well, let's give a round of applause.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai