Yeeyan Phlegming 🇺🇸🌊💙

Some really important points being made here by @sorlins, probably one of the Americans who best knows China given he's lived there half his adult life (since 1979) and has been heading the National Committee on United States–China Relations (NUSCR) for the past 20 years. He is interviewed by my friend @Hansong_Li, whose podcast I watch religiously (and you should too)! There is this oft-repeated narrative, that you hear all the time, that China didn't change, at least in terms of freedoms, since the 70s or 80s, and some people even sometimes go as far as saying that things have gotten worse. Orlins, who actually lived through it all from the very start (since he was a member of the legal team that helped establish diplomatic relations between both countries), shows how wrong this is, and how it's day and night compared to how it used to be. I wrote about this previously around my review of the book "Alone on the Great Wall" by William Lindesay (teapaw.org/RnaudBertrand/status/1…): back in 1987 he tried to run along the Great Wall, an extremely difficult task given that over 90% of the country - including most of the Great Wall - was simply forbidden to access by foreigners. Lindesay was detained again and again by the police along the way, and at one point was even expelled from China. Compare this to today where, as Orlins points out, "there are no restrictions... now if I wanna go to Chongqing, Harbin, wherever, I just go." Same thing, back in the 70s or 80s, Chinese people simply couldn't speak freely to foreigners: a Chinese person hosting a foreigner at home would typically need their work unit's (单位, dānwèi) approval - a painful bureaucratic process that most people wouldn't bother with. Today not only are there no restrictions for this anymore either, but the danwei itself, as it existed back then, has disappeared too: now most people work in the private sector, rent or buy their homes on the open market, and their employer has no say whatsoever over who they invite for dinner. Heck, a good case can be made that today the situation is almost the opposite. The Chinese are, proportionally, several times more likely than Americans to study abroad: only around 90,000 Americans are enrolled in full degree programs abroad (iie.org/research-initiatives…), versus over a million Chinese (migrationdataportal.org/them…), so in a very real way the Chinese are now more open to the world than the Americans. Same thing for foreign visitors to China: not only are there no restrictions anymore to where you can visit or who you can speak with, but chances are you don't even need a visa to visit China - which is the case for citizens of 50 countries, who can stay up to 30 days just by showing their passport (china-briefing.com/news/chin…). When you compare and contrast this with the US - especially given Trump's clampdown on foreign visitors, with a travel ban now covering 39 countries (congress.gov/crs-product/IN1…), you see two countries heading in opposite directions: China opening its doors while America closes them. Lastly, there is the point of diversity of thought that Orlins raises, which is one of the worst misconceptions about China, a country that people sometimes imagine as a monolith where 1.4 billion people all think the same thing. As Orlins points out, anyone who's actually sat in meetings with Chinese academics or officials knows they openly disagree on everything, and there is actually a very large diversity of opinions. In fact, I'd wager that the range of views on many matters is probably more diverse in China than it is in the US: if you speak to some businessmen, you'll find views fairly similar to what you'd hear in Wall Street, while at the other end you can just as easily find plenty of people who'd happily abolish the private market altogether. By comparison, the American economic debate is basically between those who think the market is always right and those who think it's almost always right 😅 I suspect that this wrong narrative - that China didn't change and therefore "engagement failed" - is because amongst all these changes it managed to remain sovereign, changing in ways that no one in Washington got to decide. Engagement did transform China profoundly: what it didn't do is turn it into a client state, and it's hard to escape the impression that, for some, that's what they mean by "engagement failed." By the way, if you want to watch the full interview, which I encourage you to, it's here: youtube.com/watch?v=Pf1LhCud…