Negotiating Ideology and Future Global Power

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I'm Michael Ooinger Last month, President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in Beijing amid growing tensions around both Taiwan and the war in Iran During Xi's opening remarks, however, he brought up a third, much older war. The Chinese President Xi Jinping reached deep into history to frame the future of U. S. China ties as he met his U. S. counterpart to Donald Trump yesterday. President Xi won against what' known as theidities trap. The idea that conflict can erupt when a rising power challenges an established one The name refers to the ancient Greek historian Hucydides. who suggested that war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable. becausecause a rising Athens seriously threatened to displace the ruling power of Sparta So in this case, Athens is China and Sparta is the United States The term Thucydides trap was coined in twenty twelve by Harvard prorofessor Graham Allison who'd looked at sixteen similar rivalries in history and found that twelve ended in conflict X's tone that day seemed to be one of both warning and conciliation. att a state banquet that evening, he said, quote Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can totally go hand in hand and advance the wellbeing of the whole world. But the key idea that Xi kept repeating was this inevitable rejuvenation of China To better understand how not just Xi but the Chinese people are understanding and imagining the rise of China on a very global stage, one researcher turned to a very specific yet booming corner of the internet Today, China's internet is over one billion users and about half of them internet literature readers. Rang Bin Han is a professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia and an expert in Chinese cyber politics Brooke spoke to Rong Bin about his new book titled Make China Great Again, Online alt history Fiction, and Popular Authoritarianism Internet literature in China, originally it was a hobby. Now, many of those web novels have been adapted to TV dramas, movies, games, comics, it involves millions of dollars every year twenty nineteen around that time, there was a report Out of the top one hundred most popular TV dramas, forty two of them were adapted from a web nth But what first got you into Chinese web novels I was reading a lot and I noticed some of those fiction titles, what I call Make China Greatg fiction. They typically involve time traveling back into history and try to save China from various crises or glorify ancient China in one way or the other. Tell me a little bit about your research. You said you've read seventy of these novels almost always involving a man traveling back in time to save China from various crises. and that these books are very long The average length of those two hundred books is two point eight eight million characters It's close to the Harry Potter series translated into Chinese The whole series about three million characters Wow You've noted that dominant theme of making China great again looks to fixing the past. What is the impulse to fix the past a bigger context that is China rise. The rise of China in the world? Yes. The primary purpose of this research is I truly want to understand What are Chinese people thinking colloective national revival drive people to look into the past and try to make up Historical sorrows. Right now it iss good future is bright Only dark side is in the history. Let's go back and remedy that That's my understanding of why There's not one title, not two titles. There are thousandls of such titles. I'm still not clear. what people get out of fixing the past, especially if the country they're living in is on the way up So it's precisely because the country is on the way up That's why it's connected to Mega in a way In the past few decades, we experienced globalization And Chinese people generally see globalization as helping China rise. A lot of people in the West argue that we kind of lose from globalization, jobs, move to China, industries moveved to China. In China, it's like, hey, we benefited from this process And future is great for us Now we are becoming a power again. So let's go back and fix history. That's the only part That doesn't look good, right Were there particular periods that people went back in time to most often. A fifty two out of the two hundred titles Let fooccus on Main dynasty. This was about a three hundred year period between the middle of the thirteen hundreds and the middle of the sixteen hundreds. That's right That's because Ming dynasty is the last Han Chinese dynasty. Before that, it was the Mongol Yuen dynasty After that, It was the Manu Qing dynasty Another crucial aspect was because Ming dynasty, according to the Chinese popular perception is a critical historical juncture when China started lagging behind the Western powers started exploring the world and then later industrialization But a lot of people believe that the Ming dynasty had the capacity. And if you have a nudge in history, it would change the course of China's development completely. And no more humiliation. Exactly. There's a particular work called the Morning star of Lingao. It was written collectively by hundredundreds of writers So that fiction was a collective brrandchild of now expired Forum One day, somebody posted a threreat say, what if actually we can time travel back to Ming dynasty and do something. What are we going to do And then there are a lot of people responding to that thread and then they started to develop this into a fiction So that has become the foundation of this what I call collective mode of productdion The fiction is published on one of the most popular literature podals. So somebody has to take charge But a lot of other people are participating in the process contributing to their stories So that's a new phenomenon, group writing of these novels. Yes, it's still being updated now. The novel itself. Yes, it is over nine million characters now I've read up to eight million characters. I haven't read the latest developments A morning star of Lingao involved colloective time travel five hundred people Greening a ship of equipment weapons through a wormhole to the late Ming dynasty. Exactly. You noted that it took twenty six hundred installments just to occupy one particular part of the region But what does this book represent There are different schools of thoughtots on Chinese internet. And a lot of people believe that industrialization is the only way to save China, why it takes a shipload of equipment machines gs and books and everything and five hundred people and takeakes such a long time for them only to occupy a small part of China because they go into details about how their arrival would transform the society how gradually industrialization may take place how political organization and everything gradually evolve People see that as a representative work of industrial Py. There's another novel called for broadcast, I'll say there's another novel called four letter word that begins with F Sing which is much more aggressive in tone. It's about time traveling to early Qing time period. They try to overthrrough the Qing dynasty and then Fast forward modernizing China The early Ching period typically is considered as a good time because there wasn't really any major external or internal crisis to China A lot of those writers and readers are pretty nationalistic And they don't like the Qing dynasty. So that's why so many of them actually would flood to Ming dynasty, especially late Ming dynasty preventing Chain from take over And so this author goes back the early Qing to expel the barbarians, revive China, to resurrect the nation like the Han and the Tang dynasties to surpass all European and Asian nations. The interesting part to me is you've noted that the author builds an ideological construct close to capitalism place Confuciionism A common feature of many of those titles, the majority of them are going to establish if not capitalist It's going to be a commercial economy cururrent leadership of China has nothing against this. You wrote in your book that at the core of the genre is the nationalist quest for a Chinese revival, a theme that directly interacts with the state notion of the Chinese dream, which is President Xi's official slogan President Xi Jinping coined the term Chinese dream almost as soon as he came into power That was twenty thirteen Now, one thing I think worth highlighting is that the make China Gade again fiction titles, they emerged long before President Xi Jinping came into power So it's not something new. The Chinese Dream is not something that the party or Pident Xi invents and then try to impose. on Chinese people Rather, I think it's the Chinese partyiess and also President Xi Jinping They're smart enough to really ride with this trend You suggest that they're co opting this trend. This is what you've called a negotiation, a kind of dance between the public and the government to Imagine The future of China, right? Through these web novels. There are so many different ways they are trying to reform China sometometimes contradictory. Sometimes actually the echo of the Chinese national dream, the official ideology They're not generally punished for contradicting it. That's why I call a negotiation The party doesn't have the capacity to effectively control everything. It's not even in their best interest to do so by allowing people to participate in the process of negotiating what China's dream is, even though at times would be contesting the official ideology benefit the regime in different ways becausecause the party can never produce so many different stories of Chinese dream that are actually read by millions of readers. Right. And you've observed also that the party was never good at producing propaganda. It tended to be of low quality and people didn't really like it State propaganda is not that effective People honestly speaking are very aware of state propaganda Research suggests that when people discern there is a connect to the government They instantly start questioning and Don't trust that source. M China's dream is about national revival. That's tryry There's nothing interesting in that honestly, speaking as average citizen, why should I learn about it Each of those make China great again titles is about how to revive China And for the party to actually recruit people, they have to allow some diversity of ideas You've been highlighting the active role of regular citizens in shaping this vision of an ideal China in this case by reading and writing these novels You also observe And this is crucial how the ruling class can rule without coercion, allowing the ruled too gradually adopt the norms and values of the ruling class willingly borrow that idea from Gramsey. Antonio Graamshid, the very idea of cultural hegemony. So the idea of hegemony is that you can rule without coercion, right peopleeople buy your ideas and willingly following your ideas Typically when we look at a communist system, we envision imposing state trying to indoctrinate people. change people's mind and we see that doesn't work very well especially in the long run Because people aware that somebody is trying to impose something on them And they're going try to fight if you allow people to actually help construct the ruling ideology and they automatically buy into this ideology in the process. you will be meeting with much less resistance because you helped produce everything. you're part of this Of course, from the party's perspective, you have to keep the bottom line. Yeah. You don't want it to spiral out of control, but you can allow diversity to a degree within. I just wonder What, if anything, do these stories tell us? Do they reveal about the hopes and dreams of the Chinese people for their country And what do these stories reveal about what the government wants and Is there space between them Really a fantastic question. And honestly speaking of that personally read like seventy plus titles from kind of cover to cover Maybe cover to cover isn't the proper way to describe it since it's online But anyways eachach of them differentifferent One of the things worth highlighting is that overwhelming majority of those titles would topple economic reforms. They would introduce commercial economy And ultimately most of them capitalism echoing China's economic reform in one way or the other They would actually talk about intellectual property rights, banking, trade, and all sorts of things like that And some of those fiction titles talk about some sort of democracy, one fiction talk about introducing parliamentary politics to the Song dynasty whichich is fascinating, right? But of course, it was confined, not really popular election, but it's parliament. And another title actually tried popular election But that story is interesting because the man character Te travel twice He was an official of the Song dynasty Somehow he got knocked out in a battle and then time traveled to modern time joined the Communist Party in fighting the Japanese invasion And then he traveled back and carried with him the knowledge You learned in the process So he conducted land reform, but he also conducted popular election Because interesting enough, the Communist Party did that before taking over the entire China But it's overall pretty limited Why should we all the way over here care about these Chinese Alt history web novels I think it is important to the Western audience because we're living in the age of China rightice where China's heading is going to have an impact on not just Chinese, but the global audience. And I'm trying to understand what Chinese people are thinking I think it's related to whether the Chinese political system will be stable in the long run My findings are correct I would bet so All those will bear implications for people on the west Finally, one point you've made is that China seems to be intentionally expanding its soft power. And you note that recent surveys suggest that China is viewed more favorably compared to the US But research also suggests that Chinese ideologies are not appealing And you say that the importance of this Work, these novels is to help China figure out what its model is before trying to export it The Chinese Party state has to come to terms with its people first before it can ever actually project itself as a global power You have to convince your domestic citizens that you are a legitimate power for you can actually convinince the international audience And to a certain extent, I think there is something that's working and there's something not working Something that's working is that China has actually convinced its domestic audience that the party can deliver economic growth and improved governance. Now a lot of people are questioning it because of slowdown of the economy and everything, right? But overall, in the reform era, the Chinese partarty state has been doing a relatively good job there infrastructure. Ping Street Eiciency. That's what the Chinese state has been delivering to its own citizens and the Chinese citizens were first convinced, now the international audience