There are several lives in the life of the Chinese-American Kaiser Kuo when he is barely in his sixties. Born in New York to parents who fled after the Maoist victory, he graduated in Political Science from the University of Berkeley and in Far Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona. He also directed international communications for Baidu, the Chinese technology giant, and in Beijing he founded Tang Dinasty, the first and legendary Chinese metal rock group. Fifteen years ago he created ‘Sinica’, the most listened to English podcast on Chinese news, which has featured journalists, activists, diplomats and businessmen. With one foot on each shore of the ocean, it builds bridges of understanding in times of geopolitical frenzy. He receives slaps from one side and the other, a corollary of good work.
How much longer can Donald Trump endure the war?
I don’t think much more, he’s under a lot of pressure to finish it quickly. From the Chinese perspective, many repeat that old song: if your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt him. China knows that the United States has made a terrible mistake, damaging relations with all its allies, except Israel, and with the rest of the Gulf countries. It has also strained them with the Global South. And all this suits China, which also knows the damage to the reputation of the United States. China is even less vulnerable to oil restrictions than to semiconductors. It has reinforced renewable energy in its mix, has substantial reserves and could buy more oil from Russia.
We always have the impression that China plans and the US improvises.
The Chinese are better at long-term planning, beyond a presidential term or a quarter-century. But they are not three meters tall, they do not have a master plan that spans decades and decades. They also improvise. And neither is the United States completely incapable of planning. This Administration is ineffective, there are a lot of idiots and stupid policies, but that does not mean that its political class improvises every response. This war seems especially poorly thought out, without a plan. Perhaps they thought that after the Israeli attacks to decapitate the regime and Trump’s spirit, people would take to the streets, but there has been no revolt. Those people are terrified. To think that they were going to come out unarmed to be shot was absurd. The United States has drunk so much of its founding mythology that it has become drunk. We turn street protests, color revolutions, into a fetish.
Is Trump a boon for China’s plan to reorder global architecture?
I think if they could choose a candidate now, even after everything that has happened, they would prefer Kamala Harris. He is the known devil. The Democrats would have continued with their very assertive but also predictable policy towards China. Trump brings his unpredictability to any room. And China does not want the global order to collapse but to change. They know that some order is preferable to no order. China has benefited greatly for decades from this order, born after the collapse of the Soviet Union and later with globalization, always with the United States as guarantor. He doesn’t want him to abdicate, there is an aversion to chaos and disorder in China. It seeks an orderly transition to a new multilateral world.
Is hostility inevitable?
It is part of the new normal and the best we can hope for is that there is no conflict. An International Relations professor at Tsinhua University told me: the two best students in a class may be cordial and polite to each other, but they will never be friends. There is an unchanging dynamic between China and the United States. Both are aware of each other’s vulnerabilities. I imagine them underwater, with a tube to breathe. China knows it can cut the American tube and vice versa. It would be mutual destruction.
My generation grew up certain that there would never be a third world war. That certainty fades.
A war can also happen in the short term, there is always the possibility of an accident. There are very serious analysts who warn that we are already at the limit to avoid conflict. They think that any accident could precipitate it because these happen from time to time. For example, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (three Chinese were killed and dozens injured in a NATO attack in 1999). The US military makes mistakes. He bombed a school in Iran thinking it was a Revolutionary Guard center. The Chinese Army also commits them. We have seen incidents in the South China Sea. If they occurred with a Washington ally, especially Japan, the communication channels are not robust enough to solve them.
Kaiser Kuo. / ASSIGNED
He assures that China’s success is not only economic, but conceptual: that it has shown that innovation, infrastructure or the eradication of poverty can be achieved through a different path than the one that the West has always dictated to the world. Is that the problem?
China has 50,000 kilometers of high-speed train, enough to circle the Earth, all built since 2008. It has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. They are indisputable achievements through an alternative route. I am not sure that other countries can do it because China still monopolizes cheap manufacturing, but it has shown that there are other possible paths. China does not encourage countries to follow its same path but rather to find their own path towards modernity and development because there is not only that of Western liberalism. They are new moral foundations that the West has problems accepting. The European Enlightenment was based on the emancipation of the individual: from the monarchy, from the authorities, from religion… But in China, the State is not something that you have to separate yourself from, but rather something that you join together for the common goal of modernity, and that provides means to accelerate the path.
The West emphasizes individual facts, Asia tends to prioritize social ones.
I am an American and I know that my compatriots are convinced that civil and political rights are priorities. And from them the others are born. But I think most of the world thinks more of Maslow’s hierarchy: first you cover your basic needs for food, clothing and shelter, and only later come more sophisticated individual rights. China also believes in the latter. And what baffles me is that the United States, so committed to internal plurality, cannot understand that this variety is also possible between countries.
Is humility lacking in the West?
I think that is the big problem. Everyone has a tendency, in moments of success, to become arrogant, accumulate pride and stop listening. But it’s not just the white man. It happens to all those who enjoy the dominance of hegemonic power. China now also runs that risk. But the biggest current problem is that the Anglo-Saxon sphere does not yet know what China represents as a challenge to the norms that they thought would be axioms for the entire world.
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