Melissa Chen: What Americans Don’t Understand About China

What's your organ experience? Right. And right now, also, with the rise of China, they are also starting to use some form of electronic tyranny. They are able to really censor the Internet in the way that's been unprecedented. You can't access Facebook, Wikipedia... None of these things that you and I can just open up our apps can be accessed in China. So the way they just control information and now exporting those same tools to other authoritarian countries around the world. That part, to me, is dangerous because, you know, I think both Basil and I came to America with this like, all right, this is the place that we can finally be ourselves and think for ourselves, right? Yeah. And we're starting to see that the whole world seems to be kind of going in the other direction. So there was a shift in China, and the shift was it was initially a completely communist society, and now capitalism, at least in a monetary sense, is embraced. Yeah, market reforms, yes. Yes. So there's this giant shift in what China actually is, which corresponds to this huge growth. Is it possible that in the future, this shift could move on to other aspects of Chinese culture like discourse or the way they view the government or even some form of democracy? That was what we expected. That's what we expected. That was the theory. But the way China has behaved now, you know, they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics. That's the official name of this long-drawn game to, you know, institute market reforms. Usher in riches for the middle class, lift a lot of people out of poverty, but in a very controlled way. In a way that's like, see, that's the thing about Asian culture, people don't understand. It's that there's a fundamental difference between the China dream and the American dream. Right. And Xi Jinping has outlined what he thinks is the China dream. It's basically a top-down way to, it's a goal, it's a national goal. And basically what they're trying to say is that, okay, we're going to lift a lot of people out of poverty, but you have to, your generation has to make sacrifices. It's not about the individual. It's about building a strong China and implicitly also about, you know, ensuring that the CCP stays in power, the Chinese Communist Party stays in power. But it's that you might have to give up, you know, personal sacrifices for the sake of China versus the American dream is bottom up. It's about your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's it. And if you do that, that's the American dream. And if you achieve a certain level of happiness, if you achieve, you know, it's all like, it's bottom up. It's not centralized and it's not something that the Chinese government is kind of trying to stuff down your throat. And China's willing to play the long game. So it is still a Leninist, Leninist Marxist government. Xi Jinping still believes in all of that. That's why it's still so totalitarian. But it's, you know, they know that like the way to gain power in the world is to get rich. And they did it on some, you know, on the backs of, on the back of trade with other countries through very unfair practices, actually, in many cases. So if you think about like how they, I think there's, there are a lot of estimates of how much they've actually stolen from the United States in terms of intellectual property, corporate espionage. Now even like academia is being infected. So how so they just arrested the head of the chemistry department at Harvard. Oh, that's right. Yeah. But wasn't that, didn't they think that that guy was in connection with some weaponized, was that a virus thing? Yeah. No, no, I meant that's thinking of something else. There was an article linking some Canadian researchers to the virus. That's what it was. No, but this was, this was different. The head of the chemistry department at Harvard was found to have lied about receiving money from the Chinese government. So there's this program called the Thousand Talents Program in China. Basically they're offering a lot of money. The New York Times had a really good expose on this. They basically offer money to like academics, because you know, it's kind of sucks to be one here in the sense of like, you're not paid that well. But China's dangling like a lot more money and say, okay, if you do research here in China, there's going to be like less bureaucracy. So that's their way to lure these people in. So he was hiding the fact that he was getting income from him? Correct. How was he hiding it? He just, he didn't report it. No. He put it in the bank anyway? Right. And so at the end of the day, when you do, when there's a relationship there, China owns your research. Right. And if you're researching something sensitive, that's a big issue.