2026-02-07 04:36:55
The Engineering State and the Lawyerly Society: Dan Wang on his new book “Breakneck”
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Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China.
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Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Dan Wang has been on the Sinica Podcast a couple of times before, and I am delighted to have him back today.
He is one of the sharpest and most original observers of China’s technology sector and manufacturing landscape, having won a certain level of fame for his annual letters and other essays — writings that somehow managed to combine on-the-ground insights with big picture perspectives.
Dan has worked for Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing since 2017. After a stint with the Paul Tsai China Law Center at Yale, he’s now at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
If you’ve seen the PBS Nova documentary “Inside China’s Tech Boom,” which I had the pleasure of narrating — it’s a film by David Borenstein — you’ve already encountered Dan. He was a featured voice helping to explain the deeper drivers behind China’s technological rise and talked eloquently, I thought, about the importance of process knowledge, of what the Greeks called metis, which is an important idea that’s really stayed with me and has become quite foundational to my understanding of China and the importance of manufacturing.
Today, we’re going to be talking about his new book, which comes out just about the time you’ll be listening to this. It’s called:
“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
It’s a book that posits — and here I’m greatly oversimplifying — that China is ruled by engineers and they do what engineers like to do: they build. America, on the other hand, is ruled by lawyers. It’s an engineering state on the one hand and a lawyerly society on the other.
Dan’s book is full of memorable witticisms and pithy, trenchant observations. Perhaps most importantly, it explores what each side might ideally learn from the other. They obviously each have their strengths and their weaknesses, so I’m really anxious to ask Dan about whether he thinks Americans are actually learning the right lessons or just burying their heads in the sand and inhaling big plumes of copium.
Before we jump in, I want to point out that this book was especially interesting for me as somebody whose abortive doctoral dissertation was specifically about the rise of this engineering state, about the… The emergence of technocrats in post-Mao China. So things might get a little in the weeds. I ask your forgiveness in advance and will do my best to keep it reasonably accessible.
Dan Wang, welcome back to Sinica and happy birthday, man.
Dan Wang: Thank you very much, Kaiser. And what better birthday present than to speak to old friends like this?
Dan Wang: Yeah, it’s great to have you.
We have to start with what, for me, was clearly the most important part of your entire book, which is that magical and totally improbable guitar-making hub in Guizhou that you stumbled upon as you and Christian Shepard from the Washington Post and another friend rode your bikes through that mountainous province toward Chongqing.
As a card-carrying guitar nerd, this totally blew my mind. I got to find this place. How does a little inland town end up just cranking out guitars for the whole world? I mean, is this just one of those serendipitous quirks of China’s industrial sprawl? Or is there something systematic in how the state, local governments, and entrepreneurial networks operate so that these clusters take root in the unlikeliest places?
And I guess more importantly, were there any of you guys who were guitar players? And if so, did you guys try out some of the local handiwork while you were there?
Kaiser, you’re much cooler than me. You are a guitar player. I am a clarinet player. And I think by coolness, that just really outranks me.
How indeed did kind of a third or fourth tier city in Guizhou become one of the great hubs of guitar making?
Well, in 2021, when I was stuck in China during the summer due to the success of the zero COVID strategy at the time, I asked two friends of mine,
“Hey, why don’t we go on a really long bike ride somewhere in the southwest, which I find the most beautiful part of China?”
Oh, for sure.
And so over five days, we cycled from Guiyang to Chongqing. It was four days in Guizhou, the province of Guizhou, and then until the fifth day when we reached Chongqing.
It was on our second or third day when we came across these giant guitar cymbals on the side of the road. So there were these guitars that were hanging off streetlights. There’s this giant guitar that was on a hill that was kind of this ornamental thing. And off in the distance, there was another big guitar that you could see on the town square.
And so we were very puzzled by this. We unfortunately didn’t stop to try out the handicraft. I’m pretty sure that neither Chris, Zheng, Tung, nor I are anything of real guitar players ourselves.
And afterwards, I went to find that Zhengan County in Guizhou is indeed the largest guitar-making hub in the world. I think it’s something like 30% of guitars in China is produced there. I have to get the exact figure right in my book.
And that happened due to a great accident in which a lot of folks in Guizhou were moving to Guangdong. In the 90s, Guangdong was making absolutely everything and anything. Some people were making guitars for export. And so a lot of people from Guizhou just happened to move to a particular guitar factory.
One of the things that we really found on our bike ride was when you’re going through China’s countryside, Tristan made this very astute observation that there are hardly any middle-aged or people in their 20s or 30s that you could find in Guizhou. It’s a lot of children being led with the grandparents. And that’s because anyone who is able to work has been moving over to the coastal areas where you could have a much better job producing guitars or whatever it is for export.
And something that the local government in Zhengan did was that it found that, well, there’s a lot of people making guitars here. Guitars are not really endemic to the local culture of people playing guitar. That’s not really a Guizhou thing. That’s not really necessarily a Chinese thing.
I’m working to change that, but yeah.
Well, you’re a big force, Kaiser. Maybe we can change that. But it just attracted a lot of people to try to say,
“Hey, why don’t you move back home to Guizhou? You can make a lot of guitars here.”
And somehow that strategy worked. And so a lot of people moved back to Guizhou from Guangdong, and now they’re producing guitars mostly on the lower end.
So this is not the sort of things that will be sold in, I think, the high-end guitar shops that you would probably frequent, Kaiser. But there is some innovation here, and I expect that they will get better and better.
Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how good quality the Chinese guitars have. I mean, it’s astonishing. And all of the major brands are actually making a lot of their guitars in China now.
Yeah. No, that’d be great. You can pedal there. Right. Yeah. No, I’m not going to do that.
But yeah, was the enticements just the usual package of tax incentives, of steeply discounted infrastructure promises of raw materials? What do they do to entice people to a place like that? What do they typically do?
I think the typical enticement is:
A lot of folks in Guizhou, folks in the Southwest can’t necessarily love the Southeast and Guangdong where they were working. It’s too humid. They might say, “we don’t love the Cantonese food. Where’s all the spices? Where’s all the pickles? Where is the really pungent flavors that folks in Guizhou are used to?”
And so this coincided with sort of this rural revitalization program that Beijing has emphasized for quite a while now. And so I think it is just this big happy accident that I would say a pretty random place in Guizhou is just making so many guitars now.
Awesome. Dan, I know you’re going to end up on every major podcast talking about this book, so I want to avoid just asking you about the main themes or going through chapter by chapter. Instead, I was hoping that we could use the main themes of the book as kind of a jumping-off point to explore a lot of the questions that popped into my head as I read it, questions I’m sure you’ve thought about as well. Not necessarily things that made their way into the pages of the book itself, but let me start here.
I mean, we can all rattle off the obvious differences between an engineering state and a lawyerly society. You got speed versus procedure, certain social orderliness versus the chaos of pure market forces. But what are some of the more subtle trade-offs, the ones that most people don’t even know that they’re making that maybe shape daily life in each system? I’m thinking predictability, dignity, moral legitimacy. I mean, which of these things matters to people who live inside each system?
Yeah. Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, Kaiser. I wonder which is the system that delivers legitimacy. I could posit that the lawyerly society has some degree of legitimacy because there are some procedures in place that people expect that rules have to be followed, and maybe the lawyers are better at following the rules.
On the other hand, the Communist Party, I think, would say, well, we have much greater legitimacy. We have this, what is that term, whole process, substantive democracy, in which we are delivering much better things for the people. So I think legitimacy is a concept here that we can play around a little bit with.
What I’ll say is that the engineering state, I think I came onto this framework in part due to these excellent articles I found in 2001, I believe, that was written by an interesting analyst at the time called Kaiser Kuo, who pointed out that there were quite a lot of engineers that were being promoted into the Central Committee and the Politburo.
And I think there has been quite a lot of discussion since 2002, which is the really striking year when every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, notably Hu Jintao, as well as Wen Jiabao, had degrees in engineering.
Of course this was a really striking fact for a lot of people.
I think there has also been this kind of view and understanding that America is very lawyerly and that the government is of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.
And so what I wanted to add onto this kind of general understanding that was in the air, so to speak, was that I felt like I really experienced the merits and the madness of the engineering state by living there from 2017 to 2023.
I was in China at a time when a lot of things were getting a lot better. The high-speed rail system had really come into fruition at that time. People were no longer shoving each other around to get in line. The system felt quite rational and well-organized.
Shanghai is a marvelously functional city where one is never really more than 15 or 20 minutes away from a subway stop. Shanghai was building all sorts of parks. It built about 500 parks by the year 2020. By the end of this year, the city targets that it will have a thousand parks. Shanghai is just this remarkably well-functional, livable place.
And so that was something that I really experienced by living there. But Shanghai is also infamously the city that suffered perhaps the worst lockdown ever. In the history of humanity, in which 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds for about eight to ten weeks over the course of the spring in 2022. And so that was something that I felt very ethically myself.
When I moved to the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, really being embedded in one of these most elite, elite-making institutions in the United States, really seeing that the US is run by lawyers, seeing how the Biden administration at that time had been really, really lawyerly. About 11 out of 15 cabinet members in Joe Biden’s administration had gone to law school. Many prominent folks went to Yale Law in particular.
That was sort of what I wanted to add, that this was something I lived and felt in both places.
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk a little bit about this idea of performance legitimacy down the road here. But so I want to dig into sort of maybe philosophical underpinnings of this contrast that you highlight.
In the West, we often reach for the trolley problem as a kind of shorthand for thinking about moral tradeoffs.
I mean, do you pull that lever to sacrifice one life in order to save five? I’ve often wondered how this dilemma looks different through the lens, you know, like the one that you’ve drawn, whether it looks different between an engineering state and a lawyerly society.
I would imagine an engineering-oriented society be more inclined to treat this as kind of a technical optimization problem. You just kind of minimize total loss, while a maybe more lawyerly society would insist on:
Kind of, you know, a utilitarian versus a deontological philosophical orientation.
Maybe that points to a deeper distinction. I mean, do these orientations that you’ve described, do they line up with the classic contrast between communitarian or group-oriented values on the one hand and on individualistic ones on the other?
Yeah. I think that’s actually a pretty fascinating question. I wonder if there is a systematically different way that Chinese tackle the trolley problem in a way that is pretty distinct from the way that Westerners think about the trolley problem.
I think the level that I was thinking a little bit more about was that I think part of the reason I wanted to come up with this framework of engineers and lawyers is that I think we’ve been reasoning about the US-China conflict in these 20th century terms like:
And all of these terms have some use, but I’m not really sure that they still really apply in very nice ways now.
You know, are we going to say that something like, is China fundamentally left-wing or right-wing? Well, I can make arguments on both sides. Is the US fundamentally more left-wing or right-wing? Again, this is something that we can debate and I’m not sure how far exactly we get up to these sort of frameworks.
And so the framework that I came up with of the engineering state and the lawyerly society, I would submit is just no worse than trying to figure out exactly to what extent China is Marxist today.
You know, I don’t think that Marxism is quite the right lens to try to understand the people’s republic. Maybe it is, but I think this is what we need to do is to have a plurality of frameworks here.
Maybe we should have something like the discussion of:
We just need to have more than one framework really to think about the great conflict of the moment.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And that’s what I really like about this particular framework is it takes us beyond these sort of binaries of ideology, you know, China being just such an incredibly syncretic society that blends so many aspects.
But the one thing that I think it all circles around is this technocratic policy, and I think it feels like, to me, a very, very good explanatory lens. So I applaud that.
I’ve often used a concept I kind of borrow from economics when I think about what a society values. And that’s, you know, the concept of elasticity.
You know, I imagine that in every society, individuals have kind of an intuitive sense. I don’t think they have it mapped out really explicitly, but, you know, how much of one thing that they value, they’d be willing to give up to gain some amount of something else that they value.
You can, you know, kind of almost put numbers to it.
I'll trade you three points of administrative efficiency to get one point of procedural fairness, right?
Or I'll trade you two points of transparency for one point of speed.
I mean, it seems to me like for decades, Americans’ coefficient of elasticity has been really, really rigid. They’ve been very unwilling to trade down in civil and political rights for even for, you know, pretty markedly… Improved economic outcomes. But I mean, it’s my sense, Dan, I’m wondering if you agree that lately, because of China’s example in manufacturing strength, in infrastructure, in its energy build-out, in the energy transition, in education, in STEM education especially, I feel like there’s a shift happening and this is happening. And I think you note this, it’s both on the right and the left, in America, like within MAGA and among also, say the abundance bros, right? You know, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and those guys, more Americans seem willing to accept some erosion in rights or process in exchange for what they believe are better material outcomes.
Do you think that that coefficient is changing? And if it is, does it change the way that you think about the lawyerly versus engineering states, especially if we start seeing each side borrowing from the other’s value hierarchy?
Well, there’s certainly a lot of borrowing between the U.S. and China at the moment. But I’m not sure that they’re borrowing all the right things.
Yeah. That’s the big issue. Are they?
Well, I think what we are seeing with the Trump administration is a lot of authoritarianism without the good stuff—good stuff like functional subways, better transport infrastructure, and better infrastructure generally. I think you’re very right to point out that there is a sense of deep dissatisfaction in the U.S. I mean, that is always true everywhere at all times, but I think there is an especially big sense at the moment that the U.S. has not been very functional for quite a long while.
The U.S. has not been very functional because especially in the bigger cities, where things are just far too expensive. If we’re thinking about cities like New York, Boston, or San Francisco, housing prices are really unaffordable for too many people. These are cities that try to build new infrastructure—mass transit—and basically don’t do a very good job of it.
You know, I was really struck that it’s not just that New York is unable to build new subway stations and new subway lines with any sort of efficiency; it costs about $2 billion per mile to build a new mile of subway in New York City. They’re not even doing simpler stuff very well.
And so this is the sort of thing that looks kind of ridiculous. Why does it take several years to upgrade a bus station? I realize that’s kind of a complex structure. There are all sorts of intricacies with the tunnels, but still this is fundamentally a bus station that shouldn’t take more than five years to build out.
So, you know, we have broken mass transit. We have unaffordable housing. The pandemic revealed that the U.S. isn’t able to manufacture a lot of pretty basic goods. There were shortages of masks and cotton swabs. There were shortages of furniture, all sorts of simple consumer goods that weren’t easily exportable from China at the time.
And so there is a pretty big sense that nothing is working when we have to face this critical transition to decarbonize the economy and to build a lot more solar, wind, transmission lines, which all demand quite a lot of land.
And so I think I wonder if there is the case that the U.S. has even made a conscious decision to try to erode some of the elasticity of the proceduralism. Because I think one of my arguments in the book is that the proceduralism has encrusted itself throughout a long period of time without anyone’s real intention to create a lot of processes everywhere throughout the American government.
This is sort of a force that kind of took a life of its own. And this was something that a lot of homeowners and especially the NIMBY set exploited, I would say, to block new housing in Berkeley for students, to block a solar or a wind project as well as their transmission grids. This became something that richer people were able to access and exploit to block projects that they didn’t like.
And that isn’t even really a majoritarian demand for greater proceduralism. This was kind of an independent life force that grew upon itself and has a very vested interest of minoritarians that are really vested in trying to keep that system so they are able to block a new apartment building if it takes them with their light away, for example.
You know, you work to be very fair in the book and that’s something I really like about it. I mean, you don’t just heap praise though on the engineering state. You make a point of calling out the downsides. And they’re very real. Can we talk about some of those? What the problems are of the engineering state? What does it get wrong? You sort of channel the James Scott scene like a state thing and a lot of the excesses of that thinking.
There’s two chapters in particular of your book that really dwell on this. And they are about, of course, the one-child policy, which is a conspicuous failure of the engineering state mentality and also the zero COVID policy, which starts off as sort of a triumph, not right away, right? It, I guess, displays some of the pathologies of it, but by the spring of 2020 you see this V-shaped recovery. You see China really use its state capacity to wrangle the COVID epidemic.
But then of course, you talk quite a bit about the lockdown. So, talk a little bit about what some of the major downsides are. I think the engineering state has major upsides.
Um, so to be clear, I really want to articulate that the speed of construction of new housing in China, new roads, tall bridges, subway systems, nuclear, all sorts of construction in China, I would say is net positive. You could go to Guizhou as I did, look at these really tall bridges. It is pretty easy to say, well, this is a bridge to nowhere, but I think it is also true that a bridge to nowhere quickly turns nowhere into two somewheres at the ends of these bridges.
If you take a look at China’s major infrastructure, I would say that on net, it’s been extremely positive, that the benefits have way, way, way exceeded the costs.
Now, I would say that there have certainly been some costs:
But in spite of these costs — human, environmental, financial — I would still say that the benefits of infrastructure way exceeded the downsides of so much frenetic construction.
When I say that you talk about downsides, I don’t mean to suggest that you present a kind of moral equivalence between the systems. It’s pretty clear that you believe one side needs to learn more from the other right now.
It’s pretty clear where you think the osmotic gradient should flow.
The problem, I think, is that the Chinese leadership is not only physical engineers. They’re also fundamentally social engineers, and they cannot stop themselves from treating the population as just another building material to be remolded or torn down as the circumstances demand.
And so I think we can point to a lot of social engineering projects in China and we can point to the repression of ethno-religious minorities in Tibet as well as Xinjiang. Even with the Han majority, people have lived for a long while with the hukou system, which is not even fully abolished yet, in which it becomes really difficult for a migrant worker to move to Beijing or Shanghai and access educational facilities for her child.
What I really decided to focus on were these two big projects that you mentioned:
And I think you’re really right to point out that zero COVID follows an arc that isn’t very straightforward.
I think the first act of this big dramatic arc of zero COVID was the spring of 2020, or even earlier in the winter of 2020, when I was living in Beijing and we heard about this new pneumonia that was spreading through Wuhan.
And when we saw the Wuhan lockdown, which was in January, I believe January 23rd, you have these sort of dates that are emblazoned in your mind if you lived through the pandemic in China.
Wuhan lockdown, hearing the stories of the ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, who raised valid concerns and was disciplined by the state for raising these sort of concerns, created a lot of anger among pretty much everyone I knew that there was yet another respiratory virus that was spreading from China.
This is the second one after 20 years with the first SARS crisis.
There had been some political suppression of bad news up until the state really tried to react and try to tamp it down. A big way. And so that was the great first act when a lot of commentators from the U.S. and parts of the West were sometimes even gleefully saying that this might be China’s Chernobyl moment in which a disaster triggers the political downfall of the entire regime. And so that was the first act.
And then the second act proved a lot of that wrong. So the second act of China’s COVID experience was the much longer time period when Beijing, Shanghai, central government, local governments proved that China was able to control the virus much more effectively than the U.S. can or much of the West could. And so the second act was people in China feeling relatively glad that they were living in China and able to be free of transmissions, able to carry on life relatively normally.
There were some costs. I wasn’t able to see my parents who were in Pennsylvania. My parents were telling me this very un-Chinese thing, which is to say,
“Stay there. Don’t come to visit us. Trump’s America in 2020 is a terrible mess. So, you should just stay in China where life is a lot better.”
They weren’t wrong. They weren’t wrong at the time.
But then there was the third act of China’s COVID experience. That third act was triggered by the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, which overcame a lot of vaccines and was just extraordinarily transmissible. That was really the variant of the virus that forced Shanghai to go into lockdown for about eight weeks in the spring of 2022 when people could only go downstairs to their apartment compounds to have their noses and their throats swabbed. Otherwise, you couldn’t really go outside even for any sort of fresh air.
And so this was a time that drove a lot of people crazy. This was a time when a lot of families were suffering some degree of food insecurity because the Shanghai government had no logistical capacity to really try to deliver food to a lot of families. I knew a lot of families where the parents really tried to reduce their food intake so that they could save some food for their kids.
The food shortages resolved after, I believe, something like the second week of April. But, you know, this was something that was pretty extraordinary—that people were feeling food insecure in China’s largest city in the year 2022. That was really surprising.
And then the great denouement of the great dramatic act of China’s COVID experience was when in 2022’s December, Beijing decided to drop all COVID restrictions in the coldest month of the year, when people had very few fever reducers in stock to meet this great ending of the pandemic when zero COVID kind of became total COVID.
And so in Shanghai, I caught COVID around December 22nd, when I think everybody else was catching COVID at around the same time. So luckily, I had quite a fine experience with all of these things. But there were a lot of folks in Shanghai who didn’t have a very good time getting COVID at that point.
And so, you know, this is where the engineering state is pretty ambiguous, I think, in terms of its effect. So sometimes it looks pretty good that it was able to follow WHO recommendations and control the virus until it then collapsed under its own weight.
So the evidence here is pretty ambiguous, I would say.
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, at the same time, I worry that there’s a certain type of American copium smoker who is taking these failures of the engineering state, assuming them to be inevitable consequences of adopting the sorts of things that you would like them to say. And, you know, they’re telling themselves these sort of self-soothing daily affirmations, like:
So, you know, actually, America is doing great. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I wonder.
I think I absolutely agree with you that the mood in the U.S. especially fluctuates way too wildly for what the situation actually is.
I remember at the end of 2022, there was just excessive triumphalism in the U.S. because China ended its zero COVID program in this horrible collapse in which a lot of people died and the state suppressed all of this data.
Russia then wasn’t doing very well in its fight against Ukraine. And so it looked like Ukraine was also winning against autocracy.
And the end of 2022 was also the years when it seemed like the U.S. had these great technological breakthroughs,
and the autocracies simply didn’t have these technologies in place.
And so the views have shifted quite a lot. And these views go up and down, I think, a little bit too wildly given the state of… The evidence. And one of the things that I’m always trying to say, you know, when I was at China, now when I’m at the Hoover Institution is always that this is going to be a really long struggle between the U.S. and China. This conflict, these tensions will go on for a very long time. I don’t think that it is anything like a static picture in which one country is winning and they will have any sort of a decisive advantage. I think that the struggle will take place over a very long time.
And there’s not going to be any scenario in which one country simply disappears off the face of the earth. That is a fantasy. And I think it is also a fantasy to imagine that either country will collapse and never get back on its feet. I think that both countries are going to be winning and losing. And when they’re winning, they’re going to be making a lot of mistakes. When they’re losing, they’re going to try to catch up. And that’s just going to be a dynamic process over the next few decades.
Do you agree?
I do agree. I think the language of existential threat and the framing of zero sum is foolish when you see it on either side. Let me get to the things that we ought to be, we as Americans ought to be learning from China. One of the things that you really emphasize is process knowledge. I mentioned that in the introduction. For you, is that primarily a cultural asset? That is the status of engineers, the kind of tolerance for iteration. Is it a firm level capability, having long patient capital, kind of shop floor autonomy? Or for you, is it kind of a policy environment with permitting and procurement and standards at the fore?
Where would you intervene first, in other words, to sort of rebuild process knowledge in the United States where it’s so sorely lacking?
I think it is all of the above, Kaiser, that it is cultural, it is policy driven, it is a matter of economics. So I think the most important thing to grasp about technology is not the actual physical instruments or tools that we can see, anything like a robotic arm. It’s also not a recipe or a blueprint or a patent, any sort of knowledge that’s really easy to write down.
I think the most important part of technology has to be the process knowledge, which is all of this meta and tacit knowledge that exists more on a population level. And so this is something that various hubs of knowledge production have been able to recreate in the past.
You know, at the start of the industrial revolution in the UK, there was just a lot of knowledge about how to build textiles in order and how to build engines.
Right.
When that moved from Britain to Germany, Germany had a lot of process knowledge about how to do interesting new fields like electrical engineering, as well as chemistry. And that has moved from country to country. The US has been a major industrial leader on something like automotives, on something like semiconductors in the past.
And right now, a lot of process knowledge with manufacturing is being built and activated and grown in China, where you could be a worker in Shenzhen, making iPhones in the first year, being poached to make Huawei phones the second year, then making a DJI drone the third year, and then making a CATL electric vehicle battery the fourth year.
And so there’s just so much knowledge that can’t be written down with technology that is necessary for the production of a lot of different goods.
So I think this is one of these things that the US didn’t sufficiently appreciate when a lot of corporates did offshore a lot of jobs to China. I want to be clear that a lot of the manufacturing job losses in the US have been triggered by automation and technological change, not so much by offshoring, but something like 10% of the manufacturing change is created by offshoring.
And one of these things that I wonder about is if Apple didn’t build all of its iPhones in Shenzhen, and rather built it in, let’s say:
What if all of that knowledge involved in building hardware was actually in the industrial Midwest in the US as well? Could it be that Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio are actually major producers of:
that is present in Shenzhen as well?
And so this is one of these things that I think has been critically understated in the US that has been driven by an excessively financial profit-driven model that didn’t account for all of the most important things with process knowledge.
Right. I mean, this possibility, this hypothetical that you float of an Apple producing in Cleveland, that seems to place a little too much of the onus on Apple. It’s not as though that decision could have been undertaken in a vacuum. There were other factors that it had to consider rather than just simply the cost of labor. It was, as you say, you know, there was a policy… Environment. You know, there are other reasons they chose not to do that. And surely you would agree that it’s not just on Apple.
Absolutely. I think that the infrastructure wasn’t in place. The costs were much, much lower in the past. And so these are all real.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you talk about, when I asked you about process knowledge and, you know, whether it’s a cultural asset or a firm-level capability or policy environment thing, you said all of the above. I mean, that reminds you of something that you wrote recently. You just published in Foreign Affairs with your former boss, Arthur Kroeber, who is, by the way, one of the people in the China space who I just admire the most.
You guys wrote that, you know, China has taken in all of the above technology strategy. What would you include as the pieces of that strategy that perhaps people are less aware of?
I think that people know, you know, big pieces of it, but some of it, I think there is still a gap in our understanding of how China did this. What would you identify?
Arthur and I wrote that piece in Foreign Affairs called The Real China Model, in part to try to rebut the sense that China has succeeded technologically simply because it has stolen all the IP from the US. And so, you know, I, one of my favorite boogeymen is this tweet by Senator Tom Cotton, which he tweeted on World IP Day,
“China doesn’t innovate, it only steals.”
I think that is a flagrantly wrong presumption that I think we just need to discard because it is not helping us understand China any better.
There’s also this view out there that China succeeded simply by subsidizing its way into technological leadership. I think that’s not wrong, but I think it is woefully incomplete to say that the Chinese have been able to make central planning work and been able to select winners. I think they haven’t had a terrific track record on that.
What we point out in this piece is that China has actually built a lot of what we call deep infrastructure to be able to have its success.
Now, deep infrastructure goes beyond traditional infrastructure where China is superb — of trains and ports and highways to move goods around. What we point out are three big things:
Yeah, you noted, I mean, I think just to throw one stat, that China’s total electricity output is greater than the United States and the EU combined, and every year it adds another Britain’s worth of electrical production.
That’s right. Chinese people are on smartphones constantly, maybe even a little bit too much. And the Communist Party is very much in charge.
And so when you marry these three pieces of deep infrastructure —
- power
- connectivity
- process knowledge
— to the fierce dynamism among Chinese entrepreneurs who are really competitive in trying to build interesting new projects, build more cheaply than the other guy, not necessarily achieving a lot of profit, but creating new and worthwhile products, when you marry all of these things together, I think it is no surprise that China has become the technological superpower that it is today.
There are some elements of technology theft from the West. There is an obvious element of the state trying to pick winners, subsidizing all of these things.
What we can acknowledge is that China has both a strong state as well as strong entrepreneurs that have built a lot of these technological achievements.
Dan, I’ve often remarked on how China in the 21st century is a much less technophobic or techno-pessimistic society than America is today. You can see it in survey research on attitudes toward things like AI. But I mean, anyone who’s lived in China and the US, as both you and I have, we know this intuitively, right? Just in the posture that people have toward technology.
I mean, so years ago, I interviewed a philosopher named Anna Greenspan about a book that she wrote.
Called Shanghai Future, one I highly recommend.
Me too.
You’ve read this?
Yes, I’m a big admirer of Anna’s work.
Yeah, she’s great. So you remember, she talked about this big difference in attitudes toward futurity in the US and China. I’ve come to use kind of shorthand that I like. China is still in its Star Trek phase and the US is in its Black Mirror phase, right?
So the question I have for you is, what is the causal direction, if indeed you see any causality at work here, between China’s technocratic engineer-dominated polity and its technophilic society? Does the technocracy create the technophilia or does the technophilia create the technocracy?
I think that the technocracy creates the technophilia. I’m willing to change my mind on this, but I think it is definitely the case that China’s leadership uses mega projects, big prestige projects, really to try to rally the population into doing something better. And I think there are some ways in which this could be a little bit insidious.
One theory that I’ve come across is that one of the reasons that Li Peng, the premier throughout the 1990s, was so heavily invested in the Three Gorges Dam was in part to try to distract from his own image as what the Western media labeled as “the butcher of Beijing” for having ordered the Tiananmen crackdowns.
And so the Chinese government decided that it is going to try to build its way out of this political crisis of 1989 and to really invest in a lot of technology here. There should be a forthcoming book about this. And so once that book is out, maybe we can point to it.
I think it is definitely the case that the Chinese government loves pointing at pictures of great infrastructure. You can’t open an issue of Tioshe, which I was fervently reading when I was living in China, without coming across some amazing new bridge that the government has built, some great new port, which always looks very telegenic, or some speeding high-speed rail going through the countryside.
And so they definitely love to create these sort of images. There is a sense, I think, in which the Chinese government really likes to promote these big novels like Wandering Earth, which has been adapted into a film, and Three-Body Problem, in which there is kind of this emphasis on a world government that is entirely run by engineers working together to overcome a great threat to humanity.
That is, I think, a common theme to Liu Cixin. I think he is one of these progenitors of the engineering state’s mindset.
Right. Of the so-called Industrial Party, the Gongyedang.
That’s right. It’s sort of the Ur text of the Gongyedang.
And I spent a lot of time talking about the Gongyedang in my chapter on tech power.
Right.
And I think the contrast is with the United States, which has had a pretty major tech clash. I think we saw a lot of skepticism of social media, especially after 2017. There right now is still a lot of worries about what smartphones are doing to young people, what social media is doing to young people, what AI might be doing to all of us.
That is all real. And that strain is less present in China, I think, in part because the state loves to create new engineering projects, and in part because I think the Chinese have naturally been more optimistic over the last 40 years than Americans have because they’ve seen their lives improve in such obvious ways.
In lockstep with the improvement of technology. So yeah, it’s reinforcing, right?
And I wonder to what extent the Chinese government might actually be actively censoring some of these views. There has been extensive censorship of opposition to the Three Gorges Dam. And there may even now be some censorship to the big new dam that is being built in Tibet as well.
And so I think there is, on the one hand, the leadership itself is technophilic and trying to engineer their way out of every problem. On the other hand, they may also be censoring some of the perhaps merited, humanistic, critical backlash against what technologies are doing to us.
I want to get into how maybe the technophilia has enabled the technocracy in just a little bit, but because I do think there’s a little bit of bidirectional causality here.
But I want to first ask you whether you think that things like the fact that so many of the leaders are themselves engineers, it sets up a ladder of success, right? I mean, where high status and access to resources and power are kind of enabled by technical, technological prowess, right? So it sets up an incentive system.
So if you are a parent, you’re raising children, you’re going to want to push your children into STEM education. And that itself kind of reinforces that technophilia in society, you know, to your point.
I feel like that’s a big piece of it. Have you given much thought to that as well, to the sort of social forces that work in reinforcing technocratic politics? I think there is definitely a sense that Chinese parents prefer that their kids study STEM degrees. And that is definitely much more obvious that many more Chinese kids are studying math relative to American kids, which I think is a shame. Many more Americans need to be much, much better than the pathetic math capabilities that they presently possess through a lackluster education focused on STEM. I think that should definitely be the case.
So Vivek Ramaswamy was right. Maybe Vivek was right. The issue, I think, is that the slight wrinkle that I would present to you, Kaiser, is I wonder if it is the case that though parents encourage kids to study STEM, they’re not necessarily encouraging the kids to become engineers.
I think the allure of working in tech and consumer internet, especially for one of these big, prestigious firms like
is still much more alluring than working as an engineer. Maybe it is so much more alluring to work in the financial sector rather than in some sort of a technical engineering field, in part because they pay so much better. And so I think the kids are still facing the same tug of incentives that smart kids in the U.S. also feel in being drawn to Silicon Valley as well as Wall Street.
And something else I wonder about, I’m really curious for your take on this, Kaiser. You’ve been spending a little bit more time in China than I have over the last few years. But I was in China in December of 2024. And one of these things that I become really cranky and annoyed by is just how much people are on their phones all the time.
So people are texting other folks over the middle of a dinner. You know, you can see over a hot pot and a hot pot restaurant, many people are just on their phones instead of speaking to their dinner companions. Every trendy cafe shop is better photographed rather than a place to sit and have coffee with other people.
Maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky here, Kaiser. Maybe you can talk me into, you know, being a little bit more sympathetic.
No, you’re only going to hear the same crankiness from me. I mean, it’s something I freaking hate. And I’m also probably guilty of it. I mean, I find myself just having that tug. I mean, I can’t even conceive of taking a subway ride without having my headphones. I’ll walk three blocks back to my apartment if I’ve forgotten my headphones. Yeah, I’m terrible about it. But yeah, this is like the plight of modern homo sapiens. It’s not just a China or America thing. I see it in the States almost just as bad.
But yeah, I mean, I’ve remarked on this before. I used to, you know, you’re standing on the sidelines of a soccer game and you turned another parent of one of your kids’ classmates and you say,
“What are you doing about juniors’ screen time?”
And they’re too busy on their own damn phone to even hear your question. And yeah, it’s a problem.
It’s a problem. I wonder if it might be slightly worse in China because everything has to be turned into a Wang Hong spot and everything has to be photographed as well.
Oh, Christ. Yeah. I mean, I was in Shaxi in Yunnan and it’s becoming that way, you know, because Li Weifei shot a television show called
“Chiou Fung Le Di Phang”
and everyone has to, you know, like have their picture taken where she was and where that scene was shot. Christ.
Maybe let’s check our crankiness and get back to some techno-optimism.
Yeah. You know, actually, I want to dig into history here. I mean, you don’t explore this so much in the book, but I’m sure you’ve given us a lot of thought, which is, you know, the question of what gave rise to the engineering state in China?
I mean, when do we start to see it emerge? Was it a deliberate policy choice or something that just sort of happened? I mean, because this is something I explored quite a bit in my own work as a graduate student I mentioned in the intro and that you so kindly name-checked. I was really inspired to write on this question because by the early nineties, when I was doing this work, it was already, you know, China was already so thoroughly technocratic.
It was already so dominated by engineers. It hadn’t even peaked yet, but already you could see it. I mean, there were already books about this, but like Lee Chung, who’s now at HKU, Lynn White of Princeton, they did a lot of work on, on technocracy. But what struck me was that it had become so technocratic, but somehow it had gone unremarked upon in China itself.
There were foreigners who were looking at this fact and marveling at it, but it was in China itself. It was like, “yeah, of course.”
I wonder if there’s something deeper in China’s history, maybe the imperial civil service examination system, or this, you know, oriental despotism idea of Karl Wittfogel in his hydraulic theory of civilization. You know, he posits that… The technical demands of water management in China created both the opportunity and the necessity for centralized political control. So you have engineers sort of running the state. These were the things that I was exploring and I was wondering what you think about this. What are the historical and maybe cultural roots of the engineering state?
Yeah, I think there are definitely deeper roots in both the engineering state as well as the lawyerly society. That was my next question.
The part of America being very lawyerly, you can read the Declaration of Independence as almost a legal document. So many of the founding fathers were lawyers: first 16 U.S. presidents from Washington to Lincoln—13 of them have been lawyers at some point. And so in the U.S. there is definitely this very obvious legal tradition.
And I think that you can say the same about China as well. I don’t want to take this too literally. I think the work of Karl Wittfogel on oriental hydraulic despotism was a product of the time. He was this strange cold warrior that was trying to discredit the Soviet Union. I don’t refer to Wittfogel at all in my book. But I am definitely a big fan of the work on the clergy system. In particular, Professor Huang Yashun’s book, The Rise and Fall of the East. What is it? Examination.
The Rise and Fall of the East. Examination, autocracy, science and technology. That might be right. We have to fact-check that one. But I think the examination system is very real.
And so I do want to trace a lineage of the engineering state to imperial times. Without being too literal about this, but one might be able to say that imperial China was a proto-engineering state in part because the emperors ordered so many people to build Great Walls or Grand Canals.
So many people died trying to build this canal. The historical records here may be exaggerating some things, but so many people were supposed to have fallen in the course of building this Grand Canal. One might be able to say that the emperors rarely hesitated to almost completely reorder a peasant’s relationship to her land. So there was some social engineering here as well.
Again, I don’t want to be too literal to say that the emperors were straightforwardly engineers, but I think one can trace the sort of lineage because of the state’s management of the imperial exam or the Keji system.
And I think one of these differences I want to trace between the West and China is that I think the Chinese were practicing a source of a sense of absolutism starting from the first Qin dynasty with Qin Shi Huang, in which the state really tried to control quite a lot of things.
This is someone that we label today in China as a despot who buried the scholars and standardized the weights. And so there’s this sense of autocracy stretching back for about 2,000 years now. The Chinese had been practicing absolutism way before the European monarchs ever whiffed this idea in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And so one of my ideas here is that one of the reasons, perhaps, that China did not develop a liberal tradition was that the court administered the exams, which was how one became an intellectual in the first place. And so it becomes really difficult for an intellectual to become a court intellectual by advocating for constraints on the power of the emperor. So mostly all of the mandarins were encouraged to just say,
“How do we govern better? How do we increase the discretion of the sovereign?”
You don’t really get very far by saying,
“Well, what we need is some sort of property rights. What we need is to protect the business people.”
You never really quite had that. And so you didn’t have as vibrant a sense of a liberal intellectual tradition emerging out of China. Rather, that was much more of an absolute sense of trying to increase the power of the sovereign.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you’ve put your finger on it right there. This cooptation of the entire literati class just by making their advancement contingent on their support for a state orthodoxy.
Right. And I think we see parallels to that today in the Communist Party. I actually think that, I mean, I could spend a lot of time talking about this, but that there’s always been this sort of privileging of knowledge elites. And that assumes, of course, that there’s some objective knowledge in the universe against which you can be tested.
So I mean, at all points, there is this sort of a paradigm of what is true. And there is some canonical set of texts. They could be the Confucian classics or they could be, you know, engineering texts. And if you have demonstrable knowledge of that, somehow that qualifies you for office. I mean, that seems to be sort of the common… Thread. Yeah. So something that I, so, you know, the U.S. obsession with process, in its best form, protects the weak, which is really good. But, as we’ve discussed, it can impede the provision of public goods, the building of infrastructure that can really hurt the weak.
So China’s obsession with outcomes often lifts the many, but can screw the few or occasionally, as in the case of the one-child policy and zero COVID, which you talked about, it can screw the many as well.
So I guess the big question is, how do you build or design institutions that kind of somehow bind outcomes to rights? That is, build fast without trampling people. And what are the kinds of small practical reforms that can move either system in that direction?
Maybe we can start with China. What are some ways where these institutions can be bound up more in rights? And then we can move to the U.S. because you’re very hard on U.S. proceduralism. You’re very generous about its civic function, but maybe we could talk a little bit about the reforms that lawyers could champion that would improve build speed without betraying that kind of ethical core.
Yeah. Well, here is where I would give a plug to my friend, Nick Bagley’s work. He is a law professor at the University of Michigan. He has a book that will be coming out that I think is a perfect encapsulation of the problems of the lawyerly society. He doesn’t quite call it that. And he proposes these tangible legal reforms such that:
So that is one of these books that will be coming out sometime next year.
You know, I think there is actually a kind of a simple answer to a lot of construction. It’s not that the U.S. and China are the only countries that are unable to hit the right balance. I think actually a lot of countries have hit the sweet spot in terms of constructing mass transit while protecting the public interest. And so this is most of Europe. This is Japan. And we can just take a look at what these other countries do.
You know, I was just back to the U.S. after spending much of the summer in Europe. My wife and I spent a month in Denmark. Denmark is really highly functional in terms of public transit. You can go down to the subway systems that are completely spotless. They’re cleaner than anything in Shanghai. They’re fully automated and they just work really well. And you don’t even have to buy any tickets or go in any turnstiles. It’s such a high trust society that people know that you will have bought your tickets beforehand.
And so, countries like Denmark, countries like Japan, which has built a lot of high-speed rail, these are not shining exemplars of human rights abuses.
I would say that, you know, we can just take a look at:
They are able to build trains and subways and all sorts of infrastructure at really reasonable costs without having violated a lot of rights. And so it is mostly the Chinese and the Americans that have gotten the balance wrong.
Yeah, that’s a good point. And do you see efforts now on either side to try to learn from these better examples?
I wonder to what extent China is learning better examples of public interest. I think there have been some ways in which China is learning good lessons. I think it is not the case that environmental reviews for high-speed rail, for example, are entirely perfunctory. I think that the builders are actually trying to do their best to mitigate a lot of environmental issues.
What’s just not available in China is endless lawsuits that can delay absolutely everything on purely procedural bases.
And I think the Chinese have also had some examples of protests that achieved the delay or the cancellation of projects. Remember, I think it was in 2020, when folks in some bigger city—may have even been in Shanghai—went onto the streets to protest the construction of a new trash processing site near their home.
Now, maybe that’s nimbyism. Maybe that is misbegotten. But, you know, we do see that there have been some protests of people trying to maintain their neighborhoods and tell what they like. Maybe that’s positive. Maybe that’s negative.
And I think there is definitely this big sense in the U.S., as we mentioned before, that the U.S. has been dysfunctional for the many, and we need to get much better at building housing, mass transit, all sorts of infrastructure to get the country moving again.
Now, for the most part, I would say that the U.S. government now isn’t learning the right lessons from China. Rather, it’s learning most of the bad lessons from China.
Yeah, as you said. So on the topic of learning lessons, you know, the COVID lockdowns… showed the extreme downsides of the engineering state. I mean, a good engineer, a good scientist, presumably learns from mistakes. I think it’s widely accepted that there were a lot of mistakes made during that time.
What lessons do you think China’s leaders themselves drew from the experience?
That’s a great question. And I haven’t given that too much thought. And I wonder whether there is a lot of studies here. Now, how did enforcing these lockdowns really change the leadership’s mind? Now, I wonder whether they have also learned some of the wrong lessons with COVID.
I mean, one of the things that really struck me was that the Shanghai lockdown, locking down 25 million people in 2022 for eight weeks was accomplished through just the normal police systems. You know, you just had the regular police actually enforce COVID lockdowns.
As best as I can tell, no officers of the People’s Armed Police, which is the paramilitary force that wear what looked like army uniforms, were really deployed to try to enforce a lockdown of that magnitude. And they certainly didn’t have to bring out the People’s Liberation Army to try to suppress the desire to be free.
And so I wonder whether the leadership has learned a lesson that actually the coercive internal security apparatus doesn’t have to be so large in order for the people to be pretty obedient about what are really extraordinary controls that no one had expected at that time. That could be a potential lesson there.
Perhaps other lessons have been that the Chinese surveillance state grew very extensively, that people were tracked on their phones all the time for contact tracing purposes. And there were some issues about privacy concerns. But for the most part, people went along with all sorts of these projects.
And I wonder if the Chinese state has just learned that autocracy is actually much more possible. It’s even more possible than they thought. And I’m hopeful that they learn some good lessons out of this as well. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure I can name any, but I’m wondering, what do you think?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that you touched on something that I wanted to ask you about, because you know, a lot of people who believe that, you know, the COVID era biosecurity state that was coming into being — you know, the controls that the health code apps and the checkpoints created — that this was just never going to be set aside once the pandemic passed, that this was going to be a regular feature of life.
They thought that the leadership was going to get so addicted to this level of control that they just never let go of it. But it seems like they have. I mean, the app is gone. The checkpoints, the screenings, they’re all, you know, a thing of the past.
Indeed.
I think that’s a pretty good example of maybe a lesson, if not a lesson learned, at least that they exercise a little bit of restraint. Touch wood.
Right. The question is whether they have very long memories and built up this muscle such that if they ever need to exercise these muscles again, they’re going to be able to roll these things out.
It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the checkpoints, a lot of these apps, and a lot of these COVID testing facilities have been torn down because they became these hated symbols of enforcement. So it could be the case that they took away these highly visible symbols of enforcement, but they have the memory and the muscles to try to bring them back really quickly if necessary.
Yeah, that’s a very good point. I think they certainly have that muscle memory now.
Dan, you write about fortress capabilities, the kind of redundancy, the overcapacity that Western analysts often dismiss or disparage as wasteful. But you actually make the argument in your book, I thought that was a really interesting one, how inefficiency can actually be kind of a source of resilience in China’s system.
How should we be thinking about the trade-off between resilience and efficiency when comparing China’s fortress model with America’s maybe leaner, but possibly more fragile system?
I think one of the things that the pandemic revealed was exactly how fragile a lot of America’s supply chains really were. They were poised for perfection, and it didn’t take much for everything to be ruined.
And there has been this…
Depending on just-in-time delivery and…
Exactly. Just-in-time delivery is something that creates a lot of profitability because you’re reducing your flow of inventory. I think this is also really attributed to Tim Cook of Apple that created these hyper-optimized supply chains. Things were moving around all the time, and so they built very little inventory in order to prepare for shocks.
And I think one of the benefits, mostly a benefit of the engineering state, is that they do build a lot of redundancy. It creates a lot of inefficiency. You can find… There is extreme inefficiency in the Chinese state with the state-owned enterprise sector. There’s just so many redundant jobs. You would just have too many people doing the same things. You have dragging down profitability in all sorts of ways. But that turns out to be really useful in a crisis, that you have the capacity to retool your manufacturing lines in order to build not electronics, but cotton masks, as was the case with JD, Jindong, as well as Foxconn as well.
And so China has a lot of redundancy. China is trying to build up its own oil and gas sector, even though it’s much more costly to tap Chinese gas and oil relative to Russian or American gas or oil because Xi Jinping really treasures energy sovereignty. They’re building a lot more farmland in less than optimal places. I think it is also very striking that as soon as you take the high-speed train out of Beijing or Shanghai, you run into farmland really quickly. And that is because they want to set aside a lot of land for provinces and major municipalities to be food self-sufficient.
And so all of the redundancy involved with manufacturing, all of this overcapacity, there’s also a way to maintain process knowledge that they are constantly training their workers to make sure that their skills don’t go rusty. And I think, again, this is where I think for the most part, China’s engineering state in a lot of economics, you can point to a lot of flaws with debt, with environmental destruction, with all sorts of profitability costs. But there are also some benefits, and these are really revealed during a crisis which you can never predict could emerge.
So Dan, I mean, shame on me. I have not yet finished reading Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance, but I think I get the gist of their argument. It’s interesting to me how little they actually talk about China. But where do your ideas sit in relation to their ideas?
I would want to be a card-carrying member of the Abundance movement. I am slated to speak at the Abundance Conference in Washington, D.C. in the first week of September. So I think I am proximate enough to that.
Now, I think my challenge to Ezra and Derek are to speak a little bit more about China. I think the first parts of the Abundance book, there’s a lot of discussion of how the U.S. isn’t building enough mass transit and infrastructure.
And then the second part of Abundance is talking a little bit more about the scientific failings of the U.S., in which they’re not really taking advantage of being able to scale up and commercialize a lot of American scientific innovations. So China is a good operating model for Abundance. It’s not the best. It is not the most amazing, shining example for the U.S. to follow.
I would love people to ask them whether that was a tactical choice on their part to avoid making the China comparison just to, you know, I mean, because the optics of it aren’t necessarily good. It no longer looks like rah-rah, go America. It erodes some of the, I think, the patriotic oomph that the book otherwise has.
I suspect that what is the case is that, I mean, it’s not only, I mean, it’s not the case that China is avoided entirely. Both Abundance as well as Breakneck talk about California high-speed rail and its awful failings relative to the Beijing-Shanghai line. I suspect what is the case is that Ezra and Derek believe, as I do, that America doesn’t need to become like China in order to build infrastructure. It would be good enough to be like France, Denmark, or Japan.
And so I think we really don’t need to reach the China model. There’s just much better models for the U.S. to reach. And so this is why I say that China is a good operating model of abundance, not the best.
It is good because China has demonstrated that there are virtues to overcapacity, that it is really good to have a hyper-competitive solar sector that is driving prices down, not making a lot of money for investors, but, you know, creating a lot of consumer surplus and building a lot of mass transit for a country that desperately needed it.
There were a lot of costs, but, you know, again, we don’t have to fully copy the Chinese model wholesale in order to get to a better mode of abundance.
You know, you close your book down by emphasizing lived experience, what ordinary citizens feel day to day in terms of dignity, of fairness, of security. I mean, I’ve argued for a long time that Chinese people, like all people, most people at least, anchor their feelings about a given government and its legitimacy, not just in performance, however important that is, but also in whether the state feels to them intuitively morally upright or whether it feels just.
States that emphasize procedural legitimacy obviously tend to foreground this. You know, in China, when you have local corruption, You have arbitrary crackdowns, you have unequal treatment. It can definitely undermine legitimacy, legitimacy on the ground. And when people see the state standing up to bullies or ensuring national dignity, it can bolster this type of legitimacy, which I would love together. You know, it’s this sort of sense of moral uprightness or justice, and that can be domestic or foreign.
How much do you think legitimacy in China actually rests on what I would call the moral dimension, the state, you know, being just or upright and defending dignity? In other words, when you have corruption or arbitrary crackdowns and this stuff eats away at moral standing versus when the state asserts itself against bullies or delivers on fairness, how decisive is that in shaping how people experience the party’s legitimacy day to day?
I ask this because so often there’s this idea that China’s only about performance legitimacy and that somehow an economic downturn or slowdown could deliver a death blow to performance legitimacy. I feel like that’s only a part of the story.
I certainly agree that it has been a persistent fantasy in the U.S. and some parts of the West that China’s political legitimacy depends entirely on economic growth. You’ve seen this narrative come again and again:
I think that is just a silly argument that we see even in 2025. I think that China’s legitimacy is more broadly based than that. I wonder to what extent moral legitimacy, the sort of Confucian virtue, is very much present in China.
I think certainly there is a view that the leadership would try to act as if they are very good Confucians in China. And I wonder to what extent that is actually very effective. Because I think one of the issues I have with China, and it was Professor Huang Yasheng who laid this out very well, is that the state tries to increase a lot of legitimacy in the virtue of the rulers, but they’re not thinking in terms of incentives and constraints and systems that really try to police behavior and induce better governance.
When they reduce things into a matter of morality and virtue, it becomes more about the person rather than about the system. And I think Huang Yasheng has been really good at pointing out how virtue has been a distraction to better governance. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I think that he’s not wrong, that that is a problem. It’s not systematized; that it’s still subject to a lot of kind of patrimonialization. And I think that he’s absolutely right, that if you look at patterns of protest in Chinese history, the way that it is voiced often is in terms of moral failings of leaders rather than particular policies. That is not always a helpful framing when it comes from above or from below. So I tend to agree with him there.
I want to move on though and talk about legitimacy itself. I think there’s this inability among many Americans, and I think you just hinted at it just now, to see beyond procedural legitimacy as the only possible foundation for proper political authority.
I have long believed that this fundamental refusal—it’s not always articulated, but it’s often really present in the American habitus, just in the language that we use—is a big part of the problem when it comes to forming a good understanding of China. It produces a very unhelpful moral framing, and it makes us interpret everything that Beijing does in the most negative possible light.
I think it fuels escalation. It’s not like Beijing is unaware also that there is this kind of assumption of illegitimacy on the American part. I mean, it’s pretty obvious from China’s point of view, and it makes them very defensive. It makes them very anxious. It makes them also assume the worst: that they assume America’s real goal is to destabilize China, which, yeah, they’re not necessarily wrong.
Maybe you’re not.
So my question is, does this appear to you to be changing? Do you think that there is now an appeal to the American public of this idea of performance legitimacy, especially since procedural legitimacy no longer appears in America to deliver the goods when it seems to be so badly eroded? Is there kind of an uptick in appreciation for performance legitimacy?
Because I mean, just to put my cards on the table, I mean, I’ve noticed since January of this year a vibe shift, especially among younger people, in their attitudes toward China. And often it seems to be on the grounds that, hey, look, they deliver the goods.
I think there absolutely is a sense even within the American elite to say, well, we design all of these… Procedures in place in order to ensure some sort of fairness and making sure that the public interest is consulted. And I think there has been a sense even within the Democratic Party that, you know, we take a look at these blue states and blue cities, big cities, which are almost unanimously governed by Democrats. And they don’t seem to be working all that well.
You know, there’s tremendous public disorder in a lot of cities. Mass transit isn’t functioning very well. A lot of politicians are much more interested to govern on social issues rather than delivering economic issues that many families, working-class families care the most about. And I think there is a sense that we can’t just rely on processes in order to deliver the sort of legitimacy that we’re talking about.
I think that that is a very vibrant debate within the left now, that we can’t simply be the lawyerly society anymore. How do we actually deliver the goods? And so this is where, to put my own cards on the table, I am in favor of abundance. I am in favor of Ezra and Derek’s program to create much better cities, show that California and New York are not deeply broken things.
That when voters point to the track record of Democratic mayors as well as governors, there is something real here to be able to say that they’re actually meeting the needs of the people rather than just making sort of statements and performative gestures that don’t actually deliver the goods for anyone.
So in the end, and here, I mean, we’ll kind of wrap up with this, but you know, the engineering mindset can be way too literal, right? And the lawyerly mindset can be way too formal. I guess what I want is some kind of conceptual pluralism. I want like this set of institutional practices that somehow are able to switch frames, you know, to use the right frame in the right moment.
I guess what I’d like to see is somehow that we build the muscle inside China, its one-party state, to build that muscle inside polarized democracies like the one we live in right now, to be able to do that, to be able to be, you know, conceptually plural in that way. And I feel like that’s what your book gets at.
Is that a fair characterization? And what are the ways we can build toward that kind of, you know, conceptual pluralism?
You’re absolutely right, Kaiser. And I’m glad that you picked up on this point, that one of the things I really craved after spending six years in China was some degree of pluralism, that, you know, it wasn’t just one official register speaking above all the rest. That was really eagerly censoring all of these different viewpoints.
And I think I’ve said so many cancelable remarks on this podcast, Kaiser, but let me offer a yet more cancelable remark. I think there is a better profession rather than engineers and lawyers to govern the population, and that is dentists. No, I joke.
I think that the right profession to govern the population, if we had to choose but one, would be something like economists. I think that economists have a sense of procedure, they have a sense of getting things done, and they have a sense of social science, not to engage in really stupid things.
Unfortunately, I think economists are the most reviled academic profession on the planet. They certainly have gotten into a sticky wicket for themselves. But I think one thing that I will always be glad for for economists is that they were the people most actively pushing back against things like policies like the one-child policy.
That was the case in China, in which it was the economist who was the head of Peking University that really pushed back against the one-child policy in earlier formulations in the 1950s. And it was mostly the economic profession in the West that pushed back against the population bomb by Ehrlich.
And so I think that economists are the happy go-between. But I think that economists certainly need to be supplemented by degrees of pluralism on themselves. There should be lawyers in government. Absolutely. There should also be engineers in government rather than the U.S. Senate, which has 47 people who went to law school and one person trained in engineering.
I think there should be some sort of a balance with all of these things. I certainly don’t want to be entirely ruled by humanists. Mao Zedong was many things. He was, I think, primarily a poet. And if you take a look at earlier iterations of the Soviet Union, you had all these fantastic writers around Joseph Stalin. They were such good writers. They were such good literary critics.
And look at what a mess they made. So I don’t want to be governed by poets and literary critics. That sounds like an absolutely terrible paradigm. I think what we need are people who understand social science. And so my nomination is to be ruled by economists.
I’m going to put my vote in for historians. I think they have that sort of… Perspicacity and then that broader frame. And they’re not as paralyzed as economists are. And if we have to go with economists, I’m going to go with the Arthur Krobers over the Michael Pettises to rule us. That’s a better economist, perhaps. I think I, as someone who belongs to an institution called the Hoover History Lab, think that historians would not be so bad either.
Yeah, not so bad at all. Well, Dan, what a fantastically fun and wide-ranging conversation I’ve had. I cannot recommend the book more highly. Make sure that you get out and buy it right away. It comes out on the 26th, on August 26th. I encourage you all to pick up a copy. Above all, it’s a really fun read. It’s full, like I said, of really great turns of phrase. I had a long list of memorable quotes from it that I put together as I was reading it.
Let’s move on now, though, down to the segment I call “Paying It Forward,” where I ask you to name-check a younger colleague, maybe somebody at Hoover. I mean, Hoover was full of villains as far as I can tell, but there’s got to be one person worth name-checking there before we move on to recommendations. So who do you offer “Paying It Forward”?
I will offer two names:
So those are my two names, Afra Wong as well as He Liu. He Liu and I have crossed swords a little bit on Substack. He’s extremely committed to the liberal project when it comes to China, and nothing wrong with that. But like I said, we’ve crossed swords a bit. But great recommendations both. Afra, I’ve seen some of her work as well, and it’s excellent.
What about recommendations, Dan? Do you have a book you’ve read recently that you would like to recommend or anything, film, music, anything at all?
Well, I think over the course of book writing, I really got myself back into the classics, the things that I have really enjoyed. And so I guess I will recommend two sets of things.
The first set are the Mozart’s Italian operas written with Lorenzo da Ponte. These are:
I found myself, over the course of book writing, listening to these highly pleasurable, fun, and inventive operas that I think will stay with me for the rest of my life. So these are the Italian operas by Mozart.
Yeah.
And I think what I will do is also recommend my quartet of favorite novels. I have four novels that I’ve been rereading recently. And so the first one is The Red and the Black by Stendhal, which has these incredible depictions of the mistakes and stupidities that one commits in the act of love. This is a French novel that was published in 1830.
I will also throw in another French novel, the Proust. And so these are really wonderful, intoxicating tales of love that Marcel Proust has created for us. The entire series of In Search of Lost Time.
That’s right. And the Penguin translations are all quite good in English.
A third novel is that everybody is reading Moby Dick this summer.
Yeah. Why is that? Why is everyone reading Moby Dick? I mean, I know that Joe Weisenthal from the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast seems to be leading the charge on this. But I reread Moby Dick about, well, maybe six or seven years ago. Yeah, fantastic novel. But what do you think explains it being such a zeitgeist thing this summer?
It is just like a strange and bizarre marvelous white whale. You never know at which corners of the four seas that Moby Dick will shoot his spout up. And so I think that’s a little bit of a mystery to me. But I am I am a dickhead. And I love the depictions of mesmerizing whale lore.
And my favorite final novel is Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It is just this very fun, inventive, clever book that is a miracle of construction. So I commend it to your listeners.
Operas by Mozart, as well as this quartet of novels. Fantastic. Great, great, great, great.
I have a couple of recommendations. One is by Yun Sun from the Stimson Center. She heads their China practice. It’s in Foreign Affairs. It’s called China is Enjoying Trump 2.0, which I thought did a really good job of sort of channeling Beijing’s perspective on what’s happened in the time since Trump took office now. It’s like seven months now.
It’s really good. She’s always solid. And this is a particularly, I think, Excellent view into the Chinese mind on this. I also want to plug a book I’m reading right now. It’s called Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clarke, who is one of my favorite historians. It’s just an amazing work of history.
Hopefully, you’ve read his earlier book, The Sleepwalkers, which is about the run-up to the First World War, which I also highly recommend. I’ve actually recommended it before on Seneca.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a working historian who has all the things that Clarke brings to the table, which is just an obvious facility in so many languages and this ability to just zoom in. Because the revolutions of 1848, which is what Revolutionary Spring is about, these happen all over Europe and at the same time.
So if you’ve got to write a book on this, you need to be able to:
And the other thing, of course, is that Clarke is just a brilliant, brilliant writer. His prose is just delicious.
I think it’s such a good book. It’s a really hardcore history. I mean, it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s more detail than I think a lot of people are used to, and it’s just great. So that and Sleepwalkers—my recommendations.
Dan, once again, thank you so much for taking so much time to talk to me. And happy birthday.
“Thank you.”
What is it? Happy birthday.
“It is my 33rd birthday.”
What is three? Is that an auspicious number?
“I’m not sure.”
Well, it’s half of 66, which is an auspicious number.
“Okay, that’s good.”
Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. And congrats on the book, which is, again, just so terrific. It’s been a total delight.
“Thank you again, Kaiser.”
Looking forward to seeing you again.
You’ve been listening to The Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at www.sinecapodcast.com, where there is a terrific offering of original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Huge thanks to my guest, Dan Wong.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Bye.
2026-02-03 08:00:01
Why the Belt and Road Is Back in a Big Way
The China Global South podcast is supported in part by our subscribers and Patreon supporters. If you’d like to join a global community of readers for daily news and exclusive analysis about Chinese engagement in Asia, Africa, and throughout the developing world, go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com/subscribe.
Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to get an update on the state of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Now, for the past several years, we’ve been hearing that the BRI is spent. The Chinese have run out of money and Global South countries that were the destination for so much of that investment simply can’t afford to take on more debt. And even the Chinese themselves have tried to change the narrative to make way for what was supposed to be a new, more austere era. Remember all of that talk about small yet beautiful? In Chinese, it’s called Xiao Er Mei (小而美). That was the line that they told everyone about smaller, more affordable, less risky BRI projects around the world.
Well, the data tells a very different story. BRI engagements last year actually reached an all-time high of more than $200 billion. Construction projects increased by 81% and investments surged by 61% compared to 2024. Energy engagements, especially in the fossil fuel sector, were very, very hot in 2025. And while the U.S. may have soured on Africa, Chinese investors haven’t. The continent was the top destination for BRI engagements anywhere in the world last year.
All of this comes from a new report published by the Green Belt and Road Center at Fudan University in Shanghai and Griffith University in Australia. Our old friend, Christophe Nedepil, is the man in charge of the project and joins us today from his office at Griffith University.
Good morning, Christophe, and welcome back to the show.
“Good morning to you, Eric. Great to be here and good to see you.”
It’s wonderful to see you and to get these surprising numbers because, again, we had heard that the BRI was all but done. Even the Chinese themselves were trying to brace us for a much more austere era. Your data says otherwise. What do you explain for this big surge of construction and investment by Chinese stakeholders?
“Yeah, I think that was a very big surprise already. When we were tracking the data, this level of commitment that we’ve seen in 2025, it’s something that we hadn’t expected and obviously hadn’t seen before.”
We’re at levels of BRI engagement and engagement, again, there’s construction contracts and investments—construction contracts where Chinese construction companies, like particularly state-owned enterprises, take the lead in implementing a large project. And investments are much more where the Chinese are investing their own money through equity investments, so they take ownership.
Now, these levels are more than double from the COVID years. So it is quite impressive. And you mentioned the energy engagement over $90 billion, and that over $90 billion is more than we’ve seen. Just kind of only the energy engagement is higher than we’ve seen during the COVID years. So this level of engagement is really something that is quite surprising to us.
I think there are a couple of explanations, of course. In the COVID years, 2020, 2021, and 2022, there was this whole idea of Xiao Armei, like small, yet beautiful, which was, I think, very logical. There was a lot of global risks. It was difficult to make deals. It was difficult to travel. And so the projects overall, the project volume decreased.
And now, really, this uptake in a still very volatile world, but with massive deals, scales more than $10 billion for single engagements.
So I think the largest one, also outside the BRI, is $37 billion by TikTok in Brazil. But we’re also tracking outside BRI. So we’re not just tracking BRI. We’re reporting on BRI, but in all the massive engagements:
And this $10+ billion engagement, we’ve not seen before. This is a new level of BRI engagement that I think is quite interesting to observe, and we’ll see whether that continues over the years to come.
So a lot of us were surprised, not only because of the size of the numbers but also the timing of it. Coming in 2025, when Donald Trump comes back into power, the international system goes into disarray, is there any connection that you can see in the data between the events that have been happening, say, within the new Trump era—that is the disruptions? Do they see an opportunity to move as the United States is pulling back from the world? Or are these just more coincidental in terms of the timing?
“I think there’s both. These projects take a while, particularly large-scale projects, take a while to negotiate.” This is not something that the Chinese are able to do with their partner countries in months. This is usually maybe a year in the making. So not everything that we have seen in 2025 was agreed to in 2025.
Now, what we know, of course, that over the last years, and this is not just the Trump era, this is also Obama era. And there was supply chain diversification, supply chain de-risking, with manufacturing plants being constructed in countries outside of China in order to reduce the tariff burdens from exporting directly from China, so rather exporting from other countries.
And there, of course, then came Liberation Day in April 2025, and with the massive increase of tariffs around the world to the U.S. And again, some of the Chinese companies have actually reacted quite quickly and also, for example, scrapped investment decisions for manufacturing from Vietnam and brought them to Morocco or other countries that have lower tariffs. So there’s still a lot of movement around in terms of the investment decisions, and that is also driven, of course, by geopolitics.
Let’s go back to energy. You mentioned that that was one of the major investment surges of last year. In fact, it was the highest of any period since the BRI’s inception at $94 billion, more than double what it was the previous year back in 2024. Give us the profile of these energy investments, because we had heard that the surge in Chinese investment overseas was in solar panels and new energy. But it seems to get these numbers at $94 billion, you’re going to have some of the older energy modes in there as well. Tell us a little bit about what happened in the energy sector.
Yeah, so I think kind of one of the quotes that have been picked up, it’s like
“2025 was the dirtiest and the greenest year in terms of energy engagement.”
And that’s true in absolute terms. So the overall engagement, as you said, increased quite a bit. It is particularly driven by oil and gas related engagement. These, for example, in Nigeria, the gas energy industrial park, there are a number of other fossil fuel engagements across the region.
So fossil fuel engagement actually has taken by far the majority, I think 75% of the total engagement is related to fossil fuel. And that’s a very high emitting energy engagement. And this is, so I remember in 2020, we celebrated that green energy or renewable energy has broken the 50% mark of the total energy engagement. And we’ve been backsliding since then in terms of the share. So that’s a worrying trend in some ways, particularly if we want to talk about a green Belt and Road Initiative and China’s green engagement.
Now, at the same time, the green energy engagement also increased to record levels. So that’s why we can also say it’s been the greenest year. And so that’s particularly in solar construction, but also in solar and wind construction, as well as in battery storage. As a broader kind of engagement portfolio that the Chinese have compared to previous years.
What’s important to note here, and I think we’ve also discussed this previously, Eric, is that we’re not looking at exports. So China’s green energy-related exports, solar panels and wind, whatever Pakistan, for example, imports 19 gigawatt of rooftop solar, this is not captured in the data. But because this is just pure export, we’re not capturing export. We’re capturing construction engagement and investment. And again, in the export space, China’s green-related exports, of course, are also increasing. And there’s great other reports out there that look at that.
Do you get a sense that in the fossil fuel sector the Chinese are building infrastructure and connectivity for exports from other countries to China? Or is this building coal, gas and oil infrastructure for these countries to use themselves or a mix of both? How does that break down?
So we don’t know exactly what it is used for each single project. What we see is that a lot of the fossil fuel engagement is indeed through construction contracts. So where Chinese construction companies just have a very strong expertise in
where Chinese companies potentially, either through a government-to-government contract or even through open bidding, have offered the most competitive price and therefore get chosen to lead this implementation.
And it might come with some Chinese financing, but it also might just come with local financing. What’s interesting for the Chinese construction companies is that a lot of these projects are very well-financed because you have the fossil fuel that in the end generates revenue. So you can be pretty sure that you’re going to get paid back for the construction that you do. And that’s different, for example, probably we’re going to talk about it in road infrastructure, which is public infrastructure, where there’s not such a strong revenue model. And therefore, the risks for the Chinese construction companies are much higher.
Again, fossil fuel, very clear. You’re going to sell the fossil fuel. You’re going to make money. And then you can pay back the Chinese construction companies. And so it’s a very lucrative business also for the Chinese.
That seems to be one of the trends that you’ve been following over several years now: the types of infrastructure that the Chinese are financing and building that used to be railroads, roads, things that we would call public goods, are less prominent today as opposed to telecommunications networks, fossil fuels — things that the moment you turn on, revenue starts coming in.
So that debt sustainability issue becomes paramount in what the Chinese are funding because, obviously, a lot of the countries where they’re doing these activities are having debt issues. So they’re looking for projects that are revenue generating right from the start. Is that a fair assessment?
I think that’s a very fair assessment.
So in 2019, the Chinese published the debt sustainability guidelines. That means for companies to evaluate whether they’re going to give a loan or work with a country to build an infrastructure project and look at the country’s profile, whether they are able to pay back the debt and whether they’re actually exacerbating the debt issues of that country.
Since 2019, this debt sustainability framework exists, and so that was before COVID. Then we saw during COVID that a lot of the global South countries were subject to a lot of sovereign debt issues. That impacts Chinese construction companies quite severely because, in the end, it’s the construction companies, if they took out loans for building, let’s say, a coal-fired power plant or a road project, and whatever country — Pakistan, for example — does not pay back the loan or does not pay back the loan in time, who’s going to be paying the loan?
And in the end, it is actually often the construction companies that have to shoulder some of the banks necessarily, but it’s the construction companies that have to shoulder the risk.
So there’s a very clear risk management necessity to understand:
I was surprised that Africa turned out to be the top destination last year for BRI engagement, $61.2 billion, an increase of 283%, largely by this big project in Nigeria that you referenced, $24.6 billion.
Just to be clear, is that project in Nigeria:
Because sometimes it’s not clear.
It is so true, Eric. So we are trying our best in our data to distinguish project-level commitments. I think every database is running into the same issues. We don’t track money. We track announcements of projects by two independent sources where possible, or a stock market announcement. So we try to be as rigorous with our methodology as possible.
There are different levels of commitments that we track. This one is, I think, more than an MOU. It’s agreed. We have the location. We have the amount. We have both sides’ agreement.
In the end, I believe this project will change and will evolve. It’s not kind of… The design phase is definitely not finished from what we can see. So there’s a lot more work that needs to come to make this project actually real. But the commitment is quite explicit from both sides and confirmed. And so that’s why we were willing to include it in the database.
Yeah, the report also said that part of the reason for this surge in Chinese engagement in Africa was because of potentially, again, just a theory, because of the lower U.S. tariffs that African countries received traditionally through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is now in the process of being renewed through Congress.
By the way, something very interesting on the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
But you said that there might be some connection between lower U.S. tariffs and the surge of Chinese BRI engagement. Tell us a little bit more about that. If a Chinese company wants to export to the U.S. and is in the process of making an investment decision, the logic is, of course, that the Chinese company will look at countries that have a tax regime that is favorable or a tariff regime that is favorable to them to be competitive against other competitors. It might be sitting in a country with a high tariff regime. So these investment decisions are just normal. I don’t think that any country or any company would not make those.
What’s interesting with the Chinese, and I think there’s an upside and a downside to that, is that China’s speed, making quick decisions, being able to build factories very quickly, and to churn out the products very quickly, is an opportunity, I think, also for host countries, for BRI countries, to attract specific types of investment.
The downside is that, and the downside is that, once the regime changes, and maybe there’s some issues, and maybe another opportunity for the same Chinese company, there’s also a risk that the facility will be abandoned very quickly.
Now, early on in the BRI, back in the 2013-2014 era, it was a lot of Chinese state-owned enterprises backed by Chinese policy bank loans that were going out and doing these big deals, these huge projects. We saw that run-up of lending that peaked in 2016, and that’s gone down. And the Chinese private sector back then played a secondary role.
Over the past couple of years, as we’ve talked to you, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that
Are you seeing that in the data for 2025 as well?
Yeah, so definitely for the investment side, it’s mostly private companies that are leading the fray, and it’s interestingly also a lot of these new tech companies that are both in kind of the IT tech, like TikTok and Alibaba, as well as in the green tech space, like Jinko Solar and other green tech companies that are leading the way.
These are private companies that are interested in:
- being closer to their customers
- diversifying their supply chains
- de-risking their supply chains
- going abroad
And that’s also now the capacity, management capacity, and technological leadership to be actually a really, really attractive partner in host countries to set up factories.
And that’s not just in BRI countries, that’s also in a lot of developed countries, and those are trying to attract battery manufacturers from China, because this is state-of-the-art technology, very different from the early phases of the BRI, where such technological leadership just did not exist.
From that perspective, I’m always very, very impressed, and I think the rapid emergence of these technological leaders in China over the past couple of years has very much flipped kind of our logic, what type of investment we want to attract.
It was at the beginning, of course, the Chinese wanted to attract Western technology, and now it is often the case that everybody wants to, particularly in the green space, attract the Chinese technological leaders to set up shop.
In the construction engagement, it’s still a lot of state-owned enterprises that are very engaged abroad. So, these are real leaders in driving these construction engagements.
What’s, I think, also clear is that state-owned enterprises have a different mandate, particularly of spending their own money. Now, construction engagement really brings them in money. That’s just revenue. You’re a service provider.
For investment, you have to, of course, use your own money, and Chinese state-owned enterprises might have a mandate to also invest domestically to create jobs. And it also, kind of, their financing modalities are quite different. Their approval processes are quite different from private companies. And so, their ability to invest abroad has also changed over the last year.
So, that’s, I think, why we’re also seeing less state-owned enterprise investments compared to the previous years.
As we look forward to 2026, which obviously is now underway, some of the trends that we should watch out for are probably:
And mining is something we didn’t talk about, but that was one of the areas that was also showing a lot of activity.
Do you expect Africa to continue to be a main focus, or will the Chinese look elsewhere to spread out some of those investments?
Man, that’s always the golden question, looking into the future. Obviously, we don’t know. I always start with that.
The trends that we’ve seen over the last years, I think, can continue. So, I think we’ll see even more tech-related engagement.
And we’ve seen this tech-related engagement, not just in developed countries, but really in emerging economies. I believe that this will continue. There are a lot of opportunities for the Chinese to set up shop. There is a lot more capacity for the Chinese in the management skills to do so, to manage all the local staff. So, I think this is really a learning. And therefore, I think this trend will continue.
In terms of the mining, there’s a very clear engagement across the world to kind of own more mines, to kind of also use this accelerated need for a lot of the transition minerals to utilize on this trend. And it’s not just the Chinese. It’s also, of course, the Australians and other countries that are trying to get their mines and their processing in order.
In terms of regional engagement, there will be a lot of kind of up and down. So, I always believe that kind of one year does not give a trend. And so, this year, of course, we saw a lot of Africa engagement. In the previous year, we often saw a lot of Southeast Asia engagement.
I think the only one that has been very constant over the last years is actually the Middle East, where there has been just a very strong engagement across a number of different sectors. It includes:
So, I think this Middle East engagement has been very strong. Also, in countries that are often not seeing a lot of Western engagement, it includes Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Chinese had some good engagement.
Again, Africa, Southeast Asia, I think this is always kind of up and down. I’m not able to see a very clear trend where it will go over the next year.
Okay. The report is the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025. It is by far the most authoritative report on the trends related to the BRI, where the money is going, what they’re doing with it, and who is actually engaged.
It was prepared by Christoph Nedepil, who is the director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Australia, and the acting director of the Green Finance and Development Center that’s part of the School of Finance at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Thank you so much, Christoph, for letting us know about everything that’s going on. We’re looking forward to talking to you later in the year to get an update on how things are going in the first half.
You do these reports every, I think, two or three times a year, correct?
“Every six months.”
“Every six months.”
So we’ll talk to you over the summer to get an update on how the first half of 2026 is going.
Thank you so much for joining us.
“What a pleasure to be here again, Eric.”
“Always a pleasure to see you.”
Thank you, Christoph, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today.
We’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South Podcast on behalf of everyone around the world at the China Global South Project.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
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2026-01-25 08:00:01
075 失控的移民执法如何撕裂美国 When Federal Agents Kill American Citizens
So, let’s go. 大家好,欢迎收听美了美奂, The American Roulette,一档深入探讨当今美国政治的中文播客,我是小花。
大家好,我是Lokin。 大家好,我是王浩兰。
这期我们也想聊一个最受关注的话题,也是我们在上一期提到可能会定义特朗普第二任期成败的一个话题,也就是现在在明尼苏达州以及甚至全国范围内沸沸扬扬的这个移民执法问题。
这一期我们也请来了另外一位嘉宾,小萧。 大家好,我是小萧,我在纽约也做律师。我从事破产法业务。
对,这一期我们决定录一期节目的契机是在1月7号上午的时候,在明尼苏达州发生的这个Renee Good杀人案。 有一位37岁的美国公民Renee Nicole Good是被ICE特工Jonathan Ross给枪杀了。
这个事情起因经过和结果,相信大家目前在社交媒体上在网络上看到的视频和分析已经足够多了,所以我们在这里也不想太过展开去分析这个事件本身。
在我们录制节目的当天呢,也就是1月24日这一天，发生了另外一起也是同样的ICE枪杀事件。 这个是有另外一名37岁的明尼阿波利斯的居民,是一名美国公民,他的名字是Alex Prattie,他是一名护士，在今天早上的时候在明尼阿波利斯被一名联邦特工，据信是这个Border Patrol（边境执法队）的一名人员给枪杀了。
当时呢是有多名特工把他按在人性道上,有一名特工用物体击打他，随后就听到了第一声枪响，大概5秒钟的时间内连开了10枪，这名男子也当场被宣布死亡。
短短这两周的时间内就发生了至少两起这样导致美国公民死亡的移民执法冲突。
我们可以想象，接下来这个事件引发的波澜肯定会越来越大，所以我们也会继续关注这个情况。
不过在这一期节目当中，我们也是想借着这个机会聊一下现在所谓的移民危机是怎么来的，以及接下来还会发生什么。
我可以说一下这次事件的最初的一个起因吧，这个起因应该算是所谓的明尼苏达发生的关于一些欺诈的丑闻。
其实这个事件可以分成两起不同的指控，
当时有数十人被指控在新冠疫情期间通过一个叫做Feeding Our Future的非盈利组织虚假申报，为贫困儿童提供餐食，骗取州政府资金。
被告绝大多数是索马里裔，但这个组织的领导人其实不是索马里人，当时已有37名被告认罪。这个案件后来成为了特朗普攻击民尼苏达索马里社区的素材。
他指责这些索马里裔或者当地的索马里移民，指责他们在掠夺国家，撕裂这个曾经伟大的州。
但是这个事件最近发酵是因为2025年12月26日，有一名保守派YouTuber叫做Nick Shirley发布了一个视频，说当地索马里人在经营的日托中心利用联邦资金进行欺诈。
他号称自己进入了明尼阿波利斯的日托中心卧底，假装给孩子报名。
这个视频发布后在保守派中迅速传播，YouTube和各大平台上播放数百万甚至上千万次，像Elon Musk、副总统万斯也进行了推广和转发。
可以说这个视频实际上没有提供任何证据支持其指控，反而是把各种无关的东西逻辑混淆在一起。
而且当时保守派提出来的一个指控是说这个事件没有任何主流媒体报道。实际上，正如我们刚才提到的那个真实刑事案件，主流媒体在一两年前已经进行了大量报道。
不过，这个事件也引发了真实政治后果：
我觉得这里还挺值得补充的，是关于这个索马里裔移民社区在明尼苏达州的情况。
明尼苏达州是一个典型的中西部，白人比例非常高的州，也是一个非常蓝、偏民主党的州。它的投票行为规律一直如此，受到的关注程度也比较高。
但是因为一些历史原因，有一些特定的移民社群聚居在一些我们第一印象不会想到的地方。
比如我们都知道纽约和加州移民很多，但是明尼苏达州也有很多东南亚，比如苗族、越南裔的移民。各种历史原因造成特定族裔移民聚居在明尼苏达或其他特定州。
明尼苏达州就有数万名索马里裔移民，以及其中很多已经成为美国公民或孩子从出生起就是美国公民。
当年2020年疫情期间，政府推出了大量救济政策，
- 现金支票发放
- 加强失业保险
- 给小企业主发放不需偿还的贷款
- 其他各种措施
当然，这非常紧急，必须快速发放资金，也造成了许多欺诈空间。很多人钻空子，索马里裔社区中就有部分欺诈行为。
去年12月，特朗普总统特别关注了这一欺诈问题，可以说是毫无限制地对整个社区数万名移民进行了攻击，认为他们来自一个”非常糟糕的国家”，并声称”他们都应该回去”。
这些言论很多人都觉得极具人身攻击性，似乎更上一层楼。
但从另一个角度看，值得补充的是，很多分析认为2020年在明尼苏达发生的乔治·弗洛伊德事件–白人警察枪杀已经被控制的黑人乔治·弗洛伊德–引发了明尼苏达及全国范围内大规模抗议。
这使得对某些欺诈的执法资源被分散，执法经历有限。
执法机关在混乱中不得不选择：是用资源打击某些欺诈行为，还是做其他执法工作。
所有这些因素导致了一些欺诈被有意或无意忽视，追责迟缓且无力。
这是一个非常微妙又高度敏感的争议焦点。
所以整体看，这一局势中的欺诈问题十分复杂：
这是一个很大、复杂的问题。
但是从12月起特朗普针对该欺诈问题的关照，引爆了后续争议。
对，明尼苏达州不能说是特别蓝的州，只能说自1972年以来从未投给过共和党总统，所以大家觉得它很蓝。
但实际上你看其政治历史及政治地理，本世纪以来民主党虽然每次都赢，但唯一一次08年赢幅超过10个百分点，其他都是2%到5%。
主要是因为哈里斯搭档是明尼苏达州州长沃尔茨，如果没有他，哈里斯可能都输。
这个地方非常特殊，可能因为其政治重要性，共和党一直认为这是可以突破的重点。
所以被特朗普和共和党重点关注也并不奇怪。
可以说说美国右派对索马里欺诈事件的反应。
从规模看，几十亿美元的欺诈很大。
但实际上，如果你生活在纽约，面对金融诈骗、证券欺诈，这些每天都发生。
我生活在纽约，接触的多是金融行业的白人男性。
他们对索马里欺诈非常愤怒，极力支持特朗普的强硬打击。
而左派、尤其是精英阶层，对金融诈骗却鲜少表达愤怒。
这表明他们的愤怒和支持，部分出自嫌恶这些犯罪主体是少数族裔、移民。
这是我个人观察到的一个现象。
而且现在发生的事件引发的社会波澜，其实和欺诈案本身关联不大。
无论是社会撕裂，还是明尼苏达社区破坏，与欺诈案的联系其实并不明显。
我们在上一期节目也提到，特朗普这一届移民执法力度和策略明显区别于之前。
提到一个数据，特朗普第一年驱逐总数约54万，
整体数字比拜登最后一年稍低，但境内驱逐人数远超拜登四年总和。
这些被驱逐的人很多已经深度融入当地社区，无论是明尼苏达、加州还是全国其他社区。
被联邦特工抓走，对社区的影响很大，视觉和心理冲击都很强烈。
这也是为何特朗普政府的执法造成如此大波澜的原因之一。
我觉得有必要把话说清楚。
我们节目每次讨论无证移民话题，评论区都会有争议。
我以前也回复过，这里我还是那句话：
英语里面有两个词
比较自由派活动家、学术人士、政客一般使用undocumented immigrants描述目前美国那些无合法身份的移民，而不使用illegal immigrants或简称illegal，因为那样形容人非常带有贬低和歧视。
人本身不存在合法与非法之说，非法指的是移民行为是否符合法律规定。
用”非法”形容人，不符道德规范，非常带有鄙视意味。
最核心的道德问题是，大家能否接受社会中有”黑户”存在？
我不能替观众朋友回答这个问题。
这是一个极其见仁见智的问题：
你是否能接受生活的社会中，有些人注定是黑户，甚至一生下来就是黑户？ 或者是就是更有可能是比如说从很小，就以非法方式进入美国，是跟着他的父母或者跟着其他人进入美国，然后他就几十年来都是黑户，这样的一种生活状态。
你是否能从道德上觉得这样是否是合理的，或者是道德上可以容忍和接受的，我觉得其实他的核心问题是这个。
然后包括就是我们后面也要说关于这个无证移民被遣返的人，比如说有多少是有犯罪记录的这个问题，这个我觉得也挺值得把话提前就说清楚的。
很多人都觉得这个“你入境的时候就违法了呀，那怎么会还需要问你有没有违法犯罪记录？” 那这个一般来说我们就认为就是说他入境的时候可能就是只是翻过一道墙，或者是在这个围墙这个编辑墙上面找了一个空，他就钻进来了对吧。
但是他有没有其他的一些实质性的这种，比如说暴力犯罪记录，或者是对于在美国的其他的居民造成财产或者人身伤害的这样的一种违法或者犯罪行为，而不是说本身他进入美国这件事情是违法的，他就是不是应该永远都顶着罪犯这样的一个标签去生活。
当然了，就是从二战以后，国际上建立了这个难民庇护申请的法律框架，也是这样的。
那么在美国的这个庇护的框架当中，如果你是以非法方式进入美国，这件事情不能成为美国政府决定是否给予你庇护的原因。
这个其实说白了这个道理非常简单，因为那二战的时候有很多犹太人，他们就是以非法方式进入美国，然后他们才捡回一条命，他们才有机会能够生存下来。
否则的话，他们在纳粹德国的迫害之下，就根本就没有任何生存下去的指望了。
所以说有这样的一个非常深远的，非常沉痛的历史教训在这里，才使得当今的法律框架是这样的。
所以说对于一个人的状态，这个人他是否是非法还是合法，是无证还是有证，跟他移民的方式是非法还是合法，然后以及这个人进入美国的方式是违法的，是不是就意味着他是一个罪犯，或者说应该被贴上一个罪犯的标签，或者说他的其他的有没有违法犯罪记录，这件事就不重要。
我觉得我想把这个话给说清楚，然后把这个判断的权利交给我们的听众朋友们。
但是我想把这个框架给大家搭成，我觉得Lokin说的这句话非常好，就是他给了一个法理上的和道德上的一个框架。
对于听众朋友可能有帮助的是，可以把如何阅读新闻这方面的新闻，或者理解这方面的数据，做一个比较简单的介绍。
就是移民执法其实是一个相对复杂的过程。
比如说移民从进入美国的边境，不管是合法进入还是非法的进入，ICE或者是美国的执法部门，在对于这些移民进行执法的时候，其实有几步的：
调查步骤：到底这些移民或者这些非美国公民，他们到底是不是合法的进来的，有没有做任何可以遣返他们的非法的事情。
逮捕
拘押
遣返
这三个数字是经常被拿来混淆的。
所以在阅读各种各样的数据的时候，要脑子里提这根弦。
比如说ICE在去年年底时，通过它最保守的数据，大概能够看出ICE在特朗普上任之后，大概遣返了30多万人。
30多万人这个数字差的不是特别大，就是它的统计口径不太一样，所以导致有数据上的区别。
但是国土安全部说，在特朗普第一年，遣返了60万人以上。
这30多万人和60万人左右的数据各种专家去查，他们是没有办法把这个数据配平。
其实现在特朗普政府有大量混淆是非的行为在出现，从数据报道的角度上来说。
还有一个可以说的是，既然数据上并不清晰，现在对于移民被遣返的执法行为更多的我觉得是一种政治美学，是一种政治宣传。
比如说如果你在X或者推特上，白宫、国土安全部其他机构经常在社交媒体会放出抓捕画面，而是很残忍的这种，包括老人孩子抓捕起来的画面。
你能看到各种各样的像战报一样的宣传，甚至成为一种日常内容。
这个甚至成为了特朗普第二任期合法性来源的一部分。
刚才Lokin和小肖可能都提到了：
这个在ICE收押这些人当中，有很多人其实没有任何犯罪定罪。
如果说只有暴力犯罪的话，那数量就更少了。
所以现在看到的是在特朗普任期当中，对于这些没有刑事犯罪的人的拘留的数字有极大幅度增长。
看到一个统计口径，是Kato研究所，一个自由智商主义的智库，统计的是：
飞行是犯罪的被拘留者数量增长，和拜登任期比起来有百分之两千以上。
所以给大家带来了很大的恐惧感。
因为即便是你没有任何犯罪，不管是合法的移民，或者甚至是一些美国公民都有可能被收押，被ICE关押起来。
这个在不少新闻上也看到过。
另外一个也可以讲的是，在ICE或者特朗普的移民执法团队当中，也存在了很多张力或者内部矛盾。
一个是ICE，另一个是Border Patrol（边境巡逻队）。
他们过去来说，在执法上的策略有相当大不同。
对于ICE来说，传统方式更有针对性的执法行动，可能抓捕一个人前需要很多小时甚至很多天的监控和规划，优先逮捕有犯罪记录的人，相对遵守法律程序。
但是Border Patrol可能采取更狂野的西部牛仔风格，街头巡逻，现场判断，有时根据外貌、口音、工作地点、收入、工作性质，当场逮捕。
过去一年发生一件事，Border Patrol在移民执法强度政策上起到更大作用。
之前即便是特朗普政府这些人员，有一些ICE高层对特朗普设定的每天抓捕3000人目标不满，觉得无法达成。
即便现在每天抓捕有1000多人，但去年发生了很多ICE高层被撤换或调离。
接替他们的人更多来自Border Patrol。
所以现在过去几个月的移民冲突，很多和Border Patrol的执法强度及风格有关系。
ICE本身是殖民执法机关，自2017年以来就没有过参议院正式批准的局长，全是临时工或者长期主持工作的副书记，非常常态化。
这也说明参议院或整个美国政坛两党对如何处理现在的移民执法存在很大争议。
当然，共和党自己觉得方式非常好，通过了大规模方式给ICE增加了大量资金支持和新的法律框架，给他们工具，可以放开手脚猛干，特别是在斯蒂芬·米勒指导下，说一天抓捕3000人，但目标实现很困难。
虽然已经使出了浑身解数，问题可能还有距离。
他们今年还准备再多招一万名专门ICE雇员，现在人数约两万多，增加近一半。
所以如果ICE今年进一步强化，明年可能动作更大。
不过最近这些事情引发很多社会反响。
毕竟民众对如何处理非法移民问题有很多想法。
特朗普和共和党常煽动政策，强调有犯罪记录的帮派人员需要遣返，这没人反对。
但问题在于，实际上在抓非法移民过程中，没有几个是这种犯罪人。
所以这是最后一个核心问题：
想让你干什么，你确实去干了
结果效果不好，美国民众不买单
这在政治周期中常见，会有反弹。
这也是为什么说移民执法很可能是特朗普第二任期非常关键的事情，决定他国内方面成败的另一大核心话题，除了经济之外。
因为没别的政策，就两个事：
经济
移民
而且从立法角度，已经超过十三四年没通过重要的移民法案。
应该说三十多年没有重要法案。
我想说的是2013年其实有过一次接近尝试：
当时是现在的参议院少数派领袖等八人帮的尝试，非常接近，参议院通过，但众议院没通过，是上一次较接近的综合性移民法案，之后没类似成果。
其实2023年我们聊过一次，两党谈的版本算不错，但特朗不同意没通过，主要是打补丁。
对包括我们听众如华裔移民影响微乎其微，比如只是给H1B配偶或子女H4身份过期做微小调整，不及当年八人帮尝试的全面改革。
随着时间推移，移民改革的政治意愿完全消失，尤其是2025年特朗普第二任期开始后，极多问题无人解决。
我个人感觉即便两党都有政治意愿支持有证移民改革，或者有政治资本推动时，两党之间在移民问题的拉扯像是：
你想要这个，我也想要这个
但我们不是达成统一共识共同通过
而是互相谈判，互相要价
导致既有证移民改革，也涉无证移民的包裹难以达成。
他们对有证移民处理部分认同，但对无证移民极强烈不认同，最终没有一致，甚至有证移民改革也过不了。
其实我们应该记得历史大框架：
上一次对无证移民大规模特赦（直接发绿卡），是在里根总统时期。
特赦是指：
在美国一定年限生活
无其他违法犯罪记录
直接发绿卡。
所以这个是必须反复提醒的重点。 这个关于移民的这样的一个话语框架，在美国这几十年来的变化，以及他的这个经历的历程到底是怎么样的，然后还有一个值得提的，包括我最近又看到一些讨论在说，关于移民这样的一个问题，能不能，就是自由派能不能和这个宗教机构，尤其是这个天主教教会达成一个新的联盟。
因为包括这个天主教教会也选出了新的这个比较轻移民的这样一位美国出身的教皇，对吧，这个事情我觉得也是比较有意思，因为也是值得提醒大家，这个八十年代最开始有所谓的这个sanctuary city，就是庇护城市或者避难城市这样的一个概念。
就是说我们作为一个城市或者是作为一个州或者是作为一个镇子，我们是不和联邦移民执法机关合作的。我们不会说是帮助联邦的这个移民执法机关去抓这个无证移民，我们是一个提供对移民的庇护和避难城市。
那像这样的一个概念，最开始其实就是八十年代的跟教会有关的一些社群领袖、政治人物，他们去推动提出的这样的一个概念。因为实际上天主要教会在教义上是同情、怜悯以及支持向难民移民这样的社会弱势群体的。
就是其实你说这么多，然后讲的应该就是说在短期内可能是看不到一个解决方案，但是在长期来看，如果这个选民联盟或者政治联盟有些改变的话，那接下来还是可以稍微期待一下的吗？
那你都期待四十年了。对我是如果是这样说的话，那是以四十年为单位我是乐观的。
那你现在其实有退步啊，比如说你右派内部其实都有关于H1B签证的这种大讨论，特朗普可能本身对于这个议题还比较亲移民，对吧？因为他认识到你要招比较优移民的这种科技方面的研究人员也好，开发人员也好，你确实需要不停地去开放H1B，或者你至少保护H1B移民的这个项目。
但一个比较大的问题就是你可以看现在特朗普这个白宫内部也好，或者说特朗普所代表的美国新右翼比较强烈的反移民的人里面会说，连H1B这样子你从美国的高科技公司都很欢迎的这个项目，他们可能都不会愿意有。
这样一个发展下去的话，可能是一个最终会有一个比较大的退步。
对，这个其实还是我们可能以后还需要做更多节目来讨论特朗普内部对移民的态度。其实之前也讲过，对于H1B或者说这种所谓的高技术移民的态度，特朗普这个保守派阵营里面其实也有很多不同的想法，而且他们想法也是在变的。
包括像之前特朗普政府也在这个H1B的申请费上尝试做出一些改动，也实际上也真真真真真影响到了不少人。
总之就是说，在美国我们都知道很多时候重大政策改革需要一个非常庞大和非常好的政治环境去实现，天时地利人和必须具备。
那当然这个主要是因为这套制度设计导致的，对吧，你没办法使用一个简单多数的民意来实现很多这种重大社会面改革。
所以最后你就会出现一个事项跟另外一个事项捆绑，然后大家一起进行利益交换才能通过。这个角度在很多时候都是这样。
你比如说当年社保改革也是一样，刚才说的三年社保改革，就大家民主党这边让一点，共产党这边让一点，大家达到自己想要的目的，然后一起绑绑绑往下跳，就怕选民大家这个驳持到底驳持谁。
所以这个倒是可以理解。
那当然你最后的结果就是如果说你没有办法调和好这个矛盾，或者这个事成为了一个分歧点非常大的地方。
因为我们也知道这些年的共和党的转向，主要还是因为商界共和党，就是原先的里根的新自由主义共和党，变成了一个特朗普主导的民粹主义共和党。
那他们在这个问题上的立场转变，以及包括这个问题从单纯的经济问题、社会问题和道德问题，现在变成了一个意识形态问题。
对吧，还有包括这个甚至是族裔问题，以及最终他的这种白人的生存危机问题。
那你最后就是说现在想要拿到公司，而且其实也就只有奥巴马的第二任期刚刚重新当选这么一个时间段，让共和党认识到自己如果不去顺从当时他们看来的民意的话，可能就会变成一个亡党亡国的危机。
但是现在来看，反方向证明了我们不仅行还能更行，所以这个问题解决遥遥无期，可以这么说。
2013年当时共和党内部做的所谓解剖报告，就是罗姆尼输了以后做了一个解剖报告说:
“如果说我们再不多元化欢迎移民，这是个亡党的问题。”
现在特朗普为首的这种新右派呢，他们说的是不会亡党，但是会亡国，所以我们应该阻止一个亡国的方向，以这个方向来增强他们党的地位。
对，当然最终还是证明了就是你这个13年之后不需要走那条路，对吧，我们有反方向的道路，然后还能正更成功，所以他就没有这个意识。
政党总是很灵活的，就是他的宣传手段不管怎么说，就他的本身目的还是得生存。
至于美国道具生不生存，对于很多人来说，也要打个道具重不重要来打个引号。
尤其是我们知道全球化的资本家们其实可以没有国籍。
我打我私是这帮人的风，这帮人的这个怎么说呢狂欢。
我们也能看到这些精英们被问到一些问题的时候闪烁其词，是吧。
比如说我们敬爱的杰米·戴蒙老师，别人问他”你这个美国CEO现在怎么都不敢质疑特朗普了”，然后这个杰米·戴蒙故左右而言他，就是不回答问题，非常defensive。
就是这个：
“你说我好像怂了，我没怂啊，然后我一直在反对啊，然后就是一直在我自己辩护。”
我们还是说回来说这个就是关于移民执法问题的事情吧。
因为在这一次这个风波当中呢，一直被提到就是这个ICE这个机构。
ICE这个机构呢，其实我们讲美国的移民执法，他当然是执法了多少年了，但是ICE这个机构实际上是到了2003年才存在的。
小强你要不要可以给我们科普一下，ICE这个机构是怎么来的？
ICE这个机构其实是2001年911之后通过了国土安全法推动成立的，他是把原本分散在不同的移民执法或者海关调查力量全部整合。
所以2003年3月ICE正式成立，整合了之前的一系列的调查移民的内部执法功能，然后他是设立在国土安全部之下的。
ICE主要有两个比较大的功能：
刚才我们有说到，随着每天遣返多少移民的KPI指标化，因为这个原因呢，现在调查这方面的执行是非常非常少的。
现在是一个非常强调的直接逮捕、直接拘押、直接遣返，来把数据往上推。
所以造成了一个这种运动化的反移民行为，其实造成了很多云甲错案，这也是为什么现在没有犯罪记录的非法移民被抓的比例极大增加，这和使用关系有关。
对，就当时在911之后，美国其实对整个国内的这些国防安全，除了国防部之外做了很大的调整，国土安全部的成立。
其实就是当时说是为了协调各联邦机构更好应对这种国家外部安全，包括国内执法。
因为之前其实刚才提到了，美国这些机构根据多年以来的设置是分散在各个地方的。
比如说现在我们知道的CBP，当时其实把移民跟边境执法在国土安全部里面分成三块：
对，对，对。进小孩屋。
我们也知道之前有一些在中美交流过程中，经常有什么学者最后还是被带进小孩屋了。
那为什么说呢，说国务院邀请大家，我们孩子被带了，国务院说你国务院关我事，关我们国务院完全没什么事，就是经常这种日常的情况。
这当然现在有很多人也在诟病，就是美国当时的国土安全部的设立和情报机构的重组，其实说是为了减轻当时的一体化决策，实际上又创造了一个超级巨大的错综复杂且内部极其难以管理的部门–国土安全部。
刚才也提到很多人是否考虑重新进行改革，甚至重新拆分。
当然了，就有一部分左翼声音叫做废除ICE，但这个是非常不受欢迎的。
你要提改革这个事大家可能还是会支持的。
废除肯定大家都不答应，这也是政治宣传的重要性。
在去年的大美丽法案中，实际上是再一次把国土安全部，尤其是移民执法方面又进一步加强了，提供了更多的资金，应该是有几百亿规模。
对。
但是大美丽毕竟是预算协调法（reconciliation bill），不能做太多实际性改变，所以都是跟预算相关的。
但是ICE本身有一个重要一点，就是执法只能执法非美国国民，所以说不能管公民肯定是不行的。
但是在执法过程中到底会出现什么事，这就难说。
因为毕竟大部分法案的授权法案里头，包括刚才提到的02年的国土安全法，很多时候都是给了一些非常模糊的框架，让行政机关自己去决定该怎么做这个事。
包括谁应该优先被遣返，是常理认为有犯罪记录的人，这种非法移民，还是大家谁都可以去抓。
然后大规模执法行动应该怎么展开，以什么方式，甚至刚才可能还没提到。
最近这两天也挺火的一件事情，就是ICE本身有一个内部备忘录，指导执法。
就是说他们拿了administrative warrant，就可以直接闯进别人家里去逮人。
这是行政搜查令，本质上是他们机构内自己发的，不同于美国第四修正案和第三修正案规定的需要法院签发的搜查令。
在美国，搜查个人住宅和公共场合的规则不一样。
公共场合可能有理由，包括现场问话然后抓人，继续审问是符合宪法保护的。
但是入侵别人家里逮人，这是一个非常违背美国建国精神的事。
但实际上我们知道过去这么多年以来，也经常有这种事出现。
不是一定保护得非常好，但这事确实可能在未来成为很大争议。
当然也可能因为曝光，ICE暂时先不这么干了。
你可以看最近在明尼阿波利斯，甚至未来可能扩展到明尼苏达，开拔到新纽约这种地方，也可能有进一步事态发展。
所以这个地方比较适合插回这个背景。
这次在明尼苏达发生了这两期，我必须说一下这个点。
因为纽约时报之前一直拒绝使用的K word–kill（杀人）这个词，在整个Rene Good的报道期间，大家对使用杀人词极其谨慎，很多媒体避免使用。
但是应该是到了今天，我们提前几天约好今天要录音，结果今天早上又再一次发生枪击杀人事件，这又是ICE执法人员杀死了一位美国公民的事件。
所以对于这个词的定性：
我也不好意思说纽约时报用春秋笔法，但他们的用词可能反映一些心态、政治氛围，以及对当下极其充满争议敏感的政治氛围的一种应激回应。
具体这两位美国公民被ICE杀死的案件，以及后续的法律问题讨论，因为我是比较关注法律的框架，呢…… 会跟比如说我们大家可能会有所了解的这个警察在执法过程当中杀人这个问题，他的法律框架是一样的，也就是所谓的这个Qualified Immunity。
然后为什么要提这个Qualified Immunity呢？就是有限度的，是有条件的这个豁免，就是对于警察在执法过程当中出现的，比如说误杀或者是过度执法，或者是滥用暴力进行执法这样的一个问题。因为这个豁免本身的逻辑其实很好理解，因为就是警察他在这个执法过程当中，即便是完全是好心好意，没有任何的这个想要杀人的这种主观的动机，他还有可能造成过度使用暴力的一个问题。
那么对于警察提供一定程度的豁免，这个是基本上任何国家都会需要面临的一个问题和抉择。
但是问题就在于，又绕回这个乔治弗洛伊德案，对吧？当时评论家也好，这个法律分析师也好，去讨论这个警察的这种Qualified Immunity，有限度的豁免的问题。
那这次的话呢，这个话题又被掀起来，不仅仅是因为有ICE执法人员杀死了一位美国公民，而且还因为副总统J.D. Vance，他说了一个在法律上完全错误的一个话，他说这个ICE执法人员享受的是完全豁免，就是Absolute Immunity，而不是Qualified Immunity，就是有限度有条件的豁免。
那这个在法律上是完全不成立的。顺便说一句J.D. Vance的这个，对吧，我也不知道这耶路法学院是怎么教的，他就堂而皇之地说了一个，就是我真的非常坚决地相信，他完全知道法律上是错误的一句话。
包括当时的这个ICE执法人员，其实大家是不知道他是谁的，因为现在这个ICE执法人员，都戴着一个面罩，也不知道是谁，但是实际上他的身份被曝出来，这个第一起枪击致死美国公民案，就是Renee Good的杀人案。
他的开枪的人，ICE执法人员叫Jonathan Ross。那这个人是怎么被曝出来的呢，还是因为Kristi Noem，国土安全部的部长，他在新闻发布会的时候，就是想要跟大家说明，这个这位特工多么不容易，之前在执法过程中，曾因为要逮捕一个抗拒逮捕的这么一个罪犯、逃犯也好，怎么也说也好，导致自己身受重伤。
就他说的这个话就太具体了，就把他所有的这个信息都已经给给出去了，所以他本来其实他是一个匿名的状态，结果国土安全部部长这么一说，好了，那媒体一下子就发现这个人到底是谁了。
所以这个人的名字我们知道还是谁，其实是因为这个原因。
然后现在关于他能不能被明尼苏达的当地的州的这个检察官进行起诉和刑事和民事的追责这个问题，就涉及到我们刚刚说的这个有限度有条件的豁免的问题。
那么他涉及到的就是关于这个执法人员的执法过程当中所使用的暴力，在当时的所有的情况都纳入考虑之后，他是否是合理的，以及他有没有违反当时就已经这个是法律明确保护的权利。
为什么要说是当时法律就明确保护的权利？比如说你是一个执法人员，然后你这个执法过程当中因为一些复杂的这个警察抓手头冒数游戏的这些一些情况，然后你使用了暴力，然后导致了伤亡事件发生。
但是呢，你去使用暴力的这么一个这种特定的这种情况啊，在你使用暴力的这个当口，当时的法律还没有明确说你这样是违法的。
如果是这样的话就没有办法进行这个民事的这种赔偿的这种追责。
当然了即便你进行民事的这种求偿，它也是就是都是有这种，你是执法人员嘛，所以肯定是有政府给你兜底的，最后也不可能是你自己真的赔钱，都是都政府赔钱，或者是这个这个联邦政府赔钱的。
这个情况是联邦政府赔钱的嘛，那可以联邦政府给你赔钱，所以说这个这个涉及到挺府的一个法律问题。
所以到时候法官呢，他不管是在行事的角度也好，还是民事的角度也好，都会需要去考虑这个证人的证词，包括我们这次都有两次事件都有明确的这个视频录像，然后就是要考虑所有的因素综合在一起去看他是否是合理的要使用暴力，以及是否是违反了当时的法律就已经明确规定的你所具有的宪法权利在当时被侵害被违反了，对吧。
他的意思就是说，不能说OK，后来两年之后，我们使到你这案子的时候，法官一看，你这个违反了这个权利，我们现在从以后开始规定，就说你这个就属于违反权利，那么这个杂不足以既往，所以他有一个这么样一个很绕口的这么一个法律的一个规定。
所以这个事情的后续事件呢，我觉得还是非常难说，这个事情很显然是最能影响它的因素，我想肯定是政治因素，全国的民意因素，对于整个这个局势的推动会造成，就是比我刚刚说的这些法律因素可能会有更大的一个影响。
对吧，因为如果是民意汹涌，然后一直推动的这个案件往前走，我们才有可能有希望看到Jonathan Roth受审。
对，这个案子有个比较大的问题是联邦政府现在和民意苏大州政府有一个很强烈的对抗性的一个现实存在，因为ICE属于联邦机构，联邦机构在州一级执行联邦法律的时候，有非常非常强的豁免权。
这个豁免权是从宪法解释出来的，因为联邦资上条款，联邦资上条款在这个最高法院的判决里面会告诉你说，联邦执法人员在州一级执行联邦法律，不受州法律的阻碍。
这是从行事诉讼的角度来说，从民事诉讼的角度来说，就是刚才Lokin说的Qualified Immunity，你很难在联邦执法人员执法的情况下，哪怕出了开枪致死的事情，来让这个具体的联邦政府来进行民事赔偿，进行赔钱。
而且还有一个很重要的一个问题是，如果你这个案子是在州法院审，对吧，州法官，州陪审团来审这个案子，那么你可能你可以理解的是，当地的这些陪审团也好，法官也好，他会比较尊重民意，对吧，比较尊重当地的这个政治现实。
他有可能会在这个审判的时候更偏袒起诉方，但是一旦联邦执法人员涉及在这种案件里面，联邦法律有比较明确的规定，就是说如果是联邦执法人员执行联邦法律，你可以把这个案件转移到相关的联邦法院去审理。
联邦法院呢，他的这个法官，他有可能就是川普的任命的法官了，他有可能就和当地的这个政治现实有很大的脱节。
所以一旦你把这个审理的这个案件从地方法院，地方的这个州的这个法院，移到联邦法院，那么其实对于被致死方这个受害人的这个，获得一个更公正的裁判的这个可能性，其实会降低。
这个就是从程序上来说也更困难。
因为这一次关于这个所谓的豁免，不管是绝对豁免还是相对豁免，就是这个特朗普政府比较有代表性的两个言论。
应该是第一个就是刚才提到了JD Vance在说，说这个Jonathan Royals，联邦执法的官员是享受有绝对的这个豁免保护的。
这个可以说是他可能在明知这个词是什么意思的时候，然后撒了一个谎。
包括后来其实JD Vance也很有意思的是，他在前两天在前往明尼苏达的时候，在接受这个记者采访的时候，又说到说：
“我什么时候说过绝对豁免，我没有说过绝对豁免。”
后来CNN也就把他两段话放在一起，然后进行了一个对比，他的确是说过绝对豁免这个词的。
另外一个就是Steven Miller其实当时也对这个艾瑟特公喊了一个话说：
“你们这些人在执行职责的时候是享有联邦豁免权的，任何对你们动手或者说试图阻止你们的人都在犯重罪。”
至少这时候这个联邦豁免权他用的词还是有一定道理的，是可以这么说的吗？可以这么说，就是联邦执法人员在州一级的这个执法行为是受到各种各样的保护的，至少形式上非常难给这些人定罪，民事上有很高很高的门槛来让他们做这个赔偿。
还有一个问题就是说刚才我们提到的就是司法部内部的这个法律备忘录，
司法部法律备忘录的意义是什么呢？比较有名的法律备忘录是当时在伊拉克战争时期，小布什政府曾经有一个，小布什政府时期有一个这个虐待、拷打方面的这个法律备忘录。
在司法部有一个类似法律备忘录的存在，他其实给具体执行法律的执法人员提供一个豁免作用，他基本上是在说，比如说你是一个ICE的员工，你上街枪击杀了人，你比如过度使用武力，检察院要起诉你。
司法部是什么呢？司法部你可以理解为联邦政府的律师，你可以跟这个法院说：
我的律师告诉我，我可以这么做。
所以相当于把这个责任从具体的执法的人员，转移到了整个联邦政府。
而你想让整个联邦政府被出这样一个法律备忘录来负责，其实是非常非常难的。
你有大量的这种具体的法律问题要在联邦法院去辩论，你在这个联邦法院辩论赢了之后，你才能去说执法人员的行为依据这个法律备忘录是错误的。
但是必须是事后你才可以这样说，你必须在这个备忘录被认为是违法之后，你才可以在之后的执法人员的行为里面判处他们违法。
但是这个备忘录的存在给基层执法人员提供，从巨大的保护是一个非常非常叫化的行为。
所以就是其实归根结底的话，这个东西我们经常看到有人在讨论说，那既然ICE现在做出了这些行为，不管是杀人还是去进行一些暴力的行为的话，这些东西归根结底其实并不是一个法律问题，而是一个政治问题。
所以我们接下来还是要看说民意的反弹是怎么样的，以及整个公众社会舆论的这个导向会出现什么样的变化，这可能才是最后这个问题，不管是说继续升级还是会走向另外一个方向最重要的一个原因。
对，我必须要就是修正我帮他说，就是我说民意的影响可能是最重要的，就是他这个是完全单方向的，就是只有民意汹涌，我们才有可能看到这个不管是地方的执法人员继续去努力的去争取，让这个Jonathan Ross和今天又一次发生的新的杀人事件的凶手是受审。
如果民意不汹涌，如果大家都很冷漠，没有反应，然后无所谓这件事情就没了，这个民意的这个影响它完全是一个单方向的， 只有民意汹涌，然后我们才有期望看到这些人受审。
如果民意不汹涌，或者是民意是另外一个方向，就根本就是支持ICE举法，对吧，那就一点气都没有，一点希望都没有了。
所以就是其实在民意上，我们已经看到了非常明显的一个反弹在表现出来了。
就是从1月7号的这个Rene Goet的枪击案发生之后，其实在不管是当地以及全美的各地，已经有大量的抗议者聚集在一起。
特别是在民意汹涌当地的时候，很多人聚集在这个市中心的酒店外面，对于很多ICE，或者说其他的这个联邦特工下滩的酒店，在周围进行大规模的抗议。
应该是1月23号这天呢，也是全州进行了一个大规模的ICE滚出明尼苏达的这一个全州的一个大罢工。
其实能看到当地的这个民意是有非常大的反弹的，包括我们看到的很多民调，其实不管现在是就特朗普的这个移民执法政策，以及ICE的这个支持率，其实是出现明显的下滑的。
但是为什么这个下滑似乎还没有反映到特朗普自己的一个表态，或者特朗普政府的这个怂动呢？
反而我们看到的是说，特朗普政府现在一直在不断的去，你可以说是升级，或者说是不服软，他在不断的去进一步的激化这个民意的反弹。
也是可以看出来这个也是特朗普在第二任期，或者说特朗普政府，以及他本人最善用的一个策略嘛，就是把这个事件给不断升级，进行极限施压之后，再看下一步怎么走。
所以我们下一步也会担心说特朗普会不会援引叛乱法，发布公告，命令这些叛乱者在有限的时间内解散，然后开始动用武力，这也是接下来可能会大家比较担心的一点吧。
对，我觉得我们现在完全还没有看到全部的完整的民意就是被展现出来，因为包括还是那句话，我们今天才去录这个节目，然后就又发生了第二期事件。
包括这第二期事件发生，它也不是一个偶然的，因为就是因为你刚刚所形容的第一期事件发生之后，明天岁亚洲有很多这种社区的活动者，他们都聚集在一起。
很多人就是这个普通民众，他们主动去贡献自己的时间，然后他们去开车，不生事，不找麻烦，但是就默默地跟在这个疑似的事，或者是被确认了是ICE执法人员的车子后面，然后就去记录他们的这个行为，然后去看着他们。
就是希望能够用这种方式来给他们造成压力，来去监督他们到底进行了什么样的执法，抓人到底是有违法犯罪前科的人。 还是一个就是可能是非法方式进入美国，但是已经在这里和平生活了很久，并且也就是正常工作纳税的这么一个人，以及他们进行逮捕的话，逮捕的方式是什么样的，是暴力的，还是这个和平的方式。
所以就是因为有这样的社区行动，所以说呢，这个特朗普在明尼苏达州的这个ICE执法又进一步加码，然后在整个这样的一个大环境下导致了今天的第二起枪击致死事件发生。
但是我不得不说我们还是要拿明尼苏达州去跟五年前去做对比的话，那现在的这个民意的反弹跟2020年的情况当然是完全不一样的。当然了，2020年的这个抗议活动它是席卷了全国的，并且有一些抗议活动就涉及到了打打抢事件。
那么当然关于这个打打抢这个行为能不能被称为暴力，我在这边再打一个这个信号吧。因为我刚刚第一反应就是说有一些这个抗议活动在2021年，它就是转向了暴力这样的一个方式，但是我又一想就是说对于这个财产的侵害和对于人身安全的侵害，是不是说就是对于侵害就已经能算是这种暴力的行动，还是说也要对于人身安全构成威胁以及这个实质的侵害才能称之为暴力？
这个事情我现在不去做一个这个评判，也是打一个信号在这里让大家自己去判断。
但是我觉得有一个很明确的事情就是现在的这些抗议的范围以及民意反弹的程度跟五年前都是没有办法同日而语的。
我也想问各位的感觉是什么，就那可能这个事情就就类似于是不是大家的这种预值又都提高了：
就像我们对于特朗普的口无遮拦的这个预值也在不断提高，当他对于这个索拉里义社群说出像去年１２月份那样的令人震惊的言论的时候，已经没有人再继续震惊了吗？
我其实不是很同意说你觉得这个舆论上的这个反弹是，或者说公众的民意上的反弹是不够的。
如果单纯从数字上来看的话，像去年就是进行的这个所谓的No Kings的这些抗议游行规模还是要比4年前或者8年前的时候要大的。
但是我觉得这个很明显的一个差别就是这个精英或者说特别是刚才提到的这个企业的CEO这些，他们这个人群当中的寒线效应是非常明显的。
像明迪苏拉州虽然说起来是这个中部的一个州，但是其实有很多的这个世界500强的总部都在这个地方。
比如说：
- 3M
- Target（一个百货公司）
- United Health（一个医保公司）
这些公司的总部其实都在明尼苏达，但我们没有看到这些公司的高管在发出任何强有力的声音。
这个可能是跟5年前乔治弗洛伊德事件发生之后，可能看到美国的各大公司都在不管是政策上还是这个高管的言论上，然后做出一些改变，这个是有非常大的一个差别的。
我觉得这个可能是现在似乎看到即便是普通民众有很大民意反弹，但是这个反弹似乎并没有影响到特朗普的这个政策变化的意义的一个原因吧。
最终还是一个核心底层逻辑，就是民意到底有什么用，对吧？因为你民意如果你不能转化为实际上的选举力量的话，那它是没有用的。
而且就是在现在我们的这个美国的政治框架之下，总统拥有的这个权力几乎等同于无限。
就是因为你实际上本党只要你有一个党的支持，这个党不至于输掉参议院的三分之一席位都不剩的话，那没有任何团队党是没有任何办法。
那你怎么样？无非就是把你告上这个法庭，看看最高法院愿不愿意帮你说话，这是最核心的。
就是你中期选举可以导致特朗普政府失去这个对立法权的控制，民主党控制众议院，控制参议院，但你不可能摆脱共和党至少还有三分之一的国内力量。
所以在这个拥有总统大位的情况之下，只要有三分之一的这个支持力就行，想怎么样怎么样。
所以我们这说这种，你说挑起这种争议，对吧，又是一次政治秀，政治真人秀，甚至闹出这么多很多过火的执法行为，那可能对于大部分美国人来说，就是可能来看是不合适的，不是很好的，是反对的，是要坚决批判的。
但是还有那么三四成美国人表示：
“哎，挺好，非常好，就是应该这么干”
那你就没办法。
所以你顶多就是说这个事可能会，因为特朗普本人自己觉得这样不行，然后就改善更长。
那如果说他就决定了我就得这么干，或者说我就要这么继续去推行下去，那你是没有办法阻止他的。
尤其是在最高法院大概率大开绿灯，而不是紧急叫停的情况之下。
特朗普其实第二任期到现在没通过太多的法律，总的来说还是在通过行政手段，在推行他大多数的政策。
对吧？去年国会其实是历史以来最低效的国会一个任期内。
但是他有这么一个大而美法案也就差不多了，因为其实现在美国总统资本上就是一个任期，也就两年之内通过两三四个大的法案，这也就差不多算是一个标准。
但是实际上刚才小小老师也提到了，他靠的这个行政手段就足以实现他绝大部分的政治目标了，就实际上还是因为立法权本身已经衰败到了，我们完全不行使这个权力，放纵你去行使你的行政权，给予特朗普这样所谓的看似三权合一的状态。
所以他的行政权才能真正演变成为这种帝王总统权，就是想干什么干什么。
那你说在中期选举如果说将这个移民这样的事情引发了反弹之后，那是不是就不能这样为所欲为呢？那肯定是不能为所欲为。
但是最终就是你调查也好，国会立法去这个试图阻挡，因为那国会也不可能完全立法，因为还有这么一个否决权在这儿。
那否决顶翻刚才讲到三分之一，你知道有三分之一本党人怎么着都当鸵鸟一样支持。
你说我们刚才看到特朗普这些行为共和党的议员没有意见吗？肯定有意见。
对吧？之前像格林兰那些事之后，很多基本上所有的众议员参议员私下都是说你在干嘛，你想干什么。
但是最后他们公开有几个反对的呢？公开不都说什么，特朗普总统说的好，我们应该这样，或者说起码不是说一定好，那也是要说他是有一定战略目的的，有一定重要性的，也是说的很对的，只是可能方式方法不对。
所以只要他的情况不改变，你想要去通过这种民意反弹去制衡他的政策是不可能的。
就说等到差不多到2029年，但这个到2029年还是很长，在战略很悲观的一个看法，也许。
但我们也知道特朗普本人是很在乎这个，有些时候是民意和这个什么事。
就如果说他觉得自己在这个问题上真的吃亏的话，他是毫不犹豫的可以选择暂停或者抛弃一件事情，比如说格林兰，目前暂时，不一定就是一定只要永远放弃。
所以移民上也同样是一样。
就是特朗普经常还有的时候还训斥一下米勒呢，美国真的就都跟你长得一样，他也不是没有，就一定什么事都听他的。
就是特朗普这个人还是非常的有这种现实主义的思想在里头，他并不是一个非常的教条式的保守主义者，也不是什么教条式的迈改主义者，因为他说“我就是迈改，我说什么就是啥”。
你既然讲到国会了，王老师你可以再展开讲一下。
因为最近，尤其是今天的这个事件，又一场悲剧发生之后，实际上不少民主党支持者在喊说，希望国会的民主党人，尤其是参议院的民主党人阻止这个新的拨款法案，来限制ICE或者限制国土安全部的这些行为。
你可以跟我分析一下他们的这么做法有没有用？
象征意义大于实际意义。
这肯定都是以最后的结果，因为这个回到政府关门的问题了。
我们知道去年做了很多跟政府关门相关的节目。
那当时在政府开门的时候呢，他是把相当一部分就是说，因为预算理论上来说是要分成12份，在国会有12份这种minibus去通过。
那当时是把几个比较重要的都放到那个时候的CR（临时协议）之后放了一整年的。
比如说国防这些类似。
所以说这次如果说，剩下还有一部分，包括像什么边境安全，就是这个关于ICE和明年的DHS拨款，是放到了1月底，也就是1月底到期。
因为应该是3月21号吧，反正就是差不多就是这两周。
那也是这两天为什么众议院之前在通过他们自己想单独通过的这种DHS年度拨款，然后这些东西都打到参议院。
参议院民主党当然有一定谈判筹码，那就是参议院的冗成一时权利（六十票的权利）。
现在来看民主党肯定要在这方面表态，做一下斗争。
但最终意义就在于，你真的又能把这东西要挟到多久？
是不是共和党之后说我们再搞一个预算协调，再给它单独给钱，那也不是没有可能。
所以这个事情只能说是会引发很大的象征性的反抗，也许会有一轮新的博弈和制造焦点，但最终我们也看到了，这个东西你是解决不了。
就除非社会面真的出现一边倒反对特朗普和特朗普，就这个事情如果真的说未来发酵到一颗不可收拾。
就因为现在只是在明尼苏达一个地方，那会不会在全国其他地方都有类似的案例出现。
但是我们也看到，这个东西只能说是实际影响，但政治方面肯定会有很多调整。
你刚才提到的就是说前些年，尤其是因为去年选举失利之后，曾经一度民主党说一定要在移民问题上调整自己之前的立场。
对吧，甚至包括什么要坚决不代替什么废除ICE，废除什么这些的事情。
那现在来看是不是又有可能会重新有新的一波，尤其是基本面这边呼吁说要废除ICE。
当然你说这个东西是需要一个非常高明的政治包装，就是你肺腑跟你不行，改革可能听起来好一些。
所以这就是一个政治宣传的问题。
所以你可能会在未来一段时间会有民主党党内去思考怎么样处理这个事情。
我们可以看到包括一些来自于非常危险选区的民主党参议员，像佐治亚州的奥索夫，他其实理论上以他的政治立场和政治处境来说，应该非常谨慎地去处理这些问题。
甚至可能不只是要迎合一些共和党在这方面的论调，包括他去年最开始也支持了当时的Laken Riley法案。
他一开始就不说话，但最后就是跟另外一个佐治亚议员一起走票，因为这个Laken Riley是佐治亚人，他就支持。
但现在他的论调就变成了一个：
“说我们也要非常严肃地去应对该怎么样重新整理美国的联邦移民执法系统”
所以他们这些话能说成这样，也体现出他们内部民调觉得这个事情未来会怎么发展。
另外一个说法是，即使可以满足基本盘的希望，对他们来说他们要做些什么，同时他也觉得这个东西对他们未来可能会是一个有利的话题。
这跟特朗普第一任期也很像的。
特朗普第一任期一开始，大家都认为民众说特朗普就是应该搞那种强硬的移民政策。
但是最后也没看到就是因为种种原因他做的事情又超出了民众的预期。
对吧？
就是你想让他这么干，但不是这么干啊。
所以之后大家又不反对。
所以甚至在2020年大选当中民众又希望换一种像拜登那种移民方式，但当他们又不喜欢拜登这个方式，又回到特朗普这个方式。
所以他们可能又发现这又不行。
所以这个正在变迁的政治环境会很大程度引领国会民主党人的决断。
那也许我们可以看到DHS有一段时间又要不开门，但这个东西最后我们也看到跟政府关门一样，那不就不开门呗，顶多一个月之后大家撑不住了又回来了。
DHS不仅只管这个，包括什么TSA这些东西里都是相关的。
因为这两天我们正在录制的时候，据说美国多少年以来不电的，将近50%的人口和地区都被这种巨大的冰雪灾害威胁到。
就是说是什么周日要下耳朵的雨或雪。
反正我觉得联邦应急管理局在很多时候就要处理这些事情。
尤其是最近这些年因为气候变化的原因，极端天气多发，冬季越来越冷，夏天越来越热。
所以这些事情就是说你在这种情况之下，要指望民主党人一定在这方面斗争到底，那也不是特别现实。
对，我觉得我还是要回应一下刚刚小话说，就是现在民意已经很汹涌了，只是没有发生像2020年那样，包括各大公司也都出台政策去改变他们的多元化政策，当然我们后来也看到这个事情已经完全是过去史。 这几年以来这个事情又中板又摆到另外一边，然后各大公司又纷纷的把自己的这个多元化政策就赶紧下架，对吧。
但是我觉得这个事情是这样子，像包括警察滥用暴力这个事情跟美国频发的枪支暴力这个普遍存在的问题，我觉得有一个类似的地方是我的一个观察，就是他改变不了选举结果，或者说他改变不了民众的投票行为。
就这事情你问他，所有人都说这个对我很重要，或者是你问那些包括其实特朗普第二次上任，或者是第二次当选以来，美国的这个人口外流，尤其是这个中产和更高收入的人去移民到什么欧洲国家，这样的一个现象其实是比前几年要多了很多的。
就是比特朗普第一任期的时候，大家都说要搬离美国搬离美国，其实这个现象不是非常的突出，但是第二任期以来这个事情比前几年要明显的很多这个趋势。
那你问这些人他们都会说没有一个人不提到枪支暴力问题是他们离开美国的原因。但是如果你问那些留下来的人，他们还在美国参与选举会去投票的人，就是他们很难因为”我担心我的小孩会遭受枪支暴力的损害，所以说我就不会再投共和党人了”，这事情非常非常难。
因为这个永远是一个小概率事件，这个事情能发生在我家小孩头上的这个概率，对于我作为一个已经选择要留在美国生活，不想因为对枪支暴力恐惧就离开美国这样的一个人群来说，也就是绝大多数人来说，这个永远都是一个极小概率的事件。
就是如果这个事情不发生在你头上，你真的很难去因为这个事情去改变你的选举结果，然后最后或者说你的投票行为。
然后最后我们观察到的就是选民还是把像是这个经济问题，什么这样的一些问题排在自己的第一位。即便他们说移民对我很重要，但是移民这个问题往往它也是一个单方向的一个影响，对吧。
因为我觉得移民已经不受控制了，所以我要支持共和党人去管理移民，但是很少有人说是因为”我觉得我要支持移民，我觉得移民对美国特别好，我觉得我们一定要多搞点移民，赶紧推动这个像2013年八人帮那种全面移民改革吧，然后所以我会投票这是民主党人。”
其实这个是两边是完全不成比例的，所以我觉得我说的民意汹涌就是，我觉得这个是一个你作为一个美国公民，生活在一个民主国家里面，这个民众到底民意有没有汹涌到全体抗议，希望就是要求他下台，然后让弹劾能过这种程度，这样我才会称之为民意汹涌。
我觉得现在这种程度完全离人还十万八千里，而且美国政客没有一个人敢去批评美国民意本身，也没有人敢去批评美国民众本身，对吧，这也可以理解，因为他们的合法性就来自于民众跟他们批评。
但是有没有可能就是民众现在就是没有做到他们能做到所有事情，也没有去做到他们的民意能到的那个最高的那个限度，也没有把他们的代表、他们的民意代表、他们的国会议员推到那个他们应该被推到的位置上。
有多少人因为这个ICE执法事情，打电话给他们的共和党参议员，要求他们支持弹劾特朗普，你就是没有足够愤怒，你就是没有足够反应，我觉得是这样的。
对，你这个说法让我想到了，过去这几天其实有一个也是有一些人的讨论说，回到这个问题就是为什么感觉特朗普第二任期的这个抵抗和第一任期好像不一样了，是有一些人觉得说，因为美国人经常还说一个字叫 “I’m American”，就这个做法不美国。
第一任期的时候，很多人可能觉得特朗普的当选是一个非常不美国的事情，等到2024年特朗普再次当选的时候，可能会有些人开始反思说，说不定这就是美国的一个特性，就是美国人就是这样子的。
所以归根结底可能就会有一些人在想，说不定就是人民不行，我们就是值得特朗普这样的人。
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2026-01-22 08:00:01
The era of the Small Giant (Interview)
My friends, welcome back. This is the Changelog. We feature the hackers, the leaders, and those living in this crazy world we’re in. Can you believe it? Yeah, Damian Tanner is back on the show after 17 years. Wow!
Okay, some backstory. Damian Tanner, founder of Pusher, now building Layer Code, returned to the podcast technically officially for the first time, but he sponsored the show. He was one of our very first sponsors of this podcast 17 years ago-almost, I want to say, I’m estimating, but it’s pretty close to that. I think that’s so cool. So he’s back officially talking about the seismic shift happening right now in software development. I know you’re feeling it, I’m feeling it, everyone’s feeling it.
So from first-time sponsor of the podcast to a frontline builder in the AI agent era, Damian shares raw insights on:
A massive thank you to our friends, our partners, our sponsor-yes, talking about fly.io, the home of changelog.com. Love Fly and you should too. Launch a sprite, launch a fly machine, launch an app, launch whatever on Fly we do-you should too. Learn more at fly.io.
Okay, let’s do this.
Well friends, I’m here again with a good friend of mine, Cal Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot.dev. Slow builds suck. Depot knows it. Cal, tell me, how do you go about making builds faster? What’s the secret?
When it comes to optimizing build times to drive build times to zero, you really have to take a step back and think about the core components that make up a build.
All of that comes into play when you’re talking about reducing build time.
Some of the things that we do at Depot:
The other part of build performance is the stuff that’s not the tech side of it-it’s the observability side of it. You can’t actually make a build faster if you don’t know where it should be faster. We look for patterns and commonalities across customers and that’s what drives our product roadmap. This is the next thing we’ll start optimizing for.
So when you build with Depot, you’re getting this: you’re getting the essential goodness of relentless pursuit of very, very fast builds, near zero speed builds. And that’s cool. Kyle and his team are relentless on this pursuit-you should use them: depot.dev. Free to start, check it out. One-liner change in your GitHub Actions:
depot.dev
Well friends, I’m here with a longtime friend, first-time sponsor of this podcast, Damian Tanner. Damian, it’s been a journey, man. This is the 18th year of producing The Changelog.
As you know, when Netherlands and I started this show back in 2009, I corrected myself recently. I thought it was November 19th, but it was actually November 9th-the very first birthday of The Changelog.
November 9th, 2009.
Back then, you ran Pusher, Pusher app, and that’s kind of when sponsoring a podcast was almost like charity, right? You didn’t get a ton of value because there wasn’t a huge audience, but you wanted to support the makers of the podcast. And we were learning, and obviously open source was moving fast and we were trying to keep up, and GitHub was one year old. I mean, this is a different world. But I do want to start off by saying-you were our first sponsor of this podcast. I appreciate that, man. Welcome to the show.
Kind of you.
You know, reflecting on Pusher, we kind of just ended up creating a lot of great community, especially around London and also around the world with Pusher.
Yeah, and I really love everything we did. We started an event series, and in fact, another kind of like coming back around-Alex Booker, who works at Mastra, is coming to speak at the AI Engineer London meetup branch that I run. He started and ran the Pusher Sessions, which became… Really well-known talk series in London.
Okay, were you at the most recent AIE conference? I was in SF. Yeah.
Okay, what was that like? I kind of jump in the shark a little bit because I kind of want to talk-I want to juxtapose like Pusher then time frame developer to like now, which is drastically different. So don’t-let’s not go too far there. But how was AIE in SF recently?
It was a good experience. Always a good injection of energy going to SF. I live just outside London, but the venue was quite big and it didn’t have that like together feel as much as some conferences. But it was the first time that I sat in a huge conference hall, and I think it was like Windsurf or something. Chatting, I was like,
“This is really like-we’re all miners at a conference about mining automation, and we’re like we’re engineers, so we’re super excited about it. But right, it’s kind of weird like it’s gonna change all of our jobs.”
Alright, it’s like “I’m working right now to change everything I’m doing tomorrow.” I mean, that’s kind of how I viewed it.
I was watching a lot of the playback. I wasn’t there personally this time around, but I do want to make it the next time around. But, you know, just the Sean Swicks wing, the content coming out of there-everybody’s speaking. I know a lot of great people are there, obviously pushing the boundaries of what’s next for us, the frontier so to speak.
But a lot of the content-I mean almost all the content-was like top, top notch, and I feel like I was just watching the tip of humanity, right? Like just experiencing what’s to come.
Because in tech, you know this as being a veteran in tech, we shape-we’re shaping the future of humanity in a lot of cases because technology drives that. Technology is a major driver of everything, and here we are at the precipice of the next, the next, next thing. And it’s just wild to see what people are doing with it, how it’s changing everything.
Everything, I feel like, is like a flip. It’s a complete-not even a one-it’s like a 720. You know what I mean? Like it’s three spins or four spins. It’s not just one spin around to change things. I feel like it’s a dramatic forever-don’t even know how it’s going to change things, changing things, thing.
And, you know, bringing it back to the Pusher days, it’s the vibe we had then. You know, there was this period around just before Pusher and the first half of Pusher I felt like where we were going through this-maybe it’s called like the Web 2-but there was a lot of great software being built and a lot of, you know, the community.
And I think the craft that went into, especially like the Rails community, and we-we’re just-we’re able to build incredible web-based software.
And then, you know, we’ve gone through like the commercialization, industrialization of SaaS.
And what gets me really excited is now when we’re, you know, we run this AI Engineer London branch and incredible communities come together and it’s got that energy again. And I guess the energy is-it’s very exciting. There’s new stuff, everyone can play a part in it, and we’re also just all completely working it out.
And it’s like sure, you’ve got the, you know, folks on the main stage of the conference and then you’ve got-we’ll chat about it later maybe like Jeffrey Huntley posting his meme Ralph Wiggum blog post-it’s like that the crazy ideas and innovation is kind of coming from anywhere, which is brilliant.
Yeah, there’s some satire happened too. I think there was a convo, a talk that was quite comedic. I can’t remember who the talk was from but I was really just enjoying the fun nature of what’s happening and having fun with it-not just being completely serious all the time with it.
For those who are uninitiated-and I kind of am to some degree because it’s been a long time-remind me and our listeners what exactly was Pusher? And I suppose the tail end of that, how are things different today than they were then?
Pusher was basically a WebSockets push API so you could push anything to your web app in real time. So just things like notifications into your application.
We ended up having a bunch of customers maybe in:
In the early days, at one point Uber was using Pusher to update the cars in real time, and that was before they built their own infrastructure.
It was funny. I remember the stand-up because we ran a consultancy where we were chatting about the WebSockets in browsers and we’re like,
“Oh this is cool, how can we use this?”
And the problem is, you know, we were all building Rails apps, so like:
Okay, we need like a separate thing which manages all the WebSocket connections to the client, and then we can just post an API request and say, 'Push this message to all the clients.'
It was a simple idea and we took it seriously. and built it into a pretty formidable dev tool used by millions of developers and still use a lot today.
We eventually exited the company to MessageBird, who are a kind of European Twilio competitor. Actually, at one point, we nearly sold the company to Twilio-that would have been a very different timeline.
According to my notes, you raised 9.2 million dollars, which is a lot of money back then. I mean, it’s a lot of money now, but like that was tremendous. That was probably 2010, right? 2011 maybe. The bulk of that we raised later on from BoltOn. The first round was maybe half a million, very, very small.
It started out as an agency, so we built the first version in the agency just for fun, I suppose, and maybe some tears on your part.
Juxtapose the timelines: you got an acquisition ultimately but you mentioned Twilio was an opportunity. How would that have been different? If you can branch the timeline?
“It would have been a great experience to work with the team at Twilio. They’re incredible people. I’ve worked at Twilio and moved through Twilio.”
I haven’t calculated it, but we didn’t sell because the offer wasn’t good enough in our minds. It was a bit of a lowball and it was all stock. In hindsight, the stock hasn’t gone very well, so it turns out it was a good financial decision. But, yeah, would have loved that experience, I think.
Twilio became the kind of OG for dev rel and dev community. How we got to know them is we did a lot of combined events with them and hackathons. That was a fun time.
They were like the origination. Daniel Moral was very much quintessential in that process of a whole new way to market developers. I think that might have been the beginning of what we call dev rel today. Would you agree with that?
I mean, it’s like the - I mean, if there was a seed, that was one of many probably, but I think one of the earliest seeds to plant of what dev rel is today.
Crazy times, man.
So what do you… how do you think about those times of Pusher and the web, building APIs and SaaS services, etc., and pushing messages to Rails apps? How are today’s days different for you?
It’s exciting because the web and software is just completely changing again. I feel like we had that with Web 2, right? That was the birth of software on the internet, hosted software on the internet. It’s such an embedded thing in our culture and our business as developers. A lot of us work on that kind of software but most businesses run on SaaS software now.
I have to remind myself there was a time before SaaS, and therefore there can be a time after SaaS. There can be a thing that comes after SaaS. It’s not a given that SaaS sticks around.
I mean, like any technology, we tend to kind of go in layers. For example:
These changes, in the aggregate, take a lot of time.
The thing that can shift more quickly is the direction things are going. Really, in the last few months, I think I’ve been more and more convinced by my own experiences and things I’ve seen playing with stuff that:
it’s entirely possible - and probably pretty likely - that there is a post-SaaS.
I don’t know if everyone realizes it or is with that intention but all of us playing with agents and LLMs - whether it’s to build software or to do things - we are doing that probably instead of building a SaaS or we’re using it to build a SaaS. It’s already playing out amongst the developers.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to think about:
I’m curious because I hold that opinion to some degree. I think there’s what SaaS stays and what SaaS goes if it dies.
You said in the pre-column burst the bubble a little bit here. You did say, and I quote:
“All SaaS is dead.”
Can you explain, in your own words, all SaaS is dead?
I think I should probably go through my journey to here to kind of illustrate it. But give us the TL;DR first, though. Give us the clip and then go into the journey.
Okay, okay.
The TL;DR is SaaS.
So there’s a few layers:
I think most developers are very familiar with the building of software is changing now. But the operating software, the operating of work, the doing of work in all industries and all knowledge work, can change.
Like, we’ve changed software. SaaS is made for humans, slow humans to use the SaaS UI. Made for a puny human to go in, understand, work out this complex thing, and it has to be in a nice UI. If it’s not a human actually doing the work that they do in the SaaS, if it’s an AI doing that work, why is there a UI? Why is there a SaaS tool? The AI doesn’t need a SaaS tool to get the work done. It might need a little UI for you to tell you what it’s done, but the whole idea of humans using software, I think, is going to change.
Yeah, well, you’ve been steeped in APIs and SaaS for a while, so I hold that opinion that you have. Then I agree that if the SaaS exists for UI for humans, that’s definitely changing, so I agree with that.
What I’m not sure of, and I’m still questioning myself, is like what is the true solution here?
There are SaaS services that can simply be an API. You built them; I don’t really need the web UI. Actually, I kind of just prefer the CLI. I prefer just JSON for my agents. I kind of prefer Markdown for me because I’m the human. I want those good pros; I want all of it local so my agents can mine it and create sentiment analysis, all this fun stuff. You could do that with DuckDB and Parquet-just super, super fast stuff across embeddings and vector databases like pgvector.
All those fun things you could do on your own data.
But that’s where I stop. I do agree that the web UI will go away or some version of it. Maybe it’s just a dashboard for those who don’t want to play in the dev world with CLIs and APIs and MCP and whatnot.
But I feel like SaaS shifts. My take is:
CLI is the new app
That’s my take: SaaS will shift, but I think it will shift into CLI for a human to instruct an agent and an agent to do, and it’s largely based on:
Yeah, I guess we should probably kind of tease apart SaaS the business and SaaS the software.
Okay, because, yeah, I agree that the interface is changing-the interface that we use, whether it’s visually a CLI or a chat conversation or something-but the way we communicate with the software is changing. It’s a much more natural language thing. We don’t have to dig in the UI to find the thing to click.
But also so much of the software we use that we call SaaS, that we access remotely, if you can just magic that SaaS locally or within your company, right, there’s no need to access that SaaS anymore. You just have that functionality; you just ask for that functionality and it’s being built.
But yeah, SaaS, the business-I guess this is the challenge for companies today-is they’re going to have to, if they want to stay in business, shift somehow because, yeah, I mean, there’s still got to be some… some harness-harness is the wrong word because you use that in coding agents-but like you should do some infrastructure, some cloud, some coordination, authentication, data storage-there’s still a lot to do.
I think there’s going to be some great opportunities for companies to do that.
And maybe a CRM, you know, Salesforce or something, manages to say, hey:
“We are the place to run your sales agents, run your magically instantiated CRM code that you want just for your business.”
Maybe there’ll be some winners there.
But the idea that I think is going to change SaaS’s business-the SaaS software-is the idea that like everyone has to go and buy the same version of some software, which they remotely access and can’t really change.
Okay, I’m feeling that for sure. Take us back into the journey because I feel like I cut you off, and I don’t want to disappoint you-but not letting you go and give the context, the keyword for most people these days, the context for that blanket statement that:
“SaaS is dead or dying.”
Okay, I’ll give you a bit of the story.
So my company, Layer Code, we, I’ll just give you a little short on that: we provide a voice agents platform so anyone can add voice to their agent. It’s a developer tool, developer API platform for that.
We’re now ramping up our sales and marketing, and we kind of started doing it the normal ways. We kind of got a CRM; we got some marketing tools, and I was just finding-we went through a CRM or two-and I was just finding them like these are the new CRMs that are supposed to be good, but they were just really, really slow.
I just couldn’t work out how to do stuff. It was like I had to go and set up a workflow, and it felt like I needed training to use this CRM tool. And I’d been having a lot of fun with Claude Code and Codex, kind of both-both flipping between them, kind of getting a feel for them.
So I just said, “Build me”. I just voice-dictated, you know, a brain dump for like 10-15 minutes:
And also, it wasn’t just like a boring CRM. It was like,
“I need you to make a CRM that kind of engages me as a developer who doesn’t wake up and go, ‘Let’s do sales.’ Gamify it for me.”
Then here are the ways I want you to do that. And it just did it. That was my kind of like coding agents moment.
I think you have that moment when you do a new project where you use an LLM and a completely greenfield project. There’s no kind of existing code it’s going to mess up or get wrong, and the project’s not too big. It just built the whole freaking CRM, and it was really good.
It was a good CRM, and it worked really well. So that was like my kind of level one awakening, which was this idea that you can just have the SaaS you want instantly. It suddenly felt true because I had done it.
I have cancelled the old CRM system now, and there’s a bunch of other tools I plan to cancel, not because they’re all crap, but because it’s harder to use them than it is to just say what I want.
Because I kind of have to learn how to use those tools, whereas I can just say,
“Make me the thing. Make me the website I want” instead of using a website builder tool, or “Make me the CRM that I want to use.”
Then there’s this different cycle, this loop of improvement where it’s not a once-off. It’s not build and then use the software.
It’s like as you’re using the software, you can improve the software at any time.
We’ve still got to work out how this works:
Just within our team of three doing this stuff in the company, it was like:
“Oh, you’re annoyed with this part of the software? Just change it. Just change it.”
Yeah, when it annoys you at the exact point in time, and then continue with the work.
I assume you’re probably still doing something like a GitHub or some sort of primary git repository as a hub for your work, and you probably have pull requests or merge requests.
So even if your teammate is frustrated, improves the software, pushes it back, you’re still using the same software, and you’re still using the same traditional developer tooling such as:
- pull requests
- code review
- merging
Yeah, that’s going to have to change as well.
Okay, take me there.
I woke up this morning with that feeling, “Okay, that’s changing too.”
How’s it changing with the CRM and with something we’ve been building this week?
There were new pieces of software. There weren’t existing codebases. I didn’t have any prior ideas, tastes, or requirements about what the code should look like.
I think this is the thing that slows people down with coding agents. When you use it on an existing repo, LLMs have bad taste - they just give you kind of the most common denominator, kind of bad taste version of anything, whether it’s writing a blog post or coding.
So when you use it on an existing project and then you review the code, you just find all these things wrong with it. Like, right now, they love doing all this really defensive try-catch in JavaScript, or really verbose stuff, or writing a utility function that exists in a library already.
But when you start on a new project and you just use YOLO mode and you’re just building static for yourself as well, right? And it works-where’s the code? Why review the code?
I think we’re only in this temporary weird phase where we’re trying to jam these existing software processes that ensure we deliver:
I think it’s hard. We can’t throw that out-we’ve got SOC2 too, we can’t throw those out the window for everything that exists today.
But for everything new that you’re building, you’ve got an opportunity to kind of pull apart, question, and collapse down all these processes we’ve built for ourselves - processes that were built to ensure humans don’t make mistakes, help humans collaborate, and manage change in the repository and everything.
If humans aren’t writing the code anymore, we need to question these things.
Are you moving into the land of agent-first? Then it sounds like that’s where you’re going.
I feel like I’m being pulled into it by… yeah, I’m slight… I’m kind of like there. There is a tide. I can’t resist. I’m falling in the hole and we’re kind of like every-we’re dipping our toes in, right? Trying to try out an LLM, try out CursorTab, and then we’re kind of in there and we’re swimming, trying to swim the way we normally swim, the way we want to go. And suddenly I’ve just gone, just relax and just let the tide, let the river take you. Just let it go, man. Just let it go.
It’s scary. It feels kind of terrifying.
They’re gonna-and I don’t have the answers to how we do code review. But, you know, if you look at a lot of teams talking about using AI coding agents in the resisting project, everyone’s big problem now is code reviews. Why? Because everyone using coding agents is producing so many PRs; it’s piling up in this review process that has to be done. The new teams that don’t have that process in place are going multiple times faster right now.
This is the year we almost break the database. Let me explain.
Where do agents actually store their stuff? They’ve got:
And they’re hammering the database at speeds that humans just never have before. Most teams are duct-taping together a Postgres instance, a vector database, maybe Elasticsearch for search. It’s a mess.
Well, our friends at Tiger Data looked at this and said, “What if the database just understood agents?” That’s Agentic Postgres: it’s Postgres built specifically for AI agents, and it combines three things that usually require three separate systems:
The MCP integration is the clever bit. Your agents can actually talk directly to the database. They can:
without you writing fragile glue code. The database essentially becomes a tool your agent can wield safely.
Then there’s hybrid search. Tiger Data merges vector similarity search with good old keyword search into a SQL query - no separate vector database, no Elasticsearch cluster. Semantic and keyword search in one transaction, one engine.
Okay, my favorite feature: the forks. Agents can spawn sub-second zero-copy database clones for isolated testing.
This is not a database they can destroy. It’s a fork, a copy off of your main production database if you so choose.
We’re talking a one terabyte database fork in under one second. Your agent can run destructive experiments in a sandbox without touching production, and you only pay for the data that actually changes. That’s how copy-on-write works.
It works.
All your agent data-vectors, relational tables, time series metrics, conversational history-lives in one queryable engine. It’s the elegant simplification that makes you wonder why we’ve been doing it the hard way for so long.
So if you’re building with AI agents and you’re tired of managing a zoo of data systems, check out our friends at Tiger Data at tigerdata.com. They’ve got a free trial and a CLI with an MCP server you can download to start experimenting right now. Again, tigerdata.com.
What is replacing code review if there’s no code review? Is it just nothing?
I think as developers, we need to think more like-we need to put ourselves in the shoes of PMs, designers, managers, because they don’t look at the code right? They say “We need this functionality.”
We build it, we do our code reviews, we ensure it works, and the PM or whoever goes,
“Oh yeah, great, I’ve used it, meets the requirements. It’s great.”
They’re comfortable not looking at the code. They’re moving along, closing the deal, with the customer, integrating. They’re like,
“I am confident that the intelligent being that created this code did a good job.”
Now, I think the only reason we’re kind of stuck in this old process is because many of them are set in stone, but also because LLMs aren’t quite smart enough yet-they still make stupid mistakes. You still need a human in the loop (and on the loop).
They’re still a bit dumb. They get done with silly things and they do stuff. They’ll go the wrong direction for a while and I’m like,
“No, hang on a second, that’s a great thought here but let’s get back on track. This is the problem we’re solving and you’ve side-quested us.”
It’s a fun side quest if that was the point, but that’s not the point.
This is going to change, right?
One of the hard things is trying to put ourselves in the mind of what it’s going to be like a year from now. I think I’ve only been, you know, after being able to play with LLMs for several years, it feels like I can feel the velocity of it now. Because I’ve felt Chat GPT-3, 4, 5, Claude, Code Codex, and now I can say,
“Oh, okay, that’s what it feels like for it to get better.”
And it’s gonna keep. Getting better for a few more years, so it’s kind of like self-driving cars, right? They’re like not very useful while they’re worse than humans, but suddenly when they’re safer than a human, “why would you have a human?” Yeah, and I think it’s the same with coding. Like all this process is to stop humans making mistakes. We make mistakes; our mistakes are not special, better mistakes. They’re still like we stuff in code we call security incidents.
So I think as soon as the LLMs are twice as good, five times as good, ten times better at outputting good code that doesn’t cause these issues, we’re gonna start to let go of this concern, like these things right, we’re gonna start to trust them more.
Something I leaned on recently, and it was really with Opus 4.5, I feel like that’s when things sort of changed because I’m with you on the trend from ChatGPT or GPT-3 on to now and feeling the incremental change. I feel like Opus 4.5 really changed things.
And I think I heard it in an AIE talk or at least in the intention of it. If it wasn’t verbatim, it was “trust the model, just trust the model.” As a matter of fact, I think it was one of the guys-they were building an agent and in the pro it was maybe his agent layer, layer agent or something like that, maybe borrowed something from your name layer code. I have to look it up, I’ll get the talk, I’ll put it in the show notes.
But I think it was that talk and I was like, okay the next time I play I’m gonna trust the model. And I will sometimes like stop it from doing something because I think I’m trying to direct it a certain direction.
And now I’ve been like, wait hang on a second, this code’s free basically, it’s just going to generate anyways. Let’s see what it does. Worst case, I’m like, you know, roll it back or worst case is just generate better, you know what I mean, like ultra think, right? You know what’s the worst that could happen? Because it’s going faster than that can anyways.
So let’s see. Even if it’s a mistake, let’s see the mistake, let’s learn from the mistake because that’s how we learn even as humans. I’m sure Ellen’s the same.
And so I’ve come back to this philosophy or this thought, almost to the way you describe it like falling into this hole, slipping in via gravity. Not excited at first but then kind of like excited because it’s good in there. Let’s just go, just trust the model man, just trust the model!
It can surprise you, and I think that still gives me that dopamine hit that I would have coding, right? When I was coding manually, you’d get a function right and you’d be like, “ah it works.”
And now it’s like you’ve got like the whole application right and you’re like, “ah, I just did a problem, the whole thing works.”
That’s really exciting. And yeah, it’s fun right now. And I mean it’s gonna keep changing. This is just a bit of a temporary phase here and now. But I think for many of us building software we love the craft of it, which you can still do, but also the making-a-thing is also one of the exciting bits of it.
And the world is full of software still. Like you think about so many interactions you have with government services or whatever-not saying that they’re going to adopt coding agents particularly quickly, but there is a lot of bad software in the world.
And software has been expensive to build and that’s because it’s been in high demand. So I don’t think we’re going to run out of stuff to build.
I think even if we get 10 times faster, 100 times faster there’s so much useful software and products and things and jobs to be done.
Close this loop for me then: you said SaaS is dead or dying (I’m paraphrasing because you didn’t say or dying, I’m just going to say or dying, I’ll add it to your thing).
How is it going to change then? If we’re making software there’s still tons of software to write but SaaS is dead, what exactly are we making then if it’s not SaaS?
I know that not all software is SaaS but you do build something, a platform, and people buy the platform. Is that SaaS? What changes? You mentioned interfaces, like where do you see this moving?
I think we’re moving. And so this is the next level, the next kind of revelation I had was I started using the CRM and I was like, this is cool, this is super fast, this is better than the other CRM, you know, and I can change it.
Cool, I’m doing some important sales work, I’m enriching leads.
And then I kind of woke up a few days later, I was like, “Why am I doing the work? What’s going on here?” I create an interface for me to use, right? Why can’t Claude Code just do the work that I need to do for me?
I know it’s not going to be with the same taste that I have, and I know it’s going to make mistakes, but I can have 10 of… Them do it at the same time and I it’s not a particularly fun idea, fully automated sales and what that means for the world in general. But it’s the particular vertical where I had this kind of “right, well the enriching certainly makes sense for the LLN to do.” The enriching is like come on, that’s I’m just the API, I’m copying things, and a lot of it is still so manual.
So the revelation was just waking up and then going, “Okay, Claude Code’s gonna do the work for me today,” like it does for software. It builds the software for me. I’m gonna give it a Chrome browser connection-that’s still an unsolved problem. There’s a lot of pain in LLMs chatting to the browser, but there are a few good ones. I’m gonna let it use my LinkedIn, I’m gonna let it use my X, and I’m gonna connect it to the APIs that I need that aren’t pieces of software but like data sources-right? And get enriched and search things.
And then I just started getting it to just do it, and it was really quite good. It was slow but really quite good. That was a kind of - that was the moment where we typed in
build this feature in cloud code
build this
but it was suddenly like this thing can just do anything a human can do on a computer. The only thing holding it back right now is the access to tools and good integrations with the interfaces-the old software it still needs to use to do what a human does.
Yeah, a bigger context window and it’d be great if it was faster, but I can run them in parallel so that the speed’s not a massive problem. In the space of a week, I built the CRM and then I got Claude code to just do the work. But I didn’t tell it to use the CRM; I just told it to use the database. I just ended up throwing away the CRM. Now we have this little Claude code harness that:
I’ve just got like a database viewer that the non-technical team used to kind of look at the leads and stuff like that. It’s just a kind of beekeeper kind of database viewer. And now Claude code is just doing the work.
We’ve only applied it there, but this is just like Claude code is this kind of little innovation in AI that can do work for a long time. We already know people use ChatGPT for all sorts of different things beyond coding, right? So suddenly I think these coding agents are a glimpse of all knowledge work being sped up or replaced. Administration work can be replaced with these things now.
Yeah, these non-technical folks, why not just invite them to the terminal and give them CLI outputs that they can easily run and just use the up arrow to repeat? Or just teach them certain things they maybe weren’t really comfortable with doing before. Now they’re also one step from being a developer or a builder because they’re already in the terminal. That’s where cloud’s at.
Yeah, I mean, that’s what we’ve done now. I’ve seen some unexpected kind of teething issues with that. I think the terminal feels a bit scary to non-technical people even if you explain how to use it. When they quit Claude code or something, they’re just kind of lost; they’re like “Oh my gosh, where did Claude go?”
Yeah, and I was onboarding one of our team members, like “Hey, open the terminal,” and then I’m like, okay, we got a cd. What if the terminal was just Claude code though? What if you built your own terminal that was just - yeah, that’s what I actually think-that specific UI, whether it’s terminal or web UI, it’s kind of neither here nor there, but there is magic in a thing that can access everything on your computer or a computer.
And they’re doing that, I think, with something called Co-work. Have you seen Co-work yet? I haven’t played with it enough to know what it can and can’t do. I think I unleashed it on a directory with some PDFs that I had collected that was around business structure. It was like an idea I had four months ago with just a different business structure that would just make more sense primarily around tax purposes.
I was like, “Hey, revisit this idea I haven’t touched in forever.” It was a directory, and I think it went and just did a bunch of stuff. But then it was coming up with ideas, and I was like, “Nah, those are not good ideas.”
So I don’t know if it’s less smart than Claude code in intent or whatever, but I think that’s what they’re trying to do with Co-work. You could just drop them into essentially a directory, which is what Claude code lives in-a directory of maybe files. That is an application or knows how to talk to the database as you said your CRM does, and they can just be in a cloud code instance just asking questions:
Yeah, I could use a skill if you want to go that route, or it can just be smart enough to be like,
“Well, I have a Neon database here, the Neon CTL CLI is installed, I’m just going to query it directly, maybe I’ll write some Python to make it faster, maybe I’ll store some of this stuff locally and I’ll do it all behind the scenes.”
But then it gives this non-technical person a list of leads. All they had to do is be like:
“Give me the leads, man.”
You mentioned enabling them as builders. I think it is a window into that because when they want something, they get curious. They’ll be like,
You’d be surprised how easy that is. Like, “help me make it easier” is one of those weird ones. Claude Code will also autocomplete and just let you tab and enter.
I’ve noticed those things have gotten more terse, like maybe the last one I did was super short. It was like:
“I like it, implement it” and that was the completion for them.
I was like,
“Okay, is that how easy it’s gotten now to just spit out a feature that we were just riffing on; you understand the bug we just got over, and now your response to me to tell you what to say - because you need me, the human, to get you back in the loop at least in today’s REPL - is ‘I like it, implemented’?”
I found myself just responding with the letter “y” and a lot of the time it just knows what to do. Even if it’s a bit ambiguous, you’re kind of like,
“You’ll work it out.”
So I think it’s very exciting that Anthropic released this co-work thing because they’ve obviously seen that inside Anthropic, all sorts of people are using Claude Code.
When we think about someone starting there for non-coding purposes, but stuff is done with code and CLI tools and some MCPs or whatever APIs, then the user says,
“Make me a UI to make this easier.”
For instance, I had to review a bunch of draft messages that I wrote and was like,
“This is kind of janky in the terminal, make me a UI to do the review.”
And I just did it.
I think this is exactly where software is changing because when the LLM is 10 times faster-I mean if you use the Grok with a Q endpoint-they’re insanely fast, it’s going to be fast, then if you can have any interface you want within a second,
Why have static interfaces?
Yeah, I’m camping out there with you.
What if everything was just in time? I think that interface-
What if I didn’t need a shirt with you because you’re my teammate, but what if you could do the same thing for you and it solves your problem and you’re in your own branch, and what you do in your branch is like Vegas and it stays there?
It doesn’t have to be said anywhere else, right? Like,
“Just leave it in Vegas.”
What if in your own branch, in your own little world as a Sales Development Representative (SDR) who’s trying to help the team and help the organization grow, and all they need is an interface, what if it was just in time for them only?
It didn’t matter if it was maintainable. It didn’t matter how good the code was. All that mattered was that it solved their problem, got the opportunity, and enabled them to do what they’ve got to do to do their job.
You just take that and multiply it or copy and paste it onto all the roles that make sense for that just-in-time world. It completely changes the idea of what software is.
It also completely changes how we interact with a computer, what a computer does, and what it is for.
I just love this notion that
Every user can change the computer, can change the software as they’re using it, as they like it.
I think that’s very exciting-it’s essentially everyone’s a developer.
Yeah, I mean, it’s the ultimate way to use a computer. All the gates are down. There’s no geeky pretty more.
If I want software the way I want software, so long as I have authentication and authorization, I got the keys to my kingdom. I want to make it my way.
And I think also the agents can preempt. I haven’t tried this yet, but I was thinking of giving it a little sales thing - we have a little prompt where it says,
Even if a web UI is going to be better for the user to do this review, just do it.
So instead of you asking it to do some work, it just comes. Back and be like “oh, what I’ve made you this UI where I’ve displayed it all for you. Have a look at it, let me know if you’re happy with it.” I mean, this is getting kind of wild-a bit of an idea-but it’s kind of how we can think about how we communicate with each other as humans, as employees. We have back-and-forth conversations. We have email, which is a bit more asynchronous.
You know, we put up a preview URL of something. I think all of those communication channels can be enabled in the agent you’re chatting to. I haven’t liked this kind of product companies sell-the initial messaging where people are sort of like digital employees. But something like that’s going to happen, and I don’t think it’s the exciting bit.
For me, the exciting bit is the human-computer interaction. It’s like, yeah, this is how it is-it’s quite exciting in the context of Layer code and why we love voice. Voice is this OG communication method, whereas humans-we started speaking before we were writing.
It’s a quite rich communication medium and a terrific way-if your agents can be really multi-medium, whether it’s:
There doesn’t have to be these strict modes or delineations between those things. Well, let’s go there-I didn’t take us there yet, but I do want to talk to you about what you’re doing with Layer code.
I obviously produce a podcast, so I’m kind of interested in speech-to-text to some degree because transcripts, right? Then you have the obvious version which is like you start out with speech and get something or even a voice prompt.
What exactly is Layer code? I suppose we’ve been 51 minutes deep on nerding out on AI essentially, and not at all on your startup and what you’re doing, which was sort of the impetus of even getting back in touch. I saw you had something new you were doing, and I’m like, well, I haven’t talked to Damian since he sponsored the show almost 17 years ago. It’s probably a good time to talk, right?
So there you go, that’s how it works out.
Has your excitement and your dopamine hits on the daily or even by minute by minute changed how you feel about what you’re building with Layer code, and what exactly are you trying to do with it?
Well, and we’ve talked a lot about the building of a company and the building of software now. I think founders today have that as important as the thing they’re building because if you just head into your company and operate it like you did even a few years ago-using no AI, using all your slow development practices, using slow sales and marketing practices-you’re going to really get left behind.
So there is a lot to be done in working out and exploring:
I’m very excited about the idea that we can build large companies with small teams.
I think a lot of developers-well, I mean, there is a lot of HR, politics, and culture change that happens when teams get truly large and companies get truly large. This was one of the founding principles when we started our startup:
“Let’s see how big we can make this with a small team.”
And that’s very exciting because I think you can move fast and keep a great culture.
So that’s why we invest a lot of our energy into the building of the company and what we build and provide right now. Our first product is a voice infrastructure-a voice API for real-time building of voice AI agents.
This is currently a pretty hard problem. We focus a lot on the real-time conversational aspect, and there’s a lot of wicked problems in that:
If you’re a developer building an agent-whether it could be your sales agent or a developer coding agent-and you want to add voice AI, there’s a bunch of stuff you’ll bump into when you start building that.
It’s interesting. We kind of see our customers, and we can predict where they are on that journey because there are a bunch of problems you don’t preempt, and then you quickly slam into them.
We’ve solved a lot of those problems. So with Layer code, you can just take our API, plug it into your existing agent backend.
You can use:
- Any backend you want
- Any agent LLM library you want
- Any LLM you
The basic example is a Next.js application that uses the Versele AI SDK. We’ve also got Python examples as well. You connect to the Voice Layer code and put in our browser SDK, and then you get a little voice agent microphone button and everything within the web app.
We also connect to the phone over Twilio, and for every turn of the conversation, whenever the user finishes speaking, we ship your backend that transcript. You call the LLM of your choice and do your tool calls-everything you need to generate a response as you normally do for a text agent. Then you start streaming the response tokens back to us. As soon as we get that first word, we start converting that text to speech and start streaming it back to the user.
There’s a lot of complexity to make that really low latency and a real-time conversation where you’re not waiting more than a second or two for the agent to respond. We put a lot of work into refining that. There’s also a lot of exciting innovation happening in the model space for voice models, whether it’s transcription or text to speech.
We give you the freedom to switch between those models. You can try out different voice models:
You can find the right trade-off for your experience. There’s a lot of trade-offs in voice between:
We let users explore that and find the right fit for their voice agent.
That is interesting. So, the Next.js SDK streaming latency-is it meant to be the middleware between implementation and feedback to the user?
Yeah, we handle everything related to the voice basically, and we let you just handle text like a text chatbot. There’s no heavy MP3 or WAV file coming down-everything is streaming.
The very interesting problem to solve is that the whole system has to be real-time. The whole thing we call a pipeline. I don’t know if that’s a great name for it because it’s not like an ETL loading pipeline or something, but we call it a pipeline.
The real-time agent system backend, when you start a new session, runs on Cloudflare Workers. It’s running right near the user who clicked to chat with your agent with voice. From that point on, everything is streaming.
The hardest part is working out when the user has finished speaking. It is so difficult because people pause, make sounds, pause again, and start again. Conversation is very dynamic-it’s like a game almost.
We have to do some clever things and use other AI models to help detect when the user has ended speaking. When we have enough confidence-there’s no certainty, but enough confidence-that the user has finished their thought, we finalize that transcript.
We finish transcribing that last word and ship you the whole user utterance. Whether it’s a word, sentence, or paragraph the user has spoken, we bundle it up and choose an end.
The reason we have to do this bundling and can’t stream the user utterance continuously is because LLMs don’t take streaming input.
You can stream input, but you need the complete question to send to the LLM to then make a request and start generating a response. There is no duplex LLM that takes input and generates input/output simultaneously.
Here’s a conceptual question:
What if you constantly wrote to a file locally or wherever the system is, and then at some point, it just ends and you send a call that signals the end versus packaging it all up and sending once it’s done? Like incrementally line by line?
I’m not sure how to describe it, but that’s how I think about it. You constantly write to something and then say,
“Okay, it’s done,” and what was there becomes the final input.
So yes, we can do that in terms of having partial transcripts. We can stream those partial transcripts and then say,
“Okay, now it’s done, now make the LLM call.”
Then you make the LLM call.
Interestingly, sending text is actually super fast in the context of voice, very fast compared to all other steps involved. And actually the default example, this is crazy, I didn’t think this would work until we tried it. But it just uses a webhook. When the user finishes speaking, the basic example sends your Next.js API a webhook with the user text. And it turns out the webhook - sending a webhook with a few sentences in it - that’s fine, that’s fast.
It’s all the other stuff like then waiting for the LLM to respond. Yeah, that’s actually not the hard part. I mean, you have maybe a millisecond-ish or a few milliseconds, but it’s not going to be a dramatic shift, right? The way I described it versus how, yeah.
And we’ve got a web socket endpoint now, so we can kind of shave off that HTTP connection and everything. But yeah, then the big heavy latency items come in, so:
Generating an LLM response. Most LLMs we use right now - the ones we’re using, coding agents - they’re optimized for intelligence, not really speed.
When people optimize for speed, LLM labs tend to optimize for just token throughput. Very few people optimize for time to first token.
And that’s all that matters in voice: I give you the user utterance, how long is the user going to have to wait before I can start playing back an agent response to them? And time to first token is that, right? How long before I get the first kind of word or two that I can turn into voice, and they can start hearing?
The only major LLM lab that actually optimizes for this or maintains a low latency of TTFT (time to first token) is:
OpenAI, most voice agents now are doing it this way. We’re using GPT-4o or Gemini Flash. GPT-4o has some annoying, open API points with some annoying inconsistencies in latency, and that’s kind of the killer in voice, right?
It’s a bad user experience if it works - the first few turns of the conversation are fast, and then suddenly the next turn the agent takes three seconds to respond. You’re like:
“Is the agent wrong? Is the agent broken?”
But then once you get that first token back, then you’re good, because then you can send that text to us, start streaming text to us, and then we can start turning it into full sentences.
And then again, we get to this batching problem. The voice models that do text to voice, again, they don’t stream in the input. They require a full sentence of input before they can start generating any output, because again, how you speak and how things are pronounced depends on what comes later.
So you have to buffer the LLM output into sentences, ship the buffered sentences one by one to the voice model, and then as soon as we get that first chunk of 20 millisecond audio, we chunk it up into streams, stream that straight back down web sockets from the Cloudflare worker straight into the user’s browser, and can start playing the agent response.
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You chose TypeScript to do all this. We’re pretty set on Cloudflare Workers from day one, and it just solves so many infrastructure problems that you’re going to run into later on.
I like-I don’t think we’ll need a devops person ever. It’s such a- That’s interesting. It’s such a wonderful-there are constraints you have to build to, right? You’re using V8 JavaScript, browser JavaScript, in a Cloudflare Worker. Tons of Node APIs don’t work there. There is a bit of a compatibility layer; you do have to do things a bit differently.
But what do you get in return?
There’s often quite big spikes, like 9 a.m.-everyone’s calling up, there’s an agent somewhere, asking to kind of book an appointment or something. You get these big spikes. You want to be able to scale, and you need to scale very quickly because you don’t want people waiting around.
If you throw tons of users on the same system and start overloading it, then suddenly people get this problem where the agent starts responding in three seconds instead of one second. It sounds weird, but yeah, Cloudflare gives you an incredible amount of that for no effort.
Compared to Lambda and similar platforms, it’s also pretty nice: the interface is just an HTTP interface to your worker. There’s nothing in front, and you can do WebSockets very nicely.
There’s this crazy thing called Durable Objects, which I think is a bad name and also kind of a weird piece of technology, but it’s basically:
You can have it take a bunch of WebSocket connections and do many SQL writes to its SQLite database it has attached. You don’t have to do any kind of special stuff dealing with concurrency and atomic operations.
A simple example is to implement a rate limiter or a counter or something like that very simply in Durable Objects.
You can have as many Durable Objects as you want. Each one has a SQLite database attached. You can have 10 gigabytes per one, and you can do whatever you want.
For example:
- You could have a Durable Object per customer that tracks something that you need to be done in real time.
- You could have a Durable Object per chat room.
As long as you don’t exceed the compute limits of a Durable Object, you can use it for all sorts of magical things.
I think it is a real under-known thing that Cloudflare has. Coming from Pusher, it’s like the kind of real-time primitive now. A lot of the stuff we’d reach for something like Pusher, Durable Objects, especially when building fully real-time systems, is really, really valuable.
You chose TypeScript based on Cloudflare Workers because that gave you:
For those who choose Go-or I don’t think you choose Rust for this because it’s not the kind of place you’d put Rust-but Go would compete for the same kind of mind share for you.
How would the system have been different if you chose Go? Or can you even think about that?
I haven’t actually written any Go, so I don’t know if I can give a good comparison. From the perspective of what we do have out there, there are similar real-time voice agent platforms in Python. I think because many people building the voice models then built coordination systems like layer code for coordinating real-time conversations, Python was the language they chose.
I think what’s more important is the patterns rather than the specific languages.
We actually wrote the first implementation with RxJS, which has implementations in most popular languages. I hadn’t used it before, but we chose it for stream processing. It’s not really for real-time systems, but it gives you… Subjects channel these kinds of has its own names for these things but basically it’s like a pub-sub kind of thing. Then it’s got this kind of functional chaining thing where you can pipe things, filter messages, split messages, and things like that.
That did allow us to build the first version of this quite dynamic system.
We didn’t touch on it, but interruptions are another really difficult dynamic part. Whilst the agent is speaking its response to you, if the user starts speaking again, you need to decide in real time whether the user is interrupting the agent or just agreeing with the agent -
“Oh gosh” or are they trying to say “oh stop”?
That’s a hard problem to solve.
We still have to be transcribing audio even when the user is hearing it. We have to deal with background noise and everything. Then, when we’re confident the user is trying to interrupt the agent, we’ve got to do this whole kind of state change where we tear down all of this in-flight LLM request and in-flight voice generation request, and then as quickly as possible, start focusing on the user’s new question.
Especially if their interruption is really short, like:
Suddenly you’ve got to tear down all the old stuff, transcribe that word stop, then ship that as a new LLM request to the back end, generate the response, and get the agent speaking back as quickly as possible.
And that’s all happening down one pipe, as it were, at the end of the day - audio from the browser microphone, then audio replaying back.
We would have bugs like:
You’re kind of in Audacity or some audio editor, trying to work out:
“Why does it sound like this?”
You’re rearranging bits of audio, going:
“Ah, okay, the responses are taking turns every 20 milliseconds, it’s interleaving the two responses.”
Real, real pain in the ass.
When you solve that problem of the interruption:
How do you direct that interrupt? It really depends on the use case - how you configure the voice agent, really depends on how the voice agent is being used.
For example:
When we call those audio environments, it’s often an early issue users have, like:
Big problem with audio transcription is that it just transcribes any audio it hears. If someone’s talking behind you, it just transcribes that. The model doesn’t know that’s irrelevant conversation.
If you imagine the therapy voice agent, it needs to:
Maybe even tears or crying, or just some sort of human interrupt - but not a true interrupt. It’s something you should maybe even capture in parentheses.
You can choose a few different levels of interruption:
By default, we interrupt when we hear any word that’s not a filler word, so we filter out things like “um”, “uh”, etc.
If you need more intelligence, you can ship off the partial transcripts to an LLM in real time.
For example, let’s say the user starts interrupting the agent every word or every few words, you:
Here's the previous thing the user said, here's what the agent said, here's what the user just said.
Yes or no, do you think they're interrupting the agent?
You get that back in about 250-300 milliseconds.
As you get new transcripts, you:
Then you get the response from that and can make a quite intelligent decision.
These things feel very hacky but they actually work very well.
The first thing I think about there is that Gemini Flash is not local, so you do have to deal with:
Or in the Claude I would… Say Cloud Web’s case, most recently, a lot of downtime occurred because of really heavy usage. The last two days, I’ve had more interruptions on the web than ever, and I’m like that’s because, yeah, it’s the Ralph effect. I’m like, okay cool, I get it. You know, I’m not upset with you because I empathize with how in the world do you scale those services.
So, why does your system not allow for a local LM to be just as smart? Then Gemini Flash might be, to answer that very simple question-like an interrupt, it’s a pretty easy thing to determine.
Yeah, I think smaller LMs can do that. Gemini is just incredibly fast, I think because of their TPU infrastructure. They’ve got an incredibly low TTFT (time to first token), which is the most important thing. But I agree that there are smaller LMs, and actually, I think probably maybe one of the Grok with a Q, Llamas, actually might even be a bit faster. We should try that.
You make a point about reliability. People really notice it in voice agents when it doesn’t work right, especially if a business is relying on it to collect a bunch of calls for them.
So, that is one of the other helpful things that platforms like ours provide-even just cost. I imagine over time, cost is a factor. Right now, you’re probably fine with it because you’re innovating and maybe finding out things like:
You’re sort of just-in-time building a lot of this stuff, and you might be okay with the inherent cost of innovation. But at some point, you may flatten a little bit and think, “You know what? If it had been running locally for the last little bit, we just saved 50 grand.” I don’t know what the number is, but the local model becomes a version of free when you own:
- The hardware
- The compute
- The pipe to it
You can own the SLA latency to it as well as the reliability that comes from that.
There are some cool new transcription models from NVIDIA, and they’ve got some voice models. There was a great demo of a fully open-source local voice agent platform done with Pipecat, which is the Python coordination agent infrastructure open source project that I was mentioning.
They’ve got a really great pattern: a plug-in in plug-in pattern for their voice agent. I think that’s the right pattern. We’ve adopted a similar one, and other frameworks have done that. We’ve adopted a similar pattern for ours when we rebuilt it recently.
The important thing is the plugins. These are kind of independent things that you can test in isolation. That was the biggest problem we had with RxJS-the whole thing was kind of like mixing, kind of audio mixing things where you have cables going everywhere. It was kind of like that with RxJS subjects going absolutely everywhere.
It was hard for us as humans to understand. It was the kind of code where you come back to a week later and ask, “What was happening here?” Often, we’d write code where the code at the top of the file was actually the thing that happened last in execution, just because that’s how RxJS was telling us to do it or guiding us on how we had to initialize things.
One of the key things we did was move to a plug-in architecture. We moved to a very basic system with no kind of RxJS style stream processing plugin-just all very simple JavaScript with async iterables. We just pass a waterfall of messages down through plugins. It’s so much better.
We can take out a plugin if we need to, unit test the plugin, write integration tests, and mock out plugins up and down. We’re about to launch that, and that’s just a game changer.
Interestingly, tying back to LLMs, we ended up here because with the first implementation, we found it hard as developers to understand the code we’d written. The LLMs were hopeless; they just could not hold the state of this dynamic, crazy multi-subject stream system in their head. The context was everywhere-it was here and there.
Even if I would take the whole file, copying and pasting files into ChatGPT Pro, being like:
“You definitely have all the context here, fix this problem.”
And they would solve the problem.
Part of the problem was that complexity-not having the ability to test things in isolation meant we couldn’t have a kind of TDD loop, whether with a human or with an agent.
Because of that, we couldn’t use agents to add features to this. The platform to the core of the platform was slowing us down, and so that’s when we really started to use coding agents called Code and Codex like really properly and hard. I spent two weeks just with Code, Codex, and the mission was:
“If I can get the coding agent to write the new version of this, it was kind of not even a refactor; it had to be rewritten start from scratch, first principles.”
Then, by virtue of it writing it, it’ll understand it, and I’ll be able to use coding agents to add features.
I started with literally the API docs for our public API because I didn’t want to change that, and the API docs of all the providers and models we implement, with like the speech-to-text and text-to-speech model provider endpoints, and just some ideas about
That experience was really interesting because it felt like molding clay. I really cared about how the code looked because I wanted humans, as well as engineers, to read it. The agents aren’t quite good enough to build this whole thing from a prompt, but I think they will be in a year or two. It did an okay job and needed a lot of
But it felt like clay in one sense because, as you mentioned earlier, you can just write some code, and even if it’s wrong, you’ve kind of learned some experience.
I was able to just say: “write this whole plugin architecture,” and it would do it. I’d be like, “Oh, that seems a bit wrong, that’s hard to understand.” Then I would say:
“Write it again like this,” “Write it again like this.”
I suddenly got that experience of throwing away code because it hadn’t taken me weeks and weeks to write this code; it had taken me 10 minutes, and I was like, “Doesn’t matter, just throw it away.”
You still have your chat session too, so even if you have to scroll back up a little bit or maybe even copy that out to a file for long-term memory if you needed to, you still have that there as a reference point.
I find myself doing similar things where it’s just like,
It did a terrific job.
The bit that really got it over the finish line was when I gave it this script that we used to have to do manually to test our voice agent. You know, it’s like:
There are like 20 different tests you had to do. I gave it that script and was like,
“Write the test suite for all of these tests.”
It did. I gave it all these bugs we had in our backlog, I was like:
“Write tests for this.”
I started doing TDD (test-driven development) in our backlog, and it was great.
Then I did a chaos monkey thing. I was like,
“Write a bunch of tests for crazy stuff the users could do with the API.”
Yes, it found a bunch of bugs and issues, including security issues.
It got it working, had a bunch of unit tests, and I was still having to do a bit of manual testing. Then one day, I realized:
“I really want a no one’s made integration test thing for voice agents.”
There are a few observation platforms, observability platforms, and eval platforms, so I was like, I just wanted to simulate conversation.
That’s part of the magic: trying something that you’re like,
“This is a pain in the ass to build,” or “How is this even going to work?”
I just got it to build it.
I recorded some wav files of me saying things and gave them to it with:
“Make an integration test suite for this and feed the wav files like you’re having a conversation and check the transcripts you get back.”
It did a great job and was actually able to fully simulate those conversations and do all the tests.
Then that - I mean, we’ve got these practices like TDD which are going to hold value. It was so valuable for the model, for the agent, to be running the test, fixing the test, running the test, fixing your tests, and that feels a bit like magic when you get it working.
So much to cover in this journey. Wow, I’m so glad we had this conversation.
I kind of feel like a good place to begin to end, not actually end, is back to this idea that is on your about page.
I’m just amazed because I love to write and really hate paper because this thing has Linux on it, and I wrote an API that I now use with my Remarkable Pro tablet. So amazing. I’m loving it. You need to be able to code Codex from your tablet. That’s next. I just got it, so the next thing is I’m gonna have this little playground for me basically, but it’s real time. So if you see me looking over here writing, audience or even you Damian, I’m not not paying attention-I’m writing things down.
One thing I wrote down earlier from your about page was the era of the small giant, which you alluded to but didn’t say those exact words. The reason why I think it might be a good place to begin to end is that I want to encourage the single developer, who may in the last couple months just begun to touch and not resist falling into this gravity hole or however we describe this resistance we’ve had as developers loving to read our own code and code review and all the things as humans.
Now, not resist as much or if at all, and just trust the model. To give them this word of encouragement towards:
“Hey, you’re a single developer, and in your case Damian, you don’t need a DevOps. It’s not that they’re not valuable or useful, but you chose a model, a way to develop your application to solve your problem that didn’t require a DevOps team.”
Give them that encouragement. What does it mean to be in this era of the small giant world?
I think the hardest thing is our own mindset, right? I just found this with coding agents-you start off putting in things where you kind of have an idea, you know what to expect out of it, and then you start just putting in stuff that seems a bit ridiculous and ambitious. Oftentimes it fails, but more and more it’s working. That’s a very magical feeling and a very revealing kind of experience.
So, I think we can all be more ambitious now. Especially as engineers, we know how the whole thing works. There is a lot of power everyone’s being given with vibe coding, being able to vibe code. There are a lot of security issues; I think they’ll be solved over time, but as engineers, we have the knowledge to be able to:
But we can do so much more now; we can be so much more ambitious.
I think the thing that every engineer should be doing now is not only trying out Claude Code and Codex and doing something new and fun. The great thing is it’s so low risk, so easy to do that you can build something ridiculous and fun that you’ve always wanted to do.
Heck yeah, you can just build something for a friend, for your wife-it’s like that. That’s really exciting.
I think this Ralph Wiggum thing, a very kind of basic idea, is:
Give a spec.md or a todo.md-just an ambitious task or a long list of tasks in a markdown file.
Run a shell script that just says to Claude Code:
- "Do the next bit of work."
- When there's no more work to do, return "complete."
The shell script just greps for "complete," and if it hasn't seen that word in some XML tags, it calls Claude Code again.
Like many of these things, it seems like a terrible idea; it seems ridiculous, but it’s also incredible what it can do. I think that’s probably one way to feel what the future is going to be like.
I feel like you write down something very ambitious in a markdown file or transcribe an idea you’ve been thinking about for a while and you set a Ralph Wiggum script off in it. Then you just go for a long walk or have lunch. When you come back, it’s a very exciting feel.
As a developer, it’s very fun because then you get to go through all this code and be like,
“Why did it do that?” and you’re like, “Oh that was pretty smart that it did it like that.”
Okay, that was quite a good idea. Then it messed up this bit, but that’s a very exciting experience-very cool.
I definitely agree with that. I’m looking forward to writing that todo.md or spec.md and just going for that one because I haven’t done it yet.
I’ve only peeked at some of the videos and demos, but I haven’t tried the Ralph Wiggum loop.
I’m gonna post on X a one-liner Ralph as well because I think you can just copy and paste and go-there’s no blog post to read.
Well, I feel like with everything, I want to make it more ceremonious-not because it needs to be, but because I want to know. I want to give myself space to think of something challenging for me even, and then give it to the thing and go away, like you said, and come back happy.
I want to save space to do that when I can give it. Full mind share versus the incremental 20 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it might be that I have available to give it, I kind of want to give it a bit more ceremony, not because it deserves it, but because I want to actually do it for myself.
I’m just in this like constant learning scenario. It’s a pretty wild era to be a developer and to be an enabled developer. You know, non-technical folks may get introduced to a terminal-like thing that basically is just Claude in a directory where they can ask questions and get a just-in-time interface that is managed to them only. That’s a really, really, really cool world to be in.
It doesn’t mean that software goes away; it just means there’s going to be a heck of a lot more of it out there. I do concur that maybe code review doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it won’t in a year, maybe it won’t in six weeks. I don’t know how many weeks it will take.
Let’s truly end with this:
What’s over the horizon for you? What’s over the horizon for Layer Code? What is coming?
The show will release next Wednesday, so you’ve got a week. Given that horizon, and no one’s listening now, it’s a week from now. What’s on the horizon for you that you can give us a peek at? Is there anything?
We are working really hard to bring down the cost of voice agents.
I’m very excited for that and, most of all, very excited just to see voice AI everywhere. Voice is just such a wonderful interface. I find myself dictating all the time to Claude Code, and you can kind of get out your thoughts so much better.
I’m excited to see how many applications we can enable by adding voice AI into their application. Then
we get an insight into the future of voice AI as well with the companies that are working-most of them are startups-and they’re building some crazy, crazy new things with voice AI on our platform.
So, there’s going to be some amazing stuff with voice coming out this year.
What’s the longing fruit? What’s the sweet spot for Layer Code right now that you can invite folks to come and try?
Well, the great thing is we’ve got a CLI single command you can run, and you’ll get a Next.js demo app all connected to Layer Code voice agent. You can get a voice agent running up and running within a minute. So, it’s super fun, worth trying.
From that point, you can use Claude Code, Codex, and just start building from there.
Well, friends, right here at the last minute, the very last question—Damian’s internet dropped off or something happened, I’m not sure. But it was a fun conversation with Damian.
It’s kind of wild to be talking to somebody 17 years later after being one of the first, if not the first-I’m pretty sure the first-sponsor of this podcast. What a wild world it is to be this deep in years and experience, in history in software, and to just still be enamored by the possibilities.
I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with Damian, and we’ll see you next time.
Well, friends, the YOLO mode philosophy is out there. The code review is a bottleneck, maybe non-existent. SaaS may be dying or dead. It’s time to trust the model, building a CRM just in time.
What kind of world is this we’re living in? Did you think the beginning of 2026 would be this kind of year?
Now, I know if you’re listening to this podcast at the very end and you’re a Spotify hater, well, guess what, AI is here to stay. You should read the tea leaves. That’s just me being honest.
But seriously, you can’t deny the impact that AI is having. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is using it. And those who aren’t, well, we’ll see.
I know our friends over at
are all loving this podcast just like you. Much thanks, much love, appreciate the support.
But hey friends, this show’s done, this show’s over. I’m glad you listened. We’ll see you again real soon.
2026-01-20 08:00:01
China’s Low-Key Response to the Iran Crisis
The China Global South podcast is supported in part by our subscribers and Patreon supporters. If you’d like to join a global community of readers for daily news and exclusive analysis about Chinese engagement in Asia, Africa, and throughout the developing world, go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com/subscribe.
Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Seneca podcast network. I’m Eric Olander.
Today we’re going to dive into the situation in Iran. It’s been a dramatic past few weeks in Iran. As we are recording this now, it appears, and again, the information coming out is quite spotty, but it appears that there has been a massive government crackdown on two to three weeks of protests that were protesting the cost of living, inflation, corruption. These were the most serious protests to the regime that we’ve seen in years in Iran, and it appears that thousands have been killed now by security forces.
Now, throughout all of this, there was also the prospective threat that the United States was going to launch some type of military intervention, potentially alongside Israel. This kind of gained momentum after the U.S. intervention and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Now, the subtext in all of this was, well, certainly the Americans have been wanting to change the regime in Tehran for a very long time, but at the end of the day, too, they also want to try and box in China. That was something that came up quite a bit in the discourse in Washington.
There was this kind of giddy excitement in some of the MAGA circles and conservative podcasts and conservative media that the United States has successfully cut off the oil supply from Venezuela to China. As we know now, the ships are not sailing. That’s going to cut off about 4% of China’s oil supply coming from Venezuela.
China gets between 12% and 14% of its imported oil from Iran. And so the prospect of cutting off about 20% of China’s oil supply was something that was getting a lot of attraction in conservative media circles in the U.S. and to some extent also in Europe.
But it’s interesting because the Chinese reaction—you would never know that so much was potentially on the line. The Chinese have had a very subdued reaction to the situation in Iran. They’ve kind of issued the pro forma denunciations of the U.S. threats to intervene. At the same time, we saw a very different reaction coming out of Beijing and also out of the United Nations than what China did for the abduction of Nicolas Maduro.
So to find out why there’s been such a divergence between Venezuela and Gaza earlier and now Iran, we have our old friend back on the show, one of the leading China-Iran scholars in the world, William Figueroa, who is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and really, again, one of the great go-to people on this issue.
Bill published a fascinating article on CGSP:
As Iran faces its gravest crisis in decades, China stays on the sidelines
where he breaks down the Chinese response to the crisis in Iran.
We are thrilled to have you back on the show, Bill. Great to speak with you. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, Eric. Always happy to be here.
Well, you started your column saying Chinese officials have struck a cautious tone in response to the protests. Let’s kind of start at the beginning and understand a little bit why the Chinese are reacting so differently to what’s happening in Iran than to what happened in Venezuela. And again, even the response to Gaza, where the Chinese were much more enthusiastic.
Absolutely. Well, first, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge what you said at the beginning, that these are some of the most serious protests we’ve seen in Iran since at least the Jina Amini protests or the Women Life Freedom movement a couple of years ago.
But also that in terms of the state response, we’re definitely seeing something new. The number of people who have been killed, the types of scenes we’re seeing, the kind of technological sophistication of the crackdown is all rather unprecedented. So it’s a scary time right now for a lot of people, for Iranians especially.
So, if you have any Iranian friends, definitely reach out to them and see how they’re doing. This is also just one of those difficult moments, especially when you see the sort of heroic scenes of Iranians who, this protest in particular, as you said, started very much growing out of spontaneous protests from merchants who are protesting against recent news that was released against the price of inflation.
And even the international context, when you talk to people who are in the protest, many of them were very disconnected from the discourse outside the country. So I think it’s also really important to remember going into this discussion, how much of this is driven by what Iranians are doing, how much Iranians are suffering and also the domestic problems they have inherent within Iran.
Right.
OK, so before we get to the China part of this, are there similarities to these protests than to those that we saw in other Gen Z riots, say, in Indonesia, Nepal, Manila and also in Nairobi, where young people in particular were frustrated with corruption?
They were frustrated with:
Yeah, I think that this is kind of underlying all of the frustrations across social classes in Iran right now. I had an Iranian friend say to me that in so many words that even people in his life who had very comfortable lives up till this point are suddenly very much wondering about their future.
They talk a lot in Iran about poor millionaires, basically people who had enough money to build these great lives for themselves, but in the current situation don’t even have enough money to put, you know, new rims or new wheels on their fancy cars to go for a drive around the country.
Right. So this is kind of the wider mood across the board.
So this is getting, as I mentioned, a lot of people in conservative media and MAGA circles in Washington excited that there is the prospect that the regime, the Ayatollahs in particular, are in jeopardy of collapsing.
And again, something similar is also happening in Havana as well, where again, the cutoff of the Venezuelan oil is prompting an economic crisis there.
So when we take that into account, a lot of people have said that China is Iran’s lifeline. It buys something around 80 to 90 percent of its oil. So the relationship between China and Iran is very close.
Iran, as you’ve pointed out, is much less important to China than China is to Iran.
But let’s get an understanding before we dive into the reactions. What is the nature of the China-Iran relationship as you see it?
Well, first of all, yeah, as you said, there are these kind of more serious questions now about the survival of the Iranian government.
I think just to put my cards on the table, based on what we’ve seen now, it seems like things are moving more towards its back to the status quo. So for me, obviously, no one knows what the next couple of weeks or months can hold, but it looks like the repression has been successful in quieting the protests for now.
So to me, that question is a little less up in the air than it felt a couple, you know, last week.
But there are two points you brought up that I think are worth discussing before we dive into that.
Sure.
And I’ll take care of the first one because the one about Iran-China relations kind of naturally flows into the second question.
So on the topic of oil, where does China get its oil from? Oil from Venezuela, oil from Iran?
You know, there’s been a lot of talk, as I’m sure you know, of this idea that, as you said earlier, that by cutting off the oil from Venezuela and potentially from Iran, if what Trump had said had actually materialized into some sort of intervention or the government actually collapsed and that this is somehow, you know, a kind of whatever it is these days, “19 D chess move” against China.
I would push back against that analysis a little bit, first of all, because, you know, as you said, the numbers might look impressive:
You put it together. It’s a lot. But China gets oil from so many other places.
Russia is its number one supplier. Other major suppliers include:
all of which are absolutely going to keep the oil flowing.
So would it hurt financially? Maybe a little bit. But I think it’s not that difficult to make up for. China has oil coming from all over the world these days, including potentially new partnerships like—and we can get into this later if you’d like to—what’s going on in Canada, Canada also being an oil producer.
Yeah, no, I do want to bring that up as well.
And just to note that there’s an estimated 60 to 90 million barrels of oil right now sitting off the coast of Malaysia and in the South China Sea that have not been able to make it up to China.
This is purportedly some of the Russian sanctioned oil and some of the Iranian sanctioned oil that is part of the black market kind of laundering that happens as the sanctions have clamped down on it.
The point is that there are pools and pockets of big supplies of oil out there, as you pointed out, that China can turn to to compensate for the 16 to 18 percent.
And as you pointed out, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, just got back from Beijing. He’s in the Middle East right now, interestingly, but he there signed deals for energy and the Canadians do not want to be as reliant on the United States. So this is a situation of Donald Trump’s making. And Canada may become a rather large energy supplier to the Chinese, again, potentially offsetting some of this Venezuelan and Iranian crew that may be cut off.
So continue on on that.
Well, first of all, I could not possibly imagine why Canada would be interested in turning away from the United States.
Yeah. So as you said, there is this question, first of all, of even if — even if, because right now it’s not looking like anything that’s going to happen. They could cut off the oil from Iran. It wouldn’t necessarily hurt them so much.
More importantly, they might even be thinking:
“You’re going to cut off the oil from Iran? Good luck,”
because about 20 years of sanctions have been unable to do that so far.
So anything short of a full-scale invasion of Iran and a sort of, you know, direct or maybe even something as dramatic as what we saw in Venezuela, a kind of a surgical strike on the leadership and then a subsequent American-dominated political reconstruction — this is not likely to happen at all. Iran is not Venezuela. It’s bigger. It’s different. It’s further away. It’s much more expensive and technologically unfeasible to do something like that.
And I think it’s really obvious by the fact that Donald Trump didn’t do anything, despite very loudly saying and recklessly, I should add, saying that he might do something, leaving Iranians bleeding in the streets, hoping that help was coming as he was saying. And he said if the killing started, he would come to their aid. And of course, he didn’t in the end.
Yes, exactly. So, you know, Iran’s not Venezuela.
Venezuela, you know, it’s more local, right? Venezuela is not really, in my opinion, ultimately about China. It’s partially about China, but it’s ultimately about Latin America, Cuba, you know, the Trump corollary, as he likes to call it, although I’m loathe to use that word.
In a word, China and the U.S. are actually operating very similarly in their foreign policy right now in that respect:
So that brings me then to the China-Iran relationship and China’s reaction to all of this.
So as you mentioned, and as I’ve said many times, Iran-China relations are much more circumscribed, much more limited than they’re often presented in the media. There’s this narrative of $400 billion worth of investment that’s gone into Iran or is going into Iran over the next 25 years, which is a complete exaggeration.
I’ve written extensively about how this number is basically plucked from some, in my opinion, some very poor journalism, anonymously sourced kinds of things. And it bears no resemblance to reality or indeed the numbers we’ve seen going into Iran from China over the last couple of years.
Let’s just take a very quick pause there because not everybody may understand the $400 billion reference that you’re making. This was part of an agreement that Wang Yi, I think it was in 21 or 22, during the pandemic, went to Tehran and signed what was purported to be this big strategic agreement that had this huge price tag on it. Maybe you could just give a little background on that.
Yeah, in the simplest terms, they signed an upgraded sort of MOU, a strategic partnership between China and Iran. And it is exactly that. It was sort of an MOU. It was a list of things that Iran and China would like to increase, like to increase their cooperation on over the next 25 years.
There were no enforcement mechanisms. There were no specific proposals. There was no China and Iran will cooperate based on these banks. It was just:
The $400 billion price tag came from some anonymously sourced news articles in Petroleum Economist, which is an oil industry magazine that got picked up by The New York Times and has been endlessly repeated since then.
And as I said, you just don’t find anything like that in the documents themselves or in reality.
So if you look at China’s investment to Iran over the last, you know, since the deal, basically, you measure the amount of money coming into the country in the hundreds of millions of dollars every year, not billions.
So we’re not anywhere on track to get to that level of investment.
And also, I should say that if we somehow were, that would account for more than half of the amount of money that China puts into the entire world as investments every year.
So obviously, that’s not going to go to Iran. And even I should say that, like right now, the amount of investment, cumulative investment that Iran and China have had since then, it stands at a couple of billion.
By contrast, all of the surrounding countries from Iraq to the various Gulf states have cumulative investments of China in the tens of millions or higher or planned in the near future.
Yeah. And Saudi Arabia, of course, being the most important country in the region.
So this might then explain a little bit why we have not heard much from China. Again, there’s been some pro forma outrage, which is quite typical. But there’s been nowhere near the passion that the Chinese had in response to what happened in Venezuela.
Let me just refresh everybody.
Within hours, less than 24 hours, the Chinese issued a statement on January 4th denouncing the United States. Then on that same day, a second statement denouncing the United States and calling for the release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia, from detention. And then on Sunday, Wang Yi used his meeting with the Pakistani foreign minister to say:
“The world doesn’t need an international policeman, an international judge.”
And then on Monday at the United Nations, they led the charge against the United States to denounce them for what they did in Venezuela.
By contrast, in Iran, virtually nothing, virtually nothing.
Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokesperson, she said it in response to a planted question and, you know, very choreographed by the Chinese media and the Chinese foreign ministry to say that they are discouraging external interference in Iran.
At the same time, just on Friday, we got a message from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a statement that was published by Russia and China asking to protect the sovereignty of Iran’s borders, which is the height of irony that Russia is talking about the sovereignty of countries’ borders.
But anyway, that’s where we are: much more subdued than what we saw from the Chinese about Venezuela.
Yeah, I would say even like there are some similarities in the sense that they’ve been equally outraged about the United States when it comes to Iran. And in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I would say that it’s been a bit of a more subdued response, which is the fact that they’ve mostly focused on condemning potential U.S. involvement.
They’ve had next to nothing to say about the actual situation and taken no real concrete steps. Anything from evacuating Chinese citizens to expressing even the same kind of direct opinions on the sources of the conflict or who is in the right and who is in the wrong that we saw in the Gaza, what’s going on in the genocide in Gaza.
What we now see in Venezuela is, I think, a higher level of outrage and even a little bit more political action in terms of, like you said, leading the charge at the United Nations, but still focused on the United States. Because, again, Venezuela is far and China has little that it can offer.
By the same token, we see even less investment, I think, in what’s going on in Iran, because, again, China is less far, but China has equally little to offer.
And, like I said before, their relationship is not especially strong. Well, I mean, it’s not that it’s not politically strong, but it’s economically not particularly strong. So there’s less to be lost for China.
Now, that doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that China would somehow benefit from some sort of chaos. In fact, I think they’re quite worried about the potential of it spilling over to their surrounding countries where there’s a lot of investment. There’s also their political clout that they’ve invested in Iran to a certain degree.
But I really don’t think this is going to hurt their international standing in the way that a lot of people seem to be imagining that it might.
What do you think of the criticism that we have heard quite a bit in media narratives and on social media as well that says Venezuela and Iran were both all-weather and strategic partners of the Chinese, and when push came to shove, the Chinese weren’t there to help or to defend them?
At the end of the day, American hard power is what’s most important.
This is, of course, the Stephen Miller line that:
“It’s this era of hard power now in China with its all-weather partnerships and its all-weather friends and its strategic partnerships in places like Iran mean nothing in a new era of hard power.”
Oh, so first of all, I would say that, you know, some people say that in a positive way. I would agree with that in a strongly negative fashion.
I do think that there’s been an overblown narrative of China is coming to replace and overthrow the U.S.-backed international order coming from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Some people are trumpeting the end of the American empire and saying that China is going to replace or hasten that as a sort of anti-colonial even or sort of, you know, non-Western force that operates differently. I caution against both of those narratives. Basically, I would say that the American empire may be on the decline in some places, but it’s still there and it’s still the predominant hegemonic force in a lot of these regions. That’s obviously true in Latin America, and it’s also increasingly clear in the Middle East.
I’ve described what we’re seeing in the Middle East not as the decline of U.S. power and the ascent of Chinese power, but rather the playing out of the Sino-U.S. rivalry in a kind of, what even Mao often called back in the day, a kind of intermediate zone, right? A middle area in which both powers have some ability to project power, but in which U.S. kinetic power is clearly much more the predominant force.
Now, what I would add to that is China is very aware of that, everyone in the region and for the most part outside of Washington and these kinds of media analysis that look at these kinds of things. And nobody had any confusion that a strategic partnership with China is going to mean China is going to come to your rescue if you are collapsing under the weight of your own internal contradictions or if you’re facing aggression from the United States, especially in areas that are not within, you know, China’s neighborhood in Asia, for example.
So I would definitely emphasize that China doesn’t call for itself this label of anti-Western defender of a multipolar order, right? It’s more of a kind of attempt to peacefully manage the reactions that naturally come from the most powerful country in the world as it tries to expand and encroach into what it traditionally sees as its territory.
Yeah, this was one of the points that I was making over the past week and some of the conversations I was having with folks that they say:
And I said, that military investment that the Chinese have made, as you pointed out, is really specifically designed for the Western Pacific and the first and second island chain, with the focus on Taiwan and then periphery defense. It is not focused on projecting power into the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, or as far away as Venezuela. That is just not what they’ve designed it to do.
So this idea that the Chinese could match U.S. hard power so far afield is simply not grounded in Chinese security strategy. And as you pointed out, it’s not a core security interest for the Chinese to be engaged militarily in Latin America and also in the Persian Gulf. The core security interest for the Chinese is:
- Taiwan
- South China Sea
- East China Sea
- India-China border
So I guess, I mean, this is why it’s been frustrating to watch a lot of the analysis coming down about this, because, again, it’s just a misunderstanding of what or an ignorance of Chinese security strategy.
Yeah, to give you a great example of how this kind of exaggeration versus reality happens, a couple of years ago, there were reports that there was a doubling of the presence of China’s fleets in the Persian Gulf. And this was interpreted as potentially having to do with the ongoing bombardment of shipping lanes that was happening at the time because of the Houthi, the Ansar Allah attacks.
What actually was happening was that the three ships that China often has in the region, that it basically just uses to, as you said, sort of run supplies and protect some of its own military maneuvers, had crossed paths with the other three ships that were moving into the region as the two were switching, basically.
So there was never intended to be more than three in the region at any time, but there was temporarily six as they were sailing past each other. And the defense news bloggers have reported this as a doubling of ships, of Chinese ships in the Persian Gulf, potentially related to China’s new aggressive power expansion.
So there’s a whole fever dream around this. And I also should say Chinese bloggers participate in the same thing. So every time U.S. seizes a tanker or something happens that could potentially threaten this sort of discussion about threatening China’s energy lines, they say:
“This is exactly why we need to build up power, and we should be doing this kind of Red Sea special ops kind of things that we depict in the movies and what have you.”
So it’s a fantasy on both sides. It is a fantasy on both sides. And a lot of the new Chinese movies have been fueling a lot of this fantasy of the ability to project power in the way that the Americans can. And the Chinese simply don’t have the capacity by design, by the way, not by any other thing.
But two other quick points before we go. Number one is you’ve talked about how they’re not reliant on Iranian oil, but about 30 to 40 percent of Chinese energy that’s imported every year does pass through the Straits of Hormuz.
And there were concerns last year that in the conflict between the United States, Iran, and Israel, the Iranians were going to shut down the Straits of Hormuz. That would cause a very big problem for the Chinese.
It’s surprising to me from a security point of view, when they’re already dealing with the Straits of Malacca dilemma, where they’re very afraid of this very small waterway that a lot of Chinese energy passes through in Southeast Asia, that they would make such investments in Persian Gulf energy that also passes through a very vulnerable waterway that the Americans or the Iranians, for other reasons beyond the Chinese, would want to shut down.
Talk to me a little bit about the vulnerability that the Chinese face in the Straits of Hormuz.
Sure. So, I mean, there is, without a question, a serious issue. I mean, if you looked at even just the downward effects of downstream effects of rerouting of so much shipping—not of oil flows, but of just commercial shipping—during the Ansar Allah attacks on Red Sea shipping cost China a lot of money. So that wasn’t great. They’re definitely concerned about those kinds of things, and that, I think, much more so than any potential loss of investments in Iran or Iranian oil access.
Again, it’s something, so I think I would answer it like this: I think they’re very concerned about it. And if that were to be something that was on the table or close to reality, I think they would be putting all of the resources they had at their disposal to preventing that from happening.
The thing is that those resources are largely diplomatic and economic. They’re not military—both, as you said, by design. China’s power projection capability is not designed for those purposes. And secondly, because it’s not in their interests, in their strategy and how they envision how they are, will and want to be and should be doing things.
So with all these questions about China’s power projection capabilities, we have to remember:
If China wanted to prevent a conflict that would cause the Straits of Hormuz to be closed, they wouldn’t see dispatching Chinese naval forces to the region as a way of countering potential U.S. naval forces in the region as conducive to that goal. They would see that as:
escalating the situation, moving it away from their strengths of diplomacy and moving it toward a kinetic conflict.
It’s also worth mentioning this is Iran’s strategy. Every bit of the Iranian military strategy is based around hunkering down, adopting a defensive posture until diplomacy can settle it, because that’s what you do when you are the militarily weaker party.
This is kind of the point I want to emphasize: there’s a lot of this crowing of
“America is great and it’s so much more powerful than China. Look at how China was trumpeting how great it was and how it was going to be a major player. And now, you know, look, we’ve proven that we’re still the big dogs in town.”
That’s one perspective. But another perspective is that unrealistically, the Western media and Western government officials have hyped themselves up about this China threat, that China is coming and that it’s going to be a massive threat to the U.S.-run order—what they sometimes call the rules-based international order or stability.
But the reality is that China hasn’t been saying that. No one is really expecting that. What they’re expecting is what China does: to come and provide
But at the end of the day, China is firmly integrated into the international order, and is really just trying to redefine and alter that in a fundamental way—yes—but not one which is going to result in this kind of conflict.
So you’ve raised your own expectations, and then China doesn’t meet them, and everyone is shocked. Well, I’m not that shocked, and I would end by just saying that it’s not the case, in my view, that if China is on the sidelines, that’s very much where they’ve calculated that they should be, and I don’t see this as a misstep for them.
Yeah, that’s a strategic decision on their part.
Very quickly before we go, just, you know, you talk about kind of misreading the situation. One of the things that I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks since this happened, when a lot of people have said that what happened in Venezuela was a strategic failure of the Chinese, and I think that’s being carried now over into Iran as well.
I always remind people that the Americans rolled into Baghdad in 2003 super fast. And remember those, you know, we took Baghdad in three weeks or four weeks, and then, of course, we have the famous “mission accomplished” on the aircraft carrier with George W. Bush.
Let’s remind everybody that today China is the number one buyer of Iraqi oil. So this is a long game, and so to make any bold declarations about Iran or Venezuela or any of these very fast-moving situations I think is highly premature.
One last question, and I’m throwing you a curveball here, so if you want to kind of deflect it, that’s fine. But while all of this was going on, China’s special envoy for the Middle East, Zhai Jun, made an interesting stop in Jerusalem and met with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli foreign minister.
This is very interesting because it overlaps with the response or the muted response, you know, in Iran. What do you make of that? And a lot of people have said that Israel, in some respects, at least strategically, is more important to the Chinese in the long run than even Iran is, given the great power dynamics with the U.S.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. It’s always been the case, in my view, that while China calculated that it was strategically advantageous to be as loud and as involved in an ineffective way, you know, their shuttle diplomacy didn’t end up much. But they were there, and they were making serious proposals to mediate in Gaza.
Despite all of that, you know, their economic relationship with Israel did not change. They are still, I mean, not substantially. There is still a big economic partner. They have investments that have been walked back, have largely been under U.S. pressure or under new security concerns from within the Israeli government, within the army. But largely, you know, that relationship is on the rocks diplomatically, but not really fundamentally changed.
And Israel has always been an important part of China’s strategy in the Middle East, not just because of something to do with their bilateral relationship, which is valuable to China as a kind of a way to a lot of, for example, a lot of Chinese companies do R&D in Israel. For various reasons, but also because their primary strength in the Middle East, as in elsewhere, is their connections to many different partners that could pretend that otherwise might have difficulty talking to one another.
The big difference here is that Israel is always much closer to the United States, and so in any situation like in Gaza, where they have the choice between Chinese mediation and U.S. mediation, they’re obviously going to go to U.S. and then box the Chinese out.
So that’s one fundamental limit on China’s relationship with Israel and also with any other country that’s very close to the U.S.
But yes, I would agree with you, and I would emphasize that, you know, this is I think we’re seeing that now that the war has kind of ended, we’re going into this phase of discussing reconstruction. China’s trying to salvage the damage from what’s happened, and I think that probably Israeli politicians will be more than happy to hear from them.
And if I could add just one last bit in the interest of, you know, this kind of things that people aren’t necessarily thinking about enough. One thing I have seen is with thinking about all this discussion of, like, is China doing enough? Where’s China’s military hardware? One question that people aren’t asking enough is what has China done already?
And one thing that China, I kind of alluded to this in the article that I posted for you guys, is that one thing it’s done is sold a lot of surveillance technology and drones technology to Iran.
To put it in a nutshell, the technological sophistication of the repression that we saw in Iran that I alluded to earlier is one of the things that’s new about this situation and has been getting more and more draconian and effective and technologically sophisticated over the last decade, largely with the help of Chinese firms and Chinese technology, Chinese even training kits on how to use the technology that has been sold to them.
So if the Iranian government, and it’s increasingly looking like it will, survives, you know, what’s going on now, it will be in no small part because China already helped them behind the scenes in a quiet way.
So it’s not a bit player in that sense. And I also really want to emphasize that this isn’t just China.
Where did China get its surveillance empire technology from?
Well, that is a great place for us to end.
And the article that Bill wrote for us, which I cannot recommend enough, is as Iran faces its gravest crisis in decades, China stays on the sidelines. By the way, it is outside of the paywall so everybody can enjoy it.
I want to also let everybody know that Bill is going to be a regular writer for us going forward throughout the year to tell us everything that’s happening in the China-Iran relationship. This is one of the most consequential and interesting relationships that China has anywhere in the world, but particularly in the Middle East.
Bill is an assistant professor at the University of Croningen in the Netherlands, and again, one of the foremost and smartest experts on China-Iran relations.
Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to join us, and thanks for the great article.
Thanks. Always happy to be here.
And we’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South podcast.
As always, if you want to follow all the work that we’re doing from the CGSP team around the world in English, French, and Spanish, go to:
And of course, if you want to support the work that we’re doing, your subscriptions are absolutely essential. Go to:
You’ll get a daily newsletter.
We are also on the verge of launching a brand new service for large enterprises, governments, universities, institutions. It’s going to be a fantastic service called:
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It’s coming out in June, and all the great analysis from people like Bill are going to be on this new platform. So keep your eyes out for that.
Again, until next week, thank you so much for listening and for watching.
The discussion continues online. Follow the China Global South project on:
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Thank you.
2026-01-20 08:00:01
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我相信有它的加入，咱们这个旅行一定会非常的有意思。
2026年3月28日至4月9日，如果您有兴趣参与这一次忽左忽右印度尼西亚旅行团，欢迎关注忽左忽右left right公众号，在公众号里回复“印尼”两个字了解详情。
各位听众朋友晚上好，各位听众大家好，欢迎收听这一期的忽左忽右。我是程衍樑。今天非常开心能跟著名的社会学家赵鼎新老师在北京相见，然後我也非常意外得知赵老师也曾经听过忽左忽右，所以非常期待今天能跟赵鼎兴老师多聊一些关于社会学、关于我们今天这样的一个时代，包括社会与政治运动，
包括赵鼎兴老师所经历的过去这几十年的中国和全世界的亲历的历史这方面的话题。
先请赵老师来向咱们的听众打个招呼吧。
“大家下午好，我是忽左忽右的一个蛮重视的听众。今天也有机会和陈彦良见面。然后呢我很经常的知道他是90后，我原来一直以为他应该是70后。所以觉得这个节目这个90后就是能够做那么好，我还是比较近期的，并不是走路又差，就是他还能对里面的好多议题、好多摄入点，我认为就是需要有一定生活阅历的才能进入，所以我是很也是再次赞个祝贺一下。”
感谢，感谢。
其实我过去在媒体做记者的时候，就经常被编辑们评价，说我这个个人趣味好像非常的70后，就包括我的那些过去阅读的这些书。后来一直到我做播客的时候，我讨论的很多话题，也会有这方面的一些可能历史纵深感吧。
其实我很早就接触过赵景星老师的作品，那应该十几年前，可能在上大学快毕业的时候。当时就读到过这本《社会与政治运动讲义》当时的第二版，当然到今天他已经出了第三版。关于这里面讨论的这些话题，我们待会可以请赵老师来跟我们好好分享一下。
当然我们在忽左忽右上，咱们在讨论这些学术化的这些研究洞见之前，其实我很想让赵老师来讲一讲您整个的一个成长到智学的一个经历。
因为您出生在50年代，您的整个的青年时代经历了可能我们这个节目很多嘉宾都经历过的轰轰烈烈的时期。
以前找过尚伟杰先生，他是去到内蒙建设兵团。与此同时期，您那会儿应该是在宁夏，我对宁夏能讲一讲吗？您不是上海人吗，怎么到了宁夏？
“我是应该上六九届。六九届实际上是小学毕业文革开始了，所以照理说我们这届按照当时是规定中学生才能组织混合并，我们小学生不能组织混合并，但你参加是可以的，你参加别的组织。
我家庭出生了又不算太好，虽然不是黑五类，但是爷爷叫资方代理人，职业经理人。”
职业经理人。
“对，就是这种东西。然后爸爸又是会计，就是立行会计学校毕业，他四九年毕业。其实他说老报员说自己毕业考试没考好，我说你怎么会没考？那解放就在打气毛，哭咯咯咯声音响的要是他在考试。他们的学校就在上海循环区交大广便，所以从小出生在上海，出生也不是太好。
然后我们的田田成分又叫小土地出租者，我不知道什么叫小土地出租者。后来到大了一点，我才知道我们江南一带其实有好多这个成分，实际上都是在城里面做得不错。像我爷爷，他就是乡下这个根还是不愿放弃。中国当时政局动荡，所以还是稍微点投资在农村的，所以一般来说在农村造个房子，买个几木地，但那地当然买不多。
就像现在好多农民共进城了，家里面还造个别墅，干什么一样。他不知道下一步万一又回家了。那他们在共产的五星红旗下，他又是实际上都工商业者，资本家又是团结者一下，对吧，又是我们的，在革命体系里面，实际上我认为蛮聪明的。这批人基本上土地不是太多的，都定乘小土地出租者，这便于团结，接于富能和上中能之间，打开那么一个成分，但是不属于阶级敌人。一到运动起来了，你就反正什么都不是。
但我是比较早熟，文革整个都经历都记忆，还去参加帮人家印传单，也自己写东西什么，但只要那么参加，你就会有好多记忆，弄好多观察。”
所以比如说六七年，我也步行串联过，串联结束我六七年到宁夏看，爸爸妈妈去了四个月。
比如说我们火车开到济南，两边武斗，那火车就不开了，不到一百米，两边就在打仗，我们大家就看着那车就不开。在火车站，就火车站，当时王效禹和他，对外两边就在打仗，打仗了，他不敢动了，火车就停着看。
但是这个我当时的最大的感受，不是看着他们打仗，也其实打仗，两边打来打去，又不是电影里面很英勇的，大家都趴在上面，就没进人，但是离我们大概五十米到一百米之间的距离，他们也有头再一直帮我们打。但是很多上面大家本来大家都要看，完了就回去打牌的抽烟的聊天的，都说这个打仗太没意思，的确很无聊，他比电影慢很多，知道吧。
然后大家聊我们重庆好看，出来飞机，出来有坦克的导弹，重庆舞都是非常厉害，我们男人都吹他们舞都厉害。但是我当时就想了，这批人我们打我们全死了，因为他万一互相打得不过瘾，对我们扫一扫这不就完了吗？
你们当时都在火车上，火车上去那边看着，也不能动。当时我就是人就是麻木，从战争的麻木状态，我非常吃惊大家一下子聊天反而吹他们打，那边舞都厉害，而不是看，这怕也要死人的。
就是我一个对人性的感受，这是六七年的时候，六七年是五月份，然后到了宁夏七月份的时候。
那我父母，特别我母亲，是宁夏的造反派，就是他们在上海过去的外地的宁夏。当时搞了一个双反一种斗，叫反大汉族主义和地方民族主义。但实际上杨静仁和马玉槐利用这个时间和上面斗，刘格平是个汉族，杨静仁和马玉槐那是回族干部，他们两边斗，斗的过程中实际上是反大汉反地方民族主义，但实际上是大汉族主义。
抓了严走，这一来就出了不少问题。六四年，像我妈妈什么都受到一定程度的打压过的，但打压最厉害的是宁波青年，有十万人到宁夏资源， 好多宁波青年集体逃回宁波。
所以文革起来，这批宁波青年千里条地跑到宁夏造反，要去打他们去，你看那个仇恨感有多大，专门又跑回去，就跑去宁波造反，对在那边是很radical的，非常极端的，就是要报这个仇。
但那有，就宁夏民族问题了，他们上面斗，等等问题倒了，就是造反派基本上都是文革像受我弃的门，在这个时候。
就比如说七月份时候，当时成立在造反派的农村就保守派的，所以当时就是迎川、石嘴山、吴忠那几个是据点。宁夏军区支持保守派，所以当时江青有个叫文工武卫，这时候造反派就被武装起来了，戴着藤条帽子，戴着大刀，戴着长矛。当时吴忠有被保守派围住了，马上就攻下来了。
吴忠有个造反派是叫马什么，他当过宁夏军军区司令员的，还是老干部，很有威信，据说抗战时候就很厉害一个人。大家为了资源，他宁夏组织了几百辆卡车，早上六七点我们去欢送，几百辆卡车那轰轰的开了几个小时，我总觉得这东西好威风凛凛，在永宁县的大关桥记得很清楚。
结果那地方拐弯路上，保守派就是军区缺缺给他们发了枪了，两边打，万里人，那死了就往有的就往唐赖区里扔，扔了之后就送了唐赖区飘，过了一天左右就飘到我们迎川地界了，我也去撩去了。
那人家的头跑得比习惯还大，很难撂起来，你亲眼看到，那当然看到吓坏我了。
我们邻居一个也被打了，肚长都打出来。然后那晚上我们大家哭了，让那反正大家让给他们造林医院。大家当时唱着什么，抬头王剑背斗星啊等等，但这个对我精力非常大非常大。
文革对我最大精力比较我比较反思性强，旁观者看到许多许多问题。我自己认为，我自己参加文革，一个最大的教训，甚至某种感谢毛泽东，把我那么聪明脑瓜子扔到下面，否则凭我读书干什么？我从小拒绝卷滥混，他工科室都蛮好，为什么呢？
你聪明就是玩这个制度很容易玩，这时候就问题了，你那么容易玩这制度，在吃雇饮，玩我们的学校环境，你越这了，你对社会环境看得越简单，你的乌托邦精神就越强。这是一个知识奉托这个重大缺陷，就是17世纪到18世纪以后产生这个现代教育制度，是选择人的N纬度。
聪明的一两个纬度是一某类人而已，而这两个纬度强了，会导致这些人往往会的别的东西脑子简单化。我到了资大，到了美国之后，看到美国那些个聪明拿了乌托奖的，一旦到了芝加哥大学，聪明脑袋比比一看就清楚，知识分子一样没经过本。
所以当时就是这件事情，包括我后来都宁夏回来了，一件事情，我到了南京，差点二早了。为什么？
在长洲，又叫切尔，去那个桥被罩牌炸，我们在南京就带了走不了了。我是省事检用，天天住在火车站，露宿了五天，到最终我都厉害，几毛钱的时候总算通车。那个当时非常害怕。
然后在宁夏，我是六几年去，当时要全国一片红，就是实际上插嘴落户，一共大概1700万人。
千天后，对我个人经历，我因为比较思辨，就是当时动员我们，其实有不少口号，我当时就总结论的口号有三个理想类型：
但是呢，我也是看那么口号就总结，这是三个类型。但我们私下聊天，就是城里经济不好了，但到了宁夏区，因为我父母亲58年就是之内跑到宁夏的。
所以当时如果你父母亲在比较边缘的城市，你可以选择不去插队落户的，就倒是跟着你父母亲到那边去插队落户的，所以是投奔你父母亲，投奔父母亲去了。
所以我就跑过去了，那是69年，去了之后，到处问营串人，没听说插队落户，我说你们知道人不接受这教育吗？没听说过。我说人民日报什么那么多事，你们不看？看要知道知道了，我说没影响。
我才发觉插队落户那不是个事情，为什么呢？当时宁夏市小三线建设正好是一大批厂，大概三五十个厂，都在差不多几前后一年左右同时挽购，找不到好工人，找不到qualify labor，所以大家都在找工作。
这一来我才知道，原来最后那个还是更精确，因为否则如果要接受评价、再教育，所以所有的人都要接受再教育。
所以这个实际上你如果说，我的社会一些视野都这种比较视角出来的，一发觉，偶尔跑到那个地方当工人去，当时我没当工人，就去了，就待在家里面，不知道干什么，是插队呢，因为是我本来就想找个地方插队，所以都要插队完。
后来才知道那个地方插队不是个事情，还没开始呢，宁夏到七几年以后找不到工作，也开始插队了，但是就找工作，找工作嘛。
后来就找了这个工作，工作带来很苦，我是当过翻煞工，当过断工，当过钱工，最后当了车工，当了差不多四年多，一共七年多的工作经历，从70年到78年。
这个过程我想最值得一提的就是当时的质量的厂，我们厂后来主要生产牛头豹，一种豹厂，成本要是上海的好几倍。
但是质量的厂，就是木匠用的那种，不是铁。铁的牛头豹是铁豹东西，长得像牛头一样，但是它用在什么？
原来机械里面叫车前洗爆磨，车就是车圆的齿轮啊什么。钱工就是做什么都有钱工，洗工就是车出来东西要是很粗，吃把它洗，爆就比较粗，把这放在那，它那个铁爆，磨就把它磨得很细。
工厂使用的就是这五个主大工种，就是工厂使用的一种machine tool，一百多台差不多。我们厂留几台别的都资源亚非拉，工人根本不认真劳动。
毛泽东想停的派系斗争，厂内的文革的派系斗争慢慢慢慢以新的方式再延续。到了73、74年，特别邓小平开主持了之后，俩变派系斗争就更厉害，而且派系斗争当然都带在这local context，当地的原来文革的好多个人的仇恨等等。
这个当然对我好处，你们这么做，到最后上班没人管了，我就看书。
所以这是一个我们个人体验，就这里面几件事情我体验比较大，一个就是林彪去世，我们体验特别武器要工程机，要尽量我们全部看，发到你们，发到不能发，但它全部阅读。
那里面都好多话，静态，联合舰队，B-52，B-52等等那些事情，还有74到76年两次。
因为我外婆太大，我非常想念我外婆，所以我攒够钱，居然去看我外婆。对我影响特别大。
74年我跑到上海，发觉上海人穿的什么衣服，那么漂亮，街上进了淮海路。 南京路没有买的，但淮海路南京已经有买比较漂亮的衣服。
这宁下来说，南京想象漂亮，但街上穿的衣服更漂亮。纽裤干什么都行了。
那再一问，找红帮裁缝做的。红帮裁缝解放前来，但是那衣服是哪来的？
我的舅妈当时告诉我，他会讲得过，他会说：
当时我们中国和日本已经建交了，尼克松也访华了。
其实当时中国已经开始有一点开放的意思了，但那开放非常有限。
但当时西方各国的其实工业展览已经开始堕起来了。
而当时政治情况，去参加工业展览的人是都需要什么的呢？
都需要经过一定正审的、合格的。
但是工业展览有什么好看的？老板姓穷得要是也不会买，那些都是工厂展览。
但很奇怪，当时工业展览都是因为不需要，就那个pamphlet，就那个产品介绍嘛。
首先那个纸特别好，我们从来没见过那么好的纸，那么厚。
所以大家去了，就去抢那个pamphlet。大家进去抢，进去抢光。
他们把舅妈给我说，有一次他也去，说进去大家趴在地上，想是很狼狈，抢着把老外看了去，在这干什么，拼命往外办，拼命往外，不一会就抢光了。
大家抢这个干什么用处呢？大家包书皮，垫抽屉，贴上墙上。
但是竟然上海人就那么小细心，把那里面竟然是……
他们可能为了辅助我们，也不干什么，总是有几个千男千女站在那穿几个时照，过几夜会出现那么一个东西的。
上海人就把这个全部剪下来，贴啊贴啊贴，贴成服装书，然后私下穿越。
我舅妈给我借了两个星期，然后呢，那是很时髦，什么很难借到的，借到了，就两个星期就要还。
你赶紧找红帮裁缝，就拼命做，就买布啊买什么的话，同时裁缝都找起来。
那裁缝当时的裁缝，就到你们家做，一天给他付一块钱，就行了，吃你们家，喝你们家。
那问题还有一点，里面最难买的不是布，是纽扣。
纽扣， 对，因为纽扣起因怪到什么来，后来我一问，在这上个的新城王庙，新城王庙，就是现在黄皮路和金陵路之间的，就是人民光在后面一点。
那原来是个城王庙，叫新城王庙，预言的不叫老城王庙。
当时那地上有好多黑市，买鱼虫的，买什么的都有，但是有个黑市就买这个纽扣的。
所以上海人就那么，就那纽扣，他就把当时中国给东欧什么出货纽扣的生产，有些纽扣比我们漂亮些，他就出来买。
但是还有人就里面太齐心，怪党纽扣，你就一粒一粒配。
好多人就可能解放钱的衣服，干什么，抄家出来，衣服破了，衣服剪下了，几粒几粒，慢慢慢慢把它配起来。
所以当时我看那个市场的涌现，看着这样，文革晚期已经有这么多私底下的黑市交易。
对对对，很多很多。
就是这是一件我非常吃惊，因为我自己整个经历的整个过程。但我回到宁夏的时候，把人家吓坏了，但是他就问我哪来的，我不敢说这个过程，一般说我是店里买的，店里买的没办法。
他最多打招，你看上海人就有资产阶级，就去拍了。
但你若是资产那么做的，很可能在宁夏，人家说你造谣了，干什么出大问题的。
是。
那七四年以后，我就开始自学了，因为我们没上过中学，没严格意义上，为了当车工，我自学。
算三括三什么，就来学数学。
然后当时为了看懂N是自然变成法，我可以自学物理和化学，中学的。
当时又买了马克思书，叫数学手稿，那里面有好多科党一样的东西。
人家说叫微积分，那我就为了看懂，他就开始学微积分了，然后学高等代数了，微风方程了。
所以到了文革结束了，我就等于把大学的东西就是已经基础学课自己读完了，纯靠自学，纯靠自学，就读得完，越读越知道，多越读越知道。
实际上越知道，就是我心里就等着要有大变，但是那大变什么时候来，我不知道。
但就是去赌一把一样。
就是表面上，我觉得一百读书，每年工农兵学员学生我在报名，但是每次有，因为你的家庭，因为你没后门，就是总是弄不上。
简单讲，我们连报五年都没上，而且他整体工农兵大学生，他那个招生数量是很少的，一般给你们唱，一个给两个，给两个大家一争，有后门的什么，就拿走了，我就没这个机会。
但76年那一次，我在上海的时候，租得去世，所以时间能够控制，我能知道很清楚。
一个大什么，应该就是冲下，中了已经去世，已经四五用动，后期那段时间，我到上海了，几件事情。
第一，我上车到宁夏开出去，开到八言高乐，上来八个人，也没票，也没坐。
上来坐，你们让来，我们本来三个人，过去自己让开，因为看他们实在有点可怕，而且五个女的，三个男的。
但最为首的男的，也说那么长一个刀八，整个年终是通了，那不倒，通的。
那个人就看上去一股杀气腾腾的，我们踏了，乖乖就让开了。
当时绿皮车，这边三个，那边两个，两个坐到三个，三个就变四个了，反正前后几个，他们一让，上来。
他们就想立刻上海话，我就跟着。
这是谁啊，对不对。
本来见他们怕的钥匙，他们说起上海话了，我就不怎么怕了，我就悄悄听着，他们在说。
但是有一件事情，来查票了，我们乖乖就拿出票了，我们都问到他们了。
为首有刀疤的拿出把蒙古刀，在桌上拍的声音之响，我都得卸在耳朵，记得着声音，拍到去，能不能看着刀就走了。
那走了，因为他们说上海话，我胆子大一些，就问起来，我说：
这不是票，我这东西能代表票吗？
我就问他，他说是要票没有，要命有一条。
所以我现在，像现在的采访，我就问他们怎么回事。
班员高了，那个地方全是严检地，基本上是一亩地。
他说是他们播种的时候，是极卡车用的种子，而收割的时候，一个人能背回来，所以是这个情况。
我去问他，那么傻了，我说你们就吃种子，不就完了，极卡都种在够你们吃的了。
他说是十枪抵着，一看偷种子，那先行反革命，要被打死的。
拨下去颗粒无收，是没关系的。
那么国家呢，也知道这个情况，所以国家给他们粮食的。
在粮食之后，他们吃半年，那还有半年回上海吃父母。
那回上海，一吃父母吃半年，有粮票，有配额的。
家里弟弟妹妹不气死了，大家都是发育头上，对吧。
你吃我们，所以家里打架干什么，就是回到家里，就是基本上，把家里搞得天空地下，这帮人。
所以他们一路给我讲的东西，我就只理解，中国非得大便，哪有拿刀可以当测票的地方，哪有不变得到，无政府状态。
对对，而且按说，就是最混乱的66到68年，其实早就过去了。
对，但即便在晚期，它还是这样的一个状态。66、68是你看了，后面一样混乱，就混乱，就以不同的表达形式而已。
但到了上海，完全另一个倾向。
就是上海当时只学长笛和学小提琴。
每家创门经常，然后经常买不到，练习小提琴26块人民币一个，出来就抢掉，出来就抢掉。
这是第一。
第二，地下音乐会很多。
我弟弟当时正好和上海有一个，当时上海人，把他叫东远东第一长笛手，一个叫王少江。
就是他就白毛女吹了，就这个人，他和他认识，所以还和另外一个歌剧团一个唱歌的认识，所以他经常会领我去各式各样的地下音乐会的。
那还是我是非常revelation，就是一下子大家已经莫扎特了，什么都在演起来了。
我记得莫扎特有得表西什么的，无标题音乐，还刚批完了，已经开始演了。
然后我记得有一次，我记得大家刚刚演到一半，那天是诸德诗诗。
按照15天，是不能够有音乐，任何娱乐活动的，当时有这规定的。
但是已经安排了。
他们说：
没关系，弄它里人不会说的。
但是把窗啊什么，弄几个棉被一定，对吧，让声音不传出去。
当然外面肯定还是能听见。
弄到一半，外面都有人敲门了。
大家，你看看我看都紧张了，想了半天，把所有的家具和火器全部一藏，说谁啊，到底谁啊。
我是武汉文工团的，过来听说在语音乐会。
大家开门了，我当时就想了，他是怎么听的这个消息，你知道这个地方有，然后他来听的。
进来之后，他们怎么考察他，非常有意思。
他们来了之后，也不怎么相信，就聊天，聊天问他是干什么的。
他说他唱歌的，你唱什么，他唱南中音。
那么他们就让他唱一个，我觉得他是唱马国光的，也不是什么草原上马尔千万匹。
唱了之后就那个上海人的，这个然后说他尾巴拉特。
我第一次听到尾巴拉特或者Vibration意思。
尾巴拉特不好，简单讲就讲，他还是在共鸣，共鸣枪，还在嗓子在技术讨论。
对，他们讨论，实际上还带着一种康德赛，非常居高的一种看待。
我当时又在宁夏，带了很长时间，很看不惯商人这一套，所以我还很不舒服。
但是呢，他们完了就认可了，他是专业的，是练过的。
第二呢，就是说他这个唱法，大家有一个非常老开了，就认为他得过圣诞小节，因为他老那么长，圣诞老共鸣会有这个问题。
完了之后，他们就开始通过这个奖赛就问了，果然他得过圣诞小节。
然后他们互相也，你看看我，好像很savy，很东京上的样子。
我当时反正很看不惯，因为我在宁夏，我已经是个北方人了。
对，所以这整个过程，我就觉得废的打扁。
所以，如果是最后一个小故事，就是在我回到宁夏之后。
我一个非常非常非常好的朋友，和我以前是在散步，说的一般，
他以后老一代革命家去世了，我们会不会吃耳扁苦受耳茶醉？
这是当时的普遍的话语，我都不敢回答。
关系非常好非常好，我就给他讲：
我们这几年最苦的时候，一人是2.5两油配额，半斤肉。
下面上来的谁配一两油，一两肉。
他自己啪啪笑起来了，然后我就给他名义示威一天。
当时就是那个，就是大家都知道变化，他谁也不敢说，特别我们这种自清。
而且我的背后，包括学习，包括实际上就是应该说得益于在宁夏的吃苦精神。
在宁夏把我变得tuffing up，坚强起来，一种野静，一种大气。
包括上海带出来的，从现在来就叫文化资本。
我看了多，当宁夏的好多朋友，后来我考上大学了全变了之后，他们问我：
你为什么不跟我们早说？
他们什么时候？
我说我当时把好多话说给你，万一你们报告了，我被信心碗给你。
对，我刚才跟你说这些话，这些都事实发生过的。
你在一个地方说过，当时可能是不是已经在工厂里面了，就是你睡觉说梦话，对对。
工友跟你说你都紧张得要死，是啊是啊。
要问他你到底说了什么。
对，那废话，因为我做什么，我看书想做笔记不敢做，那有时拿个筷子。
那好吧，就是一种欲望吧，一种做笔记欲望，但不敢做笔记。
那我当时有一年四点起床看到七点，看资本人看了一年，就怕你看马克思，谁那么看。
马克思骨子里是个自由主义者，所以实际上慢慢慢慢，你和现实和马克思所说那个世界想中间的区别之大，你可以值得。
就是好多问题你看出来，当然当时看出来并不是看了对，因为这个知识太处局限，就是实际上蛮痛苦的。
而这个之所以能够比我们宁夏或同龄的朋友，比我还大几岁，那就是我的上海这个，我知道日子不见得一定要那样过的，特别像宁夏当时那么过的。
这是讲就是文革，就宁夏那个经历给我一个，还有给我一个无所谓，那无所谓了。
就举个例子，为什么我导致这种状态，当然很多例子。
有一次我当番杀工，番杀工当时上面走来走去掉车，就掉的铁水。
但它有两个挂钩的，挂钩松掉就晃起来了，铁水就往下倒了，洒出来，洒出来。
有一天呢，我去上班厕所回来了之后，我们做番杀的时候，特别做小，有个压扫。
番杀很脏，很毒，但又很技术，就要把这压平，压平。
听到这压扫就找不到了，就是这个小朋友给我藏走了，藏掉了。
我就找到处找不到，奇了怪了。
我就一般来说工厂的凶炼，就是这样，走到你离开，什么样东西放在什么地方，都蛮贵位的，应该就放在这地方，没有了吧。
好，这个女工可能同情我到处找吧，给我挪挪嘴，在那个方向。
我一看她的奴隽摸，就走出去，大概七八步，是那一步路吧，最多了。
突然警令大发跳车，把我那坐的那个翻杀，就是哗啦哗啦哗啦，天女散花上下，弄了七零八落的闪的。
站起来，舔水离我脚的不到一步。
就是否则我就洗了澡了，那一千多度的水，没有我这个人存在了。
就是我知道有一个人，就那一小点，一年多烂了才好。
然后当时我正记得，我一下子警令一发一看，我一点没害怕，很清醒。
但是很奇怪，好多一当人把我架住了。
我觉得我很好，我没事没事没事。
但是很奇怪，我也脑子很清醒，我没事，你们放开我放开。
我夹得很紧，我不知道她为什么架住，我显然我肯定瘫下来了。
但是她们每次放掉我，这个感受真是蛮好的。
浑身骨头不存在的，就人家一面子，也不怎么就下来了。
又把我架住，一放过人，也不，真觉得我真没骨头那样了。
但是没奇怪，整个身体软了，真软了。
就是，但在好几分钟以后，我站住了。
站住的时候，才发觉我的牙齿在打颤，打得已经，我把头打得像脑针道一样，打打打疼的。
就声音之大，难以想象。
这类事情，就应该这样两次吧。
那以后我就觉得：
I don't care
我不在乎，死都差点死过了，就差不多，半秒钟不到嘛，对不对，仅此而已。
就是这种豁出来的气度吧，这个对我后面的影响蛮大的，包括…… 我第一个博士读完了，都有工作了，两个地方主动找我去，那我就不要了，再读个博士，就这样子。
所以从你后来又去参加高考到之前当工人，就是那段时间，你的这些阅读和自修也都没断过吗？没怎么断过，没断过。
但是呢，当时我有，还是蛮感谢毛泽东一点的，感谢两人。一个他搞了批林批孔，常理因为我当时都知道我比较聪明，把我组织到那个批林批孔小组。
一个星期可以拖产一天，还给点钱可以买书，我看好多中国的，包括《论语》了，包括我记得看刘忠元的《封建论》了，看《老子道德经》了，等等等等，好多都是那时候看的。
所以第一次接触原点了，我如法国家，其实好多的想法是从那个如法斗争那会儿开始的。对对，从那会儿开始的。
最终呢，我看书看多了，就有这个问题，因为常理动员我们实际上向上搞投机，常理面，我把你组织起来，最好写大字报攻击另一派人。
另一派人是卢家，我是法家，所以慢慢就发转了。还有一件的，我感谢毛泽东，就是毛泽东老了，突然问了他下面手下的人，说：
“现在小青年都看什么书？”
那个人就跟他说老实话了，毛泽东就问：
“天人论人理学没人知道，还有各样的宇宙知名没人知道。”
毛泽东一份，都没人知道。毛泽东连提了好几本，好了，赶紧再翻译再出，他出了150、60本书，就在一个75、76年。
我那天买自然病人发现那天，我记得很清楚，我钱的钱没带，一看我冒不分钱，我就没带钱，我这怎么办？
因为我不看，一放就没有了，很奇怪。说完什么，当时没多少书，一放就没有，他们看见我联想：
“你拿走吧，我给你寄个账，几天我还给他。”
所以他们知道，我知道这程度了。
所以当时我买了几十本，据说这个书150、60本，全国一份，到宁夏最多三分之一，但那三分之一我可能买了。
所以那时候，我记得《天一轮伦理学》我是肯定看过的，海克的《宇宙之迷》我是看过的。当时好像第一次接触黑格尔了。
但是回想，就是看那些完全我不可能知道的书，但感觉也是一种重新启蒙。
因为你提到这些书，很多是清末民国的时候。对对对，就已经进来了，但是到了70年代，那中国的青年又要重新再看一遍。
但是那时候，已经有点，就是开始了，因为那些个书原来我们是看不到的。
当时还有一些个书，就是有些内部书的，我没接到，但那些高干子弟就看张国涛的《我的自尊》。
当时还有一些，当时有一好像日本几个马克思主义青年跑到苏联去，后来写了他的苏联的真相，谈了好多苏联的官僚主义，苏联是个帝国主义了。
反正有好几两个，当然我们都能买到的那本书，我以前在我爷爷家的书架上也看到过。
“苏联是社会主义国家吗？”
“对对对。”
所以这个看了，我觉得，因为我们一看就发觉，他们讲的好多问题，有些问题当时苏联特有，因为苏联的确是个帝国主义。
中国当时还没这个实力，但还有里面讲的， 好多官僚主义问题，但是好多问题，中国一样有。
所以当时还是有点说的，不多了，但刚听下来，有很大量还是关于这个社科内容的。
但我记得后来去到大学，一开始，您是拿了一个生物学这块的一个学位，这个是为什么？
你这句话问我，首先我什么是回答，如果我年轻时回答，我只能讲第一个原因，但第二个原因肯定在的，而且我越老越觉得是蛮重要的。
所以现在讲第一个原因，就是首先我们看社科东西，就是你大时代，是什么东西，都和我们有关，包括我当时学了不少自然科学的东西。
那都是为了看到马克思主义，你可以想我刚才给你讲的叙事。
所以在这时候，本来肯定是考社科的，但是我毕业了十年，而且当时已经知识越来越丰富了，就发觉有名的人考社科的，都进过监牢，或者打成过右派，一路倒霉。
而且我总觉得我性格是偏直爽的，但是文革我当时毕业的，什么都不说，这是很难受很难受，违反我个性。
当时我总觉得我辛辛苦苦去考社科，我不是考个监牢的路场券吗？对不对，自己考，我怎么进肩脑的问题。
这是我是当时，因为当时虽然已经四人帮打倒了，但是打倒四人帮，用的话语体系，全部是四人帮时代的话语体系。
所以这大家必须知道，所以这导致我们对文革以后到底怎么走，并不清楚。
就时代并没有结束，其实时代应该说结束了，但是时代的那个前时代的debrick，那一大堆垃圾一大堆罪渣还是跟着满满跑着的。
而且我们受的，包括我这个，其实脑子那么清楚的人，我是心里面感到可能会有机会，这种感觉。
我因为当时和我同龄的人面对着找对象结婚生小孩做家具，这是他们做的事情，那我就变成很怪很怪的人了。
就当时，自己的压力很大，本来大家一起玩，蓦然没人和你玩了，你不要怪人了，对不对。
我因为当时和我同龄的人面对着找对象结婚生小孩做家具，这是他们做的事情，那我就变成很怪很怪的人了。
就当时，自己的压力很大，本来大家一起玩，母亲没人和你玩了，你不要怪人了，对不对。
所以当时是还是真是有一点心里面这种着急感，好像一老样子——画过风，还有两个凡事等等。
所以在这时候，整个大环境下，就正好我理科自学过了，就当时大家都不自学，像我这样自学，跟全国十万亿都不到的，就是辞职以后每天花三四个小时以上只学基本上全国可能几乎是没有的。
所以等于我很轻松，这个状态。
但是还有一层，当时是这样子的，我们一起去考文科的，都理科不好，没办法，虚荣也存在的，肯定的。
就慢慢大了，自己能可能干净自己了。
回想，这层面其实是蛮大的，因为旁边复习的人看到考文科的方法，我都看不上，这两个原因。
所以后来您是去读了生物系，一直拿到昆虫生态学的博士学。对。
这个学科在当时的中国知识分子语境当中，它是一个被人关注的东西。
就是你当时比如说你还要考虑，比如自己学完之后，你的职业路径是什么，当时是怎么想的？
我转第二博士，好多人问你出入了职业背景了，当年夏快四十岁了，三八岁的改行到一个完全不知道的领域。
我就问的一句话：
“我文革都经历过，能比那还坏吗？”
这是我宁夏带着一种个性，就是有点像大赌徒的性格。就是这种性格，如果从坏说，就这样子，就无所谓。
应该说，七级界宁夏是五十人才能考虑一个，是最差大学在里面。
然后整个宁夏、复旦北大这个水平，这个层次就二十多个人，就是我是大概几万人里面的这二十多个人。
但是实际上，我当时考的是什么呢？考的是数学。
所以复旦数学系，我自认为自己数学不错。
结果实际上是自学成才的数学，是很有问题的，一考试就发觉了。
题型看了不多，七级界很简单，但是呢，他最后手蒙这道题，是他满难的。
我那拼命做，拼命做，做了大手蒙这道题，十六分不十四分。
我做完了之后，最后一道题省过就做不出来，做不出来，一着急了。
就前面大概做了二十来分钟的确很简单，后面这道题死过工作下来，还就那么结束了。
弄得我前面也都没查一遍。
但是后来，好多契机都很差，所以我当然，据说我总分很高。
所以呢，因为我自学当时学了那么多东西，看了所以考政治考什么都很简单。
语文嘛，当时记得那个考题是当你走进考场的时候，那我进去就哭了一场出来。
那肯定怎么就讲我五年，如果考农民大学如何这个如何，就管你把。
我刚才跟你说的好多事情，就写出来，那肯定很感人，对吧。
但总之，我估计分很高。
但是呢，还没经过我同意，把我从数学系调剂到昆虫，所以那个，你想他们当时的重点大学多么看不上宁夏。
复旦给宁夏七个名额，很大方，差不多占了二十多个名额的四分之一吧。
七个名额里面三个是昆虫的，我当时接到一看复旦开心的钥匙，一看昆虫什么东西，我不知道。
到了新华书店买书谁，空虫学知识啊什么，就是那么进去的。
没过一两年，生物学就变显学了，七七界已经好像是显学了。
因为我记得上海市的历届庄严寒都是在我们生物，但不在我们空虫学，在生物化学。
所以我们当时生物学，我们四个班：
不是什么，反正四个，后来四年下来了，总分什么都没区别，我们都一样好。
但是呢，文化资本有重大差别，我们农村多一些，这四个专业的外文我们是最差。
像生化是最好的专业，他们一大批人，后来才知道他是原来是美国人，八岁才回国的。
爸爸哪个学教授，是受了共产党号召回国的，哪个人从小是就看英文出生的。
所以他们已经在看英文报纸了，看英文小说了，我们还在ABCD，RO还没分清楚。
所以实际上，在这四年的本科，像我们就是文化资本比较差的系，在英文上花奴隶。
像我一个人差不多在英文花了三文章一半经历，就要学英文，别的成绩都差不多。
所以昆虫系是在文化资本是最弱的一个系，应该说农村比较多。
第二是，昆虫当时应该说全世界还属于一个相对显学，因为农业要质保，怎么打。
现在不是问题了，现在农药各方面都是不一样的。
现在好多世界昆虫系都开始取消，昆虫系改成：
Sustain the management
就是被环境系改成这种系了，昆虫还在，但昆虫就变各个领域研究了。
然后进去之后文化资本，就我个人体现，也是路径依赖。
因为我读马克思主义读到这个程度了，我再转已经自认为自己不是马克思主义者了。
但实际上，我的看文的方式按照西方的视角，你照样是马克思主义。
当时有个英国人来，当时我陪他去一起做田野做研究，晚上我们俩就辩论。
辩论了各项事件事态，我们跟好几个人说：
“哇，你们中国还有一个很好的马克思主义者。”
就说我。后来我就发觉，就是我其实和他分析视角基本还是用结构视角。
而且我讲的结构基本上经济结构、政治结构、文化结构，但是宗教异形在这个层面没有。
别的没有的，就是还是什么，就是物质层面的某种结构决定这个。
从他们来讲，从广义讲，英国人的马克思主义是这个，不是叫马克思人，马克思的学院这个层面。
当然是马克思主义者，当时我还是非常喜欢马克思主义者。
所以我当时就想着别人其实有文化资本懂这个的，而且要找想到职业的，都做一样风质生物学。
后来我们四个办专的，四个66个人，最多是我统计过在国外是59个人。
四个专业没区别，我们的专专专业等着搞昆仲学的没多少，但都出去搞风质生物学。
一个找机制，在生化层面，而那机制能和医学什么有关的，但是我就觉得不好玩。
一个一个找机制。
因为马克思结构思维的引导下，总觉得什么学科，要么是数学，要么是机有。
就是一个学科发生成熟，那就应该数学。
我想搞数学，我都觉得学了生物学那四种费动，是觉得生物学里面只有什么进化论。
那进化论是个覆盖法则，下面一大堆机制生物学机制不能违反进化论的。
但是它又进化论推不出来的。
这点就和物理学完全彻底不一样的。
因为你学习物理学，一到经典物理学你真的学好了，实际上是你自懂牛顿善理理都行了。
别的定理都是牛顿善理的另一种写法。
所以我当时就跟你讲讲，当时我能搞一个东西能数学化的，讲别的生物学机制，就是它的另一种说法而已。
不可能的，但是我不理解。
所以当时人家做微观分子成为我做宏观生态学，因为当时数学生态学非常红。
所以在这个情况下，走了生态学这条道路。
我以前买过一本书，是威尔逊的，很大的一本书，社会生物学。
但其实那本书我从来没有完整的看完。
当我看，它写作的年代也是70年代。
它是通过生物学的研究方式，最后它提出过一个理念，认为将来这套研究纯生物的方法是可以扩展到整个研究社会的领域。
你在差不多同时代，稍晚几年那会儿，你已经是一个学昆虫生态学对生物学了解很多人了。
当你转行在90年代转向这个社会学的研究的时候，你会意识到，自己的这个生物学就是理工的这样的一个自然科学的背景。
对你研究社会学当时有一些，比如说工具或者有一些增益吗？
越到现在我理解到它影响越大，当时很大，但当时还最最主要是负面。
我看到科学的局限，然后我看到EOS，他是很好的学者，而且EOS的工作当时我记得Marshall Sallings和他有一个辩论，还写过一本书的。
但是我是不认可EOS的说法，因为我研究自己研究昆虫，知道昆虫社会动物和人社会动物的形成机制是不一样。
而人本质上是个小穷体动物，人是social不societal。
因为我们人的灵长部都是小穷体的。
人变成大穷体的，我们愿意把它分成国家产生，并不是一定必然的，并不是人的基因层面什么需要的。
这是我能感到，这第一。
第二就是所有的生物学东西，要用到社会学都要小心。
因为生物是复返回为主的。
在生物学里面结构功能主义是百分之百形的：
但人类这东西是，我文革过来的人，是不会接受结构功能主义的。
所以一下子我非常警觉，非常高度结构功能的。 形成机制完全不一样的社会生物，要想用到人类，危险之大，是难以想象。
所以当时，我是非常警觉，应该说这是第一，第二。
我说警觉，是来自我对科学的反思。
所以我做数学，数学也很难学。我当时是跑到复旦数学系学数学，那很难很难。
第二，我跑到交大学控制论和系统论。当时学了，就是实际上是，首先感到学完这东西，对机器可以，对社会不行的。逐渐逐渐感到社会不是个系统。
这个东西当然我是慢慢，86年左右，快出国左右，才形成的。
85年，我正在转型的时候，买了一本麦内斯库的书。麦内斯库当时是罗马尼亚的总理，齐奥塞斯库的副手，他写了一本叫《经济控制论》，小小的绿皮子。
这本书我到现在才宝贝要保证的，因为这是我的教训。我记得84年底，不，85年，买都忘了，刚买了，从头都一看完。
“哇，怪不得能搞得好，我们搞不好，我们就知道，末世子过河，人家你看这都里面全是数学了，矩阵，数学矩成了这种矿图。”
人家总理什么水平。到了几年以后，齐奥塞斯库被打死，他们武器出行了。
但是我在转型过程中，知道这种系统思维是非常可怕的。社会不是个系统，结构不见得有功能。
你在那个时代，就已经有这种判断了。你和生物比较，生物嘴巴掌，那是为了吃的，吃的他肯定要吃的，有这结构。
我看社会好多结构，哪有功能了，对不对？那是看得很清楚的。
经过文革的人，而且我反思比较多，我这个始终会很会想问题，因为就很会，很会很会老动脑筋想问题。
但是我自己的个人的经历，就写论文过程中，出了几件事情。
当时我和一个朋友做了一个红领虫数学模型，发了当时空中学研究，但就像现在最好的学报，像AAG的，还是生态学报，我忘了哪个学报。
然后还做了一个数学模型，变了一大堆程序。当时能变点程序，很性感的，对吧？
当时来了个质保员，那个质保员是不哪个地方毕业的，他要管红领虫，他要管别的事情。
但当时质保员要做些很苦的事情，比如对红领虫来说，一个星期下田野两次，一次三四个小时，晒太阳，就是抽样。
抽样了就才红领虫软，倒到一定密度，他就农民打药，就那么简单。
那么我就让他看我这模型了，他就问我：
“哎呦，太好了！”
他当然完全从自己的角度出发：
那个田野说是温度是报三七八度，太阳下晒的，那是四十多度，往五十度爬的，对吧，那非常人非常人。
当时我的回答是不行。
他为什么？我说我才两年数据，当然没关系，我能等。
我说还是不行。
就是这就为什么，我当过工人，那个工人的，就实践层面的诚实吧，导致我就是知道我的模型局限。
这一般当这个水平的一般，如果没当过工人，我不会知道，因为我知道他能不能用，我心里是很清楚。
我说还是不能用。
他问为什么，我就给他提了理由：
我说，我那个卵的种球密度，是在大田里搭十个帐篷，这里面去一样的。
但是昆虫和人一样，要迁徙的，跑来跑去的。
结果他的回答非常漂亮：
“他昆虫迁徙没有长距离迁徙的，你可以理解他随机的。”
这下子倒也是我想，但我后会又回答他，我还是不行，还是不行。
就是我为了预报昆虫，当时就老到学家会，西向站什么的，就遇到昆虫，是需要知道西向的。
那雨是我没办法预报的，我是控制不住的。
但是昆虫，这个昆虫有个问题，到一陵到两陵，就是这件。
他为了把那棉花上面最嫩的地方，花口啊什么地方，让给更年轻的软翅，他会爬好几个小时，从一个地方爬到另一个地方，就是到一陵到二陵爬。
因为是花口，就花刚长出来，小嫩嫩上面，多几个软，刚出来一陵，你要眼睛肉眼才能看出来，仔细看才能看出来。
他多吸几口，那花就掉了，掉了实际上，以后的小孩就没食物了。
所以他在演出演化这个行为，一零二零，就爬到老叶子上去，要爬好几个小时，因为很小，爬了很慢。
当时基本上一个中等大的雨，就可以把我博星出自化了。
就很清楚，我很清楚这一点。
但我就给他解决这问题，哪知道，他几乎侮辱性地说：
“这你做的是什么东西了，意识不用出来。”
当时我气得要死掉，但我当时的心里面就怪不得农学员出来，就是没水平。
但我是心里理性的成分那么想，潜意识里面就想，因为它是对的。
这个背后导致了我对学科理解，然后导致我后来到了加拿大。
就在Mageo，又做了一个更fancy的，叫专家系统，就做两个昆虫，就棉花里面、胡萝卜里面两个害虫。
现在胡萝卜四五十年的，将近半个世纪的市场价格，不同种，它会展现市场不同价格。
以这种昆虫密度做一个更动态的管理昆虫红领虫的方式。
那模型复杂多了，程序也长多了。
然后当时加拿大有质保员的跑来玩我的模型，他足足玩了大概十来分钟。
因为模型复杂了，他就是选择不同的场合看看，他一边点头，一边点头。
完了之后，他给我回答一句话：
他说定性：
“你这个模型很有启发。”
他原话叫 heuristic value，但你知道这模型是没有什么现实作用的吧。
I think you know。
我当然知道，因为我85年那个模型就碰到这一次了。
但是我想听听他怎么看这问题的，我就说了：
“我知道，但是呢，你是不是能给我一个很convincing、很好的道理？”
结果他给了我道理，我没想到，他是美感。
他胡萝卜，比如有一叫橡皮虫，他在羹里面，跑出来，从窝里面钻进去，走一圈出来了。
有的是，他实际上给你钻两个洞，甚至走到表面，给你把泥拉到上面，一条黑的。
他其实人吃胡萝卜，这般根本没关系，但你吃嘛，你可买嘛。
上面一个虫，一个虫，一个虫，一个虫，在这边，卖圈走了一圈，一大堆黑的，拦在胡萝卜上。
他没敢。
你这么模型，在那时候呢，我就已经发觉我们的学科的局限。
就是我这条路，要在生物学里面发学像牛顿定理一样，其实彻底错了。
我对学科理解错了。
第二呢，我就发觉好多物理学的思维方式跑到生物学里面就很难行。
比如生物学里面，我做个控制实验，找个药，这个药能治某种病，但这个药可能真的吃了就死了人，活体里面就不行的。
这种现象在物理科学部也发生的，对一大堆现象。
我觉得生物学的，把一大堆实际上就看到，我们生物学的好多假装自己提出的动向。
物理科学回头看，都是有问题的。
科学的测量头颅来测量人，颅相学，颅相学了，智商了，等等等等。
当时我们都知道这些事情，就是生物学。
还有呢，当时我准备写文章，我一直想写，后来没写成。
就是生物学有个理论，1940年提出，叫多样性造成稳定性，就是生物的多样性会造成生态的稳定性。
今天中国还在要加强生态多样性，因为报纸上大家还在说。
但当时75年，有个梅纳史密斯发了一幅数学，微分方程出发。
微分方程当时，你参数微分方程族越大，它的稳定性越小。
那就多样性会减低稳定性。
那就被两个学派了。
我那去准备造个理论，但那个理论最后，我慢慢慢慢发觉，实际上我的理论最后多样性是根据环境。
你如果把多样性搬到北极南极，搞热带雨林，你肯定不行。
就是我当地的能够承受的Maxim Community，就顶端穷落的状态有关，超过也不行，减低也不行，非常结构。
还是当然生不选，结构功能主义没问题。
这是我想发表，想搞一个数学模型，搞一个数学模型。
但这个过程中，因为我就看这两个状态，逐渐逐渐到90年代，80年末期，越来越意识到这一点。
因为你开始自认为自己以后要成为一个生态学的大家了。
逐渐越来越意识到，其实达尔文他为了寻找上帝跑到那几个岛上看这回事，等等等等。
这个故事，这是我们原来的本科的叙事。
但最后自己看书，看多了就知道了，其实达尔文他直接的最真个影响是伦敦的第二次工业革命的cut through的竞争，那个对他影响很大。
这就为什么在欧洲像当时不是达尔文提的进化，像Spencer在同时代，现在他跟社会进化，然后的Wallace，然后那边，法国那边的，就是那个拉马克，就是实际上进化论当时来说是赢者找自我感觉好的心态，是这个东西。
这慢慢其实已经开始赶到这一点了，赶到这一点了。
就是包括这篇文章，就多样导致稳定性和这个梅纳史密斯比较，比较，出国之后都发觉了。
他为什么这篇文章写了40年，最后达尔文的背景差不多，二战以后自由主义学院而已。
他和哈亚克差不多的东西，这我一下就觉得自由主义到底，正好他也有一定对而已。
你把它放在这样的，对，我都慢慢看出来了。
这就为什么我有次写了哈亚克和普兰尼，我把两个损了半天。
你看到我这个书评没有？我把两个人就重蹈到这里损。
对我这个损，就是自己损自己。
曾经有一天，也上过这些人道。
就是怎么说呢，当时越来越看到我们生物学的所欲的东西，都是社会的好东西，引设到到我们给定我们替某种启发。
所以在这时候，这个呢，当然我已经当时已经到了整体水平了。
比如说我越来越清楚牛顿定理啊什么这些东西科学，如果没有16世纪的humanism和17世纪的经验主义，它是起不来的。
所以实际上，我越来越知道，就是天才的背景，这大概就改行的时候到这个程度。
所以呢，当时，因为我要生这一套，我是彻底不信的。
而且最可怕的是路径一来，做数学有不同文化的，我这不是因为比较实用，工厂的经历太想做模型有用了。
导致我就走向一条文化，那文化叫simulation model，就是模拟模型。
还是愿意把经验层面，这个红领虫啊等等的具体生命史上的具体东西，全部引进来，真实的描述。
而这种模型都发表了好文章。
为什么呢？太特殊，你要发好文章，要大户有才行。
那个文章就那个机制要去，大家认为是universal，大家都到手都能用的。
就这时候大概我进入社会学了，已经对这个彻底不迈了。
但是呢，进入社会学之后，马上碰到一个新的问题。
好多学生和老师都会问我：
我老以为他们跟我开玩笑，然后取笑我。
但问了多了呢，我就可以想这问题了，想了我就想了想了想去。
就是首先空虫类比EOS这一套，我发现不行的。
空虫社会和我们人类社会就形成机制是不一样的，对吧，不一样的。
那么，后来我想要比，就和Bonobo，就是我们中国叫倭黑猩猩和黑猩猩比。
这两个星星是和人类基因相差就二百来个，非常近非常近。
所以一比的话，我就发觉他们是政治动物，我们是。
他们是地域性动物，对吧，要防备，要Defend。
我们也是。
他们是一定程度是经济动物，因为他们已经开始能够搞一些工具了。
我们也是。
唯有一点就是，他们不会论证自己行为。
所以这一来，就是我觉得人类就是三加一。
他们这些问候，我的思考，我彻底就脱离了马亨主义了，对吧。
走向韦伯，走向别的，就一行代文化宗教这个层面，得到这种全新的理解。
就是我们三加一。
所以你如果研究所谓社会科学，不懂观念，不把观念本身当为社会结构，是不可能的。
所以这个观念了，宗教了等等等等。
这就为什么我后来一进入社会学一看迈克尔·曼（Michael Mann）特别开心。
那你带着这样过去的，无论是作为工厂工人的经验，还是作为自然科学家的这样的一个视角，来进入到社会学里面。
那你其实审视整个从19世纪以来的这些过去的社会学理论，你自己应该是在那段时间，应该是可以对每一个人你都会有一个非常强烈的判断。
就比如说像你刚刚提到，你对于哈耶克，对于波兰，包括像勒庞。
其实我记得20年前勒庞他那个《乌合之众》中的理论，在中文世界影响还非常大。
但后来也有批评他的，认为甚至是有人把他描述成名刻的。
但是你还是在你的书里面讨论了他们，以及后来很多人的一些这个思想脉络。
这个过程当中，你有遇到比如说让你特别幸福的吗？
应该说幸福的一个都没有。
觉得稍微好一些的像梯利（Tilly）什么，就是还是比较可以。
第二就是因为实际上我刚才的所有，包括能够讲那个多样性稳定性那个发表的时间什么都有警觉。
在这过程中，包括我来反思自己的学术的误区，产生了一个现在来说叫知识社会学的视角。
就是不对知识本身，知识背景来看待解构这个知识。
这一知识社会就导致一个，是一个买奉侍极数的视角。
所以这个视角就导致你对什么大人物也不会。
我一看，比如说哈亚克，哈亚克在中国横过，普兰尼的横过。
对我来说，就是两个，你是审视他们所有人的这一刻。
但是转行之后，当时我产生那么我要从三个层面来考察。 第一个，当时说没有民主，就没有现代化，没有就是经济发展。那民主和经济发展，什么关系？
第二，当时第三，民族浪潮，我久离家小号，不久回复过亚门的时候，安德派出来了。大家给自由主义，带着梯楼的自由主义，加着共产主义策略一样的一个方法，全世界都自由主义了的，自由主义内部斗了，那么也就多党民主，这种民主形式历史会走向哪？这个我都考虑，我都要考虑清楚。
第三，我研究是社会运动，而且是支撑市场革命，而且支撑市场革命，而且支撑市场革命，从头到底就和当时就讲的内容有关。今年是法国革命200周年，新海革命70周年，共产党革命40周年，这种他们的有意识的建立观念上的连续性，那就说明这些与参加的相当人是把他自我意识当作一场革命，那我必须放到革命社会运动脉络来理解。
所以我自己给自己选择了三个马基尔的考试考题，为了这三个我就赞成阅读。当然最简单是经济发展问题，我当时提的概念叫防御，就是限制合法性。我就说经济发展智慧有好处，因为他在世界的民族浪潮下他怎么办，而且也不能内斗了，任何内斗一下子乱掉了，下场可能就是起奥塞斯库了，对吧，就讲到讲。
所以这是发展的一个最好状态，我把这种状态，我把这个defensive reaction，就防御体制，我就说台湾是五十年代发展得好，就是它是防御体制。它没办法，它有国家能力，没有民族，但必须好好做事。
因为当时西方的人还是强调强国家，他们研究说中国不是他们的最重要案例，他们研究的是非洲的好多国家，国家能力一点都没有。所以他们想到非洲拉拉丁美，甚至印度这种国家从中国出来的，就是我认为怎么用我的自由主义本色来争论。我觉得就是国家权力被没有非民主性东西权力限制了，它一样能带动经济发展了，还有defensive region，这个国家很有力量能保护自己，但是必须通过好好干保护自己才行。
所以这是我发表的第一两篇社会文章，反正是经济发展的比较简单。我就觉得其实我的最好篇文章，就算老师都觉得好，是写民主的。看了大量的书，就得正的，当时的一个说法是个约翰利级的历史学家，在美国很有名，他就说：
二十世纪的最大事件就是共产主义、法西斯的兴起和垮台。
这句话你们可能不知道，听说过，当时大家都这么说。我写完这之后，我就说了，不在民主好坏，而且你把民主往水泥了，什么地方做也不行。
所以我就讲了民主的性质：
就总结了三点：
所以这三个条件它最重要是忠于反对，也就是民主必须是假的，真的就坏蛋，真的有两党，是一个想象法西斯，一个想象象，那肯定搞。就美国现在就出现这问题。
我刚就想问，如果按照你这三个标准，那今天的美国是不是一个都不成立了？2020年的特朗普下台不肯认账，同时挑战了这三点，但是没有完全不成立，至少第三点美国人除了玩民主派，真不知道玩什么派，他没玩过。所以有一天美国民主也会倒战，但不是现在。
但总结了这之后我就讲了，其实我对世界大师当时已经很熟了。我就比较，就二战以后美国和苏联都推崇国家独立，帝国的全面垮台是美国和全苏联共同的推动。
但是为什么美国会站在帝国这一边，站在英国和法国这一边？就是因为新起来的、新独立的国家反对的西方殖民，美国要保护他们，美国也变他们敌人了。这就导致了新发展起来的国家都是搞社会主义、共产主义、马克思主义。
这美国行的多名诺古牌效应、防备，就这个道理。五六十年代，美国支持右派政权，什么。但是苏联到处输出革命，这时候因为有这个历史背景，我看苏联输出革命背后各种教训，我就知道了，美国像输出民族，像输出革命一样，后果和苏联下场差不多的，把这个苗到处来揍，一大堆后果，会影响自由主义。
你那会就，我这里面就那么写的，我就这一次，很可能是general crisis of enlightenment，对吧，这次很可能自由主义会被带上，因为你们带自由主义下面来推广这件事情。
写完了这个之后，当时老师非常厉害，非常吃惊。他说：
你要发表？
我说我不能发表。
为什么？
我中国有句话，大杀将军，英文南富，我一发表没用的。第二也不见得发表，没人听我的。发表了之后，对我最坏处没好处，以为我是法西斯，我又不是。
最终呢，我还在历史。根据我对中国的历史经验看，这个世界历史始终是蠢人推动的。我当时就跟他开玩笑，我就跟他福克鸭妈自己出来说，不是的，大家会认，果然如此。
但是这片东西呢，我就没敢发表。这边第一次在国内发表是只有一半，叫民主的限制，好像07年我在领导的杂志，08年发的。当时在国内就被骂死，我前面那些话都没敢说。
可以想象，我孩子就是把民族需要的限制、民族需要哪些条件什么什么，当时国内自由主义者把我骂的，我说我也自由主义，他说你自由主义的屁。
到了最近十来年，我才把我90那些话逐渐开始说起来了。就第三个就是因为这场革命嘛，我就在这方面上了一门课，做文献综述。这就是那时的文献综述，包括我写马基尔。
但是我上课的时候，就和他叫平闹，从头到底去吵，从头到底去闹，闹得他也不知道我在说什么。但最终他也很遗憾，成绩给我得了A减，因为我在马基尔上课，每门都是A家，然后最后马基尔给我一下免了八门课，说算了，还有八门课不要上，直接做你的东西去吧。
所以他自己都不好意思，说要么我给你改改成绩，因为别人都是我厉害的不得了，我说这无所谓，一门A减怕什么。
当时就写这本书，就是你看我弟，就是知识社会学，这个知识产生的社会背景，我就很在意。
所以当时你能看，整个过程中讲那个Malabang什么的，你说明课不是，当时都是明课。你说Malabang，19世纪，那时候都是明课，对不对，包括牛顿，牛顿也是个明课，他当时大量时间是花在alchemy，花在这种神秘主义的东西。
他认为他那类东西最厉害的东西，但确实看得出来，他有很多理论。就是大家在审视同一个问题的时候，往往提出针锋相对甚至截然不同的一些分析方法，但是这些分析方法他可能又是确实同时成立的。
比如说群众，如果越多的话群众运动就越容易爆发起来，但是你也引了例子，后来也有其他的一些学者，他同样提出了很有说服力的这样的一些新的一些看法，认为反而反倒是你人数越多的话，大家会反而不太会参与到群众运动。
对对对，我的老师就是这一伙的。
因为西方的学术它自己发展，它有一定背景的，美国人跑到欧洲留学，研究引回来的理论，基本上都是不赢马克思、不赢韦伯，就赢齐买尔和土耳干，都比较保守。这也是我当时看了大量著作，结果因为一个年纪，要上好几门课，我在上社会运动，要上别的课，我发觉这美国人想问题，虽然是加拿大，但是他都是美国培养出来的人，什么一个样子。
比如说教育社会学了，我一看教育问题，中国人跟马克思主义大的结构问题，我却没机会，他就不想的，就是做一个实验，前测后测，两个哪个教育方式好。
每个学科每门课思维方式都差不多。上次上次我就发觉了。当然了，我也是好在年轻人看胡书（胡塞尔），大量对庞蒂（梅洛-庞蒂），就实际实用主义有点影响的，这可能和实用主义有关，不谈主义只谈问题。
我然后开始看实用主义了，这时候我就得出一个对美国人都不知道的理论，我才发觉就是哪怕到了南美战争之后的美国的精英，基本上欧洲的主义还没进入美国。
美国自由主义和乱七八糟的一大堆人，叫保守主义，没有别的主义。那些主义是六千万欧洲移民带来的，对美国人来说完全搞不懂，这帮人在说什么，什么叫马克思主义，不知道，什么叫无政府主义，什么叫普鲁东主义，根本不知道。
这种对美国人的刺激很大，这个刺激过程。美国人就是出现就是改良主义，就在芝加哥，就搞改良。
但是在这个过程中，就是实用主义，这个是美国人的特有视角，它是经验主义。美国人的英国，它经验主义，拿掉本体，拿掉大结构，就不要讲主义，只要讲问题，具体问题，具体解决。问题出现在哪个层面，层个层面就在这个层面解决，头疼一疼，脚疼一脚。
这个就变成个美国独特的干文力方法，形成所谓的芝加哥学派。
芝加哥学派如果是核心的两个议题，社会学一个就是叫符号互动，那就拉邦这个路子过来。
那么到芝加哥人在闹市，是不同文化、不同宗教的人跑在一起互相搞不通，连早上打个招呼都不知道怎么打，我想早上好，一个叫breaching，就是半棍试验，就做这个的。
我跟你说早上好，你问我好什么，对吧，然后你问我头疼，怎么让最终两人吵起来了。
就是实际上他们能找到的东西，就是要把芝加哥的问题不是阶级问题，就不同种族不同宗教的人跑在一起出来的问题，那么他们住在一起了，就生态问题了。
就芝加哥人study labor hold，就是街区问题，就芝加哥学位的街区实验和符号互动，都非常幼稚的，但他们虽然很幼，初发联很幼，但他们做悬问认证，他们找到这些跟互动的因果关系，那是真的呀。
我如果说话是个犯规，人家肯定对方不舒服的，真的打架都有礼仪的。在上海打架不用怕的，打着打着就不打了，大家就拉开了。
在宁夏打架没人劝架的，就是大家打架，你们两个就大家让开让人打。
在北京打架，我有一次看见两个人还没打起来，一个人把这血都派出来了，啪站出来，啪站出来，啪站出来，好漂亮的血站出来，那个样子都派出了拳子去，还没开始打呢。
我发觉哇，不同地方打架是这不同的样子，北京只想星星能不能先打自己再说。
所以当时就是我自己的天生的社会学视角，就一天来看马上得支架，但是呢，这是唯一关键，为什么那某种礼仪被你主导了，为什么那个地方人互相都听不懂对方话了，那背后有结构的呀。
第二呢，那些左派理论也骂他们，因为那些个，我里面说的左派，都是那些个自己参加过美国六十年代公民运动的。
对，然后呢，竟然去准备读研究生了，开始研究自己的，这很正常，研究自己的，年轻最激动的时刻，一看见呢，他能用的理论就这些狗屁东西，气得要死。
就提出他们的左派理论，但是呢，在他们这些左派也是实用主义文化教育下的左派，不是欧陆的和中国的左派。
这时候他们左派不是非理性的，那还是理性的，是组织了资源了，就是他们提的组织、资源、政治机会，老话语体系就变成几个中间变量，非常肤浅。
但是我是马克思主义传统出来，虽然我不是马克思主义者了，但是我从大结构看目的方式还是我的自然，一看你们的左派也不怎么左，右派不怎么右，都得跑在中间。
那为什么实用主义在这时候大概就是我来发觉，社会科学都不应该叫科学。
我下一步就要总结，十几十几以后科学给我们带来的灾难，以及中国人为什么坚持不搞科学这一套。
在中国人非常理性分享，你看省阔了等等，包括中国翻译写的这个。
但是当时我是就是他们就从这个角度来看，原来做学问之类根本就没必要这么做。
所以在这时候，就这本书就这个背景，就完全就是从很远的宏观的一看，站在我们continental，就是整个欧亚大陆视角来看美国这道东西。
那这是我就想的问题了，我们为什么全学它。
首先我就看到了为什么定量那么发达，定量越做越发达，越做越细。
你一定要头疼一头，脚疼一脚，你要仔细的，
到底这个毛有病，那个毛有病，
就测量就仔细了。
就是你没有实用主义，因为我们去生物学统计，统计都是欧洲起来的，但从来没统计做到像美国那么发达，大数据了，统计了，博弈了，定量方法发达，就让美国人完成。
那么发达那么复杂，就是开始把头上毛有几根长短越量越细了，越量细了。
所以在这时候呢，我就想这问题了，为什么实用主义传统就是这套思维方式，全球都研究，中国人全到美国，全做这套方法。
所以我又一句话，中国70年代以后出国的，按照我的标准，全球覆没个好的，就按照我的标准，很高很高标准，因为他没看上这一点，就把这些东西当作真学问学了。
这个当然我一直和项飙，因为项飙有时候我在柏林碰见他，我就把他戳码一顿。 说他做烂七八东西，他说那个烂七八概念，很诚实地跟我说。说完我就半句都不好意思，骂了赵老师。
我也看过你东西，你是学这个四十多岁了，他们都要学问，整个碾来碾去，尽管碾不平你，我是能让人家烫来烫去，烫了十二年，烫了平平的，现在突然学了站起来，哪儿站起来都不知道。他跟我说了，他很诚恳，很诚恳，我一下子感动了，我觉得的确，所以这时候很感谢。
我是学了第二个宝石赛学，而且四十来岁了，在自然科学，已经跌了头部流血了，可以的，所以这本书其实实际上是里面的这三个项目之一。
很久以前，就有听众来问过我，咱们在节目里面提到过的这么多图书，尤其是一些比较珍贵的原版书，能不能直接通过节目来进行下单。在经历很长时间的筹备以后，互作互有的卖书业务终于上线了。
我们在微信上建立了一个橱窗，这次在橱窗当中不仅汇集了节目当中深入探讨过的书籍，也包含了一部分我个人精选的图书，其中还有少量的签名版和稀有的原版。
完整的书目信息和购买方式，各位可以前往微信公众号忽左忽右 (left right)，回复买书两个字，即可获取我们这个橱窗中的书目。将会不定期更新，尽量挑选我认为比较好的版本和图书，欢迎各位常来刷新，常来看看。
你书里面其实也谈到这一点，就是欧陆的这些对社会运动的研究和美国的比较，尤其比如说1968年，全世界都纷纷引用，欧洲也在，有欧洲的，然后美国也有，美国的这些运动。但我是确实，看您这本书的时候，我才发现原来欧陆和美国的学者在这样的一个研究问题上，其实彼此很长时间是没有交流的。
对，你说到一直到80年代以后，他们才慢慢交流。
对，那简直就是，虽然看起来今天有很多书写那个时代，好像是一种全球联动，但实际上完全不是这样子。它们是不是在平行发生？
它平行发生。
比如英国的社会运动比较不剧烈，原因呢：
就是我慢慢看到，如果从全世界看，有个代际问题，有门克的论文，我写这个60年代非常全球性的。
这是二战前，二战以后的经历完全不同，而且都存在背背部。战争以后大家生小孩，干什么，朝一代。
但欧陆人呢，因为这不同，他们自己理解也不一样。美国人知道理解，让我这本书说了，但是欧洲的比如说主流理解尽量让法国给影子。
法国出来一个叫图海纳（Touraine）、梅鲁奇（Melucci），有几个大家，都是比较左的，都是新马的人。
他们呢，基本上还没有脱离马克思主义的这种视角。他们当时肯定知道工人阶级不行了，福利已搞了，工人阶级完蛋了，但是呢，他们还是要认为历史有个前进的动力。
那既然有前进的动力，那左派就有第二问题了，总是找谁是承担者，先锋队。
所以当时图海纳写了一本很有名的书，就《后工业社会的来临》，就是学生了，但是太傻了，学生是流水的，兵过两年就不见了。
所以你就看，知识分子给傻到什么程度，但是Turin有名气大的一塌糊涂，对不对？
所以看，千万不要让这帮知识分忽悠住了。
梅鲁奇是图海纳的学生，就是他们欧陆基本上还大结构这些比较左的，但也有些德国人什么的也有些欧陆不跟着他们走的，自己在做研究什么。
就是实际上开始谈了identity politics，谈认同感政治问题了，就是欧陆谈的更多一些，反正美国人谈的少。
美国反而谈当时谈了，因为早嘛，80年初，那是因为欧陆人70年代就有人开始谈了。
因为这个对我来说，实际认同感政治明确就是说，赫鲁晓夫秘密报告之后欧洲的左派全体进到他分垮台不认账的，只有沙特什么几个，就是死英分子。
这个垮台之后呢，就导致了他左的情绪没垮台，资本主义的问题没垮台，那问题马克思的诊断还在，对吧。
而且呢，左的问题就是一个实际困扰的第二国际上的问题。我为奉斗一个先进的意义形态，但为了他奉斗他，我组织内部必须搞列定主义组织，少数分钟多数什么，因为令主义组织好控制，特别当敌人也就国家很极端的时候，令令主义组织更容易搞地下活动，更容易保护自己。
但是逐渐逐渐，他们就越来意识到，这个组织成问题。
所以呢，他们开始谈论：
所以有一个人写了一本书叫Freedom is Endless Meeting，他一个美国人写的，自由就是开不完的会。
就是他专门讲这个事情，经常他们为了搞运动，结果没有全体同意，事情都过去，他们还在开会。
所以当时呢，就是赫鲁晓夫秘密报告一个前遗症，左派的一个前期的垮胎，垮得一认同感政治表现。
所以欧洲人开始谈起来了，美国人也有谈的，相对比较少，到了他们一接触了，双方就知道一对表。
但一对表呢，总体是美国学者全体碾压欧洲学者。
第一呢，欧洲学者能撑起来的，Toran啊什么几个人太傻，那个东西一听就不对头，学生已经早就不革命了，对吧。
还有一个呢，就是欧洲学者比较从大框架讲吧，他没有经验上没有handle美国这套重乘理论，经验上就能做，反而就能发表了，能发表好杂志好文章，能卷起来了吗，按照信息来说。
然后呢，从表面看，你若看不穿，就会觉得这玩意更像科学，更科学，其实是更傻，对我来说。
但是并不是欧洲和美国没区别，当时我就发现，欧洲人如果当时的忠诚理论，他们提到什么资源了、组织了、话语了、政治机会。
对，欧洲学者讲政治机会比较多，而欧洲学者讲政治机会更讲大的结构造成政治机会，实际上是有略有区别的，就这个还是有的。
但总体上欧洲学者自己也没有意识到，他们基本上让美国知道，终于殖民了，没办法，好杂志起码就美国掌握了。
这是什么叫帝国，帝国的软势力就体现在这地方。
我想主要是欧洲这些知识分子讨论，其实讨论这些社会运动，包括你书里面提到，他们也会关注到，比如说那个时代中国的很多一些问题，比如说文化大革命。
但这个，你是作为这个历史的参与者，当然我看到的更多是一些批评，就是认为其实从这些案例当中，可以展示他们对于很多事件的分析方式，包括他们的一些观念、结论，其实跟您的经验的立场上其实完全是对不上号的。
是这样子的，因为你对什么议题感兴趣和你价值观是离不开的。
我第二个人说，为什么是鲁法国家都有这个没办法，所以欧洲人他如果对文革感兴趣，包括美国人对文革都有一个这个，他原来是毛主义者，他喜欢过，虽然失望了，但这个情节在。
我是见过一个又一个一批又一批，就很多。
不是说马尔罗什么的还来过中国吗？
对对，好多好多。
像我去年跟着我夫人到柏林，她到柏林高校园院就要住房一年，那我就跟着她旁边打加油，包括我说和香标见面，什么都那段时间。
那吵到毛主义者来找我们聊天，什么的。
现在有的还是北大的访问学者什么，他现在已经不是毛主义者了，但对中国感情很深。
应该那么说，中国几千年来始终是软势力自保国家，它从来没有能力输出软势力。
人家给我输出警教、摩尼教了、佛教了、反应伊斯兰教，但我们有个儒学，那本来是力自保而已。
这就为什么你到东南亚一带，你看你不到东南亚，你不到新加坡了，好多地方你发现印度教文化了，基督教，中国最多几个小的民间宗教庙，中国文化其实没多少。
其实中国，我们国家领导给西方这点说出去，我们这个文化是没能力搞这事情的，古代也没能力。
但有例外，就毛泽东时代，那是中国的有史以来五千年，假设五千年的话，这是软势力的顶点。
就是你有一套东西，让世界好像觉得不一样的。
我自己经历过文革，我对毛泽东的解读是很正面。
我从来不认可毛泽东就是为了把刘少奇搞到什么什么的，没必要。
凭他这个能力，凭他这个权位，别人是政治家，他是神。
但他如果对刘少奇不喜欢出于嫉妒什么一点没有，那也不可能，但肯定不是他搞文革的最终原因。
所以文革时候，因为我从头到尾参加，基本上虽然是打酱油一拿参加，但是人家辩论我去听，干什么我都不知道。
这时候我就发觉，逐渐渐文革大字报流传很多，许多消息是文革传出来了，就是顾沫洛的那个假省三百年纪在共产党史上的重要性。
大家千万不能抵触，就是毛泽东就是想进城市赶考，我们做理智城怎么办，他这句话不是没道理。
因为当时毛泽东八百万军队的人绝大多数都是不怎么实质的农民，都不是工人，就共产党整体的文化素质这样子一来。
哪怕你搞共产主义，搞什么，一当关了，实际上就是个恶霸，你的素质还不见得比地主好呢。
其实我们可以想上这批人。
所以当时，其实我们小学时候，包括我妈在文革前，在厂里授期，我们看包括王洪门什么这些人，我们小时候都已经听了很多，就这批人不怎么样，很糟糕，欺负人。
当时文革前你如果对一个车间党支部书记批评，很可能都为病医生犯党，那是很可怕的。
所以毛泽东当然他的资源有限，他要搞一个毛式的大民族，更接近罗书和Robespierre这个传统，这是毛泽东的真心。
他一直叫美国叫小民族假的，我们搞大民族。
所以他三年自然灾害之后了，毛泽东继续在这问题上考虑，考虑了他就搞社交勇动，最后搞事情。
这个是刘少奇把毛泽东给扔毛了，能看出来。
刘少奇还真没有想过反对毛泽东，他就是为了支持毛泽东。
但是他的思维方式，管理、拍工作组，党的领导一拍工作组，工作组都是当官的和当地当官的，最终自然的结合，就把好多事情捂住了。
毛泽东一看社交勇动搞得这样子，气坏了，再搞事情，让刘少奇搞讨厌经验，不要思清思不清，又有党的领导。
所以这一来，毛泽东就活很大很大了。
所以提出千万不要忘记接地动作了，继续革命之道提出来。
刘少奇再拍工作组，你要搞文革，我支持党的领导。
这一次呢，毛泽东就出了一张大字报。
所以把这些消息就传到北大，传到清华，附中等等，有一批学生就闹了不停了。
所以文革一开始，你看他们就把地府反化越来砸，砸牛鬼蛇神了，砸那些就是老保守派红卫兵干的。
那些初期都是文革叫保守派红卫兵干。
当时有一个开始出生不好的人，也能组织红卫兵了，因为当时学童论开始有批判了。
那我也组织了红卫兵，也搞了个组织，名字叫什么也忘了，反正我们几个人整天给人家应传单碗。
但是因为你三个组织投了嘛，他们有些开会，我也能去，去了就没人管你。
我两派，我到处都走，因为你这么小屁孩，没人害怕你，他们也不是保密会议。
我当时白天他们辩论，我经常去听。
我当时崇拜的呀：
反正白天辩论讲这是脑子悬涌的，对一个小孩子来说，那简直天才，怎么能想得出来，第几页都能记得。
那么，但是我的另一面就告诉我，他们是不是在准备我去参加，在晚上会议看他们准备哪些东西。
结果在上海，有机会混到这会议区了。晚上他们讨论问题完全无关的。
白天你知道他背后是谁了，但背后是谁谁谁就值一个领导，这个人文革十年前就是坏东西，他这话什么什么都在讨论，和白天完全无关的。
有了发现，晚上谈的是利益，单位的政治，白天谈的是大话语。
这时候我就发觉了，这矛盾思想，就哪怕一个思想，大家解读是个完全不一样的。
然后到了宁夏了，我们家这个是5月到9月1日，宁夏六七年，那时候也是更大一些了。
我们家经常是开会的据点，整天讨论，晚上也同样的，一模一样Universal的，就是文革前的恩怨了，等等。
这个人好人坏了，本质背后哪领导是谁了，什么的。
这时候我就说，你毛泽东怎么大家都打着你的旗号，大家都玩，你搞一元主义，就高度的以毛泽东思想的多元主义。
这就为什么我如法，我对自己形态的性质，他高度多元的个人体验的，树赢不清楚的，都是那时候发掘的。
所以到宁夏之后。
因为文革都还传出了一个
刘少奇到淮仁堂去找毛泽东，说了就让毛泽东给他介绍几本书。
对，那书里面有论机械唯物主义了什么的，但有一本就是淮南子。
淮南子，淮南子，好几本书。
有一次，**崔之元问我**，他说毛泽东为什么给刘少奇搞，我就给他讲了。
毛泽东就说：
“你搞的这套灌料子，什么都党管起来，是官僚体制管起来，这是不对头的。”
文革南子，黄老嘛，叫吴威尔治的，对不对，但那个时代，
毛泽东手上还有一张牌，
当时地方军区都支持保守派，因为省军区和当地领导关系好。
所以毛泽东手上，还有一张牌，
就是野战军。
六七年的八月份，是宁夏野战军到了宁夏，因为我妈他们是造反派的，导致我们一下子和野战军的那些团长、什么家庭关系都不错。
但当时我就在旁边观察着他们迎创市长军管了之后，野战军接着命令：
但是我当时就会发觉，这就是我天生的社会学的事情。
保守派的人个性比较好讲道理，比较极端的就是左派。
他不但社会外部这些，就是和我妈这种为了帮人都不怎么讲道理，个性都比较强，导致他们被压的时候特别硬，天天唱台都忘记绝食啊干什么。
十几派左派就造反却连在一起，一方放开了这帮人，根本不是干事的人。
这就导致了他们最后非搞大联合后，谁当官当然都让造反派当官。
但是在迎创市，我就看一点，简单讲，就是油盐降出财这个事情是非是要跟我们的官僚体制在管的。
对，后来我才发觉全国都一样，我在宁夏观察的最仔细了，比较我去发觉，弄着弄着他就相对来说以前有当官经验的相当顺点人，就把他放到更主要的位置了。
那些真正的造反派性格的人，是性格层面。萧巴那说人类有两类人：
讲道理的人是根据社会结构来改变自己，不讲道理的人要社会结构根据自己性格改变，而推动社会的正是后一种人。
我为什么对萧巴那这句话后来，那句话当时不知道，是后面才知道就写我这本书当时我已经知道。
我当时就发觉，其实造反派有些个人是不能做任何协作事情的。特别顺的时候他就是捣蛋鬼。
但是冲起这帮人怎么办？他又不能按照我现在这种理性的分析方式，他有革命话语。
只能说他们混进造反派队伍的三种人。
那帮人就不满意了，就说你野战军又走下革命的反面了。
所以到六七年底、六八年又舞蹈，所以毛泽东这牌全部打完了。
所以这个我呢，带了一个学生写过一篇关于文革的文章，具体名下文革。
但是这个过程中，我为什么特别愿意带个学生做这个博士论文，因为总结我自己那代的经验，还发表在还是一世纪上的，我记得。
所以当时我就发觉，就到了六八年两月份，毛泽东就没有任何牌了，他兴起也变了。
对于文革理解，他被他指定的革命先锋以后是历史下个历史阶段有这群人员推动的，这群人员全背叛他了。
但是呢，大量的学生里面的造反派，他们比我大四五岁，等五六岁，看问题和我差不多，整段也差不多。
但是他们用的语言，因为他们和文革的感情是应该胜多了，他们从头到底真的进去，我是这个年龄阶段很奇怪，就半进半出镜。
这个有好处，就是自己利益上、情感上没有任何内疚。
他们就认为，
“毛泽东走向巴黎公社精神的范畴了，毛泽东背叛了毛泽东的思想。”
所以这批人可以写大字报，都进了建立了八十年代初期的，就这批人搞出来的，这也没办法，就是任何地方的运动不可能贫困产生的。
对，这两个时代看起来虽然截然不同，但里面冲锋陷阵的这些人物其实几乎是同一批最核心的人群。
对，但是我为什么对毛泽东会一种非常奉饰技术的佩服，但是到了逐渐逐渐随了我年纪又大了，看问题复杂了，尤其和文革开始拉长距离了。
更就是不把文革作为自己的一个灾难了，就是因为那文革中十年自己太苦了，逐渐看出来就是所有的神秘领袖，毛泽东居然世界上没有一个人不甘心当个神秘领袖算。
神秘领袖最终他下面一代韦伯说鲁迪营营常规化，他们都算了，耶稣算了，摩罕默德算了，列宁算了，卡斯托龙算了，斯大林算了，我知道的都算了，毛泽东竟然不算。
这点呢，我还是对他真正的革命者精神，就是真正革命精神，但是他跌着头破血流，他把中国堵在他身上了。
这就为什么导致西方人到现在为止对他还是，好多人很崇拜他。
前面你提到你是后来写这个《如法国家》，从东周一致讨论过来，他最早的一个起点，可能就是当年70年代P0P孔。
对，这个能谈一谈吗？什么时候开始你突然想要把这个作为课题，写一本这样的专注？
就直接原因就是，我们是不是能够，因为西方最厉害的一个世纪以后，大家都认为重磅级的，我们能挑战他们。
就是我们是不是，你每个店叫
White Man Can't Jump
就是我们中国人是白人真正能动脑筋的问题了。
所以我当时就叫了Michael Mann、Tilly，他们认为就是二世纪后半夜最厉害的几个人，我挑战一下他们，提个新的理论。
那提个那么大规模新的社会变迁理论，那必须大大按理，那就是中国历史三千年历史座必须那么大的规模。
但是这里面有一个，就是这是马上的原因，政治带的民族之争写的第二本说的，就是存在说我也能，我们中国人也能搞理论，也能搞大东西。
但是呢，我的更长的原因，就是参加了批林批孔之后，特别读到宋朝。
宋朝党政特别多，那些党政就让后面前一会儿儒家，一会儿法家，那个苏轼当时叫两面派，反正乱七八糟，反正当时都对话得很清楚的。
对吧，司马光嘛，叫保守派，欧阳修美保守派。
但是看进去了就觉得不对劲了，没那么简单，他们私人关系有的还不错，好多东西就是当时自己说法。
但是就是看当时那些关系啊等等啊观念啊，肯定不是儒家法家，他们不能那么说的。
好多人身上就引爆点同时有儒和法，就是现实政治和道德政治两种的都有的。
对吧，你能说范仲淹是儒家法家，对吧，他是很儒的一个人，但是呢，他在西北打仗干什么，他也是很法的一个人。
这一来我就糊涂了，就是发觉中国肯定不能用儒法斗争来终结的。
第二呢，我们这个小组里面出了个人物，他比我小两岁，他爸爸是宁夏一个干部，他爸爸可能政治敏感影响了他。
然后呢，带领我们的学习的组长，是厂里的中共干部，而这个人还点背景的，他是勤奋的学生，他因为文学关系，被发配到宁夏来了，到了我们的宣传干事。
所以他想做件事情，他整天要我们写东西，要产生全国影响的东西，现在干起来更大野心，让我们能到梁校十一歌这类部写出东西来。
他又劳赖引到我们那么闲，那我们就因为看清楚了，我们就不肯写。
但这个人物跳下去了，跳下去之后呢，他后来写出文章开始能逐渐逐渐在宁夏日报发表了，后来甚至在人民日报上面也发表了。
后来他开始遍地有名、名气了，他写了一篇文章叫论积淀局长的一天。
《consecration 局长的一天》呢，是天津一个作家蒋子龙写的一本小说，都不能说写得特别好，因为里面每个人都只有革命情操、革命理想，在这个那么老干部也。
但是呢，这里面有吓得大鱼，那个十一天才拉车了，干的那个行动，反正我也忘了。
他从头的批判就把这个批判称实际上是一个反对文革的一篇文章。
所以里面有几句话说得特别恶劣，因为我们个人都是好朋友，但这几句话说了我们的小团队的有个叫马林另外一个人，他又把人家蒋子龙往火坑里推啊。
我比较善良，我觉得这样子写太可怕，但是呢，另一方面呢，我也觉得在政治赌博啊，那话说拉的什么车资本主义车。
说雨是代表着无产阶级的这个水，代表着什么什么，他就能做这种传统的谶风格语言。
但是呢，他还真有这个层面，他和我住一个宿舍的，好几个月没发表，他吓得有一天晚上又来找我。他把东西说：
“万一呢，我哪天让人家带走了，你给我父母说一声什么。”
我想你不就一篇文章投出去那么严重吗？因为他这个东西我觉得很糟糕，我们背后经常非议他这么写很糟糕，但尽管罗斯又是朋友嘛，我发觉他跟我就是像后世那么跟我说。
我才知道，哇，他心里还是点野心的。
但没多久就发表了，也就是斯林万元德士，是一篇发表人民报，还有什么求是也发表，就有红旗是不是也发表过，我忘了，反正是他一直报道大明然后直接进入武汉大学哲学系。
最后呢，他带来在武大变成三种人，因为这件事情好多年没让他考英，就生了什么，反正是个事情。
但是呢，当时就他这个表现让我感到拼铃屁股用作的可怕，就一个小小宁夏mid of nowhere，都比我小两岁的人某种政治投资可以做。
但我会考虑，至少有一点让我把阶级斗争作为历史动力，历史整个就是阶级斗争等等的。
这个我开始打送了，我在找别的解释方式找不到，完全没，直到看到金冠涛的超稳定结构这么说。
超稳定结构，虽然我马上觉得，他这么说起来很糟糕，而且我作为生物学家实际上他这个结构功能主义思想很不赞成。
但是呢，同时我很感谢他，他给我两个重要性：
你是因为读了那个才去教大，读了这个当然就很重要。
因为我总要觉得到底是什么东西比较认真，但当时整体上国内控制论、信息论和系统论是老三论，是非常整的。
所以那本书写出来之后，你后来有跟国内的学者做过类似的一些回应吗？
或者说过去这些年，你有对《如法国家》超稳定结构这块有一些新的思考吗？
我不会把它叫做超稳定结构。80年的讲超稳定结构，我是不知可否。
因为我总觉得我们自然科学角度把中国说成一个那么特殊，别的不是，总是觉得太peculiar、太ad hoc、太特殊了。
所以是不知可否，但是不知可否并不是完全赞成的。
到了西方，我读书一度多，实际上是除了西欧之外全世界都处于超稳定性，是欧洲不稳定，欧洲西罗马之后只是不稳定。
所以这是我不认可这种说法的。
国内那些商权，目前应该说没有太有利的，反而就是我后来在自家，我后来把它引进折大，今天叫利金。
他的批判的反而对我完全没什么对的，但是他学术基本更好，提了比如说里面提到的孔菲利，提到好多人的。
那些人就是我在里面的确不怎么提，所以他的里面认为我没提他们，我的这个。
后来这就为什么我不是后来写了一篇孔菲利的书评吧，他自博，我那里面孔菲利就是刚刚够个而已。
当然你写这本书肯定不会和孔菲利建立对话，倒是没有展开的。
比如说昨天我就很后悔，是我夫人跟着清华一批人去考察大同，考察印线，在考察几个事，他一下打电话给我说，哇，他看到了华延宗。
当时就是武则天为了把华延宗作为自己一个女帝的合法性，就拒绝入学了，把自己作为菩萨化身了，在整个这个然后的影响，龙蒙师库造像，影响好多事。
然后华延宗又传到日本，传到韩国，传到被廖国和西夏，就有点像佛教建国一样。
就武则天之后的影响，就华延宗的影响。
他说实际上，我当时听完很后悔，我说哎呀，我不懂。
因为像儒法国家我虽然把佛教给进来，我写了，但是很简单的很熟透的直接就讲魏肖文帝汉话什么的，就汉完了。
实际上，我也知道唐、武则天、崇佛什么的，但是呢，我一听他这话，我说哇，就是中国实际上到武则天一到西夏，怎么还很认真地想找非儒学作为和西夏之外，如果这样子我佛教那应该写一诈，不应该是写一节了。
可惜了，我说你这个东西早点给我说就好了。
还有一个，有的我觉得事后稍微有点后悔的，也是宗教上，像宋朝我就写民间宗教儒学上路国家了，反而中国的民间宗教更强大了。
对，这是我的民间宗教，但民间宗教全儒学化了，然后导致民间道教和佛教的下层也民间宗教化了。
但是我当时没区分新宗教运动和民间宗教，像白莲教啊、黄教当面是New Religious Movement，它是一次次新宗教运动，包括太平天国。
这是我是后悔的。
您刚提到这几个元素，就比如说像这种白莲教，包括弥勒教以来的这些，包括像这个太平天国、拜上历会这种宗教，过去我们一直把它当成这种地下社会来进行讨论，或者说这种反叛的势力。
但是你刚说的是新宗教。
对，这个还是我夫人，她的视角，她一直看见，因为别人还没脑，她就这是新兴宗教，中国新兴宗教很多。 这个摩门教，什么骨子里头一样的，就是太平天国。如果能够在中国待着一本证件，那今天就是新的摩门教，对吧，叫太平天国教。
对，太平天国跟摩门教是同时起来的，同时起来的。他这下就把我打开了，包括他跟我讲的，比如说，还是就是我的马克思语传统怎么说呢。
我和韦伯一样，我虽然写在里面，把异形态宗教好像是分到写在里面，韦伯说自己，我也一样。我的马克思语就是，虽然我对宗教意义上看得很重很重的，但是我对他的text本身的懂的程度不够。
我夫人后来，他再给我提点一些。他有个后面，他说：
“你这里面民间宗教实际上就是前轴型时代宗教，这我们一样，因为我们一般的传统叙事，前轴型时代在轴型时代宗教起来就慢慢完蛋了。”
他说不是那么为止，他完全不是的，所以他又真正懂了，这也是他的个人观点。
他就说日本的新动力神道教就是前轴型时代，中国明天宗教也是前轴型时代宗教。印度教是佛教起来了之后，造成对前轴型时代印度的明天宗教压力，印度明天宗教重新整合改造，变成印度教。他是这样子的。
大家给我讲，前轴型时代在不同的轴型时代，在以某种方式怎么走进轴型时代宗教。
在天主教那地方，就变神，变Saint，变Loco，一大堆神，一大堆Saint。
他给我讲了几点，我写完这本书，我越来越越来越理解到了，我对宗教的text理解不够，这是一个重大。
我是觉得，别的好像都没有，对，而且听起来这种无限的对于资料的掌控其实是无穷无尽的。
当你试图想去讨论一个横跨可能两三千年以上的历史的时候，他这些关于，就刚提到的这些细节的这些，作为一个个人学者，其实本身就是一个悖论。
但是是这样子的，一方面包括我夫人，她提这几点，也完全没能改变，包括她自己也承认，没能改变我的总体论点。
因为她说，她里面也学到很多东西，她认为我的总体理论，包括宗教都是对的。
但是作为学者自己来说，那么我定的卢学时间，定的就是中国的北方游牧半游牧部落，企图就是企图最后决定找卢学，以及决定在卢学这边，还想找别的作为疫情的合法性，那我也写的好多了，对吧。
这我觉得这第一。
那第二呢，就是这样子，因为我们社会学呢，历史学呢，它是认为，我把材料往死打，打出真理来。
但现在也知道，你材料再往死打，打出来就一种叙事，问题意识一变了，同样材料又能打出别的。
对吧，这就为什么我年轻时候训练学生，是按照唯物主义方式，基本功，基本功，基本功。
那我到学生，一到一定程度了，比如我的学生拿到长聘了，拿到什么时候，那我越来越清楚了。
我说你年轻，所谓唯物主义做学问，到现在要维性主义学生，改变视角能力。
当人家以为，这个毛巾烤干了，轰向你轰锤的烤焦了，当你拿在你的手上，你能下观音谱，能挤出东海的水，那学问才开始。
你视角改变，别人还没开始，但这个转性也是我自己个人的转性。
所以在这时候，如果那么一理解，就是话题大的意思，就变重要了。
但重要的问题有一点，硬伤怎么办？
这就为什么，我这本书写十几年，因为那本书用小包书，看了两个冬月，左转史记什么，然后一发就有个规律，东中战争、如法国家行政，就三个星期写完的，写的英文。
我就做个笔记，那笔记后来国内人把那笔记翻着作文，我就做了，一百多亿的英文笔记，就那么多说。
但是这三个月的功夫，写成一本书，把它硬伤补上，那就十几年。
然后有些硬伤不改变你的argument，有些硬伤是改变你的重要结论的。
那你这里硬伤，你肯定都补，然后软伤也一样。
你作为写历史，你哪儿都没搞清楚，那你也不行。
所以至少有一点，比如说，我这本书的最大的特色：
那我对文本也是提一手材料。
我的视角，什么和现在先请的大家没区别，包括从民国以来，像郭莫洛、顾街、刚所有先请，大家和我比不仅仅比我好。
你们有你们一套，我有我的一套，我看东西，你们看不出来。
我的东西比你们更有冲击力。
就是这时候就是说孩子对，尽量硬伤的少，尽量就是能影响主导的观点硬伤的更少。
软伤也尽量越少越好，也就这样子。
你这么说就是人家至少会觉得你是个真诚的学者。
这就为什么，我对那个谁，你看我对孔菲利的批判，那是很客气的。
那他硬伤软伤并不是太多，没什么，就是好学者，但是他好解读层面就出了大问题了。
好，请。
非常开心，今天是借着您这本社会与政治运动讲义 第三版的，重新在中国内地出版的这样的一个机会。
在北京，听赵老师讲了非常多的，其实我觉得是远远超出我意欲气之外的这些话题内容。
而且可以看得出来，赵老师的这种涉猎，以及你的这种个人经历和你的智学的经历，几乎就是无缝结合在一起。
随时随地，所有的话题里面，你都能够去回溯到自己的这些过去的个人经历也好，对吧，自己的这种阅读感悟，这些体会也好。
所以我也很期待将来在忽读回游里面能有更多的机会继续找到赵老师，我们来谈一谈一些就是关于学术也好，关于我们过去这国家几十年历史不一定是中国了。
我觉得关于这个过去，全世界现在人类的，我感觉最近这些年，也处在一个新的一个大分流的一个可能前夜。
至少很多人是这么觉得的，我觉得还有非常多的话题值得听赵老师跟我们一起来讲讲他的解读和想法。
好，今天感谢赵老师的时间，也感谢各位的收听，我们就下期再见，拜拜。
