The American saber-rattling against China has been increasing almost as fast as China’s own development in the past few years. China’s economic prosperity and international influence is undeniable yet American politicians continue to treat their rise as a threat to their global hegemony. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence is Megan Russell, a writer, academic and CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator.
Scheer is quick to point out the intergenerational dynamic between his own work on China as a fellow in the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s and Russell’s recent experience living in China and studying in Shanghai. Both witnessed and experienced the American perspective of China and how it has continued to undermine it. Scheer and Russell focus on her latest article, which calls out New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for his portrayal of China and how his deficient op-ed mirrors the broader perception of China in the United States. While many may think that China is an authoritarian country with people living under the heel of Xi Jinping, the actual material conditions of its population are often left out.
“Something [people] don’t talk about enough, in my opinion, is how China managed to eradicate extreme poverty. And that’s not just a minimum income level, it also means access to food, to clothes, healthcare, clean housing, free education. It means infrastructure, means functioning systems,” Russell says.
People also point to working conditions and the outsourcing of American jobs to China as a means of attacking them. To this, Russell explains, “All China has done is use the system in place to develop and try to provide opportunities to its incredibly vast population, while still maintaining its proto-socialist policies. It’s us that has exported the production of all our goods to make a few more dollars.”
In the end, the US stands to lose, not only in a trade war, but also in the climate aspect, since China has also made great strides towards combatting the climate crisis. Russell cites their plan of reaching carbon neutrality by 2060 and tells Scheer, “China has really undergone this internal green energy revolution, doing far more than any other country to combat climate change.”
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Robert Scheer
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where intelligence comes from our guests. I say this so, otherwise, it’s an act of egotism here. But I mean, it’s serious. I’m trying to get information. I’m not the CIA, but I’m trying to learn how the world operates in this old, great area that we don’t know about by design, or just our ignorance of other countries, or because the key issues, certainly in foreign policy, certainly regarding China, probably the most misunderstood country in the world, and we as Americans misunderstand almost—well, I’ll say all of them, because we really have the arrogance of American exceptionalism. But Megan Russell is 25 years old, a graduate of NYU and the London School of Economics, and she has made herself quite a China expert, by my estimation. And reason I’m mentioning all that is she’s sort of a bookend for me. I read this marvelous column she wrote for Counter[Punch], and it was about what Thomas Friedman, this great expert from the New York Times, on the world being flat and what the multinational economy is all about. And he’s sort of a guy whose claim to fame really is that he gets interview time, or one on one time, with the top business leaders all over the world, the top government people. So he’s supposed to be really in the know. And he wrote an article recently based on a one week in China. Now, he’s been all over the world many times, so it’s not the one week, though, but suddenly he had this discovery. This is a very different China than even he imagined, and very different China, certainly than most of the American media, the academy and everybody is discussing, and it all relates to what I think will be the pivotal issue of certainly the next four years, if not the next four decades, and that is US-China relationship, and particularly under Donald Trump. Now the second coming of Donald Trump, we have an affirmation of the idea of American exceptionalism in the extreme. We are the ones that the biggest certainly bully on the playground of the world. It’s our way or the highway, and yet he can make deals with everybody because he’s so smart and tough and believe so much, and that’s what’s going to make America great. So it’s the affirmation of American hegemony. He puts an isolationist cast on it, which might be helpful at least maybe we don’t have to send troops everywhere. We can do what George Washington advocated to have influenced by trade diplomacy, but not by invasion and so forth. That might be refreshing in the same way it was refreshing when Richard Nixon made the opening to China that no Democratic president was able to do. And actually this was when China was a communist country, and while it really had tail end of the Cultural Revolution. Now, the reason I’m going to let Megan talk now because I’ve been accused of going on too long with these introductions, but there’s a personal note here I see Megan Russell, never met her before, never talked to her before, just now, but as a bookend in my own life, and maybe it’s a useful book, and for anyone thinking about China, because I was almost her age, a little bit older. I was a fellow in the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I was a graduate student in economics, and I was specializing in China and struggling to learn the language, which I never have done in any significant way. But I certainly spent a lot of time there trying to get the tones and everything right. But also as a journalist, and I visited China, and at the time of the Cultural Revolution, which was a rare visit. I was able to go there. And I’ve been trying, thinking about writing about China all my life, ever since. And it wasn’t until I read Megan Russell’s speech and Counter[Punch], a very good publication, that I thought, wow, she really gets something. That I very few people get, and she gets it as a very good writer, but she also gets it in a very colloquial, accessible way that there’s so much bull in and I’m talking about the mainstream media. In fact, what was the headline of your piece? It’s not the New York Times…
Megan Russell
“I Can’t Believe It’s the New York Times and Not Daily Mail.”
Robert Scheer
Yeah, I mean, and she’s confronting Thomas Friedman, and she’s doing it in a way, okay, well, but she’s right, and she’s brilliant about it. So I’m going to turn it over to you and tell us what your piece was, all about, what your point was, and your own experience. You were there for a year in Shanghai. You could talk about how Taylor Swift is received in China, maybe differently than Thomas Freeman, which was central to his article. So take it from there.
Megan Russell
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here before I like talk about my article. I’d just like to give a brief background about what I do. So I coordinate our CODEPINK’s China is our enemy campaign, and the campaign was created in response to this rise in recent years of anti-China sentiments and the actions that our government has been taking to accelerate the new Cold War offensive against Beijing, and that includes spending billions of dollars militarizing Asia Pacific region, utilizing military economic coercion to push US interests outright labeling China an enemy, demonizing essentially anything China does, and all of which has led to a rise in Asian American hate around the country. So the campaign seeks to do two things. The first is to educate the public how their minds are being shaped for war. And we do this by teaching our audience about China, dismantling the lies being told by the media, by politicians, and then also informing on all the tax dollars being spent preparing for war with China. And the second thing that we try to do is redirect all that energy into a push for peace. And that’s why we emphasize the need for friendship and cooperation with China for working together on climate justice, nuclear disarmament and other extremely important issues today. So my article was in response to Thomas Friedman’s recent piece about his visit to China and his prognosis, so to speak, on US-China trade relations, which is really just a wordy piece of nothing, full of contradictions and misleading statements and an overall lack of understanding about China, I would say. And you know, it’s important to respond to the pieces that they’re throwing around in the New York Times and other places, because a vast majority of Americans don’t know a whole lot about China. And when you don’t know a whole lot about something, you tend to put a fair bit of credit in you know, these so called reputable news sources. And so Tom Friedman, he writes a column, and it’s mainly opinion pieces, but that doesn’t mean his opinion doesn’t need a correction. I think too many people take that as fact, anyhow. So, you know, he wrote this piece titled “How Taylor Swift and Elon Musk Can Solve US-China Trade Relations.” And it’s a tabloidy title, and I knew it when I clicked it. But I’m an optimistic person at heart. And I thought, you know, maybe it would have an original idea about something, but I was overall disappointed. There were quite a few things that I felt needed a correction. And so I worked my way through his piece and just attempted to show some of the many places I thought he went wrong. And I guess you know, for anyone who’s not familiar with Friedman, he’s a political commentator and columnist for the New York Times, and he’s gotten a lot of criticism over the years for writing about things that he himself has actually claimed he doesn’t know enough about, such as international trade and also for support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. You know, he’s not, he’s not very well loved by the antiwar community, and he’s invented a few theories over the years, none much better than the one in this article. I remember, specifically one, I think the Friedman doctrine, or something he called it, which argues that the social responsibility of businesses is to increase profits, and it owes no social responsibility to the public or society. And that’s, you know, criticizable, but it makes his thoughts in the article, I think, make more sense considering his previous views. And he’s also gotten a lot of criticism for his racism and dehumanizing narratives of the Middle East and support of Israel, even despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza. So there’s a whole lot…
Robert Scheer
I’m sorry I said I wouldn’t interrupt, but I want to stick to China, because the arrogance of Thomas Friedman is the arrogance of every major figure in American politics, and it’s a peculiar kind of arrogance, because China certainly has an incredibly complex and important history. We’re talking about a nation of 1.4 billion people. We’re talking about a nation that, you know, I just learned the other day, who can take any category, nickel, you know, lithium, anything, what they’re producing, what they’re doing. And the shock to Thomas Friedman, and he was at least honest enough to admit that he was shocked, because we’re trying to examine what is this tariff policy of Trump. And Trump, you know, in the first administration, while he didn’t start any actual war with China and actually visited in Korea, stepped over the line and actually talked about making peace and not wars. And actually, his campaign, I’m using a lot of actualies here, but you know, he campaigned that he wants to make deals. He’s the art of the deal, and that there’s a deal he said, said to be made with China. He said that quite recently and so forth. So if we can avoid war with China, we can avoid the end of life on this planet. There’s no way we can have war with China and still have a continuation of human existence. So we couldn’t be talking about a more important subject. So whether you like Thomas Friedman or you don’t, the article was interesting in that he admitted even he who was supposed to know, be plugged in everywhere, didn’t know how far China has gone now, economically, politically, what the BRICS alliance is about, all this stuff and you know, you took him to school on why didn’t you know it? Because you were there for a year in Shanghai. You know the language, you know a lot about the issues and what he missed. So tell us what Thomas Friedman missed, and what most of the American or I would say all of the mass media misses about China.
Megan Russell
Right. So I think one of the first things that I pulled apart was his analysis of Donald Trump. He said Donald Trump kind of triggered China into becoming this manufacturing machine. And, you know, it’s difficult to, I think, comprehensively, effectively, explain the way that Chinese people read and process American media. I mean, it’s different for everyone, of course, because, you know, China is vast, vast country of 1.4 billion people with different experiences and education levels and political views. But for those that are systematically online, you get this general consensus where a majority of people seem to be on a similar page. And I think my perspective on this also comes from my experience just talking with locals in China and trying to understand their thoughts. But from my experience, Chinese people are just, you know, regular people. Tend to view American media through a lens of sort of entertainment. It’s like this far away, strange, very different from their own systems and experiences. And because of this, they also tend to have a more positive view on Donald Trump, on Elon Musk and other leaders. You know, they find Trump amusing because he does act very strange, even for the US. His behavior is abnormal, and imagine, you know, comparing him to always put together leaders like Xi Jinping, right? This is why I say that they consider him this comical American enigma, not the reason why China became a manufacturing giant and green energy superpower. You know, China has been on the rise for decades, though it’s been a turbulent and complicated rise, as it would be for any country that went through, you know, such political and social upheaval after, you know, the fall of the last dynasty in 1911 but after the People’s Republic was established in ’49 you know, the main goal of the Communist Party was to improve people’s lives. And it’s important to note that, you know, the government is very systematic about its goals. It creates these comprehensive, you know, five year, 10 year plans for everything. It’s very Stalinist that way. And it’s historically been very, very good at accomplishing all these goals. You know, it’s not been smooth sailing. You know, even after the Communist Party gained control, there was famine, just as there was in India, there was a cultural revolution, which was this sociopolitical movement that rose in response to the desire to preserve like true socialism and not let it be tainted by corruption and capitalist ideals, which was really a divergence, historically between Chinese and Soviet past. You know, China learned a lot from Soviet Union and sought to correct where they went wrong. And so you have China, which has embarked on this new path, one without any precedent. And like I said, the main goal was to improve the lives of the people, to maintain internal stability and to develop as a nation. And in the past 50 or so years, you know, China has accomplished an incredible amount of progress, something they don’t talk about enough, in my opinion, is how China managed to eradicate extreme poverty. And that’s not just a minimum income level. It also means access to food, to clothes, health care, clean housing, free education, you know, means infrastructure, means functioning systems and and through the past half a century, you know, through market reforms, rural collectivization and other poverty alleviation programs, China was ultimately successful in its in its mission. And by 2021, I believe the last 100 million people were taken out of extreme poverty, which was nearly 900 million people total. And many UN officials call it the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history, which it is. That’s 1.4 billion people without extreme poverty. That’s about the entire continent of Africa or the US and Europe combined. You know, that’s a lot of people and so no, you know, it’s not Donald Trump that triggered China’s rise. It’s been rising for a long time, and our government’s been tracking it very thoroughly. In fact, it’s why they launched the pivot to Asia under the Obama administration in 2008 because China was growing more and more powerful, and that was starting to make the US global hegemony nervous, if you can imagine. And that was really the start of it all. This turn toward China, and this new narrative that China is some sort of existential threat to us, even though China has never threatened war or even invaded or intervened in a nation for 50 years, which is a sharp contrast to US history, which is very heavily involved in overseas conflicts. But, you know, China’s been focused on its internal growth and accomplishing its own goals. And non interventionism, of course, is one of its foundational policy pillars. And you know, before the pivot to Asia, our relationship with China was pretty good, but when the power of the Empire is threatened, you start to see this trickle into the media, this rise of a new enemy. I mean, we seen this so much through history. It’s amazing that it can still go over so many people’s heads, I think. And you know, one of the reasons the campaign started five, six years ago, was because Jodie [Evans], one of the founders of CODEPINK, reminded her of what happened with Iraq. You know, has there been a time in history when the US hasn’t had an enemy? No, and this isn’t a coincidence, there are far darker undercurrents at play. You know, the military industrial complex and the imperial institutions that keep the west on the throats of the Global South, so that was one, that was one of the things that I, you know, was felt was necessary to analyze a little bit. Another, of course, was the main theory put forth by Friedman. He called this concept the Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm. And essentially, what he argued was that instead of raising US tariffs against China, which would lead to sudden supply chain warfare, that we do a gradual rise in tariffs. So take a bit more time. And somehow, this would allow the US to, quote, buy time to lift up more Elon Musk’s, which he describes as homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff, so we can export more to the world and import less. And also this would allow China to have more time to let in more Taylor Swifts, which he called opportunities for the youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad. Yeah, I don’t know why Friedman thinks it would be a good idea to have more Elon Musk’s, I think one is quite enough. You know, I don’t see the creation of more egotistical billionaires to be particularly enlightening to American society. But I digress. I think one of the issues here is trade, right? And Friedman’s calculation that gradual tariffs are our best move. And, you know, I’m pretty firmly under the assumption that the general majority of Trump supporters lack a very comprehensive understanding of international trade. I mean, I think the majority of people do, and I can’t pretend that I’m any real expert on it, but I do think that it should be said, you know, starting supply chain warfare with China won’t just negatively affect China, it affects all of us too. You know, it leads to a lack of economic growth, frozen investments, lags in hiring. During Trump’s last presidency, his trade war led to widespread bankruptcy amongst farmers. We had the largest tax increase in years. Crazy.
Robert Scheer
I’m here to have you talk about China, not Trump. I do many shows on Trump, but I want to stick to the China thing. You’ve just hit the third rail on a number of points, but two in the main that I’d like to address of American politics. And that will sound naive or shocking to people, and China has made a very it’s an official policy of trying to obtain common prosperity, meaning that economic development, particularly the kind of rapid development we’ve seen in China, has to translate into improvement of life, of mass of people, the large mass of people. And I want to explain how difficult this task was, because I want to bring it back to the two of us being bookends on America’s understanding of China, and when I was studying China back in the early 1960s at University of California, the assumption of my professors and of the establishment was China could never develop. And the reason China would never be able to fully develop, they could do better, but would never develop, was they were overpopulated. A fellow named Ehrlich up near Stanford had written The Population Bomb. And that population itself, and this was said of India as well, another country that’s advancing towards a much more successful economy and dealing with their 1.4 billion people, or a little more now than than China. So population was seen as the big obstacle. The other thing was that China was lacking in certain obvious resources. The land had been overtilled, they could not sustain the population. They didn’t have any petroleum, which was the key to economic development, they would have to be expansionists to do something about that. And that was the conventional wisdom. And China indeed did struggle over these questions. That’s what the Cultural Revolution was. There was a lot of turmoil. There were the Great Leap Forward. There’s a lot of the post communist history, Xi, the leader of China now, his own father got caught up in the Cultural Revolution. Most of the people running China now, through their families can tell you the downside of these struggles, but I want to agree with you that I think China and India, by the way, I know it’s not just China and Brazil and and South Africa. I mean, what’s happening in the BRICS alliance all of these nations, they don’t agree. You know, the United Arab Emirates is now connected with BRICS. BRICS now represents the biggest economic bloc in the world, and certainly the biggest well population bloc. But what they have in common is a very important notion that most of us forget when we talk about human freedom and the responsibility governments. No government in the world now, in the modern world, where ordinary people everywhere in the world, through the internet, through travel, through everything can see what’s going on. There are no hicks anymore in that sense. And you cannot stay in power if you don’t deliver to your people. That’s just common prosperity. It doesn’t that mean you’re virtuous. It doesn’t mean you know your model is more rich. It’s just a real issue of survival of your system, and that’s what underlies the whole BRICS transformation. And what we see in China is the slogan common prosperity is not—we don’t have to argue about whether it’s done out of the goodness of their heart or their political system or their ideology. It’s a practical necessity that if you don’t deliver you’re not going to stay in power, you’re going to have chaos. You’re going to have—and the one thing that we can take out of Chinese history is a great fear of chaos. People suffered throughout Chinese history because of chaos, war, division, everything, including during the Great War, and but we could take it right into the Korean War, where we had conflict with China and so forth. I think most of the people in the American elite do not fully grasp this, and so this idea of common prosperity is critical. Now if you kept taking women off the farms and putting them into Apple plants and making low wages and driving some of them to suicide, that’s not common prosperity. So what is really challenging, and the reason we have conflict with China now, is they’re moving into high tech. They’re trying to do, look, take a company like Apple. Most of our Apple products are made in China, but the prosperity was not there from that. You know, Tesla has its biggest plant in China, you know, but that’s not the key to prosperity unless you pay those workers more. You’re not going to pay those workers more unless you have common prosperity. In other words, people in China can get the skills to get the better paying jobs, and you share it around. For my money, that’s the big issue right now in the world, which Thomas Friedman misses. He thinks we have the model for common prosperity. We don’t. We have the model, whatever we call it imperialism, whatever you want to call it hegemony. We have a model for leaving the rest of the world in the dust while we rip off their minerals, while we rip off their cheap labor, and so forth. That is, to my mind, the big issue, and China has put it front and center. So you now with Trump. Yes, we’re going to test the art of the deal. Okay? And yes, there is a deal to be made. There are many deals to be made. That’s what trade is all about. And it’s not about who’s using the capitalist market or who’s using free trade or lying about data. Or, you know, we either used to have all these stupid arguments, you can’t trust them to observe patents—what Elon Musk knows, is something that most many American political, even liberal and certainly the democratic don’t seem to know, is that the Chinese do have this and this is what Thomas Friedman suddenly discovered in this, Hey, this really is an economy that works on the highest level. This is not just a question of ripping off cheap labor, and this is what India is moving towards. Is what’s Brazil—It’s what the BRICS thing is about. How can we be on the in the A league, in the majors, you know, and successful. And since we’re so large, we should be the most successful, or among the most successful, right? That is the really key issue. What I loved about your article, you said it better than I have just said it. You know, you really do. So why don’t we address that the real threat from China is not that they will have prison labor or that they will conquer their neighbors. The real threat is that they may turn out to be have a more successful model of economic progress that embraces notions of common concern and delivering to ordinary people. You know, whether they work for Tesla or they work for the Chinese company BYD, or something, making these cars. But they have to, and I just want to throw a little footnote on there. I threw in the word transit before and right now, China announced that in China, 95% of their medium and large cities can give people access to high speed trains all over China. They can visit their relatives. They can visit where they came from, all over China. We don’t even have—we’re right now in the middle of this horrendous fire situation. We don’t even have the ability to put out these fires in Los Angeles, but we haven’t had the ability to have a high speed train between San Francisco and LA or anywhere else in America. Jerry Brown, our Governor and Gavin Newsom replacement, they all were committed to it. But we can’t get from San Francisco to LA in a way that the 95% of people in China can now get from one major city. You lived there for a year. So why don’t you tell us about this modern economy, and take as much time as you want, because you experience it, and that’s the significance of the Taylor Swift-Elon Musk, this is something Elon Musk and Taylor Swift both know about China because they have marketed there.
Megan Russell
Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, the concept of common prosperity is very important right now to the to the Chinese government, you know, now that they’ve completely, they’ve eradicated extreme poverty, you know, this is the next step, and it’ll be really interesting to see, you know, if, as long as war doesn’t get in the way that it’ll be interesting to see what, where that takes them In the next 10 or so years. But to your point, you know, I also want to, you know, mention the idea that China is stealing our jobs is far from accurate. You know, it’s our system, right? Our capitalist system is centered on increasing its own profit margin, on milking every last possible penny, and to do that, our company. Have been exporting the manufacture of goods to countries with cheap, exploitable labor. Is that the fault of China are the executives in charge, you know, and and when it comes to paying for goods in the US, where living is almost unaffordable at this point, the vast majority of consumers would rather buy a cheap product made abroad than a more expensive one made in the US. You know, so not to mention Trump again, but he does call this, you know, the greatest theft in the history of the world, the US trade deficit with China. But really, all China has done is is use the system in place to develop and try to provide opportunities to its incredibly vast population, while, you know, still maintaining its proto socialist policies, it’s us that has exported the production of all our goods to make a few more dollars. But here’s a hypocrisy, right? The third world isn’t allowed to develop, not if it is threatening to the US Empire, and if it does, the US will conduct economic warfare against it, and then blame it for all the problems in the world, like global warming, instead of trying to work together to solve it. You know when you measure China’s CO2 emissions per capita, it falls short of many other countries. You know, the US actually has far greater emissions per capita, as well as other countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, Poland, you know, and in these countries don’t produce a vast majority of the world’s goods. And China is also a new industrial power. You know, the total amount of CO2 emitted over the last few decades is far, far less than what the US has produced since the industrial revolution. It was only recent years that China saw this growth in emissions, but since then, and I think this is a really significant point to make, since then, it’s China has really undergone this internal green energy revolution, doing far more than any other country to combat climate change. You know, they plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 and their proposed carbon peak was no later than 2030 but recent data points out that this peak has already come, and they’re on it’s on the decline now, so they’re early to that goal. And I just got back from China a month ago, and I was really astounded to see that in the past six years, the level of air pollution had declined so much. You know, Beijing’s air quality was actually better than DC’s when I checked and when I was there six years ago, I remember it being a lot worse. So they’ve, you know, they’ve done so much. They’ve implemented these enormous domestic solar projects, built these massive wind and solar farms in the desert regions, and the mass production of of the solar materials has made it a lot more affordable for other countries as well to buy, and cheaper than, I think, a lot of non renewable energy products now. And so what do we do, right, tariffs? Predictably, they don’t want China to have dominion over anything, even if it’s helping the world and in China, now, half the vehicles on the road are electric. You can buy a cute EV for under 10,000 USD, I think, although I talked to one girl who she gave me a ride in her electric vehicle, and she said it cost her something like 6000 US dollars. And I asked her how expensive it was to recharge. And she was like, so cheap. I would love to be able to purchase one of those, but we have 100% tariffs on them. It’s crazy. And all the experts, you know, they point out that this is only going to hurt our fight against climate change and and make it harder to reach carbon neutrality in the end. So you know, the world will continue to heat up, and we’ll keep seeing these terrible hurricanes in the south and devastating wildfires in the West. And who is winning here? It’s not us, it’s not China, it’s not the people. It’s the only ones with any thing to gain from these terrible policies are car manufacturers and the weapons companies and the greedy corporations and the politicians that profit off of them.
Robert Scheer
So tell us about China, because the average person listening to this is going to think, Well, wait a minute, but they’re all enslaved, and they’re all have no freedom, and the reality is that China has embraced the consumer society. The odd thing is, we in the West have defined freedom largely in terms of what we used to call consumer sovereignty. If you got the bucks, you can buy the the American dream, you can buy the French dream, you can travel, you can live. You can have your freedom. Basically, Americans don’t define freedom as the ability to be Tom Paine and write the great documents that changed history. We jail or imprison our current Tom Paine’s like a Julian Assange. But the reality is, most Americans think, what can I travel where I want? Can I buy what I want? And your point about Taylor Swift, you know, Thomas Friedman had this arrogance well, but they should have people who could write their own music or do this. And I just want to say, for people who want to know about China, I would recommend it’s expensive but, at least trying to find a way to read the South China Morning Post, which I did for two hours this morning when I woke up at two o’clock. And this is owned by Jack Ma, you know, who started Alibaba, one of the biggest privately owned companies in China, right and now, by the way, he’s now retired, so he’s now doing rural school teaching. He started as a rural school teacher or so. I don’t want to glorify Alibaba or anything, but the fact of the matter is, China has a vibrant sense of consumer sovereignty in terms of selling cars or records or music or anything else. That’s what I thought was really quite so interesting about your article, which, by the way, we posted on ScheerPost and but people could read it there or at CounterPunch, I want to give them credit for this. But the fact is, by the standard of say, most of my students that I meet at USC or someplace, including many who come from China, when they define freedom, it’s by being able to go to a Taylor Swift concert and afford it, or buy the record, or so forth. So tell us about how you experience daily life in China.
Megan Russell
Yeah, you know, a lot of times the first thing people ask me when they hear that I lived in China was that was “Was it scary?” Did I feel threatened and watched? Someone actually just asked me that yesterday, and it’s very real to them, though it always sounds a little silly to me, because I actually felt very safe in China more than I felt in most other countries, I would say, maybe all of them. And that’s, you know, my honest answer. You know, crime rates are very low in China. I never had any safety issues. I lived there a year. I traveled extensively by myself to many provinces on all sides of the country. I never felt unsafe. I never worried about pickpockets. I never worried about being robbed. I never felt the discomfort of being a woman alone. You know, everyone has a different experience, but this was my experience, And I did have, like, an interesting conversation when I was in China a month ago with a guy who was studying to be a lawyer, and he’d said that he had lived in Michigan, he went to university, and I think it was Michigan, I don’t quite remember, but he told me that he didn’t feel safe to go outside at night because of crime, and so he went back to China, where he felt like he had more freedom, more freedom of movement, where he felt safe to walk around at night. So that was, I think, an interesting take on, you know, the concept of freedom that I hadn’t thought about myself before. But, you know, back to the Friedman article. You know, I was very bewildered about his claim that China lacks any sort of art and entertainment. I mean, I’m sure you must know that China has 5,000 long years of art and poetry and music and culture, and they don’t need to import American entertainment to fill some sort of consumers void. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. I was sitting in a park in Chongqing just last month listening to this older man play renditions of ancient Chinese songs on his erhu, which is a traditional Chinese violin. It’s one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. And he was playing renditions of other songs, like the Titanic theme song as well. And at the same time, you know, a group of 20 to 30 older folks were dancing together. And this is a constant beautiful phenomenon all over China. I wish I could bring it to the West, but I wouldn’t know how to try. It’s that, you know, everywhere you go in China, there are people dancing in the parks and the squares and the streets where there’s space, there is dancing. They love to dance, especially the older generations. And I don’t know for sure, but I think it could be, you know, remnant of the Cultural Revolution when art and dancing was particularly important, but I imagine it’s always been important. So I can’t say for certain only that it’s a phenomenon that I’ve only experienced to that degree in China. But, you know, so Friedman, he says they lack art and entertainment. Think he must have missed the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. You know, I challenge him to go to a rock concert in China, or an indie performance or pop concert. You know, they have every genre. They have an abundance of music and performers and artists. And it’s crazy that I think you even need to refute that. But he makes the claim also, you know, that they lack of music because they’re afraid to write song lyrics that could get them arrested. And I’m, you know, I’m quite sure nobody has written a song about Xi Jinping. Actually, there is one that I know of called Xi Dada, which translates to daddy Xi. It’s exactly what you think. But I think she loves it as much as the people do, um, you know. But regardless, people sing about love and heartbreak and and joy and grief, and there’s nothing that is holding them back from that. I think, you know, he was there for, I don’t remember, like, a week, right? But what just one visit to China is all you need to discover that. So I really wonder what went on during his visit, or if he did anything local. You know, I just, I went to the coolest shopping complex in Chengdu, and this was like nothing I’ve ever seen. All of the storefronts were these little fashion startups, and the city opened this space for these smaller business owners to be able to afford these small storefronts so that they could be accessible to the general public. And each store was so cool, and they had entirely different styles, and it was much better than, you know, the shopping plaza is full of H&M’s and Forever 21’s, if those still exists. And then, addition to that, you know, there, if I need to respond to the claim that they also lack humanities majors, they don’t lack that at all. They have philosophy and sociology and linguistics and history, quite a lot of history. So that point was just dead wrong. There’s, you know, no better way to say it. So I don’t know where in his mind it came from, but it didn’t come from, you know, any genuine experience I think that he had in China.
Robert Scheer
Well the mistake that Friedman makes, first of all, he’s an extremely wealthy person. I don’t know part it comes from his wife had some money, but also he’s well paid for his activities and most of us who write about it, you know, I make a good living. I’m not going to deny that, and we have a security and we have ability to travel and so forth. Everybody forgets the freedom question is not we’ve reduced it to some simple notion, which really misses the point of most human experience. Because you can have the theoretical right to do all sorts of things, but if you don’t have the money. Yes, you have the right to travel in this country, but if you don’t have the money for the airplane ticket or something, or the leisure time, what have you. And it seems to me, in all our discussion of freedom, we’ve denied that there are different paths. What BRICS, and I keep bringing it back to a this alliance, and it’s an incredible alliance. If you think of the diversity, what does the UAE have in common with Brazil, with India? You know, go down the list, South Africa. They’re all very different places, and they’re following different drum beats, you know? I mean, after all, here’s China and India that have a tremendous rivalry, yet they’re in this alliance. And the thing that ties it together is, is pluralism. I mean, the right of people to find their own way, their own way. And the amazing thing is that we so I would apply this again to all of these different countries. That’s what they’re demanding in their fair trade ideas and their travel and thing. And I don’t think we should lose sight of this. It’s not a question of celebrating China’s approach, or India’s or the UAE or Brazil South Africa, but accepting that the US does not have the secret formula that everyone should follow, because when they’ve tried to follow it, it hasn’t worked out so well for them, and that means being respectful of their tradition, their history, their needs, their people and but there is one common thing that I think we should be alert to, and that is the right of people to control, not only their thoughts and ideas and through a marketplace. Okay, there are limits to the marketplace, but really there are economic heft, and that their concern. And I want to sort of take a little time to go into this, because it’s always overlooked by human rights folks, people who care about human rights, and that has to do with the right to organize a union, the right to demand better wages, the right to demand better working conditions. And the irony is, we celebrate Apple’s success in China and we celebrate Elon Musk’s success in China. After all, as I said, half of Teslas are made in China now. But the fact is that the workers and an Apple plant, Foxconn plant or a Tesla plant do not have the rights that workers should have, and when they move to it, these very same capitalists look the other way. No, we don’t want that, I see. So the real issue. It’s odd to me, when everybody talks about human rights in China, they bring up the right of, say, Muslims in a specific province. That high irony. When we’ve made a war on Muslims in the rest of the world, but now we’re going to demand, and it’s legitimate, people should have the freedom and so forth. I won’t to go into the details of that particular one. But you rarely hear anybody talking about what are the rights of workers in American run plants, let alone Chinese workers to organize to demand better wages and so forth. And it seems to me, if they’re going to have common prosperity in China, they have to go that route, that people should not be just people, because women have small fingers assembling iPhones. Yet, if you ever ask anybody I’m using right now a computer laptop that was made in China as well, most people are and so forth. Never do we ask the question, what are the rights of those workers? Not to go to a Taylor Swift content that would require some money, less money to buy one of her albums, but to buy anything? What is their right to get more pay? What is their right to withhold their labor? So since you are working with a progressive organization, CODEPINK, I want to put it to you very directly, what is China doing about that? And why is there so little concern among American who claim to be progressive about the working conditions in China?
Megan Russell
Yeah, well, I think that’s a good point. You know, I have so many friends who have worked part-time hourly jobs with super low wages here in the United States, and they’ve been, you know, exploited and and, you know, kept for longer than they’re supposed to be, and not clocked in their hours. I mean, it’s an issue. It’s an issue here, it’s an issue everywhere. And it’s, it’s something that needs to be solved. And, you know, I think it goes so much deeper than that, too, you know, like another issue I took was criticizing the non consumption, you know, seeming to infer that some lack of consumption is an indicator that society is unhealthy, rather than one of better health, you know. And it’s not a surprising conclusion coming from someone enamored with capitalism and exploitative but it’s still misguided, right? We first, we have to agree that buying stuff is good or fulfilling, and I think most can agree that it’s a temporary fix to a much deeper issue, one that is society wide, right, a lack that needs to be filled with material gain, because it doesn’t seem possible to fill in any other way. And you know, our society has a loneliness problem. We have a lack of community and an over emphasis on hyper individualism. We’re overworked, underpaid, trapped in a system that seems to prioritize the wrong things, and we buy, buy, buy more and more to fill the gap it leaves in our souls, rather than look at the problem head on. And then we cycle through these things that don’t really provide us with any lasting contentment, and then it all goes to the landfills and into the ocean and and why do we treasure that? Why, you know, what if we went dancing in people’s squares rather than shopping for clothes we only wear once? Now? Why are we all addicted to many dopamine hits from social media like, what are we missing? But I that was, you know, another one.
Robert Scheer
I’m stressing the countervailing power of individuals against any government or economic system, and in the West, we translate that through consumption. You can go watch what you want, and therefore people will produce the movies you so forth. And but in and this has been an issue in every society, where’s the pushback? What can these women taken off the farms, lured to go work for Apple when they don’t find good working conditions at Foxconn, when and if they don’t do it through a union. And you know, yes in China, they have their form of elections and their form of responsibility, but at what point do we get to assert individual rights as a worker or as a human being, as a parent, a family and so forth? And it seems to me, this is the big question that’s been avoided at this stage of human history. And it’s true for every society. It’s true in Brazil, you compete between left right now in Germany, you may have a right wing government like Trump that he likes, and maybe they’ll be anti union. And so the social democracy that we’ve had in Europe is being threatened. Now. Do workers have rights? Can they withhold their labor? It’s an international problem, and I’m only asking you because you are working with an organization now in this initiative where they are very committed to people being able to challenge power. And you know, and to what degree I mean, it seems to me a very big issue for China, for India or anywhere else, development is not the only thing economic progress in terms of large aggregate numbers, of how much stuff we produce, but the rights of people we’re facing it. I teach at the University of Southern California, where we have 6,000 students from China, they can witness the struggle of some of our many of our faculty, particularly untenured faculty, to try to have a union. So here they are in the United States, and you’re right, our neighborhood is quite scary, if you listen to the police reports of crime and everything else, but they will witness right now part of their faculty, even at our vaunted film school, they’ve actually organized already and have a union, you know, whether even you know, workers can push back and at a university or in a factory or anywhere else. And I think that’s going to be a big test for China. It’ll be obviously a big test in every other country. It’s a big test even in Germany right now, to what degree do workers have the right to push back? So I’d like you to maybe we could just take them. We’re going to end this with an hour. Maybe you could take the next eight minutes to address this question.
Megan Russell
Yeah. I you know. I also think it’s important to note that the success of China is, you know, very triggering to this idea of Western exceptionalism. You know that any form of socialism could actually improve the lives of the people, could actually obtain any measure of success. And this exceptional exceptionalism is based on ideals, right on this imagined perfection of free markets and democracy, yes, but also on colonial racist doctrines. And that’s really, you know, at the root of it, a lot of this negativity as well. Unfortunately, though, it’s, you know, often disguised or dressed up like something else. It’s at the root of it, a dehumanization of China and Chinese people that they are worth less, that they aren’t deserving of of jobs or opportunities or of success. And I think this manifests itself very easily into a global system that is, you know, inherently based on a division of humanity that we have been forced to accept as normal and and that doesn’t just go for China, of course, but the entire Global South. China, you know, it actually defines itself as a member of the global south because of its shared experiences with Western imperialism and the very real battle to, you know, shirk off the negative influences of Western expansionism and attempt to find its footing in the world after years and years of foreign intervention, and it’s been one of the most successful cases, being the only country to go from low to high on the UN Human Development Index since the program was created. But so, you know, China’s rise was a real threat to US interests. And how does us respond to threats? Well, you know, historically, it’s had a very real overreliance on militarization and interventionism, operating on this very anachronistic cold war mentality. And generally, you know, in order to pursue these past of course, you know, we need to manufacture consent for militarization, for war, because it’s far easier with public support, and it helps maintain internal stability here as well. And this is why you’ve seen, you know, this steady rise of anti-China messaging and and fear mongering. You know, just last fall, the House passed a bill to fund $1.6 billion to anti-China propaganda around the world. You know, that’s $1.6 billion of going to information warfare. Because, you know, in order to pursue this agenda, you need to convince the rest of the world that, or at least the United States, that China is a threat and and many people aren’t, you know, convinced enough. And also, along with that, you know, there was a whole China week where they passed 25 anti China bills, including the propaganda Bill, you know, all with the end goal of countering the influence of the Communist Party of China. And another bill, actually, they recently passed, was set to revive the China initiative, because
Robert Scheer
We’re going to run out of time. I am not the US Congress. I’m not a China beta. I respect very much their achievements. Is, I’m talking about a fundamental aspect of the human experience. Power corrupts in every society, whether you call it communist, socialist, capitalist, religious, theocracy, the Jewish state of Israel, it doesn’t matter. You’ve seized power. You have power. The question is, how do you hold power accountable? Now China one mechanism. They have a very large membership in their communist party. Yes, they have all kinds of what I’m saying though, that at the end of the day, the fundamental thing is, somebody’s working at a factory, and you can coerce people, not necessarily, with police force. They need the money they have to work at Amazon. You know, Elon Musk was against unionization in California. He’s against good working conditions, so he moves to Texas from California. You know, this is an issue in Germany right now, you have a right wing party that will cut back the power of trade unions to work. It’s a worldwide issue, and it seems to me, at the end of the day, if the ordinary farmer, worker, consumer, citizen, whatever, does not have an ability to push back and and challenge you, don’t have power corrupts absolute. Power corrupts absolutely. It’s the only profound wisdom that comes out of the American Revolution, not that it didn’t exist before, but the people you know to get the ordinary people that were living here in the colonies and everything to go along with that constitution. You had to have our Bill of Rights to put the assurance that you could push back. It gets violated all the time. The role of money is dominant, but it’s a universal question, and so I’m asking about China now, very specifically. When they talk about common prosperity, what if the commoners don’t feel prosperous, or don’t feel it’s working? It happened in the pandemic pushback now in social media in China, because I had a student, a graduate student, who did her dissertation on social media, and there was a vigorous debate about the delivery of health care, the handling of these issues of medicine and so forth. But we only have I’ll go even longer if you want to spend more time on it, but I would like to know to what degree and to what mechanism can people push back in China. This is not the way. By way of saying we have the mechanism we don’t. Or if Donald Trump would not be president, this is kind of a full populism. What I am asking is that in China, which does seem quite enlightened in many ways, about the environment about, you know, all sorts of things. What I’m asking is, you know, where’s the pushback? You’re in an organization that’s pushing back very vigorously in America, CODEPINK, I respect the heck out of that group, Medea [Benjamin] and Jodie and all the other people there. They’ve challenged Congress. They challenged. So I’m asking you, somebody working with that group, where’s that going to come from, within China or Brazil or any other place?
Megan Russell
Yeah. I mean, China has its own very unique political system, very complicated. But, you know, they have elections. People are, I think, in my opinion, very enlightened. They have conversations, lots of conversations amongst themselves. I mean, I think in an American media there’s, there’s perception that people don’t have any rights, or the ability to, you know, try to change their situation. But that, from my experience, is not true. I think, you know, actually, some people argue that the political system in China is, like, more democratic than the US. I guess I don’t. I’m not sure how to to weigh the concept of democracy, especially considering that in here, in the US, even it’s so it’s so flawed a concept, right? But, you know, it’s people, they have their own methods and their own systems. You know, I think one interesting example of a policy that I saw or that I read about that was implemented in the past 10 years during their poverty alleviation reforms, was in order to take, like some of these smaller villages, out of poverty, they send these cadres to the villages to sort of oversee a way for the village to make its own decisions. And the way they did that was just voting amongst the villagers. Oh, who, who needs the most assistance in our village from the government, and they would, you know, talk amongst themselves and make that decision amongst themselves like there is a very real amount of, you know, democratic freedom and discussion amongst the people that I think people don’t, they don’t really know about or really understand, and it is a very complicated process, the way that it all works, but I don’t think—this perception in the American media that Chinese people are completely controlled and they have no freedom is very wrong, and it’s and it’s just part of the of the media narrative that you know trickles into this push, this push for war, and it’s really important not to let yourself be weaponized by that.
Robert Scheer
But you’re just preaching to the choir here. I’ve spent my whole life challenging this. On the other hand, I witnessed the Cultural Revolution. And the Cultural Revolution, which had the support of Mao Tse Tung himself, suggested that anytime you have a bureaucracy, and Mao witnessed what had happened in the Soviet Union, right? He was even victimized by it. The Sino-Soviet dispute has a lot to do with China’s rejection the Chinese Communist rejection of the Soviet model as coercive. The reason for the Cultural Revolution was to challenge bureaucracy, to challenge entrenched power. It was very much misunderstood by the American media. Yes, it was disruptive, yes, innocent people got hurt, but the impulse was very similar to what Tom Paine was talking about when challenged the people with the Whigs who gave us the constitution that the mass of people have to have ways of registering their discontent with reality and how it’s working now in the United States, that’s why Trump is President right now, because a lot of ordinary Americans, they’re not crazy, they’re dissatisfied, and it’s not working for them, And they’re saying so, and we’ve seen this throughout the world. You can have the most wonderfully designed system, but if you don’t have the safety valve of free expression to act and free action, which CODEPINK exemplifies, challenging power. Here they picketed Nancy Pelosi house in San Francisco because she’s betraying the interests of the American people. In the view of CODEPINK, there has to be the safety valve of human freedom anywhere, whether it’s Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa, anywhere, people have got to and I think we saw that recently, and we see, by the way, the government responding, to some degree, people holding up blank pieces of paper during the pandemic, complaining about over regulation during the pandemic, and so forth. And on social media, I’m not conversant with it because, as opposed to you, my Mandarin is now non existent. Not that it was ever anything, you know, I did study it, but the fact is, according to the students that I’ve seen who’ve written doctoral dissertations on it, there is a lively, much livelier social media than we think, and you’re absolutely right to call attention to this dangerous caricature of what China is. I applaud you for that. That’s why I wanted to do this podcast. But I want you now, you know you went to the London School of Economics right to get your advanced degree. I want you to, you know, let’s take some time and think outside the box a little bit. China has to face this issue, and they know it even on the highest level, because after and see the leader of China knows it, because its own father got attacked during the Cultural Revolution. So they’re very well aware of it. And I would like to know to what extent you saw evidence of people pushing back, and how do they push back?
Megan Russell
Yeah, I don’t want to cut this conversation short, but I do need to hop off the call soon, just it’s been just 2:30.
Robert Scheer
Okay, so this will be the last question, but really, please try as much time as you have to answer it. As you know, I appreciate you taking all this time.
Megan Russell
Sure. I mean, yeah, like you said, China has a very lively social media um, there’s [inaudible], which is a really fun one. It means Little Red Book, like Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, but it’s a social media app. It’s very similar to tick tock. They also have the Dalian, which is also very similar to tick off tick tock and Instagram. Um, but, you know, people post lots of stuff on social media, all kinds of stuff. Very similar to. The US. I can’t pretend there isn’t a degree of censorship. There certainly is a degree of censorship in China. But you know, when you go there, and you surround yourself with locals, and you start having conversations with people, you know, they’re very open about what they feel, what they think, about the government. You know, the people, they don’t just not talk about things. It’s not like they’re censored from their thoughts and their opinions and their ideals. You know, it’s very similar to, you go to people in the US, people talk, they sit down and talk about politics. I’ve had lots of conversations in China, very similarly, with different, different opinions, some people that are happy with some things, not happy with other things. I think that’s, you know, one of the most important parts of just being able to talk about it amongst yourselves with people, to talk about your opinions and what you think, and to share that with other people.
Robert Scheer
Well, so I look, I want to conclude this, and I think the important thing is, I certainly feel, and I think many people in the United States now that was at least, you know, almost half the country is very concerned about Donald Trump being President, as was the other half of the country when Joe Biden’s president. So we don’t have the answers here. We also know the role of money and power. You know, in our elections and our processes left a lot of people dissatisfied, and we see it in Western Europe. That’s why we have the rise of the right but I think for the rest of the world, when they look for models, and then we’re taking you and I are both in agreement on taking China very seriously as a model, as an alternative model of how maybe society should be run, we have to build in the pressure cooker, escape valve. How do people register that? And because we’ve seen it. We saw it the collapse. So Mao was right. The Soviet Union was a failure, and that’s why we had the end of communism. And clearly, a lot of what drives the current Chinese Communist Party is to avoid the dissatisfaction and the failure to address real problems in the Soviet Union. So clearly this notion of common prosperity is a way of saying, Look, that’s what we began this discussion with anyone in the world now, whether they’re in Germany, whether they’re in Saudi Arabia, anywhere in the world, knows that with modern communication, everybody knows what’s going on. They could see what’s going on, and if they’re not being satisfied, they will show it, and it will lead to the overthrow the end of regimes, I think that is a very important check on what any government is doing, including the Chinese government. They know they can have color revolutions, whether they’re manufactured by the United States or but they also to what degree they’re responding to real concerns about individual freedom. So I you’ve been very generous with your time, and I want to thank you for your insights and so forth. But unless you want to add something now, I think this is a good point on which to wrap it up. Do you want to add? Have the last word?
Megan Russell
Yeah, just thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk with you, and I guess if anybody wants to learn more about the campaign and what we’re doing, you can learn more at our CODEPINK.org/china and just check out some of our articles and our past webinars on the subject.
Robert Scheer
What do they sign on for? We’ll go try to post this, but tell us how they get more.
Megan Russell
So you can just send me an email. It’s [email protected] or you can look at our campaign website, CODEPINK.org/china and check out some of the past work that we’ve been doing, and keep up to date with any of the events that we have in the future. And we have lots of actions you can participate in, and meetings that can now you can join to learn more about China and the work that we’re doing,
Robert Scheer
Great, because this is the discussion, as I said before, we better have, and we better have with some urgency, because if we treat China as some kind of dangerous stereotype, it’s really going to be the end of humanity. Because China can push back. They actually pushed back pretty effectively in the Korean War, and that’s long before they had their own jet planes or anything. So this is a conversation that has to take place. I want to, as I began, applaud you, first of all for being a terrific writer and providing what I think is really a rare insight into what’s going on with China on the part of someone in the American media. So my hat’s off to you that respect. I also want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the independent NPR station in Santa Monica, for hosting these shows, for posting them. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, for suggesting our guests and for pushing this show and putting it together. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, Max Jones, who does the video production, which reaches people on our YouTube channel, and I want to thank the JKW Foundation, the memory of a very fiercely independent journalist, thinker, Jean Stein, we mentioned the Middle East, who very effectively wrote and talked about the Middle East, but also generally about the world situation, for giving us some support and for Integrity Media, based in Chicago, Len Goodman, a great lawyer there for also giving us some support. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
