State of Asia
The STATE OF ASIA podcast brings you exclusive, engaging conversations with leading minds on issues that shape Asia and affect us all. AND: bonus episodes with insights straight from some of the many events organised by Asia Society Switzerland.
State of Asia
How We Talk About China, with Kaiser Kuo
Kaiser Kuo, host of the long-running Sinica podcast, joins us in Zurich to discuss the evolving narrative on China, and why the West is so often 'stunned' by Chinese breakthroughs in electric vehicles, green technology, or, most recently: AI, with DeepSeek.
We explore the reasons behind the challenges of reporting on China, the importance of strategic empathy, and the shifting dynamics of global influence, particularly in relation to American exceptionalism.
Recommendations mentioned at the end of the episode:
- Chartbook, by Adam Tooze
- Pekingnology and The East is Read, by Zichen Wang
- Interconnected, by Kevin Xu
- Baiguan, by Robert Wu
- Chinese Cooking Demystified
- Playground, by Richard Powers
- Dal recipe
Stay up-to-date on all events and activities at Asia Society Switzerland: subscribe to the newsletter and support our work by becoming a member.
-
STATE OF ASIA is a podcast from Asia Society Switzerland.
Season 8, episode 5 - Published: February 4, 2025
Hosts: Nico Luchsinger and Remko Tanis, Asia Society Switzerland
Editor: Remko Tanis, Programs and Editorial Manager, Asia Society Switzerland
00:00:03 Remko Tanis
From Asia society Switzerland, this is state of Asia.
00:00:07 Remko Tanis
I'm Remko Tanis.
00:00:10 Remko Tanis
One with even the slightest interest in China, to name one China focused podcast, and their answer is very, very likely going to be Seneca, our guest today on this podcast, Seneca cofounder and host Kaiser Cool has been talking about China from any number of angles almost uninterrupted for.
00:00:27 Remko Tanis
Years now on his show churning out weekly.
00:00:30
I.
00:00:30 Remko Tanis
That cover politics, economics, culture, humanities, tech.
00:00:34 Remko Tanis
Name it informed by his decades of living and working in China, and having built a wide, wide network of people ranging from prominent economists to his words chain, smoking, drinking, rock, musicians. If it's happening in China and what isn't happening in China.
00:00:49 Remko Tanis
Kaiser has got it covered with Seneca.
00:00:50
I.
00:00:51 Remko Tanis
And he's taken the conversation to go beyond the news of the day, searching for an answer to the question how do people in Europe and the US actually talk about China?
00:01:00 Remko Tanis
After attending the World Economic Forum in Davos late last month, Kies are swung by the Asia Society Switzerland offices in Zurich when my colleague Nicola and I sat down with him for a chat.
00:01:10
The.
00:01:10 Remko Tanis
How's it all very welcome to the state.
00:01:12 Remko Tanis
Asia podcast.
00:01:13 Kaiser Kuo
Thank you Remko. Thanks Nico.
00:01:14 Remko Tanis
Great to have you here in Zurich this.
00:01:16 Remko Tanis
We were chatting and you said, well, I'm releasing a narrative shift on things regarding China and.
00:01:23 Remko Tanis
You're here just after the news on deep seed broke and how it.
00:01:26 Remko Tanis
Is according to a lot of headlines, stunning Western AI companies, and I thought we've seen kind of the similar thing with the developments in the EV industry in China.
00:01:36 Remko Tanis
The renewables the move not too long ago from people fearing tick Tock ban in the US go into retail.
00:01:43 Remko Tanis
Always in Western sources, Western news media, the West is stunned by what China has accomplished.
00:01:50 Remko Tanis
Now, with deep sea you call that a narrative shift.
00:01:52 Remko Tanis
Do you mean by that?
00:01:54 Kaiser Kuo
Well, I'm not 100% sure I would call it yet.
00:01:57 Kaiser Kuo
Narrative shift, but I feel the stirrings of it for sure.
00:02:00 Kaiser Kuo
And it's it's fascinating to watch as it's taking place right for our eyes and and watching people talking about it.
00:02:07 Kaiser Kuo
So it's something I'm going to be, you know, keeping a very close eye on. I actually put out a very informal Twitter poll asking people whether, you know, what we are witnessing right now, as you say, because of the sort of TikTok refugee phenomenon where people leaving.
00:02:20 Kaiser Kuo
Were suddenly.
00:02:21 Kaiser Kuo
Xiao Hongshu and finding a very warm welcome there and being sort of astonished by the low prices of groceries and and the fact that people don't need to work two or three jobs to make ends meet and the relatively nice apartments that they live in all of that.
00:02:36 Kaiser Kuo
Of course, deep seek, right?
00:02:39 Kaiser Kuo
But as you say, this is.
00:02:40 Kaiser Kuo
This is layered atop a lot of other things. For example, this recognition that China is just such a leader in renewable energies. I think a lot of people are now waking up to the fact that China is now for two years in a row, installed more renewable cap.
00:02:55 Kaiser Kuo
Than the world had in the previous year.
00:02:58 Kaiser Kuo
So it's.
00:02:59 Kaiser Kuo
It's quite.
00:02:59 Kaiser Kuo
And then, of course, electric vehicles.
00:03:00 Kaiser Kuo
Vehicles. That's been very much in the.
00:03:03 Kaiser Kuo
So this stuff is crude and and I think it may have hit one.
00:03:06 Kaiser Kuo
Those those mythical tipping points at this point right now.
00:03:10 Kaiser Kuo
And it's fascinating, and it's not so much.
00:03:12 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, I try not to get let my optimism get the better of me and start thinking about what does this narrative shift mean? You know, how good is this going to be?
00:03:20 Kaiser Kuo
Is this going to usher in a whole?
00:03:22 Kaiser Kuo
China song since I've been.
00:03:24 Kaiser Kuo
That would be wonderful and all that, but I'm more interested maybe in why are we always caught off guard by these things?
00:03:30 Kaiser Kuo
Why are we always so?
00:03:32 Kaiser Kuo
By what's happening in China, what does it actually say about us?
00:03:37 Kaiser Kuo
I mean about Americans, I mean. And actually, I think it does say quite a bit.
00:03:40 Kaiser Kuo
It's it is also very much about what Chinese capable of.
00:03:44 Kaiser Kuo
Know how?
00:03:45 Kaiser Kuo
Able to pull off these quite coordinated large scale transformations in society and it not for the reasons that people imagine.
00:03:52 Kaiser Kuo
I think it's a really interesting mirror to look in now and to see something about ourselves, but also a lens through which to look at China.
00:03:59 Remko Tanis
Do you have an idea on?
00:04:00 Remko Tanis
Why the US or Europe seem to be caught off guard by China in these fields so often.
00:04:07 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah, I've got lots of ideas about that.
00:04:10 Kaiser Kuo
I think that that part of it, I mean I I was writing about this this morning on Twitter.
00:04:14 Kaiser Kuo
And I mean, I'll try not to repeat exactly what I said, but I think part of it, you know, a very big part of it is that the way that we.
00:04:22 Kaiser Kuo
Lens the the Chinese narrative.
00:04:23 Kaiser Kuo
It's almost invariably political, right?
00:04:26 Kaiser Kuo
Our reporters there are mostly people who've been trained in, you know, understanding the Chinese political system.
00:04:31 Kaiser Kuo
System, which also often means they don't understand the Chinese political economy particularly well.
00:04:38 Kaiser Kuo
They don't necessarily understand cultural.
00:04:40 Kaiser Kuo
They don't have necessarily the language training to read things.
00:04:45 Kaiser Kuo
Free of.
00:04:45 Kaiser Kuo
Sort of. The distortions that come through translation or from just sort of impartial or just sort of only partial reading.
00:04:53 Kaiser Kuo
So part of it is the way we report China, I think we've seen this before, for example, in the early period of the COVID outbreak, I think we were really Hanford by the fact that we were covering it primarily as a political story.
00:05:06 Kaiser Kuo
We didn't understand it well, as a public health story.
00:05:09 Kaiser Kuo
And so when you look at back then, the narrative was either China has bungled this because of its Leninist political system because of the inability of people to report up. And there's certainly some.
00:05:20 Kaiser Kuo
To that, but then we also immediately afterward, as soon as China seemed to be doing well, we started talking about Chinese state capacity, how the Chinese political system, you know, has given the Chinese the ability to do this massive massive.
00:05:35 Kaiser Kuo
Tracing systems and these quarantines and and massive testing roll out.
00:05:39 Kaiser Kuo
Like.
00:05:40 Kaiser Kuo
I mean we we always look first to the the political system to understand it.
00:05:46 Kaiser Kuo
Once again, we're we're in that same.
00:05:48 Kaiser Kuo
And we we're always in that same trap now.
00:05:50 Kaiser Kuo
This isn't the fault, I don't think of the reporters themselves.
00:05:54 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, you're in China?
00:05:56 Kaiser Kuo
You're 1 of only a handful of reporters for your.
00:06:00 Kaiser Kuo
This has obviously gotten much worse because of all the expulsions. You can go back and figure out, you know, who expelled who 1st. And you know, you could say that this is all the fault of the United States for having expelled all these People's Daily and and.
00:06:14 Kaiser Kuo
Xinhua reporters, or you could say it's the Chinese fault for having, you know, expelled these Wall Street Journal reporters after this really execrable op-ed by Walter Russell Mead called.
00:06:25 Kaiser Kuo
Sick Man of Asia, timing and all that you can.
00:06:28 Kaiser Kuo
That it doesn't really matter, but the effect is that there are not enough reporters in China and they're necessarily going to do the political stories first. There's really no choice.
00:06:39 Kaiser Kuo
So unfortunately we it leaves gigantic blind spots for us. So and that's just one of many reasons I'll go.
00:06:45 Kaiser Kuo
Mean. I think that a lot of it is this, this sort of Orientalist idea that.
00:06:50 Kaiser Kuo
East Asian says this is the same for the Japanese.
00:06:52 Kaiser Kuo
Only capable of imitation, not of.
00:06:55 Kaiser Kuo
This idea that there are, you know, these sort of soulless automatons, that they can't invent this idea that we've held onto a very long time, that, you know, innovation is the is the exclusive purview of.
00:07:08 Kaiser Kuo
The the white man, the the lone genius toiling in Menlo Park.
00:07:13 Kaiser Kuo
You know, New Jersey or Menlo Park, CA, right in his garage.
00:07:17 Kaiser Kuo
That myth, and that's.
00:07:20 Kaiser Kuo
A big problem as well, but many more reasons.
00:07:22 Nico Luchsinger
Part of the reason why the deep seek story landed so well is it was excellent timing.
00:07:28 Nico Luchsinger
Because the announcement, the release of their R1 model came really just a few days after President Trump's.
00:07:34 Nico Luchsinger
Also, after announcing of the Stargate Project and if in thinking a lot about this, somebody called this a split screen and I think there's lots to.
00:07:41 Nico Luchsinger
To the split screen because.
00:07:43 Nico Luchsinger
You have, you know, in the space of a few days, an announcement on the American side of 500 billion investment into.
00:07:50 Nico Luchsinger
Data centers to advance AI and then a few days later, you know from China where the narrative is. It's kind of an entirely top down, state controlled, huge bureaucracy driven things.
00:08:04 Nico Luchsinger
You have the guys who are basically running a hedge fund under their side project is an AI company and they develop this model basically on purposely on a on a shoestring budget. And then they're also publishing, it's an open source model.
00:08:17 Nico Luchsinger
In a way, it's it's not a shift of narrative so much.
00:08:21 Nico Luchsinger
Kind of like a.
00:08:21 Kaiser Kuo
Complete inversion. Yeah. Yeah, an inversion of the narrative.
00:08:24 Kaiser Kuo
I mean.
00:08:25 Kaiser Kuo
What's even more stunning about it now?
00:08:27 Kaiser Kuo
Let's let's be fair.
00:08:28 Kaiser Kuo
This is not apples to apples. I mean, Stargate is not a comparable thing.
00:08:33 Kaiser Kuo
What one company?
00:08:34 Kaiser Kuo
But the optics are certainly there and they.
00:08:36 Kaiser Kuo
Certainly.
00:08:39 Kaiser Kuo
Are pretty shocking and we should.
00:08:41 Kaiser Kuo
You know, we should be careful to understand what these guys at deep seek actually.
00:08:45 Kaiser Kuo
And there's another angle that I don't think has been really explored enough, and that is how it's the very thing that so many people were sort of complaining about.
00:08:55 Kaiser Kuo
How Xi Jinping was so hell bent on driving people out of the finance sector, you know, engineers should be doing engineering. Physicists should be doing physics.
00:09:05 Kaiser Kuo
I think that this actually attests to the over financialization of of the American and many other European many European economies.
00:09:13 Kaiser Kuo
The idea that our best and brightest STEM students go to Silicon Valley, which by the way, has very little to do with silicon these days.
00:09:22 Kaiser Kuo
And we work for what are essentially digital media companies and they make a lot of money in these social media companies, right?
00:09:31 Kaiser Kuo
That is that where our best?
00:09:34 Kaiser Kuo
You know, physicists should end up so China doesn't think.
00:09:37 Kaiser Kuo
And it cracked down very, very hard on these quants, especially they think that they were.
00:09:43 Kaiser Kuo
You know, damaging, very damaging to the health of the Chinese market and so these having been sort of driven out, they found refuge, they they, they kind of had to pivot.
00:09:54 Kaiser Kuo
And yeah, it was a side project for them.
00:09:57 Kaiser Kuo
And I think that we, we can't take too literally this idea that the whole thing was built on $5.6 million.
00:10:03 Kaiser Kuo
Not the training was done for 5.6 million.
00:10:06 Kaiser Kuo
That's I think we can probably reliably believe that, but that doesn't mean that the entire neural network.
00:10:13 Kaiser Kuo
That they build.
00:10:14 Kaiser Kuo
Was built for.
00:10:14 Kaiser Kuo
We still don't have perfect clarity on what kind of chips went in on when those chips were actually purchased on, you know, what kind of a stockpile they had before the October 23rd announcement last year.
00:10:27 Kaiser Kuo
I'm sorry two years ago.
00:10:29 Kaiser Kuo
To really curtail exports of of GP US to China, so a lot of it is still unknown to us.
00:10:36 Remko Tanis
The spring of 2024, you published this three-part essay My China Priors, which is a very personal family.
00:10:43 Remko Tanis
And personal history about how you view China, how your family history influence the views you have of China, of the US, and what is your role being as a bridge builder? You called it between those two countries. I think somewhere near the end of the three parts you.
00:10:57 Remko Tanis
I feel compelled to admit an extinct urge to defend China when I hear criticism of it.
00:11:01 Remko Tanis
This even extends the ruling party and even.
00:11:04 Remko Tanis
Bing, they say, but adding to be fair, I have to say reaction when the US is, to my mind, criticized unfairly.
00:11:10 Remko Tanis
A time to be alive for you.
00:11:12 Remko Tanis
To feel defensive off both of those.
00:11:14 Remko Tanis
How do you do that?
00:11:15 Kaiser Kuo
Strong medication now I know medication so far.
00:11:16
Right.
00:11:19 Kaiser Kuo
Actually, I think I've sort of gotten.
00:11:21 Kaiser Kuo
I think that whole exercise writing those 3 essays was pretty cathartic for me.
00:11:26 Kaiser Kuo
It was therapeutic in a sense.
00:11:28 Kaiser Kuo
I I.
00:11:29 Kaiser Kuo
I came to one kind of strange realization, which was during that that I I feel like I probably I've invested so much emotionally in in in hoping that these two halves of myself could be reconciled.
00:11:42 Kaiser Kuo
That I maybe took undue credit for things when they were converging, and conversely I've taken taken on a little too much blame when things have diverged.
00:11:52 Kaiser Kuo
I don't need to feel so defensive about.
00:11:54 Kaiser Kuo
I think this has helped me a little bit and you know I think just sort of clearing clearing that getting that off my chest really helped in that regard.
00:12:01 Kaiser Kuo
I do feel, you know, an instinctive defense, but I'm much better at fighting it down now, and I know you know how what it looks like when other people act sort of defensively.
00:12:13 Kaiser Kuo
I don't like it when other people do that, and so I try not to do it myself, but I think it's it's important to admit the tendency there and it's no different.
00:12:22 Kaiser Kuo
Mean people may have really fraught and problematic relations with their parents, but I still don't want you saying mean things about my mother.
00:12:29 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, I I it's just it's it's it's a very human thing.
00:12:32 Kaiser Kuo
Think there's no, there's no problem in admitting to that.
00:12:35 Nico Luchsinger
What I think was so valuable about this three-part essay that you wrote is that I think it's very uncommon for people who spend a lot of their time analysing a specific subject to.
00:12:46 Nico Luchsinger
Be that open and direct and explicit about their priors, and maybe the gaps they have, because the biases that they have, and I think that's.
00:12:53 Nico Luchsinger
It's incredibly helpful for somebody listening to your podcast kind of half that back story and sort of to know where you're coming from and why the things you're interested in are interesting to you and why other things maybe not.
00:13:03 Nico Luchsinger
And in a way, I think it's also very similar to this idea of strategic empathy or cognitive empathy that you've been talking about for a long time.
00:13:10 Nico Luchsinger
This is exactly what it is is to understand the other sides of Genesis and history and and priors and biases and cultural and historical kind of dimensions, without necessarily having to agree to all of them.
00:13:23 Nico Luchsinger
And so you went through basically through this personal exercise of allowing almost for other people to extend you kind of the cognitive and strategic empathy. You spend a lot of time arguing for that. And I couldn't agree more. But at the same time, it also, it seems to.
00:13:38 Nico Luchsinger
Very hard to actually achieve.
00:13:40 Nico Luchsinger
What are the most successful strategies if you want to?
00:13:44 Nico Luchsinger
Achieve strategic empathy, right?
00:13:45 Nico Luchsinger
We talked about before, you know the limitations on reporting coming out of China, which I think puts a huge kind of like just cap on how much we can do that so.
00:13:53 Nico Luchsinger
If one you know if you're in on the American or the European side and you want to develop more strategic empathy towards China, but also if you're on the Chinese side and you want to have more strategic empathy.
00:14:02 Nico Luchsinger
Western countries like how do you do that?
00:14:04 Kaiser Kuo
I've often thought about.
00:14:05 Kaiser Kuo
That's a. That's a really great question and I'm going to answer it in a strange way.
00:14:10 Kaiser Kuo
I'm going to say.
00:14:11 Kaiser Kuo
I'm going to say humanities, I'm going to say that that what really?
00:14:17 Kaiser Kuo
Look, you can read all you want.
00:14:21 Kaiser Kuo
From other people you know in in, say, the Chinese strategic class.
00:14:24 Kaiser Kuo
But if you want to understand the sort of root psychology, the emotional responses to things which are ultimately more important.
00:14:32 Kaiser Kuo
It's hard to get that.
00:14:35 Kaiser Kuo
You need to either immerse yourself in that culture.
00:14:37 Kaiser Kuo
Expensive you can.
00:14:38 Kaiser Kuo
Not everyone's going to be able to uproot and go live in a Chinese village for years.
00:14:43 Kaiser Kuo
That's just not going to happen for most people.
00:14:45 Kaiser Kuo
So what is the other way we have into the minds of, so I want to understand the mind of.
00:14:51 Kaiser Kuo
A Victorian in England. I'm going to read Jane Austen novels.
00:14:55 Kaiser Kuo
Going to read.
00:14:56 Kaiser Kuo
I'm going to read Middlemarch. Right. I think it's important to do that to to time travel that way through through letters.
00:15:03 Kaiser Kuo
Through through.
00:15:04 Kaiser Kuo
Literature. So I think that there's a lot of accessible Chinese literature and translation right now.
00:15:10 Kaiser Kuo
I'd say that's a very good start. Even silly things like watching Chinese, you know, soap operas and just I think that's underrated and it's it's under taught right now not everything has to be about national security and defense.
00:15:23 Kaiser Kuo
Everything has to be even about.
00:15:26 Kaiser Kuo
Not everything has to be about, you know, industrial policy.
00:15:29 Kaiser Kuo
It it's it's a human endeavor first and foremost.
00:15:32 Kaiser Kuo
Foremost figure out how they think I have the extravagant advantage of having grown up in a Chinese family and having lived in China for a very long time.
00:15:42 Kaiser Kuo
So yeah, I get asked that question in different forms a lot and I think this is the answer I'm going to go with ya.
00:15:47 Remko Tanis
When we spoke earlier today, you said I've seen kind of a shift in the attitude of the Chinese.
00:15:52 Remko Tanis
We see visa free travel being opened up to many more countries, which is of course very helpful with people to people contact, which could expand knowledge of each other beyond geopolitics.
00:16:02 Remko Tanis
Me a.
00:16:02 Remko Tanis
Bit about what? What kind of shift you see in that leadership and where you see that go.
00:16:06 Kaiser Kuo
Let me let me first say that it's entirely anecdotal and impressionistic.
00:16:11 Kaiser Kuo
Be hard for me to point any any.
00:16:12 Kaiser Kuo
Specific policy document or sets of policies, but in regular conversations that I have with people who are in China or near China, there is a sense that things are are loosening a little bit.
00:16:23 Kaiser Kuo
Think this is to be expected right now.
00:16:26 Kaiser Kuo
We see China actually feeling.
00:16:28 Kaiser Kuo
Despite all the doom speak from from outside, and despite, you know, all the.
00:16:32 Kaiser Kuo
We read about the many travails that China is undergoing around, and this is not untrue, right?
00:16:38 Kaiser Kuo
There is a problem with flagging consumer demand.
00:16:41 Kaiser Kuo
Is a problem with youth.
00:16:44 Kaiser Kuo
There is a problem with excess capacity.
00:16:47 Kaiser Kuo
Are a lot.
00:16:48 Kaiser Kuo
A lot of these problems.
00:16:50 Kaiser Kuo
These are not invented, but you know this is one side of the balance.
00:16:52 Kaiser Kuo
This is we don't we don't look at the assets side right as much as we look at the liabilities.
00:16:58 Kaiser Kuo
This is a problem and the assets have a crude.
00:17:03 Kaiser Kuo
Years this whole idea of shifting from, you know, old to new.
00:17:09 Kaiser Kuo
Means.
00:17:09 Kaiser Kuo
Sort of quality drivers of growth.
00:17:12 Kaiser Kuo
This is something that's that's happening that's very much underway and it's palpable.
00:17:16 Kaiser Kuo
So there is a growing confidence, I think among Chinese people in the Chinese leadership. There's such a focus on the Malays.
00:17:25 Kaiser Kuo
Lying flat, people you know who are studying ruins here and the the the fleeing of China. You know just.
00:17:33 Kaiser Kuo
Capital flight and talent flight and all this stuff. But it's part of the story.
00:17:38 Kaiser Kuo
It's not the entire.
00:17:38 Kaiser Kuo
So I think what I'm hearing from people who are in traditionally more sensitive areas, whether in culture or even in in sort of.
00:17:48 Kaiser Kuo
Critical politics is a little bit of a loosening up, and this is, as I say, what what we expect in periods where China feels growing.
00:17:56 Kaiser Kuo
I think that this also has to do.
00:17:59 Kaiser Kuo
With the Trump administration coming in and the sense that this guy is transactional, we kind of have his number.
00:18:05 Kaiser Kuo
Know how to deal with.
00:18:06 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty, but what's the worst he's going to?
00:18:09 Kaiser Kuo
Right now.
00:18:10 Kaiser Kuo
He is not going to be as threatening to us as the Biden administration was.
00:18:16 Remko Tanis
Couple weeks ago on the cynical podcast you had decided Lindsey Lee as a guest? Yeah.
00:18:22 Kaiser Kuo
And the brilliant Lizzie Lee?
00:18:22
Watch.
00:18:23 Kaiser Kuo
Mean. She's absolutely brilliant.
00:18:25 Remko Tanis
One of the parts of that conversation that I remember most now is I think she asked you about your recent visit to to China. I think was last fall.
00:18:35 Remko Tanis
So I did.
00:18:36 Kaiser Kuo
I was there in July at June and July last year and then again in October.
00:18:39 Remko Tanis
She asks you. Well, guys are telling me I'm hearing all these.
00:18:43 Remko Tanis
Hadn't been back there since the pandemic.
00:18:45 Remko Tanis
So I'm enrolled this economical *** and people are really depressed and blah blah blah.
00:18:49 Remko Tanis
And you said and she asked you, did you notice that?
00:18:51 Remko Tanis
You said. Not really.
00:18:52 Remko Tanis
And I found that divergent between two experts and and very knowledgeable people both on China in China.
00:19:00 Remko Tanis
I found them very interesting and not one is right, the other is wrong but but they elaborate a bit on that right.
00:19:05 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah. I mean, I think that part of it is the the group of people that she talked to versus the people I talked to.
00:19:09 Kaiser Kuo
Mean she she talks to people who are probably going to have a more informed opinion.
00:19:14 Kaiser Kuo
She talks to, you know, macroeconomic analysts. She talks to heads of enterprises, she talks to.
00:19:21 Kaiser Kuo
You know, academic economists and things like that.
00:19:23 Kaiser Kuo
Mean, who do I talk to?
00:19:25 Kaiser Kuo
I talked to a bunch of, you know, chain smokers and hard drinking rock musicians.
00:19:29 Kaiser Kuo
I I talked to, you know, people I I meet randomly in.
00:19:34 Kaiser Kuo
You know, a lot of people who are just sort of ordinary folks and.
00:19:38 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, I think I said this on that show and I've said it.
00:19:40 Kaiser Kuo
In writing, I feel like.
00:19:43 Kaiser Kuo
Depending on how you ask the question or you know what your frame of mind is, the way that the whole sort of context of the approach to the question you can get a very different answer from the very same person in the course of one conversation, I mean.
00:19:56 Kaiser Kuo
On the one hand, you know if you if you start get getting them talking about the device they're carrying.
00:20:01 Kaiser Kuo
My God, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll talk about how.
00:20:04 Kaiser Kuo
Embarrassed, they are at American, you know, electronics and how great everything is here. And then they'll segue from that into cars and that whatever you want into architecture into, you know, all the fabulous affordable amenities that they have now available to them.
00:20:20 Kaiser Kuo
But then in the same breath, practically, they will also talk about, you know, depressed.
00:20:27 Kaiser Kuo
They'll talk about, you know how there are no really great job prospects, how the whole culture industry has sort of shut down in fear over, you know, crackdowns on taxation and things like.
00:20:40 Kaiser Kuo
It's a mixed bag.
00:20:42 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, in the longer conversation goes on, the more confused you are.
00:20:46 Nico Luchsinger
But I think that's that seems to be an important kind of realization is that.
00:20:53 Nico Luchsinger
There, you know, based on based on the conversations that that you've had, maybe there is right now in China kind of this joint feeling of both let's like technological.
00:21:02 Nico Luchsinger
Advance, maybe even technological superiority like the the E VS are certainly better.
00:21:07 Nico Luchsinger
Phones are probably.
00:21:08 Nico Luchsinger
They're definitely cheaper for the same quality, but at the same time also sort of like broader, not economic stagnation, but sort of.
00:21:15 Nico Luchsinger
Slow down anything.
00:21:16 Nico Luchsinger
Again, it's probably it's just important to acknowledge that these two feelings can coexist. You know, in the same society and within the same person at different times.
00:21:25 Nico Luchsinger
I wanted to ask about a chart that I've been very obsessed.
00:21:28 Nico Luchsinger
It was first shown to me by Adam Tooes, who was on your show several times and he was here in November delivering our state of Asia address.
00:21:37 Nico Luchsinger
As we were used from Adam a very far ranging and broad ranging address, but the one thing the one true that he showed that I just can't stop thinking about is.
00:21:47 Nico Luchsinger
A chart showing Chinese consumer confidence over time and it's, you know, it's a lion's little bit up and down, but it's more or less sort of like flat. And then in April 2022, it takes a massive dive and you know drops like 30-40 points.
00:22:00 Nico Luchsinger
Then it continues kind of like flat, but on a much lower level and obviously the reason for the drop is obvious.
00:22:06 Nico Luchsinger
During COVID it was it was the Shanghai Lockdown.
00:22:08 Nico Luchsinger
And so that kind of makes sense.
00:22:11 Nico Luchsinger
What I've had a harder time to figuring out is like.
00:22:15 Nico Luchsinger
Why it never recovered?
00:22:17 Nico Luchsinger
So there was, in a way, kind of like something broke in April 2022. And you know how Chinese consumers feel, that seems to have not come back yet.
00:22:27 Nico Luchsinger
I'm curious if you have an.
00:22:29 Nico Luchsinger
Given everything we just talked about and given that there are definitely kind of.
00:22:33 Nico Luchsinger
Optimistic and positive feelings about how some things you know in in, in sort of public life go in China, why that has not come back.
00:22:40 Kaiser Kuo
I would attribute a huge percentage of it simply to the real estate market.
00:22:45 Kaiser Kuo
I think that that you know, as we all know.
00:22:49 Kaiser Kuo
The one enormous asset that what is it, 95% of Chinese who are homeowners you know are are tied up in is their residence and not necessarily just their primary residence but maybe also that that other investment vehicle that they've bought you know that that home.
00:23:05 Kaiser Kuo
So yeah, of course they're extremely sensitive to the property market.
00:23:08 Kaiser Kuo
So I think that's a huge piece.
00:23:11 Kaiser Kuo
But the other thing I would say, and this gets back to you know, my literature thing, and I mean if you know anything about the Chinese psychology, Chinese people, come on.
00:23:19 Kaiser Kuo
Love to complain?
00:23:21 Kaiser Kuo
We love to, you know, if if one it's, it's the most infectious possible thing in a hys group is one person grumbles.
00:23:28 Kaiser Kuo
You got to outdo the other person.
00:23:31 Kaiser Kuo
And until a tale of even greater and.
00:23:35 Kaiser Kuo
English I mean this is a there's there's a psychological dimension to this and it's very, very hard to recover from low consumer confidence.
00:23:43 Kaiser Kuo
Think it? It's the the Chinese government's approach to it, though I don't think is. I'm not ready to write it off.
00:23:50 Kaiser Kuo
I think that it is.
00:23:51 Kaiser Kuo
I'm starting to see evidence of it in the way that they talk about the goods available to them.
00:23:56 Kaiser Kuo
The whole thing, this supply side approach to it, right?
00:24:00 Kaiser Kuo
You know, I've I've heard it explained to.
00:24:01 Kaiser Kuo
You know dozens of of times by by advocates of this, but.
00:24:07 Kaiser Kuo
If the goods available to you are better, I mean, you're not going to sit at home with that crappy 1990s.
00:24:15 Kaiser Kuo
White good. You know in your in your house that that, that really awful old stove or that awful dishwasher or that old bicycle or, you know, all these things you're going to upgrade. And when you start upgrading these things in your life and you look around you and.
00:24:29 Kaiser Kuo
See that they are. There are fabulous available, you know, domestically manufactured goods that are of.
00:24:36 Kaiser Kuo
Higher quality you spend.
00:24:38 Kaiser Kuo
And I'm starting to see that.
00:24:39 Kaiser Kuo
I go around to my friends houses and they're just delighted to show me the things that they have.
00:24:47 Kaiser Kuo
Does your Roomba do?
00:24:48 Kaiser Kuo
And they'll show me this amazing programmable Chinese.
00:24:53 Kaiser Kuo
You know room cleaner that just does things that you can't even.
00:24:56 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, yeah.
00:24:57 Kaiser Kuo
So all of this stuff is starting to happen and I'm.
00:25:00 Kaiser Kuo
I'm not ready to write it off. I think that that it's it's a slow thing.
00:25:04 Kaiser Kuo
It will take a little while.
00:25:05 Kaiser Kuo
While but I'm.
00:25:07 Kaiser Kuo
I don't think they're wrong.
00:25:08 Nico Luchsinger
Recording this as I think we've mentioned couple of times already previously you know about 7 days into the second Trump administration and you just returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos and that made me think about eight years ago when we were kind of in a very.
00:25:24 Nico Luchsinger
Position.
00:25:25 Nico Luchsinger
And Trump had been elected. And you know he.
00:25:27 Nico Luchsinger
He was just being inaugurated. I think the devolstrous kind of really freaking out was in early 2017.
00:25:33 Nico Luchsinger
And Xi Jinping actually came to double.
00:25:36 Nico Luchsinger
He was here in person and he gave this speech.
00:25:39 Nico Luchsinger
Wait, I still remember how translation of the speech was printed in full in Switzerland's leading newspaper, which I think today will be.
00:25:46 Nico Luchsinger
It would be crazy idea to 1st newspaper to print the sheet in pink speech, but that back then that was that was absolutely possible and you have to speech.
00:25:55 Nico Luchsinger
Where he basically made the argument that China is now the I don't think, he said. Like free world. But China is now like we're leading.
00:26:01 Kaiser Kuo
This now, like the flag bearer of globalization.
00:26:03 Nico Luchsinger
Black bear of globalization were still for free. Trade were still, you know, for common advancement.
00:26:08 Nico Luchsinger
And I think back on the speech and like, God, what a missed opportunity he could have actually done that. Or China could have actually done that.
00:26:14 Nico Luchsinger
I think they didn't.
00:26:15 Kaiser Kuo
Well, you tried.
00:26:16 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah, I think they.
00:26:17 Kaiser Kuo
They faced, you know, serious serious headwinds, right?
00:26:21 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, when the rest of the world doesn't want to play along when everyone else is talking about decoupling, it's it's pretty hard to be the only one doing that.
00:26:27 Kaiser Kuo
But you know, talk to people in, in the global South.
00:26:32 Kaiser Kuo
Who is the the in the developed or developing world?
00:26:35 Kaiser Kuo
Is the flag bearer of of of free trade.
00:26:37 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah. That will certainly say that it's China.
00:26:40 Kaiser Kuo
I think that, yeah, we don't see it from the same perspective.
00:26:43 Kaiser Kuo
In the developed N but I think I don't think it was an entirely lost opportunity.
00:26:48 Kaiser Kuo
That there's some of the things that he.
00:26:50 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, look around in in the years intervening, what country has held the the banner of of green energy?
00:26:57 Kaiser Kuo
Transition I mean and put their money where their mouth is, right?
00:27:00 Kaiser Kuo
Big theme during that speech.
00:27:02 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, in terms of trade, look, look, have Chinas tariffs increased noticeably from 20?
00:27:09 Kaiser Kuo
Only only in direct response to tariff hikes by the United States have have we seen Chinese tariffs increase, right?
00:27:18 Kaiser Kuo
I think it's. It's not an unfair argument to say that China has.
00:27:22 Kaiser Kuo
Still continue to.
00:27:23 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, just now in Dyn Chinese vice premier, he gave another speech at Davos in in, in.
00:27:29 Kaiser Kuo
Person and he started his speech off, basically reiterating I'm quite explicitly saying eight years ago here or how long ago it was when Si Xinping gave that speech. We still feel exactly the same.
00:27:42 Kaiser Kuo
Then he went on to reiterate all those points.
00:27:45 Kaiser Kuo
China still is sort of the the ironically, the last, you know, neoliberal champion out there standing.
00:27:51 Kaiser Kuo
They would much rather the the the world still be economically integrated.
00:27:56 Kaiser Kuo
They nobody gained more from.
00:27:59 Kaiser Kuo
From it, then China, the big hump of Bronco Milanovic S elephant curve.
00:28:05 Kaiser Kuo
That's China right there, right?
00:28:07 Kaiser Kuo
All the whole, all the ELE.
00:28:08 Kaiser Kuo
Back those are Chinese people who, in the course of these several decades of globalization, have left the countryside to the cities and gained appreciably materially.
00:28:21 Kaiser Kuo
So yeah, I mean, there's no question that China still is all in favor of that.
00:28:25 Kaiser Kuo
They would love to go back to a world.
00:28:27 Kaiser Kuo
Pre, you know, populist uprising.
00:28:28 Remko Tanis
Thought at the cynical podcast about 15 years ago, right with Jeremy Goldborn, it was more about the news today or the week and last year you said somewhere you wrote somewhere like I now want it to be more.
00:28:31
Yeah, yeah.
00:28:39 Remko Tanis
Go bit deeper and be more about how we talk about China.
00:28:42 Remko Tanis
I thought, how do they talk about us or about Europe?
00:28:45 Remko Tanis
The US and.
00:28:46 Remko Tanis
Not the Chinese Government, but Chinese people do they kind?
00:28:49 Remko Tanis
Look at us with Glee. Like, oh, you're still writing, folks, weapons that don't even have 6 screens in them.
00:28:55 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah, there's there's a.
00:28:56 Kaiser Kuo
A little bit of that, sort of, you know, shot employee and then some of it is tongue in cheek.
00:29:01 Kaiser Kuo
Of it is is honestly felt.
00:29:03 Kaiser Kuo
I think that that they're still very frustrated that old narratives persist.
00:29:07 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, it's an enormous relief. That's why I think.
00:29:11 Kaiser Kuo
You see the the Chinese response on Xiao Hongshu these TikTok migrants, they've been very polite and they they understand this opportunity to finally correct the narrative and they're doing their best to to, you know, to be good hosts.
00:29:24 Kaiser Kuo
To not be too boastful, and when they show them themselves, things still not laugh too hard. But I mean, it's funny. I think that the feeling of having a little bit of pity almost for the people who have lorded it over them with their material, you know, super.
00:29:39 Kaiser Kuo
For so very long is a very new one.
00:29:42 Kaiser Kuo
And it's produced a little bit of giddiness, I think.
00:29:45 Kaiser Kuo
Not all of it warranted, certainly, but yeah, it's.
00:29:49 Kaiser Kuo
I think on balance it's a healthy.
00:29:51 Kaiser Kuo
I think that a more confident China is a better China.
00:29:55 Kaiser Kuo
Mean it?
00:29:56 Kaiser Kuo
I think having that chip on their shoulder for so very long has not been a good force for global stability, right?
00:30:03 Kaiser Kuo
Glad to see it sort of starting to now finally fall off.
00:30:06 Nico Luchsinger
I wanna put Adam Tooos again from his address here in Zurich because I think he just made so many points worth dwelling on. And he ended his speech by saying.
00:30:15 Nico Luchsinger
That Asia and I'm quoting is both the greatest generator of change and the greatest generator of solutions.
00:30:21 Nico Luchsinger
He didn't limit this to just.
00:30:23 Nico Luchsinger
He meant all of Asia or large parts of Asia, but obviously China is a very important part of this and when it does come to the green energy transition, and that was Adam's point.
00:30:32 Nico Luchsinger
Decisions that are being made today in Beijing and possibly in Delhi.
00:30:36 Nico Luchsinger
Matter much more than decisions that are being made in Washington, DC or Brussels or anywhere else. And I think that's a very reasonable point to make that I would agree with.
00:30:46 Nico Luchsinger
And I was wondering, given your your perspective from from both sides in both China and the US?
00:30:53 Nico Luchsinger
I've been thinking a lot about what that means for us from a European perspective.
00:30:57 Nico Luchsinger
Think it's? I think it's the same for American perspective.
00:31:00 Nico Luchsinger
We're not used to not being the ones with the influence. We're not used to basically being relegated to the.
00:31:08 Nico Luchsinger
I don't think that's necessarily something bad. I think you can do really well in the periphery, but if we accept that the Sol.
00:31:13 Nico Luchsinger
The biggest generator of solutions is not us anymore.
00:31:17 Nico Luchsinger
What does that do to?
00:31:18 Nico Luchsinger
Like how can we still be responsible citizens of this planet if we kind of already know that? Really, what's going to matter is what kind of a small group of Chinese leaders decide when they wake up in the morning and really anything we do doesn't matter at all.
00:31:32 Kaiser Kuo
Let me draw a line between Americans and Europeans first.
00:31:35 Kaiser Kuo
Not that I mean to say that Europeans should have been, and maybe perhaps already are used to, having been relegated to irrelevance.
00:31:43 Kaiser Kuo
But come on.
00:31:44
You.
00:31:44 Kaiser Kuo
You.
00:31:45 Kaiser Kuo
You don't suffer the same kind of exceptionalism in Europe that that Americans see.
00:31:49 Kaiser Kuo
Had a little while to acclimate to it, even the Brits.
00:31:52 Kaiser Kuo
But Americans have not Americans. For Americans, this is still a very novel experience, right?
00:31:57 Kaiser Kuo
I've written about this before.
00:31:59 Kaiser Kuo
Think that there are.
00:32:00 Kaiser Kuo
Two very distinct types of exceptionalism in play here.
00:32:04 Kaiser Kuo
The United States has its, you know, American.
00:32:07 Kaiser Kuo
It's so famous for and we know it from, you know, all these expressions.
00:32:12 Kaiser Kuo
You know the indispensable nation, the shining city on the hill. What have you all the way down to America first, right?
00:32:17 Kaiser Kuo
That this, this idea that they've been singled out for a special historical destiny, that they they.
00:32:23 Kaiser Kuo
Sort.
00:32:24 Kaiser Kuo
It's owed to America that they should be the the leader in all things we've gotten used to it in the course of a couple of generations, and it's it's a sickness. I think it's a it's a really bad one.
00:32:35 Kaiser Kuo
China is, as I've written before, it's sort of no less deficient in humility. I mean, in terms of its own idea of itself and its historical, you know, sort of uniqueness.
00:32:49 Kaiser Kuo
We know, you know, China does, does feel a special destiny too.
00:32:54 Kaiser Kuo
But there is a really, really big difference.
00:32:57 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, as ugly as both of these ideas might be, one of them is proselytizing and the other is not.
00:33:04 Kaiser Kuo
The United States believes that its values and its institutions are and should be true for all people in all times, and and you know.
00:33:13 Kaiser Kuo
Will push these things quite actively. As we all know, and as we've all you know, felt and probably to our consternation, right.
00:33:19 Kaiser Kuo
And China is very.
00:33:21 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, when you look at, you know, the Chinese ideology, do you think that if they wanted to package an ideology for the rest of the world, they'd call it? Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era that doesn't exactly roll right off.
00:33:35 Kaiser Kuo
Old tongue does.
00:33:36 Kaiser Kuo
No, it's it's. It's insane to. I mean, China is not is not a.
00:33:41 Kaiser Kuo
Religion that doesn't exonerate it.
00:33:43 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, it doesn't mean that it's it's good because if you are living in.
00:33:49 Kaiser Kuo
As a minority nationality in China, or if you're living in close proximity to China, the old idea of China is not necessarily one that you think is going to is going to be good for you necessarily either, right?
00:34:02 Kaiser Kuo
And you know, but I think that it does put a limit and an inherent limit on China's appetite for quote UN quote global domination.
00:34:09 Kaiser Kuo
Mean it wants.
00:34:10 Kaiser Kuo
Hegemony. Of course it does.
00:34:11 Kaiser Kuo
But that's this sort of historic.
00:34:13 Kaiser Kuo
It wants to revert to what it believes is an historic norm.
00:34:17 Kaiser Kuo
Again, not such a good thing if you are living next door. What I think has happened is that American exceptionalism has been badly battered by by these things in in in China, these things that happened are mostly attributable in some way to China or they're related to China.
00:34:31 Kaiser Kuo
So these pillars of American exceptionalism, one you're not supposed to be able to have.
00:34:38 Kaiser Kuo
Functioning market economy, except under auspices of political democracy.
00:34:42 Kaiser Kuo
But China has done that right.
00:34:44 Kaiser Kuo
Two, these are both related to the relationship between politics and technology.
00:34:50 Kaiser Kuo
So 2 and I remember hatching this idea really here in Zurich, in conversation with Evgeny Morzoff.
00:34:57 Kaiser Kuo
Were talking about these two narratives and I ended up developing this into.
00:35:03 Kaiser Kuo
A bigger idea, but there was this sort of liberation narrative.
00:35:08 Kaiser Kuo
This idea emancipatory narrative where technology, especially digital media, was supposed to free everyone from.
00:35:14 Kaiser Kuo
It was like the quintessential techno utopian dream, right? Social media was going to throw off the.
00:35:20 Kaiser Kuo
Battles of totalitarian authoritarian rule, and this was the animating idea of the later color revolutions. And of course, the Arab Spring and that flipped.
00:35:30 Kaiser Kuo
Narrative flipped around 20/15/2016.
00:35:33 Kaiser Kuo
Technology was not.
00:35:35 Kaiser Kuo
Emancipatory. It was actually a tool of repression, right?
00:35:38 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, we all thought, of course, there was the Edward Snowden.
00:35:42 Kaiser Kuo
There was, you know, Russian meddling in the American election and in EU elections as well. There were was, you know, the whole.
00:35:49 Kaiser Kuo
Crisis that we were undergoing of surveillance.
00:35:52 Kaiser Kuo
We understood, finally, that it wasn't necessarily just this liberating force.
00:35:57 Kaiser Kuo
And for better force.
00:35:59 Kaiser Kuo
Maybe we?
00:36:00 Kaiser Kuo
But China was again the exhibit A in in, in.
00:36:04 Kaiser Kuo
Then there was that other one that Evgeny and I talked about, which was this innovation narrative, which we're we're seeing again here right now. The last vestiges of it being overthrown.
00:36:14 Kaiser Kuo
But it really did again begin to flip around 2050, 2016, when suddenly there was this.
00:36:19 Kaiser Kuo
God, Chinese out innovating us there. We need to stop them.
00:36:22 Kaiser Kuo
They're going to eat our lunch.
00:36:23 Kaiser Kuo
Going to roll over us.
00:36:25 Kaiser Kuo
They're going to be beating us in quantum and Oh my gosh, they have hypersonic.
00:36:30 Kaiser Kuo
Ballistic.
00:36:31 Kaiser Kuo
Now they've got all drone swarms, they've got all AI and rail guns and all this other, you know, technological stuff that it's it's, you know, relegating us to to, to obsolescence.
00:36:44 Kaiser Kuo
It's it's. It was a.
00:36:45 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, I think it was in a wild overestimation then, but but it was another pillar of American exceptionalism.
00:36:51 Kaiser Kuo
Doubt industrial policy we used to speak of contemptuously in America.
00:36:55 Kaiser Kuo
This is something that, you know, other countries do out of desperation.
00:36:59 Kaiser Kuo
Know it doesn't work.
00:37:00 Kaiser Kuo
Governments can't choose champions.
00:37:02 Kaiser Kuo
Can't.
00:37:03 Kaiser Kuo
It's only the market that can do.
00:37:04 Kaiser Kuo
And so we have lived in denial of our own industrial policy for a long time.
00:37:08 Kaiser Kuo
Suddenly we weren't.
00:37:09 Kaiser Kuo
Suddenly we were practicing it without having had any kind of a national conversation about it.
00:37:15 Kaiser Kuo
Suddenly we're we've got the inflation reduction act. We've got new the chips and Science Act. We're doing industrial policy.
00:37:21 Kaiser Kuo
And free trade, the one we were talking about, we used to be the banner hold the great flag bearer for free trade in the world.
00:37:28 Kaiser Kuo
Now it's a bipartisan thing to oppose it.
00:37:31 Kaiser Kuo
You could not possibly pass a free trade agreement right now with any, you know, bilateral one or a multilateral one through the US Congress, right? It's not.
00:37:40 Kaiser Kuo
A non starter? What?
00:37:42 Kaiser Kuo
These things have really eroded American confidence and made us susceptible to this moral panic, which naturally is directed at China, which is the thing that knocked out all these pillars in the first place.
00:37:55 Kaiser Kuo
That's why we are where we are.
00:37:57 Kaiser Kuo
That's what sticks in the American craw about China's rise. And frankly, I think it's pathetic, right?
00:38:03 Nico Luchsinger
We're at the end of this conversation.
00:38:04 Nico Luchsinger
Thank you so much, Kaiser now.
00:38:06 Nico Luchsinger
On the Seneca podcast that you host and that I cannot recommend enough to people you do something that I really like and just going to blatantly steal.
00:38:13 Nico Luchsinger
Is.
00:38:13 Nico Luchsinger
Ask your guests for recommendations at the end of the show and you give some recommendations yourself. So we're just going to do this here now to what are your recommendations for us today?
00:38:21 Kaiser Kuo
I'm going to recommend just a bunch of sub stack newsletters.
00:38:26 Kaiser Kuo
I mean, some of them are obvious, like Adam choose chart book. If you're not reading Adam 2's chart book, you're really missing something.
00:38:33 Kaiser Kuo
A second one is Chen Wang's peaking knowledge, and the east is red.
00:38:38 Kaiser Kuo
Both of these peaking knowledge spelled strangely.
00:38:44 Kaiser Kuo
It's P/E, KING, N0L 0G, IGY peaking knowledge.
00:38:47 Kaiser Kuo
Was here in.
00:38:48 Kaiser Kuo
I understand speaking at the Asian society not long ago, he's absolutely brilliant.
00:38:53 Kaiser Kuo
I would also recommend interconnected from Kevin Hsu Xu.
00:38:57 Kaiser Kuo
That is a, especially if you're interested in technology and the way that technology and government interact.
00:39:05 Kaiser Kuo
That's a really great one.
00:39:06 Kaiser Kuo
And then Robert Wu has a couple of them that he.
00:39:09 Kaiser Kuo
One of them is called bygone BAIGUAN.
00:39:12 Kaiser Kuo
Are all in English.
00:39:14 Kaiser Kuo
That one is absolutely.
00:39:16 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah, start with that one as well and then just one for fun.
00:39:20 Kaiser Kuo
Chinese cooking.
00:39:22 Kaiser Kuo
It's just fantastic if you're interested in Chinese cuisine, the guy who runs it with his wife, Stephanie Chris is just such a Mensch.
00:39:32 Kaiser Kuo
Such a model.
00:39:33 Kaiser Kuo
I can, if you ask me. I mean, he is the brilliant kind of deep knowledge of it, but also this sensitivity and respect that is so admirable.
00:39:41 Kaiser Kuo
Adore.
00:39:42 Kaiser Kuo
I adore that.
00:39:44 Nico Luchsinger
So I have two.
00:39:45 Nico Luchsinger
One is a book called Playground by Richard Power.
00:39:49 Kaiser Kuo
Oh God, I have that on my I'm that's for the plane on the way home.
00:39:52 Nico Luchsinger
Excellent. I think you're gonna have a good time on your way home. So it's beautifully written novel that somehow manages to combine themes of the ocean and climate change with AI in an incredibly subtle and also somewhat surprising way.
00:40:06 Nico Luchsinger
Don't wanna give any spoilers, but there's.
00:40:08 Nico Luchsinger
The I theme is it's a very subtle and it only comes to the forefront towards the end, so I very much enjoyed reading that and I think you will too.
00:40:16 Nico Luchsinger
Other recommendation is also very directly food related to my recommendation is for a dish.
00:40:20 Remko Tanis
You're not going to say Swiss cuisine demystified, right?
00:40:23 Nico Luchsinger
No. My recommendation is for an Indian dish that I think everybody will know called Dal.
00:40:23
There.
00:40:28 Nico Luchsinger
Just the very sort of classic Indian lentil based Stew. There's not really one way to make it.
00:40:35 Nico Luchsinger
1000 ways to make it and and that's what I like about it.
00:40:38 Nico Luchsinger
Incredibly simple to make is you're going to be quick to make.
00:40:41 Nico Luchsinger
I always make like huge batches of it because my children love it as well.
00:40:45 Nico Luchsinger
It never quite tastes the same because I never kind of follow a specific recipe.
00:40:48 Nico Luchsinger
Don't need any like fancy.
00:40:50 Nico Luchsinger
You can mix and match. You can put in whatever you have and especially kind of in like cold winter times. I think it's just an incredibly great, comforting dish to eat and I cannot have enough of it in effect, now that I talk about it, I want some.
00:41:01 Nico Luchsinger
Doll.
00:41:01 Kaiser Kuo
We make it all the time at.
00:41:02 Kaiser Kuo
Yeah. And I I like to do the kind of gussied up tadka doll. You know, where you actually have the fried spices on top?
00:41:09 Remko Tanis
It's coming up lunchtime, but we still support you through here.
00:41:12 Remko Tanis
So for this.
00:41:13 Remko Tanis
Thanks very much guys for your time.
00:41:14 Kaiser Kuo
Thank.
00:41:15 Kaiser Kuo
Thank you, Nicole.
00:41:16 Kaiser Kuo
You, Nico.
00:41:18 Remko Tanis
Kaiser Wool talking with my colleague Nicole Singer and myself during his visit last week to the Asia Society Switzerland office here in Zurich.
00:41:26 Remko Tanis
Links to all the recommendations you heard at the end are in the show notes, and while you register for all the newsletters Kaiser recommended.
00:41:34 Remko Tanis
You should also sign up for our own newsletter, which is published every Tuesday and keeps you informed on all events and activities of Asia society here in Switzerland and at our fifteen other centres around the world. We'll be back with more soon, including with an episode on the.
00:41:49 Remko Tanis
Let's say dynamic fines in global.
00:41:51 Remko Tanis
Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app to state of Asia.
00:41:55 Remko Tanis
Do not miss out for now.
00:41:57 Remko Tanis
Name is Liam.
00:41:57 Remko Tanis
Thanks very much for this.
