Book but they are responsible for its inception. My grandparents on my fathers side came from poland. They were polish jews. They left at the beginning of world war ii. On my mothers side, my mothers father was an american diplomat sent to hungary who was kicked out. He was accused of being a spy which he wasnt. In some ways, these stories, the experience of being ejected from poland or hungary, formed a backdrop in our familys story about life under authoritarianism. I think it always i was always interested in what it felt like to live in a country where there were fundamental constraints on how you live and what you could care about and what your values were. When there was a moment in my life where i could go to a place to dig into that, china was the place that fascinated me. That family story is very present in my interpretation. When you first went there in 1996, could you speak chinese . I was learning chinese. I started the previous year. If anybody told you how hard chinese was going to be, you would never undertake the process. I ended up taking about four years of College Chinese before i moved to china. I was just starting when i went for the first time. I am going to ask you a question in english and i want you to answer in chinese. What is this book about . [speaking chinese] you would say in chinese [speaking chinese] what i mean is that this book is about ambition. Literally in chinese, it is about the wild heart. That is the term people use in chinese to describe ambition. Wild heart, for a long time in chinese was an unimaginable idea. If you are accused of being ambitious, you are accused of being wild hearted. That was a death sentence. What it meant was that you put the group before anything else. Im sorry, you put yourself before the group. For chinese history, that was unimaginable under the confucian period or the socialist period. When i got there, things were beginning to change in some deep way. What i began to hear around me was people talking about themselves, not in a self glamorizing or selfpromotional way, but just in a self protective way. They would say that it matters what i want in this world. Even the term in chinese for myself was transforming. People were getting comfortable using it. In the United States, we talk about the me generation. In china, it was a revolution in our conception of what it meant to be a person. In the past, people would always talk about the group, the family, the clan, the factory. All of a sudden, beginning after 1979 when the country embarked on this economic transition, people had no choice but to think about themselves. That became the fundamental dynamic that drove my eightyear fascination and investigation of china. You married in the middle of all this. How did you meet your wife . I met my wife in beijing, Sarabeth Berman who is from massachusetts. She went to china for a year and met me. She stayed for the next six years and we came home together. Does she speak chinese . She does. She learned it living, working in an all chinese environment. She was the only foreigner working in a modern Dance Company in china. She was the manager. All day long, she was surrounded by chinese speakers. They would go to places like italy and she was their link to the rest of the world. She has a natural understanding of how people talk daytoday rather than learning in the classroom. What difference does it make in trying to write this book and working for the new yorker and writing about china, that you spoke the language . I couldnt have done the kind of work that we do at the new yorker if i didnt speak the language. So much of what makes a new yorker story and what makes this book is the texture, the minor strokes of conversation, the little choices that people make when they use an expression, when they choose an idiom. For instance, the fascination i have with this concept of the wild heart, that would be inaccessible to me if i hadnt studied chinese. Studying mandarin is one of these processes that goes on your whole life. There are still times when i go with a translator for an interview because i know that person is going to be speaking about something technical or using a dialect. It gives me a cushion. I can think about what is on the wall behind them or how they are holding themselves with their emotional experience. It buys time too. This is one of the great secrets of working with a translator. It slows the whole thing down. One of the experiences in this book that was a big part of my life in china, was going on a tour of europe with Chinese Tourists. It was an idea that came from an editor at the new yorker. He said, i heard the Chinese People are beginning to go to europe. I thought, maybe i will sign up for a tour and go with them. That was a case where there were 39 Chinese Tourists and me. From the get go, they were incredibly welcoming. I often thought if the roles were reversed and this was a group of american tourists and a chinese journalist showed up, how would we respond . I spent this whole 10day trip, five countries, 10 days, we ate almost entirely chinese food in all these countries, but they were speaking to each other in chinese. The ability to participate in that conversation without it being burdensome for them was the only way a story like that becomes possible. What did you learn about them being on that trip . Had you been to those european places before . I had, i was born in london. Flying to germany with most of them, almost all of them entirely were leaving asia for the first time. There was one guy who had been outside of asia and he was like magellan. Then there was the guide. He was much more than a guide. He was a storyteller, an authority figure. The first thing he told us to do on the bus was to synchronize our watches. We werent going to miss a single second of europe. We would go country to country. In some ways, our imagination from the west is that we think of it as being this muscular figure starting to make its way in the world and it feels brave and strong maybe in some ways that we dont at this moment. The truth was that there was a great sense of selfconsciousness and vulnerability as they made their way out into these unfamiliar places. We would go to chinese restaurants. I thought, why would we do this . Why would we go to france and italy and eat general tsos chicken . It is like americans that go to paris and eat a hamburger. That applies also politically and economically with the way china conducts itself. It has not acclimated to having the body of a superpower but it does not yet have all the experience that comes with that. One of the things that was striking about that experience was they also looked at some things in europe and the United States and they were not impressed. They would look at downtown milan and say, why is there graffiti everywhere . Why are these people on strike . They want to work less . This is a radical notion for a chinese tour group. Fundamentally, what they were impressed by was the power of the western education system. They would return to that subject, western schools, western universities, the power of creative thinking. I think that more than anything else is the thing that appeals to Chinese People today about what we have in the west. It is not our physical infrastructure. It is not our wealth. It is that we have this culture in which people are able to pursue idiosyncratic intellectual ideas, that they havent been able to do. You write in the book about china stand up what is the story behind this video . China stand up was a video that emerged in 2008. The olympic torch was making its way around the world. It became a symbol in many ways of china. It attracted protests and people used it as an opportunity to express their complaints of chinas handling of tibet and human rights abuses. Inside china, this stirred a nationalist response among young people. This video is like a manifesto for that argument. This very proud and defensive response to the worlds criticism of china. It became the most Popular Video in china, second only to a tv blooper of a news anchor doing something silly. That demonstrates some things are universal about the internet. This video was fascinating because it was clearly an attempt to express an idea that i didnt recognize. I had been in china for three years. This was an idea that was becoming much more powerful in chinese life. That was a proud interpretation of chinese history and the chinese president. It was a response to criticisms from the west. I said i had to figure out who made this video. Who made it . Not a guy that i expected. I had an image of who it would be. It would be somebody that was angry, isolated from the west, probably living in the proverbial parents basement, totally unaware of what it means to be an american. A chinese friend helped me trace this video back. There was no name attached to it. He traced it back to a guy in shanghai at a university. I said, can i come see you . He said, sure. Before i left, i said i am going to meet this guy who made this very almost militant video. If you dont hear from me, ring the bell. I got there and the first thing he did was try to pay for my taxi fare. He was a graduate student studying western philosophy. He was dressed the same as i was. Khakis and a blue shirt. He was studying the work of edmund herzel. Very esoteric elements of western philosophy. He said, you are familiar. Of course, naturally all americans are. I wasnt. Like all americans, i wikipediad. What was interesting about him was, he spoke german, he spoke english. He was studying ancient greek. He was studying latin. He was deeply literate. His room was this personal library that he had assembled. Yet it had not made him instinctively affectionate towards the west. What it had done was heightened his sense of the ways in which china was either being drawn into or excluded from the international system. That had become for a whole generation of talented, successful young Chinese People, a dominant fact of their interpretation of the world. Which was that china could only go so far. Two names, tang jie. We are going to show some of it. I have broken it into three. How many people do you have any sense of how many people have seen this in china . Millions. By that time i got interested, it was already up to one million. That was a couple weeks after it happened. It is still on the web today. It remains a manifesto for this community that calls itself the angry youth. The angry youth in chinese is a stripe of Chinese Society that is angry for all kinds of reasons. The thing that draws them together is that they are proud of china and frustrated by their own sense that their lives are somehow limited. I wrote down what is said on there but it is the script right below. They will see it. The music, did you figure out what the music is . It has the sort of surging strings. I said to him, where did you find this . He said, i just typed into the internet, moving music, and it eventually pointed him to an artist called vangelis. This was the soundtrack to a movie called 1492 which he liked because this meant it was about globalization. Did he also do chariots of fire . Lets watch this and talk about it. You go back to the beginning. We saw chairman mao dead since 1976. Right after that, famous words, imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us. Do they really think that in china today . Fundamentally, they do. The language has changed. They dont really talk about imperialism unless it is in the context of this creed where they are trying to register their contempt for what the west was doing. They do feel in a deep way that the west will probably never allow china to achieve its full superpower status without putting up a fight. That has become a key element of the way that chinese leaders see this moment in their rise in the world. It is a very anxious moment. They see a certain inevitability, they were for most of Human History one of the greatest civilizations in the world. At this point, when you look back, whenever a country has emerged to challenge an incumbent power, in this cas the United States, most of the time it has led to conflict. Both sides are aware of this. If you read in the chinese press, they write about thucydides trap. The chinese recognize the threat of this moment. This is an important point. That concept of chinas the antagonism that china encounters has become an important part of the education system. That was not an accident. Tang jie who is the creator of this video was raised in a period in which china was searching for the thing that would pull the people together. Socialism was in the rearview mirror. They realized that was not their economic salvation. In 1989, the 25th anniversary will be this spring, Tiananmen Square was an indication that it was not going to satisfy people. They said, we will rely on two things. After the failure to mobilize, the failure to inspire people, that is how he explained Tiananmen Square. Those things are prosperity and nationalism, the ability to wrap people around the flag. Patriotism. This young man and many people in his generation have grown up being told about the ways in which western countries have sought to keep china down. They are not wrong. In the 19th century, china was carved up like a melon. That is the term they use to describe the way that foreign powers took control of chinese land. They talk about a century of humiliation. This is taught explicitly in chinese schools. China has weathered this century. That is the dominant fact of what it means to think about chinese history if you are a young person today. They spend a lot of energy focusing on preventing china from being humiliated again. Lets watch some more from that video. Lets start with the last part, the dalai lama. Tibet has three or four main people at the most. They have a vast territory with this very sparse population. How many people do they have in china . 1. 4 billion people. Why is there so much fuss about this tiny populated country . They call it an administrative region, autonomous administrative region. Tibet is this immensely neuralgic issue in china. It represents the possibility that their territory could be broken up someday. The tibetans and the han chinese which makes up the majority of the population, they have a different interpretation of how chinese is tibet. There is a contemporary debate. Is there a way to have a more robust tibetan life inside chinese borders . The tibetans want to be able to worship more frequently. They want fewer han chinese moving into the tibetan areas. The reason we hear so much about tibet in the west is because the chinese really do believe that if they lost tibet, if somehow it was able to achieve independence, that would lead to similar secessionist movements elsewhere in china. China has 56 ethnicities. This goes back to this 19th century history. If they were if they allowed their territorial integrity to be compromised, they would eventually lose everything. That is why they draw this hard line on any independent movement inside tibet. The person they blame most of all is the dalai lama. Why do we americans why is there so much fuss over the dalai lama . I think you would probably agree with this. He is a sort of accidental celebrity of history. I spent some time writing about him. He is a fascinating figure for a few reasons. He never left china he left when he was young but he never left asia until he was in his mid 30s. He was a guy who lived very much the life of his predecessor. He had he realized at a certain point that if he did not turn the tibetan cause into a charismatic issue, if he did not allow himself to be, the face of something that people would connect with, this issue the tibetans are not the only people in the world who have what they claim to be a claim on greater independence within the borders of the country. Part of it i think is that americans going back 100 years have invested mystical significance in tibetans. Mountains, buddhism, it is an astonishing culture. He has been an extraordinary spokesman for tibet in a way that i dont think people would have predicted. He was chosen when he was a toddler by the doctrine of tibetan buddhism. He was said to be the reincarnation of the predecessor. He has turned out to be in many ways the principal opponent of the Chinese Government. His great friend was pope john paul. In some ways, the role the pope played against the soviet empire has become the role the dalai lama plays against china. How much of the Financial Support to keep them going comes from america . We dont know. There is a lot of different kinds of support he receives. The conspiracy theories in china, there are all kinds, that he is a cia operative and things like that. The truth is probably a lot simpler than that. He has been enormously effective at being able to put himself into a conversation in the west that tibet wouldnt naturally occupy. He has written dozens of books, some of which range from traditional tibetan buddhism doctrine, all the way to things about neuroscience and getting towards the selfhelp genre. He has made himself popular to all kinds of people. Back to the beginning of that video. It said, we provide for them by lowcost commodities made in china, but our people still have a rough time. What they are talking about is the goods that china sends abroad around the world. They are right. I should say, tang jie is selfconscious about the english he put in that video. He sent it out on the web and it became a phenomenon before he could correct his grammar. He would want me to say that. What they mean by that is that china has become the factory to the world. It sends products around the planet in a way that makes our lifestyles possible. We couldnt have the quality of life we enjoy if we didnt have lowcost goods and labor in china. Yet, in china the standard of living remains only about 1 6 of what it is in the United States in terms of per capita income. That is a source of frustration. People realize, we work hard, we are participating in the global economy, we play by the rules in some cases and yet we are not enjoying the quality of life that they have in the west. For most of chinese history, people had no idea what life was like outside. This gets back to this tour of europe. Chinese people can now sit on a computer and have a pretty accurate understanding of what it feels like to live in washington dc. That heightens this conflict. One more clip from the movie and we will move to other stuff. They said in the middle, thanks to cnn, bbc, all the liar western media. Their behavior have educated a whole generation of young chinese. What they were responding to was, there had been a series of video clips th