Description
What do you mean, Chinese lack freedom? Chinese can start a business quite easily. Chinese invest, innovate, go to movies and buy books and travel internationally. Shopping malls are far superior in style to anything in the US.
In 2025 the tariff conflict between the US and China is fundamentally a stupid conflict. And also, fundamentally, it is of no matter which economy has greater GDP. What does matter are those freedoms we claim to cherish – to speak and write and associate freely, to criticize government, to think as we wish. That is what Taiwan is really about, and why 140,000 people left Hong Kong between 2020 and 2022. And Tibet and Xinjiang and Ningxia and Hong Kong.
Millions of middle class Chinese live lives that are full of material well-being and they don’t have those freedoms. So why we are so protective of those values? What is freedom for? Hint: agency, the ability “to feel useful in this old world” as Davy Crockett told us in the 1960 movie Alamo. And you can get agency through freedom, but also other ways – like identification with a leader, as we see now in China and in the US. I discuss work by Joseph Chan and Ci Jiwei.
