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Edward Wong

lines on the record: 33
first: 2024-07-05
most recent: 2024-07-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Court history that this is how history should be observed and that we need to remember all these grand forces that we write about and that we talk about, we need to remember the effect that they're having on the people and also the actions that people are taking in order to try and either change history or be a participant in it.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that when we talk about history and geopolitics, what gets lost are the experiences of the people and also certain moments of contingency, both among the people at in the grassroots as well as among the leadership and sort of times of decision and times of choice and action in the lives of both people and leaders in these historical epochs. And so when I was writing this book, I wanted to try and capture that and to capture the idea that there are certain momentum and I wanted to capture that and to capture the fact that there are movements and courses of action throughout history on a wider scale that people take part in and that they each make individual choices that change the course of their lives and those around them. And that this is, in my opinion, the most valuable way to reach.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he then makes the long journey by truck and train once again back into interior China. And he enrolled the university. But things don't turn out quite the way he had expected. Very quickly, he realizes the party application that was pending isn't going anywhere because party officials soon tell him that there's still something wrong with his background that they need to investigate his family more. And he realizes that despite all the sacrifices he had made as a soldier, he hasn't been able to win the trust of people in the system. And then, of course, on a bigger historical level, the great famine under Mao starts at that time. And he starts to experience some of the very real suffering that took place across China as, as Famine said, and because of Mao's failed economic policies during the Great Leap Forward.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he eventually moves out to one of these agricultural garrisons near the border of Soviet Kazakhstan. And that's his last posting at that time. He wins the favor of one of the senior officers there who decides to recommend him for party membership. So he's got this application for party membership pending, which gives him great hope, of course. He feels he's fulfilled a personal mission of trying to get back into the good graces of the party. And then he also gets a chance to go back to interior China because at that time the leadership in Beijing was looking for young people of talent to apply to universities and train to help boost the economy of China and the industrial progress of China. So he gets a slot in an aerospace university in Xi'an, which is an ancient capital of China. And it's not that far from Beijing.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that's one of the ironies that some people have pointed out that while Xi Jungshin was charged, at least in some periods of his rule over Northwest China with taking a more, he was charged with some periods of his rule in Northeast China with taking a more softer policy. He was charged with some periods of Israeli northeast China, or he was charged with some periods of Israel in northwest China with taking a softer policy or softer approach to the people in Xinjiang, his son Xi Jinping.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The very top level, Mal decided to remove the genero who had been running Xinjiang, Wang Zhun because he felt Wang Zhen had come down too hard on the ethnic people in Xinjiang. And so he actually charged the father of Xi Jinping, Xi Jong Xian, with trying to change the policy in Xinjiang. And Xi Jong then went about purging some of the officials who were in that command structure, which I think was incredible that there was this tie between what my father was experiencing out there and the family, the father of C Jinping today.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is closer to Baghdad than it is to Beijing geographically. And I started, and at that point I started to hear about some of the aspirations of the Uyghurs. I would meet Uyghurs who would tell me that they felt oppressed under communist rule, that they felt that the Han officials that were ruling over Xinjiang were treating them unfairly. Some had greater aspirations to autonomy or maybe even independence in the region. Many just wanted a better life for themselves. And I start to get a glimmer of some of the very harsh policies that the communists have put in place. Now, the policies have fluctuated in different forums throughout the decades. And even in my father's time there, there were debates about how hard to go in the region. And during some of my father's early years there, for example,”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first contact with Xinjiang took place in 1991 right after I finished graduate school, before I became adjourned for the New York Times. I went out to China and made an overland journey between Hong Kong and New Delhi where I traveled across the length of China. And Xinjiang was my last stop in China. That was my last stop before I went over the Caracorum highway into Pakistan. I went to Xinjiang in part because I had started hearing about it from my father while I was in graduate school. I wanted to find out more about it and see some of the places that he had lived. And it was extraordinary to me. I mean, I saw many of the same stark topography, the deserts, the mountains, the oasis towns, the valleys that my father saw. I met many of the same people. I went very close to the Russian border. And then I also interacted with some Uyghurs in places like Kashgar, which is this OA.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Language. And a lot of his interactions would end up being with Kazakh and Uyghur soldiers because he would be put into army units to work with Kazakh and Uyghur soldiers, partly to indoctrinate them with communism and partly to carry out more bureaucratic functions and also to carry out missions like setting up agricultural garrisons run by the military in Xinjiang, which was a very important form of control in Xinjiang and was a form of control that had begun under the Manchus when they sent armies out there. Some of their soldiers stayed there and lived there in Xinjiang and then the communists would take up the same method of control under Mao.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Xinjiang in Chinese means New Frontier, and that was essentially how the Manchu rulers saw it. They wanted to extend their empire and their sort of sphere of security beyond China proper. And they conquered that region. The people there, there's a huge number of ethnic groups and languages there. And my father came across people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures as he made his journey. And they include Mongols, Tatars, Kazakhs, and Uyghurs, which we see in the headlines often these days. Many of the groups are Muslim. Some are Buddhist. And he interacted with them. It felt like this very alien and very wild world to him at first. He would gradually acclimate to it in his years there and even learn some of the Kazakh and Uyghur languages, which is a term.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Karin, really glad you picked up on that theme in the book because when I wrote the book, one of my main intentions was trying to show readers the huge diversity of China today and in the Mao era and to really explain how these different parts of China, very different parts of China, different languages, different cultural influences, different ethnicities have influenced the character of the Chinese polity throughout history. And so he's there in the Northeast training for the Air Force where this is the land where the Manchuks came from. It wasn't land dominated by the ethnic Khan until much later in Chinese history. And it was the Manchus that came down from these forests and then conquered China.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had gone to live and study in America. And his parents at that point had moved back to Hong Kong and, of course, had taken up their business again. And so in long conversations he had had with officers who were interrogating him about his family. He had told all this to his superiors. And he thinks it was all put in his file. And it's emblematic, I think, of the way that there was this sense of fear, paranoia within the Communist Party where they were looking to root out enemies and they saw enemies everywhere. I think that that's been something we see coming up in psychos throughout communist rule in China. And as I said, it took place very intensely under Mao. And we see it taking place now undersea, though it's not nearly as intense yet as it was during the Mao era.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, when my father first joined the military after dropping out of university very soon after that parade in Tianeman Square, he wanted to fight with the nascent Chinese Air Force against the Americans on the Korean Peninsula. That was an important part of the communist drive at the time. And Ma was seeing the Americans might try and topple the party in Beijing if they made it past the border between Korea and China. And so my father is very intent on becoming part of a bomber squadron, for example, that would deploy over Korea. But he was then sent out to join army units in the far northwestern China and essentially took a long journey in the opposite direction. And he suspected at the time when he was told to leave the Air Force Academy that it might have been because of his background, his family background, his brother, as I said.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When there was too much dissolution, when he also saw what happened to Sobein and the breakup of the Soviet Union, when there wasn't enough strong control by the very top in the capital. And so he is trying to exert a very forceful control over all of the country. And I think that's different than many key periods in Mao's rule.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later on are the great leap forward that resulted in disasters by the leadership. There were these very hardline drives early on. And I think we see Xi Jinping embracing some of those ideas. But there are important differences. Mao, at many key points in his leadership, decided that he needed to throw China into chaos in order to maintain his personal power. When he felt that he was being pushed aside by other party leaders, then he would decide to restart a rebellion among the grassroots in China and the Cultural Revolution was one of the best examples of that. And it set China back many years. He is now looking for that like many people who grew up during the culture revolution. He fears chaos in China. He also saw what happened to the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moving in many ways away from the reform era under Dung Stauping when China was more willing to experiment with things like market forces, economic opening, and to instead look at the country as one where a national security state should be at the center of controlling or maintaining oversight of the nation. And Mao had very much some of the same thoughts in parts of his rule, especially in the years when my father first joined the army. There was a movement against counter-revolutionaries, for example, where the communists tried to root out people they thought had bad backgrounds. There were many purges, there were executions, many people put in prison, and that was from the very start of communist rule. It wasn't just the Cultural Revolution much.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, well, earlier you talked about rejuvenation, Carl. I think that that's the key word that comes up over and over in the book. The idea of rejuvenating the nation and C really has fixated on that word and has used that word as one of the main organizing principles in his rule of China. When he first came to power in 2012, he made a trip to the National Museum of Beijing where he visited an exhibition called The Road to Rejuvenation. And that's become sort of the theme of his rule of China. exerted much greater party control over all aspects of Chinese life that includes, for example, reining in entrepreneurship in China, trying to take control of ideas in academia, for example, pushing forward Marxist-Leninist thought more strongly, as well as Xi Jinping thought. And a lot of that centered around the idea of authoritarianism and of a firmer grip by the party around China.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them from the stands. My father doesn't remember whether he actually saw Mao himself up there. It was decades ago, but he still feels the aura of Mao even now when he tells me about that story. And I think that that is an important element of understanding how the country was galvanized by the leadership of the communists at the time.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, he's absolutely devoted at this point to trying to help the communist cause. And he graduates in the very first class of his high school that enters a China rule by the communists. And so while his brother was moving to America to study in the United States and Washington, he took the opposite path, which is he took a train up to Beijing. He had gotten into the agricultural university up there. on October 1st he marches in Tiananmen Square on the first anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic Wao Mao and Mao's senior compatriots are standing there in the rostrum overlooking the square so you can imagine how dramatic that must have been and how it must have energized everyone who took part in it there were students there were workers there were soldiers all marching in the square past Mao who waved down”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The economy of China and make it into this great power in the world once again. I think that's a central drive of both of these types of governments.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even in these republic eras, whether it was the nationalists or communists, they looked to the Qing and they look to the idea that the Manchu rulers of the Qing, even though they were these conquerors from north to east, even though they, and they looked to the Manchu rulers of China, even though the Manchu rulers of China, even though they were these conquerors from the northeast, from these non-ethnic Han regions, they looked to them as inspiration because they managed to expand the Chinese Empire well beyond anything the Chinese polity had seen before. They controlled Xinjiang in the far northwest, which is very core to their idea of empire. They managed to exert control over Tibet and Mongolia. And so they had this vast Inter-Asian Empire. And when the nationalists and the communists each took over, they wanted to hold on to that empire and to also reduce.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, there was a lot more in common between the nationalists and the communist than we tend to think. We in America, I think, because we grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, we always think about these grand ideologies of communists, ideals of socialism. Of course, Mal did talk about that. He had read Marx and Lenin and the party really used that ideology to galvanize many of their recruits. But in the end, what Chinese leaders have striven for generation after generation is wealth and power for the country, this national vision of China as a great nation. And a lot of that is rooted in imperial history of China, which I talk about in the book, especially the Qing Dynasty, which is the last imperial ruler, which is especially the Qing dynasty, which is the last imperial regime of China.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have been very successful in the war until the Americans entered the war. And so the Chinese really wanted to rejuvenate their nation and they got behind Mao in this cause. And my father is one of those.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He didn't come from an impoverished background. He wasn't a peasant. And yet his vision for the revolution was to have a peasant uprising topple the communists work together with people in urban areas, workers in factories across China or in cities and then really push out the communists and then really push out the nationalist military. And so this was something that Mao used to great effect. He really rallied people throughout the countryside. And I think those people really felt they wanted a change as well. China at the time, as you know, was a very impoverished nation. They knew that Europe and America had far surpassed them in terms of industrial capacity. And they knew Japan had done the same because Japan”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And hearing about the change that they want to bring to China. And he also suspects there's certain members of the faculty in his high school, for example, who are communist sympathizers back then. There were many communist sympathizers across parts of China, but in certain areas where the nationalists had control, they have to keep it very well hidden. Of course, my father, his own sympathy started to gravitate towards communist. And that was for many different reasons. But I think a lot of Chinese at the time thought that the nationalists were a corrupt government that they were rife with officials who were only out for themselves and that they had no capacity to govern China properly. There was enormous inflation at the time, for example. And my father also saw many homeless people in the streets in southern China.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And this is the big turn in Chinese history in the mid 20th century when the nationalists failed to hold on to control of China. They have been fighting the Japanese. Their forces have been weakened by the war, the Japanese, despite American support. And then they enter this intense campaign with the communists, which have been put on hiatus during the Japanese war. And the communists really deal severe blows to the nationalist forces up in northern China. In the south where my father is growing up and then going to high school, he doesn't feel the heavy effects of the war as much there initially because most of the intense fighting and bloodshed is in the north. But in the south, he's very much aware of what's going on. He reweeds newspapers. He hears broadcasts. And he's also learning about the communist ideals.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That these ideas from Europe had had a big effect on Chinese who come to contact with them in the South, in port cities or who had traveled overseas and brought these ideas of architecture, of aesthetics back, and then developed these villages to resemble European ones, partly, I think, because they looked up to European ideals at the time.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I visited my home village twice during my time in China. I also traveled around the area. And what struck me was that this is an area of Guangdong that had really been influenced heavily by contact with European nations and European business people and travelers and others. And European ideas and American ideas as well. And my parents had never talked about this to me when I was growing up. They never described to me the geography of the place or the unique cultural aspects of Tai Shan County. But when I went, I realized, oh, there's these entire villages full of villas, multi-story villas, and watchtowers, like four or five story watchtowers that really resemble, say, Tuscan villages in Italy. And it was astounding. I realized that what was happening was.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ruled by the Brits at the time and the Chinese were not didn't have entirely the same rights or the same privileges as the British did. But the Japanese war changed everything. The Japanese occupied Hong Kong. Many people had to then leave for China, partly because the Japanese were pushing out many refugees from China at the time. And then my father and his close family members then went across to Guangdong province and sort of took shelter in their home village. And that changed the course of my father's life because that placed him firmly in China itself. And China then went into the civil war after the Japanese war ended. And that really affected the lives of everyone in China.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The story begins in 1941 when the Japanese empire decides to conquer Hong Kong and some other British colonies in the region. And this is part of obviously a Japanese campaign to take over Asia. They had already been fighting a very intense land war in China where they committed atrocities across China. People who were living in Hong Kong, both the British and the Chinese, were very aware of the Japanese drive for conquest and they were fearful that the Japanese would do this one day. My father was born in Hong Kong, had been growing up in Hong Kong as part of a middle class merchant family. His father sold herbal medicine that he imported from mainland China and then sold to places in Southeast Asia as well as in parts of southern China and Hong Kong. So he had this fairly comfortable upbringing, even though Hong Kong”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In China at the time, the broader movements in the country, the ardor for change in China when Mao took over the traction to communism and to what that could bring to China. And so I thought I would tell the tale of Mao era China through my father and then come up to today and talk about what I saw in China during my more than nine years there as I was reporting everywhere from Beijing in the capital to Guangdong and Hong Kong in the south and then to the far west in places like Xinjiang where my father had been posters of soldier and in Tibet.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've been working in China for nearly a decade when I hit upon the idea of working on this book in earnest. I had some big notions of wanting to write a longer piece of work about China while I was based in China for the New York Times. But as I thought carefully about what I wanted to say in the book and how I wanted to structure the book, I realized that so much of what we're seeing now in China has its roots back in the Mao era. And I thought about how I could tell that story. Some journalists will use interview subjects that they've met during the course of the reporting to talk about the past. And I thought, well, why not talk about the past through the story of my family and in particular my father? Because I felt that the visions, the drives, the goals that my father had when he was young really matched the broader momentum that was happening.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm head of programming, Conor Boyle. On this episode, Edward Wong, the diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, whose work often focuses on global affairs and US foreign policy, discusses his new book at the Edge of Empire, a family's reckoning with China. Let's hear more from our host, The Technology Researcher, author and co-founder of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank demos, Carl Miller.”
2024-07-05 · Intelligence Squared · Growing Up in the Shadow of China, with Edward Wong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT