Priority Pluralism

Rethinking Universal Values in U.S.-China Relations

By Kaiser Guo

I got an email from Robert Daly the other day.

Robert, who heads the Kissinger Institute at the Wilson Center in D.C.

is someone for whom I have boundless admiration.

He's sharp, measured, well-read, has excellent Chinese, and is, above all else, genuinely wise.

As I've said of him before, when I had him on the Cynica podcast, he embodies all the precepts I look for in a good analyst of China.

Chief among those is empathy.

Robert's well-developed empathy is coupled as it should be with an excellent moral compass.

As complementary as these two qualities usually are, they will occasionally give rise to contradiction,

especially when it comes to thinking about contemporary China.

Empathy and especially cognitive empathy inclines us toward factoring in context,

giving weight to history's gravitational force, and working to understand how things

look from the other side, while morality sensitizes us to injustice, the suffering of individuals

and the abrogation of basic rights.

I suspect that just this type of contradiction prompted Robert to write to me.

He had, he told me, just listened to my letter from Beijing, an account I published a month

back reflecting on my four-week trip back to Beijing this summer, and while he had kind

things to say, he raised an important question.

Quote, as I listened, I was wondering about your

views on relations between the personal and the political, and how they are shaped by one's status

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