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I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Back before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I embarked on a series of podcasts that I was calling

Thinking About Thinking About China.

I wanted to do some shows that explored some of the deeper issues on how we look at China

and bring in issues of moral philosophy, epistemology, historiography, psychology, and much

else. My feeling is Longman that we don't think deeply enough about how we approach China, how we think we know what we think we know, about the very questions that we ask, about our priors, our blind spots, our sources of cognitive bias.

After February 24th, that got derailed a bit. I've always meant to get back to it and do some more shows that go beneath the

surface, not just dealing superficially with the latest twists in the U.S.-China relationship

or the breaking news.

So when I cracked open Yashung Huang's new book, The Rise and Fall of the East, I immediately

realized that having him on the show to talk about the book would scratch this itch of mine that I have long had and allow me to get back into some of these deeper topics that I have set aside for too long.

The rise and fall of the east, and you should know that East here is an acronym that stands for exams, autocracy, stability, and technology. It's one of those lamentably rare

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