Too much of a good thing? Connectivity and the age of "unpeace," with the ECFR's Mark Leonard
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2022
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Mark Leonard, founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author most recently of The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict. Mark talks about how despite the bright promise that increasing connectedness — whether in trade, telecommunications, or movements of individuals — would usher in a world of better mutual understanding and enduring peace, the reality is that this connectedness has made the world more fractured and fractious. He explains how the three "empires of connectivity" — the U.S., China, and the EU — each leverage their extensive connectivity to advance their own interests. He also unpacks his assertion that the world is coming to share China's longstanding ambivalence toward connectedness.
1:05 – Kaiser tells how researching an abortive book project presaged Mark's conclusion that familiarity can breed contempt
7:58 – How Mark came to be a deep ambivalence about connectivity
16:03 – The three "empires of connectivity" and how they leverage or weaponize connectivity
31:41 – How all the connected empires are taking on "Chinese characteristics"
41:41 – How the Russo-Ukrainian War fits into Mark's framework in the book
51:49 – Chinese intellectuals and the shift in their thinking
A full transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Mark: Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History by Zhang Feng
Kaiser: "A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression," the latest piece by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker; and the Israeli spy thriller Tehran on AppleTV.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 0:15.3 | Subscribe to SubChina's daily, newly designed China Access Newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China |
| 0:21.5 | from hundreds of different news sources. Or check out all the original writing on our website |
| 0:26.2 | at supChina.com. We've got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and |
| 0:32.2 | trackers, regular columns, and of course a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign |
| 0:39.1 | relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim |
| 0:44.6 | peoples in China's Xinjiang region, to China's travails as it wrestles with a surging wave of COVID-19. |
| 0:51.6 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is |
| 0:56.0 | reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you |
| 1:02.6 | from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I want to beg your indulgence for a longer-than-usual |
| 1:08.0 | intro to today's conversation, but I promise it's really relevant. |
| 1:12.3 | Way back in 2009, I started working on what proved to be an abortive book project. |
| 1:18.5 | My wife gave me a full year to write a proposal in some chapters and, you know, to try to land a publisher. |
| 1:23.4 | But I was distracted and disorganized and spent too much time on music stuff. And after my year was |
| 1:29.7 | just about up in the spring of 2010, I shelved the idea and ended up starting this podcast, |
| 1:36.1 | which is a good thing, and taking a job at Baidu just a month or so later, which was also a good |
| 1:40.5 | thing. The topic, though, that I was working on is one that I have continued |
| 1:44.6 | to think about quite a bit, and it's very much in line with what we're going to be talking about |
| 1:49.8 | today. So all through the 2000s, Internet users in China were practically doubling every year. |
| 1:56.7 | There were only a million or so of them in mid-1999. But by the time of the Beijing Olympics, there were over 200 million. |
| 2:04.1 | Still not a huge percentage of the Chinese population, not like it is today, as the mobile |
| 2:09.5 | internet wasn't really a thing yet. |
... |
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