Published 22 August, 2021

David Zweig (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, Division of Social Science, HKUST and Director, Transnational China Consulting Limited. He is an Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Defence Technology, Changsha, Hunan, and Vice-President of the Center on China’s Globalization (Beijing). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in 1984-86. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1996 and was a fulltime faculty member at HKUST for 25 years. Dr. Zweig studied in Beijing in 1974-1976 and did field research in rural China in 1980-1981 and 1986. In 1991-92 and 1997, he did field research on China’s “opening to the outside world.” Since 1991, he has surveyed and interviewed academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, and employees who returned from studying abroad, and Mainland-born Chinese working overseas. In June 2012, he gave Li Yuanchao, then head of the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a critical evaluation of the CCP’s Thousand Talents Plan. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages (2002) and Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony (2016). “’The best are yet to come’: State programs, domestic resistance and reverse migration of high-level talent to China,” appeared in the Journal of Contemporary China (Sept. 2020), and in May 2020, his report, America Challenges China’s National Talent Programs (with Kang Siqin), was published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He is a Contributing Writer to the South China Morning Post. Recorded 13 May, 2021.

Show Notes:

05:08 DZ on his days as an aspiring revolutionary at Beijing University during the 1970s

07:13 DZ on basketball and the Gang of Four

10:17 DZ on the first Tiananmen Square protest

16:05 DZ on the second Tiananmen Square protest

19:22 DZ on how the Chinese have always wanted to find a way to get back to their glory days

23:00 DZ on how China is now ready to share the "Chinese model" with the world

27:50 DZ on the different models of economic development that China experimented with during Mao

29:37 DZ on the different models of economic development that China experimented with during Deng

34:00 DZ on some of the key tensions in the Chinese model

36:30 DZ on the Xi Jinping model of development

41:06 DZ on why so many China observers got it wrong and whether things could have been done differently

46:45 DZ on China's undemocratic capitalism

51:54 DZ on the political and economic leanings of the real China

59:29 DZ on the difference between India's and China's treatment of reverse migrant entrepreneurs

1:07 DZ on what the West can learn from China

Notes from Utopia:

• The Tropicalist compares Confucius' junzi, or the moral exemplar for Chinese leadership, with Plato's philosopher king.

Postscript:

• Hosts Jesse and Madhavi discuss how the Chinese leadership conceives of good governance.

Links:

• China's anti-Confucian campaign of 1973-1974
• Why use an ox-cleaver to carve a chicken? The sociology of the junzi ideal
• Yu Keping and Chinese intellectual discourse on good governance
• The first Tiananmen Square incident
• Reverse entrepreneurial migration in China and India
• The West can learn from China
• The uniqueness of China's development model
• Well this is a fun read: a 1976 article on the "Chinese model" of development
• Two articles on Deng Xiaoping here and here
• And let's not forget Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao

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