Adam Tooze

You see Chinese tech CEOs and startup founders suddenly disappearing, like Jack Ma, who ends up coming back.

But

You have parts of the upper echelons of the Communist Party being marched out of meetings.

In fact, just now, the other day, we saw the top general functionally defenestrated.

There is a sense that China had effective authoritarian government for quite some time, but now the thing that always happens with authoritarian government is happening, and the leadership is out of touch, and it's turning on itself.

And the capacity to continue governing this very, very complicated state well, and, you know, as demographics change, is going to weaken.

And I remember doing interviews with Jake Sullivan and others at the end of the Biden era.

And one of their big things they would say is, look, America's never been stronger and our opponents and antagonists and competitors have never been weaker.

This is a rapid change around in the conventional wisdom on how to think about China and its governance strength.

But now this is a conventional wisdom.

It's a bear trap.

So should I not?

No, it's a... Now that they're great and they know what they're doing is now the conventional wisdom.

Not great morally, but capacity-wise.

You spent a fair amount of time traveling China in the past couple of years.

And as I've tracked your commentary coming back from it, and people could hear it in what you just said, I feel like it has been a bit of a mind-bending experience for you.

Oh, for sure, yeah.

And I've heard you say things like, you know, the whole prehistory of modern industrial organization is just prelude to what is happening there right now.

So there's some way in which I'm watching you try to grapple with...

scale that feels very inhuman.