Arthur Kroeber

If I think about

What the United States was like socially in 1985 compared to what it is today in terms of the space for gay and lesbian people, trans people, social acceptance of different lifestyles, awareness and attention paid to racial issues, all these kinds of things.

We were the...

Changes that have occurred in the United States over the last 40 years, I think, are substantially greater than the changes that have occurred in China over that same time period in terms of people's fundamental understandings of how do we interact together in a society.

And partly that just reflects that the US is intrinsically a somewhat more complex society

than China with all of these layers of races, the whole immigrant experience that was – just in terms of the number of foreign-born people was much lower in 85 than it was today.

But socially, we are much more –

There's just been a lot more change and a lot more, I would say, evolution of people's basic attitudes towards what they think about society and how we should interact.

China, in that sense, I think has been more stable.

It's more cohesive.

It's more attached to rather deep-rooted notions of...

gender relations, patriarchy, sort of how the society should hang together.

So that, you know, as we think about all of the change that's occurred in China, which is real, and some of it, you know, the changes in social relations that has come with the essentially abolition of the planned economy system and the replacement with this

basically capitalist system with a Leninist political carapace.

Those are very significant, right?

So I don't want to underestimate how much transformation has gone on in China over that period.

I think it's been substantial.

But in the US, it's been, I think, in many ways, even more.

There's a kind of intrinsic churning dynamism to the American system that is just always there, is often very uncomfortable to live through, and we're living through, I think, a very particularly uncomfortable moment now.

And in China, there is some of that, but there's a lot of containment and there's more stasis in a lot of the kind of fundamental sort of social relationships.