Azeem Azhar

In a summary, he says China has become a principal architect of modernity, perhaps even the principal architect of it.

So Western states need to replace a denial of that with an honest assessment and learn from China's performance legitimacy.

And he says that what's happening now, and you touched on this with the Biden administration, this notion that legitimacy came from procedure.

And Kuo argues that legitimacy is actually moving from procedure to performance and that the Chinese track record of the last 30 years is really about that performance.

And given what's happening with the build-out of solar and high-speed rail and other things, it might continue for a little bit longer.

But there is a deeper question there, which is how well can anyone ever understand it?

And, you know, it's famously a difficult system to get your head around.

And there's lots of misperception.

I went to Tianjin and to China for the first time in many years.

And, you know, I came away with the same experience that I think many people do, which is, first of all, things are similar but different.

So all the apps are very different.

But the second thing is a lot of things work and they work really well.

I mean, I was in the most stunning electric vehicles and there were all these other automated gadgets that were running around, making life quite interesting.

From your perspective and what you see and you read about in the US and you talk to people, what is the thing that they most get wrong in trying to understand China?

Yeah, I was certainly not suggesting it's a fool's errand.

I think it's more one needs some humility about understanding what you're seeing.

I mean, it doesn't feel like a communist country in the five or six days I was there, right?

It felt like, you know, a rich capitalist Asian country with nearly as many CCTV cameras as some parts of London.

I wanted just maybe to finish on this.

I noticed you've got a poster of the Manhattan Project.