A podcast with Hansong Li, a political theorist and historian of political, economic, and legal thought. We discussed a breadth of topics ranging from the Tangut language, Eastern philosophy, development economics, to modern political ideologies and cultural expressions. Hansong’s insights shed light on historical contexts while drawing connections to contemporary issues.
The conversation delves into broader philosophical and economic themes, comparing past and present political thoughts and examining the effects of international aid on development. Hansong emphasizes the importance of learning from history and cultural interactions for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary global dynamics.
Transcript, contents and summary below.
00:18 The Tangut People and Their Language
11:16 Modern Interpretations of Chinese Philosophy
22:07 Global South and Regional Concepts
27:09 Montesquieu and Sea Imagery
32:55 Rousseau's Plan for Corsica
37:56 Economic Development in Northeast Asia
40:34 International Aid: Help or Hindrance?
46:56 Global Economic Thought: East vs. West
56:29 Hamilton: A Political and Cultural Analysis
01:01:51 Underrated or Overrated?
01:06:04 Current Projects and Life Advice
The Tangut Legacy: A Journey Through Language and History
Our dialogue began with an exploration of the Tangut people and their language. Hansong provided a richly detailed account, explaining that the Tangut were referred to by the Mongolians, while the Chinese knew them as the Western Xia. Significantly positioned along the Silk Road, the Tangut introduced their own script, imitating Chinese characters but retaining a Tibetan-influenced grammar and syntax.
"Learning the Tangut language is fun," Hansong remarked, pointing out its synthetic nature, blending elements from Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. He also emphasized the diverse cultural fabric of the Tangut, mentioning Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Han Chinese influences, and how insights into their daily lives reveal much about medieval Northwestern China.
In discussing the Tangut’s military prowess and strategic diplomacy, Hansong noted their frequent military victories over the Song Dynasty. He highlighted how Genghis Khan's frustrations with the Tangut contributed to his deteriorating health.
When questioned about the regulatory landscape for something as mundane yet fundamental as opening a bakery in that era, Hansong illuminated the extensive yet fascinating legal codes and contractual details. This granularity highlighted the historical depth and richness often obscured in conventional narratives.
Modern China: Misunderstandings and Moral Vacuums
Transitioning to contemporary topics, Hansong challenged the notion of a moral or spiritual vacuum in modern China. He argued that, despite China's complex relationship with its traditions post-1950s and post-1989, a rich tapestry of normative traditions persists, driven by intellectuals and everyday people alike.
"There is a world full of normative traditions, contentions, and intercultural contestations in China," Hansong asserted, adding that today's intellectual landscape thrives on the interplay of Marxist, Confucian, and other philosophical streams.
Economic Thought and Development: Lessons from Rousseau and Modern Implications
Hansong's reflections on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s plan for Corsica drew fascinating parallels with contemporary development economics. He praised Rousseau's stage-by-stage approach to building economic surplus, emphasizing its relevance to modern East Asian economic models where initial industrial policy laid the groundwork for technological and innovative leaps.
This led to a critical discussion on international aid. Hansong acknowledged its varied impact, cautioning against viewing aid as a one-size-fits-all solution. He stressed the importance of domestic capability in creating surplus and self-reliance, advocating a balanced approach akin to China’s industrial policy.
Western Economic Philosophies: Evolution and Reflection
Discussing Western economic thought, Hansong spoke about the ongoing evolution from 1970s neoliberalism to today’s reflective and sometimes critical stance. He emphasized the significance of considering both distribution and production in economic models, rejecting binary views in favor of nuanced, context-specific strategies.
Cultural Reflections: Musical Theater and Classical Music
We concluded on a lighter note, reflecting on cultural phenomena like the musical "Hamilton." Hansong critiqued its oversimplified portrayal of social mobility and individual heroism, while acknowledging its power to communicate complex narratives. He pondered the power of performative arts in shaping social and political discourse across cultures.
Travel and Inter-Normative Thinking: Life Advice
"Traveling a lot and being open-minded to different ways of life is essential for any public intellectual," he emphasized.
Transcript (AI derived, mistakes are possible)
Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Hansong Li. Hansong is a political theorist and a historian of political, economic, and legal thought. Hansong, welcome.
Hansong: Thank you so much, Ben. So glad to be here.
Ben: What can we learn? from the Tangut language and people?
Hansong: The wonderful question to start us off to start, of course, the Tangut and the word Tangut is the actually was a Mongolian reference to the people whom the Chinese call Western Xia.
And they occupy to the [ ] corridor so somewhere between modern day, [Gangsu and monglia] there were people who basically occupy this very strategic place in what we today would call the Silk Road as we reimagine it. And at the time of course, it creates some troubles for the Song Dynasty because they really blocked the pathway to Central Asia and to Eastern Europe.
We can learn a few things from the Tangut groups. First of all, the way they created their own script in imitation of Chinese characters, but also preserving that [ ] somewhat, it was rather close to Tibetan in, in grammar and syntax, but with a lot of loan words from across the board from Sanskrit, from Chinese.
So it's a very synthetic language, and it's just so much fun to learn. I started learning it when I was 13 or 14 reading martial arts novels, which involved some characters from the re imagined Tangut dynasty, but and then I wondered, I really wanted to know how they spoke and what they really thought and what kind of buddhism did they have and how did they treat people of different cultures, religions and ethnicities, because it was not just a regional kingdom, but there were [ ] medieval Uyghurs the [Hui] people who were conquered and incorporated in there. There were Tibetans, there were more Central Asian peoples.
There were obviously also a lot of Han Chinese influence. And it was a very diverse. And incredibly rich source of historical imaginations. And we can also look into the daily lives at the micro historical level, the way they contracted loans and investments. And my favorite piece of artifact was really just a piece of paper saying all the things you need to start a bakery shop and all the utensils you need and how much it cost it. And of course, you have to rent the room to open that bakery shop. So all the details you need to know about ideas, we would call it high medieval, late medieval Northwestern China.
And their interactions, their diplomacy, their economic life, their total activities it was just a kind of black box because it's not officially classified as 1 of the 24 histories and dynasties of Chinese history for complicated reasons. But this mysterious dynasty really has a lot to offer once you open up this black box and you see all the treasures inside.
Ben: I mean arguably it was on a par with the Song dynasty. Is that correct? ... the 1100s to 1300s
Hansong: Exactly and it overlapped with both the northern southern Song dynasty. So it started in the really in the heydays of northern Song dynasty So [they] able to battle off both the Khitans and and Han chinese And then later on, the Khitans were replaced by the Jurchens and the, the Song Dynasty, the Imperial Dynasty, then retreated to the South, but it continued to exist until the Mongol conquest.
And obviously the Mongols had a lot of troubles conquering the Tang groups. And it's rumored, several sources, including some Mongol sources, that Genghis Khan really was infuriated at the slow pace that Which they were [attacking Tangut] territory. The Tangut was really good fighters in terms of military power, not in terms of economic power.
They were probably much superior to the Songs. There were more victories on the Tangut side than on the Song side throughout the North and Song dynasties. [it is said on Ghengis Khan... that] The frustrations he had with his Tangut campaigns might have contributed to [his] the worsening of his own health situations and might have even contributed to his death. And, but of course we can't really verify that.
Ben: And were there many bakery regulations? Is it like today where you needed lots of licenses and tax inspectors, or was it relatively simple still to open up a bakery?
Hansong: It involved, of course, the regulatory regimes and and the legal code was extensive.
The Tanguts ... learned from both the Tibetan and [ ] their Chinese sponsors, patrons, peers at the time, and they also compiled they learned both from the [Tang] and the [Song] codes. And to open up a bakery shop, of course, you have to have a certificate. You have to have the permission to do that.
But then the taxes, right? All the the loans, the pawning and the transactions the land. Ownership and all of that have to be sorted to legally and we do have these legal codes, both the code itself and how it actually applied because we have the contracts and the laws and you can compare if in practice, they were really enforcing what the law says.
It's incredibly fascinating that you can do a lot with these materials. Then sometimes you can do with the seemingly richer Chinese sources at the time.
Ben: And was it predominantly a steamed bread or a baked bread? And I was bread more popular than noodles, or I'm assuming rice at the time.
Hansong: Yeah. Northwestern Chinese. [The Tangut] took over basically the agricultural zone of the yellow river[ region quickly but] they never gave up on nomadic ways of life. They kept herding hunting and other activities, but they also took over the local agriculture of Northwestern China.
And so these are rough. pies with, I I don't think there was a lot of filling in there. But then there is also this question of the evolution of things like. Momo for example, in this Northwestern Chinese dialect, it really just nowadays, it meant just a bun without any filling in there.
But and then what the Chinese would call baozi and jiaozi nowadays are closer to samosa and momo and manti. But all of these words, of course, come from Tibetanized Chinese. Or other like Turkified Chinese. And so all of the new, so you can basically, like an average Chinese tourist would go into these Central Asian or Eastern European restaurants and order by speaking Mandarin.
Ben: What would have been the greatest cultural artifacts of the region in the time?
Hansong: In the territories, it would be, architecturally, these magnificent pagodas and the imperial mausoleums actually, it's been the government of Ningxia has been petitioning for a UNESCO status for the Tangut Mausoleum, and I was involved in translating some of the documents that was also very tricky, right?
If you want to call it the tombs or mausoleums, and if it's like classifying it as a kingdom or an empire, it also has geopolitical implications hence also political sensitivities. And these are architectural wonders. On the other hand, you also have Buddhist sutras and also block prints, because the Tanguts were very advanced in book printing.
Towards the end, because of a lot of fiscal disasters and also because of the high expenditures on military campaigns it suffered a dearth of resources. So at the time they were using a recycling papers a lot. So in, in towards the end of the Tangut Imperial history, you will see that all the sutra pages were recycled and you would write your personal like diaries or practice your calligraphy or even write out your contracts On the flip side of maybe a sutra or some kind of textbook so it becomes messier at the time. It's a combination I guess to answer your question. It's a combination of textual artifacts and then there are a lot of These Buddhist artifacts these boxes where you will put in a tooth or it's or there, there will be like larger architectural artifacts.
So we, we have a lot of these and also inscriptions and steels and other things spread out across mostly Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Ningxia.
Ben: And what would have been the dominant philosophical thought of the time?
So there was obviously Buddhist influence, a kind of Tibetan Buddhist influence.
You also had the nomadic people. There was, a spirit influence. And I guess there's a little bit of a, one of those medieval diverse melting pots we would, might say today, but I was interested about that philosophical thought either I guess a little bit is economic military philosophy, but also the kind of [ ] spiritual, how should they live their life?
Hansong: Absolutely, it's also fascinating if I could time travel, I would definitely try to reconstruct a kind of cosmology of the 10 groups, but I also, I guess it would have been a melting pot and even just officially the 10 groups had bureaus, they had bureau, Creative structures, which regulated Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.
So you have the Confucian academy system. You have a regulatory regimes overseeing the conduct of the Taoist monist. Of course, part of it is also to make sure the religious sectors don't get subversive and they're well regulated. So there's that kind of state to view it through the eyes of the state.
There is that regulatory intention there, but also it says a lot about the prosperity of Buddhism and even Taoism, Confucianism. And of course, at the imperial level, there were all ways. These more like pro harm confusion. Sectors, and there are these more Buddhist state sectors, and there are the more kind of authentic, if not indigenous 10 good intuitions about, we should be more nomadic and less sinicized.
And so there's always this contention from within the Imperial household. Sometimes the the clan, the maternal clans of the Empress would be a little bit more pro Tengu, pro like more indigenously minded and sometimes the male clans would be a little bit more pro Confucian. And then on top of that, of course, you have military treatises, which are also very philosophical.
You have. receptions of all kinds of thinking from the Central Plains, from Tibet, from, India directly, indirectly through Tibet. And so you have this kind of synthetic cosmology in which different sources of normative and philosophical religious thinking would come together. And usually the Tengu are very versatile in synthesizing them and they print all kinds of texts in all across traditions.
And they're quite proud of that.
Ben: That's a good segue into thinking perhaps around today's thinking, tracing it through a sort of history of economic thought or philosophical thought. What do you think is maybe misunderstood about China today? Or perhaps another way of thinking about it is, it seems to me that an understanding of Chinese philosophy or, different parts of it still seems to be an underrated way or lens [of thinking about China].
You've already mentioned a few the Tao or Confucianism and obviously you've got that through to thinking about modern China today. What do you think are the important to understand about how China's come about and it's thinking tracing it through the history to where we get today?
Hansong: Yes, absolutely. I think there are several intuitive assessments of the situation in China that I think needs to be more qualified or enriched or expanded. And the first is that there is some kind of moral vacuum, a spiritual vacuum if not post 1950s. ... at least post 1989. So this thesis about moral vacuum or spiritual vacuum could either come from neo left reactions to China's integration into global neoliberalism is a kind of discontent with the fact.
And now we only care about the market and no longer about the morals. So that would be one critique. And the other critique is, Oh, you've got, you've lost all of your Confucianism since the 1950s. This obviously is an oversimplification because since I would say since early modern China, at least not since the Jesuits came in, there was this kind of a first and the Jesuit pivot to the Buddhists.
And then they gave up on the Buddhists. And decided to align with the confusions against the Buddhist and talking about the material moment. And and then after that you still have this continued legacy of inter cosmic or inter epistemic contention, which exploded of course, in the aftermath of the Western.
Interventions in China since the open war. And this and then with the the reception of Marxism, you have traditional, and it must be emphasized this, a very heterogeneous traditional world of Chinese philosophies, which shouldn't be too Confucian centric about it the Confucian, Buddhistic other Traditions of thinking heartening back, of course, to the late spring, autumn, early warning states periods.
This entire internal world of contention descent then interacted with, of course, the Marxists and the liberals. And you literally see the receptions being parallel and also crisscrossing overlapping with each other. And we're very much in the aftermath of that kind of molten. Multiplex reception and today, of course, you still have intellectuals adhering to or mixing and matching these very different traditions.
And it's really not the case that you have a vacuum. If anything, you have a world full of normative traditions. Contentions and inter normative, international, intercultural, inter religious contentions. And I think that's a very healthy thing. So I don't think there is a moral vacuum. And I think it's actually a, an exciting moment to look at the ways the Chinese not just intellectuals, academics, but also the ways that people on the middle or bottom level.
Understand and different sources of normative. Imaginations, right? So that is one big thought that I think it's there, there's a lot in there. And secondly there is a kind of post colonial reading of China, or a And also it's not appropriate to say indigenous, but it's kind of NeoCon confusion or neo post-colonial reading of China, as you know now that China's reacting against the whole, the entire legacy of post imperial, then post-colonial, and then post-war liberal international order.
And it's responding to that, reacting against that with his own tradition. But then here are my responses again that the Chinese tradition must be unpacked and and deconstructed. And it's not just about Confucianism. It's a lot of things in there. And to what extent China's opposed colonial has a.
Post colonial mentality, it's certainly strategically and geopolitically identifies with the post colonial moment, but it's also a very special case. So I think the best way to approach the thinking world, the thought world of China today is to look at, first of all, the genealogy of these ideas and how they contest each other in the long duration, not just in the past 10 or 20 years after reform and opening up.
But throughout the 20th century, going back to the late imperial moment but also to be open minded about the many ways that different sectors of the Chinese public sphere part choose to participate in these different kinds of problem consciousnesses.
Ben: So that's a rejection of both. The simplistic view that you could understand China today just as a post colonial thinking, or also a rejection of just thinking about China entering a free market, neoliberal type of thinking, either way seem too simplistic.
And the best way of thinking about it is still a pluralistic melting pot of many traditions which have been there for hundreds to thousands of years To, to where we are today. So perhaps thinking today and crystal ball into the future, how do you think this might pan out? And maybe we could maybe make it a little bit simpler because you already pointed to the fact that different parts of Chinese society think differently, and you can think about this almost urban countryside, elite, non elite.
Technocrats merchants versus bureaucrats. So it there's no one answer either because it's a pluralistic kind of view of the world. But I guess with the dominant thought on the government side, or perhaps trading merchant side, where do you think it might be going? Is any one of those threads of thought potentially becoming more dominant or some intersection of that where you think this is maybe a little bit misunderstood and seem to be a more dominant piece of thinking which might last for now and into the immediate future.
Hansong: I see the continued relevance and prevalence of this idea that we we're bear, we're torch bearers of this particular socio political economic tradition that Situates us somewhere in as a kind of dual track policy thinking mode and in between big bang neoliberalism and old fashioned collectivism.
So I think that kind of middle ground, the post 1980s, 1990s. Eastern European moment when, of course, China sent economists to the Eastern Europe to discuss what to, what should be done or what is the old Leninist question what is to be done now that we share the kind of global East mindset, we don't want to go back to this basically empirically.
Ineffective mode of collectivist economic production, very imbalanced, very unhealthy, does not even deliver on social welfare that we pride so much we pride our system so much on and but on the other hand. Not only the symptoms of, the old Martian language, the inner contradictions, but not so much.
The, just the state of crisis in a blind and unreflective kind of neoliberalism. So I think it's now become a kind of implicit tacit doctrine that we are somehow a dual track. Political economy, and that's when the state comes in to correct, say, during a crisis panic moment all the prices go up irrationally.
Of course, the state will come in and instruct some state enterprises to lower the prices and to stabilize the markets. So the there was no no, no feeling that this is somehow working against the logic of the market. It's if anything, as opposed to moderate, the irrationality is propping out here and there and not wait until a hundred years when, for the market mechanism to really work out.
And but on the other hand, the idea of the market primacy as the main market. Place for for transactions and as the way to distribute resources. I think that's not going to be shaken. With whichever administration comes in place, which, whichever kind of ideological orientations.
Is taking precedence within the standing committee within the Congress. I think that stands that socioeconomically. We are a dual track political economy. We stand ready to use whichever instrument that will deliver. We will use industrial policy to support new energy, knowledge, technology, Economy based, I know the industry, there is no qualm about using industrial policy.
And so it's, if anything, it's harmonized with the market reform logic. So that's something I see at the end, since you were asking about the governmental side, I think that's going to be like a very. Stable policy, but as for how to interpret that kind of dual track identity, and as for which one to use at what moment, that is definitely a matter of prudential judgment.
And you do see ideologies coming in when the committee members or the, the top leadership. Selectively uses the different elements of that dual track identity to further its own vision of what is better for the country going forward. So it's so I guess it's not purely ideology, but it's not purely like 1 of the 2 political outlooks.
Say it's it's, there is something stable there, but also it depends on the floods and the reflux of ideological leanings.
Ben: That makes a lot of sense. So in principle, dual track, but case by case, hard to know which track [has most of the waiting and in the moment]
Hansong: But having, but basing your legitimacy on the dual track identity, I think, I personally find it a better alternative than many others, but I think it provides a source of stability because if you can't walk back on the dual track ideology, [...] Then at least you wouldn't go full mode, [Thatcher, or]
[Reagan] on the other hand, you wouldn't go full mode.... let's return more power to the state. If you can't really say that within the framework of legitimation then if you must provide some kind of explanation for why you're sticking to the dual track identity, then I think that's at least a constraining force and it's a good thing to have it because otherwise you could have much more unstable policies that confuse people and potentially damage the ecosystem that has been built over the past 40 years.
Ben: Sure. That makes sense. And I guess a lot of western thinkers have come out with large, broad based concepts, sometimes geographic or things. The Global South and South Asia, you've done some work on Indo Pacific. But actually, on some of those concepts, Take one, which has talked about when you unpack something like the global South, it seems so much more con complex than that broad based element.
How helpful do you think some of these concepts are? And maybe if we would unpack global South, or we could also comment on South Asia and Indo Pacific, are they. too simple as to actually being potentially not helpful or as a way, particularly for those in the West, or maybe when you're thinking about some of the causes that the global South tend to campaign for is that a useful framework for them for now and into the future?
Hansong: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I think these spatial concepts are becoming more and more ambiguous and fluid. There is a narrow reading of the global South. And there's a narrow reading of the global East and the narrow reading of the global South is the Latin, Latin American, African, Asian solidarity in the 1970s moment.
When these postcolonial states sought statehood and autonomy and self rule and self national determination, UN seats and all of that, they did share and you can All that entire blog, global South. But of course now in that post 1970s moment, what is global South? That becomes more ambiguous and the global East.
Also, there was a narrow definition, all the post Soviet Eastern European or central Asian moment of, what to do now. And do we preserve the Soviet institutions? Do we mix and match? Do we grow food like EU mode? And where are we turning? Is there a third path? So that's a narrow reading, but nowadays you have plural and parallel solutions to that.
You can for example, if you're a post Soviet Central Asian state, you can go to the Turkic coalition. It's not only not yet a Turkic union, but it's a kind of international society. You can go to an Islamic world. You can go to the Eurasian, the Neo Eurasian you can do the Eurasian project of Russia.
You can do belt and road. You can do Shanghai cooperation treaty. You can do all kinds of things. So nowadays it's hard to say, what is the global East? What is Eurasia? What is global South? And it's hard to say what is the Indo Pacific? Because even if you're looking at it from the point of view of institutions, political institutions what are you going to do with South Asia?
And even just India looking at India... western all cruise type of think tankers who would like to simply impose Western liberal assumptions on the largest democracy in the world always have trouble understanding ... what exactly India is doing. It confuses them profoundly because they don't really look.
Go into the cultural aspects. So it, it's hard to pinpoint these concepts nowadays, but to look at them as intersected regional phenomena of intercultural and international development to look at them as for example, to look at. Southeast Asia as a whole, as a source of innovation.
I think that made sense to look at the global south in the South Africa and South Africa's pleading at the ICJ and all the signatories too. South Africa's case against Israel, you can definitely see some kind of coalition building there, and that's most. Around the global south. And then that kind of goes and then it conquered the global north.
'cause all the European states then decided they must side with South Africa on this limit. [At least on the li more limited] limited side of the argument that and then you have China coming and say that we have to go back to the 1970s- mode and say that anybody under occupation has the full right to resort to even violent means to to regain their territory.
And that is a pretty strong argument. So China clearly is also trying to give itself a post colonial, anti colonial identity. So you have these moments where you say, okay, these kinds of regional spatial concepts somehow make sense, but when you really try to pin down where is where it's, it becomes very fuzzy because we now live in a very, we now live in a world of parallel alternatives and all of these overlap is very hard to even single out. If there is a US backyard, a Russian backyard, if there is a region that's dominated by a set of cultural norms, because it's all very fluid. And so we live in this kind of world of of normative and in geocultural fluidity.
Ben: That makes sense. So in the historic moment, the narrow definitions make sense descriptively, like you said, East Asian moment global South moment, post 1970s or post that. But in, in today's case it's much more complex where even nation states have different things going on in them.
I'd like to turn to a couple of pieces of your work, which are I guess slightly esoteric, but still seem to tie up to me. I'm going to turn to Montesquieu and sea imagery. So I was reading that someone interprets Montesquieu as saying his law is like being a fisherman's net. So this idea that often you can swim through it and only big things get captured.
So you go through most of the time and the laws don't really affect you and obviously he was very influential to many legal systems and constitutions like the U. S. Founding Fathers and a lot due to this idea of separation of powers. But I think you've done some work on the sea imagery in Montesquieu.
So what's going on with this, the sea ocean trade and is this a way of understanding Montesquieu and economic thinking of the time?
Hansong: Yeah, it's of course, it's one of my passion projects and Montesquieu being one of the first Western readers I came across when I was a child growing up in China.
And he's very hard to pin down because Montesquieu is very versatile and is all over the place. It's very hard to know what is Montesquieu all about? Of course, the Americans have a Separation of power in their mind and it's that kind of label Montesquieu Montesquieu wanted to be a natural philosopher.
He wanted to be even an engineer at some point. He there was a famous story where Montesquieu, of course, would go to the school. And we know this from the Asian experience. Teacher would tell you all the, horrible things happening with your child and why you should help the teacher and inculcate and infiltrate the mind of your child at home and make it easier for the school.
Also someone just went up there and asked the teacher, what's happening with my son and the teacher said I'm not sure if you're smart enough. Is really into the natural science. So he seems much more interested in the literature and the humanities. And won't just to hearing this fell back onto the chair and all growing pale in his face, Oh, no, he's not going to be another useless humanist like me.
So he's really he would rather be and a hard Art science professor and not a a rambler about law and philosophy. And and I find some of that, of course, in his early writings on the natural sciences. And he was chairing, coordinating, and sometimes writing natural science words.
And when he was traveling and noticed that he was really interested in the sea, the lagoons, and these water projects, these aquatic engineering projects. And he even had thoughts that he was going to build a machine that takes out all the mud from the lagoon. So that as to so as to facilitate a maritime traffic and trade and on the other hand.
So this is the natural scientific leanings. On the other hand, I read a lot of very classical Western thinking about the sea and land and starting with Plato and Aristotle, they wonder. Plato famously was skeptical of the port. He decided that if you have a port and everybody's coming in through the port, what's going to happen is that you will have a lot of different normative thinking and a lot of ideas of how to live your life.
What is the best way of life coming in? And it will be very hard. Yeah. To to implement what you think is the best form of civic life. So it's very dangerous to have a port. You don't know who's coming in. You don't know what's being talked about in the marketplace once you open up the port. On the other hand, he realized, oh, if we have to have a port, let's have a port.
You have, I have to have some kind of trade with other cities, other polyas. Plato never was that autarkic. He always conceded, especially in the laws, not so much in the politics. That you need to have some kind of intellectual exchange between the police. You need to have certainly some kind of trade as well.
The Montesquieu was living in a moment when commerce was really taking over with the post Machiavellian moment where there was no return. You have to have trade. And the question is how to tame trade and use trade. In a way that doesn't end up in disasters, but actually benefit your physical well being and all the entire health of the civic body as a kind of in a physiological sense as a body politic that the money is circulating through your body.
Rousseau would call it would make the metaphor. The money has blood going through your your body. But if you have too much finance, unregulated finance, it's almost like having too much fat clodding your veins. Montesquieu was already thinking in those terms. He said that Marseille classical, like ancient Marseille, and also in his own time, was it, it's good to have all the ideas coming in and all the different groups and services coming in.
But the question is how do you think about it legally, philosophically in such a way as. To promote and not to damage the health of the citizenry. And so those two strains of thought, his interest in the sea as a natural phenomenon is interested in the fact of human sociability on the sea.
So maritime sciences or oceanography, there wasn't like proper oceanography yet, but some kind of oceanography. And maritime sociability and the political philosophy, legal philosophy of of human movements of people, ideas, goods, materials, tests on the sea or came together and made Montesquieu this this, I think a major thinker of the sea.
I identify him as a pivotal moment in history, political thought. And and I think he really made a huge Impact his nose, his diaries during his voyage went directly into it. So the the spirit of the laws where, you know, the founding fathers of America founding moment they drew a lot of inspiration from it, but I think it really was a kind of collection of reflection on what he saw and thought during his travels.
And he thought a lot about the sea during his travels.
Ben: Okay, I hadn't appreciated that and then the interlink obviously at the time that to see was so important for trade and trade being the lifeblood of what's going on there. But like you say, needed to be tamed. You don't want it to be clogged. You mentioned Rousseau as well, and I hadn't realized until reading your work that he had a plan for Corsica and its government in the mid 1700s.
And this kind of plan has echoes today about. Or perhaps it doesn't we can discuss that relevant to thinking about what do we do for developing countries? Yes, should other richer nations have a plan for these countries? What should that plan be? Is international aid good or not? Do you wrap it into your own political ambitions... like give cheap loans... buy land... belt and road or international aid or whatever but maybe we could start with what do you think about Rousseau's plan for Corsica in the 1700s? What did that mean? And has that actually influenced our thinking about global development today? And then what people think about, these supposedly less developing countries and what other thinkers should demand or suggest for them in terms of their own development economy?
Hansong: Absolutely. It's a wonderful question. It would allow me to be very honest about it because when I was looking at Rousseau's historical thought on what to do with Corsica, I was completely, my mind was completely filled with development economics as a discipline and my reflections and critiques Of that and my own preference when it comes to thinking about development in our own time.
So I think they're really connecting. It's very personal as a piece of history of political thought. It felt very personal to me. So Rousseau was invited to give a constitutional plan. It wasn't really like a constitution in like strict doctrinal legal sense, but he was reflecting on the situation in Corsica, so it's a very contextual piece.
Not only that we need to contextualize him in that moment, but that piece itself reflects the way he contextualizes Corsica at that particular moment. And occasionally he made the essentialist remarks on the, how the Corsicans are brave and they're just intrinsically good as a people. But of course, you have to say that when you're legislating for them, you're all stupid.
And here I am, I'm your legislator, but he certainly thought a lot about an African. of an affinity with the core students. But more largely, he was thinking systematically and it was thinking he was trying to apply, really what he thought about the the questions bothering Europe at the time, which is the physical, the fiscal and financial imbalance, which Took many years and centuries for France to resolve.
At the time, the question is, are you going to use finance? If you use finance, and if you finance your your military campaigns, are you ever going to pay it back? Is there something else? There's some other way to finance the army is, They're another way to finance these other development projects.
Rousseau's answer is surprisingly pragmatic, but it's also, at the end of the day, I think it's quite radical. He believes that Corsica first of all, since we were talking about the sea, the Corsica is an island. He says you should close it up for a while. Most readers of that piece think that he's autarkic.
He wants to close the entire island to the outside world. I disagree. He clearly, there is a temporal thinking there. He wants to close this, the island to the geopolitical threats for at least a while enough time so that Corsica could grow into an economic not an economic power, but at least grow to a sufficient degree where it would be able to finance its own defense. So in the here and now Corsica should start with agriculture, and that's why people think he's autarkic, but you have to start with agriculture and then go into industries. And for now, the different regions of Corsica, given these different geographical features, they should trade inter regionally.
And if you don't have a healthy cash flow- barter, no but you trade by goods first, and then you can have a currency system. So he's not against currency, he's not against trade, he's not against opening up, he just thinks that you need to do it step by step, stage by stage. And then we're getting very close to the kind of economic development idea there.
And he thinks that you should build up a surplus in course of time, a very rudimentary sense of surplus by agriculture and industry and collect that surplus invested in where you think matters the most and in a sustainable way. The extraction of salt should be very carefully deliberated because there are these easier to extract harder to extract or higher quality salt that you want to export 1 day.
So please try to do it sustainably. There are woods of different calibers. You need to save up the best wood that in the future will be used to construct warships. But for now, you're not having a Navy because you're not there yet. And let's. Use the worst would for just daily consumption. So he's very careful at every step.
He wants to make sure you're doing the right thing so that the plan would evolve into the future. And how does that teach us? What does that teach us about economic development? This whole idea that look at Northeast Asia, look at Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan for a while, when during the cold war They were very much using industrial policy to build up surplus at home.
And then they were using that surplus in a very centralized way. The Republican Chinese government in Taiwan, of course, used industrial policy. Korea, South Korea used a lot of industrial policy to build up the surplus. And Japan, under all the influence from the U. S. Still, it tried to really concentrate its energy on certain sectors and to succeed from that from there.
And China is also a [an example..] China is a great example that we built a surplus from, manufacturing and other industrial activities. And then selectively and concentratedly use that surplus to advance other knowledge, economic productions. And so as to to leap across certain stages of development and to go straight to the more innovative parts.
And there is a certain level of success. Empirically it, it worked to some degree, at least that's from the anxieties we see now with Chinese export of EVs back to Europe that this idea of. Building a surplus investing strategically and then going straight to the more innovative sectors and then while maintaining an overall balanced healthy economic development.
That is very resilient to me. That's very resilient. And it's not just about opening up. And then you naturally see the. Then the resources will flow and the incentives will work. And then somehow in 300 years, it will grow to a some kind of natural, naturally grow into a political economy that you're teleologically determined to be.
There is, there's not that kind of big band full blown. I don't think any economies, even my Chicago teachers, I don't think any of them really think like that. I think there was Rousseauianism in every. Economic thinker of development. So that's what I learned from it. And I think we can learn a lot from Rousseau's thinking.
Of course, it's not just authentic agrarianism. It's very sophisticated in step stage by stage. He walks you by the hand and tells you what to do. And and it's a very open minded outcome there.
Ben: It's really fascinating. And just seeing how these patterns of economic thought, go back and where they start and how they then express themselves today.
I guess that leaves me also with a couple of thoughts. So one is for particularly the poorest nations is international aid potentially then more detrimental than not, I guess there's a couple of schools of thought. So one school of thought which Deaton, the economist suggests is that if you give international aid, the country itself cannot develop its own... that well, its own infrastructure, its own form of government or institutional capacity. International aid will often misallocate not very well and therefore produce more harm than good. The opposing thought is that. You get there's a kind of hump that you need to get over in terms of some sort of surplus or you need some capital they don't have access to cost cheap call it cheap capital so if you get cheap or free capital from other places you can make really big differences in terms of things and the so that's One blob I'm thinking about and then the second kind of almost riffing off You're saying is I can see the success of so Korea or Singapore and in Japan And then you've got those which look like they might be doing something similar So say Vietnam, which is still a little bit manufacturing But you can see is going up into some higher knowledge even Bangladesh Which has been pretty successful in clothing other manufacturing seems to have other elements going through you parts of India, whereas that whereas it looks like this could be quite hard to replicate in places like Africa, where it's hard to see what even their domestic surplus would be.
I don't know. There's kind of arguments Other side of that. And so whether that playbook will still work for some nations, it could actually still definitely work in places of Latin America. Arguably Mexico is actually doing this similar idea as well. So I guess there's two components because international aid listed on that.
So do you think it will still happen that way? And we should encourage that. Today and where does international aid play if that playbook is the one to follow or not?
Hansong: Absolutely so the part one of the question is about international aid and I think there are different levels on which we can think about it.
Some international aid is through international, Organizations institutions and humanitarian aid, and that's one thing. There are compensated compensation, motivating international aid. And then there is also this kind of development oriented loans and other forms of aid. And if you're talking about.
Political science literature is on the effectiveness or political economic literature is on the factings of these international aid. It's very context dependent. Once the aid or FDI, in more like classical or neoliberal terms, come in and gets injected into the domestic political economy, a lot depends on the ecosystem in that country and how it's being channeled into the economic lives of the people.
I think it's the aid loans and foreign direct investment, and then they certainly form an important channel through which the initial surplus, the initial capital could be found. But we shouldn't simply. Assume that the allocation will be uniform across the board because it depends a lot on, again, on the ecosystem at home and the ecosystem cannot always be dependent always be dependent on because it fluctuates from government to government from, factors like corruption to simply how favorable it is to do business and invest in these projects.
And from the bottom up, we also see entrepreneurs Either from homegrown entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs with education from abroad who need to then adapt to their home environments. They could also come in and feel those institutional voice when you can't really rely on the government and providing a perfect Martin environment then you can do something that will also alter and hopefully optimize that that environment.
I think a lot of the. I guess the ways that this model cannot be simply generalized and applied in across geocultural regions is has to do with that. But I think the people on the ground and with, if you can negotiate different kinds of expertise is a little expertise scientific expertise and marketing incentives an effective way to negotiate these Different sources of knowledge, so this kind of epistemic synthesis, if it works well, then you can adapt in different contexts.
But I think across the board, what is general about this? So an insight is that you need to before you can strategically invest in anything that then make up your political economic identity to even get to that stage of being able to choose. The Milton Friedman says the free to choose, but you have to have a base from which to choose.
And how do you get that base? Is I think all the African students whom I've come across at Harvard, they tell me that what they envy about, or they, what they want to emulate from like these Northeastern nowadays and Southeastern Asian countries is is to get to that base. And not to emulate or imitate any of these models, there is no such thing as a Chinese, Korean, there's no, no such thing as a Northeastern or Southeast Asian model of development, but there is that sense that you need to have a base and just blindly waiting for FDI to generate the base for you, or to simply let loose your speculative financial system and wait until the free investments from random incentives takes place.
To do the magic of building your base is probably not going to be as effective as if you're also willing to combine it with some kind of industrial policy or some other kinds of planning that of course, should not interfere then with the market mechanism. So it again comes down to if you can do a dual track or multi track kind of development.
Ben: That makes a lot of sense. So that, international aid compensation or humanitarian, whatever it is, can work on a context specific basis, but you need to get all of those things together, but in terms of overall development, if you don't have a base [to] work with some sort of foundation where you're at least neutral or ideally have some surplus, then it's really hard.
So you might be aiming at the wrong question. If particularly for really poor, say African nations where, you know, where they are below that. Okay. So trying to put a lot of this all together So this is impossible task. I'm going to put some things to decide because obviously we got Chinese political and economic thought.
We're going to loosely call that dual track. You've got actually another kind of geopolitical axis centered around that. Perhaps you have Russia, India, Indonesia. So this is one whole axis. I'm going to slightly put that to the side because we touched on it slightly in terms of development economics and Chinese thought.
And then if you put the other side, the kind of Anglo Saxon, Europe, UK America, North America. There's a sense here that there's been a split as well. So I guess we've called it a neoliberal or free market, although they would argue how free it, it really was. And now there's a kind of pushback.
You've got the extreme pushback, which I would say, they tend to call this then, late capitalism or post colonial and leads into arguments around degrowth, which is a kind of very Malthus, Malthusian idea, actually which, we can comment on, but really backs away from economic growth, which is problematic in its own sense, but it's a kind of backlash from some of this.
And then you've also got, even in Western thinking it comes and goes, but in terms of industrial policies, but the U. S. with the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA is a kind of industrial policy piece. Actually, if you unpack it, if if China or Russia announced it, you go, Oh that's definitely industrial policy.
It's interesting that you've had that and some supply side, economics with it. When we stretch it all the way back to economic thoughts, you can go back to Adam Smith, you can even go back earlier to some of the the Roman or other thinkers or trade thinkers.
It just seems that we're having another evolution in, in, in the thinking about what what markets or what capitalism would be. How do you think that that balance is at the moment between the opening up that we had over, the Thatcher, Reagan years Friedman with, much more free markets less regulation, but what do we do with the lifeblood of trade to where we are today, where there's been a partial backlash.
Some of it is still going on. We've got some places which have some industrial policy. We've got pushback on both sides, from left and right as to working out, particularly in Western thought. But if you look at growth today, it's muddling through, it's positive, not as high as it was, but it's certainly not is not yet sort of recession.
And then these are just tensions between free markets, industrial thinking, Or all the way, is that how you would think about that Western part of the world? And do you see that balance shifting anymore into where we see the near future?
Hansong: It's an enormous question. I certainly now as a now, as I'm pretending to be an international lawyer in Germany, I I always hear this nostalgia, of course, for the 1990s and nostalgia coming from the legal, juridical community is that it was a time when global institutions diffused.
Of course, that meant Western transatlantic values and institutions diffused, but of course it diffused. Until recently only because of this 2 reasons. 1st of all, there is the Western and transatlantic NATO domination in the security sphere. And then there's the economic consensus that free market has 1 and so there are these 2 reasons.
So it values institutions only diffused under these 2 umbrellas now, both are being challenged because with the diffusion of material power and agency no, you no longer have those kind of us Western European led global security system on the 1 hand. And you also don't have this universal uniform consensus that there is 1, only 1 way to advance economically.
So I agree with you that we're not in the complete, moment of rejection of of the post 1970s, 1990s the golden era of a global liberal economic doctrines. We're not there yet, but there's definitely a lot of reflections, as you also pointed out and critiques of that, and both from the left and from the right and part of the critique.
At home across Western nation states especially in the U. S. and Europe with where you, I didn't really see this so called back right wing populist backlash has to do with socioeconomic inequalities and different the hierarchy of priorities when it comes to socioeconomic distribution. So it is fundamentally a question about distribution- distribute distributive justice. Now the right things we have the wrong priorities. We prioritize all of these global projects or liberal elite projects and spend a lot of money on these leftist ideological programs, but do very little about the very basics. If you go to a [poor/run down] in the rural areas of Northern Netherlands.
Of course, the peasants used to vote for the Communist Party, but now they have no viable leftist alternative. So they do turn to the right wing parties for simply the socio economic quest of, more egalitarianism or something like that. And then on top of this kind of distributive discontent, you have a productive reflection, which is holding production constant, we're moderately growing. The question is how to distribute more fairly. You also have this question of can you sustainably grow or even grow further into the future? And then you look at different modes of growth and not necessarily the rates of growth. That transatlantic economies are no longer the sole drivers of innovative economic productions, right? You now have productive hubs, innovative hubs across the metropolitan areas of East, South, Southeast Asia, Latin America. Occasionally also, in Africa, there was a lot of, it's just not as systematic, but there are a lot of these innovative hubs across Africa.
And and of course you still have Silicon Valley, you have Boston, you have Frankfurt, you have other places, yes, but this diffusion of innovative capacity and agency is definitely a fact. So now the question is, are you going to have something to say about production, not just distribution?
Are you going to have something to say about both? And to think about it more productively, I, on the level of production, I think. There is a kind of sober moment where this idea of the, reindustrialization in it may be not in, in the literal sense of it, but it's introducing some industrial policy elements or to think about, is.
Technology uni is technology linear in its development evolution. Do we have different preferences and aesthetic tastes when it comes to what to innovate? If we have scarce resource to invest in Potentially 10 different things, which ones do we care more about at the normative level? And to go back to the Chicago school, if you look at Frank Knight and these 1st generation, 2nd generation, even and even Milton Friedman and certainly higher and others, they draw a clear line.
Between aesthetic taste and market efficiency. And so the whole idea is that only if you hold taste and aesthetics constant, can you have a framework of price theory or can you have a framework of market mechanism to allocate resources effectively? But of course, we have different philosophies of aesthetics.
So I think that- that also means that when it comes to technology there is not a linear progression towards something like a particular kind of AI or something. You can choose what to develop. China chose to invest fully- emotionally also- but also financially in EVs, but you don't have to do, you can do something else because there's only so much you can do with your limited time and resource.
So I think we need to rethink at least on the level of production, what to invest in, which ones are worth our time and energy and thought. What do we care about as a political community? And as humanity as the human collectivity. Yeah. Altogether, but whichever way we go and whatever we think it's no longer viable to simply sit there and say that the global distribution of labor and the way we invest in these alternative projects of economic production is simply.
Something according to a magical algorithm embedded into whatever we received from the 1970s and 1990s global economy, because that has drastically and dramatically changed.
Ben: I hadn't picked up on that point on aesthetics about having an agreed set of taste, which does it. And actually that you can see in some places, for instance, in the Nordic countries where they become more heterozygous, they just weren't, they weren't as, they were more homogenous than perhaps they had realized.
So with this has produced. Difficulties in terms of setting that and that interesting thing about actually nation states will maybe have to decide what they want to focus on and they can focus on all sorts of things, whether it was, EV or batteries or art or whatever it will be, but they might have to focus.
Excellent. Okay. Running through the last couple of sets of questions, something a little bit more fun for, although also with that it's thinking about Hamilton, the musical. And I hadn't realized in your reading of Hamilton that actually there is, in some ways, if you look at it today in its reading, there's a kind of almost pro Democrat, pro Biden sense to running through Hamilton.
And that actually. It's it can be thinking slightly selective in terms of what you want to emphasize or not emphasize within the musical as well as all the dance numbers and songs and things. But do you think is your reading of Hamilton that its current reading is actually slightly more democrat than Republican?
Does it have a politics to it? And how else should we understand both the songs and the story narrative in the musical version that Lin Miranda did for us?
Hansong: Thank you for asking that. It's a very fun question. I, my reading is that the Hamilton is A great piece of art but of course it was produced in the late Obama context where a more progressive and appealing sense of social mobility was used to provide a kind of.
Common ground on which we can reason together as as, one American nation. And so the idea is that Hamilton technically it's not an immigrant. If you went from one British colony to another and Lafayette somehow, they like they. A clap hands and they feel like we, we immigrants do the job and something like that.
I'm Lafayette was certainly not an immigrant. He was a French. But this whole, I, this emphasis on immigrants rising right from random, from poverty, all the way to the founding father status and and this kind of heroism in that story of social mobility. A very individualistic heroism and romanticization of social mobility in a pivotal moment in American history.
So that's, of course, a, I think there is that's definitely a, an undertone that a basso continuo throughout the musical. And is it's, of course, a lot of the in that historical inaccuracies come from the book on which it was based. So I wouldn't blame the production team for that, but at least the kind of ideological message there.
That America is socially mobile, that you can be an individual hero from just being ambitious and hardworking. And this idea that Hamilton started with calling his mother a whore and son of a whore and goths and Scotsman. It's not true that his mother was called a whore by in the court by someone who was trying to abuse and and and vilify her, but what's she.
So this over emphasis on him being from very humble backgrounds, but just through his own exertion of energy and and effort rose to what he was. And then where is Hamilton's financial ideologies? Of course, not emphasized. His hawkishness is neglected. So all of the troubling things that still matter.
America today, right? Hawkishness in foreign policy. This trust in, of course, we shouldn't over, shouldn't oversimplify that either, but his trust in them the financial system that he created and all of these are omitted in preference to, to give time. To glorify this individual heroism and social mobility story.
So I, I think that is quite ideological. And then, of course, at a superficial level, we can also look at the way the production team and the actors and actresses literally intervened, lecturing Mike Pence, not that he shouldn't be lectured on, but it just, now that you've seen the show, here is something we want to say to Mike Pence, who's sitting right there and the way they gave free tickets to the Hillary campaign.
It's quite obvious also at that kind of campaign political level. But I care more as a political philosopher, I care much more about the messages it delivers. And. Of course it resonates with Upper East Side, Upper West Side, New Yorkers who see it. But if you go to the Rust Belt, if you go to the Deep South, if you go to rural America and play Hamilton does it resonate with them?
Are you going to use Hamilton to turn around the upcoming election? I am seriously skeptical of that.
Ben: Maybe not. Although that that doubling down on this idea that the underdog through Just hard work and become the pinnacle of being America is the American, I'm going to say myth in the kind of most positive sense, like every nation state has to have it.
It's missed the British like underdogs and we like royalty, right? And the Americans like this American dream that, immigrants and that. And so it's really interesting the way you see it. And you can see from the outside that's being constructed. And yeah, there is a Democrat slant, but the actually it's, it is a left and right thing.
This idea that no matter how poor you start off with hard work, you can make it to the top, even how mythical in actual practice. That is for the average anyone, but average Americans, that's interesting. Wait, okay, we have a short section of underrated and overrated, and then we'll finish on current projects and life advice.
So just a couple of things random things about whether you think these things are underrated or overrated.
Sauerkraut.
Do you think sauerkraut is underrated or overrated?
Hansong: Underrated because of how global they actually are. And of course, German sauerkraut is overrated, but there is a global sauerkraut phenomenon.
Ben: So that's like kimchi and all the fermentation foods. Yeah. Okay. All right. Global sauerkraut. Underrated. The German version maybe not so much. Great. I stick on the food theme. Rice porridge or congee, do you think it's an underrated or overrated dish?
Hansong: Overrated in the white rice version of it.
Of course, you can have millet and other things we eat in the north. So I think because of the Cantonese influence, we always think of it as white rice. So again, I think it's. The narrow sense is overrated, but the broader idea of the porridge with grains in it. It's... underrated. The grain porridge.
Yeah. I've been cheating. I've been cheating. It's always the same.
Ben: Go into politics. On the one hand. Yes. On the other hand. No. So I'll take votes from both sides. Very good. Classical music today.
Hansong: Today. Yes.
Ben: No, I guess in the, in history, but I guess how we do it today. So is it underrated or overrated?
Hansong: Oh, wow, that's very difficult. I think it's I think it's still underrated.
[Cross-talk] Neutral. Yeah still under Yeah, I think it's the right amount in terms of the I think it's overrated in the industry.
In the industry I think the musical the classical music industry is in terrible shape so it it's not healthy but I think in terms of it's impact on the way of the way of thought.
In the way that we talked about the musicals it's underrated because we don't realize how it actually shapes society in very profound ways. But I think the classical music as an industry as a group of people doing what they're doing, I think it's overrated in the sense that there is inflated and it's not it's not.
It's all the market incentives are distorted and you don't have jobs for the musician, it's in horrible shape.
Ben: Okay. And last one on this, then maybe harking back to Hamilton, musical theater overrated, underrated. Should we have more or should we have less of musical theater? I
Hansong: think the right amount or a slightly overrated because but I shouldn't say that.
Let's say the right amount, because I think the at least by Broadway standards, I think it's still healthy. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. It's still very influential on, on the world. I think that's the one thing about arts and humanities, because we don't realize how. Yeah, so you don't have like in the hard sciences, you don't have exact answers and they change we know in the moment in the context.
They are so influential on [absolutely] how we are
Hansong: I would say it's underrated in China where I write these musical reviews.
Musicals have not become the standard currency of language or currency of thought In east asia yet. There are a lot of fans because But they don't really delve into the musicals in the ways that musicals are obviously scrutinized and interrogated very deeply in in Anglo American art.
So I think it's underrated in East Asia, I would say.
Ben: Yeah. It's interesting if I think of performative arts in the broad sense the popularity of TikTok to me. is a slight sign about both the power of essentially performance. These are just mini performances done by individuals.
Some of them are that, but the fact that it draws in such an audience and you have everything from the really banal and not to quite political thought embedded within essentially these performances, they were a form of performance. And I think it's a form of social artifact. Really social media overall, but even in the TikTok form I think it's a, it's a broadly thinking it's a kind of form of art or expression and actually it's a form of social expression.
[So absolutely] Yeah, it's really intriguing. Great. All right. Last couple of questions. What are your current projects that you're working on or anything in the future that you'd like to share?
Hansong: I'm working on a few projects. One is a global micro history of Shanghai's sand shipping industries in, 17, late 17th to the early 20th century. So from when sand shipping...
Ben: is that shipping literally gravel?
Hansong: In this, it started as a way of shipping on sandy maritime terrain. So you could easily run into these sandy rocks and other things. So it requires a slightly adjusted technology when it comes to navigation, but then it got into deep oceanic waters.
So at least start at the start, it was more like on the. In the yellow sea in the northeastern Asian seas, and then it slowly was able to go into the deeper and stormier waters of the South China Sea. The, but it's I also looked at the sociological phenomenon of sandshipping merchants, the way they integrate in an infrastructure.
Urban development in Shanghai. They were financing police stations. They were financing lifeguards along the seacoast, and they were building theaters for the city. And they also were increasing the enrollments of local academies and sending more people to Beijing for civil examinations. These are like, Shanghai is the Gentries who were generous who generated the profit from from shipping and they went to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, but also just between North and South China.
And then used to use our language of the surplus, to use their surplus to do these projects, these cultural projects, these political liaisons they've built within. And so it's a kind of global micro history of a. Of Shanghai as it turned from the late imperial to the international status.
So that's one project.
Ben: It's interesting how a lot of these big, important organizations, companies even call them put this, call it civic arm onto themselves as they get to a certain size. Even if you look at a Google alphabet today, they have a Google culture. Thing Apple have the same Facebook meta has the same micro Microsoft of this, the same.
And some of it is now called this. Social responsibilities here, something, but a lot of it is this, you're influencing the humanities and arts for either locally. So local companies always do it in their community, but then when you reach this global scale, because of this interaction of essentially social phenomena, which you then become a part of.
And if you don't influence it or steer it into your favor you're not as You're not thought of as the same as you're not as important. Absolutely. Anyway...
Hansong: As a historian of political and economic thought, I would add that in the early modern moment, the idea of the state as a corpus, as a body, and the idea as a of course the body and the state and the corporation.
And that's how it the, these ideas ran in parallel that the corporation was a corpus and was also a kind of state and the state was a kind of corpus and a corporation. And these three metaphors really were blended since the early modern era, and we're still living in that kind of intellectual legacy and thinking of states and enterprises, right?
We still draw these analogies between states and enterprises, but that's a small note. Yeah. Yeah. And the other project I am working on is a book on the ideas of interpolitical justice. In. In Western Indian Chinese traditions. So I draw from my classical and in analog chronological musings to shed light on how political communities have thought about ideas of justice across.
Territorial and cultural borders. And so it's a kind of comparative and connective a study of ideas of common justice in 3 different thought worlds. And so that is the more theoretical and normative project. And the Shanghai merchants are the fun project.
Ben: Excellent. Great. And then last question is, do you have any life advice or advice that you want to share?
Maybe advice thinking about being an international public intellectual or scholar or advice on music or the arts or your career or anything you'd like to share with us?
Hansong: My advice would be just to do a lot of travelings, because I'm a enthusiastic traveler, and of course, to the idea of being open minded to different ways of life, I think it's a very Herodotian anthropological starting point to be, to be in any but of course, certainly to be a public intellectual nowadays you have to be an inter public intellectual.
It's hard to be a public intellectual in the U. S. or in Europe without having something to say or just being able to understand what's happening in Ukraine and in Gaza. So it's no longer viable to be a public intellectual, you have to be inter public, and to be inter public you have to be able to think inter normatively.
How do you think inter normatively between different ways of different cosmological approaches to making sense of what's happening around the world of course learning more languages and talking to people from very different normative backgrounds, and of course to go there and take a look. So it's but it's also not this kind of globalist ideology of, Traveling around and it's, it could be very, it's in China, it's a medieval ideal of traveling around and blending in with with the landscapes wherever you go.
One of my favorite thinkers, poets writers, literati from the Weijing period, late Three Kingdoms, early Weijing moment Renzi, he was famous for having said, I think he said he his ideal life is Huo Bi Hu Shi Shu, Lei Yue Bu Chu. I would rather stay at home and close my windows and read for months and not go out.
Or he would travel around and and and forget to even return. So you can go in between these two modes and but the idea is, That is no longer viable to stick to a very enclosed a normative framework. Now that we have no choice, but to have something in mind about what's happening around the world and all the, and even just locally, how a global divisions of labor are affected.
In our local lives, and how we can no longer take anything for granted without regard to what kind of global understanding. So I think that would be a nice to travel a lot like Herodotus did Montesquieu did, like Montaigne did, and keep a travel journal as I do. Write down your conversations with the locals and reflect on them many years later, show it to your friends and families and hear what they think the more communicative assets to invoke the Harvard Marcian concept to globalize it, because Harvard must distort ethic is still quite limited in my view, but to expand it and have a kind of global discourse assets and do the conversations like we're doing right now with more people.
Ben: That sounds great. Yes. To travel is to learn. With that thank you very much.
Hansong: Thank you, Ben. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation.
