Some ideas that I still think about:

1. For the Chinese, the “barking dog” strategy doesn’t work. Especially in foreign diplomatic relationships, they seek and command respect. A polite request is considered to be more successful than a rude one. Quotes such as “we’re negotiating from a position of power” doesn’t often work.

For example, in March 2021, President Biden’s young director of national security, Jake Sullivan, opened a face-to-face session with his Chinese counterpart by saying: “We are negotiating with you from a position of power.” A position of power, whatever it means and regardless of its truthfulness, is an unusual expression in diplomacy.

“we Chinese never yield to a bully”

2. For an authoritarian rule, where there is no opposition party, one could argue that everything the Government does could be treated as the right thing.. however, they’re judged not by a sitting opposition, but by history. This viewpoint is very different from the way democracies work. Once the party is no longer in power, we don’t judge the past that harshly, instead our focus is much more on the present, and this could even be termed as some form of “neomania” in various occasions. The chinese still think strongly about the “century of humiliation”, the debacle of the Opium war where Hong Kong and Taiwan had to be ceded away from Mainland china. Looking at everything from the lens of history, also explains why China wants to finally end the era of humiliation by getting back Taiwan.

Chinese leaders are disciplined by their expectations of how they will be judged by history. I also explain that most people in mainland China perceive the country’s modern history as starting with the Opium War (1840–1842), which was the start of the “century of humiliation.” As a direct implication, the common view in mainland China is that Hong Kong and Taiwan have to be properly united with China in order to end the humiliation. Most important, perhaps, is that most Chinese, based on history, do not expect a rising China to replace the United States as the world’s hegemon, but they do believe that US-led preemptive attacks on China must be resolutely fended off.

In China, history itself is a very important check on power: Current leaders have to think twice when making decisions, since the weight of history’s judgment constrains their behavior. In the United States, my observation is that when a president leaves office, all is gone. History will make judgments, but the president would not personally bear a heavy load of accountability.

3. Is Chinese communist party a misnomer? How does reconcile the difference of Marxist doctrine with capitalism? After all, China is becoming more and more capitalist, and less state-owned.. The best explanation for this is what Den Xiaoping provides. He states that an ideal communist society is the end goal, but we’re very far away from that future, and in the short term we would still have to promote privatization of capital. So that, eventually social equality is also possible..

But how does the Chinese Communist Party reconcile itself with the Marxist doctrine that capitalism should be buried and a communist society should be built to replace it? Since the start of reform and opening up, the Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping has developed a theory that creating a communist society is a goal that will be realized far in the future. Until then, a type of socialism should be promoted in which private ownership of capital should be allowed in order to provide incentives for the economy to develop. Meanwhile, some social inequality should be tolerated so long as most people are making progress in their economic well-being. In official language, this is called the primitive stage of socialism, and this stage will last a long time. In practice, this means that the party manages the market economy with government intervention to prevent extreme volatility and inequality

4. Describing China’s history into three crucial periods:

The history of the Communist Party, which marked its one hundredth anniversary in July 2021, has deeply shaped its character. Its history can be best understood by dividing it into three periods. The first period covers the first fifty-five years, 1921–1976, mostly under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The second period covers the next thirty-five years, mostly under the influence of Deng Xiaoping, 1977–2011, and the third period started in 2012 under the current leadership of Xi Jinping.

5. I also didn’t know that Red Guards movement was criticised strongly even by the future governments after Mao. Most teachers were terrorized by young students seizing the schools for a purported revolution.

The most famous incident took place at Tsinghua University Affiliated High School, where students answered Mao’s call by drawing large character posters criticizing their teachers and the school principal. These students signed the posters using the pen name Red Guards, the personal and loyal guards of Mao. The Red Guards exploded into a massive movement that terrorized local party officials, school personnel, intellectuals, and anyone else labeled as revisionist, bourgeois, or antirevolutionary. Arguably, the phrase Red Guard is the most ingenious and successful stroke of political marketing in modern Chinese history. It was coined by a few junior high schoolers at the Tsinghua High School.

6. Den Xiaoping also started slowly opening up the economy of China to the outside world.. implementing sweeping reforms by which China would methodically “cross the river by feeling the stones..”
7. Party and government are quite intertwined in China due to the one-party rule. It’s similar to the usual trend in US, where presidents usually complete law school first.

Why do young people choose to join the party? The answer is actually quite simple: because the party manages personnel decisions. To become a government official, it is almost essential to join the party. To make a simple comparison, college graduates in the United States wishing to enter public service often attend law school first. The list of notable figures who have taken this path includes Presidents Clinton and Obama.

8. It’s also quite against Chinese culture to skip and jump across hierarchies. The successful Chinese candidate is usually the one who is meritorious, but also works hard. Which means that one should slowly climb up the ladder, one by one, block by block, and anything else which is unusual is frowned upon. Daokui Li mentions that this is also a big disadvantage as the candidate finally becomes the Premier, they have to get so much ingrained in the system taking +1 incremental steps to the finish line, that thinking “out of the box” becomes quite tricky..

It is interesting to compare the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of promotion with analogous practices in the United States or the West in general. The Chinese approach places emphasis on long-term evaluation and accumulation of experience through step-by-step hierarchical promotions in addition to qualifications and meritocracy. What is good about this practice is that by the time individuals are finally promoted to senior official positions, they possess extensive work experience.

9. Preservation of social order is considered more important than individual liberty. This is the opposite of modern liberal democracies.
10. Tuition fees are regulated in China. This was mainly because of the exorbitant spike in the executive MBA programs offered in China, and as a result the proportionate spike in tuitions that were catering to serve these audiences, making it even harder for the lesser priviledged to participate in an equal level playing field to get into these prestigious MBA programmes..

The tuition for executive MBA programs is also regulated by the NDRC. An executive MBA is a part-time MBA program offered to business executives. Of course, EMBA (Executive MBA) programs are also offered by US and European business schools. Chinese business schools have found that EMBA programs are very useful not only in boosting the schools’ revenue but also in adding some of the country’s most successful businesspeople to their alumni network. But since the tuition fees are quite high—around 100,000 USD for a two-year program—an uproar erupted on social media and the internet at large, saying that elite universities were being too greedy. As a result, the NDRC stepped in and began regulating tuition prices. The rationale for regulation is political: The government does not want to be accused of allowing state-owned universities to collect what are perceived to be exorbitant fees.

11. I also didn’t know about the Quanjude Peking Duck, similar to the McDonalds in the US. This was one of the “old-brand” restaurants that have existed forever.. After the Chinese revolution in 1949, it was gradually collectivised and transformed into a state-owned enterprise.

12. Not entirely convinced how SOEs are beneficial, but one advantage here is to accelerate implementation of policies which government in itself cannot..

The third reason why SOEs exist is that they can help the government implement certain policies that private enterprises may not. An obvious example is the Beijing Olympics in 2008, which was conducted on a grander scale than any Olympics in history—particularly the opening and closing ceremonies. Recent Olympics have proven to be enormously unprofitable and can burden a city with debt for many years. However, in the case of Beijing, the municipal government was actually able to turn a small profit. How was this possible? The simple answer is that the Beijing municipal government, with the help of the central government, made numerous requests to state-owned enterprises—such as to build a special power plant near the Olympic Park. In addition, SOEs were asked to rush deadlines for building facilities and roads, and were even requested to assist in ceremony rehearsals.

13. Confucian values also place business class folks at the lowest rung (remember, Merchants of Venice?)

Chinese entrepreneurs have had to fight social prejudice more than the American tycoons of the early 1900s. The reason is that Confucian values place businessmen among society’s lowest classes. In many ancient civilizations around the world, merchants and businesspeople were not held in high esteem within the social hierarchy. In fact, most were subjected to severe discrimination, as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This attitude was particularly prevalent in China, where Confucianism designated the king and his relatives as the highest class, followed by government officials, scholars, and peasants. Artisans and merchants were ranked the lowest. Even today, this tradition remains deeply embedded in peoples’ psyches. This could explain why many private entrepreneurs, after becoming successful, seek to establish close relationships with academics.

14. College entrance exams are as closely guarded in the way bankers guard cash. Satellite tracking. and all that.

China’s college entrance exams are perhaps the most rigorously organized exams in the world. A few days before the exams, the exam papers are guarded as closely as bankers guard their cash, and satellite tracking is employed to monitor the movement of each box of the exam papers. Occasionally, news surfaces that the contents of the exams were leaked by accident. Whenever this happens, it becomes a nationwide scandal because exams are considered the most sacred and equitable form of competition in China. New exams will be given in such cases. Before the test, all who were involved in designing the exam questions are secluded in a hotel until the exams conclude. After the exam, a large contingent of graders, numbered in the tens of thousands, are also secluded while doing the grading. All answer sheets are supposed to be anonymous. Any answer sheets with a possibility of disclosing the identity of the student would be voided.