Doing What's Easy vs. Doing What's Right

Rui Zhong draws a connection between China-watchers' responsibilities towards China, the US, and Palestine.

Rui Zhong is a policy specialist focusing on US-China relations. In this conversation, we discuss our responsibilities towards both China and the US, the China-watching community’s silence on Palestine, and the material risks needed to bring about change. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You can find more of Rui’s writing here.

This is the second interview in a series exploring how people whose work involves China are thinking about the rise of authoritarianism in the US and what role we should play. You can read the first interview here. If you’d like to share your thoughts on this topic and potentially contribute (even anonymously), please reach out.

Sunset from a sleeper train between Dingxi and Lanzhou. January 2019. Source: Arthur Kaufman

Arthur: How does your identity affect how you engage with China in your work?

Rui: I would say that my identity definitely informs a pretty large component of how I study China because I've always had family there. It's not something that you can very easily remove. Being a 1.5-generation Chinese-American has been a big part of my language and cultural habits. This has definitely been really beneficial but also limiting in a lot of ways. Limiting both in terms of discrimination, as a Chinese-American woman, but also with the biases ingrained in me as a cisgender Han woman. I think there's this in-between space that somebody with my combination of identities occupies. So while doing work, this is something that I try to be aware of in various circumstances in which I'm talking to different people from different walks of life.

Arthur: It sounds like the connection between your identity and your work imposes a sort of responsibility on you. Is that accurate, and if so, how do you view that sense of responsibility?

Rui: I think that we all have responsibilities to examine how we are conditioned or raised for certain things to be the default, and then to assess whether or not that's a value that we want to continue on with or start questioning and exploring a little bit more. I think that's a perfectly natural thing to do. For some people, they're more eager to get into that than others. But for me, that sense of inquiry has been a big part of my reading and I think it's made my overall research and analytical work better for it. And it's not just the surface-level "check your privilege," but it's the question of who holds power, what are the consequences of powerful people's policy in this time, place, etc. Contextualizing that is really important to me.

Arthur: Could you give an example of how that plays out in your work as it relates to China?

Rui: Sure. So I've written about class in China. My family is a white-collar one. So we do approach issues like this from a position of privilege, but at the same time I question what kind of voices are getting omitted and where we should start. So I would probably be finding out different types of social media posts or other types of perspectives offered by migrant workers who are feeling frustrated over how they've been treated by Chinese people during zero-COVID and to try to get a larger-scale sense of the picture on those issues.

Thinking outside of the China-watcher box is something that I try to do as often as as possible. I like looking at different blogs on social media, different reports, different academic work by people outside of my functional or regional specialty. One of my favorite books on electronic propaganda, censorship, and social media is actually by a Kenyan scholar named Nanjala Nyabola. It was really eye opening to look at how consent is manufactured even if it's not directly related to my field of study. I try to keep my mind open and be open to learning from different sources.

“It’s the question of who holds power, what are the consequences of powerful people's policy in this time, place, etc. … what kind of voices are getting omitted and where should we start.”

Arthur: When it comes to other people in the China-studies field, like American academics or think-tankers, what kind of responsibilities do you think they have when it comes to how they engage with China, even if they don't share your same identity or background?

Rui: At the end of the day, what I would really like people to try to do even if we're not ideologically aligned is to understand that your job is secondary to the material well-being of people in and affected by China. I say "in and affected" because it's a very broad community that's impacted by the many consequential things decided by the Chinese state. This applies to myself as well. It's not great that I'm job hunting and it's frustrating to look at how foreign policy in Washington is right now. But at the end of the day, my material condition is going to be really different from other people inside China and people who are affected by Chinese politics and state policy.

Arthur: I'm curious about how the US factors into this. In addition to work about China, what kind of responsibilities would you say that you and others in the China-studies field have towards the US?

Rui: This is one of the things that I really have struggled to reconcile with a lot of colleagues. At the end of the day, you log off your computer, you stop working on your project, and you have to be an informed part of American civil society if you live in America. Obviously, it sucks being "on" as a political analyst all the time. But at the same time, we owe it to our discipline and to our mission to talk with the public, to make things understandable, to frankly assess authoritarianism, censorship, propaganda, and overreach by law enforcement entities, regardless of who is conducting the overreach.

Arthur: I very much agree. It's been frustrating to see how a lot of people in the field are able to do their work on China, or criticize human rights abuses in China, and then like you said they log off and happen to be less interested in engaging with very similar human rights abuses that we see in the US, even though many of them are US citizens living in the US and working for American organizations.

Rui: Right. And it's less a question of whataboutism, which I think is the common deflection on these issues, but it's also that these are consequential policies. Either you are a specialist in these subject matters of authoritarianism and political repression, or you're not. There's no circuit breaker when it comes to, "Oh, this is a little bit more risky for me." People have criticized Chinese scholars for self-censorship, so what's going on?

Arthur: I want to talk about Palestine, as well. From your perspective, how would you say the China-studies community in the US has handled both Israel's genocide in Gaza and also the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices in the US?

Rui: Back in April, a professor named Eman Abdelhadi was scheduled to talk at a conference of the University of Notre Dame's Institute for International Peace Studies, and the dean of the university's School of Global Affairs, Mary E. Gallagher, wrote her and said: “We were unaware of your planned lecture, and since this conference overlaps with two other annual events on campus, we cannot provide security at short notice. For this reason, we respectfully request that you do not participate in the conference.” Gallagher is a scholar whose work I read and really respected in the past. Her writing on social media in China in the 2000s and China's manipulation of key opinion leaders is something that was really fundamental to my work. So, to see her in her authority as a dean at Notre Dame telling an academic to not participate because it could be a potential security issue—It's something that was very formative in showing me where China practitioners are. I don't know how many China practitioners are deans at major research universities, but if this is a representative sample of the behavior and the type of conduct that is going to be the norm, it's not a good sign for the field, because in practice I can't really classify it as anything except self-censorship. This idea of writing it off as "we need more security for this, therefore do not talk about this," it's honestly a really big setback for China studies that somebody with this much seniority within China practice makes that kind of decision.

Arthur: I totally agree. And that was a particularly egregious example of hypocrisy, in that she has previously written critically about censorship in China.

Rui: Yeah. I don't know what the current state of China work is like but I feel like a lot of people think, "We'll just keep our heads down and keep working. We don't have to talk about Palestine. This has nothing to do with China. We can just talk about China and coast." The fact that Trump just banned the entry of Chinese students wholesale, regardless of political affiliation, is a sign that you can't actually do that. The shoe is just going to keep dropping. At the end of the day, you're either prepared or you're going to get caught unawares. So what's it going to be?

“A lot of people think, ‘We'll just keep our heads down and keep working. We don't have to talk about Palestine. This has nothing to do with China…’ But you can't actually do that. The shoe is just going to keep dropping.”

Arthur: To what extent do you think that Mary Gallagher's handling of Israel's genocide in Gaza and censorship of Palestinian voices in the US is representative of how most other people in the China-studies field have also approached those issues? Would you say her case is unique?

Rui: I would not say that, because as a default the US tends to regard its alliance with the Israeli state as something that's bordering on sacred. There's been bipartisan support and continuous military aid from the Biden administration seamlessly to the Trump administration, even with significant cuts to USAID and the State Department. So the sense that this issue is untouchable definitely permeates from the State Department and Congress to academic spaces. Academic repression has cracked down on numerous scholars who have made clear positions on Palestine and who were foreign born. They were torn apart from their families and detained. Many international scholars remain detained, some of them outside of their state of residence. I don't see China-sector people and international-relations people discussing this. If China were removing scholars and detaining them with no trial and no criminal charges, you would see a huge rallying of dissident speakers, big multi-day conferences stating something like, "Oh, they've really crossed the line this time," etc.

But because of the special status of the cause of Israeli state violence, there's a carveout for it. People who talk about it are seen as crazy, anti-Semitic, including Jewish critics who suddenly don't count. And as a Chinese ethnic person who criticizes the Chinese government, I kind of sympathize with them because I also get told that I don't count. So, welcome to the club. The exclusionary way that American civil society organizations have worked in tandem with the American state's interests makes it tough to hold a position other than saying that they should just release the hostages and that we're not going to talk about any other type of violence that occurred during this time period. So, it's very frustrating. I'm not sure where it leads because I don't really see this going anywhere better.

Arthur: Coming back to more specifically the China-studies community, what do you think accounts for their reaction to what's happening in Gaza and their apparent silence when it comes to the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices in the US?

Rui: I can't say how Gallagher got to her position personally because I feel like she was acting in an official capacity. But at the same time, I don't think there's a whole lot of personal support from a lot of China practitioners. They might feel bad slightly, but then they're not going to do anything substantive to advocate against the degree of military aid that the US sends to Israel. They don't really want to change anything significant. In terms of substantive material change or efficacy, I don't think it's something that they're very interested in. The position of the American China- and Asia-watching communities is just one of relative indifference. It's not something that that comes up a lot because the US now has its own homegrown authoritarian problems, and now they typically will just mention Gaza by saying, "Oh my god, can't you have just held your nose and voted for Harris?" People are very defensive about stuff that's more close to home on politics. There's not a lot of room for people to do self-reflection on that issue right now. Raising the question is kind of a non-starter at this point. I just don't know if I can expect people to change.

“If somebody made their name on human rights and pushing back against authoritarian practices, then [Gaza] is definitely something they should be talking about, because otherwise what are you doing? What are you waiting for?”

Arthur: But I'd love to hear you make the case for why they should, assuming that you do think they should change their stance. Why should they be taking this seriously and calling out these abuses related to Palestine?

Rui: Well, it's very simple: because any type of material change might increase the chances of food, medicine, blankets, or a better tent going to families in Gaza in real time. It's not theoretical. They are constantly scrambling for black-market bags of flower. This is happening in real time. I'm really hoping that people can start applying pressure in whatever capacity they can, and advocating for more multilateral organizations to operate freely in and out of the Gaza Strip, and for more oversight over Israeli army conduct. The material change that those things would bring to people that are experiencing horrific hunger, sickness, and other health-related problems in this blockade would be very meaningful to them. That's why I would advocate for some kind of sea change in how American foreign policy specialists conduct themselves. We started our conversation asking who is most impacted by this. On Palestine, it's those people.

Arthur: And this responsibility is not just for American foreign-policy specialists, but specifically people in the China-watching community.

Rui: If somebody made their name on human rights and pushing back against authoritarian practices, then that's definitely something they should be talking about, because otherwise what are you doing? What are you waiting for?

“People are going to have to start getting a little bit more uncomfortable. Frankly, will it be a little bit detrimental to people's careers? I don't know, maybe… But at the end of the day, do you want to do what's easy or do you want to do what's right?”

Arthur: What would you concretely want to see other people in the China-studies community doing in order to better address all that? What advice or recommendations would you have? I imagine some people who read this might somewhat agree but wonder what that looks like for them personally.

Rui: The material risk that China-studies people will need to take is thinking about their connections to Capital Hill and the State Department, and whether it's really worth maintaining those. What I mean by this is the following. Every single year I see people getting summoned to do testimony at different types of Congressional hearings, in open events, panels, and closed-door sessions. The way they more or less treat those occasions—it's like watching people do like a pleasant little visit in a Jane Austen novel. There's never anything challenged in terms of power, in terms of perspective. In order to really raise the issue publicly, people are going to have to start getting a little bit more uncomfortable. Frankly, will it be a little bit detrimental to people's careers? I don't know, maybe, because people on the Hill are fairly thin-skinned about this sort of thing. But at the end of the day, do you want to do what's easy or do you want to do what's right? I can't answer that question for people. Using opportunities on platforms, panels, hearings, submitting, expertise, discussing these types of problems with clarity and with conviction is something that I think that most experts could be doing a lot more.