Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Here in the US, coronavirus seems to be spreading steadily. Now. I know we cover this in a special episode last week with Mark Lipsitch, But for me, this whole pandemic issue is still very much front of mind, and it feels like most people I've talked to over the last few days are thinking pretty much the same thing. As of my taping this on Monday night, ten states have now reported cases Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, and New York. With its geographical spread, that list tells you that pretty shortly it'll be all fifty states that have cases. But in China, where the epidemic first erupted, the outbreak, at least for the moment, appears appears to finally be slowing down. About a week ago, as that process was beginning, I spoke to Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's based in Beijing. I asked him what life is like in a city where everybody is sheltering in place, all twenty million of them in Tell me what the mood is among the people you speak to with regard to coronavirus. Well, there are some cities in China where for a couple of weeks, although things are loosening up a bit now, they had people under complete lockdown where you couldn't leave your housing compound without permission, or sometimes families could only leave their housing compound once every couple of days to go shopping or something like that, where all the park sort of closed. In Beijing, which is of course a big city, so it's even hard to generalize in Beijing, but it's a little easier the parks are open, and of course in the capital, buying groceries and so on is no problem. And I guess also the thing in Beijing, the government's influence is probably at its strongest, just like probably in any capital city. So I think overall in Beijing, the sense I get is that people are they're getting a little frustrated. They're feeling that boy has been going on for a while. The government's asking us not to meet anyone, not to go out. But how long are we supposed to do this? I think when it started. It started right around Chinese New Year, which is a time when people tend to be more inwardly focused anyway, visiting family members, and so it became sort of like a really long Thanksgiving weekend or something like that, which is good or bad depending on how you're feeling about your family at the end of Thanksgiving weekend exactly, you know, sort of again the weekend from hell. And I think that's what it's going to become for some people, because this long weekend's gone into two weeks and now it's a month, and people are start of wondering, well, when's this going to end? In one sense is in the government that there are people asking that question. Also, even if for another reason than GDP reasons like when can the economy get going again? So I think there's a little bit of frustration and percolating up. The frustration makes perfect sense to me. This is sort of fascinating that almost precisely at the moment that you're describing people in Beijing thinking can this be over? Already? In much of the rest of the world, people are waking up to think, oh my goodness, this might just be getting started. Do you think that in Beijing there just haven't been a large number of reported cases, so people don't have a sense of the immediacy of the danger. Yeah, I think it's partly about but I think the government also set this up wrong. The government set this up as a quick crisis that it could manage and come out successful, where they were going to put the country into lockdown, implement these your onian measures for two weeks or four weeks, and in some ways, statistically we are You see the rate of increase in China has gone way down. But also as the country gets back to work, people are going to come into contact with each other. You can't have even Hubei Province can't stay indefinitely locked down. This would be almost like the entire Midwest. This would be like Chicago plus Illinois plus maybe Michigan to So to get a sense of the overall economic impact of Hubei Province right at the crossroads of the country being locked down. That can't go on forever, and so it's going to spread. They're going to be other centers of the epidemic, and the government hasn't set people up for this. The messaging is sort of off. It's that it's going to be over by now, and these draconian measures are going to stop, but I don't know what they're going to do when this continues on. I think everybody now has come to the realization in the sort of expert community that this is going to continue on for months to come. The Chinese government is pretty sophisticated in managing the way that its own citizens make sense of what's going on in the world, and I'm wondering if there isn't a pivot point available to them as it becomes more of a global phenomenon. Is there a way for the Chinese government to say to their own citizens, Look, this is bigger than just us, and we're just doing what everyone else in the world is going to have to do, and this is an unfortunate normal, But don't look at us and say, why didn't you solve this? After all, no government in the world has a simple or straightforward solution to this problem. It's nature. And in a way, might that in a sense almost let them off the hook. Yeah, I think that would work better if the government weren't partly culpable for the outbreak, and they also just haven't been able to downplay that that is still kind of popularly understood on some level that there were these whistleblowers, they did try to say something, and at least local officials were responsible for the outbreak. Now I think the government's going to try to just push all onto the local officials. But I think there is on some level and Moong more sophisticated people or not maybe more sophisticated the wrong world, but maybe in a narrower group of people, there's an understanding that the government was also responsible. So that makes it harder to make that case. I think, is it clear that had the early whistle blower has been taken more seriously, that could have actually contained the virus, because the sense that I have from speaking to epidemiologists is that as we learn more about how the virus spreads and whether you can spread the virus when you don't have any symptoms at all, it's at least possible that nothing that the government could have done would really have been able to contain this well. I think that's right. I think the government sort of hasn't made that argument yet, but it's probably true. And I mean, even this heroic guy who died the face of the whistleblower Leeu and Leang, the doctor whose image is now ubiquitous even in Chinese social media. He wasn't a real whistleblower. He was telling a social media group of friends of classmates about this. It wasn't as if he had filed a formal complaint to the government or gone on widespread social media about this. So it just shows, of course how ubiquitous the government censorship is that they can even see what you're saying to your classmates. But he hadn't actually started a process that could have resulted in anything, even if the government had been open to it. So yeah, I think that's that's probably true. It's not clear at all that that would have changed things, but at least there's a sense in terms of trying to make win the pr battle that the government's partly responsible for it. What is your daily life like in light of the current situation. Well, my daily life, like other people's, is sharply constrained. So it's very hard to go and meet people because for the people who are buying the government line, they're still like, oh, we better not meet because the government's told we shouldn't read people. And then even for the people who aren't binding the government line, is getting harder and harder to get into people's housing compounds, because if you just go to somebody's apartment block and to try to get in, you can't even necessarily get into the building. And then with most restaurants and cafes closed, the most you can do is go for a walk in the park or something like that with somebody. So it's hard to get as much information as before. It's sort of fascinating because it draws out the ways in which a quarantine works alongside technological control to really shift the way information spreads. That sounds as if for someone like you who talks to people about things that they may not want the government to hear, there's actually a real limitation on your ability to gather information. Yes, it is hard to talk to people. I mean I think when you read things on social media, you really have to parse things. And I find a look at an article on social media, and one of the things I try to do because things get erased so quickly, is I'll quickly send myself on wa chat. There'd be things through these articles that people write, they sort of self published someone wa chat, and so I'll see something like this, some sort of edgypiece about how the governments in trouble and so on and so forth, and I'll quickly save the URL and printed to PDF for something like that, so that if it's gone, I still have a record of it. But I sometimes have to do that really quickly, because if I sort of say, oh, I'll do that in a couple of hours, I go back and reopen the URL and it's been closed. So the government's pretty quick on that, although sometimes what I'm surprised is that not everything is erased. And I just had an article that somebody sent me the other day on how nothing will nothing can be the same after the coronavirus, and partly they were talking about how the government had to allow a free or flow of information. They avoided key words that would cause the bots to censor the article, like freedom of speech and stuff like that, but I was surprised that that hasn't been eras yet. Do you have a theory about why. I think partly the censorship works on two levels. One is they have bots to just go through and so if you say something like you know, the Nobel Prize winning dissident to Leosha boy, you put those three characters out there boom, your piece is probably going to be automatically erased. But I think also things that are a little harder to tell from just if if you're just using AI, maybe you need a human eye on it. I think the flood of articles right now is such that probably the censors are just a little bit behind on their work. You know, that's probably the only explaination. I don't think it means that there's a split in the government and that therefore the information is getting out because someone in the propaganda ministry, etcetera, etcetera. I don't think. I don't think that's happening. In light of what you have described as genuine mismanagement of the crisis from the standpoint of the government, and in light of the fact that this is, you know, almost certainly the most significant threat to the country that Chi Jinping has faced during his entire time in office. What do you think are likely to be the longer term consequences for his relatively still young transformation of the political codes of the country. Well, I hate to say it depends, but it sort of depends on how quickly we can pull out of this. It's like the government has sort of put the patient in a coma to try to solve the illness, and now I was going to try to pull it out of the coma. And if that works and the illness is cured literally and metaphorically, then I think the government can still say it was a big success. You know, we took firm, resolute measures, and it was difficult. And GDP's taken a hit and probably will be you know, zero in the first quarter or something like that, but this was a difficult situation. It was a national crisis, and we did the right thing and so on and so forth. But if this goes on, and if we do indeed have another wave of cases, which a lot of people are expecting as the country gets back to work, and if there's maybe another wave again in the autumn, which is sometimes a possibility in these patterns, and the numbers keep going up and up and up, I think it will be hard for this to not be seen as another really major crisis. The memory of the SARS crisis of two thousand and two and two thousand and three is still surprisingly fresh for people who were saying over thirty or thirty five years of age, people still refer to it all the time, and that it wasn't really handled maybe all that well. So I wonder whether this isn't going to be another one. In fact, I think it's going to be hard for it not to be a case like that, unless this turns into some full blown real disaster or with tens of thousands of people dead or something. I don't think this is going to be a Chernobyl type event, which is the other scenario that people look at. It's amazing how the government can control these narratives. Thirty one years ago there was a Channeman Square crackdown when hundreds and hundreds of people were gunned down to death in the center of Beijing. The government came out of that wounded and damaged, but still okay, and was able to keep control. I think one always has to be careful in China about saying this is a turning point that will shake people's faith in the system. People's stability to believe in the system again, just like in any country, is amazingly resilient. So I'm hesitant to say that this will be a turning point or shake thing. So what you say it makes enormous sense, especially with respect to the overall system of Communist Party rule. I guess what I'm wondering about is whether, at just a more micro level it might have an effect on Shijun Ping's own bid to say, remain in power you much longer than his predecessors have done. Do you see it having a micro effect on those internal party developments and debates. I think it can. I think the problem with is that he hasn't also really handled this very well. I don't think this is I'm not trying to project what I think a Western politician would have or should have done in this case, in other words, that they should be out glad handing people or visiting all the emergency wars and so on. But the only visibility that he's shown at all was to go to one neighborhood in Beijing, which is not badly affected at all. The city and the neighborhood is not particularly affected, so that is not much visibility. He's made speeches and said sort of the right thing. He recently said that this was a grave and serious crisis to the country. But he's normally at the forefront of these kind of big things, and it looks, I think even for casual viewers, it looks as if he's not willing to take responsibility because it is such a problem, and he's let the premier, who is supposed to be in charge of the leavers of the actual bureaucracy and government, he's let him take a greater role. Although even he hasn't been really out there every day. So I guess there are different models of authoritarian rule. There's a sort of Putin model, which is he's you be out there probably on talk shows and fielding questions and stuff like that. Teaching thing would never be like that anyway, but he's been, I think, quite noticeably absent from the day to day managing of a crisis. One story that's gotten a fair amount of coverage outside of China is the Chinese government's decision to expel three journalists associated with the Wall Street Journal in retaliation for the headline of an op ed editorial piece. The headline referred to China as the sick man of Asia, a reference to a nineteenth century formulation that was actually mostly used about Turkey in the nineteenth century, although I learned in this context it was also sometimes said about China. My first question is, are you surprised by the government's decision to do that? Well, I am surprised. You know, I could see where they would expel perhaps one person, but three seems a lot. It must also be tied to the State Department's decision to declare Chinese media companies to be the agents of foreign influence or something like that, that they're essentially working for the state, which is accurate, but that that was sort of maybe in Chinese do a provocation or throwing the gauntlet down, and so they had to say something. So I think the number of people probably went up from one to three. The government had been asking for several days for some sort of an apology, the people in the journal even before the expulsion, the people on the news side of it, the reporters in the bureau, many people were sort of appalled at it. So I think that it was something that the government probably felt it had to do something not to be sort of a conspiracy theorist, because this is sort of hard to prove this, but I think this also plays wonderfully into the government's narrative. I mean, this was something that they could blast out on social media. I don't think this term sick man of Asia. It was to me sort of a face plant, a grown sort of like, Oh, I can't believe they did that headline. I mean, I worked the Walsta Journal for many years. I know the opinion page very well, and they like to provoke. They like to make people to get up and notice something, and so it's not atypical for them. But when I saw that, I was okay. So I was a little shocked, but I was even more shocked by the government's reaction. And I think it's a nice way for them to shift attention away from the crisis and be able to blame a foreign country for kicking China while it's down and stuff like that. I think it's this outrage has been really fomented by the government and probably they're quite happy for this sort of thing. And this might also be a precursor of a strategy in the future if the crisis spins out of control and we feel a need to somehow sort of divert attention and blame foreigners, etc. Going back to your face palm reaction. Was your reaction because you thought to yourself, Oh, my goodness, this is going to make the Chinese government crazy? Or was your reaction? Boy, that's actually kind of offensive, because, as I discovered after a little poll of my friends and family. Most people are not going to get their reference to, you know, nineteenth century European treatment of the Ottoman Empire, and so most people are just going to see it as a kind of you know, almost quasi racist statement that China is sick in some way because of the coronavirus. Well, I mean, first of all, my face plant failing was like, this is a stupid cliche. I can't believe they're using that. But you know, I think when countries are down. Historically, when they've been down, they often look to analogies to the human body. You know, if you go back to say Germany in the mid nineteenth century, there was this movement among nationalists who wanted to unite Germany to literally improve the physical strength of people to get out there and climb mountains and do outdoors activities and things like that, to strengthen the physical body of the people, and that would strengthen the body politic and the national character and so on and so forth. And so I think it is sort of on a deeper level, it is sort of insulting to people to imply that their country is sick and that it has some sort of fundamental illness. I know, the article itself didn't make that the case exactly like that. It was saying there was something wrong with the political system. But you can see where people might take it if they're not really reading the article anyway, and they're just reading this stuff on social media third hand and fourth hand and so on and so forth, that they would say, hey, you know, China is not sick. And the whole story the columnist party is pushed over the past seven years is that the Chinese people have stood up. That's what Mao said in nineteen forty nine at think Dat of Heavenly Peace in downtown Beijing. This is his famous of saying at the founding the People's Republic, we've stood up. We're on our own two feet. And then a few years later they fight the US to a down still in the Korean War. So now to sort of imply that China is weak and sick, it is a bit of a provocation to many people. So before the coronavirus story came to dominate your coverage and the West's consumption of news about China, you were doing amazing work in explaining the complexities of the Hong Kong protests to the rest of us, and I was following your coverage of that extremely closely, and in fact, when my producer Lydia Jina first reached out to you, we thought, well, we'll talk to Ian about Hong Kong. Presumably Hong Kong is going to have to undergo the same kind of nobody in the streets, nobody talking to each other, shelter in place arrangement as other major cities in China have been undergoing. What is that going to do to the protest movement that otherwise was sort of continuing. Well, I think in the short term, this, of course will make it hard to have protests if you're not allowed to be out on the streets. But I think it feeds much more strongly, much more importantly. I think it feeds into this overall feeling that we don't want to be part of this governing system which is sort of not on our level. I mean, I think there's this feeling among Hong Kong people at some basic level that we're much more advanced. We've got a modern, functioning, cosmopolitan city that we built. Yes, it was a British colony, but we Hong Kong people, we built the city. These are our freedoms and so on, and we don't want to lose this, and we don't want to be part of this sort of messed up system north of the border that isn't able to handle a public health emergency without having a giant conniption fit that you know, has all these other problems. So I think they're going to look at this as further proof of the incompatibility of Hong Kong with the mainland, and when people in the mainland get frustrated about those people south of the board are protesting all the time, those uppity, no good Hong Kong people, great, thankless Hong kongress. One of the first things people in the mainland say is let's just cut off the water supply and see how long that works, or the food supply and so on and so forth. So you know, the two places are really closely linked, of course, and of course we all are, and Hong Kong's just going to catch this earlier. But we're seeing this spread to other neighboring countries South Korea, obviously, Japan. This shows probably the well, it'll make it hard for people in Hong Kong to avoid what's going on. No matter how much they want to independent of the virus, was it your sense that the protests were losing steam or that they had just sort of entered a phase of institutionalization where people were accustomed to them and working around them to the extent that they could, and they were going to remain a challenging facet of life. We've had a series of protests over the past say ten years. They come, they go, they come, they go, but they seem to just it SEMs like a roller coaster ride, but maybe where the altitude keeps increasing, so you're just you are dipping down a little bit, but you go up to newer highs. You go down a little bit, but you go up again. And I think we might see that again, maybe after the coronavirus ends, if there's no end to the political crisis, if there's no accommodation from the side of Beijing, that will probably see a new wave of protests, perhaps later this year or next year. Last question for you in I know you go back and forth frequently between Beijing and London. Can you still do that? What will happen to you when you go to London? Are you allowed to fight to London? You have to stay in quarantine. You know what's going to happen. Well, I am planning to go to London. There's no, for example, British Airway flights, but there is Air China, which is the national carrier and probably a great financial loss, is still flying to countries around the world. So I still have an Air China flight booked, and unless things change dramatically, I guess I'll be out of here. But yeah, I'm going to self quarantine myself. I have a family member on the outskirts of London who has a big country house and has given me a wing of the place and just said you can just hang out there for two weeks. And so I'm going to do that and go for walks in the English countryside and do writing on my computer and so on, and then I'll be clean and then I'll come back to China again in a few months when I can get more work done, because basically the problem here is it's really hard to do any research, to go out and talk to people because the country is in such lockdown. Well, I hope you're extended English country weekend with your own wing of the house is an enjoyable one, but more importantly, and I hope you stay healthy and well yourself. And thank you for speaking to me, and thank you for your steady stream of insightful analysis of events in China. Bye, thank you, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. We caught up with Ian when he had just returned in the UK. Here's what he says. Yes, I've arrived in the UK. It was shockingly easy. I thought a guard's regiment might forcibly take our temperature, or at least ask of our contact information in case someone had to track down those who had contact with an infected person. But nothing of the sort happened. I arrived when through an automated passport control and was in a car in a few minutes. Now that's a little bit upsetting. If that's how you traveled from China to the UK right now, that may have consequences for the rest of the world. Ian, however, is a good citizen and a good sport. He's now in the empty wing of his relatives country home south of London. He's going for long walks through the English countryside while avoiding pubs, swimming pools and any other place where people congregate. It's nice work. If you can get it. We'll be back with this week's playback in just a moment, and now our playback. That's the sound of clapping in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where a representative of the US government and a representative of the Afghan Taliban signed a peace agreement this weekend. The clapping notwithstanding, this is an agreement that's already facing very significant challenges, and those challenges are only going to get greater. To understand why, you have to begin with a painful fact about the nearly twenty year US engagement in Afghanistan. By any ordinary military standard, it ultimately looks like a defeat. It didn't start that way. When the United States first came into Afghanistan, it very effectively and very rapidly made the Taliban leave the country, and that, after all, was the initial reason for the invasion. The idea was number one, get rid of the Taliban. Number two, catch as many members of Al Qaida as it's possible to get our hands on. The trouble was that happened almost too quickly, and then gradually imperceptibly over time, the US mission in Afghanistan changed. Ultimately, the argument was that the United States should make an effort of some kind to produce some kind of stable, functioning, quasi democratic government in Afghanistan, and yet the government that presently exists in the country is very very loosely democratic and only stable in the loosest sense of the word. In fact, most observers believe that should the United States actually withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, as it has promised eventually to do in this agreement, that that government would have a great deal of trouble, withstanding a serious attack from the Taliban now in order to get there, the so called agreement between the United States and the talis An Agreement, which notably does not yet include Afghanistan as a party, says that the Taliban are supposed to negotiate a peace with the Afghan government and put down their arms. From there, we're supposed to move on to an eventual US withdrawal of all of its troops. But from the standpoint of the Taliban, they don't have any really strong reason to put down their arms if it would require them to form a compromise with the current government that would not be to the Taliban's liking. The reason for that is that once the United States has said publicly that it intends to leave Afghanistan, its leverage to force the Taliban to do anything other than whatever it wants is reduced very drastically. After all, all along in this war, the only thing the United States has ever been able to do when it wanted the Taliban to listen to it was to continue to fight the Taliban. That's why, within a few days of the initial agreement, the Taliban demanded that if the Afghan government wanted to negotiate with it, the Afghan government would have to free five thousand Taliban prisoners. For their part, the Afghan government is terrified about the possibility of an actual US withdrawal, so it's in the Afghan government's interest to delay that as long as possible. Consequently, the Afghan simply said, we're not handing over the five thousand Taliban prisoners, which means that at least as of right now, the Taliban on the one hand and the government of Afghanistan on the other hand, are not even on speaking terms. Technically, without an agreement between them, the United States cannot withdraw and therefore the agreement between the United States and the Taliban might turn out to be more symbolic than actual. Nevertheless, this agreement probably will have a major long term consequence, and that long term consequence is primarily in the US domestic context. Donald Trump, in the run up to a reelection, seems fully prepared to do what none of his predecessors were willing to do and essentially admit defeat in Afghanistan by agreeing to do a deal with the Taliban. Barack Obama was not prepared to do that, even in a second term when he himself was not running for reelection. George W. Bush wasn't prepared to do it in either of his terms as president. Both of them ended up owning the American involvement in Afghanistan, and the history books will so record. Donald Trump, on the other hand, despite to a great extent continuing the Obama administration's policies in the first part of his term, has actually now signaled a willingness to bite the bullet to say that the United States actually must get out, and Trump will now carry the historical legacy of the willingness to withdraw even if the United States doesn't withdraw in either of his potentially two terms in office. I hate to say it, but that's actually a major gift that Donald Trump is making to the United States and also to a future president, any future president, and it's no secret that my view is that it would be better for it to be anyone other than Donald Trump. In twenty twenty, we'll be able to continue the Trump policy of saying that the United States has signed a deal and is prepared to leave the country. That will be a tremendous advantage because it will mean that that president will not have to say we agreed to lose the war on my watch. There is, however, a final coda, as there almost always is. No US president is going to want to preside over scenes in Kabble that are reminiscent of the famous scenes of the US withdrawal from Saigon in nineteen seventy five. No one will want to be present in the United States with helicopters flying out with the last US personnel and tens or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Afghans begging to be on those helicopters. And yet that scenario is entirely possible if the US government ultimately withdraws troops and if the Taliban move on the city in a serious military way. The agreement does give Donald Trump the flexibility to say that, under those circumstances with a Taliban army heading to Cobble, that the United States would not withdraw, but it seems entirely possible that Donald Trump would be willing to do so, and to bear even that price. A remarkable consequence of Trump's confidence that his base will support him almost no matter what his apparent belief that he cannot be made to look weak on foreign policy, no matter what his actual policies are, and Trump's conviction probably accurate that most Americans, even if they would feel bad in the short term at such a painful public betrayal of the Afghan people, are ultimately tired of this war. The upshot of all of this as if the United States will at some point find itself with its troops out of Afghanistan, and the consequences for the Afghans are likely to be disastrous. The Taliban in this piece deal did not say that they had embraced democracy, because they haven't. They did not say that they now support the education of girls and young women, because they don't. They do not commit themselves in this agreement to any future course of action other than agreeing to talk to the Afghan government, something which is already not happening. Ultimately, historians will look back at the legacy of the American presence in Afghanistan and wonder just how the United States could have gotten itself wrapped up in a nearly twenty year war. Why They will ask didn't the United States defeat the Taliban, catch Osama bin Laden and then turn back to the Taliban and say, you know what, if you want to go back to Afghanistan, there's nothing we can do about it, and we're not going to try and stop you. Real politique will not answer the historians question. To make sense of how the United States experienced the ultimate mission creep in Afghanistan, will have to look back to the context of post September eleventh, to the feeling in the Bush administration that the goal of the United States should not simply be to try to take steps against those who perpetrated the nine to eleven attacks, but to bring about generational transformations in the countries of the Muslim world so that such attacks would never happen again. Those transformations turned out to be well beyond the power of United States and probably beyond the power of any one country. In retrospect, it all seems so painfully obvious. At the time, a derangement syndrome far greater than that of trumped arrangement gripped us all, myself included. We wanted more because we the United States, thought that the trauma we had suffered was unmatched. Unmatched trauma was supposed to lead to unmatched realization of new plans for a democratic Muslim world. In the end, the only people who can make democracies in majority Muslim countries are the people who live in those countries, and the American effort to create democracies by the sword is definitively a historical failure. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah r Feldman. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Here in the US, coronavirus seems to be spreading steadily. Now. I know we cover this in a special episode last week with Mark Lipsitch, But for me, this whole pandemic issue is still very much front of mind, and it feels like most people I've talked to over the last few days are thinking pretty much the same thing. As of my taping this on Monday night, ten states have now reported cases Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, and New York. With its geographical spread, that list tells you that pretty shortly it'll be all fifty states that have cases. But in China, where the epidemic first erupted, the outbreak, at least for the moment, appears appears to finally be slowing down. About a week ago, as that process was beginning, I spoke to Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's based in Beijing. I asked him what life is like in a city where everybody is sheltering in place, all twenty million of them in Tell me what the mood is among the people you speak to with regard to coronavirus. Well, there are some cities in China where for a couple of weeks, although things are loosening up a bit now, they had people under complete lockdown where you couldn't leave your housing compound without permission, or sometimes families could only leave their housing compound once every couple of days to go shopping or something like that, where all the park sort of closed. In Beijing, which is of course a big city, so it's even hard to generalize in Beijing, but it's a little easier the parks are open, and of course in the capital, buying groceries and so on is no problem. And I guess also the thing in Beijing, the government's influence is probably at its strongest, just like probably in any capital city. So I think overall in Beijing, the sense I get is that people are they're getting a little frustrated. They're feeling that boy has been going on for a while. The government's asking us not to meet anyone, not to go out. But how long are we supposed to do this? I think when it started. It started right around Chinese New Year, which is a time when people tend to be more inwardly focused anyway, visiting family members, and so it became sort of like a really long Thanksgiving weekend or something like that, which is good or bad depending on how you're feeling about your family at the end of Thanksgiving weekend exactly, you know, sort of again the weekend from hell. And I think that's what it's going to become for some people, because this long weekend's gone into two weeks and now it's a month, and people are start of wondering, well, when's this going to end? In one sense is in the government that there are people asking that question. Also, even if for another reason than GDP reasons like when can the economy get going again? So I think there's a little bit of frustration and percolating up. The frustration makes perfect sense to me. This is sort of fascinating that almost precisely at the moment that you're describing people in Beijing thinking can this be over? Already? In much of the rest of the world, people are waking up to think, oh my goodness, this might just be getting started. Do you think that in Beijing there just haven't been a large number of reported cases, so people don't have a sense of the immediacy of the danger. Yeah, I think it's partly about but I think the government also set this up wrong. The government set this up as a quick crisis that it could manage and come out successful, where they were going to put the country into lockdown, implement these your onian measures for two weeks or four weeks, and in some ways, statistically we are You see the rate of increase in China has gone way down. But also as the country gets back to work, people are going to come into contact with each other. You can't have even Hubei Province can't stay indefinitely locked down. This would be almost like the entire Midwest. This would be like Chicago plus Illinois plus maybe Michigan to So to get a sense of the overall economic impact of Hubei Province right at the crossroads of the country being locked down. That can't go on forever, and so it's going to spread. They're going to be other centers of the epidemic, and the government hasn't set people up for this. The messaging is sort of off. It's that it's going to be over by now, and these draconian measures are going to stop, but I don't know what they're going to do when this continues on. I think everybody now has come to the realization in the sort of expert community that this is going to continue on for months to come. The Chinese government is pretty sophisticated in managing the way that its own citizens make sense of what's going on in the world, and I'm wondering if there isn't a pivot point available to them as it becomes more of a global phenomenon. Is there a way for the Chinese government to say to their own citizens, Look, this is bigger than just us, and we're just doing what everyone else in the world is going to have to do, and this is an unfortunate normal, But don't look at us and say, why didn't you solve this? After all, no government in the world has a simple or straightforward solution to this problem. It's nature. And in a way, might that in a sense almost let them off the hook. Yeah, I think that would work better if the government weren't partly culpable for the outbreak, and they also just haven't been able to downplay that that is still kind of popularly understood on some level that there were these whistleblowers, they did try to say something, and at least local officials were responsible for the outbreak. Now I think the government's going to try to just push all onto the local officials. But I think there is on some level and Moong more sophisticated people or not maybe more sophisticated the wrong world, but maybe in a narrower group of people, there's an understanding that the government was also responsible. So that makes it harder to make that case. I think, is it clear that had the early whistle blower has been taken more seriously, that could have actually contained the virus, because the sense that I have from speaking to epidemiologists is that as we learn more about how the virus spreads and whether you can spread the virus when you don't have any symptoms at all, it's at least possible that nothing that the government could have done would really have been able to contain this well. I think that's right. I think the government sort of hasn't made that argument yet, but it's probably true. And I mean, even this heroic guy who died the face of the whistleblower Leeu and Leang, the doctor whose image is now ubiquitous even in Chinese social media. He wasn't a real whistleblower. He was telling a social media group of friends of classmates about this. It wasn't as if he had filed a formal complaint to the government or gone on widespread social media about this. So it just shows, of course how ubiquitous the government censorship is that they can even see what you're saying to your classmates. But he hadn't actually started a process that could have resulted in anything, even if the government had been open to it. So yeah, I think that's that's probably true. It's not clear at all that that would have changed things, but at least there's a sense in terms of trying to make win the pr battle that the government's partly responsible for it. What is your daily life like in light of the current situation. Well, my daily life, like other people's, is sharply constrained. So it's very hard to go and meet people because for the people who are buying the government line, they're still like, oh, we better not meet because the government's told we shouldn't read people. And then even for the people who aren't binding the government line, is getting harder and harder to get into people's housing compounds, because if you just go to somebody's apartment block and to try to get in, you can't even necessarily get into the building. And then with most restaurants and cafes closed, the most you can do is go for a walk in the park or something like that with somebody. So it's hard to get as much information as before. It's sort of fascinating because it draws out the ways in which a quarantine works alongside technological control to really shift the way information spreads. That sounds as if for someone like you who talks to people about things that they may not want the government to hear, there's actually a real limitation on your ability to gather information. Yes, it is hard to talk to people. I mean I think when you read things on social media, you really have to parse things. And I find a look at an article on social media, and one of the things I try to do because things get erased so quickly, is I'll quickly send myself on wa chat. There'd be things through these articles that people write, they sort of self published someone wa chat, and so I'll see something like this, some sort of edgypiece about how the governments in trouble and so on and so forth, and I'll quickly save the URL and printed to PDF for something like that, so that if it's gone, I still have a record of it. But I sometimes have to do that really quickly, because if I sort of say, oh, I'll do that in a couple of hours, I go back and reopen the URL and it's been closed. So the government's pretty quick on that, although sometimes what I'm surprised is that not everything is erased. And I just had an article that somebody sent me the other day on how nothing will nothing can be the same after the coronavirus, and partly they were talking about how the government had to allow a free or flow of information. They avoided key words that would cause the bots to censor the article, like freedom of speech and stuff like that, but I was surprised that that hasn't been eras yet. Do you have a theory about why. I think partly the censorship works on two levels. One is they have bots to just go through and so if you say something like you know, the Nobel Prize winning dissident to Leosha boy, you put those three characters out there boom, your piece is probably going to be automatically erased. But I think also things that are a little harder to tell from just if if you're just using AI, maybe you need a human eye on it. I think the flood of articles right now is such that probably the censors are just a little bit behind on their work. You know, that's probably the only explaination. I don't think it means that there's a split in the government and that therefore the information is getting out because someone in the propaganda ministry, etcetera, etcetera. I don't think. I don't think that's happening. In light of what you have described as genuine mismanagement of the crisis from the standpoint of the government, and in light of the fact that this is, you know, almost certainly the most significant threat to the country that Chi Jinping has faced during his entire time in office. What do you think are likely to be the longer term consequences for his relatively still young transformation of the political codes of the country. Well, I hate to say it depends, but it sort of depends on how quickly we can pull out of this. It's like the government has sort of put the patient in a coma to try to solve the illness, and now I was going to try to pull it out of the coma. And if that works and the illness is cured literally and metaphorically, then I think the government can still say it was a big success. You know, we took firm, resolute measures, and it was difficult. And GDP's taken a hit and probably will be you know, zero in the first quarter or something like that, but this was a difficult situation. It was a national crisis, and we did the right thing and so on and so forth. But if this goes on, and if we do indeed have another wave of cases, which a lot of people are expecting as the country gets back to work, and if there's maybe another wave again in the autumn, which is sometimes a possibility in these patterns, and the numbers keep going up and up and up, I think it will be hard for this to not be seen as another really major crisis. The memory of the SARS crisis of two thousand and two and two thousand and three is still surprisingly fresh for people who were saying over thirty or thirty five years of age, people still refer to it all the time, and that it wasn't really handled maybe all that well. So I wonder whether this isn't going to be another one. In fact, I think it's going to be hard for it not to be a case like that, unless this turns into some full blown real disaster or with tens of thousands of people dead or something. I don't think this is going to be a Chernobyl type event, which is the other scenario that people look at. It's amazing how the government can control these narratives. Thirty one years ago there was a Channeman Square crackdown when hundreds and hundreds of people were gunned down to death in the center of Beijing. The government came out of that wounded and damaged, but still okay, and was able to keep control. I think one always has to be careful in China about saying this is a turning point that will shake people's faith in the system. People's stability to believe in the system again, just like in any country, is amazingly resilient. So I'm hesitant to say that this will be a turning point or shake thing. So what you say it makes enormous sense, especially with respect to the overall system of Communist Party rule. I guess what I'm wondering about is whether, at just a more micro level it might have an effect on Shijun Ping's own bid to say, remain in power you much longer than his predecessors have done. Do you see it having a micro effect on those internal party developments and debates. I think it can. I think the problem with is that he hasn't also really handled this very well. I don't think this is I'm not trying to project what I think a Western politician would have or should have done in this case, in other words, that they should be out glad handing people or visiting all the emergency wars and so on. But the only visibility that he's shown at all was to go to one neighborhood in Beijing, which is not badly affected at all. The city and the neighborhood is not particularly affected, so that is not much visibility. He's made speeches and said sort of the right thing. He recently said that this was a grave and serious crisis to the country. But he's normally at the forefront of these kind of big things, and it looks, I think even for casual viewers, it looks as if he's not willing to take responsibility because it is such a problem, and he's let the premier, who is supposed to be in charge of the leavers of the actual bureaucracy and government, he's let him take a greater role. Although even he hasn't been really out there every day. So I guess there are different models of authoritarian rule. There's a sort of Putin model, which is he's you be out there probably on talk shows and fielding questions and stuff like that. Teaching thing would never be like that anyway, but he's been, I think, quite noticeably absent from the day to day managing of a crisis. One story that's gotten a fair amount of coverage outside of China is the Chinese government's decision to expel three journalists associated with the Wall Street Journal in retaliation for the headline of an op ed editorial piece. The headline referred to China as the sick man of Asia, a reference to a nineteenth century formulation that was actually mostly used about Turkey in the nineteenth century, although I learned in this context it was also sometimes said about China. My first question is, are you surprised by the government's decision to do that? Well, I am surprised. You know, I could see where they would expel perhaps one person, but three seems a lot. It must also be tied to the State Department's decision to declare Chinese media companies to be the agents of foreign influence or something like that, that they're essentially working for the state, which is accurate, but that that was sort of maybe in Chinese do a provocation or throwing the gauntlet down, and so they had to say something. So I think the number of people probably went up from one to three. The government had been asking for several days for some sort of an apology, the people in the journal even before the expulsion, the people on the news side of it, the reporters in the bureau, many people were sort of appalled at it. So I think that it was something that the government probably felt it had to do something not to be sort of a conspiracy theorist, because this is sort of hard to prove this, but I think this also plays wonderfully into the government's narrative. I mean, this was something that they could blast out on social media. I don't think this term sick man of Asia. It was to me sort of a face plant, a grown sort of like, Oh, I can't believe they did that headline. I mean, I worked the Walsta Journal for many years. I know the opinion page very well, and they like to provoke. They like to make people to get up and notice something, and so it's not atypical for them. But when I saw that, I was okay. So I was a little shocked, but I was even more shocked by the government's reaction. And I think it's a nice way for them to shift attention away from the crisis and be able to blame a foreign country for kicking China while it's down and stuff like that. I think it's this outrage has been really fomented by the government and probably they're quite happy for this sort of thing. And this might also be a precursor of a strategy in the future if the crisis spins out of control and we feel a need to somehow sort of divert attention and blame foreigners, etc. Going back to your face palm reaction. Was your reaction because you thought to yourself, Oh, my goodness, this is going to make the Chinese government crazy? Or was your reaction? Boy, that's actually kind of offensive, because, as I discovered after a little poll of my friends and family. Most people are not going to get their reference to, you know, nineteenth century European treatment of the Ottoman Empire, and so most people are just going to see it as a kind of you know, almost quasi racist statement that China is sick in some way because of the coronavirus. Well, I mean, first of all, my face plant failing was like, this is a stupid cliche. I can't believe they're using that. But you know, I think when countries are down. Historically, when they've been down, they often look to analogies to the human body. You know, if you go back to say Germany in the mid nineteenth century, there was this movement among nationalists who wanted to unite Germany to literally improve the physical strength of people to get out there and climb mountains and do outdoors activities and things like that, to strengthen the physical body of the people, and that would strengthen the body politic and the national character and so on and so forth. And so I think it is sort of on a deeper level, it is sort of insulting to people to imply that their country is sick and that it has some sort of fundamental illness. I know, the article itself didn't make that the case exactly like that. It was saying there was something wrong with the political system. But you can see where people might take it if they're not really reading the article anyway, and they're just reading this stuff on social media third hand and fourth hand and so on and so forth, that they would say, hey, you know, China is not sick. And the whole story the columnist party is pushed over the past seven years is that the Chinese people have stood up. That's what Mao said in nineteen forty nine at think Dat of Heavenly Peace in downtown Beijing. This is his famous of saying at the founding the People's Republic, we've stood up. We're on our own two feet. And then a few years later they fight the US to a down still in the Korean War. So now to sort of imply that China is weak and sick, it is a bit of a provocation to many people. So before the coronavirus story came to dominate your coverage and the West's consumption of news about China, you were doing amazing work in explaining the complexities of the Hong Kong protests to the rest of us, and I was following your coverage of that extremely closely, and in fact, when my producer Lydia Jina first reached out to you, we thought, well, we'll talk to Ian about Hong Kong. Presumably Hong Kong is going to have to undergo the same kind of nobody in the streets, nobody talking to each other, shelter in place arrangement as other major cities in China have been undergoing. What is that going to do to the protest movement that otherwise was sort of continuing. Well, I think in the short term, this, of course will make it hard to have protests if you're not allowed to be out on the streets. But I think it feeds much more strongly, much more importantly. I think it feeds into this overall feeling that we don't want to be part of this governing system which is sort of not on our level. I mean, I think there's this feeling among Hong Kong people at some basic level that we're much more advanced. We've got a modern, functioning, cosmopolitan city that we built. Yes, it was a British colony, but we Hong Kong people, we built the city. These are our freedoms and so on, and we don't want to lose this, and we don't want to be part of this sort of messed up system north of the border that isn't able to handle a public health emergency without having a giant conniption fit that you know, has all these other problems. So I think they're going to look at this as further proof of the incompatibility of Hong Kong with the mainland, and when people in the mainland get frustrated about those people south of the board are protesting all the time, those uppity, no good Hong Kong people, great, thankless Hong kongress. One of the first things people in the mainland say is let's just cut off the water supply and see how long that works, or the food supply and so on and so forth. So you know, the two places are really closely linked, of course, and of course we all are, and Hong Kong's just going to catch this earlier. But we're seeing this spread to other neighboring countries South Korea, obviously, Japan. This shows probably the well, it'll make it hard for people in Hong Kong to avoid what's going on. No matter how much they want to independent of the virus, was it your sense that the protests were losing steam or that they had just sort of entered a phase of institutionalization where people were accustomed to them and working around them to the extent that they could, and they were going to remain a challenging facet of life. We've had a series of protests over the past say ten years. They come, they go, they come, they go, but they seem to just it SEMs like a roller coaster ride, but maybe where the altitude keeps increasing, so you're just you are dipping down a little bit, but you go up to newer highs. You go down a little bit, but you go up again. And I think we might see that again, maybe after the coronavirus ends, if there's no end to the political crisis, if there's no accommodation from the side of Beijing, that will probably see a new wave of protests, perhaps later this year or next year. Last question for you in I know you go back and forth frequently between Beijing and London. Can you still do that? What will happen to you when you go to London? Are you allowed to fight to London? You have to stay in quarantine. You know what's going to happen. Well, I am planning to go to London. There's no, for example, British Airway flights, but there is Air China, which is the national carrier and probably a great financial loss, is still flying to countries around the world. So I still have an Air China flight booked, and unless things change dramatically, I guess I'll be out of here. But yeah, I'm going to self quarantine myself. I have a family member on the outskirts of London who has a big country house and has given me a wing of the place and just said you can just hang out there for two weeks. And so I'm going to do that and go for walks in the English countryside and do writing on my computer and so on, and then I'll be clean and then I'll come back to China again in a few months when I can get more work done, because basically the problem here is it's really hard to do any research, to go out and talk to people because the country is in such lockdown. Well, I hope you're extended English country weekend with your own wing of the house is an enjoyable one, but more importantly, and I hope you stay healthy and well yourself. And thank you for speaking to me, and thank you for your steady stream of insightful analysis of events in China. Bye, thank you, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. We caught up with Ian when he had just returned in the UK. Here's what he says. Yes, I've arrived in the UK. It was shockingly easy. I thought a guard's regiment might forcibly take our temperature, or at least ask of our contact information in case someone had to track down those who had contact with an infected person. But nothing of the sort happened. I arrived when through an automated passport control and was in a car in a few minutes. Now that's a little bit upsetting. If that's how you traveled from China to the UK right now, that may have consequences for the rest of the world. Ian, however, is a good citizen and a good sport. He's now in the empty wing of his relatives country home south of London. He's going for long walks through the English countryside while avoiding pubs, swimming pools and any other place where people congregate. It's nice work. If you can get it. We'll be back with this week's playback in just a moment, and now our playback. That's the sound of clapping in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where a representative of the US government and a representative of the Afghan Taliban signed a peace agreement this weekend. The clapping notwithstanding, this is an agreement that's already facing very significant challenges, and those challenges are only going to get greater. To understand why, you have to begin with a painful fact about the nearly twenty year US engagement in Afghanistan. By any ordinary military standard, it ultimately looks like a defeat. It didn't start that way. When the United States first came into Afghanistan, it very effectively and very rapidly made the Taliban leave the country, and that, after all, was the initial reason for the invasion. The idea was number one, get rid of the Taliban. Number two, catch as many members of Al Qaida as it's possible to get our hands on. The trouble was that happened almost too quickly, and then gradually imperceptibly over time, the US mission in Afghanistan changed. Ultimately, the argument was that the United States should make an effort of some kind to produce some kind of stable, functioning, quasi democratic government in Afghanistan, and yet the government that presently exists in the country is very very loosely democratic and only stable in the loosest sense of the word. In fact, most observers believe that should the United States actually withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, as it has promised eventually to do in this agreement, that that government would have a great deal of trouble, withstanding a serious attack from the Taliban now in order to get there, the so called agreement between the United States and the talis An Agreement, which notably does not yet include Afghanistan as a party, says that the Taliban are supposed to negotiate a peace with the Afghan government and put down their arms. From there, we're supposed to move on to an eventual US withdrawal of all of its troops. But from the standpoint of the Taliban, they don't have any really strong reason to put down their arms if it would require them to form a compromise with the current government that would not be to the Taliban's liking. The reason for that is that once the United States has said publicly that it intends to leave Afghanistan, its leverage to force the Taliban to do anything other than whatever it wants is reduced very drastically. After all, all along in this war, the only thing the United States has ever been able to do when it wanted the Taliban to listen to it was to continue to fight the Taliban. That's why, within a few days of the initial agreement, the Taliban demanded that if the Afghan government wanted to negotiate with it, the Afghan government would have to free five thousand Taliban prisoners. For their part, the Afghan government is terrified about the possibility of an actual US withdrawal, so it's in the Afghan government's interest to delay that as long as possible. Consequently, the Afghan simply said, we're not handing over the five thousand Taliban prisoners, which means that at least as of right now, the Taliban on the one hand and the government of Afghanistan on the other hand, are not even on speaking terms. Technically, without an agreement between them, the United States cannot withdraw and therefore the agreement between the United States and the Taliban might turn out to be more symbolic than actual. Nevertheless, this agreement probably will have a major long term consequence, and that long term consequence is primarily in the US domestic context. Donald Trump, in the run up to a reelection, seems fully prepared to do what none of his predecessors were willing to do and essentially admit defeat in Afghanistan by agreeing to do a deal with the Taliban. Barack Obama was not prepared to do that, even in a second term when he himself was not running for reelection. George W. Bush wasn't prepared to do it in either of his terms as president. Both of them ended up owning the American involvement in Afghanistan, and the history books will so record. Donald Trump, on the other hand, despite to a great extent continuing the Obama administration's policies in the first part of his term, has actually now signaled a willingness to bite the bullet to say that the United States actually must get out, and Trump will now carry the historical legacy of the willingness to withdraw even if the United States doesn't withdraw in either of his potentially two terms in office. I hate to say it, but that's actually a major gift that Donald Trump is making to the United States and also to a future president, any future president, and it's no secret that my view is that it would be better for it to be anyone other than Donald Trump. In twenty twenty, we'll be able to continue the Trump policy of saying that the United States has signed a deal and is prepared to leave the country. That will be a tremendous advantage because it will mean that that president will not have to say we agreed to lose the war on my watch. There is, however, a final coda, as there almost always is. No US president is going to want to preside over scenes in Kabble that are reminiscent of the famous scenes of the US withdrawal from Saigon in nineteen seventy five. No one will want to be present in the United States with helicopters flying out with the last US personnel and tens or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Afghans begging to be on those helicopters. And yet that scenario is entirely possible if the US government ultimately withdraws troops and if the Taliban move on the city in a serious military way. The agreement does give Donald Trump the flexibility to say that, under those circumstances with a Taliban army heading to Cobble, that the United States would not withdraw, but it seems entirely possible that Donald Trump would be willing to do so, and to bear even that price. A remarkable consequence of Trump's confidence that his base will support him almost no matter what his apparent belief that he cannot be made to look weak on foreign policy, no matter what his actual policies are, and Trump's conviction probably accurate that most Americans, even if they would feel bad in the short term at such a painful public betrayal of the Afghan people, are ultimately tired of this war. The upshot of all of this as if the United States will at some point find itself with its troops out of Afghanistan, and the consequences for the Afghans are likely to be disastrous. The Taliban in this piece deal did not say that they had embraced democracy, because they haven't. They did not say that they now support the education of girls and young women, because they don't. They do not commit themselves in this agreement to any future course of action other than agreeing to talk to the Afghan government, something which is already not happening. Ultimately, historians will look back at the legacy of the American presence in Afghanistan and wonder just how the United States could have gotten itself wrapped up in a nearly twenty year war. Why They will ask didn't the United States defeat the Taliban, catch Osama bin Laden and then turn back to the Taliban and say, you know what, if you want to go back to Afghanistan, there's nothing we can do about it, and we're not going to try and stop you. Real politique will not answer the historians question. To make sense of how the United States experienced the ultimate mission creep in Afghanistan, will have to look back to the context of post September eleventh, to the feeling in the Bush administration that the goal of the United States should not simply be to try to take steps against those who perpetrated the nine to eleven attacks, but to bring about generational transformations in the countries of the Muslim world so that such attacks would never happen again. Those transformations turned out to be well beyond the power of United States and probably beyond the power of any one country. In retrospect, it all seems so painfully obvious. At the time, a derangement syndrome far greater than that of trumped arrangement gripped us all, myself included. We wanted more because we the United States, thought that the trauma we had suffered was unmatched. Unmatched trauma was supposed to lead to unmatched realization of new plans for a democratic Muslim world. In the end, the only people who can make democracies in majority Muslim countries are the people who live in those countries, and the American effort to create democracies by the sword is definitively a historical failure. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah r Feldman. This is deep background