Asia's "Opinion Wars" with Historian Alexis Dudden

Podcast music: Blindhead and Mick Lexington.

DEVIN STEWART: Hi, I'm Devin Stewart here at Carnegie Council in New York City, and today I am speaking with Alexis Dudden. She is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and today we're speaking about a new initiative that we've launched at Carnegie Council looking at information warfare, which is various initiatives, campaigns, and projects all around the world to influence public opinion, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere.

Alexis, great to see you today.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Thank you for having me.

DEVIN STEWART: Your specialty is East Asia's history. A major theme we're looking at is looking at China, Japan, and the United States, and looking at the various narratives that they're trying to push out there. Can you give me a sense of how you see the three—or, if you include Korea, the four—narratives? What are those competing claims? What are they trying to convince global public opinion about?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: This is an excellent initiative. It's an excellent question. In many respects you could argue that East Asia is now playing catch-up to what the United States has long embedded throughout the world. I think of very positive examples: Voice of America, the Fulbright Program, programs of exchange that obviously have brought many people from throughout the world but particularly East Asia to the United States and have influenced and shaped political thinking, social thinking, and certainly economic planning.

As economies have grown—Japan, South Korea, and now China—we have seen similar programs put into play. I think I may be the first generation—or maybe together we are—in the 1980s when the Japanese government had a lot of money, all of a sudden there were scholarship programs for Americans to go to Japan. I was certainly part of that generation. In many respects I don't think there is anything pernicious about a foreign government spending money abroad for knowledge. It's a question of how it's shaped and how it's encoded.

I think in all the countries, we're talking about certain people pressure for certain actions. We've seen recently the South Korean government unfortunately chose to attempt to shut down a website, 38North.org, that a lot of us have learned a lot about the North Korean weapons programs from. Does that mean South Korea is going authoritarian?

DEVIN STEWART: That was at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of International Studies (SAIS), and they found a new home.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: They've found a new home at Stimson, I believe. My point is, the more open these societies are, the better the international exchanges, the better for opportunities for learning throughout the world, especially now.

Fast-forward from when I first went to Japan, there is this thing called the Internet, so no matter how much a government wants to try to shape knowledge, there is much more ability for contestation, and that's where China is the outlier in many regards because of its control over, the "Great Firewall" that we experience as travelers to China or living in China, when you really can't find Google or the websites you want, but there are ways around that. As much influence as a certain government would like to exert, it's tricky for the 30-and-younger crowd that just immediately goes to their smartphone.

How North Korea will blend into this mix is the wild card in many respects because I can only imagine what engaging with truly open information will be like for North Koreans.

DEVIN STEWART: Why did they decide to catch up on the propaganda or information game?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Because they think many countries have figured out that if you can shape the kind of questions that young people are asking about a society, then you shape the society's future. For a long time if you had a Ph.D. from an American university, it was almost a ticket into government in both Japan and South Korea, and certainly increasingly so in China. Xi Jinping's daughter went to Harvard. Does that mean she's going to be anti-Chinese? No, of course not.

There is a way that education broadens, but there is also a fear. If you are trying to shape or control society, the more information that one has is dangerous to those in charge. When people refer to China moving forward, when they're spinning the expression "AI" (artificial intelligence) into "authoritarian innovation," that's an interesting expression because the Chinese government has gone with I think in recent years a program to make clear that technology is how they're going to move forward in terms of capital accruement, but it's still going to maintain a very hierarchical, disciplined society that one really wouldn't call an "open" society.

So, how to make young Chinese buy into that system, especially if they've had experience abroad, is really the challenge for the Chinese government. How they want to target students abroad, how they want to target Americans, Japanese, people in Europe—I think the best example is what has been in the news, the Confucius Institutes. I think there are almost 500 of these around the world. They are about 15 years old. These are language institutes. That's probably the most difficult way to control information because as soon as you learn language you can read anything.

But many people have criticized these for the textbooks and for the kinds of instructors, and I think at certain institutions that makes sense. The University of Chicago is probably the best example of this—and I'm a University of Chicago graduate, so I understand the impetus and the people involved. They criticized this impetus for the right reasons: There was an effort to select faculty according to whether they would uphold doctrinaire Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies.

Yet you look at the broad spectrum of these institutes in the United States—and there are about 100 of them in the United States—and I think the Chinese government has rather smartly picked institutions that are not the top tier, and I mean that with all—I teach at an excellent school. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have the ability to have Chinese-language programs; other institutions can't afford them, so if the Chinese government wants to give a couple of million dollars to set up a Chinese-language school for American kids who might need that edge in growing markets, is that bad? So it's tense to criticize this outright, especially when by all metrics the Chinese economy is a young kid's ticket to a job in the future.

Other examples: When the Chinese government has tried in recent years to influence press publications—I think Cambridge University Press is probably the most famous one—to shape things that make the Chinese government look good. Well, we have examples from the Japanese government in trying to interfere with an American textbook at McGraw-Hill. Is this unique to China, or is it that China does it ham-fistedly at the moment? I'm not sure. I can't imagine the United States government has not had similar instances in publications abroad or simply refuses to countenance publications.

In some respects that is business as usual, in other respects, I think on a deeper level when we look at how the Chinese government has tried to enter the U.S. patent market, things like that, they're really playing hardball, and they're playing hardball at a time when Americans are nervous about the economy, the Japanese are nervous about their economic futures. China, even if it's not 6.7 percent growth every year, is still doing a lot better than we are.

DEVIN STEWART: Do you get a sense of what type of messages the Confucius Institutes and other methods are trying to push out there? What does China want to tell the world?

Also, you're a historian, so please let us know how it relates to the global understanding of the history of East Asia because I understand that there are historical claims involved, too.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: There are historical claims. There are also territorial claims involved—

DEVIN STEWART: Which is a part of history in a sense.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: —and maybe I'll come to that in a second. It's not quite Dick and Jane, that is to say, the old American textbook of heteronormative white kids skipping home from school, but it reads like that today if you look at the basic Chinese textbook. We've got two happy kids learning from a teacher, and they're learning to uphold party line.

On the one hand, that's totally anachronistic, and yet I as a teacher don't know what the kid is going to take away from that. Is the kid going to take away the story line, or is the student going to memorize the verb form?

DEVIN STEWART: Every friend that I have who has studied Chinese language has been taught to recite communist doctrine as part of the language class. Is that pretty typical?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I don't think it's abnormal. That's the rub right here. I think that doesn't necessarily make someone a communist, and I think of our so-called "China hands" in the State Department, many of whom were not even allowed to study in China until 1972; Taiwan was where you went for the language for so long. But it doesn't make you a communist to learn the language.

The thing that is causing concern is the way that these institutes insist on picking their own instructors and insist on having the students memorize language policies that are not necessarily open speech. I think of my best Japanese language instructor in Tokyo in 1991 at Keio University who looked at the textbook and said: "Oh, this is completely not how Japanese people speak. This is not how we read," and he threw the textbook away. This was on a Ministry of Education fellowship at one of the best universities in the world, and he was fine. Nobody censured him. It was no problem. We all did great on the Japanese foreign language exam.

That's not allowed in the obverse, in the Confucius Institutes, and that's where the issue of freedom of academic expression and freedom of inquiry is at stake.

Is China alone in that? At the moment, maybe.

DEVIN STEWART: In terms of forcing instructors to use—

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I'm just thinking this in the way that you've asked the question, in terms of South Korea, Japan, and the United States. There have been times in the last four decades that, say, the United States would have had similar influence on picking certain professors, the South Korean government certainly in the 1990s had similar influence.

DEVIN STEWART: That's what happened with 38 North, right?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: That one's a little murkier in terms of right now.

DEVIN STEWART: The Korea center at SAIS, the government wanted to select who the fellows were.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Right. That works against the image of any society as an open society. So if a government is going to issue cash to an American university or a Japanese or—work in circles here—any of these places, then they should be willing to allow that university's faculty engagement with the institute because that is the point of an open-learning system.

Spin it to something else like the Chinese government's commitment to new broadcasting techniques to rival CNN, to rival NHK World-Japan, then it's easier to say, "Okay, you're spinning doctrinaire policy." That's up to the viewer to be able to figure out and parse.

Again, it's easy to target the Confucius Institutes. I guess while they remain at the level of language instruction, I think that's one thing. If the Chinese government starts saying to Columbia University or to Yale, "You can't hire that person in political science or history because that's not the history of China because we've always had Taiwan," things like that would obviously be more overt interference.

DEVIN STEWART: Talk to me a little bit about the history claims that the Chinese or Japanese want to put out there.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Right now we have the example in which the Chinese government wants to ban international airline carriers from going to Beijing if they don't change their maps to read "Taiwan, China." So far really only U.S. carriers are pushing back. Lufthansa has gone with the Chinese government. I was just flying on All Nippon Airways (ANA). This is a huge market. Are airline carriers going to say that Taiwan is its own country, or are they going to go with that market that they need for business?

There was a Japanese clothing company called Uniqlo—I think there are several branches in the city—that had a map of the world, and Hong Kong was not listed "Hong Kong, China." The Chinese government protested, and the company changed the T-shirt—if it's a T-shirt, it's a bag, it's a map—on a piece of clothing.

But the Chinese government has just recently ratcheted up to include Taiwan and is testing first interestingly not in a university setting, not in a government setting, but something that they know needs business in China, which is airlines. Most airlines have actually succumbed to the demand because the market is more important than some notion of history. But that's how China is testing its ability—at least as I see it—to push this authoritarian approach to rule and society.

It's a tricky moment insofar as around the world liberal democracies are, if not in crisis, certainly having enormous moments of self-reflection and pressure. If there are movements within the great societies of the West to tighten control, to shut down, and to say egregious things that are now being supported from on high in the United States, England, and France, then why wouldn't the Chinese government pounce right now?

At the moment, yes, it's easy to see what the Chinese government is trying to do to shape ideas, but it's really up to the liberal order to stand up to that and withstand it by saying: "No. We don't teach this way. If you would like to put a language institute in our university, we'll pick the textbook."

DEVIN STEWART: You mentioned before the podcast that a similar eruption happened over a mango mousse. Can you tell that story?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I think about these complaints, which on the one hand seem frivolous. Example, Taiwan on a map: Does it really affect your life as a Taiwanese person?

DEVIN STEWART: Or does it affect the average passenger? Are they going to be brainwashed from now on?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Especially if you got a really cheap ticket and you want to go to China for the weekend from X, Y, or Z. If you want to fly from Sydney, you're going to get the cheap ticket, so why shouldn't Qantas change? Who cares, in the one way of thinking.

On the other, the Panmunjom Declaration, North and South Korea leaders coming together, these two for the first time, the third time in history, and to be Korean, that is to say, to show a common Korean-ness, the dessert featured the real unification flag, which has—

DEVIN STEWART: The blue one, right?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: The blue one, but it has both islands. It has Ulleungdo and Dokdo, the latter of which the Japanese refer to as Takeshima. Instead of just taking a pause and saying, "Isn't it good that the Koreas are talking?" the Japanese government lodged a formal complaint against the South Korean government saying that that was not their territory, that was Japan. It's a mango mousse with a frosting on it.

These are games at the top level that may be amusing to the people in charge, but they really do breed this kind of nationalist performance. I guess that's where I'm hesitant to condemn the Chinese government for language institutes if they can pull back, because that's a performative moment. Let as many people in the world learn Chinese as possible with Chinese government money, but don't tell them how they have to speak.

At the same time, yes, we should pay attention to things like the infiltration of the United States patent market. Things that are actually going to change societies are based in economics, and that is not just Marxian economics, that's the real world, and that is where China is making enormous gains, and it has nothing to do with language institutes.

DEVIN STEWART: Your example about the Japanese officials getting wound up about the dessert and probably ended up being self-defeating in doing so reminds me of Jeffrey Kingston, who has written extensively about how he sees Japanese attempts to influence global narratives as quite inept, that Japan has not been the best producer of effective propaganda. I'm wondering, could you try to give us a sense of what are these countries trying to achieve with these campaigns, and who is the best at it do you think?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I think the United States is the best at it. In the wake of World War II we managed to make a lot of people want to come and study in the United States, want to buy American goods, and watch American movies. Ardent far right, far left, no. On principle, no. But the majority of people came to the United States from countries we defeated in that war based on efforts—the Marshall Plan for Europe but a differently named plan—

Again, the Fulbright program is not a Marshall program, it's not a pernicious program, but it brought an awful lot of important Japanese future leaders to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s including the future governor of Okinawa, Ōta-san, who went to Cornell and didn't learn to be anti-American, but he learned to stand up as a liberal democrat for the people of Okinawa and lead the anti-U.S. base movement. Is that a bad result, or is that the most successful example of nation-building out there?

If we're really true to this whole 70 years of nation-building program, which has brought more wealth to more people than in any time in world history, then we have to say: "Okay, we are going to be passing the baton at some point during the 21st century to China in terms of economic leader," and the trick will be to make it in China's interest to be the leader in an open way.

I think Howard French's book China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is absolutely important for everybody to read because this is maybe the future of the 21st century: How do we as a global society, as a society confronting climate change, as a society confronting intolerance and extremism, how do we make it in Africa's interests to want to move forward in a way that benefits the planet and not one party line? I think China is wrestling with that. We have a clear example of where they want to go right now. Is that in reaction to American policy right now, or is this something that is determined to overturn the U.S. world order? I can't answer that.

In terms of what Jeff Kingston has written about very eloquently, Japan has done wonderful things when it is acting as the open leader, and that is particularly in the regional East Asian context because for many—especially South Koreans have been able to find their Korean-ness by coming to Japan and learning what happened under colonization.

As backward as that sounds, it was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that South Koreans could come and really wrestle with what it meant to take control of their society and would engage with the democracy movement, but that was because in many ways the energy of Japanese students engaging with their democracy movements, which had more constitutional guarantees at the time. So Japan has led much of the region.

So when Japan turns in a backward direction, that doesn't benefit East Asia. There were several constitutional law scholars at the height of collective self-defense debates two summers ago who said: "Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we doing? If we don't hold on to the preamble of our constitution right now and talk about Japan as an open society to the world, then what separates us"—Japanese society—"from North Korea and China?" And these are people who are actually saying this on record as prominent constitutional law scholars because they see a special role for Japan especially in that region to lead Asia into this notion of a common future for humanity.

If we increasingly and around the world entrench ourselves in national boundaries and nationalist discourses—we did that in the 1930s, and it didn't end well then.

DEVIN STEWART: What does it look like on an American campus? You're at the University of Connecticut. How do these "opinion wars" play out at the campus level? Is there a danger of backlash against people saying, "Hey, I don't want to be brainwashed here"? What's going on?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I think I'm really lucky. I am fortunate to have students who are absolutely Connecticut-born and -bred, but I also have students who are Japanese-Japanese, South Korean-South Korean, that is to say, Korean American but also Korean-Korean—I have not I don't believe yet had a North Korean student in my classroom, but I'd welcome one anytime—and Chinese-Chinese, Taiwanese-Taiwanese, and so I get a very healthy melting pot.

I must say that this past year I had the experience of just a wonderful Mainland Chinese student who wrestled with histories that he had never been taught before both on a personal and broader level. I won't say his name, but he is Korean-Chinese, meaning that his family came from what is now North Korea, and he learned about in my class to the best of my ability the Korean War in a way that had never crossed his textbooks, his learning.

He is not going to be a historian, he is going to make gajillions of dollars. He's a math major, a finance major. But he thought about how he could help North Korea as a Chinese student, not as an American, not as anything else. In that respect, that's my role as a teacher, just to open possibilities for the future. I don't believe that the Chinese government's impact in infusions of cash is making my students feel compromised.

I was at a university in Sweden this spring that had rejected a Confucius Institute because the Chinese government had built the statue, and then the—

DEVIN STEWART: What was the statue?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: There's a statue of Confucius that comes with the institute.

DEVIN STEWART: That seems kind of benign.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: It's benign. They kept the statue, but they rejected the institute.

DEVIN STEWART: They got a free statue.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: "We don't get to pick our own textbooks? We've been teaching Chinese for a long time. We'll keep the statue, you guys go." There was no backlash.

DEVIN STEWART: Doesn't sound very Swedish, whatever that means.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: There's that, but I guess it was Senator Marco Rubio who picked up on these Confucius Institutes as "the worst thing that were happening in the"—

DEVIN STEWART: Senator Rubio and Ted Cruz and Ed Markey, I believe.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Yes. They have this thing against them, and they go: "Well, this is not true to Confucius." I must say Confucius was incredibly authoritarian as a thinker.

DEVIN STEWART: He's hierarchical.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Yes. We can call them "China" institutes, but it's still a government trying to put its way of thinking in place.

But again, if it's at the level of a language institute, you're giving someone the chance to learn your language, and then if they want to try to subvert you from within, that's that student's choice. If they want to get a job in semi-conductors, then that's another future.

If the Chinese government—again, I think I've said this—starts insisting that, "Well, we've given you a language institute, so now we're going to pick your political scientist, we're going to pick your historian," that's a different ballgame. But language is a broadening tool. Again, I benefited from numerous Japanese and South Korean government grants to allow me to learn language, not to make me "drink the juice."

DEVIN STEWART: Drink the Kool-Aid?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Drink the Kool-Aid. I think that's what the American government has done well, not necessarily just through language grants, but I've met people who were in jail in South Korea who had listened to so much Voice of America before they were arrested for democracy activism that they would spend their days in jail in the 1980s just memorizing dictionaries so that their English would be even better when they got out. Because in so many ways language is a tremendously liberating category of thought and knowledge, so if the Chinese government wants to teach language around the world, then it may get differences of opinion. That it may not be prepared for.

Right now, it's going with technology and language. Okay. But if you teach a lot of Swedish people Chinese, Martin Luther might have something to say to you.

DEVIN STEWART: That is pretty optimistic, Alexis.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: I have to be optimistic. I'm a historian.

DEVIN STEWART: Yes, we have to be, right? I like it. It's a very liberal way of thinking that I'm sympathetic to.

Just a couple more questions as we're running out of time a little bit here. It sounds like what you're saying is part of what our message in the West is hopefully, to defend liberal values, and maybe the Chinese one is to cast doubt on liberal values if I could be very simplistic. What would you say America and Japan could do better to defend liberal values? Before the podcast, you mentioned a minister of propaganda. How is that going?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Right. This is possibly an apocryphal story, but recently in Tokyo I was told that a colleague at the Foreign Ministry in Japan refers to himself now as the minister of propaganda. He says this tongue-in-cheek, he's not going to go on the record saying this, but if you are privileged enough to be in an open society with constitutional guarantees—the United States, Japan, South Korea—you have to fight for those more than ever right now.

If there's anything we—the so-called "liberal order"—have to offer, it's the recourse of judges and law that guarantee what we take as a basic system of governance and society. That's not there in China, it's certainly not there in North Korea. So we know what we're talking about in its absence, North Korea being possibly the most egregious example on the planet.

But in Japan, even if you're branded the worst anti-Japanese person there is, you still can hold onto your tenure at an excellent university such as Waseda. You just have to have the courage to stand up for it.

DEVIN STEWART: Anti-Japanese or anti-government?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: At the moment, that's the problem. I think that's the problem with the rise of "authoritarianism lite" in a lot of our countries—Japan, Italy, France, Austria, England, and the United States. We have movements that may not actually be the true majority but are encouraging feelings, encouraging a sense of, Oh, thank goodness, it's okay to be white again. Oh, I can be truly Japanese and not worry about those other people.

Obviously, I'm speaking tongue-in-cheek there, but there's something in that movement that is racially essentialist in each of them. It has a lot to do with immigration policies and possibilities but has very little to do with economic realities.

To me the most interesting writing in Japan is about immigration policy because this is a highly educated, highly literate, highly functioning society that is heading for population decline at such a precipitous rate that it simply won't be the economic power it still could be if Japan were to drop all of its immigration borders and allow people in to continue the innovation and continue the jobs that others won't take.

These are not unique issues to Japan, they're not unique issues to South Korea, France, or Italy at the forefront of pressing refugee questions, but they turn societies into moving toward these essentialist narratives in which, "Oh, the United States is a happy place built not on genocide and slavery but the hard work of a few white colonists from England." We got rid of that narrative, thank goodness, at about the time you and I were in kindergarten, but we're returning to that right now for reasons that really don't have much to do with reality.

If you were the government of China, you'd pounce on that because you haven't changed that narrative within, so why do you have to do anything at the—

DEVIN STEWART: Pounce on it in what way? Shine a spotlight on it?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Not spotlight it so much as say, "Oh, we can offer you free Chinese classes, and you will have a job, and you can love China."

DEVIN STEWART: So, take advantage of the—

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Take advantage of the fear of an economic demise. In Connecticut my students are nervous about their future incomes because Connecticut is not a great economy. So if I have a student who could have free language classes, that's a boon in a way that works to the Chinese government's advantage.

But that student has also the ability to question. That's where I'm not as apprehensive. Again, I understand the dismissal of these institutes at universities that have longstanding programs. That makes sense to me. For example, in New York Pace University, why wouldn't Chinese language be a great addition to the curriculum? It's different from Columbia's economics and Columbia's background. That's where we also have to think about what we're doing for our students within rather than simply condemning outright.

I think that this moment of trying to use China as the boogeyman for all of our social ills and our economic ills doesn't help our own problems but doesn't hurt China in the sense that if we really wanted to target China we would say, "Look, the only way you can have these institutes is if you let us pick the textbooks." But then that forces a debate that might hurt American students' futures. So then maybe more American education money should be spent on building Chinese language departments in the United States.

DEVIN STEWART: Sounds reasonable.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Yes.

DEVIN STEWART: Before we go, I understand you're working on a big project called The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020. 2020 is when the Olympics are going to take place in Tokyo. Can you tell us a little bit about that before you go today?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Yes, thank you for asking. It is a big project because Japan is an open society, and Japan remains the most open society in Northeast Asia, and it's at a crossroads. If Japan closes its doors, which it hasn't really done in a precarious way in at least the last 80 years—and even then, Japan was expanding, but it was expanding only if you were racially essentialist Japanese. If Japan can hold onto its true constitutional—and again, this is beyond whether Japan has a military or not, Japan has a great military—values that are on the books, then Japan will continue to be the open society of Northeast Asia and then help not just that region but the world in the ways that it has.

I think of independent journalists who because of Japan's anti-war posture have been able to give us incredibly useful information from America's war zones but also Japanese medics who have provided more assistance, say, in the U.S. war in Afghanistan precisely because people on the ground know that they are not fighting the war. So the open Japan to the world, the humanitarian Japan to the world, is the open society.

The closing one is the one that would draw rigid borders either through territorial disputes in the region or rigid immigration policies or insist on a certain definition of Japanese which means "born of two Japanese-Japanese parents" always and forever. That is against Japanese history, the longue durée, but those are the two poles I see as possibilities.

It's interesting watching it go into the Olympics because many people with whom I've spoken say: "Okay, so this is great. 2020 we're going to have all these visitors, 40 million people are going to come, and we've got all these hotel rooms. But then what happens? Are you they going to come back?"

DEVIN STEWART: Crickets?

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Yes, exactly.

DEVIN STEWART: I've heard that is a possibility, that that will be the peak for Tokyo.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Right. Then they've got more empty space for a dwindling population. It would be good for the Fukushima refugees, but I probably shouldn't say that.

DEVIN STEWART: That could be an upside.

Alexis, thank you so much for coming today. Alexis Dudden from the University of Connecticut. I hope to talk to you again soon.

ALEXIS DUDDEN: Thank you very much.