Adam Kokesh CMC '06 Civilly Disobeys at Jefferson Memorial... And Gets Body Slammed

As per usual, Kokesh figures out a way to get into the national news. Good on him. Be safe, Adam, and remember civil disobedience is still disobedience.

WSJ's Bret Stephens Asks Kissinger About Minxin Pei And Finds Out that Kissinger Has Never Heard of Him

In this weekend's interview for The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens interviews Henry Kissinger. Here's the relevant exchange. 

I ask him if he has thoughts about the argument advanced by Carnegie Endowment scholar Minxin Pei in his widely acclaimed book, "China's Trapped Transition," which contends that an autocratic China will never fulfill the promises of genuine economic reform. Mr. Kissinger has heard of neither the author nor the book, so I summarize the argument. 

Mr. Kissinger resorts to generalities. "In the next phase," he says, "[the Chinese] will have to align their political reality with what has been happening in the last 20 years under the impact of reform." I try to pursue this line of questioning by asking what he makes of evidence that Beijing has been backsliding on economic reform, using the case of Google as an example. He says, "the issue of reform, of political reform, will have to be substantially up to the next group of leaders."

Kissinger was pretty cagey in the interview, but it was otherwise fairly interesting.

I have to say that I'm in the Pei camp when it comes to skepticism about the Chinese overtaking America, though I have to wonder how genuinely he believes it himself. It seemed from my few months in his class that he was controversial for its own sake as if bucking the conventional wisdom were the only means by which he could distinguish himself from the clamoring, teeming Chinese experts out there.

Perhaps the class got a bit more interesting after I dropped it but I don't know. I ultimately dropped the class. I was more interested in working at The Claremont Review of Books and other work than the class itself, which struck me as a bit more pedestrian than anything else. If one regurgitated the readings, one did better than if one did not. For example: if you disagreed with the received wisdom that China's currency was too low or that income inequality is truly a problem in China or (anywhere for that matter), you were criticized in the class.

I guess that's I.R. classes for you. Anyways, I've always enjoyed reading Pei's academic work but I'm not so convinced he was the greatest teacher. Sorry to ramble, but my advice would be read his stuff, think about it, and go about your way.