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he has one of the most hard-nosed answers to liberalism. He insists upon understanding politics as a distinction between friend and foe, friend and enemy. He insists that legal orders have real foundations in space and in power, in the taking of a territory, fundamentally. That they therefore have limits and necessarily have limits, that they define insiders and outsiders. That structures which are truly comprehensive threatened to emerge in the course of the 20th century

properly understood liberalism clearly isn't premised on the absence of the state, its premised on a well-ordered set of relationships between individuals, the law and various types of representation. That structure is not necessarily robust if economic power becomes monolithic. There are ways of taming that by way of corporatism, in which you have an organized representation of economic interests. But you can also imagine systems in which it can become a sort of destructive set of flywheels of extremely explosive dynamics of gigantic interest groups contending with each other more or less in an unmediated direct form interest on interest.

a clash within the one-party state of different interests, of agglomerations of technology and capital, of different party factions

It's quite difficult to describe the Chinese regime in categories that are at all familiar without reducing it hopelessly and just failing to recognize its complexity

This sort of apocalyptic thinking of a history that's going to end with some sort of big bang, or some terrible ghastly discreditable whimper, rather than just facing up to reality in which the world is different and America's position is not what it was in 1945. Which is not after all the end of the world.

there are deeply intelligent, obviously brilliant political and legal theorists working in China, trying to articulate and make sense of the logic of this emerging power. One of the sources that they go to – and this has emerged from the tireless work of many translators of recent Chinese political writing and international relations thought is -- is a German political and legal theorist called Carl Schmitt.

what does monopoly do and what do oligopolistic structures do to the domestic political structure?

you can immediately see why Chinese scholars seized on precisely this logic for thinking through the emergence of Chinese power in the context of what they would diagnose as American empire

they also see in Schmitt a theorist of China's own potential empire, a zone of influence and power that would create its own structures of incorporation, its own norms. Given from China, defined by China, set and ultimately rooted in Chinese power, radiating out from East Asia, encompassing other states.

“One Nation, Two Systems” was precisely a kind of Schmittian vision of an overarching Chinese empire, with the pluralism that's contained within that. Safely contained with the acknowledgement that this is about China, under the leadership and the hegemony of the CCP, tolerating two systems. Of course, that isn't what we're seeing

It seems to me that there could be a horrifying originality to what they're doing. After all the tech dimension of what China's able to do now in terms of surveillance is beyond the wildest dreams of any previous authoritarian regime.

It too easily slides out of consciousness that the Chinese regime undertook what Foucauldians would call one of the most grotesque, grandiose, and very violent political experiments in history, the one-child policy. It pursued that towards the Han population. That it’s then also capable of taking those kinds of techniques and applying them to resistant population like the Uighurs or Tibetans or the Mongolians, I don't think it’s surprising. It's the same toolkit. In the eighties, it was ferocious in its intrusiveness, monitoring women's menstrual cycles, forced abortions. This stands alone. No one's ever done that before on that scale. It’s quite mind-blowing and too easily consigned to the history books.

Perhaps the common denominator is simply control and this being a matter of the highest possible political stakes. Not to be able to control this virus would be a far more serious blow to the prestige and legitimacy of a regime which has those kinds of pretensions than it is to the Trump administration in the U.S., which in the end just shrugs

We were fought to a stalemate in Korea. Vietnam was a debacle. And one of the key anchors of the ultimate demise of Soviet Union is, after all, an alliance with China. And in 1989 at the moment, as it were, where the chips are falling and the Warsaw pact is disintegrating in Eastern Europe, we have Tiananmen Square, the Communist Party basically giving notice that this regime change will not extend to them.

I think that ought to force us to reconsider this notion that the Cold War ended with us winning as it did in Europe. It didn't in Asia, and Korea feels the force of that, Japan feels the force of that, and the United States is now coming to terms with it too.