Once a regional beacon of press freedom, Hong Kong’s media landscape has become barely recognizable under the harsh limitations imposed by the national security law (NSL) in 2020. And while journalists in the city have struggled to adjust to this new normal, there is a fresh chill on the horizon as the government looks to implement Article 23 of the territory’s Basic Law later this year with a more wide-ranging law on national security.

To learn more about the rapidly changing situation for the press in Hong Kong, CMP Managing Editor Ryan Ho Kilpatrick recently caught up with Professor Francis Lee at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communications. 

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: You said recently that media in Hong Kong have reached a “new balance” in how they operate under Hong Kong’s national security regime. But now it feels like that newfound balance is already being thrown off yet again by all the uncertainties around Article 23. Do you think that’s the case?

Francis Lee: That’s the difficulty of speaking about these things. When journalists ask me these questions, I say that this is only what applies at 11:52 A.M. on February 15th. Don’t quote me on this one month later. Any equilibrium is bound to be short-lived.

If you’re living in Hong Kong day in and day out, I think this is part of the social psychology of adaptive resilience. Something happens and then you feel bad for two weeks and you don’t know what to do and then after two or three months you kind of adapt to the environment. After a few months, it seems like you can do certain things. It seems like you are not getting yourself in trouble. You look at your peers and they are also doing OK.

At that moment, you feel like maybe there is an equilibrium. Right now in Hong Kong, we all know deep down that any so-called equilibrium can be thrown off-balance tomorrow. No matter how you feel, that sense of being in equilibrium is something that you develop after the fact, after six or nine peaceful months.

Right now, of course, it’s very different, because you don’t know what the law will be. It depends on how you look at it. Like a lot of things these days in Hong Kong, it’s about expectation management. I think that’s how a lot of organizations in Hong Kong have been doing things since 2020. It depends on how experienced and how well-established these news or civil society organizations are. The more systematic, more well-organized and more well-established organizations immediately do an internal risk assessment to study the stipulations as soon as they come out and then compare it with their own work to assess where the risks are, whether certain adjustments are needed, and so on.

RHK: So this is a process media organizations will likely be going through right now with Article 23?

FL: For me, the most dangerous law for the news media is not necessarily Article 23. Like before, in the past two years, we had the NSL and then we have the common law offense of sedition. I think the general idea among a lot of journalists and a lot of media organizations is that they have been worried much more about sedition than the NSL.

“For me, the most dangerous law for the news media is not necessarily Article 23.”

It’s not easy for journalists to run afoul of the NSL as long as you stay away from Hong Kong independence and foreign funding, and follow a few other simple rules. That requires a bit of self-censorship, but at least there are ways for you to stay away from that. But sedition is different because anything that arouses hatred against the government can potentially be seditious. And basically, that means that whenever the news media tries to perform its watchdog role, it’s potentially in the gray area already. Of course, the sentence for sedition is at most two years in prison, which is nothing compared to NSL. But at the same time, it’s much easier for the news media to run afoul of.

When [these laws] are established, Hong Kong media just have to do the risk assessment again. There might be additional lines of self-censorship that they have to implement, but I believe they will find some way to survive. I think the legislation more journalists will be worrying about — or have been worrying about — deals with “fake news laws,” which the government has said they are studying but which we still know very little about. [State secrets] might require you to, again, to self-censor on a number of topics, but you can still avoid it. But disinformation, depending on how it’s defined, could be much harder to avoid.

RHK: You just spoke about how there’s this constant process of risk assessment and management and you yourself have been trying to advise people on how to manage that process. Probably the best example we have of how not to do that so far is the Foreign Correspondents Club, which scrapped the Human Rights Press Awards after, they say, lawyers advised it would be risky, and they decided they had a responsibility to avoid risk. But isn’t some degree of risk unavoidable for journalists in Hong Kong now?

FL: I tell people that my legal advice is not to seek legal advice. When you ask for legal advice, a responsible lawyer will tell you that the safest way is not to do anything. In a sense, they’re doing their jobs and I respect that. The problem is that the answer [to whether it’s perfectly safe to do something] is always going to be “no.”

The tricky thing about risk assessment and risk management [from] my own research in the past two or three years on news media and also civil society organizations is, first of all, that risk assessment in contemporary Hong Kong can be very idiosyncratic. You assess the risk in your own way. Different organizations assess the risk in their own ways. It depends on the organization’s background and the backgrounds of the people inside the organization. What a certain organization or a certain individual can do in terms of risk management may not be feasible for another organization or for another person.

“You need people to step inside the gray areas so as to show other people that this is actually possible.”

The problem now is there is a gray area and that gray area is huge. It’s really huge. So can you really stay away from it? What it means to stay away from the gray area now is to listen to your legal advisor and do nothing. What would it mean if we, as the School of Journalism and Communication, were to completely stay away from the gray area? You cannot have everyone completely staying away. You need people to step inside the gray areas so as to show other people that this is actually possible. At this moment, it’s still OK. It gives a sense of security to other people. You have to try to… not to push the boundary, but at least reclaim that small part of the gray area.

Now, of course, the gray area also varies by gradation. Light gray is different from dark gray. You can still make that distinction. I can totally understand why people would stay away from the dark gray area. I’m not going to step inside the dark gray area for too long. But you cannot stay completely away from even the light gray area. Ultimately, of course, it’s also individual. It depends on individuals’ personalities and how exposed they are to economic pressures and threats to their assets or family in Hong Kong.

When a lot of people talk about risk, it’s not actually legal risk. The clearest example is school teachers. For primary and secondary school teachers, their imminent risk is to be reported by students or parents to the Education Bureau, which will then take away their job and their license to teach. That is the real risk — not that they’ll be grabbed by the national security police. For civil society organizations engaging with issues like social service provisions or homelessness, they have to collaborate with a lot of other parties. The real risk for them is that if they become too outspoken, they might be criticized by the government or the leftist press, and then others will stay away from them and they can no longer do their work.

Something I’ve come to realize more and more is that the risk that people are facing is, mostly, not legal. For most people, it’s basically about their jobs. That’s why people have to stay away from expressing anything on Facebook. Your boss is watching. Your colleagues are watching. We have so many cases of people losing their jobs because of what they wrote. That is the real risk.

RHK: All this talk about how professionals in Hong Kong need to think about political risk and work around it reminds me of another interview we did recently with Emily Chua at the National University of Singapore. In The Currency of Truth, she makes this distinction between the ethics of truthfulness — the traditional journalistic ideal that’s all about uncompromising truth-telling — and what she calls the “ethics of efficacy,” an alternative ethics she observed among journalists in mainland China that accepts a certain level of compromise and self-censorship in order to continue doing their work and also write meaningful stories. Are we seeing something similar emerge among media workers in Hong Kong?

FL: That’s a good way of conceptualizing it. In the mainland Chinese system or in some organizations, if you are a trusted worker in the organization, you can have much better ways of dealing with [the censorship apparatus]. Many years ago, I had a friend in a state media organization. He was a commentary writer for state for that state media organization. I still remember I was asking him, “You’re very liberal — why would they ask you to be a commentator?” And he said that they needed someone who is relatively liberal to balance out their really conservative commentators. He told me his way of working as a commentary writer in state media was that he would try to push the boundaries. Of course, he had a sense of what was absolutely impossible and he wouldn’t touch that. But then on any topic, he would try to push that topic to maybe nine [out of ten], and then, typically, it was struck down. So he would dial it down to an eight and then maybe strike it down to seven. That was how things worked during the Hu-Wen era (2002-2012), at least. 

The ‘Alternate Ethics’ of Chinese Journalism

In the Russian context, we also talk about ethical self-censorship, which refers to when you self-censor in order to protect your sources or prevent your colleagues or your organization from getting into trouble. I think this is actually quite typical in authoritarian settings because you are not working in an environment where freedom of information is well protected.

In the early years of the NSL, a lot of people were still willing to talk to the media. There were still a lot of outspoken people in Hong Kong who were willing to criticize the government on certain things. And sometimes journalists would actually have to tone down their criticisms [to protect them]. They’d have to say, if I write directly what you said, you will get into trouble, so I’ll tone it down. I think that’s also the kind of scenario that gives you the sense of being in equilibrium.

I did a very lengthy interview with a news organization on a sensitive topic and they let me read the whole article before [it was published] even though I didn’t request that. I never request that because if I have any concerns about an interview I say no, and I’m careful to say what is on the record and what is not. I read the whole thing and I suggested deleting two sentences — not because of my own words but because I had mentioned another news organization, so I told the reporter, “Maybe we should just kill those two sentences — we don’t want to put that organization out on the table, right?” And she agreed. You could say that’s ethical self-censorship. I told a colleague who’s a veteran journalist about this and they were shocked. In a normal situation, this whole interaction would’ve been so strange. But what do you expect? This is the nature of the time.

RHK: I’ve done the same for sources in Hong Kong over the past few years, actually. In journalism school we were taught to never do this — to let your interviewees screen what you would and wouldn’t publish — but I also think we owe a duty of care to the people we interview, and that has to come first if the work we do might put them in danger. 

FL: Frankly speaking, we need to rethink the whole ethics thing. Back in school, when we talk about how journalists should not allow interviewees to dictate what they write, we normally talk about interviewees who are more powerful than us. You’re dealing with power. But what if you are dealing with vulnerable people?

“If [sources] are still inside an authoritarian country, we have to see them as a vulnerable group.”

Consider another example. Let’s say you’re dealing with a MeToo case and the victim wants to be interviewed. Then they say they want to retract something. What do you say? Yes, I think — you have to say yes in that case. Basically, I think we are now applying the rule for dealing with vulnerable people to interviewees speaking on sensitive topics. If they are still inside an authoritarian country, we have to see them as a vulnerable group.

[Hong Kong] society is undergoing an extremely challenging and difficult period for people who uphold certain values of liberty and democracy. It’s not in the early years of the [1997] handover when you could heavily criticize the government. These days, it can be very risky. So you have to adapt. You have to try to feel where the red lines may be. But you still have to try to do something. Even though the situation is very difficult, people are trying to cling to their values, to cling to their beliefs, to hold them dear, and try to do something.

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: Here at CMP we try to highlight the exceptional work of Chinese journalists and push back against the perception that there isn’t meaningful reporting being done in China. In your book, you warn that too much emphasis on journalistic excellence can lead to the motif of “pockets of exceptional journalists” that stand above the rest. Why is this problematic and how do you push back against it?

Emily Chua: What you focus on really depends on the kind of question you’re asking. If you’re interested in a specific kind of journalistic practice, like investigative or environmental journalism, then it makes sense to go look at the people who do that. But as an anthropologist trying to take up the question of news in China and the practice of journalism in China, I didn’t want to go in with a preconceived definition of what news is. I mean, it’s a discipline-specific thing. 

Anthropologists try to understand what things are like in the field we’re investigating, which we assume will be different from anywhere else. I think that’s a difference between a media studies or political science approach to journalism and an anthropological one. With political science, it may be important to go in with a definition of journalism, but with anthropology we think that news is shaped by context, and can be different things in different places — it’s completely shaped by the context.

I wanted to go in with an openness to exploring what news meant in China. If I only looked at people who are doing a very specific kind of journalism, then I’d be missing most of the picture. I wanted to do an ethnography of the non-heroic journalists, the mainstream ones that don’t get highlighted and, as a consequence, are often assumed to just be cogs in the machine.

RHK: You observe that even these “non-heroic” newsmakers, the so-called cogs in the system, also exercise agency in their daily work. What are some of the ways they do this?

EC: Agency is a complex subject that gets theorized in a lot of ways. In the context of Chinese journalism, I was trying to push back against the way that agency tends to get conflated or even confused with something much more specific — basically, politically independent public speech. That’s a form of agency that’s closely associated with journalistic practices in the West. 

In many Western contexts, that’s the whole purpose of journalism. But if your objective is to understand how news can be made and thought of and lived with differently in other places, then it’s important to broaden our sense of agency.

Everyone who’s done any study of Chinese journalists has said that journalism in China is complex. Everyone talks about how complex it is — and it’s true. That’s something I wanted to convey. 

Even being a very ordinary, un-famous unheroic journalist actually takes a lot of work because of this complexity. All of them are managing these very dense and intricate and shifting political and commercial considerations and networks and relationships. I think their agency is really shown in the decisions they make about how to navigate and manage those demands, how to live with and make the most of and nudge those relationships in different directions.

Everyone talks about how complex [Chinese journalism] is — and it’s true. That’s something I wanted to convey. 

Even the decision to comply with a censorship order at any given moment isn’t necessarily a lack of agency. It can be an agentive decision that’s based on calculations about what the costs and benefits are, what one’s long-term objectives are, and whether it makes sense to compromise in the short term in order to keep working towards a long-term goal that one believes in. Agency is everywhere once we broaden our conception of it.

RHK: Perhaps this can take us to what you call the ethic of efficacy. What do you mean by this and how does it differ from the ethic of truthfulness?

EC: The ethic of truthfulness is the way I label the established ideas of what journalistic ethics should consist of and what the role and purpose of journalism are: truthful representations of reality that inform and empower the public. The ethic of efficacy is the term that I use to try to conceptualize the alternate way in which the journalists I worked with went about their practice. Instead of thinking that because they weren’t subscribing to an ethic of truthfulness they therefore had no ethics, the goal was to try to conceptualize this alternate ethic that they had.

At one level, the ethic of efficacy is the ethic that governs the use of news as currency. But if we put that aside for a minute, it is an ethic that I think emerges in an era where the classical business models of the news industry no longer apply. The ethic of truthfulness — and the idea that journalists can and should simply focus on delivering truth — was historically enabled by a certain business model in which newspapers had a monopoly on an audience’s attention.

Agency is everywhere once we broaden our conception of it.

They use that attention to generate advertising revenue, and that steady stream of income enabled them to pay for journalists to do what they believed they should. Marketing and editorial work were completely separate. The revenue keeps coming in. The journalists keep doing their work.

That business model is in crisis all over the world, not just in China. The ethic of efficacy is something that I personally think of as a globally emergent contemporary phenomenon.

I’m not an expert in journalism anywhere else, but I don’t think it’s entirely exclusive to China. It’s an ethic that governs journalistic work in an age where the old revenue streams just aren’t there anymore. Journalists now have to think about survival, about the survival of their newspaper, about their own survival in the industry. And when they have to think about survival, then they can’t be focused entirely on truth, on delivering important truths. So journalists now have a multiplicity of objectives that they have to achieve with their articles. 

Efficacy is the term that struck me as useful to convey the goal of the journalists I worked with who wanted to be effective in using their news articles to survive, to contribute to the survival of their news-making practice, which meant both their own careers and their newspapers as a business.

But at the same time, they also drew limits. They didn’t want to go to the point of treating news only as a means to make money. They had colleagues whom they felt were mercenary that way, or whom they considered to be going beyond an ethically acceptable limit in the way they used their news articles to achieve instrumental ends. So it’s trying to maintain this ethical balance of being practical but not being grossly instrumental and vulgar and selling your practice out completely.

RHK: Let’s walk back a bit to the concept of the currency of truth. What do you mean by that and how do you see it as a product of the digital news era?

EC: In the classical news model, when we assume you have an audience and a monopoly on their attention, you can call that “the public,” and you can think of “the public” as a stable thing that’s just out there receiving the messages you send to it.

But in a digital era, where there’s a lot of content competing for attention, publics aren’t just sitting around waiting for you to give them some information. It comes down to the kinds of business models that newspapers need to come up with under conditions like this, where you don’t have an audience that’s just waiting to pay for and read your content. The argument is that news articles in a moment like this don’t necessarily reach a public.

They have the potential to garner public attention. I call this their publicness. This possibility that this might become an object of public attention gives a news article a certain kind of value. Businesses with products and shares to sell and government and party officials all have an interest in this publicness. So the potential of a news article to garner attention makes it a kind of currency for people in political and commercial networks.

The goal of that analogy was to explore how newsmakers work in a context where news has this quality, and where news articles circulate in this way. Being a newsmaker in such a context involves transactional relationships and a certain kind of strategizing, but it also gives rise to different kinds of ideals and ethics.

RHK: I want to unpack another interesting turn of phrase that you use, which is turning the Communist Party from a main character in the media landscape to background noise. What do you mean by that?

EC: I was trying to push back on what seems like the dominant tenor of a lot of discussions of news in China, where the automatic assumption is that if you’re talking about news in China, the main character is the Party. But it depends on what question you’re asking. If you’re a political analyst who’s interested in the Party, then it makes sense for you to make the Party your main character. But that’s really just one of the facets of the practice and culture and life of news and journalism in any place, and in China in particular.

Ethnography has the capacity to bring out ground-level perspectives, and everyday life and reality on the ground is so much richer and more complex and in a way more chaotic and less mechanical than you’re able to appreciate when you start out with this main character, the Party that does what it wants and gets what it wants. The process of getting there is actually much more fraught and complex and contingent and in a way fragile than we necessarily see.

RHK: Another interesting way you characterize the media landscape in China is as a jianghu world reminiscent of wuxia novels. And is that because of the chaos and the confusion that you saw there, and was that different from what you expected to find?

EC: A comparative literature scholar, Petrus Liu, has written extensively about Jin Yong’s novels and their handling of the notion of jianghu. Liu calls Jin Yong’s characters “stateless subjects.” Reading him, I came to think of jianghu as a term that captures the relational quality of social existence. It’s an imaginary that focuses on the weight of relationships as opposed to the weight of the individual will. 

Building on that, I try to use jianghu as a counter concept to Charles Taylor’s idea of the modern social imaginary that underlines all our modern institutions. This is the image of a world made of free, autonomous, equal individuals who voluntarily come together to form societies. When that’s your imaginary, it makes sense to think of the newspaper as something that people voluntarily come together to do, to benefit individuals, collectives, and societies.

But if you start out with the jianghu as your social imaginary, then you don’t imagine autonomous individuals voluntarily getting together to form a society. Instead, you start out with the idea of these binding relationships and everybody being born into and having to live within these networks of binding relationships, which are shifting and contingent, but also asymmetrical. 

The book’s experiment was to approach journalism from the perspective of this very different imaginary. I found myself observing the weight of these relationships at the newspaper and the way an individual newsmaker, in their day-to-day actions, was not forced to do one thing or another but always had to consider the implications of their actions on the networks of relationships that they were embedded in.

The jianghu analogy tries to bring out the question of what it means to be an ethical subject in this social world. What is it to have ideals in a context where you are constrained not simply by censorship orders and commercial considerations, but by these relational obligations, these imperatives and responsibilities that come from the specific interpersonal relationships that one had with others.

RHK: So much has changed in the media landscape in China since you did your fieldwork in the early 2010s. Whereas the ethics of efficacy might have meant killing one story to do another meaningful one in a few months back then, now it could be a matter of years until they get to do something they find meaningful. How do you think these dynamics are different now?

EC: That’s a really good question and a tough one. I would agree with you completely that it seems to have pushed that horizon so much further. And you really have to have faith now. I think everyone recognizes that a lot of people have left the profession — and for a very good reason. The horizon is so far into the future that you really don’t know if it’s going to happen within the lifespan of your active career.

At the same time, I think that the usefulness of thinking about an ethic of efficacy rather than just looking at a lever of control that goes up and down, is being able to see that if and when things change, there is a whole world of people and ideas and relationships and practices that are there, that are going to respond to these changes. 

It’s a pretty heavy-feeling industry. There’s not a lot of immediate excitement about imminent change. But at the same time, there are these deep channels of potential and thoughtfulness that it’s important to see.

RHK: I wonder if even it’s possible now to do the fieldwork you did back then.

EC: No, I don’t think so. It was a moment where people were a lot more relaxed and open. This is not the case anymore. I’ve spoken to people trying to start ethnographic projects around news in China and they don’t get anywhere. Even people I spoke to then are more guarded now, more careful.

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: The preconception I had going into your book knowing it would explore dehumanization is that it would be about the precursors to mass atrocities because I thought that dehumanization is something only monsters do. But you lay out how this is something we have a very natural capacity for, that we do all the time, and sometimes is even necessary. Can you explain what you mean by dehumanization?

Liya Yu: You were actually right to think of dehumanization as atrocities that only so-called monsters commit because the first wave of dehumanization research was exactly framing it as such. A lot of this was from Holocaust survivors or second-generation Holocaust survivors in the US. But the way I look at dehumanization now, using new research methods coming from neuroscience, is to look at it as a brain capacity. And that means that in order for us to make it through one long day and be successful at it, we need to dehumanize certain people in order to get on with our day. Evolutionarily, it made sense: we needed to very quickly distinguish between who was in our in-group and who was in our out-group. And so dehumanization, I think, is a very helpful and powerful lens through which to look at exclusion in our time.

In a time when people don’t admit to [being racist or sexist], dehumanization is a very powerful lens through which to still detect it.

In our post-Cold War, somewhat liberal world order, it is actually not okay to publicly call yourself a racist, to publicly call yourself a sexist. If you look at people on the far right from Trump to Orban, none of these people would call themselves openly racist. They call themselves nationalists, patriots, etcetera. So in a time when people don’t admit to the egregious exclusions that, of course, are still going on, dehumanization is a very powerful lens through which to still detect it.

Dehumanization is important in a political context because in order to make meaningful and stable ties with people — whether that be in our communities or even diplomatically at the international level — you need to be able to humanize somebody else. I like this brain approach because it’s not moralizing. It’s not saying “You need to be a nice person; you need to just see everybody as your friend.” That’s not what I’m saying with this. My neuropolitical framing of humanization is very much located in brain agility and ability.

RHK: Growing up in this post-Cold War, End-of-History world you alluded to, we were often led to believe that liberal democracy is the natural state of the world, the system all humans gravitate toward. But you make the case that, actually, liberal democracy is exceptionally difficult to achieve and maintain. What makes it such a challenge?

LY: That’s a very good question. So I argue in my book that the liberal brain is one of the biggest cognitive challenges of our time — upholding the liberal brain. Liberal values such as inclusion, tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism are all values that might be easy to affirm. But it’s actually very hard to maintain every day over time because our brains naturally form in-groups very quickly. Sometimes these in-groups are irrational. So in our modern world, we often need to cooperate with a diverse group of people, and often we need to change these allegiances over the course of a very short time span. Now, our brains are really not used to this. Our brains are also not used to dealing with difference as something that is pleasant.

The liberal brain is one of the biggest cognitive challenges of our time.

Studies in political neuroscience on conservative versus liberal brains, especially in the US Republican versus Democrat context, showed that people who lean more on the Republican side would be disgusted by certain cultural triggers that are novel to them like unfamiliar smells. Not even very political things at first glance. But there’s a kind of cognitive preference for sameness, for continuity, for not trying new things out. And liberal democracy is all about embracing, to a certain degree, people who you don’t agree with. So I think in this context, we could also say that the liberal brain is not just a challenge for those who live in liberal democracies but also for those who are sort of at the threshold of potentially transitioning into liberal democracies. Because it asks a lot of people. My argument is that politicians and educators and political analysts underestimated the cognitive challenges that come with it. And we maybe need to rethink the language with which we approach people and tell them what is in it for them.

RHK: Civilizational discourse has recently become ubiquitous in China. We recently wrote a piece on “Xivilization,” the portmanteau the Global Times invented for what Beijing is now calling a new model for civilization guided by Xi Jinping’s thought. The implication is that the CCP doesn’t just represent a competing ideology but a competing civilization. What are some of the dangers in this way of thinking, in assigning institutional differences and points of friction in international relations to innate and insurmountable cultural differences between insular, exclusive entities?

LY: I speak in my book about Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and how there is specific research on civilization and dehumanization. When you say you’re more civilized than somebody else, you are kind of saying that you’re farther removed from the apes, so to speak. And so in this whole research field, they linked this to behavioral consequences, which is intergroup violence. They tested this. People were less willing to make peace with each other if they felt that they were dehumanized in this kind of civilizational way. And so I would say the international community needs to really wake up in terms of the language that we use and the concepts that we use, including, Huntington’s polemic about civilizational clashes. If Chinese people hear that and they feel that they’re seen as less civilized, their behavioral response will actually be more defensive and aggressive than if they just felt disliked by an individual Western white person.

[Civilization discourse] is, of course, very smart of Xi Jinping because he is creating an in-group identity that’s very sticky in our brains. It’s not just about abstract CCP values. It’s about history. It’s about your place in it.

I would say this civilized version that you mentioned is, of course, very smart of Xi Jinping because he is creating an in-group identity that’s very sticky in our brains. It’s not just about abstract CCP values. It’s about history. It’s about your place in it. It’s about Chinese people having suffered in that history under colonialism. It’s about Chinese people rising again. And so at the brain level, all of that really plays into people’s need for inclusion in the Chinese context and the shame of having had to try to be Western because, you know, I think we all experience this.

I’m German Chinese. I identify as German, really. My parents immigrated to Germany from China. But of course, I never fit in because I don’t look German. I’m a second-generation immigrant. And so first, you know, you try to be white, you try to fit in, and then you start to resent that self that did that. So basically, I’m just describing at the micro level what happens then at the macro level. And then you just need somebody to come in at that moment when you feel that resentment and say, “Hey, I have this other identity for you.”

I would add to this that the whole civilization discourse is inherently dehumanizing because in order to elevate yourself, and your own civilizational status, you have to dehumanize others. To an extent, that’s the dynamic. But traditional leftist and liberal frameworks of analysis against racism and exclusion would be unable really to lay the finger on this. This is why I came up with my theory. Why is Huntington still so successful and why do a lot of liberal people in DC also support this theory? Because it’s not so obviously racist. It’s not so obviously politically incorrect. But with a dehumanization lens, I think you can say no, it’s actually problematic for this and that reason.

RHK: Why do you think we need a new social contract?

LY: I think a lot of people are actually currently in what US researcher Daniel Yudkin calls the “exhausted majority.” Although our societies seem very polarized on both of these sorts of extreme ends, a lot of people are in this exhausted majority. The social contract is literally trying to pitch to people why they should join this liberal democratic project. That means that if you join, you have to make certain sacrifices. You will lose something, but you will gain something else. And I think why right-wing populism, and also people who are touting Chinese authoritarianism as a more effective way of governance — why they are successful is because liberals have failed for a long time to pitch the social contract successfully to that exhausted majority. People ask, “Well, what’s in it for me? You just basically want me to say I’m a bad person because I’m by virtue of being white, I’m a bad person by virtue of being a man.”

I think that as much as identity politics has been important in driving movements, it actually has been quite toxic in a social contract context in convincing people what’s in it for them. Because a lot of the current culture wars don’t really try to pitch to the other side, to say that maybe you don’t belong to this particular identity we’re fighting for the rights of, but actually you need to support us because it’s in your interest, because the alternative, as Hobbes would say, is complete chaos.

RHK: In Vulnerable Minds, you write about how, instead of discussing what unites and divides us, you want to talk in terms of universals. How do you respond to the charge that there are no universal truths to the human experience and saying there are implies a form of hegemony?

LY: This is where I come in with my identity as an Asian woman. The reason why I wanted to create this kind of theory in the first place is because I felt excluded. My field, especially political philosophy, is very white and very male. I always knew that I wanted to go to the heart of power to change the inequality that I had experienced, because I knew that the radical exclusion that comes with racism and sexism that I had experienced as an Asian woman in the West could only be countered with a radical kind of inclusion.

I knew that the radical exclusion that comes with racism and sexism that I had experienced as an Asian woman in the West could only be countered with a radical kind of inclusion.

I’m just as critical of that kind of hegemonic universalism as my friends on the left are. But I came up with a new universalism in which I wanted to be radically included as an Asian woman, up from a kind of biological layer of my existence.

I know that a lot of people have issues with neuroscience methods and the claims that they make, which is why in my book I dedicate a whole chapter to methods. It sounds kind of dry, but I think it’s also kind of exciting because I speak about the historical context, how those methods and social neuroscience developed in the wake of the civil rights movement. I know that I have a lot of critiques of this, my universal approach, but I would just say maybe two things.

I’m not using neuroscience in a deterministic or reductionist way. In fact, I haven’t really met any social neuroscientists who would do so. They all say we need context. But for me it’s empowering to know what what the brain does. My students with minority backgrounds, when I taught in the US, would never question why it’s important to universally understand what happens in the brain of the excluder because when you get arrested by the police as a young black man and you sit in the back of the car, you know how to maybe humanize yourself — some strategies how to humanize yourself, such as, you know, something as innocuous as some stating your vegetable preferences or just, you know, talking about your own life and your stories. So to me, in the end, it’s actually white privilege on the left. There are some on the left who are very hostile to psychology, very hostile to neuroscience, and I ask you what privilege in your life allows you not to need to know what happens in the brain of your excluder.

RHK: Your work mainly attempts to understand the rise of far-right movements in the West, but what has relevant research taught you about the phenomenon of online pro-authoritarian leftists, or “tankies,” in Western liberal democracies?

LY: What always struck me with tankies is that they actually dehumanize Chinese people — often very explicitly so and without being aware of it at all. I mean, they’re not that different from Stalinist back in Russia or Maoists who would say, well, we need to sacrifice so many people for my ideology. They’re just super ideological. And I think what my neuropolitical theory offers is breaking through ideologies. It allows us to think from within our brains, saying neither that our brains are very good or very bad. It’s more looking at the capacities that we have and, given the capacities that we have, what kind of society can we achieve or do we want to achieve? It’s also about, well, here you have to set yourself some goals. And with tankies, of course, it’s very much so that they the goals have already been set by their ideology. And so they need the reality to fit ideology. This is very typical of how our brains work. It’s a need for control.

If we try to humanize tankies for a moment, why do they do it? They feel overwhelmed by a certain social economic order that they live in. They are very frustrated with US imperialism, with the way the US capitalist market works, and they see injustice… I mean, just to be fair to them and also so that we can eventually roll them back into our common project because otherwise the alternative is mutual destruction, right? So I have some faith in tankies that, maybe, when you tell them basically, I humanize you, I understand your thoughts, your motivations behind your frustrations — and that you actually are motivated by a sense of justice. Many of them are, but then when they apply that sense of justice to China, Chinese people don’t count. It’s just about how it fits into their own experiences of misery in the West and I think I would say in this context also — because I talk in my book about teaching pro-Trump students in Virginia in 2016 — what’s really very counterproductive for our brains is shaming and basically dehumanizing you, putting you in a category of just being dumb.

Offer them humanizing stories of Chinese people in China that would challenge their ideologies. I believe that some of them will not respond, but some of them might or some of them might feel, hey, this person is somewhat on my side and at least getting my motivations.

RHK: What role can the media play in helping to humanize each other?

The media has a lot of power over framing people and situations in a humanizing way.

LY: The media has a lot of power over framing people and situations in a humanizing way. A Norwegian study showed that disgust-based framing of Roma refugees in the media led to an increase in support for hostile refugee policies in people. Disgust is usually a neurocognitive trigger for dehumanization, meaning that it can lead to dehumanization of an out-group, such as if they are associated with disgust-based descriptions about their cleanliness, for example. Describing people as animal-like, machine-like, or their bodies having superhuman qualities can also increase dehumanization. This was highly relevant in the context of Black Lives Matter, where young Black men were framed in police descriptions as having superhuman, hulk-like bodily qualities. If you describe someone like this, you automatically assume that their body is different from others’ and can take more pain, leading to pain-denial in punitive and even medical settings. It’s important that journalists are aware of theses dehumanization triggers, especially because some of them might seem innocuous.

RHK: What new insights have your three years living in Taiwan yielded?

LY: I would say something that we should pay attention to, and that the Western world and white people won’t do for us because it’s not really in their interest, is to talk about intra-dehumanization in Asia. Of course there’s also racism but I think it’s more helpful to put it in dehumanization terms because especially in the Taiwan, China, Hong Kong context, where you have people who share the same or similar ethnicities, people are like, well, that’s not racism, so what is it? And of course, you know, in the bigger East Asian context, there’s so much more to say about dehumanization in Japan, Korea, and all of that. But I think just in this kind of triangle [Taiwan-China-Hong Kong], I have witnessed a rise in dehumanization going hand-in-hand with a rise of authoritarianism in China.

We are at a crucial, very volatile point in geopolitics in Asia where we can’t really afford not to know what’s going on in Xi Jinping’s brain, not to know what’s going on in Chinese peoples’ brains..

I have seen an increase in dehumanization between Taiwanese people and Chinese people. Even commemorating the Tiananmen massacre. There are fewer Taiwanese people coming. A lot of Hong Kong people are keeping it up. There are Taiwanese young people saying, what does this have to do with me? And I get it. I really get it that there’s frustration, but I think our brains have to overcome some of that. It’s called meta dehumanization. Taiwanese people feel dehumanized by China and trying to attack Taiwan and obliterate its existence. And so they’re like, well, guess what? I’m not interested in you either then. But if that leads to a withdrawal of political solidarity, I think it’s not in Taiwan’s political interest. I think it’s not fair that this is put on Taiwanese brains, so to speak, that you have to overcome yourself. But I’m saying that we are at a crucial, very volatile point in in geopolitics in Asia where we can’t really afford not to know what’s going on in Xi Jinping’s brain, not to know what’s going on in Chinese people’s brain — to mentalize them.

Humanizing them doesn’t mean that you love them. It doesn’t mean that you have excessive empathy towards them. It just means you can imagine, what are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they dreaming about? What is their next move? And currently, I don’t know how many people in Asia are doing that towards China and Chinese people. What’s their next move? And the A4 Revolution (白紙運動) was a great moment of humanization of Chinese people. Very powerful images as well that people could relate to. That was a great like little opening and I think we should do studies to see how that has translated into more humanization.