Does language shape the way we experience consciousness? Recent research from the University of Liège is offering new insight into that question, suggesting a deeper relationship between language and awareness than previously understood.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have explored the nature of human consciousness. However, the connection between language and consciousness has remained especially puzzling. While it might seem intuitive that consciousness exists independently of language, new findings indicate the relationship may be far more intertwined.
Charlène Aubinet, a neuropsychologist and speech therapist with the Coma Science Group, explained that researchers have identified a key distinction between levels of language processing.
Low-level processes—such as recognizing speech sounds or simple words—can occur even when consciousness is significantly reduced, including during deep sleep, under anesthesia, or in patients with severe brain injuries.
“In contrast, more complex processes, such as understanding an entire sentence or integrating abstract ideas, seem to require a high level of consciousness,” Aubinet said in a statement.
The interaction between language and consciousness (Photo credit: University of Liège / C.Aubinet).
Studies of patients emerging from coma have revealed parallel recovery patterns in language and consciousness. In some cases, early signs of language processing even precede and help predict the return of conscious awareness. Aubinet noted that “this observation has major clinical implications, as it cautions against assuming that the absence of verbal responses equates to unconsciousness.”
Interest in so-called “silent speech” has also grown alongside advances in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Companies including the MIT-linked startup AlterEgo have demonstrated wearable systems that interpret subtle neuromuscular signals associated with internal speech, allowing users to communicate without speaking aloud.
The technology has generated excitement for accessibility applications, while also raising privacy concerns as consumer neurotechnology advances.
Inner speech—the internal voice people use when thinking—may not simply reflect consciousness but actively shape it. Researchers suggest it supports self-awareness and metacognition, enabling individuals to evaluate thoughts, emotions, and past actions.
Evidence from patients with aphasia, a language impairment caused by brain damage, further reinforces the connection. Many such patients experience difficulties with self-reflection and other higher-order cognitive functions, indicating that language plays a role in how conscious awareness is organized and expressed.
Traditional models often treated language and consciousness as largely independent. Current research instead suggests they operate as closely linked systems: language does not create consciousness, but it influences how people interpret, reflect upon, and interact with the world.
Fundamentally, Aubinet and her colleagues argue that much of the problem when it comes to breaking down the relationship between consciousness and the words we speak boils down to the nuances of how language is processed.
“The difficulty of disentangling the role of language in consciousness stems from the multi-determined nature of language processing itself, which ranges from low-level processing of phonetic and phonological features associated with speech to high-level processing of semantic content and morphosyntactic rules involving complex integration skills,” the researchers write in their recent study.
Beyond philosophical implications, the research carries practical importance. Improved understanding of language processing could help clinicians better assess patients with brain injuries, refine therapies for language disorders, and deepen knowledge of the neurological basis of self-awareness.
Rather than separate faculties, language and consciousness may function as complementary processes—something which researchers might liken to being “partners” working together in the complex mechanisms underlying human thought.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
The Magazine feature about the hidden meanings of Frankenstein provoked a huge response from readers, who weighed in with some of their own.
So it’s a book about a mad scientist who creates a monster, right?
Not entirely. Since Mary Shelley wrote her novel 200 years ago, it has variously been interpreted as a comment on, among other things, slavery, race and post-natal depression.
Influenced greatly by the Victorian paradigm of homosexuality, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to explore the inability to ignore or destroy one’s sexuality. Victor Frankenstein creates a large, masculine being in order to complement his own effeminacy and to fulfill his repressed homosexual desires. The creature acts also as a symbol of Frankenstein’s sexuality. The creature pursues Frankenstein and Frankenstein pursues the creature – they have eyes for none but each other, and women act only as intermediaries between the two. Frankenstein’s passion clearly overshadows his affection for Elizabeth, and a similar situation arises between the creature and his woman counterpart. Frankenstein’s relationships with Walton and Clerval also emphasise effeminacy and are undoubtedly sexual in nature. Throughout the novel, Frankenstein remains unable to escape from the creature’s grasp – from his homosexuality – until at last he dies. The creature dies only after Frankenstein’s death, finalising Shelley’s idea that homosexuality is a natural, inextinguishable trait.
Emily Puleo, Saint Louis, US
A Woman Out of Time: Rebecca Solnit on Mary Shelley’s Dystopian Sci-Fi Novel The Last Man
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is now widely credited with writing the first science-fiction novel with Frankenstein in 1818, and you could extend that to make her author of the second as well, the one you hold in your hands now. Revisiting Shelley’s life and work makes me wish I could wield what would become one of that genre’s favorite devices, time travel, on her behalf, to amend the maladies and masculinities that were the causes of her life’s great griefs.
With a time machine, I would send medical care back in time, all the way to her 1797 birth. Had a more sanitary doctor tended her mother, the legendary feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797), than the one whose unwashed hands likely gave her the infection that killed her, her namesake might not have been motherless. Other interventions could perhaps have prevented three of Mary Shelley’s four children from dying so young and, for her, so heartbreakingly.
But for the other half of her trouble we’d have to send her into the future, because it wasn’t only the medical realities of her time that shaped her life; it was the limits put on her as a woman. As a man, she would have cut a swathe through nineteenth-century English intellectual life and paid no price for living with her future spouse before marriage. As a woman she was cut down to nothing again and again.
Her imagination was itself confined by its time in some ways. In others, it soared above it as the airships in The Last Man soar above the late twenty-first century landscape. In both Frankenstein and this novel, she simply bypasses the conventions of Christian theology to reimagine the world.
In the former, life is created neither by God nor by biology but by a scientist; in the latter human beings face extinction, though the Christian apocalypse and Last Judgment are nowhere in sight, and this plague is natural, not divine punishment. All the rest of life goes on blooming without us—human beings seem to be neither necessary to life on earth nor the pinnacle of creation. Charles Darwin was just a schoolboy when she wrote these books, and the ruptures he and the geologists would produce in the understanding of the earth and its living beings had yet to happen.
As a man, she would have cut a swathe through nineteenth-century English intellectual life and paid no price for living with her future spouse before marriage. As a woman she was cut down to nothing again and again.
So Shelley was plunging out ahead, on her own. That nature seems to thrive without humans in The Last Man recalls contemporary ecological visions—notably Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us, in which he imagines how nature would restore itself were our species to vanish suddenly.
In the age of climate chaos, in which human beings are so obviously the source of destruction from pole to pole, from oceans to peaks, from burning forests to flooded plains, the world without us can seem blessed rather than cursed. The current Thirty-by-Thirty plan seeks to preserve that portion of earth and sea percentage of the earth, by 2030, for wildlife and the natural carbon sequestration plants engage in, realizing human withdrawal in a more positive way.
But the thriving natural world is not a welcome sight in The Last Man, and her protagonist declares, “We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb….” But at a later point, he sees all nature thriving: “Where was pain and evil? Not in the calm air or weltering ocean; not in the woods or fertile fields, nor among the birds that made the woods resonant with song, nor the animals that in the midst of plenty basked in the sunshine.”
From the perspective of our time, a catastrophe that leaves the natural world untouched seems a relief. In 1826, this decline of the species does lead to one interim boon: social and economic equality among the survivors, as titles and rank come to mean nothing, and palaces and treasures become available to all.
Mary Shelley also shows an insurrectionary interest in equality and a distaste for monarchy, writing when government by hereditary elites threatens to return: “The half extinct spirit of royalty roused itself in the minds of men; and they, willing slaves, self-constituted subjects, were ready to bend their necks to the yoke.” This so outraged a reviewer that he wrote, “A king of England, in conformity with the wishes of the people, retires from his throne, to make way for the establishment of a republic. Can we wonder at the plague that was to follow, and sweep off all the inhabitants of the earth? The holy salt of royalty removed, what was to preserve the mass from corruption?”
In these ways her work is subversive. In others it’s conventional. She dethrones kings in this book, but not husbands. The protagonists of The Last Man, Frankenstein, and some of her other novels are male, because despite her own mother’s famous screed against the suppression of female possibilities, she cannot or at least did not imagine women with the agency to participate so fully in life.
Instead, she ventriloquizes through a series of male narrators, so much so she seems to see women through men’s eyes. The good women of The Last Man, though they live and breathe in 2073 and after, are demure wives, devoted mothers, a dutiful niece. Only the minor character Evadne takes a more adventurous and creative path and plays a role in public life, at a cost.
Shelley herself lived a life strangely stretched between speech and silence, deference and adventure. In her journal for 1822, she recalls that six years earlier, at the Lake Como villa of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, “incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations,” so she merely listened as her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, and the other men present conversed.
But it was during those conversations, while the freakishly cold summer kept them indoors, that Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Mary’s towering entry into the competition, Frankenstein, was initially published anonymously, and her husband was sometimes credited as the author (and later The Last Man was coyly credited to “the author of Frankenstein“). It’s a roundabout revenge that the girl who hardly dare speak wrote a book that would by the twentieth century loom far larger in the public imagination than anything those men did.
While her husband lived, she was dependent on his income and his whims, and he was often capricious, improvident, and callous. When he died, his hostile father, Sir Timothy Shelley, furnished her and her surviving child with a modest allowance on the condition that she silence herself, so she was forced to publish anonymously while she strove to write for a living.
The Last Man shows the tension between what she wants—to explore ideas and craft an allegory for her profound sense of loss and loneliness—and what she thought the market might want. So her flowery and sometimes florid prose style and her characters’ emotional lives seem conventional furnishings in an utterly unconventional premise.
Before the Romantics, the word “lonely” mostly just meant alone, isolated, as likely to be used for isolated places and objects as for forlorn people—the 1755 edition of Doctor Johnson’s dictionary defines it as “solitary, addicted to solitude.” It lacked the sense of sad yearning and bereftness that it now evokes. Mary Shelley’s peers and their near predecessors, the first generation of Romantic poets, were preoccupied with solitary figures, outcasts, orphans, and with loneliness. A number of them wrote about the mythic figure of the Wandering Jew, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge modeled his Ancient Mariner after him (one of Shelley’s childhood memories was hiding behind the sofa as Coleridge recited the poem to her father and stepmother).
Among all these figures, Shelley might be the one whose life was most threaded through with an actual experience of loneliness, and in making that emotion a subject for literature she was a true romantic. After her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died, she was raised by an unsympathetic stepmother and a father who prized her intellect more than he protected her wellbeing. When, at the age of sixteen, she ran off to France with the married Shelley, she was rejected and reviled, even by her own father, for violating the sexual rules circumscribing women’s lives.
The stigma lived on long after the death by suicide of the first Mrs. Shelley and her marriage to the poet. During the eight years of their life together, she had at least five pregnancies, resulting in the early death of three of those children and a miscarriage. She nearly bled to death from the latter, a few weeks before her young husband and his friend died in a boating accident in early July of 1822. He was almost thirty; she not yet twenty-five. Her journal stops abruptly upon his death and then resumes a few months later, “Now I am alone—oh, how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sighs; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none.”
In April of 1824, Byron died, apparently of malaria and blood loss after being, in a common medical practice of the time, bled repeatedly by his doctors. Though her relationship with Byron had been conflicted, she felt his passing deeply—and, it’s often said, modeled The Last Man’s Raymond after him. In her journal for May 14, 1824, while in the midst of writing this novel, she wrote, “The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.” Only her son Percy lived on as a companion to the widow and a relic of those hectic years among the poets.
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There are few books about loneliness more wrenching than The Last Man, but it’s hard to attribute it all to her bereavement when the novel she wrote in the midst of her marriage and the society Shelley brought with him was as fierce an exploration of solitude.
There are few books about loneliness more wrenching than The Last Man, but it’s hard to attribute it all to her bereavement when the novel she wrote in the midst of her marriage and the society Shelley brought with him was as fierce an exploration of solitude. Frankenstein describes the utter loneliness of the singular creature cobbled together from corpses, brought to life with electricity, and then abandoned by his creator. Lionel Verney, the protagonist and narrator of The Last Man, is fated to become as unique and as solitary as this creature, to be the only one of his kind.
But it’s worth remembering that Verney’s life begins in solitude as well as ends in it. As a child, he had been orphaned and sent out to herd sheep, becoming a “vagabond” whose life offered “companionship with nature, and a reckless loneliness.” The latter part of the phrase negates the former: nature is indeed a companion, and beauties of landscape are much praised in this book, but it is no substitute for human companionship. Verney’s life echoes Shelley’s—a lonely childhood, an adventurous heyday among remarkable peers, and a return to isolation.
I contemplate that time machine and the possible meddling with her hardships and losses, and then contemplate that had her life turned out differently her work might well have too, or never come to be. We need that work, and so I leave her to her fate and her readers to her books.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty-five books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include this year’s No Straight Road Takes You There, as well as Orwell’s Roses, Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian and serves on the boards of the climate groups Oil Change International and Third Act.
In Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the popular idea that living well requires a coherent life story. Human life far exceeds the narratives we construct, he argues, and some of us don’t experience ourselves narratively at all.
By Jack Maden | February 2026 (philosophybreak.com)
We can’t help but tell stories about our lives. It could be a tale from years ago, depicting our days at school, replete now with its own heroes, villains, and mythology.
It could be an anecdote about when we were hurrying through the rain, late for a date, and a passing lorry roared through a puddle to drench us to the bone.
It could be a past glory or heartbreak, which over the years has shed all extraneous detail to become in memory a touchstone of pure feeling.
Some thinkers suggest our weakness for a good story betrays an inherent human quality. We are all naturally disposed to impose some kind of narrative upon our lives. As the writer Terry Pratchett puts it in The Globe:
The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett, meanwhile, suggests each of us are characters in an ongoing story that’s been progressing since our birth. As he writes in a 1988 piece for the Times Literary Supplement:
We are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, and we always try to put the best ‘faces’ on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self.
Narrative struts its stuff not just in our personal lives but in many aspects of our culture. Nations construct histories. Politicians spin ideology. Companies develop brand stories. Celebrities build personal brands. Non-celebrities do, too.
Think of the CV and covering letter: effective ones weave the story of why we are the natural fit for this job at this precise moment in time: that every moment of our employment history has been building to this grand crescendo, this wonderful opportunity, this unique role we were born to fulfill. (And then we repurpose the application, swapping out the company name).
Whether it’s constructed in public or private, identity is the name of the game. We’re all briefly here, carving out our own stories. If we want to live good lives, we better ensure our stories are good ones.
constituting an identity requires that an individual conceive of his life as having the form and the logic of a story—more specifically, the story of a person’s life—where ‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative.
And to develop fully as authentic people, Heidegger tells us, we must own the narrative: we must be the heroic authors of our own tales.
But is viewing life this way the best or only way to approach it?
In his famous 2004 paper Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson suggests that, while it’s easy to get swept away by this narrative view of life and the self, its power is vastly overstated.
Not everyone constructs and lives out their life as a story, Strawson argues, and nor does a good life require a coherent story arc.
In fact, thinking of life and the self only in terms of narrative, Strawson claims,
hinder[s] human self-understanding, close[s] down important avenues of thought, [and] impoverish[es] our grasp of ethical possibilities.
Are you ‘Diachronic’ or ‘Episodic’?
Some people are ‘Diachronic’, Strawson observes. They feel a continuous sense of self from the past into the future, and connect different parts of their life into a coherent whole.
Not everyone is like this, however: Strawson claims that many people – himself included – are ‘Episodic’.
For episodic individuals, the ‘I’ experiencing the present moment is genuinely distinct from the ‘I’ that existed ten, twenty, thirty years ago. There is no urge to forge any kind of psychological continuity between earlier and later selves. As Strawson writes:
I have no significant sense that I – the I now considering this question – was there in the further past… [this] certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have any autobiographical memories of these past experiences. I do… And they are certainly the experiences of the human being that I am. It does not, however, follow from this that I experience them as having happened to me…
Episodic individuals have memories; they just don’t identify, in a continuous narrative sense, with the subject present in those memories. The past happened to someone else; the beginning is always now.
Strawson thinks the existence of episodic individuals like himself disproves the assumption that humans are inherently narrative.
And, given there need not be a single protagonist journeying through time, Strawson reflects, neither is there an obligation to force the disjointed events of the past into a unified plot.
Reducing everything to a narrative risks distorting reality
Advocates of narrativity argue that without some story linking our past and future, responsibility and growth become hard to make sense of.
But the riposte from Strawson is that imposing narrative on everything could actually be harmful. It opens the door to a certain revisionism and self-deceit: our egos tidy up past events to better serve a particular autobiographical narrative.
‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually the memory yields.
But as well as self-aggrandizing, narrative can also be self-limiting. We believe certain stories about who we are, and so prevent ourselves from becoming something else. This is a form of what existentialists call bad faith.
The solution for Strawson is to release ourselves from the assumption that life needs to be a good, coherent story in order to be good or coherent: “The business of living well is, for many, a completely non-Narrative project.”
An episodic approach might be less prone to revisionism and rumination on the past, Strawson suggests. Given episodic individuals tend not to thread back to their past selves, they are primed to show up to the present moment without being bogged down by the weight of some previous identity.
This doesn’t mean rejecting or having some kind of intentional amnesia towards the past; it just means understanding what happened in the past need not take narrative form. We don’t need to identify with our past selves in order to make sense of our lives or live well, Strawson argues:
I’m a product of my past, including my very early past, in many profoundly important respects, but it simply does not follow that self-understanding, or the best kind of self-understanding, must take a narrative form, or indeed a historical form.
Strawson cares about who he is now. He doesn’t care about how his current self connects to his past self, or the story of how he might one day develop narratively into another character. He shares the bemusement of the journalist Goronwy Rees, who he quotes as follows:
For as long as I can remember it has always surprised and slightly bewildered me that other people should take it so much for granted that they each possess what is usually called ‘a character’; that is to say, a personality with its own continuous history…
Our lives need not resemble the linearity of a flowing narrative. In fact, Strawson concludes, a strictly narrative view “risks a strange commodification of life and time”:
It misses the point. ‘We live’, as the great short story writer V. S. Pritchett observes, ‘beyond any tale that we happen to enact…’
What do you make of Strawson’s arguments?
Strawson’s Against Narrativity throws up many questions around personal identity, selfhood, memory, responsibility, and what it means to exist in and through time. What do you make of his analysis?
Do you think a good life requires a coherent, unified story arc?
Do you live your life as a narrative? Or do you tend to be more episodic?
Is there a happy medium? If life isn’t one huge story, could it be an interconnected collection of short ones?
If core parts of our identities do not persist through time, to what extent should we be held responsible for past actions?
To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related Philosophy Breaks:
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On February 22nd, 2026, Venus (at 15° Pisces) is trine Jupiter (at 15° Cancer).
Venus and Jupiter are the 2 ‘benefics’ in astrology – planets considered to be the most beneficial and supportive, associated with growth, harmony, opportunties, protection, and goodwill.
Both Venus and Jupiter are in their exaltation signs – exaltation signs are where their qualities can express themselves at their very best, with less friction and more natural confidence.
Venus and Jupiter are connected by a trine – which is considered the most beneficial aspect in astrology. The Moon (now in Taurus) is also sextiling both, creating a soft, supportive minor triangle that further stabilizes and amplifies the flow.
If that was not enough, Jupiter is also aligned with Sirius, the brightest and one of the most auspicious stars in the night sky.
Here we are. If there was a 5-star astrology transit, THIS is it.
Venus Trine Jupiter – Abundance, But Not By Default
Venus trine Jupiter is a fertile transit promising abundance, opportunities, and a sense of ease and flow.
But just because the astrology looks generous doesn’t necessarily translate into abundance for everyone.
For us humans, the idea that there is abundance everywhere is somehow hard to believe.
It’s not easy to live by the principle of abundance. We are born in a world that, historically at least, has been dangerous. Our ancestors lived in caves and took turns staying awake while others slept so they wouldn’t get attacked by prey animals.
Up to some decades ago, owning valuables didn’t necessarily make us safe, but more anxious – what if I become a target? What if I get robbed? What if someone finds the pile of cash under my bed?
I am in a happy relationship right now – but what if something happens to my partner? To my children?
The world we live in used to be dangerous, and it still is to some extent – there’s no minimizing this either.
However, many of our fears and survival patterns are rooted in a reality that no longer exists.
Jupiter Trine Venus – Abundance Shakes Hands with Inner Reality
But what if this is the time to align our beliefs about how the world “works” (Jupiter) so that it better supports our personal sense of happiness and fulfillment (Venus)?
In Pisces, Venus operates from the space of infinite potential. Pisces is the field itself – the place where personal values, desires, and meanings are already connected to something larger.
Call it source, the ether, the field, 5D – whatever language you prefer – Venus here experiences what matters to us as part of that universal plane of possibility.
Jupiter in Cancer speaks to nourishment, protection, and emotional abundance. Cancer is the mother energy – creation, care, safety, and belonging – and Jupiter expands whatever it touches.
This placement grows our capacity to feel held by life, supported enough to open, and safe enough to receive.
Jupiter in Cancer is an incredibly abundant transit, but this doesn’t mean that just because Jupiter is in Cancer right now, we all automatically experience abundance.
To access it, we first have to align with the frequency of Jupiter in Cancer. Then, and only then, can we tap into it and manifest what we want.
We Manifest What We Are
However, there’s an important catch. We don’t manifest what we say we want – we manifest the emotional and psychological state we consistently live in.
If we tell ourselves we are rich BUT we don’t actually feel safe, supported, or nourished, we will manifest the emotional frequency we are emitting – not the words we repeat. That’s precisely why many manifestation techniques don’t work.
We are what we nourish, emotionally and psychologically. What we give attention to, we amplify. Where we direct our emotional frequency, energy flows.
The old belief is that resources are finite. But if we understand that we manifest our frequency, and that reality responds to what we consistently pour into it, then life suddenly opens into something else entirely – a field of infinite possibilities.
And the Venus-Jupiter trine could be the moment when things start to click without force. That ease comes from the aspect itself – the trine.
A trine is a harmonious aspect that occurs between planets in signs of the same element – fire, earth, air, or water.
Right now, Venus and Jupiter form a beautiful water trine.
What does this actually mean, they are in a trine? When 2 planets trine each other, they are in the same element, so they speak the same language.
2 planets in different elements, for example, fire and water (Aries and Cancer, Leo and Scorpio, Sagittarius and Pisces), will instead form a square – that’s because their baseline is very different.
Fire wants to act, initiate, move forward. Water wants to feel, contain, protect, and respond. Water can extinguish fire.
Planets in square are not ‘bad’ – they simply have different priorities and a different type of goal. In the best case, water can temper fire that has gone out of control, and fire can warm up water – when water is contained and receptive – creating balance rather than conflict.
But the difference is that with a square, we get a different type of outcome than we would get from each of those signs acting alone.
The trine works differently. With a trine, both planets operate from the same element and the same baseline. There is no internal contradiction to resolve. Instead of negotiating, the planets reinforce each other.
That’s why 2 planets in trine act as an activator of that element’s potential – they don’t dilute it, they amplify it. You get more of the element itself, expressed with ease rather than effort.
A trine brings momentum to otherwise isolated, unactivated potential. We can have one planet in a water sign by itself – for example Venus in Pisces – but without activation, this remains a potential.
Same with Jupiter in Cancer, if Jupiter is not making aspects to other planets.
But when Venus and Jupiter align, the potential of that water element gets activated.
Water Trine – What is Water?
Water is what nourishes us and sustains life. Water is what we emerge from. It is the medium through which the mother communicates with the unborn child – the medium through which nutrients reach different parts of the body.
It’s also the medium through which water on Earth gets recycled – evaporation, rain, circulation.
Water is, therefore, the medium through which realities communicate and blend with each other. This is different from air – the other connectivity element – which is immaterial and more abstract in how it connects.
Basically, water is about how we feel with ourselves and with the world we live in.
If we feel safe, supported, and emotionally nourished, that is water. If we feel good in our lives, in our environment, we exchange with the world in a way that is natural, responsive, and sustaining.
Venus in Pisces trine Jupiter in Cancer is about how we feel about ourselves and our lives starting to connect with what really makes us happy – and from that place we shift our frequency, which later becomes the foundation for manifesting a new reality.
So the formula is:
Personal reality (Venus) → belief about how the world works (Jupiter) = a certain personal frequency.
When this frequency is aligned with emotional safety, nourishment, and trust, we experience support, abundance, and a sense of flow.
Venus in Pisces asks us to reconnect with what genuinely feels good.
Jupiter in Cancer then expands that feeling into our relationship with the world itself – do we feel held by life, protected enough to grow, supported enough to take space?
From that place of alignment, our frequency naturally shifts – and we begin to attract more ease and abundance.
Sooner or later, the world has to respond to the different frequency we are emitting.
The Venus-Jupiter Trine and Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries
And the sky is very charged right now. Saturn and Neptune are still at 0° Aries, rewriting the narrative. We are still bathing in that Zero energy of potential – the space before form fully crystallizes.
So we’re not just talking about optimism or ‘positive thinking’. We’re talking about a rare window where we can consciously rewrite the narrative we’ve been living inside of – about safety, worth, support, and what’s actually possible for us.
Venus-Jupiter helps us reconnect with what feels nourishing and meaningful. Saturn-Neptune at 0° Aries asks us to commit to a new inner stance, even before there’s proof.
Together, they invite a shift in frequency – away from survival and scarcity, and toward trust, openness, and receptivity. And once that frequency changes, the outer story has no choice but to follow.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Feb 18, 2026 Jack Hunter, PhD, is author of Spirits, Gods, and Magic: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Supernatural; Engaging the Anomalous; and is editor of an anthology titled Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. He is also coeditor, with David Luke, of Talking With The Spirits: Ethnographies From Between The Worlds. He is also founder of the journal, Paranthropology. Here he describes different approaches taken to the realm of spirits by scholars in anthropology. He recalls his own fieldwork studying spiritualist mediumship in the United Kingdom. He presents various cases suggesting that spiritual entities are part of the natural world. However, he acknowledges that it is exceedingly tricky to distinguish between living agent psi and autonomous spiritual entities. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on August 31, 2020)
Yes, the word “miracle” shares a deep Indo-European root with the word “smile,” leading to the etymological idea that a miracle is something that causes us to smile in wonder. Online Etymology Dictionary +1
Here is the breakdown of the etymological connection:
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Root: Both “smile” and “miracle” can be traced back to the PIE root *smei- or *(s)meyh₂-, which means “to smile, laugh, or be astonished”.
Latin Evolution: The root developed into the Latin word mirus (“wonderful”) and mirari (“to wonder at”).
Miracle: From mirari came miraculum (“object of wonder”), which evolved into the English word “miracle”.
Smile: The root developed through Germanic languages into the English word “smile”. Online Etymology Dictionary +3
Therefore, historically and linguistically, a miracle is a “wonderful” event that causes one to smile with astonishment. FāVS News +1
verb: soothe; 3rd person present: soothes; past tense: soothed; past participle: soothed; gerund or present participle: soothing
gently calm (a person or their feelings).”a shot of brandy might soothe his nerves”
reduce pain or discomfort in (a part of the body).”to soothe the skin try chamomile or thyme”
relieve or ease (pain).”it contains a mild anesthetic to soothe the pain”
Origin
Old English sōthian ‘verify, show to be true’, from sōth ‘true’ (see sooth). In the 16th century the verb passed through the senses ‘corroborate (a statement’), ‘humor (a person) by expressing assent’ and ‘flatter by one’s assent’, whence ‘mollify, appease’ (late 17th century).
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Feb 17, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy David Hanscom, MD, is author of, Back in Control: A Surgeon’s Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain and Do You Really Need Spine Surgery?: Take Control with a Spine Surgeon’s Advice. Dr. Hanscom is an orthopedic complex spinal deformity surgeon who quit his surgical practice in 2019 to focus on teaching people how to break loose from the grip of chronic mental and physical pain – with and without surgery. His insights arose out of escaping from his own 15-year ordeal of suffering with severe chronic pain. As he began to share his approaches with his patients, a predictable sequence of learning evolved. It is reflected in the self-directed action plan that he created, The DOC (Direct your Own Care) Journey. His website is backincontrol.com. David explores how our responses to others’ suffering influence both physical and psychological pain. He describes how schadenfreude — taking pleasure in another person’s suffering — can bring temporary relief, while compassion toward oneself and others may have longer-term effects. Helping others and experiencing connection can support healing, suggesting that altruism may contribute to lasting changes in consciousness and well-being. 00:00 Introduction 02:42 Unwanted thoughts 08:41 Dynamic Healing Model 17:47 Mental rigidity and belief systems 18:57 Schadenfreude, pain relief, and ego 27:49 Altruism and compassion 30:54 Authoritarianism and chaos 37:24 Awareness and connection 43:01 Transgressions, safety, and transformation 50:10 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on January 12, 2026)
The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature
Few people will easily admit to taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But who doesn’t enjoy it when an arrogant but untalented contestant is humiliated on American Idol, or when the embarrassing vice of a self-righteous politician is exposed, or even when an envied friend suffers a small setback? The truth is that joy in someone else’s pain-known by the German word schadenfreude –permeates our society.
In The Joy of Pain, psychologist Richard Smith, one of the world’s foremost authorities on envy and shame, sheds much light on a feeling we dare not admit. Smith argues that schadenfreude is a natural human emotion, one worth taking a closer look at, as it reveals much about who we are as human beings. We have a passion for justice. Sometimes, schadenfreude can feel like getting one’s revenge, when the suffering person has previously harmed us. But most of us are also motivated to feel good about ourselves, Smith notes, and look for ways to maintain a positive sense of self. One common way to do this is to compare ourselves to others and find areas where we are better. Similarly, the downfall of others–especially when they have seemed superior to us–can lead to a boost in our self-esteem, a lessening of feelings of inferiority. This is often at the root of schadenfreude. As the author points out, most instances of schadenfreude are harmless, on par with the pleasures of light gossip. Yet we must also be mindful that envy can motivate, without full awareness, the engineering of the misfortune we delight in. And envy-induced aggression can take us into dark territory indeed, as Smith shows as he examines the role of envy and schadenfreude in the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Filled with engaging examples of schadenfreude, from popular reality shows to the Duke-Kentucky basketball rivalry, The Joy of Pain provides an intriguing glimpse into a hidden corner of the human psyche.
Richard Smith is a social psychologist and writer of nonfiction and fiction. He has written or edited books on envy, jealousy, and schadenfreude. His first novel, Blockbuster, was published in June 2020. He also writes a blog for Psychology Today and dabbles in photography.
China is the justification for our AI policy, our defense spending, our tariffs, even our alliances. What if we’re wrong about all of it?
China. It’s one justification for why we’re racing headlong into artificial intelligence development. It’s why defense budgets keep climbing into the hundreds of billions. It’s why we’re restructuring decades-old alliances — even as those allies quietly slip off to Beijing for their own meetings with President Xi Jinping.
It was the organizing principle behind tariffs that reshape global trade, the justification for decoupling entire economies, the specter that haunts every discussion of semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and the future of manufacturing.
It’s China, China, China.
David C. Kang, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, has done something remarkable with his colleagues: They systematically analyzed what China says about itself. Not cherry-picked quotes, but 12,000 official articles and hundreds of Xi’s speeches.
Their findings, published in International Security, challenge every assumption driving current US policy.
What Kang and his colleagues discovered might surprise you. Or alarm you. Or both. Because while we’re spending billions on military posture and abandoning economic engagement, fewer than 1,000 American students now study in China, while 250,000 Chinese study here.
We’re fighting yesterday’s Cold War with what probably should be tomorrow’s most important relationship — being reckless with our technology, our understanding, and the competition that actually matters.The gap between Washington’s certainties and the region’s realities keeps growing.
The question Kang asks is whether we’re creating the very threat we think we’re containing.
Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
[00:00:10] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We’ve been told the story so many times, it’s become almost gospel. China is rising, ambitious, expansionist. A revisionist power determined to overturn the international order, displace American leadership and reshape the world in its authoritarian image. It’s a narrative that’s driven billions in defense spending, reshaped alliances across the Pacific, and created a bipartisan consensus in Washington that views military containment as our only viable strategy. But what if we’ve been reading China wrong? What if the evidence, when examined carefully, systematically, without the distorting lens of worst case assumptions, tells a fundamentally different story? My guest, David C. Kang, is professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Korean Studies Institute. Along with his colleagues, he’s just published a remarkable study in international security that does something rare in today’s polarized discourse about China. They’ve actually looked at what China says about itself. They’ve analyzed 12,000 articles from official Chinese sources, hundreds of Xi Jinping speeches, and traced China’s territorial claims, not just back to Xi or even Mao, but across dynasties and centuries. What they found challenges nearly every assumption driving current U.S. policy. Their research reveals that China far more focused on regime stability and internal challenges than external conquest. A country whose territorial claims have actually decreased over time, rather than expanded. And a government that has consistently, if largely ignored by Western observers, stated it has no intention of displacing the United States as a global hegemon. This isn’t about being naive or dismissive of real problems in U.S.-China relations. Chinese firms do engage in questionable practices. The government does violate human rights, and there are legitimate disputes over maritime boundaries and sovereignty. But understanding what China actually wants, as opposed to what we fear it wants, could be the difference between managing a complex relationship and stumbling into an unnecessary confrontation. Today we’re going to examine the evidence, question the conventional wisdom, and explore whether the generation-long focus on military competition, deterrence, and decoupling might be solving the wrong problem entirely. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor David Sikang here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. David, thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. I’m delighted. Well, it is a delight to have you here. How is it that we have evolved a policy that has been really so consistent with respect to China over so many years, and so many administrations, and arguably be wrong at its core?
[00:03:08] David C. Kang: Yeah, that’s a great question. There used to be a fairly rigorous debate in Washington, D.C. about China. Some people were skeptical. Some people were more optimistic. About 10 years ago, 10 or 15 years ago, everybody began to move, on the left and the right, began to move to the China threat viewpoint. And it has become now so entrenched in Washington that you can just simply say it. And that justifies, as you pointed out in your introduction, it justifies massive defense spending, decoupling, huge generations-long attention to potentially fighting a war against China. And in many ways, these aren’t necessarily justified perspectives.
[00:03:51] Jeff Schechtman: And arguably, they have been the policy of both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. There’s been a remarkable consistency about China policy.
[00:04:02] David C. Kang: Yes, there has been. And that’s what’s particularly interesting, is that in foreign policy, both left and the right, come back to a view of a China threat. This is in part based on things roughly about China. It’s getting big. It will threaten us. It’s just as much based on an American view of ourselves. And it has nothing to do with China, that we have to be the biggest country and we have to be the leader. And so anyone who’s not going to either accept that, or that even potentially is going to be bigger than us, must be a threat. So it’s as much about American fears as it is about what China is actually doing.
[00:04:40] Jeff Schechtman: How much of it has been the result of China’s modernization and success, and that it has happened so dramatically, so rapidly, etc., that it has created concerns inherent in that?
[00:04:53] David C. Kang: That is one of the main reasons that we have this. I mean, the Soviet Union was a threat for, you know, a couple of generations, but the Soviet Union was never economically a threat to American dominance the way that China is. And the speed and the scale at which China’s economic reforms have, you know, catapulted it to be one of the largest countries in the world is something that’s relatively unprecedented for Americans to have to deal with. And that means that almost no matter what China actually is doing, the mere fact of its size and its reach allows people to say, well, you never know. It could be a threat. They could become threatening. And that’s what’s happened is, as you pointed out, worst case assumptions or, you know, guesses have begun to be taken for granted as being reality.
[00:05:45] Jeff Schechtman: It is a classic case, I suppose, of fighting the current war with the assumptions from the old war. We are dealing with China as if it is still the Cold War against the Soviets.
[00:05:56] David C. Kang: Yes. Yes, we are. And one of the issues is the Soviet Union definitely had global aspirations and they had empires and countries that they conquered and were involved in, etc., etc. So we look at a China and we look at a China and say, well, they must have the same things. And one thing that you see in D.C. is, you know, just a multitude of studies about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And if they get Taiwan, who else could they invade? Maybe they’ll invade the Philippines. And so there’s this endless worst case scenario discussion about what might happen that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what is going on in East Asia itself.
[00:06:35] Jeff Schechtman: You talk about China today as a status quo power. What does that mean?
[00:06:39] David C. Kang: What we mean there is, my colleagues and I, Jackie Wong and Zenobia Chan, when we started talking, you know, we’ve been looking at this for years and thinking about, like, why, you know, why is the China that we know very different than the one that’s being talked about in America? And one of the reasons is, when we look at China, when we see a status quo country, what we mean there is they’re much more concerned with trying to stabilize the speed at which China has grown and changed domestically is dizzying. I mean, within one generation, from the 1980s till today, hundreds of millions of peoples of lives have gotten richer and bigger and they moved to cities. And there’s all of those attendant domestic problems. Pollution, social issues, population issues, real estate. And so China is much more focused on trying to actually balance that and handle that than it is looking outwards to revise the way the world does business.
[00:07:38] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also this need for regime stability in China. That’s a big part of their actions.
[00:07:45] David C. Kang: Yes. And that’s one part of it, right? China is an authoritarian country. It’s a communist one party system. There’s no question about it. And it engages in human rights abuses. It restricts freedom of speech. Yes, those are all absolutely true. The thing is, those are domestic issues that are going on in China. And the Communist Party and Xi Jinping, who’s the current leader of the party, are focused on making sure that the party retains power. And that regime, the government trying to stay stable on top of an incredibly quickly changing society and economy, is where, like when Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, I’m quite sure that’s what he’s focused on. Not necessarily invading other countries and reaching out. So the stability of the party and then the stability of the country is pretty clearly what leaders are focused and the people are focused.
[00:08:35] Jeff Schechtman: Which brings up this issue of whether China would ever try to become a hegemon or be successful enough or use that desire as a way to deal with internal politics.
[00:08:48] David C. Kang: Yes. One of the things that’s very clear in, first of all, in Chinese rhetoric in general, a hegemon in America, the word hegemon has a sort of neutral, if not positive, meaning. It implies someone who’s taking care of the world and watching out and stuff like that. The Chinese view of hegemony is actually much more sort of domineering and pushy and bullying. It’s not a positive word. In that sense, Chinese don’t talk about trying to become hegemons. Consistently, the rhetoric over decades from the leadership has been about multilateralism, about working with other countries. Now, China views itself as one of the leaders, but it’s not the sole leader and it doesn’t have any intention to be so. One of the things about hegemony is this. We laugh. It’s a very common Chinese phrase, which is Chinese characteristics. They talk about socialism with Chinese characteristics, or they’ll talk about business with Chinese characteristics. Well, what we forget about that is that that phrase is not just an empty phrase. It’s a very different view of Chinese values than American values. We view American values as global, as enduring, as universal. Chinese don’t. They say, this is a Chinese thing. It may not fit in your country. We’re not trying to export Chinese values to Africa or Indonesia. You do you. So the view of Chinese, its own civilization or its own culture is not an expansive universalistic one. It’s a very sort of almost ethnic, ethnocentric view of Chinese values, which is that they’re Chinese. They’re not necessarily global.
[00:10:36] Jeff Schechtman: Hasn’t China attempted to put its values out there by way of soft power, as we’ve seen in Africa, as we’ve seen in various Chinese endeavors?
[00:10:47] David C. Kang: Yes. One of the most interesting things, and Zenobia Chan, my co-author, she has done a lot of work on the Belt and Road Initiative, which is the sort of catchphrase for China’s foreign economic policies. Belt and Road, meaning China reaches out and has trade and investment deals around the world and et cetera, et cetera. Well, her research shows, and this is actually very interesting, that the attempt to use Chinese soft power, first of all, they get criticized, China gets criticized by the United States for doing deals in Africa without adding conditions. So we criticize China for doing deals in Africa. They’ll work with dictators, they’ll work with autocrats. They don’t only try and get them to reform. Americans are the ones who try to push our values onto African countries. The Chinese don’t do that. When they try to use soft power, it’s almost always aimed at gaining support for issues that China does consider to be central, fundamental national security issues, the main one being support for Taiwan. The issue of Taiwan, whether it’s Chinese or not, is an enduring Chinese issue. So when the Chinese use the Belt and Road Initiative to try and get soft power, they want countries around the world to support their view of the Taiwan problem. So it’s less about exporting their values out, but trying more about trying to get other countries to support a Chinese view of an issue that frankly only involves, say, China and Taiwan.
[00:12:20] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about that because there is the assumption repeatedly made that Taiwan is simply representative of greater ambitions on the part of China, that Taiwan doesn’t exist as a sui generis issue for China, but that it is simply representative of their reach.
[00:12:38] David C. Kang: And that is, I think, one of the most dangerous views of the Taiwan issue. We don’t have to agree with China what they think. We don’t, right? That’s fine. But to not know how the Chinese view it is really risky. And the Chinese view is this. Taiwan has been a part of China for centuries. And I’ll talk about that a little bit. And it was always sort of on the frontier of China. In the 17th century, around 1600s, one of the dynasties fell, the Ming dynasty fell, and the survivors fled to the island. And then they had raids back. They’re fighting with the new dynasty, the Qing. The Qing eventually took over the island and incorporated it as part of Fujian province. They made it its own province in 1800. So this has been, for centuries, it’s been viewed as Chinese. Nobody else thinks it’s theirs. In the 19th century, 1895, Japan took Taiwan from China after a war. Famously, the chief ambassador for China at the time said, if Japan does this, our two countries will be enemies forever, for generations, because this island of Taiwan is Chinese. This is not a new issue. This is literally centuries-old issue that Taiwan was a part of China. That view went from the Qing dynasty in the 19th century to the Guomindang, the Republic of China that was sort of viewed by the, was formally recognized by the United States as the legitimate ruler of all China in 1925. And then in, during World War II, at Potsdam or Cairo, one of the meetings with the leaders to settle the post-war order, the United States and ROC and UK agreed that all those islands that were under Japanese rule will go back to China. Now, there was no disagreement about that up until we have now potentially the chance that this island wants to declare independence. But this is not a new issue. It’s a centuries-old issue.
[00:14:56] Jeff Schechtman: One of the points that you also make is that there were many other territorial issues that China might have brought to the fore and didn’t over the years. Lots of territory that China once occupied, and it is strictly Taiwan that is still at issue.
[00:15:13] David C. Kang: Yes, that is true. What’s particularly important to recognize, whether you, you know, you don’t have to like PRC. This is not a sort of defending, you know, communist China issue, but it’s, what is the reality of what’s going on? China couldn’t, China, the Qing dynasty in the 1900s, in the 1800s, the Qing dynasty at its height was 13 million square kilometers. The current China that exists today is about 9 million. So China has given up on its borders around 4 million that it could be making all these extra claims to, but it’s not. It has stabilized relations with everybody. There’s a tiny little Indian debate over, you know, over where their border is. But in many cases, Vietnam, North Korea, et cetera, Russia, the Chinese, in order to stabilize the borders have, you know, when they weren’t sure where it is, they’ve given up 54%, 55%. And this stabilizes their relations. And they’ve said, okay, that’s fine. This is where we’ll stop. This is where you start. The one that they have not been willing to do that on is Taiwan. They say, no, Taiwan is part of China. We cannot negotiate that. And the point I want to make is, it’s not, we don’t have to agree, but we do need to take that seriously. Right? I mean, that’s, and that’s what the United States has done for about 40 years, has taken that seriously. We’ve said to China, PRC, we don’t agree, but we understand where you’re coming from. Just don’t change the status quo. The threat right now is that Taiwan would declare independence or Americans to perform democracy are going to make such an issue out of Taiwan that we change the status quo.
[00:16:56] Jeff Schechtman: And then we do risk a possible conflict. Talk about the difference with respect to how the U.S. sees Taiwan and its relationship to China versus how much of the rest of the world sees that relationship.
[00:17:10] David C. Kang: Well, what’s interesting, so the United States, and again, the ROC, the Republic of China, up until about 1992, was also an authoritarian regime. It was under martial law in Taiwan. And both the KMT, the Republic of China, and the people’s, you know, the communists claim to be all China. So the ROC claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all of China, mainland China, in addition to Taiwan. It was only with the transition to democracy in the 1990s that it became possible to talk about an independent Taiwan. Well, the United States, we support democracy. We love democracy. So there’s a sort of view that we should help Taiwan against these awful authoritarian commies. And I mean, that’s a legitimate view. It just risks a war. What’s interesting is around the region. So a couple of years ago, Nancy Pelosi, who was the Speaker of the House at the time, the third ranking American politician, visited Taiwan. It was very much a performative show of supporting democracy. Well, China got mad. Within that week, within days of her visit to Taiwan, every country in the region, every country in the region came out publicly and supported the one China policy, which is Taiwan and China are Chinese. There’s no difference. Vietnam, the Philippines, all of ASEAN, Indonesia, Malaysia. Nancy Pelosi went from Taiwan to South Korea, which is a close ally in a democracy. South Korea had at the time a conservative pro-US president. He didn’t even meet with Nancy Pelosi because he was not going to legitimize that visit. So I happened to be talking to one of their national security advisors the next year, and I said, does South Korea still support the one China policy? And the advisor said, we made our policy in 1992, which is when they normalized relations with PRC, meaning, yes, we have a one China policy and we haven’t changed it. So everybody in the region is like, that’s a Chinese issue. It’s not what happens there does not affect how we think we’re going to interact with China, which is different from the way the U.S. views it.
[00:19:28] Jeff Schechtman: At the core of this, and we’ve talked a bit about how we get it wrong and how we misunderstand China. Do they misunderstand us to the same degree or do they have a better understanding of the U.S. and the West than we have of China?
[00:19:43] David C. Kang: Yeah, this is one of those things where I think the misunderstanding goes really more one way than the other. And we’ll just start with linguistics. There are so few people in the United States who can speak Chinese and actually read like we tried to do with 10,000 or 12,000 different newspaper articles to see what they say consistently over time, right? There’s very few people who can do that. So they have to rely on other people to tell them what’s going on in China. But obviously, Chinese, everybody starts learning English. And the most striking statistic is this. There’s an incredible need in the United States for people who understand Chinese language, culture, have lived there, etc. Right now, we have less than 1,000 students, American students, studying in China. Less than 1,000, like 700, I think, was last year in 2024. Chinese studying in China, 250,000, right? There’s so much better knowledge of how America works than it is what a China is. And that’s not to our credit. That harms our ability to make good policy for the United States.
[00:20:52] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that you talk about is all the areas that we could be cooperating with China. Back in the 90s, we had this constructive engagement going on. What was that all about? And what happened there?
[00:21:06] David C. Kang: Well, okay. So one of the views is, and this, again, has become taken for granted in D.C., but it’s not true, is that in the 90s, all of us were naive and we thought, if we trade with China within a couple of years, there’ll be a democracy, right? And ha, ha, ha, you guys were all wrong. They’re not. They’re an authoritarian regime. Nobody thought that at the time. Nobody’s that dumb, right? The goal wasn’t that we’re going to transform China into a democracy. It was, there are so many places that we can cooperate and we need to cooperate. Let’s focus on those. And what happened was, there was a tremendous, I mean, one of the things about U.S.-China relationship is, the last 20 or 30 years have been unambiguously successful for both sides. And what I mean is, yes, we can talk about, are they stealing intellectual property? Is a certain company not making money? But overall, our trade relationship with China and our student relationship, we got a lot of incredibly high quality goods, extremely cheaply. They got American dollars and were able to grow and become, you know, take, you know, the numbers like 400 million people moved out of poverty in China, right? Just unbelievable transfer. Everybody got rich and there was no war, right? Yes, there’s quibbles and squabbles. Of course there are, that’s business, right? But you handle it. Well, the goal was that. We moved away from that in ways that have partly to do with China and partly to do with American politics. And this is for a different subject, but I never ever in my lifetime thought that the mainstream view in Washington would be that tariffs are good, right? I never thought that would happen. And yet the Biden administration not only kept Trump’s initial tariffs on China, they doubled down on them. They increased the decoupling from China. Bernie, right? I mean, I’m a big fan of Bernie Sanders. I actually helped his campaign in 2016 and 2020. I wrote his China stuff. On national security, he was all for diplomacy, but the far left is very much for labor unions and trade barriers. And obviously you go to the far right, you get labor, you know, anti-labor unions, but you get trade barriers and tariffs and decoupling. So you end up in the same place where I never thought we would. So part of this has nothing to do with China. Part of it is about American politics and where we are, but part of it is also about China. And as they began to get way, way stronger in the 2000s, views towards our ability to cooperate with them changed to, uh-oh, they might be a threat.
[00:23:44] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other things that adds to this threat assessment is that traditionally they have been difficult to negotiate with, and we have many times mistaken difficult negotiating with some kind of existential threat.
[00:24:00] David C. Kang: Yes, very much so. And that’s a great question. Chinese are notoriously difficult. They can be bullies. They’re pushy, both as diplomats and then as companies, you know, individuals. There are, you know, story after story, example, example of pushing as hard as they can until they don’t get any more. And so in a lot of ways, it’s really frustrating to deal with the Chinese. It absolutely is. My point about that is the solution to that is not a military solution, right? Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been about, you know, massively increasing defense spending. We need more aircraft carries. We need 350 ships in our Navy. That doesn’t solve the diplomacy problem. We need a better economic strategy and a better diplomatic strategy, not a military strategy, to deal with this stuff.
[00:24:56] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about it in the context of other Asian nations and how they are dealing with China, how they see China, and how they’re really operating between the U.S. view and the reality of China.
[00:25:11] David C. Kang: Yeah, there is. One of the things about the United States is we’re so big even now, you know, we’re still by far the richest, you know, biggest country in the world. And we have an ocean between us and China. So we can trade, but a lot of the issues remain almost more speculative. The thing about countries in East Asia is they’re not moving away. They’re stuck, right? They have to live with a big China. There’s no other alternative. If you’re Vietnam, if you’re Korea, if you’re the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, whatever, you are living with a big, massive China. And the size of China, the scale of how big China is, it’s hard to visualize, but one way to think about it is they have a 1.4 billion people. The next largest country is, you know, Japan, close, what, 130 million. So like 10 times the size. Chinese population is 10 times the size of Japan, right? Vietnam has 100 million people, right? So this is, you know, China could have economic problems and still be much bigger than every other country. So many of these countries, however, have learned over literally the centuries how to live with a big China. And one of the best examples I heard was from a Vietnamese military officer, actually, when I was there a couple of years ago, who said, every Vietnamese leader needs to know how to stand up to China. Every Vietnamese leader has to know how to get along with China. And if he can’t do both of those at the same time, he doesn’t deserve to lead Vietnam. And what you see is the Vietnamese are fighting, you know, pushing, not fighting literally, but gray zone tactics, keeping, you know, defending their claims, the maritime claims in the disputed South China Seas with China vigorously. They’re not giving an inch. At the same time that the Vietnamese and the Chinese Coast Guard conduct joint patrols in Haiphong Bay, because they have to sort out fishing and commercial activities. And they have a virtually undefended border where it’s just, you know, a couple of border guards as trade goes back and forth. And so countries are doing both at the same time. And the reason is that countries in the region don’t view China as an existential threat. It’s really sort of interesting that Americans view China as an existential threat when there’s no conceivable way that China is going to invade America, right? They’re not coming across the ocean. And yet the countries in the region, they know they don’t like dealing with China in certain things. They have to push back in many ways. But they also don’t view China as about to invade them. And they’re not behaving as they should. So the Vietnamese are not arming their border to deter China. Neither North nor South Korea is worried about a Chinese invasion. They push, they have disagreements, but they’re not worried about surviving. And so they behave differently. One of the aspects that you talk about that is so prevalent in Chinese discourse is this idea that there really is no intention on the part of China to be a replacement for the U.S. This is something that, you know, one thing that we, the longer article there, you know, it’s an academic article, but if anyone’s interested, it’s, you know, we try to go through in great detail because people will choose a particular phrase. And then they’ll say, aha, this is what the Chinese really think, you know, read the tea leaves and things like that. I’ve had people say to me, we know the Chinese are lying because their lips are moving. Like, we don’t believe whatever they say, but then we’ll choose a particular phrase. And one of those phrases they use is the East is rising, the West is declining. And people have seized on that to say, aha, they do have aspirations after all, right? The thing about that phrase though, and the thing that’s really particularly interesting about that is that was not, first of all, that’s a descriptive phrase. That’s not necessarily a goal or an aspiration. Many people around the United States would say, yeah, we’re in trouble, right? It’s descriptive. But when Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, uses that phrase, it is almost always followed by another sentence that we mostly overlook. And that sentence is, but China has no intention to change the United States or replace it. I mean, consistently, if you actually look at Chinese rhetoric, the rhetoric is about how do we adjust to this situation? But let’s also make it clear, we’re not out to try and compete with the US. The G2 summit, which is just the two big leaders, China has been the one that’s been hesitant to join that. The US has been trying to create a G2. China has been the one that’s been, eh, maybe G7, maybe G20, but we’re not sure we want to, we don’t want that mantle. We don’t want that yet, right? It’s about domestic policy, a success, rather than a goal of taking over the world.
[00:30:14] Jeff Schechtman: Are there dangers in the economic problems that China faces that could make them more aggressive?
[00:30:21] David C. Kang: Yeah, this is a good question. We are all waiting. We have been waiting for decades. We have been predicting the end of the Chinese miracle. I mean, literally, I can remember articles in the early 2000s about how this can’t last. There’s no way China can keep going. There’ll be a real estate problem. There’s going to be a massive problem, right? Like any economy, China has ups and downs. At some point, there will probably be a big, big recession or something even worse in China. The question is, first of all, why has it taken so long? Already, they have beaten every estimate you’ve ever had about, you know, books written in 2005 saying China’s trapped transition. They’re stuck. They can’t go on. And here we are, you know, 20 years later, literally. So yeah, the question is, when something like that happens, real estate bust, something even worse, there clearly can be economic repercussions. Because we’re going to see right now how much tariffs matter. We’ve watched the markets and prices and everything ricochet over U.S.-China trade wars. So imagine that worse. It’ll have a worse impact here. Would, though, something like that cause the Chinese to sort of wag the dog or divert, you know, economic problems at home? And so now we’re going to try and do something adventurous overseas. Probably there’s far less chance of that. The main reason being, the only thing that we really see, excuse me, the only place we really see a place for actual conflict that anyone really thinks conflict could break out is over Taiwan. And Taiwan is not an issue that’s going to be started or not. A war is not going to start over Taiwan as a diversion. That will be because of what happened in Taiwan. So I think those odds are fairly, fairly low.
[00:32:20] Jeff Schechtman: What is the advent of gearing up this tech competition that is going on now? What does that do to the relationship? Because there’s the sense, again, comparing it to the Cold War against the Soviets, that this is a little like competing with the Soviets with regard to going to the moon.
[00:32:39] David C. Kang: And this is the other side. This is a great question. And you do a great job with the questions, because this is the other side of if there’s a problem. I think the problem from China comes much more from its success than from its failure. And what I mean is, right now, we are talking about NVIDIA chips versus Huawei, semiconductors and on and on and on. EVs, electric vehicles, battery, all of that stuff, there’s just solar energy. There’s no question that China is in the lead. It’s just no question. You read these reviews of the Xiaomi or various Chinese electric vehicles. They are banned from the United States. And people write these reviews and they’ll say, if they were in, man, they would just destroy the market because they’re so good. So we are in a situation not really about the Soviet Union. It’s really, the best analogy is Japan in the 1980s that had amazing technology with all the cars and Sony and Mitsubishi and on and on. And what that would do to American manufacturing. That’s much more the question as the challenge from the success. And one of the issues is this. To my mind, I think that I 100% disagree with the general American economic strategy of abandoning the region, of decoupling, of large fence, small yard, whatever else, all this kind of stuff to protect ourselves from China. We are dooming ourselves when it’s clear the future is in EVs and solar and batteries. And so I know this one American tech company, and I was talking to some of the leadership last year. Everybody would know this company if I told you the name. And they said, we think in America, we think that if we create a big wall with China, that all the innovation will happen on the American side. Americans think that. These people said to me, we’re not so sure. Half of our business comes from China. If we put our innovation compared to theirs right now, we benefit from it going back and forth. We think there’s as much of a chance that their innovation is better than ours. And this is coming from a top American company. And so the challenge is how do we do this, right? How do we interact with an incredibly vibrant economy that is moving forward on places? And I really disagree with us not being involved in trade in the region. And it’s not just China. It’s throughout the region. We’re not involved in things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. There are a bunch of regional economic, East Asian economic initiatives. And the United States is not involved. We have no policy other than tariffs and decoupling. And I think that is a big mistake.
[00:35:32] Jeff Schechtman: How much damage did the pandemic do to the U.S.-China relationship?
[00:35:36] David C. Kang: That did damage. Obviously, there’s a whole bunch of blaming COVID on China and things like that. One of the biggest places where we had damage is the number of students that went home from both countries. And the numbers came back much more quickly from China to the United States. But again, the number of Americans studying in China just plummeted and has never recovered. So there’s definitely issues there as everybody was sort of bunkering down. Although I think the relationship would be struggling anyway, right? I don’t think the pandemic, it just moved, accelerated it. But U.S.-China relations were not that good anyway.
[00:36:17] Jeff Schechtman: Is there any conceivable vision that you have, even at this point, that the most optimistic vision might contain that there could be cooperation on things like climate change and renewable energy and pollution, etc.?
[00:36:32] David C. Kang: Right. That’s the hope. And one of the interesting things about the Trump administration is it is so subject to what Trump feels. And so many of the hawks, many of the real China hawks have been sidelined because Trump goes over there and he threatens the parents, then he pulls them off. Then he says they’re allowed to buy the chips. Then he goes and has a great meeting with Xi Jinping over in Korea in October. So the chance to have some cooperation is bigger now than it was under a Biden administration, where it was basically everybody from Biden through the foreign policy apparatus, the establishment was on board with decoupling, right? But the goal, long-term, the goal should be to find those places where we clearly have to cooperate. And that, as you said, climate is one. China has done more than the United States to move beyond fossil fuels, to move to solar, to stop the pollution. We like to think of China as this really dirty, polluted place where these factories are just pumping out smoke. That’s a 20-year-old view, right? When I used to go to Beijing, even like 10 years, maybe 15 years ago, yeah, it would be so dark you couldn’t see anything. They have worked really hard and unbelievably quickly to begin to clean up the pollution, for example, right? This is great, but it should be with the United States, not in isolation. So there’s a lot of places for us to cooperate, despite the fact that we’re going to be competing on other things. And a president or an administration that would be willing to do that, I think, could make real progress in ways that right now we’re not.
[00:38:18] Jeff Schechtman: And of course, the other part of it is how much Taiwan and what China does vis-a-vis Taiwan plays a role in this.
[00:38:25] David C. Kang: Yeah, right? Right now, the real question is not what China will do. We don’t have to like what China says, but they are very clear. Do not change the status quo. Taiwan should not declare independence. They don’t say we will invade. They say we reserve the right to, right? So it’s not like Taiwan declares independence the next day they’re going to start lobbing missiles. But yes, they do say we may use force, right? This is not something we are going to give up. And most of us believe they’re not bluffing. Most of us believe what they say. Who is actually pushing the status quo are, in many ways, the Taiwanese leaders who over the last five or 10 years have more and more said things like, we’re independent anyway. We’re de facto independent. And it’s almost like they’re trying to poke China in ways you don’t need to provoke them. Because what the Chinese have said is this. The status quo over Taiwan that worked since the 1970s, it’s one of the most successful diplomatic maneuverings, if you think about it, among three countries. It’s unbelievably successful, which is this. We say to the Chinese, the Chinese say, Taiwan is ours. But Taiwan, you can have your own flag. You can have your own economy. You can have your own money. Just don’t declare independence. But you can act essentially independent. We say to China, okay, just don’t use force to change the status quo. And we say to Taiwan, don’t you declare independence. That status quo, where we don’t agree, but we agree to disagree, has worked since the 1970s. It’s been phenomenally successful. It allowed China to get rich. It allowed Taiwan to get rich and become a democracy. And it allowed the United States to buy goods from both of these countries that we really like. And nobody got shot. That’s an unbelievably successful diplomatic… Why would we change that? Just kick the can down the road another 40 years. Let’s worry about it then. Because the status quo is unbelievably successful.
[00:40:34] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent did Chinese actions vis-a-vis Hong Kong shape some of this policy today?
[00:40:41] David C. Kang: Yes, there is definitely a Chinese push in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, other places, Tibet, where the rest of the world agrees that those are Chinese. But we also see that they’re a little different. And China had said they would act with kid gloves. They’d act gently. And they have not. They’ve increasingly become authoritarian. There’s no question that the Chinese have basically abandoned the agreement they made with the UK, which was we will leave Hong Kong alone. Two systems, one country. And they’re interfering now. So that definitely has a part to play with what’s going on in Taiwan. That being said, it still is as much a Taiwan issue itself about domestic politics as it is about what they’re looking out over what’s happening in other parts of the world.
[00:41:33] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about Hong Kong another minute. What was it that they did with respect to Hong Kong that you think was consistent or inconsistent with all of these other attitudes that we’ve been talking about on the part of the Chinese?
[00:41:48] David C. Kang: The consistent part is, I mean, if we think about what China was in 1841, Hong Kong was clearly a part of China. And the British came in and they basically forced the Chinese to cede this land to them. And so that’s galling, right? I get it, right? That’s bad. They finally got it back 150 years later in 1997. And so the goal was to reunify China. Retrocession is the word they use, which is sort of honorably recovering territory, right? And so part of the task was, the deal in 97 was, we will let Hong Kong remain Hong Kong. They’ll have their own vote. They’ll have their own governor. They can have a free press. And we just want to have it be Chinese, part of China. And they sort of let that go for a while. But now it’s clear that Beijing chooses who’s the head of Hong Kong. The press is not nearly as free. Protests are suppressed and everything else. So that’s the part where they have not gone along with it. But also Hong Kong and Xinjiang, I have not been a precursor towards ambitions towards Vietnam or Indonesia or something like that, right? That’s the part. That was Chinese and they wanted it back.
[00:43:11] Jeff Schechtman: What would be today a realistic policy towards China on the part of the U.S.?
[00:43:17] David C. Kang: One of the things that I say, and actually both Zenobia, Jackie, and I have a piece that we’re, I think it’ll be out in a couple of months, where we do this. If we’re right, if China is more status quo than revisionist, if it doesn’t want to take over the world, but it does pose just a simple coordination problem because it’s so big, what should American policy be? Fundamentally, I think there’s a major focus, which would be less military and more economic, or less military, more diplomatic. Right now, overwhelmingly, American grand strategy towards China and East Asia is a military-first, jut-jawed, forward-leaning, military-first approach, which is we need to be out there. We need alliances. We need to arm our allies. We need to put our forward station, our military forces in Guam, in Korea, in the Philippines, and almost non-existent. And when I say non-existent, I mean the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Forum, IPEF, whatever his plans, had five paragraphs that were completely substance-free on economics. They were completely substance-free. They were like, green technology and stuff like that. Nothing specific. So we have no economic strategy towards the region. And the region is continuing to move forward. The region is continuing to integrate with China. So I would reduce the military focus and increase the economic focus around the region and with China. That’s the overall focus. Then if you want to get more specific, many of these issues that we have with China are not solved with the Navy or with the Army. We need to focus on, okay, what is going to be our green strategy? What is this going to be? Are we going to try and protect our domestic markets from Chinese car imports? Or are we going to let them in because competition is good and they make great cars and everyone should buy an EV, right? We need to have that argument and discussion. And I think in many ways, we would benefit if we had much more open and forward leaning approach towards engaging the entire region in China with much more economics and business.
[00:45:43] Jeff Schechtman: Which brings us back almost to the 1990s policy of this constructive engagement.
[00:45:48] David C. Kang: Yes, I do. I absolutely think, right? This doesn’t say everything’s great. There’s going to be problems. That’s called life. You’re going to have to be negotiating and pushing back and learning how to deal and then finding out where they’re cheating and making sure they don’t. And then making sure that we do well. I mean, let me give you an example, right? There’s been a ton of talk in the West and DC blob, especially in Washington, about how Huawei can potentially steal our data and stuff like that, right? You’ve heard that. Huawei, right? Two points. The first one is the US government has never provided evidence that Huawei is actually doing that. They just say it’s potential. They’ve never provided evidence. But secondly, all companies do that, right? I’m totally in favor of banning TikTok if we ban all social media. It’s all awful. We know that. I have two teenage children and I’d love it all to be banned, but banning TikTok doesn’t solve the problem of companies stealing our data and selling and doing all that stuff, right? So, there’s so much more where we could be proactive towards China, but it’s not a Chinese issue.
[00:46:57] Jeff Schechtman: Professor David Kang, I thank you so very much for your time today.
[00:47:01] David C. Kang: Well, thank you for having me. It was really enjoyable. Thank you.
[00:47:03] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Jeff SchechtmanJeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.
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