Chartbook 341 On thinking in medias res: An Interview with Ding Xiongfei from the Shanghai Review of Books (summer 2024)

Conducted in the summer of 2024 in Shanghai this interview with Ding Xionfei is the most far-reaching public discussion I have had had about the development of my writing and thinking since Perry Anderson’s review of my work. I want to thank Ding Xiongfei for his remarkable engagement and for permission to republish part of the review that originally appeared in the Shanghai Review of Books in Mandarin.

Ding Xiongfei: I attended both of your lectures in Shanghai. In your lecture at East China Normal University, you argued against the idea of hegemonic succession. In your lecture at Fudan University, your configuration of polycrisis—along with your citation of Mark Blyth’s phrase, “a one-way trip into the unknown”—reminds me of the philosophy of history espoused by Walter Benjamin and early Adorno. Is there a consistency between these two lectures? If so, are they both, in some sense, challenging Hegelian or dialectical ways of thinking?

Adam Tooze: Yes, I think you're right. This has become increasingly clear to me as an essential theme. But if we set ourselves against any idea of smooth succession or dialectical resolution, the question then is what conclusion you are left with. In my books Shutdown and Crashed, the answer was a sort of future of perpetual liberal crisis management. If the condition of polycrisis is what power confronts in the current moment, my answer to its containment is not resolution in some crashing form, but rather a long run of management.

Ding Xiongfei: My further question is: if we follow your line of thought, is historical periodization even possible today? You once mentioned that The Deluge is about the beginning of the American age, and Crashed is about its end; therefore, our current era is a novel one. Is this now the age of polycrisis? How can we characterize or define our age?

Adam Tooze: I think the concept of polycrisis, in its somewhat diffuse outlines (it is clearly somewhat facile conceptually), addresses your question in that it captures the unraveling of a familiar pattern of power—namely, that of the unipolarity of an American-centered age. But I'm not particularly fond of the typical Gramscian move that follows from this, which is to claim that we are in an interregnum, where the old is dead and the new cannot yet be bornThe more I have thought about it, the more inappropriate that image appears as a way of understanding our current moment. It's the kind of Gramsci that actually merits the critique of historicism leveled at Gramsci by Althusser—the idea of history as an organic totality, a womb from which a new epoch is waiting eventually to be born. This, like Arrighi’s conceptualization of hegemonic sequence, combines a declaration of current crisis with a form of reassurance, implying that we understand the crisis and can reduce the disorder to something temporary, recurring, and predictable. It assumes an underlying mechanism that functions transhistorically. I don’t think any of that really pertains to where we are now.

If a new universal order were to emerge, perhaps one might imagine it being organized around the climate crisis and common policies to address it. Ironically, that seems our best hope of a new synthesis at least that is why I am currently so fascinated by the climate problem. In a sense, it holds the promise of restoring a totalizing objective, with decarbonization and climate stabilization to be achieved by a certain deadline, 2050 or 2060. It’s a return to old-school high modernism, but on a planetary scale.

For me, polycrisis is useful as a challenge to even this last shred of technocratic complacency. It's odd to think of the climate crisis as organizing a technocratic totality, because in so many respects, it points to failure and disaster, likely leading to future runaway changes that we cannot control. Yet, as imagined by the politics of the Paris Treaties of 2015, the slogan of net-zero politics, the climate problem does serve as a technocratic totalizer. Everything can be organized around it. I’ve seen a matrix-like plan in the halls of the German economics and climate ministry, where a flip chart laid out a roadmap of government policy aimed at meeting the 2030 target. It was a matrix plan of all the different departments and what they would do to ensure Germany hits its 2030 targets—something I wasn’t supposed to see, but there it was. The wild, ill-defined concept of polycrisis kicks against this. It reminds us that our plans will likely fail and be overwhelmed by complexity and dynamics we cannot adequately specify and more often than not merely gesture to.

Ding Xiongfei: Two years ago, you wrote a piece about John Mearsheimer, and your attitude toward him seemed somewhat ambiguous. What is the difference between your theory of polycrisis and his theory of realism?

Adam Tooze: Geopolitical tension, I believe, is endogenous to this process of comprehensive changes we are discussing. It is a key driver of polycrisis. So I don't disagree with Mearsheimer’s view in that the conflict with Russia should not have come as a surprise. I find the scandalized attitude of Western liberals with regards to Russia's claims on Ukraine to be in bad faith. Putin made his red lines clear at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. The West may not approve of Putin’s stand, but if we ignore his warning we should not be surprised by the fall out.

There is a structural tension between Russia and the West. This is not a matter of Putin’s personal ideology, but of major geopolitical antagonisms, empowered by Russia’s oil and gas revenues which are themselves generated by world economic growth. There is nothing surprising about Moscow’s efforts to revise the huge imbalance on the European continent created by the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.

In short I would add a powerful economic component to Mearsheimer’s geopolitical analysis. But where I differ from Mearsheimer is in his simplistic suggestion that having diagnosed the structural causes of tension we also have an adequate explanation of Moscow’s high-risk and brutal decision to invade Ukraine. That simply does not follow. Intellectually, I think that's a sleight of hand.

It doesn’t logically follow that just because the expansion of Western influence into Ukraine—whether through the EU or the potential threat of NATO membership—is perceived by Russia as menacing, it then explains the decision to wage an all-out war. The act of launching the Russian military across Ukraine's borders, risking mayhem and massive loss of life, requires other explanations. At the deepest level Mearsheimer’s claim to be the ultimate realist is undermined by his failure actually to take war as such – as opposed to geopolitical maneuvering – seriously. In a body of thought that claims to be realistic about power this is a profound failure.

I teach military history and spend much of my time reflecting on major conflicts, particularly World War II. If you believe that international tension per se is a sufficient explanation for the decision to initiate war, you haven't thought hard enough about what war is. This may sound harsh in reference to Mearsheimer, but if you watch his speeches you may enjoy his energetic style and his common sense, you will also notice the reductive and simplistic way in which he talks about the protagonists in global dramas. One of his favorite phrases it to refer to everyone from Putin to the Israelis as “tough hombres” caricatured American slang for Mexican bandits. Essentially, he attributes violent actions to the nature of tough men doing vicious things. But that’s where his thinking stops. It's an abdication of the responsibility to explain the resort to large-scale, and that’s my issue with him.

Mearsheimer does speak truth to power and often challenges the American liberal establishment with very disagreeable ideas. However, I find it disappointing that, at the crucial moment, his argumentative chain is as weak as it is. I admire his boldness in insisting that we consider Russia's perspective, and I agree that Russia operates according to a logic that is not irrational. I also appreciate his acknowledgment that Ukraine is the ultimate victim in this entire derailment of policy. I do not believe Ukraine’s interests have been best served by the encouragement they’ve received to align with the West in the face of Russian opposition. They are paying an extraordinarily high price for this, though, of course, that price depends on Russia's willingness to escalate to such extreme measures.

Ding Xiongfei: You've mentioned Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck frequently. Could you elaborate on how they have influenced your thinking? How do you reconcile their differences and limitations in your own work, particularly when addressing the concept of polycrisis? Do you see a way to balance Latour’s skepticism of macro-level constructs with the need for a broader explanation of modernity and its crises—if, indeed, such a need exists?

Adam Tooze: Yes, I am a product of my times. I am a Gen X thinker heavily influenced by the thinking about “second modernity” or ‘reflexive modernity” and hybridity. Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society appeared in 1986 at the moment of Chernobyl. Latour’s Science in Action in 1987 and his We have never been modern in 1991. As a short-hand you could say that Beck describes a reflexive, second modernity but with the intellectual tools of the sociology of the first modernity. Whereas Latour radicalizes that project, putting social science itself in question.

I appreciate Beck's grand vision of a world shaped by second- and third-order risks, which are generated by the success of our first-order effects. However, what I find problematic in him, in some sense, is his rather crude notion of sociology and how it functions. I’m referring to Risk Society here. Beck presents a relatively static view, where society is treated as a given, a system with a certain logic at a particular moment in history. His approach is a simple stage theory of history. We leave first modernity behind and enter second modernity and risk society. This is where I resort to Latour's conception. His idea of assemblage, and how he understands notions like the social and the economy as being constructed through socio-technical systems, through techno-scientific structures and apparatuses, and through centers of calculation that interact with one another, offers a more dynamic and fluid approach. My first book on the history of economic statistics was an effort to describe the emergence of modern economics, macroeconomics, in somewhat Latourian terms.

That said, Latour has his own limitations. Latour’s constructive approach to the social sciences is hugely inspiring to me, but it leaves him without a comprehensive account of modernity. He doesn’t provide a macro-level description of social processes. For example, in We Have Never Been Modern, Latour implies that hybrids that multiply in the modern regime enable an acceleration in social development, but he doesn’t describe the acceleration itself, let alone quantify it. He writes effectively about the beginnings of industrial or scientific revolution, but he is so skeptical about those big terms that he doesn’t turn them into an account of long-run historical development. And yet a narrative like that in We Have Never Been Modern gestures to a story about how this system that was “never modern” develops, accelerates, amplifies and expands itself. This implicit but never fully articulated historical moderl, comes out all the more clearly when we turn to Latour’s politics, which ultimately aim at slowing modernity down, making hybrids (the entanglement of nature and society) visible as such, and thereby reducing the pace at which we innovate and change the world. However, his own theory doesn’t really provide a thick description of that historical dynamic.

These questions return for me when we come to the concept of polycrisis. One injunction and aspiration is to treat the escalating crisis and uncertainty as endogenously generated. But endogenity, as opposed to exogenity, implies a clear distinction between inside and outside. And then, with a Latourian twist we are lead to ask: what is the system, what is the holism with regard to which we can say: “this process is endogenous and that exogenous”? In Latourian terms, positing a macro sphere within which processes are driven endogenously is itself a framed construct. It is precisely the sort of micro-macro framing that he rejects and urges us to be more self-conscious about.

The only answer I have so far is to invoke what you might call a “fragmentary” holism or an “unclosed” or “partial” holism within which to situation the multiple crisis symptoms that lead us to announce a polycrisis. So, we can point to zoonotic disease mutations, CO2 accumulation, escalating geopolitical arms races. But I don’t offer, and in some sense I am refusing, some would say dodging the responsibility to provide, the macroscopic account of, say, modernization, growth, or the historical processes which is producing all of these effects through a single, tightly described logic. Frankly, if you think you have “figured it out”, you are not experiencing polycrisis. This tension, I think, is something I inherit or embrace from the Latourian tradition.

Ding Xiongfei: What is your perspective on the quantitative approach? In your Twitter posts, newsletters, and books, tables and graphs regularly appear. Your first book on statistics, which can be viewed as an archaeology of knowledge, traces the innovation of economic numbers. How do these elements fit into your broader intellectual framework?

Adam Tooze: Exactly. This traces back to my first book, which was based on my PhD thesis and focused on the history of statistics, taking an explicitly Latourian approach. What I was trying to explain in that book is how the macroeconomy—the world described by GDP numbers, inflation statistics, balance of payments, and unemployment figures—was constructed. How was this matrix of knowledge, which allows us to state, for instance, that China is overtaking the United States, produced, by a particular network of actors and a particular configuration of power within and between them, at a particular moment in history?

In a sense, my first two books are at right angles to each other. The first one describes the emergence of the matrix of macroeconomic knowledge, which, for example, led to German cabinet meetings being scheduled in the calendar to follow chronologically the publication of specific economic data—there was no point in holding a meeting before knowing the GDP number or the level of unemployment. The entire calendar of decision-making and the construction of political trade-offs depended on this apparatus of knowledge, which was also an apparatus of the actual administration of governments. In The Wages of Destruction, I then took that body of knowledge, already available to decision-makers at the time, and used it to tell the grand narrative of the political economy of the Nazi regime. The second book was widely received and made my reputation, but the statistics book is where I most consciously tried to tell a Latourian story about the emergence of the object of the national economy. In Wages of Destruction, this knowledge base becomes a kind of motive force. I aim to account for both the materiality of production, captured in the reified form of GDP numbers, and the political effects of its representation or reinterpretation through data, which itself exerts influence within the political system.

For example, in 1938 in Berlin there were meetings within the German planning bureaucracy where officials sensed they were losing the economic race with the Western powers. They would discuss the reasons why, and then someone would present a purchasing power parity-adjusted GDP figure showing that Germany was still far behind Britain and France. So there's a back and forth within the centers of calculation of power over how to represent and how those representations capture the flux of material forces.

The aim of understanding how data is created is not to debunk those data as merely “constructed” or “imagined”. This is also true of my analysis of American power. Statistics are not mirrors of reality, nor are they the same as what they describe. They are engineered and based on connections with the reality that they capture for us. They are like the speedometer on a car or the small wheel on an old-fashioned bicycle that measured speed. The relationship between statistics and economic reality is similar in that the data tell us about the world because they are mechanically related to it, built into it, integrated, part of it within it. I think of power and knowledge not as forces or capacities that are given, or born, or appear to us in a “flash”. They are made; not inherited, but constantly innovated. Everything we do as analysts, as journalists, or in any other capacity, is immersed in the same process of the making of things, the making of representations of things, and the making of things that are representations.

Ding Xiongfei: I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss Perry Anderson's piece on you, published in the New Left Review. You mentioned that you once drew inspiration from Anderson’s approach for your class on the end of history in the 1990s. However, in his 47-page article published in 2019, where he reviewed The Wages of Destruction, The Deluge, and Crashed—which he viewed as a trilogy—he raised several criticisms. First, he argued there was an anachronism in your understanding of American hegemony, particularly in your portrayal of the Nazi regime’s attitude toward America. Second, he criticized what he called your “situational and tactical approach,” which, according to him, “plunges the reader into the stream of events” while “dispensing with a structural explanation” of your subject’s origins. Third, he linked this approach to your liberal politics, suggesting that your reluctance to engage in structural critique reflects an acceptance of the existing order of things. You once mentioned that you planned to write a response to Anderson, but ultimately didn’t. I’m still curious—how would you respond to him now?

Adam Tooze: The most puzzling, and in the end, also the most generative element of his remarks about my work has got to do with his opening line, where he associates my left liberalism with what he describes as a situational analysis. He uses this phrase and implies that liberals, because they are complicit with the status quo, must always remain at the surface in their analysis, unable to tackle the underlying structural conditions. His argument implies that if only liberal thought was able to address these structural conditions it would recognize the need for radical change and visa versa. A commitment to radical change would open the path to a deeper understanding of historical structures and processes. It is a familiar left-wing conceit.

In contrast, my approach, because I'm a liberal and therefore, as he sees it, also situational or occasional, simply latches onto particular moments. He describes my work as being formulated “in medias res, ” in the midst of things. He sees me as a left-liberal with a problem regarding structure, and he views this as a deficiency—a gap, a blind spot in my thinking. I would simply respond that I do have an intellectual problem with structure. But that is not a weakness or simple failure on my part. As our preceding discussion about polycrisis, Latour, Beck etc suggested I have a necessarily incomplete but nevertheless capacious historical explanation for why structure is at this particular moment not transparently given to us. This is necessarily formulate in in medias res. And my question back to him would be: how can anyone who considers themselves a Marxist intellectual believe that they think and act in anything other than in medias res? How can a materialist imagine they are not in medias res? We are thrown into history, living in history in medias res—that’s not a choice, nor a methodological stance. It’s our fate; it’s an existential condition.

Frankly, I see his stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower, observing the world and understanding the deep structures of history from a privileged vantage point. That is no more or less in medias res. It is just a particularly precious, secluded angle from which to view the world. My own preference is to dispense with that conceit and to own, embrace, tackle and engage with what is everyone’s condition: i.e. being within the system, within the world. We are endogenous to that world. From this perspective, at any given moment, the question is what structures are relevant to our analysis. This is the Latourian move again: you tell me what your crisis is or what your context is, and I’ll tell you who and where you are—or vice versa.

Unlike Anderson, I don’t believe the history of the 19th and 20th centuries has already been completely written according to some intellectual canon be it Marxist or otherwise, so that we can simply learn from and extend that narrative into the present. I believe that the challenge of discovering the world at work around us is continuously renewed for us by the drama of modern history and protean change. I don’t start from the premise that I already know what the structure is, because I think that’s an open question—history is still unfolding in dramatic ways, continuously producing new realities and new forms of knowledge that subvert previous understandings. Far from being some kind of left-liberal sellout, I consider this a more self-reflexive, realistic and, to be honest, more radical position than the one Anderson inhabits.

Crucially, though it is of course a privilege to be read by Anderson and he was right to read the middle three of my books – Deluge, Wages and Crashed – as a trilogy, he didn't read the first book. So he doesn't really grasp what I am trying to do. Of the three books he did read, The Deluge is the toughest and least forgiving politically. It is a book that offers a nuanced but unorthodox reading of Lenin, a figure I find both fascinating and disturbing. Anderson, in his academic Marxism, pretends to have a deep affinity for Lenin and is correspondingly offended by my critical take.

On the other hand, Anderson simply does not seem to understand the argument about global political economy being made in Deluge and Wages. He takes too lightly an understanding of the balance of global power, which is not rooted in the superficial attachment to American power that he attributes to me ad hominem. He suggests I have some romantic infatuation with America whilst ignoring altogether the undergirdings of my analysis. Crucially, these combined Stephen Broadberry’s productivity analysis, Angus Maddison’s OECD GDP data set, and David Edgerton’s research on the British economy. Anderson ignores all this and this is not by accident. Anderson’s entire biography has been crafted around a particular telling of British power in the 20^th century, which David Edgerton and I have unhinged. A history of Germany in the 20^th century from an economic point of view always implies a history of Britain and visa versa. Anderson is simply deaf to all this. Not to put to fine a point on it, his understanding of European political economy is stuck in the 1960s and 1970s and Britain's declinist narrative of that period. This is precisely one of those instances in which our understanding of “structure” shifts with historical change. The economic history work to which Anderson turns a blind eye, produced in the 1990s and 2000s fundamentally revises the declinist script for Britain on the one hand and the anachronistic view of Nazi Germany as an industrial power house, which I revised in Wages.

In the end one the main reason for not diverting to writing a lengthy academic reply to Anderson is not my impatience with the superficiality of his out of date historical critique, but the fact that he is right. His critique more than anything else has fueled my deliberate and relentless focus on thinking and engaging in intellectual and political action in medias res. So far from being a quiescent politics, my work is deeply and profoundly engaged. This ranges from writing a real-time history like Shutdown that was fed by dozens of real-time public meetings in 2020-2021, to technocratic actions—such as the “Campaign against Nonsense Output Gaps, ” which targeted central bank policy in Europe and the IMF and led to changes in how certain figures are calculated—to more macroscopic interventions. For instance, the narrative of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, the inadequate Obama stimulus etc, which I helped memorialize and monumentalize in Crashed, was one of the inspirations for the massive second stimulus launched by the Biden administration in early 2021. So, when academic leftists ask, “Where’s your politics? ” I know exactly where mine is. My question to them is: where’s yours?

This engagement comes with heavy responsibility. The Biden stimulus experiment may not end well. Despite the amazing macroeconomic numbers and the promise of a “soft landing”, Larry Summers may be proven right and Harris may lose because of popular resentment about inflation that has been falsely attributed to Biden. But accepting that responsibility is what follows from being in medias res, being in the game, trying to change the conversation.

This has been a process of learning on my part as well. In academic historical leftist circles, there’s a temptation to endlessly replay the chess moves of classical revolutionary periods—the Comintern, the CCP’s alignment with the Nationalists, the decisions of the German Republic during the early Weimar years. In The Deluge, I indulged in that historical game myself. In the historical reenactment I played out the role of a hard-nosed, Keynesian, left-liberal unafraid to accept responsibility for violence. I regret that I indulged in that historical time warp myself. Not because I adopted a position different from that approved of by Anderson, but because I indulged in the game at all, and thus opened the door to his critique. I allowed myself to slide out of the more urgent domain of the present into the time-warped present of the academic ivory tower, in which now is 1924 and 1924 is now. I allowed myself to be sucked into an unproductive argument about a history that is no longer ours. This, I have come to feel, is a kind of escapism. If we were in a revolutionary moment that would be one thing. But we are absolutely not. So, very little is gained for understanding present-day politics by engaging in a historical Disneyland where we cosplay as Lenin, Trotsky, Wilson, imagining who we would have been and what we would have done. That’s playing at history. It’s the kind of boyish stuff people play on computers. We need to grow up. There’s too much at stake in the world right now. Things are too urgent. We need to be in the present, as best we can, fully engaged in medias res.

The challenge as I see it, is precisely to center our thoughts in the present, to be as much in medias res as we possibly can be. Precisely because of the tug of nostalgic role play amongst other things, that is not easy.

Ding Xiongfei: Could you discuss the relationship between Shutdown and Crashed—the two books, the two crises, and how governments handled each crisis? What are the similarities and differences, the continuity and discontinuity between them? While reading Shutdown, I noticed many parallels. So, is there anything particularly new or different?

Adam Tooze: I initially set out to write Crashed as a 10-year anniversary history of the 2008 financial crisis, beginning the project in 2012. At that time, we thought the history had restabilized—Obama had been reelected, and Mario Draghi had stabilized the Eurozone. But then, of course, the crisis reignited, starting with Ukraine 1.0, the Greek crisis, the Chinese financial turmoil in 2015-2016, Trump, Brexit. So what began as a 10-year anniversary history became a rolling 10-year account of an ongoing crisis. Finishing it in time for the anniversary was, to be honest, quite difficult. As we said at the beginning of this conversation, the promise of stabilization seemed increasingly remote, history was moving in ways that seemed quite new. Having somehow wrapped Craahed, I was looking for a follow-on and initially thought I’d write about climate change—but I got diverted by the pandemic into writing Shutdown. And, you are absolutely right, Shutdown is a continuation.

The main substantive difference is that while the centerpiece of Crashed, in terms of macro-financial history, is the private banking crisis of 2008 stabilized by government balance sheets (and its sequel in the Eurozone), the central story of Shutdown is a crisis in the American government debt market, the Treasury market. This is still, to this day, the great underestimated financial event of the last quarter century—arguably more dangerous than what happened in the private banks in 2008. The reason is simple: the US Treasury market is the pivot of the global financial system. When we talk about the dollar-based currency system, what we’re really talking about, apart from trade, is the US Treasury market. US Treasuries are the “safe asset” in which large US dollar reserves tend to be invested. US government debt underpins the entire dollar system, and the market for those debts, which should be perfectly liquid, in 2020 came close to collapse. The scale of the effort undertaken in March 2020 to stabilize the Treasury market, which was an order of magnitude larger than in 2008, reflects the severity of the risk. What makes it even more remarkable is that this stabilization had to be carried out amidst what I still believe is a vastly underestimated crisis of the American state during the final year of the Trump administration.

In style and structure, Shutdown is undeniably a sequel to Crashed. However, it describes the escalation of the crisis of the American state, something I only touched on at the end of Crashed. Crashed was completed just as Trump was taking office, so the crisis of governance wasn’t yet front and center. In Shutdown, however, the crisis of the American government is absolutely the focal point. That’s the connection between the two books.

The difference, of course, is that in Crashed, I was still thinking primarily in terms of a crisis generated endogenously within the capitalist system and within the geopolitics of globalization. With Shutdown, I’m wrestling with what I believe is best understood as the first comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene—the era in which human engagement with the environment produces systemically disturbing effects. I think that’s the best way to conceptualize the pandemic. So, there’s a fundamental transition and shift there. It is a stepping stone towards the idea of polycrisis, which is referenced in Shutdown as what you might call a “native category” i.e. a phrase used by European bureaucrats and politicians.

There is also a connection between the two books and the two crises through an embedded history of learning. The community of people, of which I was part, that intellectually digested the 2008 crises had a direct impact on policy response to the COVID shock in 2020 and 2021. This was evident both through the German government, specifically the Olaf Scholz team in the German finance ministry, and through the leadership of the Democratic Party in the US Congress. The critical thinking around the limits of the 2008 response, and the failures in the Eurozone, were crucial in strengthening Germany’s resolve to avoid a repeat of the Eurozone catastrophe. Similarly, it influenced key figures around Chuck Schumer in pushing for a truly gigantic second stimulus in 2021. So yes, it’s a clear instance of learning from history. The same was true also for the US central bank, the Fed. At a technical level, the Fed couldn’t have done what it did in 2020 without the experience of 2008.

The argument I make in Shutdown, in a sense, is that there’s a perverse way in which the left’s diagnosis—that we were facing Anthropocenic challenges in the form of climate change and pandemic shocks, and that these would require large-scale fiscal and monetary responses—was absorbed into government at the very moment that more radical left-wing political forces i.e. Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, suffered decisive defeats. You could say that the status quo demonstrated its capacity to absorb systemic critiques, critiques it didn’t generate on its own.

Ding Xiongfei: Why do you believe the scale of government spending and central bank intervention in 2020 confirmed the essential insights of economic doctrines like Modern Monetary Theory? Could you explain?

Adam Tooze: Step away from Modern Monetary Theory because it produces a lot of smoke and not that much fire. What the crisis response to COVID confirmed was the basic logic behind monetary Keynesianism and functional finance, schools which have been around since the 1940s. The basic lesson is simple. In extreme conditions resembling a true crisis, the most powerful response is a synthesis of fiscal and monetary policy. You simultaneously enact large-scale fiscal deficits and fiscal spending, and you finance it through money printing. Modern Monetary Theory, with its focus on the origins of money and other aspects, isn't necessary to explain this. It’s simply the practice of functional finance that was developed by all the major combatants in World War II – the Germans as much as the New Deal regime in the USA – and was theorized by Keynesians like Abba Lerner. The key is that the central bank and the treasury collaborate. Any debt issuance that causes stress in the debt market is absorbed by the central bank onto its balance sheet. This is how the West financed World War II and how we financed the response to COVID. It’s a powerfully stimulative approach. China did the same thing in 2008-09 when its central bank absorbed a significant amount of government debt to drive its stimulus. Yes, it works, and it worked remarkably well, generating one of the fastest recoveries in U.S. history.

Ding Xiongfei: In your recent podcast, you mentioned that vaccines are a kind of status quo technology. How do you see the role of different technological solutions in addressing global challenges?

Adam Tooze: Yes, vaccine are like a black box, a quick fix. If we consider technological solutions to our current world problems, there’s a wide spectrum. On one end, you have speculative technologies like AI—it's a powerful force, but we don't really know how it will shape the world. Many think it will be absolutely comprehensive. Then there's green modernization and the energy transition, which at the engineering level, we understand pretty well. Adopting green electricity allows us to carry on with our existing lives. The sort of change that is required involves switching the types of cars we drive, overhauling electricity infrastructure, and altering how we generate power. These are significant adjustments, but they are mostly confined to specific sectors like energy production. And then there are vaccines. From one moment to the next, you go from being at risk—constantly vulnerable—to being protected. All it takes is a simple jab, allowing you to resume life as before. Vaccines are minimally invasive, yet profoundly effective. They're relatively inexpensive compared to other technological solutions, costing billions of dollars to develop, not hundreds of trillions. Add them all up, and for just a few hundred billion dollars, we could develop a complete suite of vaccines to protect against all known zoonotic pathogens. The funding isn't there yet, but the technology is. In many ways, vaccines are status quo technologies—they make us safe without requiring a fundamental change in how we live.

Ding Xiongfei: You believe AI is being overhyped, correct?

Adam Tooze: Honestly, I’m not sure. I think it's still in such an early stage, and we’re very much in the zone of the “Solow paradox,” where everyone is talking about it—it’s supposedly everywhere—but it hasn’t really started doing or changing much yet. I've been asked this question so many times in various talks that I ended up creating a “polycrisis” diagram for AI. There are so many possibilities that might spin out. What worries me the most is the massive bet being placed on AI in the American stock market right now, which is essentially predicated on the assumption of a huge leap in productivity. The flipside of that is a huge upheaval in white-collar, routine labor markets, which could be devastating for employment and social stability. What we’re seeing is a vast, leveraged financial gamble on social disruption. If things go “well,” we could see a real social revolution. If they don’t, investors will be disappointed, and there could be a collapse in stock market values. At the same time, if AI underperforms, social stability will be preserved, and the existing employment structure will remain intact. So, it’s a very ambiguous moment. It’s tempting to think that the sheer enthusiasm for AI as a transformative technology reflects a broader sense of impasse—when people start looking for a single technological silver bullet to change the world, it may indicate that they’ve grown disillusioned with other forms of transformation. But that’s a bit more speculative. It’s conceivable that AI will deliver. In the stock market, especially in the US, there’s always a search for the next big thing, the next big narrative—and right now, AI is it.

Ding Xiongfei: There’s an American presidential election coming up this November. Reflecting on the past four years, could you tell us your thoughts on Bidenomics? Though, given the current state of the president’s reputation, they might need to come up with a new name.

Adam Tooze: My relationship with Bidenomics has been somewhat uneasy. I’m often described as someone who's quite close to power, with an unselfconscious association with political elites. But in reality, I’ve found the situation where associates and even some friends are in power in Washington to be deeply uncomfortable, in ways I didn’t anticipate. The core logic of Bidenomics, to me, has always been a form of progressive economic nationalism, and I find that position quite uncomfortable, the nationalism and the anti-China direction particularly so. I also think its impact has been over-hyped. The idea that the level of investment they’ve undertaken could fundamentally shift the attitudes and voting patterns of a significant slice of the American electorate strikes me as unrealistic—it’s clearly not going to happen. The excited brouhaha around Bidenomics as some world-changing force seemed either naive or, in some cases, cynical. It felt like certain people had been won over by the allure of power—access to the White House can be very glamorous. Being on a call with the White House, or visiting it, is undeniably exciting. We have all seen it on TV and in the cinema so many times, you can’t help reacting. But I think that glamour has clouded people’s judgment.

To me, Bidenomics feels more like a floundering attempt by the liberal elite to project a simulacrum of coherent global power, rather than its reality. In my newsletter I wrote about the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) as a sort of takedown of this, referring to them as “Potemkin ducks”— something that walks like a duck, quacks like a duck but may not actually be a real live duck. These policies suggest coherence and appear to be major contributions to geoeconomic competition with China, but in reality, do little to drive actual development, whether in South Africa or elsewhere.

The same goes for many of Biden's domestic policies. They’re designed to make incremental progress, and in fairness to the administration, they did as much as they could. They would have loved to go bigger but lacked the congressional majority. So, they settled for what they could achieve, and then the Biden propaganda machine kicked into gear. They’re very good at selling the narrative—smart people, convincing messaging. Many media outlets love the story. “Post-neoliberalism” is a great catch phrase. But in terms of changing the political economy of the United States in any significant way? No, I don’t think so. In fact, I’d argue it’s the other way around—the only reason the Inflation Reduction Act and similar measures got passed was because the political economy of the U.S. had already shifted. The green energy lobby had become a significant force, demanding that America also needed subsidies. So, the administration responded with subsidies. But the notion that the Biden administration is fundamentally transforming the game is, I think, deeply misleading. If you compare US subsidies with those in Europe, many estimates suggest European subsidies are much larger, though less well-organized.

Again: I see the Biden administration as a somewhat desperate effort to put a gloss of liberal coherence over an increasingly chaotic situation. One image I sometimes show is of Biden on the picket line, supporting the United Auto Workers in 2023. The sitting president of the United States participating in a strike—that’s a pretty bizarre configuration, and it reflects the unusual political dynamics of the moment.

Ding Xiongfei: In Shutdown, China is portrayed in a relatively positive light, but given the current situation, there seems to be an atmosphere of low expectations. In your newsletters over the past six months, you've mentioned China-related topics around 29 times. You are currently visiting China, meeting students, officials, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals in Dalian, Beijing, and Shanghai. What are your impressions? Could you express your thoughts on China and explain why it is important to you?

Adam Tooze: Given my age—I graduated from college in 1989—the biggest regret of my personal and professional life is that I didn’t grasp the significance of China until far too late. For many years, I was narrowly Eurocentric in my outlook, having grown up in Cold War Europe. After completing Wages of Destruction, I began to realize, over the course of five or six years, just how profound my ignorance was, particularly in failing to understand the basic dynamic of the early 21st century, which is China-centric. With The Deluge, I set out to correct that. I would argue that The Deluge is one of the few books that treats that history of global power in the early 20^th century with a degree of symmetry regarding both East Asia and Western Europe, delving into the warlord politics of China during World War I and the post-1920s period.

Since then, I’ve worked systematically to educate myself and better understand China’s history and dynamics, particularly in terms of economic growth, which China has dominated on a global scale for years and continues to do. My new focus—climate change—also places China at the center. I’m deeply interested in the climate issue, and part of that interest stems from my desire to write about China. Of course, I never quite feel qualified to write a book solely about China. I am only just learning to speak and read Chinese. Nor am I a professional “China watcher”. However, writing about climate allows me to explore China’s centrality in the modern world. That’s why China features so prominently in the Chartbook newsletter—I read about China every day.

What I’ve experienced during my visits to China has been a limited glimpse, heavily biased toward a university setting where the concerns of young people entering the job market are naturally at the forefront. There’s a palpable sense of anxiety about the future. I had read about this but hadn’t fully felt it up close until now. That has made a strong impression on me and has shifted my perspective somewhat. I’ve also been struck by more technical analyses I’ve come across, particularly around the possibility of a balance sheet recession and a fundamental collapse in confidence in investment, driven by ongoing debt issues and the unresolved problems in the real estate sector. While I had studied these issues in the abstract and on paper, seeing them play out has had a much greater impact on me than I anticipated. It’s something I’ll be exploring more deeply in the future.

What I’m most fascinated by, however, is the green energy transition—a massive technological shift that can be seen in urban settings through the proliferation of new energy vehicles. But much of this transition is taking place far from the eastern coastal areas, as the major solar and wind energy bases are in the west. Here, in the cities, you mostly see the transmission lines, which are impressive, but they’re a long way from the reality of the giant transition taking place elsewhere. Judging the green energy revolution from Shanghai alone is difficult—you really have to go to the source to truly grasp the scale of what’s happening and see its full impact.

Ding Xiongfei: Can you share more about your upcoming books on climate change? Besides China's central role, what's the book going to be about?

Adam Tooze: It traces the evolution of global climate politics, starting from its early stages when scientists first identified the problem. Initially, in the 1980s, the climate crisis was framed as an issue caused by emissions from the West and the Soviet Bloc—essentially a Global North problem that the North needed to fix. In other words, “We caused this, so we must solve it.” Then we move into the climate politics of the 1990s and early 2000s, marked by moments like the Kyoto Protocol, where in a UN-style setting—like the COP meetings—the Global South pointed fingers at the Global North, saying, “You are responsible, you must fix this.” So, the narrative shifted from the North controlling the issue as an internal problem to a confrontation between the South and the North.

The breakdown came in Copenhagen in 2009, where India and China directly confronted the West and said, “No deal.” At the same time, China’s emissions were surging to unprecedented levels—overtaking the United States in 2006 and reaching extraordinary peaks by 2011-2013. This was accompanied by massive, apocalyptic pollution in much of urban China. The turning point came with the Paris Agreement, where China, now responsible for over 30% of global emissions—more than any country ever, and twice as much as the US—began to take ownership of the climate problem.

On one level, this could be seen as a triumphant, progressive narrative where China is cast as the hero. But from a Western perspective, this represents a huge shock. For the climate left, for the audience I usually write for, the left-progressive opinion in the West, we’re still stuck in the climate politics of the 1990s. We see climate politics in Western-centric terms, as a struggle between progressives and bad guys in the West, activists v. carbon criminals like ExxonMobil. If you read American left-wing climate journalism, much of it is still focused on exposing climate denial, climate skepticism, and Exxon’s misdeeds.

But if you look at the 20 largest corporate polluters in the world today, Exxon is 5^th on the list. Who’s at the top? China Coal, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, mostly state-owned enterprises from emerging markets, which have driven global growth over the last 20 to 30 years. The point is not moralistic. The point is not to reverse the finger pointing and to blame China. China’s energy consumption is the key to lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In per capita terms it is now higher than in Europe but far behind the US. The point is not moralistic but ultimately one about the philosophy of history. It is about who or what is the historical agent of change?

Climate change is arguably the first issue in which China dethrones the West as the decisive historical force. In the West, in the 1980s and 1990 progressives framed climate change as the ultimate test of collective rationality. This is what I was referring to earlier in describing the climate crisis, ironically, as the last remaining hope of totalization. Now we must come to terms with the fact that if this story ends well, the West will not be the hero—China, under the rule of the CCP, will be the leader. That poses a novel and radical problem for the West in the philosophy of history. Why? Because the climate crisis is itself a novel and radical problem. The race to be the world’s top geopolitical power – to build aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles - doesn’t pose a new problem. That’s an old problem, and it’s almost tedious that it’s still discussed in such nationalistic terms. Surpassing the leading economy is a process of collective change, where individual agency is relatively unclear. It’s more about the growth of a system. But climate change, aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050 or 2060, requires a level of political agency we’ve never seen before. And the leading agent of this transition has to be the Chinese regime. That’s a world-historic twist the West was not ready for, especially in climate, the chosen domain of progressive struggle for many years.

That’s what the book is about—it’s a story of the shifting locus of power and rationality in global politics. I’m truly obsessed with the current pace of historical change. And I have a hunch that that is part of what engages people with my work. I think part of my public presence inspires people to do their own research, in a way somewhat analogous to the dynamic in QAnon, though obviously not in a conspiratorial sense. QAnon, the most extreme Trumpist online conspiracy theory, encouraged its followers to “go do your own research,” which became a powerful driver of self-activated conspiracy theory generation. In a similar way—though more like a “liberal QAnon”—people who follow me often dive into the footnotes and explore the materials I publish, which don’t always have a clear, fixed shape.

If I serve as a role-model it isn’t therefore by offering a straightforward, simple template. It’s more like presenting a puzzle. Its like that mysterious thing yoga instructors tell you to do: “Lets all take a deep breath and center ourselves in the present.” Try it! It is incredibly difficult to do. It’s incredibly hard to be fully present to actually be in medias res—When Perry Anderson says I’m in the middle of the present, I take that as the highest compliment.

In my critique of Mearsheimer’s realism, I argue that his realism is fake—it’s a kind of cliché realism where tough guys do tough things. Real realism is much more difficult. It’s what artists and poets grapple with—how do we describe and respond to reality in all its rich complexity? What’s the political economy of this hotel we’re sitting in? Why these nuts that we are snacking on and not others? There’s nothing simple about any of it, and I think that’s what draws people in—the shared sense that the world is fascinating and not simple at all. That doesn’t mean we’ll never make up our minds, or that we’ll always be indecisive. Or that big social forces like “capitalism” are not in play in building the hotel or bringing us the nuts. It just means that we shouldn’t assume anything is simple to begin with. Lets start with the fact that hotel construction capitalism and nut supply chain capitalism are very different. That’s the message of my newsletter—it’s like a scrapbook of things that strike me as having depth and that people may find interesting to think about or think with. Being realistic in today’s world isn’t a formula—it’s a daily challenge, perhaps a science, a skill, certainly, a discipline, maybe even an art form.

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