Posted on February 12, 2023
Rock On, Little One
Parenthood is full of joy, wonder, and horrifying surprises. Often, those three facets get tied together in a neat little package that leaks something obscene out of a corner you thought you had strapped down.
Yesterday, my son and I had some quality bonding time while my wife went out with a friend. I had made it several hours without serious incident and decided I was ready to try and make myself lunch while Ezran was still awake. This was my first mistake. You see, my son is still an infant and delights in finding new and interesting ways to express himself. “Today,” he thought, “I will surpass myself.”
Not knowing the horror literally brewing within my child, I plopped him in his activity center we have dubbed the Chair of Cheer and carted him over to the kitchen. My goal was to continue pushing the boundaries of our new air fryer with some potstickers while Lil’ EZ chilled with an assortment of toys. We had rocked out to classic rock all morning, and AC/DC accompanied my incompetent but passionate air frying efforts.
All was well until a realization left me Thunderstruck—my son has made it eight months and not ONCE had I introduced him to the concept of air guitaring. I tossed the ill-prepared potstickers in the air fryer, cranked the tunes, and caught my son’s attention. Then, I jammed.
This was not casual air guitaring, a few half-hearted strums at waist level with a vague indication of fingering chords. This was no holds barred, leave it all on the table, sweat inducing showmanship. I danced, I spun, and I slid on my knees while raising my air guitar to the awe-inspired heavens as I poured years of mild-shame of never learning the actual guitar into my performance.
Ezran. Was. Thrilled.
My son shrieked with joy and laughter, slamming his hands on the Chair of Cheer not unlike Thor demanding more beverages at his table in Valhalla. His smile radiated a level of wonder that only the very young or the very insane can truly convey. Back in Black roared in the background as his little feet splattered on a growing puddle of sickly yellow liquid.
The presentation of a lifetime came to an abrupt stop. My eyes went from being filled with passion to being filled with horror as I realized just what my son was currently squishing between his toes.
In the midst of his excitement, Ezran had decided to unleash a poop waterfall out his diaper and along his leg, leading to the aforementioned puddle of off-colored excrement he continued to dip his feet into. He looked up at me and smiled with his toothless gums and eyes open just a touch too wide. I looked deep within and beheld only chaos as he slammed both feet into the puddle over and over, spreading his joy in one of the only mediums he understands.
It was at that point the air fryer dinged to let me know it had just turned my potstickers into briquettes. Parenthood, as they say, is always an adventure.
On the writing front, I’ve got a draft title for my debut science fiction novel! Artificial Threat will be the first of three novels in the Artificial trilogy, followed (tentatively) by Artificial Uprising,and Artificial Empire. As my wife and I are fond of saying, good things come in threes, and I like how it keeps one of the story’s primary themes consistent across some nice repetition.
As for progress, I’m still deep in Phase Two of my editing process: Strategic Planning. This is where I look over the reconnaissance from Phase One and identify issues of plot, character, and world building. As I document them, I also triage them into Critical, Substantive, and Minor. As is expected from a 100% Gardener book, I have plenty of weeds to yank. I’m up to sixty-seven issues so far, most of them in the Critical or Substantive categories.
While this would have disheartened me earlier in my writing experience, I’ve come to recognize the need to identify these problems before considering my work complete. I didn’t do that for The Mortal Mercenary, and I wasted far too much time trying to push out a subpar product because of it. I’m also learning a lot about how I write and the craft by doing so, which is always a plus. Once I get all the issues documented, then I will formulate a plan to get after them. The most important step you can take is always the next one!
Posted on February 5, 2023
The Infinite Variabilities of Taste
Taste is a funny concept. You can have good taste or bad, acquired taste or popular. The one thing we all have in common is we each have our own taste, be that for food, media, or people. But one thing we think we have but actually don’t is the ability to force our taste on others. And oh, how that infuriates us.
My wife decided two episodes into Andor that she didn’t like it. I, of course, was aghast. After inhaling the rest of the season, I established it in the upper pantheon of my favorites. So is the proper response to judge and berate her for her obviously poor taste? Of course not—she’s entitled to like and dislike whatever she wants. Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells go in depth on this in a recent podcast/video of their excellently named series, Intentionally Blank. Differences in taste should be celebrated, not judged. Not only do those differences allow for interesting conversations, they help push art in new and interesting directions. Creators can look at the vast array of what’s available, find nothing to their liking, and do something new for others to enjoy. There’s value to that, especially as we look down the barrel of a future with mass-produced content generated by algorithms instead of people.
Next time you see that someone doesn’t like your favorite show or their Netflix queue makes you cock and eyebrow, take a deep breath (through your nose!) and relax. Live and let live, watch and let watch—there’s enough out there for all of us.
On the writing front, I’m making decent progress. I’ve made it through the top level summaries of my main plot arcs with their accompanying subplots, plus character arcs for the most important players. Even though I’m not fixing things yet, I’ve got quite a list of problems to address. Next up will be world building, seeing what physical and cultural pillars my setting has established so far.
The few weeks I’ve been at this make it abundantly clear how valuable breaking up the process is to effective editing. My last novel still suffers from structural issues because I never bothered finding out what they were, choosing instead to focus on the line edits—losing the forest for the leaves on a branch of a tree. While this will take make longer overall, I’ll end up with a far better product at the end. Or it won’t and I’ll just dump the whole manuscript into ChatGPT and have the machine give it a go, because why not?
Updated on February 5, 2023
ChatGPT, So Hot Right Now
“A wise man can get more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”
– Baltasar Gracian
They’ve done it. They went and ruined my writing career before it ever had a chance, and they don’t even care. “They” in this case being the developers of ChatGPT, which depending on your viewpoint is either the first step into a beautiful new age of AI-supported utopia or the vanguard of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For how short it’s been on the scene, it’s amazing how quickly ChatGPT has poked the hornet’s nest.
For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an online tool people can chat with to figure stuff out. Think of it like the next generation of Google, or what you wish Siri was actually like. It’s quite amazing how authentic the machine sounds, and it’s capable of some truly fascinating things. I asked it to give me a literary comparison between Hamlet and Sharknado, and after trying to convince me that comparing the two was idiotic, ChatGPT gave a shockingly decent go at it (common themes between the two are revenge and man vs nature, if you’re curious). The most intriguing part for me is how conversational the whole experience was. I typed my questions like I was chatting with a real person, and the machine responded in kind. This is no customer service bot struggling to understand why you’re upset your package never showed up. ChatGPT covers down on anything shy of politics and war, which it is hard coded against at the moment.
Personally, I don’t think ChatGPT has destroyed anything yet, but you can see where it does from here. A lot of the furor online revolves around people claiming the essay as a school assignment is dead, since students can just plug prompts into ChatGPT and copy the results. After playing with it a bit, I think there’s some validity to this concern. It will take a bit to get there, both in terms of the platform’s capability and students’ awareness of it, but the artificial writing is on the wall.
What concerns me more is whether ChatGPT or something like it can take over writing fiction. Would-be authors have already saturated the market, and algorithms churning out decent products at the speed of silicon might mean the death of small time authors. I was hoping people overreacted to this threat, but then I asked ChatGPT to give me an idea for a political intrigue novel in a fantasy world. In a few seconds, the machine spat out a run-of-the-mill—but infinitely serviceable—storyline involving a young champion of the people leading a rebellion against council of corrupt sorcerers desperately clinging to power. It’s not hard to see how this becomes the norm as new authors realize how hard it is to write and lean on ChatGPT as a crutch. Eventually, that crutch becomes an electric scooter and Wall-E becomes a prophetic metaphor for the world of writing fiction.
In the meantime, I want to keep playing with the tool. Sure, it could mean the death of my hopes as an author, but it’s still fun to see what the computer comes up with. I’ve asked it for book title recommendations, help with developing elevator pitches, and idea generation. I want to see just how far I can take it as I edit my current novel and see what comes out of a blending of capabilities.
As the saying goes, work smarter not harder.
Posted on January 22, 2023
Editing Step 1: Recon
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
– Philip K. Dick
I wonder if there are writers out in the world who prefer editing to writing. If so, maybe they can scoop up some of their twisted sense of prioritization and ship it my way, because editing is not my forte. After my productive procrastination session designing a far too intricate editing checklist, I finally got started on the process itself. Step one in my editing process: recon. That’s when I realized just how painful this process will be.
You see, I wrote this entire book in the gardener fashion (or as it’s more commonly referred to, as a pantser). I had some inklings of where I wanted things to go, but that revolved mostly around introducing characters I thought might be fun to write. Once it all congealed on the page, though, it quickly became clear that while things progress from Point A to a conclusion, that may not be Point Z. Or even a point in the same alphabet.
This is why recon is so important to the editing process. Delving straight into line-by-line editing would result in me fixing typos and ignoring the huge structural issues, so it’s best to identify all the ugliness first. I wrote out summaries of each chapter and slapped them into a timeline. General bafflement came next, followed by figurative head bashing against the desk as I saw how many obvious inconsistencies I need to address. That’s the issue with writing a book in manic bursts over several years—you tend to lose one or two threads along the way.
While it was ego-deflating to see those problems, doing this recon now will help tremendously throughout the editing process. I’d prefer to know the ugly up front so I can incorporate fixes into the entire process instead of finding out about it at the last minute and having to start over if the issue is fundamental enough. By understanding what I have to work with now, I can move into the next step (analyzing structure) with more confidence.
I will say this though—I have an intense desire to make sure my next book is thoroughly outlined to save myself this hassle in the future.
Posted on January 15, 2023
New Year, Who Dis?
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
A novel I recently read had a great line about forgiveness. One of the fictional cultures had a practice of stating how one would make amends instead of saying sorry, putting action ahead of words. I failed in producing a Wandering for the past few weeks, breaking my streak just shy of a year. Since this blog is for me more than anyone else, my amends are aimed towards myself: I will ensure I have a surplus of posts ready to go so I don’t let the holidays knock me off course again.
Now that that’s resolved, let’s talk about this new year’s direction. Last year, my Wanderings covered a wide variety of topics. One week would be a movie review, the next would be a think piece on international affairs, and the one after that would be a long-form dad joke. While this served the purpose of making me write consistently, it didn’t translate well into making me work on my novels. Since that’s where I want the bulk of my writing effort going, this proves problematic.
My solution: adopt a lesson from Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work and focus my blog on what progress my novels and writing skills have made. The hope is this will force me to both think more deeply about my development as a writer and serve as a self-induced guilt trip to make me sit down and write. Seeing as I’m a new father, I need to practice doing that anyways—win-win!
That said, I do reserve the right to Wander off onto paths that are sufficiently shiny (The Recruit on Netflix is wonderful and deserves a binge, for example). But those will serve as some of the buffer posts I create to make sure I don’t have a lapse again. My primary effort is focusing on my writing. If that interests you, fantastic! If not, also great! You do you, champ. I’ll do the same.
Posted on December 11, 2022
The Outer Range: Out of my Range of Caring
We live in a post-truth world. Even the certainties of life are under assault—most billionaires laugh at the concept of taxes, and plenty still believe Tupac is alive. But I hold that one truth remains strong: if you’re characters suck, so too does your story. This is what plagues the otherwise interesting Amazon Prime show The Outer Range, a modern Western with a healthy dash of sci-fi. Spoilers ahead, partner.
The show has two primary conflcits that a plethora of subplots leach onto. First, the “good ol’ traditional ranching” Abbotts family is fighting a hostile takeover from the neighboring “corporate ranching sell-out” Tillerson family. Second, those good old Abbotts are hiding how one of their boys murdered one of the Tillerson sons. Both provide plenty of conflict, and both allow for multiple tie-ins to the sci-fi element of the show.
The characters let this story down. I just don’t like any of them. In the first episode, they do an excellent job making the Tillerson’s out to be jerks. Sweet, I thought, here are our villains! But then they have the Abbotts literally murder someone, and now the water gets muddy. Sure, there are positives to having your protagonists taking a darker path, but you have to balance that out in some way to ensure your audience empathizes with them still.
Take Walter White in Breaking Bad. The audience could empathize with his objectively heinous decision to start making meth because they saw the terrible circumstance he was in with an inability to afford medical care—something many Americans have legitimate concerns with. Granted, yes, his frienemy offered to pay for his care, but Walter refusing it was a) foreshadowing how his pride would ruin everything, and b) necessary for the story to go anywhere. The situation gave enough of a reason for the audience to root for him as he took action to fix his problem, even if those methods were terrible.
Contrast that with the Abbotts. The family patriarch, Royal, is a royal pain. He demonstrates little to no redeemable features, shutting out his wife and acting in a domineering way over his entire family as he tries to lie, threaten, and connive his way out of the Tillerson situations. The eventual reveal as to why he’s hesitant to share the Void with anyone else is too little, too late—by the last episode in the season, the audience’s opinion of him is set.
His sons aren’t any better, both two-dimensional vessels of “woe is me” that get roughly no agency of their own as they take orders from their father. Round it off with the wife who goes along with covering up the murder even as she professes to be a God-fearing Christian and a granddaughter who exists solely to find a dead body and become another character in a few years, and you have an unlikeable family in a bad situation. Not fertile ground for great storytelling, that.
When the audience has no one to root for, it doesn’t matter how interesting the plot is. If the audience doesn’t care about a story’s characters, the whole thing turns gray and lifeless. On the other hand, great characters can turn a staid and prosaic plot into a tremendous story that resonates with millions. If I say Harry, Ron, and Hermione, 99% of you will know immediately who I’m talking about. But if I tried to explain their story without any of the usual Harry Potter markers, there’s a decent chance you’d get it confused with the myriad of other good versus evil fantasy stories in the world. “Good magician and co. stop bad magician from conquering the world” is a trope, but great characters turn it into Harry Potter.
I wish Outer Range had been as bold with its characters as it was with many of its other choices, because the sci-fi elements kept me coming back for most of the season. By the end, though, I realized something we all do eventually with old high school acquaintances—if I don’t like these people, why am I wasting my time hanging out with them?
Posted on November 27, 2022
Humility – Leadership’s Most Important Facet
When you search ‘leadership books’ on Amazon, it returns over 30,000 results. I won’t even try to quantify the number of blogs, podcasts, newsletters, sermons, and social media posts on the subject. There must be billions of words on the subject across every language, culture, and people. Leadership is so important to us because we recognize the value in taking a group of people from here to there in a complex world. We should know everything about it by now, right?
Yes and no. Anyone can grasp leadership’s fundamentals, though interpretations and prioritizations vary. Things get messy in execution. Leaders find themselves in an infinite number of circumstances, and no leadership guru can outline even the smallest fraction of them into a convenient checklist. Instead, people offer catch-all phrases that guide efforts in a variety of situations. Leaders Eat Last, Extreme Ownership, and Trust and Inspire are some popular examples today.
But even this wavetop approach can overwhelm a beginner. Do I eat last first, or do I inspire from the front? Does my extreme ownership conflict with expressing trust in my people? Ask ten consultants how to start leading, and you’ll get back eleven answers. If you approach leadership from a first principles mindset, however, many of these books and articles on leadership teach similar core lessons. The most important of these? If you want to lead, learn humility.
You cannot learn to lead if you refuse to learn in the first place. This goes beyond a willingness to peruse the local self-help section in the library. First, I’d bet the majority of people who read books on leadership and self-improvement fail to implement anything from what they read. Behavioral change is hard and we overestimate our own abilities to undertake it. Second, humility does not thrive in a pick-and-choose mindset. You cannot effectively learn from a book on leadership if you choose to ignore the feedback around you. The world already provides the best leadership laboratory you will ever need—itself.
Whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a night shift manager at a local grocery store, or flying solo, every moment presents opportunities for learning to lead. Whether or not you take advantage of them comes down to your level of humility. Recognizing that every one and every thing has something to teach you is the critical first step you must take to becoming a leader worth following. Once you have that humble mindset, all the wisdom written and spoken across countless forums becomes a treasure for you to inherit, and those you lead will benefit all the more from it.
Posted on November 20, 2022
The Three Questions of Life
The verdict is in: life is hard. Show me a person who claims they have never struggled and I will show you a liar. Of life’s many obstacles, understanding it is often the most difficult. Anyone can put their head down and grind through rough times, but having a reason why apart from survival takes so much more. Those rough times are like sandpaper—they wear away at reasoning, leaving either a hardened truth or nothing at all. Knowing your truth is a personal question that only you can answer, and it takes a level of introspection hard to accomplish in the cacophony of today’s world. But it can be done, and done in answering just three questions: where you come from, where you are going, and who you are.
Where you come from is not just a geographical question. While the location you were raised does have some impact, the circumstances of it mean far more. Those circumstances had two major effects on you. First, they established the playing field for your development. Second, they resulted in the experiences on that playing field that shaped your development. My old playing field of middle-class Southern California is as different to that of an illiterate child that has to work to survive from an early age as a checkers board is from a rugby pitch.
While some of the boundaries are universal—nourishment requirements, a need for community—some playing fields are far more forgiving than others. The harder the playing field, the more extreme the experiences upon it are likely to be. For example, a child raised in a Sao Paolo favela is likely to face much harsher trials than one raised in a posh section of London. Understanding the playing field you came from and what the experiences there taught you are step one to understanding your life.
The next question is where you are going. Again, this is more than geographical. What you need is an understanding of your desired circumstances in life. A person who wants to settle down in the same town they grew up in with a high school sweetheart will need to take radically different choices from someone who wants to emigrate to another country and leave their original playing field behind.
Where you come from has a huge impact on where you’re going. Those earlier experiences mold what you like, what you hate, and what you need. Those factors shape the desired boundaries of any future playing fields, which help you target the right circumstances. The issue with not knowing your answer to this question is that if you don’t exercise your agency to choose, the world will choose for you and you’ll never realize it.
Answering the final question requires answers for the proceeding two, though at first it is not evident why. After all, isn’t knowing yourself key to understanding your past and planning your future? The three answers are inextricably linked, but knowing yourself cannot take place in a vacuum. If you tried to define who you were without pulling on a single past experience or future desire, what would that leave? A formless husk, indistinguishable from any other judged by the same criteria. It is the answers to the first two questions that provide the context for a satisfying answer to the third.
Perhaps you overcame personal tragedy in your original playing field and strive to create a new one where the likelihood of such experiences is smaller for your children. That dictates certain attributes about who you are that are unique to you, far different from someone who never had those experiences and thus do not share similar desires. Knowing yourself is difficult, but likely the most important of the three questions for personal contentment.
Together, these three questions—where you come from, where you are going, and who you are—are the keys to understanding your life. Having the humility to ponder on the answers as they are instead of how you wish them to be is the necessary step we should all take to know ourselves.
Posted on November 6, 2022
Russia, Iran, and Autocratic Friendship Circles
I live my life by a simple set of rules. Rule Number One? Don’t go to jail. It’s not relevant to today’s Wandering, but it always bears repeating. Rules Number Two and Three, however, are germane: read, and read often. The written word remains the most efficient way to spread ideas, and they can come from anywhere. Case in point, this line from the novel The Light Brigade: “Any human power can be changed by human beings. That is a truth, a constant. Humans can’t build power structures that cannot be destroyed. We are the power structure.” I love that concept and want to apply it to a thought loitering in my mind—autocratic friendship circles.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took a nasty turn recently as Iranian-made kamikaze drones started targeting civilian buildings and critical infrastructure across Ukraine. Leaving aside how Russia seems intent on racking up war crimes like Stalin is grading their performance, Iran’s support marks the first time the country has gotten involved in a major European conflict. Given how poorly Russia has fared in the conflict and in international opinion (though not nearly poorly enough, unfortunately), it seems odd that Tehran would look at the situation and think yeah, that seems like something we want in on. Why would they do this? Sure, Iran has a history of fighting Western interests via proxies, and yes, their economy can use whatever boost arms sales can provide, but I think the driving reason is more environmental.
The internet credits Jim Rohn with coining the phrase we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Pair this with Dr Marshall Goldsmith’s thoughts (with Mark Reiter) on environment in his book Triggers: “We think we are in sync with our environment, but actually it’s at war with us. We think we control environment but in fact it controls us.” Together, the two points indicate that the people we spend the most time with are our environment, and our environment shapes who we are and what we do. Now we come back to autocratic friendship circles.
Whenever Russia does something naughty, it can rely on its clique of fellow ne’er-do-wells to have its back. It says something about a country when its closest partners are China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. I think it’s fair to say that the five of them are responsible for a truly depressing amount of the sum total of human suffering in the last century. And much like any Mean Girl crew, none of them see anything wrong with each other’s horrifying behavior. Assassinating political opponents on foreign soil? Not a hint of condemnation. Illegally annexing territory of a sovereign nation and launching a proxy insurgency to claim more in the future? Nothing to see here. Launching an unprovoked invasion of that same sovereign nation in a naked land grab attempt? Not only do they fail to condemn it, they appear fully onboard.
There are two reasons why this autocratic friendship circle is so strong. First, because it pays to have friends when you decide to cosplay as a tzar and the majority of the world treats you as a pariah. No country can go it alone, a case proven by how even the infamous Hermit Kingdom of North Korea relies on lifelines to China and Russia to keep from collapsing in on its own incompetence. Second, the autocratic friendship circle provides what Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Ali Khamenei all really want—a friend. More importantly, a friend who never critiques.
At the surface level, autocratic regimes seem like an efficient way to get things done. If only one person is making decisions, you don’t have to worry about pesky things like elections or compromise to make forward progress. However, that advantage fades as that sole decision maker becomes a bottleneck. The situation worsens as the decision maker inevitably surrounds him or herself with Yes Men that only feed the decision maker what they want to hear, regardless of its veracity. Putin invading Ukraine, Xi doubling down on draconian COVID policies, Asaad using chemical weapons on his own people, and literally anything Kim Jung Un does are all examples of actions that a stable of sane advisors could have talked those respective dictators out of if they had any shred of humility left inside them. We can now add shipping thousands of Iranian-made kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles to Russia as they target civilians to that list.
I like to imagine that Supreme Leader (not a joke title) Khamenei had a moment like this as he made such a terrible decision. His advisors come to him with the proposal. “Sir,” they say, “you know how Russia has become a comic book villain while also getting its collective posterior handed to it by Ukrainian forces?” The Supreme Leader nods—of course he knows how his buddy Vlad is doing, such a shame how his invasion—I mean, ‘special military operation’ has gone. “What if we tied ourselves inextricably to that situation?” the advisors suggest.
Khamenei goes to answer, then stops himself with a frown. Wheels long atrophied start cranking as he considers the ramifications of helping Russia double down on becoming the war crime champion of the century. He opens his mouth to order the execution of his advisors for wasting his time with such a stupid idea when his sleeve slides down and reveals something colorful on his wrist– the friendship bracelet Putin made for him at their last autocratic friendship circle. He smiles fondly, then gives the go-ahead for his country to further alienate itself from the world with little to no benefit in return. After all, what else are friends for?
Posted on October 24, 2022
Xi Jinping and China’s Downhill Sprint
‘90s rap is a trove of wisdom and quips. Coolio coined the phrase “Ain’t no party like a West Coast party / ‘Cause a West Coast party don’t stop” back in 1995. In homage to Professor Coolio and in line with the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, I present the following adaptation: Ain’t no party like a Chinese Communist Party, because a Chinese Communist Party can’t stop.
The CCP hosted its every-five-year Congress this week, and President/Party Secretary Xi Jinping has followed in the path of dictators the world over by functionally declaring himself President for Life. This comes as no surprise, as he lit groundwork for this move with strobing neon lights. One fun example is how last year, Xi went ahead and removed pesky reminders of the threat behind cults of personality and the need for collective leadership in a document meant to enshrine how the CCP views its own history.
What is driving President Xi to make such a radical shift? The trite answer is that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, yada yada. And to be fair, there could be an element of that involved. Xi obviously thinks he alone has the vision to usher China into global dominance. But I think the environment he finds himself in drives him as much—if not more than—overweened pride.
First, a caveat. People making grand proclamations of how the Chinese system works ooze out of Western sources like leftover orange chicken sauce from the dumpster behind a Panda Express. Chinese culture and practices are complex, having been formed over thousands of years of tradition and oppression. Take any claims otherwise with a shaker full of salt. That said, I’m going to go ahead and do that now anyways.
Modern China revolves around the Chinese Communist Party and its primary goal: survival. Any political power or regime fights for its survival, of course, but to the CCP, it is an all-consuming priority. I am not knowledgeable enough in Chinese history to know where that comes from, but my guess is millennia of violent dynastic overthrows mixed with decades of civil war and a Japanese invasion during its formative years means the CCP has a paranoia streak that would make a doomsday prepper want to pump the brakes. Historically, China has been difficult to hold together in a unified whole without excessive force (there’s a Romance about it and everything). As the leader of the CCP, Xi must pursue regime survival at all costs or risk losing support of the Party that gives him his power and legitimacy.
The CCP has a long and storied history of purging those who don’t toe the Party line to maintain internal order, and maybe I’ll cover that in a future Wandering. What I find more interesting is the rest of China. The vast majority of Chinese citizens are not members of the CCP, but hold the ultimate “torch and pitchfork” threat over the CCP should they get sufficiently riled. How does the CCP maintain control over a billion-plus people? Bread and circuses at gunpoint.
Let’s start with the bread. China has made remarkable progress lifting its citizens out of poverty. Over the last four decades, China was responsible for three-quarters of the global poverty reduction by bringing wealth into their country. Between 1990 and 2005, GDP per capita increased 400%. This has also resulted in significant wealth consolidation amongst CCP elite, with Party officials making bank as money pours into China. The CCP likely thinks that so long as it keeps people flush with cash, they’ll stay content enough to never pose a threat.
I’ll roll in the general thought of circuses as leisure entertainment into the bread points above and focus on a different sort of pastime China enjoys: nationalism. Internal Chinese narratives love to use foreign entities as whipping posts to focus Chinese citizens on external threats over internal issues. That said, they use such a tool strategically—allowing protests in some cases to exert political pressure on foreign governments, while stifling them in other areas when it suits them. This gives them an unwieldy pressure valve to help manipulate and control the populace, but one that carries significant risk as we’ll talk about later.
Finally, the gun. One of the convenient bits for writing negative articles about China is the Chinese are very good at providing extreme examples of just how oppressive they can be to their own people. Here are some of the highlights from just the past few decades: the Uyghur genocide, crushing agreed upon democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, continued oppression in Tibet, disappearing inconvenient critics, forced organ harvesting from persecuted minorities, and the wholesale massacre of peaceful protestors. When you put it all in one place like that, it’s clear that the CCP has yet to encounter a problem they didn’t think a boot on the neck would suffice to solve.
So the CCP has things on lock, right? Well, maybe not. The issue with maintaining absolute authoritarian power is that it’s an all or nothing gamble. The moment enough cracks show up, everything comes tumbling down. And while I am not predicting the imminent downfall of the CCP, I think it’s fair to consider the numerous issues across China that may have driven Xi to trump tradition to maintain power. The slowdown in economic growth means the quality of life increases the average Chinese citizen has come to expect may slow as well. An ongoing collapse of major firms like Evergrande is wiping out savings across the country and leading to widespread protests. The populace has been worked up into such a frenzy over Taiwan that the CCP might be forced into an armed invasion to satiate them. When you run out of bread and the circus is out of control, how much longer can you maintain things with just a gun?
Allow me one more strained metaphor, dear reader. The gentle folk of Gloucester, England, have a tradition. Every year, men and women line up at the top of a 200-meter hill with a 50-degree slope and chase a rolling wheel of cheese to the bottom at full tilt. Injuries are, of course, frequent. But a few lucky souls occasionally make it down unscathed, keeping their footing the entire time.
Xi is at the 100-meter point in his sprint downhill chasing after CCP survival cheese. He has kept his footing so far, but like anyone who has run downhill before knows, stopping is no longer an option. As he faces looming hillocks and gopher holes like economic collapse, North Korean instability, and a demographic crisis, he must somehow stay upright or crash terribly. And the thing about making yourself President for Life? When you crash and burn, you tend to take a lot of people down with you.
