Andrew Clavin challenges systemic racism’s dominance in explaining racial disparities, citing post-Civil Rights Act progress—rising Black homeownership and middle-class growth—while dismissing genetic IQ claims as overstated. He argues culture (marriage stability, education) trumps race in outcomes, critiquing liberal policies for widening achievement gaps. Meanwhile, Ying Ma reveals China’s fraught support for North Korea, balancing strategic interests with frustration over Kim Jong-un’s volatility, and defends Trump’s targeted tariffs ($600B in IP theft losses) as leverage against Beijing’s coercive trade practices. Xi Jinping’s power grab—abolishing term limits, purging rivals—risks economic stagnation amid "ghost cities" and state-controlled inefficiencies, undermining China’s long-term stability despite its authoritarian growth model. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we're going to talk about race, genetics, and IQ.
A conversation so uncomfortable it will make you sweat until you become slightly nauseous and begin to wonder if you really are as racist as you keep pretending not to be.
Finally, you'll end up sitting on the bathroom floor, alternately vomiting and sobbing, but afraid to kill yourself lest you go to hell for all eternity so that you're forced to push on through yet another miserable day of meaningless existence.
This is going to be fun.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is ticky boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-ding.
Ship-shaped tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
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All right, the long-distance Clavenless weekend is coming upon you, but I will be back in the studio on Monday.
This has been quite a trip.
Last night I was at the Manhattan Institute.
They had a really, really nice meeting with the young leaders, as they call them, of the Manhattan Institute.
They're very accomplished people in their 30s and 40s who contribute to the Manhattan Institute, one of the great think tanks in the country.
One of the smaller think tanks, but really, really do good work.
And I write for City Journal, and so they interviewed me.
And then we had dinner with a select crowd.
And it was really a very, very pleasant evening, I have to say.
Author Ying Ma is with us today to sort out the China situation.
And I really am going to talk about race.
You know, it was the 50-year anniversary of Martin Luther King's death yesterday.
And obviously, the left has always uses Martin Luther King as a cudgel with which to beat the rest of us.
So I just want to examine, you know, whether they have a case.
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Why Race Matters Today00:07:14
So anyway, you know, I was still thinking this meeting with these kids at this college kind of haunted me because they were all so geared up about race and it was all about the numbers, how unfair it was and how the history had crippled blacks.
And there was really, I almost felt like there was nothing I could say to get through to them.
I see the speech has been posted online.
You can look it up on YouTube.
And I could see that some people were frustrated that I wasn't attacking them.
I know people love to see these things that says something like, Clavin destroys this social justice war.
That's not my style at all.
I mean, I look at these guys and they're like this age of my kids.
It's the last thing I want to do is destroy them.
I actually do just want to listen to them.
But I started thinking, you know, maybe it's me.
Maybe I'm not thinking this through properly.
You know, John Nolte, the late John Nolte, and we call him the late John Nolte because he used to have the common decency to work at the Daily Wire and then he just sold out and went back to his friends at Breitbart.
But he is a big movie watcher, used to write for Breitbart's Big Hollywood.
And he made the point in a tweet yesterday that in 1998, there was a Marvel superhero movie with Wesley Snipes, a black actor, called Blade.
And it was a big hit, and they made three, there were three in the franchise, and nobody said a word about it.
Nobody said anything.
This is Nolte's point.
Whereas now, when they make Black Panther, it's a cause celeb.
We all have to talk about, wow, a black hero and a black Marvel superhero.
And Nolte's point was basically that Obama had set us back.
I always say that Obama played the race card so that people wouldn't notice what a bad, bad job he was doing.
And Nolte was saying by doing that, and by remember chasing after the police and how they were out there murdering black people left and right, and according to Obama, and that he set us back so that now that's all we're thinking about again when really we had gotten past that.
And so I started thinking about that, you know, how we've been set back, but maybe we right wingers are missing something.
I mean, my point of view has always been, it is today as it has always been, that, you know, we are all children of God.
I don't care what race you are.
I don't care what you do with your personal life.
I don't care about any of it.
You are here in whatever relationship you're in with me is what I'm looking at and how you behave in that relationship and what you can do as far as your job is concerned.
And the other thing about it is because there's a lot of talk now about race and IQ.
And in my personal life, I have noticed that IQ doesn't mean very much in terms of a certain range.
Obviously, if you're way down the line or you're way up the line, it's going to be startling in one way or the other.
But I've just noticed that there are people of a wide range of IQs who have so much to say and so much to contribute.
And sometimes people who might on a test get a lower IQ, have wisdom that people on a higher IQ don't have, or they have talent and gifts to give, or just a personality that you want to be around.
But it suddenly occurred to me that when you deal with people individually, you're taking them one by one.
So why should you care about their race?
Why should you care about anything?
Because even if the numbers on a broad scale are there, you know about this individual person you're dealing with.
But sociological problems turn up on a big scale.
So IQ is, in fact, a big predictor of outcomes.
It does, you know, I think people of high IQ even live longer.
And they certainly make a lot more money and all this.
And there's nothing you can do right now about IQ to raise it.
The IQ is what you have.
You can preserve your IQ by working out and stuff like that.
But you can't make it any higher.
So I was just looking around and all these kids were coming up to me and saying, well, blacks, there's more poverty in the black community and it makes it very difficult for them to get out.
And then I was watching yesterday all these MLK tributes because of the anniversaries of his death.
And it's always, they're always talking as if the fight is still, the racial fight is still at its peak.
It's still that moment when we're really at the barricades and we're really fighting for so much.
To play a clip of Representative John Lewis, who was a big guy in the Martin Luther King civil rights days, but since then he's become kind of a racemonger.
I mean, he's the guy who accused the GOP of wanting to take us back to Jim Crow days, you know, which was a Democrat institution in the first place.
And he's the guy that Breitbart challenged.
Lewis said he had been called a racial slur in the midst of this crowd.
And Breitbart challenged him, like offered $100,000 if anybody could produce the video, and nobody had.
So he's been playing the race card a lot, but he gave this speech yesterday.
It is very simple when you're something that is not right, something that is not fair, something that is not just.
You have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.
cannot be quiet.
Some of you have heard me say that we have to be on the right side of history.
We have to treat people right.
We have to love everybody.
It doesn't make sense.
Plus to see young people who came to our country in front of babies.
The dreamers.
That's not right.
That's not fair.
That's not just.
And history will not be kind to us.
I mean, I'm sorry, but I just don't see this as the same time when marchers were being set upon by dogs and hit with fire hoses.
Plus, the level of these people, you can sort of tell a movement by the level of the people who are in it.
And they're talking to guys like Al Sharpton Jr., who's a terrible human being, an anti-Semite guy who has resulted whose reckless rhetoric has resulted in the deaths of people.
He's a tax dodger, an FBI informant.
I don't even know why the guy's a thing.
Why is he even a thing?
But they're interviewing him about this.
And of course, he links it all to Trump.
So we're still in this terrible, terrible trough of racism in our country because we elected Donald Trump.
Here is the wonderful, the lovely and talented Al Sharpton Jr.
I think what people really don't understand for those of us that grew up in the King movement and the generation after King is that we marked the 50th anniversary with the challenges that we have a president that has made this kind of racial divide and tolerance become vogue again.
Because when you look at what Donald Trump is doing around pet questions of people of color, Mexicans, blacks, Muslims, he has reintroduced what Dr. King's life was against.
Or is he going to keep playing this kind of racial demagogery that he's playing to a crowd, but dividing the country?
Why We Left Blinds.com00:02:34
It's King Day.
I wonder, Mr. President, can you find at least the moral strength to memorialize him and what he stood for?
Well, if there's anybody who should know about racial demagogery, it's Al Sharpton Gr.
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I hope you can hear that siren in the background.
It's the lovely music of New York.
You know, remember Dracula when he heard the wolves said, ah, the rule, children of the night, what the music they make.
You know, when you hear a siren in New York, it's, ah, children of New York, what music they make.
Anyway, finally, I just want to play one more cut about this, about, you know, using Martin Luther King Day to hammer the left, which I really don't think is fair at all, since it was Republicans who were so important in passing the Civil Rights Act.
But they start, Chris Matthews had, what's his name, Eddie Gloud.
I don't know how to pronounce his name.
Racial Differences Evolved00:11:10
He's with an African-American think tank.
And he starts talking about the fact that Trump is always picking on Obama, who used to be president.
You probably don't remember because his legacy is turned to ash and blown away like the dust of yesteryear.
But here's Chris Matthews psychoanalyzing with Eddie Gloudy.
He's psychoanalyzing the president.
Eddie, let me ask you about this old, this refresher course in Obama hatred.
What is that about?
Is that just playing the race card?
I mean, when he goes after Obama, it has nothing to do with the current conversation at all, and starts talking about cheating Obama.
Is that just playing the ethnic thing?
I mean, sometimes I wonder if that's just what he does to keep that base happy.
Your thoughts.
I think so, Chris.
I think it is in part a part of the kind of race baiting that is in some ways a feature of his invocation of the immigration question.
He's appealing to the baser instincts of his base, as it were.
It's also a case study for Freud in terms of projection.
There's something about his obsession with Obama and what he's constantly projecting onto him that suggests something about his psyche.
In some ways, Trump...
Oh, help me.
Go on.
Follow this all the way.
What is it?
You know, in some ways, it seems to me that the success of Obama, the fact that Obama clowned him, to use a kind of colloquial phrase, clowned him at that, well, I forget which event it was.
The president, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
The success of his administration over the eight years, the fact that Obama made fun of him or clowned him at the press club meeting, right, has made him the object of Trump's scorn.
Go deeper, Eddie.
Go deep, because we've never had a president who blamed his predecessor before.
You know, I wanted to bring in some samples of Obama blaming George W. Bush throughout for eight years of his presidency for the fact that his presidency, unlike what they were telling you on MSNBC, his presidency, really was a failure all the way.
It was a real dud.
And he blamed George W. Bush, but there were so many of them I couldn't pick one out.
So I just brought Jay Leno making a joke about it.
President George Bush has invited President Obama to the opening of his presidential library later this month.
President Obama says he's looking forward to going through the library, see if there's anything else he could blame Bush for.
So he's going to be going through all the files, finding where we get there.
And you'll notice the audience got the joke right away.
They knew exactly what he was talking about and applauded because they knew that that is what Obama did.
So let's see, let us see how things are right now.
I got some numbers from the Brookings Institute just to compare how things were and how things are to how things work.
In 1940, 60% of employed black women worked as domestic servants.
Today, the number is down to 2.2%, while 60% hold white-collar jobs.
In 1958, 44% of whites, 44% of whites said they would move if a black family became their next-door neighbor today.
What would you guess the figure is?
The figure is 1%.
In 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18% of whites claim to have a friend who is black.
Today, 86% say they do, while 87% of blacks assert they have white friends.
More than 40% of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class.
42% own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75%.
And this is important.
It rises to 75% if we look just at black married couples.
Okay, so if they're following the middle class, the bourgeois rules, they get the bourgeois goods.
Black two-parent families earn only 13% less than those who are white.
Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia because these are facts the media seldom report.
The black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public.
Now, still, there are still racial gaps in economics.
I think there's still the terrible stat that I think 30% of blacks are still living in bad situations.
But Jason Riley points out, the columnist he is with the Manhattan Institute and writes for the Wall Street Journal, he says racial gaps were steadily narrowing in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but they would expand in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which suggests that disparities that continue today aren't being driven by racism.
Notwithstanding claims to the contrary from liberals and their allies in the media, it also suggests that attitudes toward marriage, education, work, and the rule of law play a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.
More marches won't address out-of-wedlock childbearing, and more sit-ins won't wor black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.
And that's what I was saying to these young people.
I was saying, you know, there is not one thing, not one thing that is going to stop a young millennial today in his life from getting the things in his life.
He will not miss out on anything because of racism.
It's just not going to happen.
I mean, to me, now, I have to say, the left uses racism to mean any untoward feeling you might have, but that's ridiculous.
That kind of racism is a subset of tribalism, and we all have that.
We all follow our teams.
We all like our people better than other people.
Those are just feelings that you have.
They don't really mean very much.
And what racism is, is it's a philosophy.
Racism is a philosophy that there is a moral difference between a quality difference between different races.
So, you know, I started to look this up, and I've looked it up before, and I always feel when people go to IQ, like I said, it's racism by other means, that they're talking about genetics.
But the fact is, over the last few years, in spite of the fact that there's a great taboo of studying racial differences in genetics, they are discovering racial differences in genetics.
Evolution doesn't stop.
It affects the brain just like it affects every other organ.
You know, I think it's about 50,000 years ago we came out of Africa, human beings came out of Africa, and they divided into the three great races, the Asian and white and black.
And evolution has been working on us ever since.
And they are finding minor differences.
And obviously, it is fairly well accepted that right now, at least, there is a difference in IQ.
But one of the things about this, and again, IQ is a predictor of outcomes.
But one of the things about this is if you look over time, in 1971, the average American 17-year-old African-American could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger.
The racial gap in math in 1973 was 4.3 years.
In science, it was 4.7 years in 1970.
By the late 1980s, however, the picture was notably brighter.
Black students in their final year of high school were only 2.5 years behind whites in both reading and math and 2.1 years behind on tests of writing skills.
But between 1988 and 1994, the racial gap in reading grew.
It grew wider.
And nobody knows why this happened.
This could have been the crack academic, but it also could have been left-wing teachers who stopped teaching facts and started teaching silly, you know, kind of politically correct nonsense that doesn't help people and doesn't expand their mind.
Okay, so let's look at some of this.
Some of the stats about IQ.
There's a guy named Nicholas Wade.
He used to be the science writer at the New York Times.
He's been writing about this a lot.
He talks about the fact that there's just no denying that there are racial differences.
Here's this quote.
The academic community as a whole have come to the view that the best way to fight racism is to deny, quite contrafactually, that it has any biological basis.
So this movement started really in the 1950s when everyone had the Holocaust much on their mind and people sort of readily accepted that it was best to clay down the biological aspects of race.
And this meant playing down evolution too.
So many social scientists have no use for evolution, even though it is the informing theory of biology.
So you have this quite profoundly, I would say, anti-scientific attitude that reigns among academics in the United States and elsewhere.
So in spite of the fact that we are all genetically the same, the problem is deep in the genomes, there are these things called alleles or something.
They are the things that make the difference between us, even though we're genetically so similar.
The problem is, the problem is whether or not, see, we don't know, like things that are genetic traits can change very, very quickly.
You know, you start eating well and suddenly your whole race gets taller in a generation.
We don't know yet how embedded these differences are.
We don't know how much of them are due to culture and how much of them are scientific.
But my question is this.
What is the difference?
What is the difference?
If it is wrong, as I think it is, when a person walks into a room to take him by the way he looks or the way she looks or whether it's a he or she, if it is wrong to hire a person that way, which I think it is, if it's wrong not to hire people on the merits, if it's wrong not to support people on the merits of both their personalities and their integrity and their intelligence, if it's wrong to do that, why isn't it wrong to look at large groups of people that way?
Why isn't it right to deal with the problems that beset our society?
Problems like poverty, problems like single-parent homes.
I mean, these are real problems.
Problems like drug use.
Why isn't it right to look at those problems without race at all?
What would happen if we just stopped talking about race?
Would that be better?
Or would it be worse?
I'll end with this.
Do we have the picture of Korea, North, and South Korea seen from the air?
If you look at North and South Korea seen from the air, I'll describe it in case you're listening and not watching.
You've probably seen this.
North Korea, where there's a communist, where there's communist oppression, it's pitch black.
There's no electricity, just a couple of bright spots.
South Korea is just alive with light and life, and it's clearly an operating modern society because they're free.
There can't be a whole hell of a lot of difference between the genetics in North and South Korea.
So the vast, vast, vast difference that culture makes is just positive.
The vast difference that culture makes changes everything.
And if, after correcting for single-parent homes, after correcting for drug use, after trying to fight the causes of poverty and the entrenchment of poverty with education, with different kinds of education, letting go of your liberal fantasies and teaching what really matters, if after that things are disparate, well, then things are disparate.
So what?
I mean, that is not the problem.
If you stop thinking about race, then it won't be a matter of race anymore.
It'll simply be a matter of culture.
That has to be true.
That has to be true.
We know it for a fact.
All right.
So that is what I have to say.
And I would say it anywhere.
China's Role in Korean Affairs00:16:03
I want to remind you that the conversation is coming up.
It is coming out April 10th, 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, and it features the lovely and talented Andrew Clavin.
The guy is just incredible.
I will answer any question that you also lovely, you know, almost as lovely Alicia Krauss will be there asking the questions.
Here's what you do.
The episode will stream live on the Daily Wire's Facebook and YouTube pages, and it's free for everyone to watch.
It goes on at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific on April 10th.
Anyone can watch it, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So come on over to thedailywire.com, subscribe.
It's allows you 10 bucks a month, and all your questions will be answered.
And of course, answers guaranteed 100% correct.
To ask questions as a subscriber, log on to the website, I just do a little bit in Chinese.
DailyWire.com and head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream.
After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box where I will answer questions as they come in for an entire hour.
And best of all, you will get to hear your words spoken by Alicia Krauss.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by me on Tuesday, April 10th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
All right, let us go to Ying Ma.
She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, which I have read.
It's really good, a memoir about getting to know freedom from post-Mao China to inner city Oakland.
She's the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC.
She's a contributor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace.
Ying also worked on the first professional staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
We had a really fascinating talk about what's going in China on in China right now.
Ying Ma, thank you very much for coming on.
It's great to see you.
And I'm sorry you're so far away now.
You're in Washington.
I am.
Well, thank you for having me.
It's great to see you too, even if it's just online.
Well, so I'm watching the events unfold with Kim Jong-un being invited to China before what is supposed to be the summit with Donald Trump.
And I heard a lot of commentary, a lot of people saying the Chinese are showing support for him and wondered, is that the way you see it too?
Is this China backing him to the hilt?
Or is it them pulling him aside and saying, get your mind right?
I mean, I think on the surface, what they're trying to do, the two countries, they're trying to look like they're actually on the same page.
They want to show some form of a united front before Kim actually meets with Donald Trump.
But there are a lot of tensions under the move, and the Chinese have been extremely frustrated with Kim Jong-un's antics.
And I think the North Koreans have been incredibly angry with the Chinese too.
I do think that the meeting took place in part because it would seem a bit unseemly for Kim Jong-un to go meet with the United States, which he considers an enemy, before he meets with his most ardent ally, China, which supplies him with his economic lifeline.
And so it does appear that the meeting makes sense in that vein.
And obviously, China and North Korea have been allies for decades now.
And it makes sense for the two, at least the two leaders of the two countries, to actually sit down together before the historic summit with the U.S. Why are they allies?
I mean, is that a stupid question?
It just seems to me that Kim Jong-un is such a loon, whereas China, whatever you think of it, is obviously a rational country and a world actor.
What do they get out of North Korea?
Well, I think there are a number of things.
I mean, they became allies back in the Cold War.
Obviously, back then, there was a communist North Korea, communist China, and the two fought a war together.
A lot of Chinese people died in the Korean War.
And, you know, and the alliance or the friendship was cemented in that fashion, and they call it as close as lips and teeth.
It's a way of describing the alliance.
Over the years, obviously, China has changed leaps and bounds, and North Korea still appears to be stuck in the Stone Age with this crazy person.
And I think it's one reason why the tensions have been so apparent.
A lot of people in China, in fact, ridicule Kim Jong-un and they jokingly call him the third fatty because his grandfather was the first fatty.
His father was the second fatty.
Now we've got the third fatty and all three of them are sort of, it almost seems like every one of them is more of a caricature of the one before.
China, I think, continues to provide support to North Korea for a number of reasons.
One, China does not wish to see a unified Korea under South Korea command, which has an alliance with the United States.
And having the United States that close to its border right there in its face is not something that China wants.
Number two, China also doesn't want North Korea to collapse, even if it really finds the North Korean regime to be idiotic and completely counterproductive and not useful to China's goals of its economic development and a number of other things.
If the North Korean regime were to collapse and send a whole bunch of refugees across the Chinese-North Korean border, that could have a huge impact on the stability of Chinese society.
And that's also something that China does not want.
And it's one reason why it continues to prop up the North Korean regime.
Interesting.
You know, you're the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, which was a pro-Trump super PAC.
So you've been a big supporter of President Trump.
Is he behaving wisely in sort of hoping China is going to help him out with dealing with North Korea, or is he playing a fool's game?
Well, I think he's not depending solely on China.
I think he's talked a lot about his chemistry with the Chinese president.
He's talked about how well the two of them get along together.
And it does seem to be the case, but I don't think he's depending solely on China.
You know, we've got sanctions at the UN against North Korea, and there's some of the toughest sanctions that have been levied against the North Korean regimes and regime, and the sanctions have begun to bite.
And I think it's one reason why the North Korean regime has indicated a willingness to come to the table.
But if you look at some of the actions that Trump has taken against China recently, the tariffs against China on aluminum and steel, and then also the promise tariffs that are coming that are worth about $60 billion or so on the Chinese, on a wide variety of Chinese goods.
Trump is not just sitting around saying, you know, I'll do whatever the Chinese president wants me to do.
I think he wants China to be more helpful, and China is in a position to be more helpful than any other country.
But at the same time, he's threatening this crazy lunatic in North Korea in his own way, too.
So I think he's using a wide variety of tools, and some of them appear to outside observers as perhaps unintentional.
But only the president himself can tell you how intentional his rhetoric is.
And I think leaving a certain amount of uncertainty is part of the objective, too.
How did you feel about the tariffs?
I mean, obviously, there's people on the right, most of us are free traders, and tariffs always seem to hurt us as much as they hurt anybody else.
What do you feel Trump's up to with that?
Is that just a negotiation ploy with China, or is he looking for something specific?
So I would separate the steel tariffs, aluminum tariffs that were announced across the board.
Although right now, we've learned that the president is going to grant exemptions to certain countries like Canada, Australia, and others.
I would separate those tariffs from the impending tariffs that will be levied against China on a whole range of products.
And those tariffs are supposed to be worth about $50 to $60 billion.
On the latter set of tariffs, I actually think they're not a bad idea.
I think most of us conservatives are free traders, but many would argue that it's China that has started the trade war, not the United States.
That the set of tariffs, the larger set of tariffs that we're talking about, in many ways is a sign of U.S. frustration with decades-long complaints about the Chinese government doing business in a very unfair way.
And that kind of unfairness would include everything from stealing our intellectual property.
We've got a government report that says every year about $600 billion of worth of intellectual property is stolen from the United States economy.
And most of that can be attributed to China.
Now, furthermore, China does something that is incredibly galling to U.S. companies, which is that it forces them to transfer technology to China, to Chinese actors, Chinese entities, in exchange for market access.
And there's an investigation that took place recently by the government.
And the conclusion was that every year about $30 billion is lost due to that kind of forced technology transfer.
And the set of China specific tariffs that the president has announced recently is an indication of how frustrated the U.S. government is precisely against that kind of predatory economic activities and how the Chinese government has not, in fact, reciprocated with Western governments on opening its market space.
And in the past, we've taken a lot of actions that are sort of much more focused on negotiations.
But I think the president has taken a completely different route, which is to come right out and threaten China with all these tariffs.
And what we've seen since then is that even though China has said, well, we're going to levy some tariffs on you too, is that the two countries have actually begun a dialogue about what they can do, particularly what China can do to open up its markets more.
And so if the tariffs actually get us to a place where we have wanted to go for a long time, but have not been able to go, then I think we can give Donald Trump some amount of credit for doing things in a much more disruptive way and for changing the equation in a way that previous presidents have not been able to do.
Now, with the scheme and aluminum tariffs, I am much not nearly as big a fan of those.
I just found those to be generally a headache and the way they were rolled out to be a bit problematic.
But on the China stuff, I actually think that it's not a bad idea at all.
It's a good way to try something new.
What is, you know, for a while, it seemed like China was actually going to kind of liberalize.
And now the president basically seems to have had himself elected for life, which I always feel is a bad sign.
That doesn't always give me hope.
What are they up to?
I mean, is that a movement toward liberalization?
Is that over?
Are they going to try to run a market economy from an authoritarian regime?
Is that the plan?
I think they are actually going to try to run an economy that has market characteristics, but is ultimately controlled by the party.
And that is something that they are unwilling to let go of.
What we're seeing in China is a manifestation of the party being in charge of politics.
Here in the U.S., you know, we've got the government and we've got the two different parties and we've got various third parties that are far less prominent.
But there is a big difference between what the Republican Party does and what the Democratic Party does.
In China, there's increasingly no such separation.
And in fact, that separation was very was much more tenuous to begin with because the party, the Communist Party in China invades and pervades every aspect of life, even after China has liberalized its economy and after all these years of sort of having a more open society and whatnot.
But what we're seeing under Xi Jinping and particularly his recent stint of making himself emperor for life or president for life is that the party is back firmly in control and particularly under the control of one man.
And it is disturbing for a number of reasons because if you look at the Communist Party in the previous decades, despite its authoritarian rule, it actually had a process, a managed process for peacefully transferring power from one group to another.
And we saw that a few times in recent decades.
And now what we're seeing is something almost something kind of very similar to power transition in Russia, which is that there's not going to be a transition.
And I think if you want a stable communist authoritarian regime, you could potentially have something very stable under this president.
But in the long run, then you get other problems, which is that instead of authoritarian institutions, you get an authoritarian.
And I think ultimately in the long run, that's not good for China's reform prospects at all.
But it is what it is.
This current president is very charismatic, and he's been able, he's also accumulated a massive amount of power.
And that is something that we're going to have to live with for quite some time.
What's your take on him personally?
I mean, in terms of the level of his bent toward oppression of the people?
Well, I think he is very effective at amassing power.
It's pretty amazing to watch how quickly and how much he's been able to do.
He's purged a lot of his opponents, including some very powerful people within the Communist Party, within the government.
And that's also one of his problems, which is that because he has gone after so many these people, and most of the time it was under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign, that if he were just to relinquish power, what would happen to him?
Because one of the people who went after was a very powerful former security chief of the Communist Party, and that guy was retired when Xi Jinping went after him.
And in some ways, it broke.
sort of an unwritten rule about going after these powerful leaders while they're out of office.
And so it's a little bit of the same calculus that Putin has to ask himself too, right?
There will be plenty of people coming after these authoritarian leaders once they leave office simply because they've made so many enemies.
The current leader, I think, is very keen on making China more powerful, more modern, more rich, all of those things.
He is not particularly interested in granting more freedoms in the sense of democratizing or freedom of speech and those things.
So I think the authoritarian streak in him is very strong.
You know, one of the things that drives me nuts, I'm running out of time, so this has got to be my last question, but one of the things that drives me nuts is the kind of affection that, especially on the left, that they have for this idea of an authoritarian but prosperous country.
So you get obviously Thomas Friedman is the big one who says, oh, if we could only be China for a day, we could solve all our problems.
But I hear it a lot.
German Show Mystery00:04:31
Do you think their economy is as strong as it seems?
I mean, it always seems to me that you can't actually run a free economy without making the people free.
But maybe I've got that wrong.
I mean, maybe you can do all kinds of things that I don't like.
So do you feel that their economy is as strong as people think it is?
Is it going to continue to grow under this kind of authoritarian regime?
Certainly the hope of the Chinese government is that it will continue to grow.
What we do know is that underneath their economic growth, there are a lot of problems lurking.
And so, you know, Thomas Friedman, for instance, loves to talk about how quickly China builds its infrastructure.
But we all know that during the financial crisis, when China unleashed, you know, trillions of dollars into its economy, what it ended up building were a whole bunch of ghost cities that nobody live, you know, nobody actually lives in.
When they built their high-speed rail really quickly, we found out that, in fact, the high-speed rail, certain legs of it were really not built very well, and it ended up leading to a very tragic accident some years ago.
There are all kinds of things like that in the Chinese economy.
What I would hope they would do is that they will continue with liberalizing the economy because the economy is still not a carpet market economy.
There are vast sections of the economy that are still controlled by the state.
And I think that will remain the case.
And I think that will continue to hinder how free they can be and how prosperous they can be simply because the logic of the party, the logic of an authoritarian government is to keep a tight lid of all of those things.
And ultimately, I do think that it will hinder the kind of growth that they actually can have.
Interesting, interesting.
Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, which I read and recommend.
That's amazing.
You have an amazing story.
You can find her at her website, yingma.org, and on Twitter at GZ2Ghetto.
So G-Z-T-O-G-H-E-T-T-O.
Yingma, it's great to see you.
And I hope you come to LA soon.
She's really interested.
She's kind of a little intimidating.
She knows so much.
It's like you can ask her anything on this subject.
And she always has a big answer.
All right.
Stuff I like.
Has anybody seen Dark on Netflix?
If you liked Stranger Things, Dark is like Stranger Things for Grownups.
It's a German show, so I watched it in German with subtitles.
You can press the button, right, and just watch it dubbed if you like, but I like to watch it in the original language so I can see the guys act.
But it is really, really interesting.
Just a very, it's a very creepy, slow burn.
You know, you go in for about three episodes before you really have a sense of where it's going and what's going on.
And it's just a lot of mysterious stuff.
And, you know, it makes sense and it involves this little town in Germany where a child went missing, I think, 30 or so years before.
And now another child has gone missing and it's just repeating itself.
This situation is repeating itself.
It's really powerful.
It's been renewed for a second season.
I was a little sorry it's going to have a second season because I thought I wanted it to just wholly resolve itself and it does resolve the season, but it obviously leaves the door open for more.
But a really good character-based thriller that I think if you like Stranger Things and you're a grown-up, I think you'll actually like it.
I won't say I liked it more than the first Stranger Things because that first one was so well put together, but it's certainly more original and very different and the relationships are just a lot more complex.
All right, the Clavenless weekend has come.
There's nothing more I can do for you.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Those of you who survive, come back on Monday.
I will be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.