The Ideas Letter

Iza Ding, a social scientist, is a keen observer of how culture and politics are imbricated. Her third piece for us, on the hoary concept of soft power as applied to China, provides a singular mapping of modern Chinese history and contemporary culture. Ding suggests that soft power is better understood as a messy admixture of politics and market power whose global appeal represents an accidental propaganda success. By masterfully dissecting the viral toy character Labubu, she unpacks the complicated ways in which a culture is spread. In the end, she writes, soft power is “the softest alibi” of hegemony.

Nicholas Bequelin lived in and has studied China for decades. Unlike many China hands, Bequelin seeks not to explain an inscrutable China to a mass audience (as necessary as this may be) but to showcase the unusual developmental and strategic paths taken by the Chinese state. Simple explanations won’t suffice. Similar to Ding’s effort to complexify the Chinese condition, Bequelin argues that the development of AI doesn’t pit China in a race against the US so much as reveal the two countries’ distinctive political histories and developmental commitments. The future, he argues, for China and the world, may not be rosy.

The historian Daniel Bessner has hardly been shy in taking on challengers to his reinterpretation of postwar American history. His essay here might require him to keep at his intellectual pugilism. Bessner argues that the world is moving into a post-American, non-ideological era where power—not ideals, not ideas—drives international politics. This system may be more realistic but also more fragmented and dangerous, and it will require new forms of cooperation to avoid war.

IL 63’s curated section leads with the acclaimed historian Jeremy Adelman. Adelman, whose book on the history of capitalism will be published later this year,