Shi Zhan, Breaking through the Cocoon

“Breaking through the Constraints of Information Cocoons, Looking at the World Rationally and Dispassionately”[1] 

​Pengpai Interview with Shi Zhan on his new book Breaking through the Cocoon:  Isolation, Trust, and the Future  

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Shi Zhan (b. 1977) is Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the World Politics Research Center at China Foreign Affairs University.  He is one of many Chinese scholars attempting to rethink the world order on the basis of China’s rise, and, despite his young age, is the author of several well-received volumes, including The Hub:  Three Thousand Years of China 枢纽：3000年的中国 (2018), discussed at some length by Liang Zhiping in his essay on tianxia and ideology translated on this site, as well as Spillover:  The Future History of Made in China 溢出:  中国制造未来史 (2020), which is discussed in the text below.

In the text translated here, Fan Jialai, a journalist for Pengpai, interviews Shi Zhan on the occasion of the publication of yet another volume, Breaking through the Cocoon:  Isolation, Trust, and the Future  破茧: 隔离，信任与未来 (2020), which I am anxious to read, but have not yet been able to acquire.

The table of contents (available on Douban, China’s rough equivalent of Amazon) suggests that the book is a wide-ranging and imaginative effort to see past the various conceptual bubbles—or “cocoons” as Shi calls them—in which we live our lives and confront the fault-lines as well as the possibilities of a world—and a world order—that may look radically different in a few decades. 

This is not a “China as Number One” book.  One of the cocoons Shi is concerned about is China’s cocoon, the idea that China’s rise means that China is returning to her rightful place as a world power, and he makes a variety of arguments designed to problematize what to him is an ill-conceived overconfidence, pointing out, for example, the increasing obsolescence of the notion of the nation-state in general and the continuing importance of the American dominance of the seas.  Other concerns are more worldwide and have to do with the nature of knowledge and public discussion in a world dominated by information bubbles, and the need to generate new norms as the digital economy changes commercial practices. 

The interview is fairly light-handed—like me, the journalist may have only been able to skim the Table of Contents—but it is enough to give us an insight into the ambition and reach of one of China’s important young thinkers.

Favorite Quotes

“My original intention in writing Breaking through the Cocoon was to focus on China, and the first step in returning to rationality is to figure out the reasons standing in the way of rational thought, so I started the book by analyzing the creation of these information cocoons and the possibility of breaking out of them. At the outset, people in information cocoons are happy and contented in the false comfort the cocoons create, but under the impact of public events, the walls of the cocoons are constantly pierced, and people wind up being forced to face problems that make them very unhappy, with no place to air their grievances. So they start to argue violently with people who have different views. In the Internet era, people's social relationships can be extremely ‘light’ and unidimensional, without the constraints of relationships in which you see one another frequently, so there is no incentive to keep their emotions in check, which means that arguments readily get out of hand and the Internet becomes a vile place.  

One of the issues that has divided people most during the pandemic is international politics, and for a variety of reasons, in the second part of Breaking through the Cocoon I spend several pages discussing basic methodologies for understanding international political issues. International politics is much more than what pundits [lit. ‘keyboard politicians 键盘政治家’] call the ‘Thucydides trap.’ It is not so simple and black and white, and there is a complex and far-reaching logic behind it.”
 
“There is one huge difference between today's maritime order and the past maritime order. In the past, the dominant military and commercial players were usually the same country, not because the military hegemon had a monopoly on trade, but instead because the real economy of the military hegemon was usually the strongest, and it had the largest commercial share. So it was something like the ocean hegemon opening a large shopping mall to collect rent, and at the same time having itself the largest store in the mall. But today, the largest share of the real economy has shifted to China, and the largest store has changed owners, but the majority shareholder of the mall has not.  So the military hegemon and the trade hegemon are no longer the same country, a phenomenon that has never before happened in history. Being the military hegemon of the sea is very costly, and in the past these expenses could be defrayed by the profits gained by being the commercial hegemon, but the logic may well change since the two are now different countries. 

But even if the logic changes, this does not mean that the commercial hegemon should compete to become the military hegemon. The maritime military hegemon must be an island nation, which keeps it from having to divert resources to land security issues, and frees it up to invest more in maritime power, and the United States is a super island nation in the international political sense. A continental great power has to devote at least half of its resources to deal with land issues, which makes it impossible to compete in an arms race with the maritime hegemon.”
 
Links to other texts on this site

For texts related to globalization, click here.
 
For texts related to the Internet, click here.
 
For texts related to ideology, click here.
 
For text-related to Sino-American relations, click here.
 
 
Translation
 
The United States is Fracturing, which Rocks the Entire World
 
Fan Jialai:  Sino-American relations this year are undoubtedly a hot topic. In one of the chapters of your book, "The Source of American Power," you mention that "Americans are hard to provoke," and at the same time you cite Pearl Harbor as an example of how the United States, "once provoked, cannot be held back by any force imaginable."  However, there are also many arguments to the effect that Trump's election to the presidency is a sign of a rupture in current American society. Do you think the U.S. could rally as it did after Pearl Harbor?
 
Shi  Zhan:  Of course they could. When the United States was provoked by Japan in World War II, it responded with a sudden burst of strength, which is an example I give in the book. In fact, even at the time, before being provoked by Japan, the United States was also very divided internally, and was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression. The Great Depression itself had already brought about huge divisions in American society, and the policies Roosevelt deployed to deal with the Great Depression were seen by many Americans as an infringement of their own rights and freedoms, which sparked a great deal of opposition and doubt.
 
Let's look at another example, that of the Vietnam War. The divisions in the United States during the Vietnam War were much worse than today, and the size and strength of the civil rights movement, as well as the importance people accorded to it at the time were, in my view, greater than in the case of Black Lives Matter now. This kind of legitimate opposition can have an extremely divisive effect on a society, and the divisions in America were much worse than today, but what were the consequences? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it looked like the Soviet Union was hitting its stride while the United States was brought low by internal rifts. However, that was the moment when the U.S. rose from the ashes like a phoenix, and a series of great innovations and great companies emerged, laying a strong foundation for subsequent U.S. growth, while the Soviet Union declined dramatically a decade or so later.
 
The current divisions in the United States should not be too surprising. After a period of development in any country, certain imbalances in the internal order will appear. This is because the system was established decades ago, while the social order and structure, as well as a series of internal issues like the distribution of wealth, constantly diverge and change over the decades. The previous order cannot effectively cope with the new social changes, so many conflicts necessarily accumulate. Some regimes are more resilient and better at resolving the contradictions, and thus are more capable of reviving themselves. Other regimes are more rigid and from the outside may appear to resolve their problems with less violence, but the process may take longer, and other problems may arise as a result. For the United States, the current divisions reflect an airing of the problems. In fact, internal problems exist in all countries, but the airing of such contradictions in the U.S. happens to be clearer and more direct.
 
Fan Jialai:  In this year's U.S. election, from the time of the debates through the final vote, public opinion was very uncertain. Did you expect Biden to win?
 
Shi Zhan:  That was not the outcome I expected. From the experience of the last election between Trump and Hillary, we learned that the pre-election polls are not necessarily accurate, so I paid more attention to the Yiwu index,[2] that is, how the merchandise for the two campaigns was selling in Yiwu, which showed that Trump had an overwhelming advantage, but this time the Yiwu index also failed. My joke is that this is another example of a “quantum leap” in history, because the Yiwu index sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, which is also a manifestation of uncertainty.[3]
 
In the post-war period, the U.S. consistently been the world’s number one power, and before the last election its posture as the number one power had been fairly certain, so that people felt like no matter who the president was would not make much difference, which meant that the result of the U.S. election was not a key variable affecting the direction of the world order, so people paid relatively little attention to U.S. elections.  Today, even if the U.S. is still number one, how it will act has become uncertain for the first time, and the results of the presidential election will have a direct impact on this.  Thus U.S. domestic affairs have become a key variable affecting the direction of the world order, which will have a very real impact on every country, so this time the U.S. election garnered unprecedented attention from all over the globe.
 
If you want to understand and grasp these issues more effectively, rational analysis is essential, but in today’s society, too many people are trapped in information cocoons, and social perceptions are seriously fractured, which means that rational thinking and discussion are becoming increasingly difficult. My original intention in writing Breaking through the Cocoon was to focus on China, and the first step in returning to rationality is to figure out the reasons standing in the way of rational thought, so I started the book by analyzing the creation of these information cocoons and the possibility of breaking out of them.

At the outset, people in information cocoons are happy and contented in the false comfort the cocoons create, but under the impact of public events, the walls of the cocoons are constantly pierced, and people wind up being forced to face problems that make them very unhappy, with no place to air their grievances. So they start to argue violently with people who have different views. In the Internet era, people's social relationships can be extremely “light” and unidimensional, without the constraints of relationships in which you see one another frequently, so there is no incentive to keep their emotions in check, which means that arguments readily get out of hand and the Internet becomes a vile place.  

One of the issues that has divided people most during the pandemic is international politics, and for a variety of reasons, in the second part of Breaking through the Cocoon I spend several pages discussing basic methodologies for understanding international political issues. International politics is much more than what pundits [lit. “keyboard politicians 键盘政治家”] call the "Thucydides trap." It is not so simple and black and white, and there is a complex and far-reaching logic behind it.
 
 
Fan Jialai:  You have a section in the book that is devoted to maritime affairs, and you state that the United States is the military hegemon of the sea, while China's main advantage in the maritime domain is trade.  What is the basis for this judgment?
 
Shi Zhan:  To determine what country dominates the sea militarily we must analyze specific logics, conditions, prerequisites, etc.  It is not a matter of wishful thinking.
 
Domination of the sea is above all military, but there is a major difference between naval warfare and land warfare, in that on land you fight over difficult or strategic geographic features, and most countries wind up establishing their borders around oceans or mountains, and stationing their armies behind those natural borders.  There are no such geographical features on the high seas, so naval warfare is a war of annihilation, a situation that encourages naval military monopolies.
 
However, it is not in the interest of the military hegemon of the sea to have the ocean completely closed down.  It is in the military hegemon's best interests to open up the sea to free trade and maximize the rent it collects. To collect more rent, it is necessary to provide basic maritime security and guarantee the basic rules of maritime behavior, which means that the oceans are monopolistic in the military sense and free in the commercial sense.
 
There is one huge difference between today's maritime order and the past maritime order. In the past, the dominant military and commercial players were usually the same country, not because the military hegemon had a monopoly on trade, but instead because the real economy of the military hegemon was usually the strongest, and it had the largest commercial share. So it was something like the ocean hegemon opening a large shopping mall to collect rent, and at the same time having itself the largest store in the mall.

But today, the largest share of the real economy has shifted to China, and the largest store has changed owners, but the majority shareholder of the mall has not.  So the military hegemon and the trade hegemon are no longer the same country, a phenomenon that has never before happened in history. Being the military hegemon of the sea is very costly, and in the past these expenses could be defrayed by the profits gained by being the commercial hegemon, but the logic may well change since the two are now different countries.
 
But even if the logic changes, this does not mean that the commercial hegemon should compete to become the military hegemon. The maritime military hegemon must be an island nation, which keeps it from having to divert resources to land security issues, and frees it up to invest more in maritime power, and the United States is a super island nation in the international political sense. A continental great power has to devote at least half of its resources to deal with land issues, which makes it impossible to compete in an arms race with the maritime hegemon.
 
This is a logic that we must analyze rationally, and we cannot allow emotion to replace reason with emotion. This is also the meaning of the title of my book, Breaking through the Cocoon. We have to break through some of the blinders of our own information cocoons and look at issues related to international relations in a more rational and dispassionate way.
 
Fan Jialai:  In the first two chapters of your book, you also discuss the problem of information cocoons.   How do you define “information cocoons,” and why do you think the phenomenon is so serious in today's society?
 
Shi Zhan:  One big explanation for information cocoons is that the way media is disseminated has changed substantially from the way things worked in the past. In the past, people shared time and space in the physical sense, and public media played the role of setting public issues. With the spread of the mobile Internet and streaming media, the rise of different social media and the algorithms they use to recommend things to their users, those shared time and space patterns and public issue-setting mechanisms no longer exist.
 
Recommendation algorithms allow people to see only the information they prefer. This makes people feel happy, since their limited time is filled with their favorite content, and in their state of psychological comfort, they feel as if they are understanding the entire world, while unbeknownst to them, they are actually trapped in an information cocoon.  Information cocoons have reshaped the relationship between people, and I don't think we can easily return to the state we were in 10 years ago. Ten years ago, there were arguments about social issues on the Internet, but they were mainly about convincing people, whereas today's arguments are just about venting grievances.
 
Emotional venting does not help at all to solve problems, and we still need to be able to have reason-based debates. But where does this possibility exist? This used to happen in the public sphere, but today, people may only start to reflect on the situation after a certain number of public events pierce our information cocoons.
 
Fan Jialai:  You say that public events might pierce the walls of our information cocoons, but I wonder if there might be some other way to restore fair and equal discussions among people?
 
Shi Zhan:  I think it is quite difficult at the moment.  The recommendation algorithm is like a mental opium, and it's hard for people to let go of it. It's not until opium makes people sick over and over again that people will start thinking about it. And even if opium is already harming the body, smoking more opium may mask the problems, while the true pain is covered up as well.  We need more public events to raise awareness, so that even mental opium no longer obscures the problems, at which point we might start thinking again. Otherwise, as far as the business model of the recommendation algorithm is concerned, the only thing that can beat mental opium is another and better mental opium, and it is very difficult for us to simply go back to what we used to be.
 
Fan Jialai:  Does this mean that our only choice is to adapt to a society full of information cocoons?
 
Shi Zhan:  Maybe it’s not quite so pessimistic.  Information cocoons only became a thing over the past decade. There will be a lot of black swan events,[4] and in this moment of quantum leaps in history, everything is unpredictable. It is possible that something that looks really serious now will disappear in two months; it is equally possible that something that looks trivial at the moment will turn into a catastrophe in a couple of months.  Anything is possible.
 
If black swan events continue to multiply over the next few years, many people will be forced to leave their information cocoons and try to understand what is happening, which may lead to the appearance of a new mechanism to facilitate public discussion.  Exactly what this might look like is unclear, but to my mind, this possibility surely exists, so I’m not all that pessimistic.
 
Fan Jialai:  Breaking through the Cocoon takes up the idea of the "New Hanseatic League"[5] mentioned in Overflow and presents it in a more comprehensive and complete way. The New Hanseatic League, based on merchants, has turned many people's views upside down. Will there be any challenges in the implementation of such a vision?
 
Shi Zhan:  There will certainly be challenges, but I personally feel that such challenges will not stop its progress, because the New Hanseatic League is based on specific observations concerning the evolution of the state of the world. In my opinion, the digital economy has long since transcended national borders. In fact, this is true not only of the digital economy, but also of the traditional manufacturing industry which is already transcending national borders at a high level, as I discuss extensively in Spillover 溢出.[6] The international economic governance mechanism, which used to be dominated by national units, is no longer able to cope with the new economic model. This means that, as they carry out their concrete commercial operations, businessmen are in a state of normlessness.
 
The lack of norms is good for businessmen in a sense, because they can take advantage of various institutional differences to engage in arbitrage. But in the long run, the lack of norms is a big problem for businessmen because any gains that cannot be defended according to legal norms are unstable. Therefore, businessmen will internally come to feel the need for a governance mechanism in supranational space.
 
As to how to establish such a mechanism, we can only let our imaginations go, but such a need has already emerged, which suggests that imagining the future order is worthwhile.  In my book, I give the example of Friedrich List (17809-1846), a 19th century German economist. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Germany was not yet unified, and its territory was made up of hundreds of small states, each with a very fragile economy, unable to cope with the external challenges of France on the one hand, and unable to develop its economy for the industrial revolution on the other, because their markets were too small.  

List realized that the small states and their industrialists needed a larger market, even if this need had not yet been clearly recognized and expressed. So List advocated the promotion of a German customs union. He made these demands clear, and repeatedly promoted them, so that a consensus gradually grew up around the issue, and they eventually found a way to set it up together. By 1834, the German Customs Union was finally put into practice.
 
In a similar way, I think the New Hanseatic League could become a possible order for the second half of the 21st century, because it is not based on my feeble efforts to imagine it, but rather on a realistic need, although precisely how the need will be met remains unclear. I did some fairly heavy brainstorming in Breaking through the Cocoon, and came up with a rough idea of what this need is and the path to be followed to meet the need. Rough ideas are fine—what is important is to ask the questions, and as long as people's ideas and imagination in this area are stimulated, it may lead to some kind of future basis, just like in the case of the German Customs Union.
 
Our efforts to have the state guide and encompass all political, economic, and social spaces only started some two hundred years ago with the French Revolution.   But these concepts exist only in our imagination, and such attempts did not truly succeed in creating a world in which all of these spaces are truly encompassed by politics.  In my book I call this way of thinking "encapsulated thinking 封装式思维," which uses politics to encapsulate everything. In the real world, our economic lives, political lives, cultural lives, religious lives, etc., each exist in a different dimension, each with its own spatial structure, each with its own logic.

This has always been the case, and in a broader historical perspective, people have not always tried to encapsulate everything within politics, and it is only in the 200 years since the French Revolution that the notion of "encapsulation" developed. Today we often take this "encapsulation" for granted, but this is only because we happen to live during those 200 years, which have fundamentally shaped our perceptions, but those 200 years of experience certainly do not exhaust human possibilities.
 
Fan Jialai:  When Spillover was published, you mentioned that you might do some research on the Silk Road region.  Did the pandemic get in the way?
 
Shi Zhan:  No, I’m still working on it. It's not just the Silk Road, it's the entire corridor between China and Central Asia. In the past, we have generally equated the history of China with the history of the Central Plains, but in fact China is a concept that goes far beyond that one region.  China it is a large system composed of the Central Plains, the grasslands, the Western region, the Tibet-Qinghai highlands, etc. What we call the history of China is in fact the evolutionary history of this large system. An important zone linking many of these components is what we usually call the corridor.

Therefore, if we look at Chinese history from the perspective of the history of China as a system, Chang'an and Luoyang are not the best central perspectives, and the true central perspective is the corridor.  It’s like in the past, from the perspective of the Central Plains, we thought that the Great Wall was China’s northern border, but this is very problematic because if the Great Wall is the China’s northern border, then it means that beyond the Great Wall is not Chinese territory, which is absurd.
 
So from a true Chinese perspective, the Great Wall should not be seen as the northern border, but rather as the center. If you stand on the Great Wall, facing in the direction of the sea, you see farmers to the south of you and nomads to the north, with the Western region and the Tibet-Qinghai highlands behind.  What you are seeing is all of China, and otherwise what you see is merely the Central Plains. The Central Plains is what it is today precisely because it was gradually formed in the process of continuous interchange with the grasslands, the Western regions and the highlands. In this perspective, I will continue to take the corridor as the central point of entry to try to reconstruct an explanatory framework for China. The research I have done over the past few years in this area is also an attempt to put this new interpretive framework into practice from macro and micro perspectives, and from various angles.
 
In fact, in The Hub 枢纽[7], I already established the larger framework, and now I want to further flesh it out at the micro level. That's why I have been researching and travelling about in various corridor zones for the past few years. This research is related to the research I did in Spillover and Breaking through the Cocoon, which are two sides of the same coin. To understand China as a country, we have to see both its internal and external sides. Internally, we have to study how the multiple components of a plural China have been "mutually constructed" and how multiple corridors contributed to the evolution of today’s China; externally, we have to sort out the mutually-constructed relationship between China and the world, and uncover internal consistencies between China and the world. The combination of these two aspects can together constitute our understanding and explanation of "what is China".
 
Fan Jialai: What's your latest new writing project?
 
Shi Zhan:  In the future, I will start from the perspective of corridors, and further clarify the logic of China's "plural construction", i.e., the "multiple corridors" of the Central Plains, the grasslands, the Western region, and the highlands. Once this is done, I hope to be able to seek out the basic historical preconditions that facilitated China’s internal integration,  which is probably where I will spend a lot of energy in the coming years.

​At the same time, I will continue to focus on the relationship between China and the international community, and on the possible implications of the new digital order for humanity. As I said earlier, the internal and the external are always linked, and it is impossible to talk about one in isolation from the other; technology brings new variables to the logic of linkage between internal and external, and may drive some changes in this logic. For me, these concerns are always in a state of synchronization, and may have different focuses at different times.
 
Notes

[1] 专访 施展,《破茧》：破除信息茧房的束缚，理性平和看世界, published online on December 21, 2020.
 
[2] Translator’s note:  Yiwu, Zhejiang, is the home of the world’s largest wholesale market, and one way of trying to predict the election was to compare the sales figures of merchandise connected to the two campaigns.  See here for more information.

[3] Translator’s note :  Shi is referring to the myth that “quantum physics is all about uncertainty.”

[4] Translator’s note:  A black swan event is an unpredictable, highly impactful event.  The image was made popular by Nassim Nicolas Taub’s eponymous 2007 volume.

[5] Translator’s note:  “The New Hanseatic League…was established in February 2018 by European Union finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a two-page foundational document which set out the countries' ‘shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union (EMU).’ The name is derived from the Hanseatic League, a Northern European commercial and defensive league which lasted until the 16th century.”  Click here for more information.

[6] Translator’s note:  Spillover was published in early 2020.  Here is a description of the book’s contents from the Douban site:  “China's mega-manufacturing capacity defines its special position in the world order and drives the symbiotic evolution of China and the world order. What is the future direction of China's manufacturing industry? How will trade frictions affect this?  The author conducted field research in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions, as well as in Southeast Asian countries. As represented by Vietnam. He found that the so-called "transfer" of manufacturing to Vietnam is actually a ‘spillover’ from China's supply chain. The force driving the ‘spillover’ is China's private economy. The root cause of the ‘spillover’ is the evolution of technologies, forms of corporate organization and production logics that have allowed economic space to transcend national borders in various ways. It is therefore possible for the merchant order to come to the forefront of history and, together with the political order, to drive the evolution of a new world order.  In this book, one can see the real power of China's manufacturing industry and the evolutionary logic of East Asia's manufacturing agglomeration from inside-out through first-hand research on the front line of the manufacturing industry. The research in this book not only focuses on current reality, but also shows the future possibilities of China's economy and the world economic order.”
 
[7] Translator’s note:  The Hub: Three Thousand Years of Chinese History, was published in 2018.  Here is the description of the book’s contents, taken from the Douban site:  “At the heart of The Hub: 3000 Years of China is the question, ‘What is China?’ There are already many similar studies available, but Shi's book has some very important features compared to them.  The author has found a central thread, namely, China's supermassive nature, which connects the history of China from ancient times to the present and provides a unified explanatory framework. Using this thread, Shih explains the reasons why China was able to maintain a unified empire, and the reasons why China fell into backwardness in the modern era.  The history of the great Chinese revolution of the twentieth century acquires a new meaning in this context, and moreover explains the unique position of China in the world today. The book breaks away from the common Central Plains perspective and the grassland perspective of the school of  New Qing History, and discovers a unified historical process that transcends the various sub-regions, such as the Central Plains, the grasslands, the Western region, the plateau, and the sea.  The author identifies the process of interaction and interdependence, thus positioning Chinese history as a systemic history.”  Liang Zhiping discusses Shi’s volume in his important essay on Tianxia and ideology elsewhere on this site.