KEVIN MALONEY: Brian Wong, thank you so much for joining us on the Values & Interests podcast. I appreciate it.
BRIAN WONG: Thanks for having me, Kevin.
KEVIN MALONEY: We are going to cover a lot today. We will provide your bio to our listeners when this comes out in a few days, but in looking at your CV you were tailor-made to eventually appear on the Values & Interests podcast. You may not have known when you studying at Oxford and starting your first publications, but for the intersection of those studying philosophy and politics all roads lead to Values & Interests.
BRIAN WONG: Absolutely. All roads lead to you.
KEVIN MALONEY: Here on the Values & Interests podcast, we like to get a sense of who we are talking to from a values or personal perspective. So often I think we skip to the professional side of the CV. My listeners will know by chapter and verse now that at Carnegie Council we do not disaggregate the personal from the professional and morality from power, so let’s lay the foundation and get to know you a little bit, and we can go from there.
BRIAN WONG: As someone who currently works at the intersection of geopolitics, political and moral philosophy, and nascent technologies situated here in Hong Kong with a focus on China and also looking at China’s relationship with the rest of the world, specifically the emerging “blocs of countries,” so to speak, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations but also the Indian subcontinent by and large, you might wonder: Okay, so where are the values in all of this?
The first and foremost description I would attach to myself when it comes to values is pluralism, the embracing of and affirmation of pluralism. That in turn is something I credit, most significantly, to Hong Kong, my birthplace, a city that has of course always been very hard to describe and quasi-liminal if not fully liminal at some point in its history, and that is to say that on one hand you have a very robust and strong sense of Chinese identity—Chinese language, Chinese culture, and traditional Chinese characters—being the prevalent norms and also the modes of communication as well as social tethering in this city. Yet on the other hand we have also inherited from our days under British rule, for instance, a pretty substantive and I would say still enduring set of common law institutions and openness to freedom of trade and freedom of movement and capital exit and entry.
Of course, there have been challenges, and of course these values that we speak of here do not necessarily gel or coagulate around and with one another in a seamless fashion, yet the fact of the matter is that Hong Kong has always been an experiment, an imperfect yet functional experiment. It is thus perfect in its constant adaptiveness and flexibility.
So I would say first and foremost growing up in Hong Kong, speaking English and Cantonese natively and then picking up Mandarin at the age of two, learning that, and hopefully turning that into something at this point I can call native or quasi-native, was a formative set of conditions that inculcated in me this belief that we can disagree about and over a lot of things and still see eye to eye as friends and peers despite not agreeing on a lot of these substantive issues.
Of course, whilst growing up I spent a fair bit of time on the mainland participating in debating competitions and working as a debate and English educator, adjudicating debate contests, and training up high school debaters. This was a very critical part of my exposure to the mainland, which allowed me to see how China drastically transformed and evolved in the early 2010s through to what it is today in terms of the exceptional, the good, and also the bad. You see both the strengths and also setbacks that the Chinese population and economy—I loathe to draw generalizing claims about this population of 1.4 billion because it is so difficult to define and pin down exactly, but you get to see the plurality and pluralisms that comprise modern China today, going back to that word again.
Finally, when it comes to my university and postgrad education, I did eight years at Oxford, and these eight years drastically changed the way I engaged with knowledge inquiry but also interrogation of doctrines and dogmas that were previously heralded and held up as unquestionable truths. Many of these truths were organically questioned during my time at Oxford, including the inevitability of the triumph of liberalism, the “end of history” thesis. That was contested by Brexit and also the election of a certain individual to the White House in literally my first and second years at Oxford.
Then came the outbreak of COVID-19, the fragmentation and fracturing of supply chains, the seeming rollback to a lot of the cosmopolitan and optimistic outlooks that we saw characterizing the zeitgeist in the late 2010s. Much of that was rolled back by the dire and rather drastic changes that we have seen in the world over the past six years.
In my view, pluralism was contested and challenged, and yet at the same time my conviction and belief in building bridges and connecting folks across disparate factions and worldviews has never been stronger than it is today. I suppose that is the genealogy of my values, so to speak, a kind of Nietzschean term.
KEVIN MALONEY: That is a great overview. I appreciate how you talk about your time on the mainland and getting to know not the political system but the individuals within that system. I think a willingness to engage from points of empathy, intellectual humility, and political humility underpins pluralism. That can be an experiment domestically within the United States, but you can also scale that up to how you approach the world from an academic and geopolitical perspective.
We recently had Matias Spektor on the podcast from Fundação Getulio Vargas in Brazil, and he talked about his time in the UK academic system post-9/11 and looking at the moral and political position in the world of the United States changing, its hegemonic position changing, it being a wake-up call, and him being in a few rooms from a Brazilian perspective and saying, “No, I know.” It was an interesting interview from that perspective.
Maybe we can dig more into what pluralism means at a human level for you before we get into the geopolitical sphere of things. What are the virtues that people need to inculcate if they are going to be good-faith pluralistic actors from your perspective?
BRIAN WONG: I think the first and foremost prerequisite is epistemic humility, to accept that there are many things you do not know and that you may not know what you don’t know, but what you do know is that if you don’t know about something, you should not be averse to acknowledging it and being confronted by it. The normalization of ignorance as a past condition and also the ritualization of learning as a forward-looking condition go hand in hand, and both of them are anchored in turn in this virtue of epistemic humility.
I will start by confessing here that there are lots of things I don’t know about the world—geopolitics, the intricacies of Byzantian history, and the classics; I must confess that I am not a well-trained classicism and never did much classics when I was at Oxford.
There is so much about the world in the past, present, and future especially that I do not know, but I am okay with that. I am at ease with that, not because I am content with it but because I acknowledge it, and in naming the reality we can then embrace and affirm the changes we want to see to the reality.
KEVIN MALONEY: It also gives you a reason to wake up in the morning.
BRIAN WONG: Absolutely. This podcast gave me more than a sufficient reason to wake up in the morning.
The second observation I will make is that your strategic empathy is also vital. That is to say that you want to empathize with others because you need to see how they see the world to understand what they care about and what their priorities are in order to talk, negotiate, engage in compromise, but also to learn from them.
Why must empathy be strategic? Here I am reminded of a few articles I read a couple of years back that talked about the perils and dangers of excess empathy. We cannot empathize with everyone in the world, and empathy can be burdensome and cumbersome if it comes in excess because it forces us to some extent to erase and negate who we are in order to accept ontologically another part of the other in ourselves.
How do we strike the right balance here? You need strategy. We need strategy. We need to understand that empathy requires us to see just enough of what others are seeing without forgoing what it means to be ourselves. We should appreciate the difference between acknowledging the pluralism of viewpoints that exist in the world and the almost cynical kind of relativism or hugely adaptive but also amorphous outlook where you just shift your views and stances based on who you are with. I find that cynical and also rather perilous. We have to strike the right balance there, and that is the second virtue that is a prerequisite.
A final observation I will note is not a virtue but more of a heuristic per se: Try to understand the subtext and the linguistic and cultural context in which others operate. There are certain idiomatic phrases, for instance, that we hear in Cantonese or Mandarin that would be rather jarring if directly translated into English. For instance, [speaks Chinese], translated literally as “exhausting your tendons and also draining your energy,” whereas in Chinese it is an anodyne, harmless phrase denoting that you are feeling shattered and knackered in relation to something, you have given it your very best and exhausted all your energy in order to bring something to fruition. Again, different subtexts and different linguistic contexts generate different sets of meanings, and the ability to straddle and speak across them is of the utmost importance, especially in this era of nascent globalization 2.0.
KEVIN MALONEY: The empathy discussion right now is interesting from a geopolitical perspective. It is also interesting from a U.S. perspective. I think you are alluding to this—feel free to push back—and that we are in alignment on the moral relativism trap. I think that is a big trap to avoid in terms of what we do at Carnegie Council, where you want to be pluralistic in your approach, but not all ideas are equal from a moral perspective. We very much believe that.
Everybody has to stand for their values, but in a pluralistic political system there is give and take. It is not zero-sum, and that is the ultimate tradeoff there.
I want to get your perspective on this, and then we can get back to the international. There has been a big push of late from far right-wing and not so far anymore anti-empathy campaigns that dovetail with Christian nationalism here. They say empathy is actually the ability to allow sin in certain contexts. There are actually large campaigns—Turning Point USA and other places—pushing the idea that empathy feels good on the surface but it is an acidic anti-virtue if you start to let it permeate through society. It is very interesting how different people use empathy politically, and it is definitely having a bit of a moment here in the United States.
BRIAN WONG: For sure. I must confess, I am not a professional theologian, so I do not want to claim expertise in this subject matter, unlike perhaps some officials who have managed to recite passages from one of my favorite movies of all time, mistaking that for gospel. There is a line from Matthew 9:36, I think, which basically says: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.” In my view, someone who truly cares for others, whether through religious or nonreligious reasons, should do so in a manner that is sensitive to the circumstances in which individuals are situated.
Approaching sin as a question, if we believe that sin is something we can do away with—of course, that is itself a contentious premise—and if we believe we can challenge, cleanse, and rinse ourselves of our sins, then surely a very important part of that process is to understand why some of us sin more than others and to appreciate the root of sin.
That is where I think constructive strategic empathy is also vital for engaging many of the very angry and disillusioned supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. I am not calling for a generalization across the board to say that all of these individuals are victims. That is not what I am asserting here. That is also disrespectful toward their agency and ability to take responsibility, but we ought to look at the underlying background causes for the emergence of MAGA-ism in the States or Brexiteers and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. It is not hard to find a number of root causes, but which of these prevails of course requires further political scientific testing.
It might be social economic inequalities—these folks were in many ways the losers from the advent of globalization—or the cultural warfare that has been fought, which to be fair, it takes two sides to tango, and left many relatively socially conservative folks feeling alienated from the more progressive left because they feel it has gone too far. Alternatively, there is this ingrained sense of bigotry and norms that are larger than individuals, norms that are inculcated through mass media and social media transmission with of course artificial intelligence (AI) being an amplifying tool.
All of these forces have contributed to the state of polarization in America today, and that is also why I wouldn’t try to, despite my strong grievances toward the figurehead helming or benefiting from a movement, castigate any and all supporters of the individual as being morally depraved. In fact, they would probably feel, as my friend Alexandre Lefebvre would say in his book—an excellent book, by the way, Liberalism as a Way of Life—that liberalism is a form of soulcraft, a spiritual way of life. He would say that many of these supporters genuinely believed that they were enrolling in a comprehensive doctrine that worked for them.
Whereas his solution is to advocate liberalism as a competing comprehensive doctrine, in layperson speak a “cohesive set of worldviews and conceptions about the good and the right, especially the good,” my antidote to the malaise of our times is less that and more, “Let’s try to figure out a set of values, a set of modus vivendi, that can allow for the incorporation and integration of different comprehensive doctrines into one cohesive society without the imposition and advocacy of a further comprehensive doctrine, so to speak.
KEVIN MALONEY: I need to mention this, which is actually a great thing about being able to host this podcast: The last conversation I had and that we released last week was with Aarathi Krishnan, who is Malaysian by birth, grew up in Australia, worked for the United Nations for 20 years, and now is in the private sector had a great line in the interview: “Values without epistemic humility is basically just ideology.” I am paraphrasing there, but it is on the quote wall now. We have to put it up at Carnegie Council.
BRIAN WONG: We also have to bear in mind that to some extent ideology can put on a façade of humility. That is how ideology works.
KEVIN MALONEY: Certainly. One of the things we are looking at quite closely now at Carnegie Council, and listeners will have heard me talk about this, is basically “moral masking.” Hans Morgenthau talks about this from a political perspective, but everybody in history politically has wanted to gain the moral high ground because there is efficacy politically in it, but I think from our perspective there is a dividing line. I think Joe Nye would have been in our camp in terms of good faith versus bad faith: Are you purely using morality as a manipulative tactic and there is no desire pluralistically to do good for others or serve others through your political role? This is the tension we are seeing right now with the one-dimensional MAGA morality to an extent and the transactionalism that is coming out of that.
BRIAN WONG: On that note, intention in my view is one thing, but not where one’s attempt to engage with one’s worldview ends up undermining others’ ability to pursue their moral worldviews and outlooks. That is a test of compatibility and if you like, a Kantian universalizability test, and that to me is a very important part of the question that is conceptually and even empirically distinct from the intention segment, because you can have perfectly well-intentioned individuals who truly believe that what they are doing is ethical, and yet what they are doing is absolutely abhorrent from an objective or intersubjective point of view.
And you can have the exact opposite, folks who are wholly cynical and wholly doing something for the sake of serving themselves, self-aggrandizement, and advancing their own political ends, and yet they might actually bring about more good than harm. How we appraise the moralities and autonormative states in each of these cases is a very interesting question.
KEVIN MALONEY: The simplest, most approachable way in the geopolitical-historical context that I have found is Joe Nye’s book Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, where he talks about not only means and consequences but intentions. He gives a great scorecard, and it is easy to wrap your head around it while still being morally sophisticated and not leaning into just consequences or just intentions. It is definitely interesting from that perspective, and he wrote the book at the end of Trump 1.0, so it is interesting from that perspective.
BRIAN WONG: Professor Nye was and is brilliant, despite his having physically departed this world. He is incredible.
KEVIN MALONEY: He was a great friend of Carnegie Council and is definitely missed.
I want to pivot a bit to the current geopolitical moment. I think there is a lot of noise in terms of the latest post on Truth Socia; or sad military kinetic means; or the deteriorating situation in Sudan, Gaza, or fill in the blank. It just seems like a deluge, like drinking from a firehose right now, but there are certainly levels to geopolitical analysis and there is also “above the fray”—these strategic pieces that are moving and the values and interest systems that are pushing against each other a bit right now.
As a China expert, as somebody who grew up in Hong Kong, and someone who is focused on this right now—we have not had a China-area-based scholar on the podcast yet—I want to get your perspective on this values and interests equation from a China perspective right now, and maybe we can lay the groundwork a bit for that discussion.
BRIAN WONG: I would start by observing that when we speak of China we need to be very clear: Are we talking about the Chinese people or the Chinese government? When we speak of the Chinese government, we have to talk about the Communist Party of China (CPC).
I would say that the Communist Party of China’s leadership is fundamentally very pragmatic about it wants, and its priority most certainly is the preservation of its interests over the adherence or compliance to any sort of values, which, by the way, they don’t purport to want to export. When you read the statements, even ones involving global initiatives, I do not think that the Chinese leadership is keen on exporting values. They are instead keen on finding grounds for mutual interests or common interests which is, in other words, a game theoretical treatment of the way they approach their self-interest. Namely, through playing iterative games the leadership has come to realize that if you cannot give others at least 30 to 40 percent of the cut, then others will not go for the deal that would net you the desired 60 or 70 percent of the game. That is essentially a very transactionalist but also realistic way of looking at the world.
As a result of that, the first and foremost motivating factor undergirding the Party’s foreign policymaking but also domestic political economy is the continuity of the Party. Continuity here need not be a 6-foot-tall monster that some folks would project onto the Party and the policies it pursues, and that is because through the many past decades of survival it has come to imbue and draw upon disparate strands of power maintenance. There was a revolutionary dimension, which has given way to a more carefully devised method of social management.
There is of course the ideological dimension and the nationalism or hypernationalism that undergirds that, but by and large there is also an emphasis upon performance legitimacy, which does not exclusively entail economic growth. It can also come in the form of greater redistribution, improved living standards or environmental conditions, and anti-corruption. All of these are not just talking points but genuinely motivating deliberative factors that the Party takes seriously as a means of—going back to what I said—pragmatically retaining and holding onto power.
What does that mean for its foreign policy then? Again, interests prevail over values in that context. A very interesting piece came out from a friend, Bao Wei, rather recently in Foreign Affairs, where he talks about the primary and secondary contradictions in the world today and the way China sees it.
I may not necessarily agree with the worldview espoused by what he attributes to the leadership. He notes that he is not attributing these views that way himself. I am just saying that these views are a reasonable interpretation of how the Chinese leadership is thinking through the lens of Bao Wei.
Of course I may not agree with the specifics there, but one thing is for sure: The language, the Marxist-Hegelian dialectics and language of contradictions has been appropriated and adapted to the Chinese context by the CPC and not just vis-à-vis domestic priorities but also when it comes to foreign policy tradeoffs.
The most classic example and case in point would be, of course, how the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War actually gave rise to a pretty drastic reorientation on the part of Beijing away from typecasting the West and the capitalist order as the primary enemy and capitalism versus socialism as the primary contradiction to instead pinpointing socialism with imperialistic characteristics on the part of the Soviet Union as the primary source of objective antagonism and that the Sino-Soviet split displaced the Sino-West split or the capitalist-communist split, so to speak, to be the primary contradiction that Chinese leadership has sought to arrange its worldview and outlook around toward the end of Mao Zedong’s tenure and also at the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s time and Hua Guofeng in between the two of them.
That goes to show that the Chinese are flexible. It might take them a while to steer, reverse course, or change the course of their foreign policy motion, and by and large very often these changes in directions come by more subtly. They very rarely engage in 180-degree turns unless something rather drastic and unexpected happens, but even then, it is more of a subtle and gradual reorientation of a ship in a direction of starboard, for instance, as opposed to a 180-turn right away.
All things considered, that is to say, the interests paradigm or interest centrism of the Chinese also gives rise in practice to a flexibility with regard to stances, positions, and also even statements that they put out, which I described previously on another podcast as containing not just “multitudes,” as Whitman would put it, but also this kind of strategic ambiguous dexterity that allows them to have plausible deniability when they decide to settle upon one concrete option over another.
Where do values come into play here? I am not saying that values don’t matter, but all I am suggesting here is that values are more like guiding heuristics, a cognitive shortcut, that facilitate the attainment of particular ends and means, and they are also very useful instruments in rhetoric and also in coordinated effect in ensuring that the bureaucracy can achieve the desired end goal, which is the maintenance of its interests. That is where I think the Chinese state looks at values and interests.
One double-click here or one addendum that I would like to note is that the Chinese are not particularly preoccupied with regime types. Look at some of the greatest and most important trading partners that China has, for instance. Many of them are democracies, and that includes of course the United States which remains still an important trading partner despite the best efforts of both sides, especially on the American side of the Pacific, in putting some distance between the two. This is not a value judgment; it is just an observation that despite attempts at trade decoupling trade has actually persisted.
The Chinese also have no qualms trading with the European Union. They know and understand that the European Union and the European market are important, and if they end up dumping cheap goods in Europe to the chagrin of their European counterparts, that is not going to get them very far. That is also why they are recalibrating their trade policy, by the way, because in part of the backlash from abroad but also domestically the involution, the churn, inefficiency, and potential for a deflationary spiral. All of these have alarmed leaders, and they are thus engaged in a course correction.
KEVIN MALONEY: In terms of new relationships that are being forged right now in response to I would say the belligerence or unpredictability of U.S. leadership—we obviously see Mark Carney turning toward China in a number of ways; I believe the leader of Spain was recently in China as well—do you see this as a blip on the Western radar which will then realign in a few years’ time, or is this a systemic shift away from more liberal values-based relationships of the West because the United States has forced other countries’ hands in terms of security, or is this a new transactional world we will all be living in for the foreseeable future?
I know it has always been transactional, but I think the United States stepping back from even the façade of values is having a seismic effect from a security and alliance perspective. I want to get your take on that framing. Feel free to say, “No, you are completely wrong, Kevin.”
BRIAN WONG: I want to start off by saying that once again we must avoid falling for the defeatist thought that values don’t or should not matter at all. As you and I agree, in the realm of ideals and rights and wrongs, values remain aspirationally and evaluatively important. I don’t think the normative truths undergirding what the international order should look like have changed much over the past 80 years.
Let’s talk about the descriptive and empirical domain. Here I want to quote one of my favorite social and political theorists of all time, Antonio Gramsci, who said: “The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born, and now is the time for monsters.” I want to add an addendum and say, “Or realists.”
When it comes to the United States, the “old world,” so to speak, of the post-Cold War U.S.-led hegemony, appears to be weakening. I don’t think it is dying per se, but it is increasingly destabilized. What the real issue is, having thought long and hard about this, I concluded that it is not about consistency or integrity. This is not to single out the United States, by the way. Many powerful countries around the world, great powers by history, have never displayed full-fledged consistency and integrity in their foreign policies. Indeed as a voter in these countries, I would have been very concerned if they did display full consistency.
What the United States has lost over the past decade or so is predictability whether it be in terms of who is running the White House and policies and alliances offered by those in the White House, setting aside inter-bureaucratic, inter-ministerial, and interdepartmental competition, or in fact more precisely it is sort of a dearth of predictability coming from the same leader, a leader who could say today, “We have a great deal, a tremendous deal, the best ever,” and then tomorrow say, “There’s no deal, it’s a terrible situation, very nasty.”
KEVIN MALONEY: Throw some expletives in there too.
BRIAN WONG: That is not the kind of predictability that helps American allies, American partners, or the world.
On the other hand, the new world is also struggling to be born, and here is why: I know there are lots of optimists who say, “Oh, China is the answer, China will provide the solution, and China is going to step up,” but I think that while China does have the capacity to some extent to do so what I don’t see as of April 2026 is the sense of responsibility and willingness to play ball on the part of China when it comes to vital global goods such as security provision and counterterrorism across the world and when it comes to a desired more normative and moral order that the world has long craved. That is why we invented the liberal international order (LIO) as an explanation, as Mark Carney said, to help us understand and make sense of the world.
I don’t think China is interested in creating a parallel to LIO let alone be the replacement for LIO. Where we do the Chinese stepping up and stepping in is on select areas such as climate change governance with green infrastructure, renewable transition, electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries they are investing in. We also see it when it comes to public health and the provision of vaccines, masks, and medicines. I wrote about “mask diplomacy” actually around six years ago when COVID-19 first started.
So, in select domains the Chinese are stepping up, but even then it is not a top-down, concerted, and cohesive effort. You have got the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) vying for influence against the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), against potentially to some extent the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), but also on the front of AI governance you have the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and also NDRC butting heads, but now it is pretty clear that the NDRC has won out, so it has been elevated to a matter that NDRC is going to take charge of.
The Chinese do not move in a synchronous tandem, and that is a popular misconception about the Belt and Road Initiative. When we say “the Chinese government’s Belt and Road plan,” whose plans are we talking about here? Which department? Which minister? Which minister’s assistant? Which director is in charge? Those are questions that we have to take seriously.
The final point I want to note is that now is the time for “monsters or realists.” Why did I add this addendum? Well, I am not a pessimist, and I am not one for self-defeating pessimism. We should have of course a clear-eyed understanding and appreciation of what the stakes are and the lay of the land, but we should not give up on trying to be non-monsters, to push back against the urge and itch to be monsters, so to speak.
As a final comment on this question, I want to bring in a learned friend and someone I look up to a lot, former prime minister and now president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, who’s coined in his latest work this sort of tripartite framework of looking at the Global East.
KEVIN MALONEY: Great book.
BRIAN WONG: He talks about China, the Global East, and Singapore as well. There is a Global West with the United States and the rest, so to speak, and the Global South, where he would put presumably India as he highlighted during the Raisina Dialogue amongst a number of other important developing countries at the helm of, and the rest of the world as well within that category.
If I may add a suggestion. I don’t know if he is going to hear this, but my suggested amendment to this framework is, Why don’t we make it a four-party game? That is to say there is a Global North and a Global West which are separate. The Global North refers to developed economies, former colonial powers, powers that might have been involved in historical injustices and are therefore burdened with moral debt and yet are not themselves necessarily complicit or actively involved in the perpetration of heinous kinetic warfare manifesting acts of aggression. I refuse to buy into a narrative that everyone and all in the proverbial West think the same, that they all stand behind the many wars of aggression that have been waged on innocent populations and peoples of yore and in the past. That is just not the case when it comes to vast swathes of the population in the proverbial West.
I would group them as Global North regions, populations, peoples, and stakeholders, and that includes many in America today who are speaking up against the, I would say, unwise military maneuver in the Middle East, to be an understater on that front.
Then there is the Global West, and the Global West comprises those who are firmly in favor of and in defense of a more revanchist, assertive, and also a haughtier, new “imperial,” used in a neutral sense, West, one where the West still calls the shots and the rest of the world must take, take, and take the instructions, orders, suggestions, priming, and acceptance of the way things should be in the eyes of those in the Global West. To me, the Global North and the Global West are not the same and to conflate the two would be a perilous mistake as well.
On the other hand, there is a Global East, where I would also include a number of East Asian and Northeast Asian economies, and this is where the Global East must be reconceptualized not as a unified bloc, for there are clear tensions between China, Japan, and South Korea, especially China and Japan in the status quo, yet if we are to look at the supply chain and flows of goods and trade—goods and trade don’t lie. They don’t engage in politicization. They don’t engage in the hubristic, chauvinistic rhetoric that we see coming out of certain governments and regimes in East, West, North, or South, and the truth of the matter is that the Global East is increasingly integrated as a trading bloc, oriented and geographically revolving around East Asia per se.
Finally, there is a Global South, which again, drawing upon the work I have done on Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), it is a smorgasbord. It is not a team, a coalition, or a bloc; it is a group. It is a blob that is loosely conjoined maybe at the hips for some or heads for others or not at all physically, yet they are conjoined by a mixture of shared grievances and also shared yearnings and desires as well. That is really where the world stands today.
Of course, India is a very important player in the Global South, but so too arguably are a number of other middle powers or emerging regional powerhouses straddling the status of regional powerhouse and a middle power. They are not quite there yet when it comes to being like India vis-à-vis the subcontinent but are certainly more powerful than your average middle power as well.
This is how I would see the world, as a Global North/South, East/West divide as opposed to one that lumps together Europe, America, and also all these developed economies as if they were homogenous and aligned on the same front. As evidenced by the Greenland saga, the war in Iran and Strait of Hormuz opening, reopening, closure, opening, Schrödinger situation, it is apparent that the Global West and Global North are not one and the same and wholly aligned.
KEVIN MALONEY: I think this is definitely a fracture point you can see manifesting from institutional decay, whether it is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization coming into question or Keir Starmer stepping up against the “special relationship.” I am not assigning blame to any one side there, but there are certainly moments of fracture to think about.
I want to pull on one part of the reorganization/recategorization thread there, which is Global North versus Global West. From my perspective, the demarcation line around that is really civilizationalism itself. I would think about Global West as people who are supporting political systems or politicians who are anti-universalist from a humanity perspective, equal moral worth of every person. This goes into the anti-empathy bin, where it is JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference saying, “No, there are certain societies”—this is the Viktor Orbán—“that we are tiering above others.” This is not actually only to the West or to illiberal allies. You see this in Indian culture sometimes. It is very interesting from a psychological and anthropological perspective.
If I was going to drill down politically or geopolitically, right now in this values and interests moment what manifests politically is a blatant tiering of certain civilizations over the others.
BRIAN WONG: What is interesting here, Kevin, is we have to differentiate between cosmopolitanism and a civilizational proselytism that we see still adopted and embraced by many on the far right but also many who are broadly speaking aligned with the cause of remaking entire countries and peoples in line with their “perfect visions of the world.” I would say the real cleavage lies between those who are pluralists versus monists, who believe that there is only one true or ideal path to living out one’s dream society and to craft and shape it as such.
Are we looking here at a world shaper or someone who is happy to take the world as it is, so a world liver? I think that is the contrast and juxtaposition here, whereas both sides do profess to think about values. I am sure JD Vance would say: “I do care about values. I care a lot about Christian values. I care a lot about ensuring that we have the right kind of personal private liberties. I respect that,” the sort of libertarian dog whistles that one can use and he can use to name check and galvanize a lot of folks through values. The Tea Party movement supported a more laissez-faire and minimalist government.
I have to be fully honest here. I too, when it comes to my social values, am fairly progressive and also libertarian at that. When it comes to my economic values, I am also center right to right, so I can see the merit and appeal in a smaller government and a government that does not clutter up policy and resource space for uninformed decisions.
The trouble here, going back to the point you were making about masking, is to what extent are these narratives merely narratives, or are they in fact reflections of deeper normative commitments? I don’t know. That means that when we see civilization-oriented narratives play out vis-à-vis more cosmopolitan, you might say milquetoast liberal values where there is a clash within a civilization or a clash between those who want to turn one’s own practices into a civilization and those who say we don’t want to do that.
You see similar dynamics playing out in India today as well between those who say we need to propagate Hindutva values, Vishwaguru, versus those who say, “We can still be the world’s teacher without practicing and adopting this sort of Hindutva ideology.”
Of course, there are those in China as well who say that the China model works and others within the system who say, “But let’s not try to export this because we have no control, no say, and no interest in doing so.” There is a tension between those who want to export ideologies and remake the world according to the way they see fit and those who say, “Let’s just stay put and let each of us live life as we desire to live, separately, autonomously, and disparately.”
If anything, that is my addendum. I am not disagreeing with you. I am just saying that there is perhaps more than meets the eye when it comes to the framing of civilization versus values or civilization qua values versus a non-value-centric worldview.
KEVIN MALONEY: This is why we have people like you on. I would just interview myself if I only wanted to have a conversation in the mirror.
BRIAN WONG: That would be great as well. Why not?
KEVIN MALONEY: I definitely want to have time to talk to you about your book, but before we pivot to that I do want to get to this tension point that is always centerstage in terms of China and the United States or China and the West. It is a tension around sovereignty versus universality of values and what takes precedence. I am not asking you to answer this, but I would love to get your take on how you work through that and think about it in terms of tiering it in the political system and also on the geopolitical stage.
I have said this many times in the past, so I will lay my cards on the table, I am personally guided Amartya Sen and his article “Democracy as a Universal Value” from 1999 in the Journal of Democracy—buried in the middle of the article, but I think it should have been at the top—where he basically says, “Universal consent is not required for universal values. You define universal values that people anywhere find the value as valuable.”
This is me paraphrasing, but this has kind of been my north star when thinking about how you think about values on the geopolitical level. That does not mean being moralistic or crusading from a liberal perspective or exporting these things but just having this in your mind. That was a big wind-up, but I wanted to get your reaction to that.
BRIAN WONG: Perhaps a thin veneer of liberal values, like the fluids that move in and out of semiporous membranes of cells, is not such a bad thing.
I will start off by laying my cards on the table. I am a meta-liberal, or as Robert Nozick would say, why not be meta-libertarians where basically we embrace utopia where each and every one of us can form our own utopian societies governed in accordance with the way we desire and yearn for these societies to be governed. That is a sort of normative end goal that we have in a very, very distant horizon. But as Amartya Sen himself would say, we cannot do political theory through ideal theory. You have to engage with the non-ideal.
So I want to set aside the ideal theory whilst using that to disclose my broad underlying moral contours and issues. While that is indeed important, it is not perhaps the most germane to your question at hand.
To answer your framing concerning sovereignty versus values, what I would say is, one, of course different countries, different political communities can and do in fact yearn for different political orders. That is true and that is where we can argue that there are some political systems that are more suited to countries X, Y, or Z, or A, B, and C, and this gives rise to my very deeply seated sense of pluralism about regime type and legitimacy, which is by the way an in-the-pipeline project as well. There is no one single way to govern.
Yet—and this is a big yet—having read a lot of the literature when it comes to political legitimacy and defending alternative views of legitimacy in the past 20 or 30 years, especially alternatives relative to the dominant Anglo-American consensus, what I must warn and caution against is a conflation of regime interests with the people’s interests. Yes, there are connections empirically between the regime’s survival and endurance of regimes, especially nondemocratic ones, and the obtaining and adherence to the people’s interest. There is an empirical correlation.
Regimes that are nondemocratic and do not deliver, short of turning to very effective repression and violence, will often flounder and collapse whereas regimes that can deliver credibly for the people and some of them might be democratically elected—you might say numerically more of them are democratically elected than not—but by and large regimes that deliver by performing to the expectations of the majority of at least those with political power and economic resources will tend to survive longer.
What we cannot do is conflate the regime with the people and say, “Oh, well the regime has its own values, and therefore in respecting sovereignty we need to defer to the regime’s values.” The real question is this: To what extent do the values espoused and embodied by the regime actually reflect those of the people?
I do think there are non-democratic regimes out there that can effectively embody a sort of broad tacit consensus amongst the people and populations when it comes to political orders. This does not mean that they are maximally justified and legitimate, but it does mean that they are sufficiently legitimate to the extent that it would be unwise, unjustified, and unwarranted to attempt to alter unilaterally the ways in which the political structures of these governments and of these countries are indeed constituted.
On the other hand, we must also avoid lapsing into a kind of anything-goes relativism and say, “Oh, well, some countries are more suited for democracy than others, and therefore all of those countries are not democratic and we should just let things be the way they are.” That is not in my view a particularly responsible way of looking at international affairs. We have to evaluate things through the lenses of both what we ought to aspire toward as well as what is feasible, but the neglect of what is feasible leads us to build castles in the sky whereas the omission of what is desirable would render us cynical, trapped residents in a castle that is burning down with no recourse or water to put out the fire.
KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is helpful framing. What we try to do in the conversations on this podcast is be educational and less proscriptive. We talked about this before we hit record, but applied ethics requires something of everybody listening to this. Take what you just heard and run with it and agree or disagree with it, but that is very helpful framing, and I think we can very closely align on the traps of relativism here and acceptance of relativistic approaches politically. Blind acceptance of that is not good from an individual ethical perspective or even tiered up to a societal perspective.
I do want to pivot to your book, Moral Debt: Defending a New Account of Reparative Justice, which was excellent. I have been going through the PDF in various forms on plane rides and train rides and at Carnegie Council. Obviously it looks at this concept of reparative justice to an extent, but I want to talk about the book as a lens through which to talk about the future and a geopolitical system that might be more equitable or responsive and get you to give your vision and what the inspiration was behind the book.
BRIAN WONG: As someone born in Hong Kong, which was under British rule for over a century and a half, and also as someone whose family, as I detailed in my introduction, was personally affected by the Sino-Japanese War—my grandmother lost half of her uncles and aunts to the Japanese invasion and went from being in a comfortable upper middle-class or middle-class family to living as an adopted orphan because both of her parents died—it is very personal for me, the question of historical injustice and relationships with what happened in the past which lives on through the stories told and untold, which lives on through the scars that are taking decades and centuries even to heal if ever, and that lives on through persisting structural inequalities and structural injustices that Iris Marion Young, Catherine Liu, and so many others have brilliantly written and opined on in the past.
Historical injustices are ubiquitous and germane. Just a few days ago, France adopted unanimously a framework bill where they would agree to the restitution of cultural artifacts looted during the colonial era, and now the bill is going to appear before a joint committee as we speak.
Of course, there is also the broader conversation concerning reparations over slavery that we see being raised. Spearheading that movement and that push is the government of Ghana but by and large a number of other former colonies as well. They are asking questions like, “Why can’t we receive proper compensation and restitution over the crimes and wrongdoings of yore?”
Of course we have to separate the question of reparations from the question of reparative justice. I focus on the latter without necessarily proscribing the former because reparations may not necessarily be the best way out, so to speak. You can also have cases where reparations end up in the hands of those who are not accountable so the money then becomes effectively wasted in the hands of those who act with impunity, but I want to set that aside for now.
On a moral debt account, and I am happy to elaborate on it further, the gist of the argument is as follows: Whenever injustices occur, a moral debt is created between the perpetrators and the victims. There might be an overlap in duality and identities, by the way, between them. Perpetrators can be victims and victims can be perpetrators. There is also the question of accomplices as well, which I plan on writing a follow-up article on, which will appear probably over the next 12 months or so.
KEVIN MALONEY: An accompanying article. I am a dad now so I have to make that joke.
BRIAN WONG: Dad jokes are great. As a pundit myself, I appreciate the role of puns and punctuality.
Moral debt of course is created and can be passed on by those who possess the debt, to whom the debt is owed. They can pass this on just as we can pass on and bequeath financial assets, titles, and even other nonfinancial and nonmonetizable benefits and advantages. There is a right to transfer.
Even short of this active right to transfer being invoked or bequeathed rights being invoked there could also be a secondary consideration at hand here, where the descendent of the original victims can lay claims to their ancestors’ moral debts as a means of fulfilling core self-originating or self-origin-oriented interests. That is a second claim concerning the inheritance of the claim to the debt.
The third prong of the equation is that symmetrically there is inheritance on the front of the perpetrator, so the perpetrator’s heirs and inheritors would come to inherit the moral debt as well. The analogy I often draw here is with the thought of tainted property. If one’s continuous claim to and ownership of material titles and also nonmaterial advantages arises from one’s refusal to repay one’s moral debt, then one has inevitably tainted one’s possessions, material and nonmaterial, with the injustice of a failure to discharge moral debt.
That means that the claims of one’s descendant to whatever one decides to bequeath upon them are also correspondingly discounted. It is like saying if I stole a book from you and pass it on to my daughter, just because my daughter did not voluntarily commit theft and might even say “I did not want to inherit this involuntarily transferred to me or bequeathed to me title, I did not want this stolen book,” well, sure. In this case you would have the duty to disgorge this stolen book and ideally restore it into your hands as opposed to someone else as opposed to herself. The analogy I draw here is that those who inherit moral debt must discharge the moral debt accordingly.
That ties me to the final plank of this thesis, which is the role of the collective. Historical injustices do not take place in a vacuum. They are not purely atomistic or individualistic exercises. They necessarily involve collectives working in tandem, working in accordance with the logics of complicity outlined by say, Chris Kutz, for instance, or List and Pettit. Take whatever account of complicity you like and apply it to the account. I am more of a Kutzian or, as Avia Pasternak would put it, essentially someone who believes in the role of participatory intentions in grounding and also supporting the attribution of responsibility, so that is why I have opted to use Chris Kutz’s and Avia Pasternak’s framework of complicity in supplementing my collective moral debt account of reparative justice. That is quite a mouthful, but you can just call it CMDRJ. It has a ring to it as well. That is the gist of my moral debt account.
KEVIN MALONEY: Very interesting. Only very rarely with anything around this topic will people who are not ethicists full-time, and even those who are, attach a very emotional reaction to something that is at its heart a philosophical question at its beginnings. What I appreciated in the book is the robustness with which you just gave us the summary and laid that out.
The question always is the gap between academia and policy and practice. I know as a professor you are very focused on bridging theory and practice as we are at Carnegie Council, so I want to pose a secondary question after hearing the thesis which you so excellently laid out: If you had a wish list of outcomes based on this book, is it a direct policy move to start paying down this debt or is it at a normative level raising awareness for this and making a sophisticated moral case for why this is important for you to be aware of?
The last part of that is not necessarily a point but maybe an addendum: What I am struggling with a lot personally from a U.S. perspective in terms of our pullback from alliances and pluralism is that there seems to be no historical memory of that time and sacrifice. I knew my grandparents, who fought in World War II. I am 37 years old. But that is not the case for people who are even a few years younger than me.
There is a lot loaded in there, but maybe we can start in terms of what you wanted to achieve with this. It does not mean that it is everything, but I want to get inside your head a bit in terms of that.
BRIAN WONG: I will be frank with you. My first and foremost objective is catharsis. I wanted to understand who I was. To me there are few better means to understanding one’s self than to write a book.
KEVIN MALONEY: I hear you.
BRIAN WONG: Of course that is a unique way of self-understanding, but I have written or co-edited at this point five books, and I have one book coming out very shortly on the geopolitics and ethics of AI or the ethics of geopolitics and AI, and to me each of these book projects is not just about getting the title out there or shaping public discourse. It is about catharsis. I want to get to know who I am, why I am here, what I think about the world, and basically help myself prepare for wonderful conversations like these.
A book is a first step, and then I can double-click on interesting aspects of it and tease them out in conversations with disparate and very different voices. I have managed to present Moral Debt in Beijing, Oxford, and across a number of other contexts and environs. I also have another book out on nondemocratic regimes and reparative justice under them. I enjoy talking to people from different countries and different cultural and political systems and learning from them through the books as resources. That is what I would say first and foremost.
Let’s take a step back. I would say that broadly speaking there are three macro objectives: The first is about naming the reality, and here I want to give a lot of credit to Mark Carney. He talked about the imperative of naming the reality that we inhabit. I truly think that the first and foremost obligation of a public-facing philosopher is to help people make sense of the world around them as Bernard Williams would put it. How can we make sense of the basic legitimation to man? How can we make sense of the relationship between state and citizen? How can we make sense of concepts of political legitimacy and the social contract in an era when these concepts appear increasingly vacuous and also bereft of empirical content? That is the duty of any reasonable philosopher or indeed intellectual in my humble opinion.
Then there is also the pedagogical value. A lot of these materials I write I do not set as compulsory texts, but I do send them to my students, and over the years I have managed to build up a sizable network of students across Oxford, where I taught, and also the United Kingdom where I used to be a debate coach for Eton, and now of course here at Hong Kong University I get to work with amazing colleagues under a very supportive administration with students who are bright, very ambitious, and very keen to learn, especially on an undergraduate level, about the world and what they can do with it, so the second purpose I suppose is pedagogical, again, very modest, but I also teach and run courses for business executives and diplomats in Southeast Asia, so it is not just youth I am working with here, although I find them deeply inspiring, the young guys I work with. The guys and girls, lads and lasses are fantastic.
The final thing I would note in terms of practice is about galvanizing action. Here I would go back to the recent example of the debate in France but also the less recent example of apologies over the atrocities of the Marcos administration, the push for apologies and compensation that we have seen in the Philippines over the past 15 to 20 years. What has been motivating that again is a desire for historical grievances to be acknowledged, also with women in South Korea and China vis-à-vis what the Imperial Japanese Army did during World War II and even more generally speaking the chatter about restoring the Elgin Marbles, statues, and also of course the Koh-i-Noor.
All of these are debates we see in the status quo. Even Rhodes Must Fall, which is a very close-to-home question seeing as I got the Rhodes Scholarship after the peak of the movement, but I did write a piece prior to my taking up the scholarship, commenting on the fact that Rhodes should indeed “fall” but not through dismantling it but instead through relegation to a museum where people can learn about history through the lenses of the Rhodes statue, plaque, and the annotations surrounding it. These are conversations we see taking place around us every single day.
I think there is a wave of reckoning, a wave of awakening, and a wave of recognition that this tide will not and cannot be turned, namely the tide of an awakening to the unatoned for, unaccounted for, and largely in some context erased historical injustices. The question is not so much there for whether or not people care. I think that is step one. The second step is: How can people care effectively? How can they channel the energies most emphatically and effectively in ensuring that we do right by those who were harmed in the past, no matter how long ago they lived and no matter how fundamentally and seemingly unharmed their present-day descendants are? We have a duty at the very least to remember, talk about, and apologize over histories, even if it does not actually require any substantive and drastic redistribution efforts in the status quo today.
KEVIN MALONEY: I love that answer, and thank you for the honesty, especially in the former part of it.
I had a similar experience over the past years in going back to school and deciding to do a Masters and then deciding to do a PhD. To be very honest, there was a kind of addiction in the level of expertise especially in a really noisy world, like getting onstage and talking about your research or being able to be that person. You are always going to have imposter syndrome, but I find that there is catharsis in getting away from the noise and just doing something for two years and coming out the other side of it and feeling confident. That really spoke to me. Thank you for the honesty there, because most people would have said, “Well, I did it for everybody else,” but that’s not the way human nature works most of the time.
This has been such a great conversation. I have learned a ton, and I know everybody listening will too.
We talked about your students, the next generation. Man, is it a bit of an acidic, up-in-the-air period in geopolitics right now. Again, in terms of being a younger professor—we are in a similar age bracket—how are you thinking about imparting knowledge to students currently? What do you feel that you can give them now that is going to be usable and valuable in their toolkits not just a few months from now but a few years from now? How are you thinking about that?
BRIAN WONG: We live in an era of automation, of increasing geopolitization and hyperpoliticization of the personal, an era of great uncertainty, of flux, and of transformations that appear to be impeded if not effectively truncated, dying in the cradle before their emergence. This is an era of mass confusion, so I turn to my students always and tell them, in an era of AI, “AI is coming to get you.” You are told that AI is getting your jobs, AI is going to induce mass displacement, and AI is going to take away your freedoms, liberties, and all that.
What I would say is, remember what it means to be human and cherish that. More concretely, because I do not want to come across as a cliché or bromide disseminator here, firstly remember that it is the relationship that matters. It is not about what you say. Sometimes it is about how you say it, but very often it is about who you are saying it to and why they should and would listen to you.
Folks listen to you not because of what you have to say only. They also listen to you because you are you. So where is the “you” in this conversation? What is the difference between you and a brilliantly AI-generated passage of text or interview questions, Kevin? You are you, and you bring the sum total of all who have come before you. I am channeling my inner Kamala here into talking about who we are. We do not fall off coconut trees.
Secondly, remember the imperative of being flexible. You can get a generative AI that writes you beautiful poems, but a gen AI cannot make you coffee. You can have a brilliant robot that engages in coffee brewing, but they cannot put together a speech or do geopolitical risk analysis on the intricacies of what is happening in northern Myanmar vis-à-vis rare earths today. You can have someone who can do rare earths analysis, but it cannot necessarily provide you with an appreciation of Aristotelian ethics and the intricates of his Nicomachean Ethics and also the other great works that Aristotle put out. Get me someone who does all that, and that to me is someone who can survive and weather the onslaught of AI and beyond.
The final thing to note is that imperfection is in fact perfection. Flaw is in fact feature and indeed is a feature of the human condition. In an era where you can train gen AI or indeed other forms of AI, discriminative, for instance, to do your bidding and whatever you would like them to do, they are moving very quickly beyond just being mere stochastic parrots, to reference that rather important paper that came out.
I think by and large we have to understand and grapple with what it means to have reasonable expectations and also expectations that reflect authenticity. When I speak with my students I value and cherish those who are authentic, who push back, who challenge me, and who are not so fundamentally smooth and debonair that they will always say, “Yes, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” How can I be right if what I said five seconds ago and five seconds later are contradictory? How could I possibly be right? I often insert that into our conversations to test my students for their willingness and ability to challenge, contest, and say, “This is not what I think is right,” or “Brian, this is actually something I would strongly contest.”
I want them to do that because to be able to speak up for yourself, to be able to challenge and question, is the greatest gift that has been bestowed upon mankind. I don’t think any other form of technology can ever reasonably or sufficiently supplant that. I guess that is my last piece of advice in response to your wonderful question.
KEVIN MALONEY: That is great. There is a reason, coming out of the Aristotelian and Socratic tradition. The question is how do we live a good life and not how do we live a perfect life.
BRIAN WONG: That is exactly right.
KEVIN MALONEY: Ethics is not binary, it is not zero-sum, it is not ones and zeros, and I think this is cutting through what you are telling your students. I feel very strongly that humanities are going to play a critical role in the future, and I think this is a moment when we need to lean into ethics instead of away from it, and not lean into moral absolutism right now. We need to understand the gray area in these discussions. That is the only way we are going to move forward as humans. It is an interesting moment.
Brian, thank you so much. I learned so much from this conversation. I cannot wait to get this out, and when that book comes out on AI and ethics I hope you are making your way to some other places outside of Hong Kong. We would love to figure out how to do something with you. That would be amazing.
BRIAN WONG: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, and once again I am a massive fan of the work that you guys do. It is tremendous and terrific to be able to join you today, so thanks for having me.
KEVIN MALONEY: Thank you so much, Brian.
BRIAN WONG: Thank you so much.
Carnegie Council 国际事务伦理中心是一个独立的、无党派的非营利机构。本播客表达的观点仅代表发言者本人，并不一定反映Carnegie Council 的立场。
