Don’t turn page on China

George Costanza grumbled to Jerry Seinfeld about that day’s New York Times over coffee at Monk’s Cafe.

“When are they gonna learn that any news about China is an instant pageturner?”

I repeated the gag to Evan Osnos over lunch on Greenwich

Avenue back in February. We’ve known each other since before the “Seinfeld” episode aired in 1998.

After serving in 1994 as co-editor of the

Greenwich High

School newspaper,

The Beak, Evan interned at Greenwich Time. He recalled me sending him on his first assignment, to cover a sailing event, laughing at his shallow nautical knowledge.

He navigated more familiar waters when we chatted again a few days ago. I moderated a discussion with Evan for Stamford-based World Affairs Forum (WAF) titled “China & the U.S.: Shaping the Narrative.” I know as much about China as George Costanza, and even less than Evan knows about sailing (he at least has one clip in his archives).

On the other hand, Evan is one of the most authoritative journalists covering China, which is part of his politics and global affairs beat at The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for 12 years. His first book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book Award in 2014.

Evan, whose sole shortcoming may be his humility, showed mercy when we brainstormed potential issues for the Zoom forum beforehand. He considered questions pitched by WAF members and offered rewrites so I wouldn’t be awkwardly rehearsing pronunciations of Chinese names overnight.

I joked that the audio version of his January New Yorker essay on China-U.S. relations clocks in at 1:21:27, while we only had an hour. He demonstrated how deftly he can condense layered issues by stripping 98-word questions to their Twitter-friendly essence, which makes Evan the ideal person to interview himself.

The George Costanzas out there will always turn the page on China, a profound miscalculation of its relevance in their lives. The World Affairs Forum audience is considerably more sophisticated. We invited live questions and collected 41 before the clock ran out.

I chased the elephant from the room early in the exchange by veering offtheme to ask Evan about his May 11 article, “How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump.”

As evidence that not everyone in the town loathes him for revealing Greenwich’s political identity crisis in the pages of The New Yorker, he reached northeast of his computer’s camera to retrieve a Tod’s Point sticker he received in the mail “from a reader who enjoyed the story.”

It didn’t escape Evan’s attention that his article happened to drop during the peak of the polarizing debate in Greenwich over the post-pandemic schools budget.

“It felt to some people like the decision to cut funding from education in Greenwich was an extension of the kinds of values they don’t like about the Trump

Administration. So these two things became fused in people’s minds,” he said.

One of Evan’s most acute observations in the article is how “the economic divisions that would come to define America in the age of Trump became evident on the lush back roads of Greenwich, in a sign so subtle that it was easy to miss. Many of the new estates going up were no longer surrounded by the simple stone walls, stacked to the height of a farmer’s hip, that crossed the New England landscape. Instead, the builders introduced a more imposing barrier: tall, stately walls of chiselled stone, mortared in place.”

In recent weeks, he has become concerned about walls closer to his current home. For years, he could jog along Pennsylvania Avenue past the most famous address in America, a symbolic declaration of openness in contrast to shielded locations of seats of power in places such as Beijing and Cairo, where he also has lived.

That changed June 4, when the White House was wrapped in a fence and the street was blocked in the aftermath of protests over George Floyd’s death while in police custody. Evan’s musings about the significance of Trump’s wall to the WAF audience were a first draft of an article he published Wednesday.

“It’s a metaphor for the way in which we feel right now,” he said during our discussion. “Many people feel alienated from American government.”

Evan’s phrasings are so precise that I wished we were in front of a live studio audience when he uttered a rare gaffe about “the Biden Administration.”

But when he tried to synthesize the broad discussion into a sound bite, he might as well have printed it in bold on a page.

“The single greatest takeaway from our conversation today is that neither China nor the United States are showing themselves to be reliable, predictable stewards of global security at the moment.”

People who turn the page on China miss that it is poised to dominate the 21st Century the way the United States defined the 20th. Evan predicts “you are going to see China as a main character in the upcoming presidential campaign,” though there is essentially radio silence between the superpowers right now.

“People love to look back at the Soviet struggle as a model because we won that one. It’s like asking the Mets if they want to go back to being the ’86 Mets. Of course they do,” he said.

That brand of metaphor is sometimes needed to get people to pay attention. He tossed out another one as he tried to contextualize whether Chinese leaders envision dominance outside of their “neighborhood.”

“Or do they see themselves carving out this zone of control within the context of the world in which they are superpower roommates with the United States,” Evan said.

China and the United States as superpower roommates (cue to clip of Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in yet another “Odd Couple” reboot).

Now there’s a premise for a sitcom, though one of the leads may be recast in a few months.