Interesting points. It also seems relevant to know whether the kind of “singling out” directed at Tesla also happens to other Chinese EV makers. This is hard to assess, but my subjective view (based on admittedly very limited exposure to the Chinese media) is that the negative publicity re Tesla is no more significant than any other negative publicity about other Chinese EVs.
>My pushback here is not that government influence never exists. It is about the inferential jump from “this spread widely” to “this signals a policy reversal.” In practice, the argument quietly shifts from capability to culpability—from “could” to “therefore did.”
This articulates *exactly* my frustration with a lot of western China-related reporting.
Alexis de Tocqueville, observing the young American republic with the detached precision of an outsider, remarked in Democracy in America that "the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people." He meant this not as simple condemnation but as diagnosis: a civilization shaped by short settlement history, Protestant commercial culture, and the relentless pressure of democratic equality tends, he argued, to subordinate metaphysical patience to instrumental urgency. What Wang Zichen's careful dissection of the Tesla-China media episode reveals is precisely this tendency operating at the level of geopolitical analysis. The analytical habit of treating "state influence" as a conclusion rather than a starting condition is not an innocent methodological error. It is the intellectual expression of a civilization that Tocqueville elsewhere described as inclined to mistake energy and confidence for depth, and that has historically found it easier to construct a usable enemy than to inhabit the uncomfortable complexity of a genuinely foreign civilization. Thucydides, writing of the Athenian assembly's disastrous rush toward the Sicilian Expedition, warned that the Athenians "were ignorant of the size of the island and of the number of its inhabitants," and that this ignorance was not accidental but willed, sustained by the emotional momentum of collective desire. The parallel is uncomfortable: when Rush Doshi moves from "Chinese portals reposted this story" to "Beijing has signaled a policy reversal against Tesla," he is not conducting analysis so much as confirming a prior. And prior-confirmation, as Thucydides understood, tends to end badly for the confirmer.
The deeper cultural asymmetry at work here is the one between what we might call predatory knowing and patient knowing, between civilizations whose relationship to truth is primarily instrumental and those whose relationship to time is long enough to make patience structurally possible. China's media ecology, as Wang meticulously explains, is not a simple top-down signaling machine but a layered, historically sedimented system shaped by portal-era path dependence, risk-averse compliance culture, cheap aggregation economics, and the entirely ordinary human instinct to share a dramatic story about a car losing power on a highway. To flatten all of this into "state coordination" is to commit what Simone Weil, writing about the uses of force, called the error of seeing only the exercise of power where one should also see the weight of circumstance. Montaigne, that great skeptic of civilizational self-congratulation, wrote that "every man carries the entire form of the human condition within him," and the corollary for nations is that every media ecosystem carries within it the entire sediment of its own history. The American analytical temptation is to read Chinese complexity through American categories, specifically the clean binary of state versus market that American political culture has always preferred, and then to treat the failure of Chinese reality to fit those categories as evidence of Chinese bad faith rather than American conceptual poverty. Ibn Khaldun, observing the rise and decline of successive civilizations from his position of magnificent detachment in fourteenth-century North Africa, noted that dominant powers characteristically develop a kind of analytical arrogance, assuming that what they cannot easily categorize must be deceptive.
What Wang's exchange with Doshi ultimately illuminates is something Tocqueville diagnosed as both the strength and the long-term vulnerability of democratic cultures: the tendency to substitute rhetorical persuasion for epistemic discipline, and to mistake the emotional resonance of a narrative for its truth content. "In democracies," Tocqueville wrote, "nothing is more fertile in marvels than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom's apprenticeship." The apprenticeship he had in mind was not political but cognitive: learning to sit with ambiguity, to resist the gravitational pull of the satisfying story, to ask as Wang does what would actually count as corroboration rather than what feels confirmatory. The Athenian orator Demosthenes, watching Philip of Macedon advance through a series of partial truths and plausible framings, warned his countrymen that "nothing is easier than self-deceit, for what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." The strategic use of partial truths, the Athenians learned at enormous cost, tends to degrade the user's own epistemic instruments over time: you eventually lose the capacity to distinguish between the enemy you have constructed for strategic purposes and the civilization that actually exists. Wang's quiet insistence on attribution, context, and restraint is not pedantry. It is, in the deepest sense, a defense of the analytical commons, a reminder that civilizations which abandon the discipline of accurate perception in favor of strategic narration do not, in the end, serve even their own interests very well.
Also considering US Large Corporation more or less own the US Government ala the famous Princeton study showing voting doesn't mater, money does, it's hard to argue US companies are not benefiting from the government they own.
Thanks.
Interesting points. It also seems relevant to know whether the kind of “singling out” directed at Tesla also happens to other Chinese EV makers. This is hard to assess, but my subjective view (based on admittedly very limited exposure to the Chinese media) is that the negative publicity re Tesla is no more significant than any other negative publicity about other Chinese EVs.
>My pushback here is not that government influence never exists. It is about the inferential jump from “this spread widely” to “this signals a policy reversal.” In practice, the argument quietly shifts from capability to culpability—from “could” to “therefore did.”
This articulates *exactly* my frustration with a lot of western China-related reporting.
As an aside, TIL that China.com still exists
Alexis de Tocqueville, observing the young American republic with the detached precision of an outsider, remarked in Democracy in America that "the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people." He meant this not as simple condemnation but as diagnosis: a civilization shaped by short settlement history, Protestant commercial culture, and the relentless pressure of democratic equality tends, he argued, to subordinate metaphysical patience to instrumental urgency. What Wang Zichen's careful dissection of the Tesla-China media episode reveals is precisely this tendency operating at the level of geopolitical analysis. The analytical habit of treating "state influence" as a conclusion rather than a starting condition is not an innocent methodological error. It is the intellectual expression of a civilization that Tocqueville elsewhere described as inclined to mistake energy and confidence for depth, and that has historically found it easier to construct a usable enemy than to inhabit the uncomfortable complexity of a genuinely foreign civilization. Thucydides, writing of the Athenian assembly's disastrous rush toward the Sicilian Expedition, warned that the Athenians "were ignorant of the size of the island and of the number of its inhabitants," and that this ignorance was not accidental but willed, sustained by the emotional momentum of collective desire. The parallel is uncomfortable: when Rush Doshi moves from "Chinese portals reposted this story" to "Beijing has signaled a policy reversal against Tesla," he is not conducting analysis so much as confirming a prior. And prior-confirmation, as Thucydides understood, tends to end badly for the confirmer.
The deeper cultural asymmetry at work here is the one between what we might call predatory knowing and patient knowing, between civilizations whose relationship to truth is primarily instrumental and those whose relationship to time is long enough to make patience structurally possible. China's media ecology, as Wang meticulously explains, is not a simple top-down signaling machine but a layered, historically sedimented system shaped by portal-era path dependence, risk-averse compliance culture, cheap aggregation economics, and the entirely ordinary human instinct to share a dramatic story about a car losing power on a highway. To flatten all of this into "state coordination" is to commit what Simone Weil, writing about the uses of force, called the error of seeing only the exercise of power where one should also see the weight of circumstance. Montaigne, that great skeptic of civilizational self-congratulation, wrote that "every man carries the entire form of the human condition within him," and the corollary for nations is that every media ecosystem carries within it the entire sediment of its own history. The American analytical temptation is to read Chinese complexity through American categories, specifically the clean binary of state versus market that American political culture has always preferred, and then to treat the failure of Chinese reality to fit those categories as evidence of Chinese bad faith rather than American conceptual poverty. Ibn Khaldun, observing the rise and decline of successive civilizations from his position of magnificent detachment in fourteenth-century North Africa, noted that dominant powers characteristically develop a kind of analytical arrogance, assuming that what they cannot easily categorize must be deceptive.
What Wang's exchange with Doshi ultimately illuminates is something Tocqueville diagnosed as both the strength and the long-term vulnerability of democratic cultures: the tendency to substitute rhetorical persuasion for epistemic discipline, and to mistake the emotional resonance of a narrative for its truth content. "In democracies," Tocqueville wrote, "nothing is more fertile in marvels than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom's apprenticeship." The apprenticeship he had in mind was not political but cognitive: learning to sit with ambiguity, to resist the gravitational pull of the satisfying story, to ask as Wang does what would actually count as corroboration rather than what feels confirmatory. The Athenian orator Demosthenes, watching Philip of Macedon advance through a series of partial truths and plausible framings, warned his countrymen that "nothing is easier than self-deceit, for what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." The strategic use of partial truths, the Athenians learned at enormous cost, tends to degrade the user's own epistemic instruments over time: you eventually lose the capacity to distinguish between the enemy you have constructed for strategic purposes and the civilization that actually exists. Wang's quiet insistence on attribution, context, and restraint is not pedantry. It is, in the deepest sense, a defense of the analytical commons, a reminder that civilizations which abandon the discipline of accurate perception in favor of strategic narration do not, in the end, serve even their own interests very well.
Also considering US Large Corporation more or less own the US Government ala the famous Princeton study showing voting doesn't mater, money does, it's hard to argue US companies are not benefiting from the government they own.