even over the weekend i guess that's right i was here for a committee of one hundred conference and milica site i was over there all over waldorf a story that's an important organization and yes yes it's a prominent organization of chinese americans who are committed to human rights  promoter understanding between china and the u s great well the book is great welcome welcome very much to our conversations were it's a great personal honor to walk and pleasure to welcome to the program iris chang and iris chang and i met some years ago when she was engaged in if i may show writing a book that became a bestseller at times the new york times bestseller that being with the paperback edition that was called the rape of nanking which people will it is still in the bookstores i go absolutely still in the bookstores and it was a discussion of the horrendous treatment of the chinese in name king in the thirty's and so forth and she now has she's on tour just starting a book tour to promote and let people know about her new book here no it's my pleasure indeed to welcome you to the program so i wonder if you can we've got a lot to talk about to so much contained in the book and as i say it really is so beautifully written you write really very very well and i thank you very much i learned a great deal but i wonder maybe you could could you share with arsed myself and with the table audience a little of your own background where you were born and raised that sort of thing i mean we can get into a conversation ok certainly i was born in princeton new jersey the daughter of two academics american one was the reality of how chinese people were depicted in the mass media and the says something that came through like television theaters and it was riddled with racial stereotypes you know the food and shoot charlie but at the same time then there was also the reality of my personal life which is very different from that our university community was truly multi ethnic community and there were scholars from all over the world congregating in this small town in cornfields to do important research and interracial marriage was very common in my high school was almost like a mini united nation and so i always grew up feeling that while popular culture might have these stereotypes that in real life people can be friend each other across color lines work together even marry each other and race should not be a consideration but then later i remember there was a backlash against chinese americans at that time because suddenly china was viewed as a potential enemy you know want to talk about it yeah yeah and then we had to do with the fact that with the soviet and that sort of thing so there was an anti communist sentiment there with the korean war wasn't are entitled chinese or anti asian sentiments that took on some pretty nasty to anyone had back then it would happen in cycles i mean i would say that the st backlash major backlash against the chinese americans came into actually in the th seventies because of the economic depression white workers were afraid of chinese economic competition among the though like during world war two when china with america's allies and us and then in japan was actually seen as the great villain and japanese americans were then seems the bad guys and they were then in turn you know horrible horrible shameful period in our rose gradually up to the top where in their model minorities now and there they're winning the nobel prize absolutely absolutely and it's because they were actually welcomed when they st arrived it was only when their numbers screw or when there was an economical political crisis the things got worse they'd be scapegoated that's right and the reason i feel it's important to emphasize that is that other ethnic groups often experience the same thing sure just think of the jews went through the irish went through it everybody went through these people that came here really as a form story but really as a quintessential american when we've got an ethic group that like other ethnic groups really struggled to assert their rights as americans they were searching for the american dream yeah many of them achieved it many of them had to face had a piece in there defy me going back to history is that at the time of hannibal was it or the time of the punic wars or something that there had been established in china where you had this long running civilization a language that was it restricted to the leading elements of the of the society what happened was it it helped china it's united china is a cohesive force it did because while there are many dialects in the country all the educated individuals in china could read and understand that one standard chinese and that was introduced by a particular individual that was an emperor yes and but the more stockport thing is that it was instrumental in creating that bureaucratic infrastructure yeah it created a bureaucratic infrastructure that separated the leaders from the masses as i read it in  your story and that it was only the leadership to get do this and they would aspire but trying to pass certain tests and become part of that leadership element during the ching dynasty the manchus exerted great control over the chinese populace by having them actually engage in their own suppression my having them go through these tests and there are three tiers of tests one at the local level the other at the provincial level finally and the one up at the national level which would tradition or something like that in iraq but it did give a it gave it like they had latin for a while among the catholics in the or the church and in europe where the language of the educated class there was the language of the leadership element in china that gave  which is spoken by many people and you have also many other dialects but all of that the fact that there was one standard written language as i said before helps kind of empower a central eyes government soon and then you have this other country of the united states which was which was such a new rock country territory and at the time of the in the mid th century there had been you know terrible problems caused by overpopulation a natural disaster trying to what happened was that a lot of people decided that they had to leave i mean people do not get up and just naturally emigrate it has hard that's right you know to start all over again and strong economic and political pressures are usually in place me there are about three million chinese americans today in the united states which is not a very large number in the overall population but it is the largest size that the population has been  no yes i mean ever there was a time in this country when there were only a few tens of thousands of chinese like in the early part of the th century before and by you know in before eight hundred and fifty i think there may have been no fewer than fifty yeah there was just a few here that  then it sounded to me like if i may you set me straight but it sounded like a lot of those people were brought here they were almost impressed then they sounded like conditions of the inner passage of some of the black slaves that were brought to america within this maybe i overrode that but it was a very difficult situation a lot of people came away from and the terms under which they were brought here were very very limiting on to the well that was the many of them signed contracts that put them in a period of you know ind they would have to pay off their debt but but they were not slaves it was it was just a situation in which they would be in debt you know what was happening with the chinese in cuba or the chinese who were tricked into being slaves and   involved in that in the gold rush that's right and sometimes they didn't want to challenge the white miners so they would actually be scavengers then when kind of pick over abandon claims rather than actually come head to head with many of the white prospects you know and then the then they took up and became did the prejudice against them manifest itself from the get go from the beginning or was there a period of live let live kind of thing out there in go was sort of a wide open it was wide open frontier town and what is so astonishing is that the chinese were actually welcomed at st when they st arrived in san francisco the city leaders held a special party for them they were invited they were kind of quaint and and you know it's interesting to note that the chinese beef with who had preceded their arrival actually were often displayed as as museum to the chinese woman was actually it was shown in a museum in new york but it was only when the number swelled up into the thousands when there was a backlash own when they became an economic threat and soon they laws were passed to prevent the advancement the chinese were not permitted to testify against whites they were not no they were not and they were also forced to pay special taxes special license fees the revenue of which went to support hospitals which they were not allowed to use and what they soon realized this while they might have had tremendous economic power they did not have the political power that was required to protect themselves now doesn't mean that the chinese were passive just all this they constantly fought back right from the beginning when they were building the transcontinental railroad they were really good at it they were wonderful at it but it came at a tremendous cost three chinese died for every really kind of cut out of a lot of the official histories later i mean that they were not really seen until recently as being part of this wonderful epic experience and yeah building the railroad i had occasion i do to do one it would happen to be about the treatment of blacks in the slave that sort of thing and went back in the th century with cartoons and everything and there was really vicious races stuff directed against the chinese yes there was against the asian as much as there a great number went to other parts maybe thirty million i think you said other who went to places like in south asia so they moved out and they became maybe a good film you know and that's their social like in indonesia they're associated with a great that they filled a mill man role and they tom soul has spoken of the certain racists who outside of their homeland have adopted the role of middle man minorities the chinese even here in the united states but then the backlash against them is even more extreme but when that when they were thinking of they called the gold mountain and the somebody's going to go off the gold mountain and they're going to make a lot of money and come back in honor and also repatriate back and so forth that were the united states was a goal after about eight hundred and fifty we'll say a lot of them didn't think they were going to stay permanently that is often the case in most immigrant stories they came here and they often sent money back to their family with fact a lot of the immigrants were actually pressured by their families to people to pakistan people will come here or they will go into the gulf states now and then they will do the remittances back and that's right there in a lot of them are fleeing repressive governments and it's fun it's more opportunity here and the they're the often it's the money it's the lifeline for their entire families they can't leave they feel obligated to and then what happens is inevitably they change they come here and even though they're my dream of going home what they don't realize is when they do go back to china t chinese they once knew doesn't exist anymore changes things change and go home and so that's right now trying to been going through some big changes and there's no question i mean that's one thing i really want people when they read my book to keep in mind is that we tend to view races or viewpoint who leaves the country and tries to return to that fifty years later is not going to be able to do so and also the whole nature of for example interracial marriage which occurred all across the chinese american immigrant experience  the british when they went out and colonized i mean i read the thing the seas the cells were roads the other day and his attitude toward the people in africa was that they were just lesser beings and we had to do everything we can to make them britishers and we were as really that there are there are almost no real actual biological differences right race is there it's just in sickness and yeah that's right well they we were understand that so that there but still people have suffered this suffered and benefited dieting going to see for about four hundred years they've been in control and so when there was a big overthrow leading up to that then you had a big big thing with mr monti tomb and the communists in words or a number of people maybe some of the people were educated some of the people there were well that was the wave that they would have wanted to maybe in great desperation with this china this communist thing that mr mao was doing that was a a wave of immigration came from that some of the best educated in the most well placed i'm forwarding left not only for america but also for other parts of asia just as the st wave came to state you know political and economic conditions from the nd wave also came as a result elites and the nationalist regime had to go into exile you know most of them went to taiwan or hong kong only if st at st and often either they or their children when then come to the united states yes  starting in the sixty's and well before them but the i think there was a massive wave from taiwan that came in the sixty's to attend graduate programs and colleges in the united states but there were a small number of people who immigrated directly from china to the now well what what has happened is that yes china now is undergoing a huge economic boom and so tremendous growth growth there's it's almost like that we're on the verge of seeing a huge intellectual and economic and artistic renaissance in china you know so because of the one child policy and parents now have the resources to lavish this much attention on one child this as they want  before i think china tended to you know when it's over population to have many children with a family and a lot of them wouldn't necessarily have that much at attention and in fact a lot of them lived in dire poverty and you know there are some of the pyramid world because the thing is that you so many would die and you had some figures in there that i rates of child mortality even and the living the living well i can remember if i can this is in my country in the united states my father was mournin what setting is aside but maybe just really marvelous advancements in all fields of learning and education and there's so much going on you could live in the th century it took two hundred years to invent a nail now they've got a revolution in every field every day and things are happening so  exciting because there's so much potential for good and yet there is that frightening potential to for it to be used destructively absolutely you had a true we've got the damage when i think it's still there it's awful on television you know the day who knows and we going away with the fall of the soviet union that damn ugly and stormy still can destroy the whole species that's right and that's something brand new since about one thousand nine hundred and seventy when we could do that we were protected before that so we live in a kind of existential challenging here and where you get this tremendous capability but at the same time we have a tremendous destructive capability if it's let loose by some conflict a foxconn for gratian or confluence of different kinds of and that's why we have to be so vigilant about preserving experience of the chinese is just one facet of that struggle and that's why the last chapter of my book's called an uncertain future you know and because they and other ethnic groups can continue to experience racial or ethnic cultural profiling and none of us are really safe in the end you know i feel that people should adopt a universal standard when they look at the spec and realize that a lot of the problems facing the chinese  the american people's the right have been as few as ten i mean that crossing back fifteen thousand years ago in the most horrendous condition that well that was the american indian people who were decimated in this continent they had just been decimated and still are they've got that kind of a thing but they're they're all part of eleven system and we got these all four kinds of conditions and we're susceptible to all kinds of hate mongering particular when things group is has a unique lock or monopoly on committing atrocities or being the victim of them in fact there's been some interesting research finds but there's only one factor that determines whether a group is going to commit these atrocities  researchers like to look it up and he actually found that across world history no one race or nationality or religion or political philosophy was responsible for any for these genocides and the only thing that was responsible was the sheer concentration of power in other words in a sense if an elitist people amass enough power no matter what their i doubt it was war their race or their nationality religion they would find a reason to they would commit atrocities they would kill they would have wage war surprised and they would kill their own people at home well lord acton said power tends to corrupt absolute power corrupts absolutely and it was right that's right and now actually the theme of suggests to me that all people that are capable of this and that the real problem we're facing that is is the concentration of power and then the solution he found was the diffusion of power that if you do it through democracy to a threat you cation that every time you have a system of checks and balances and prevent people from acting on their darkest impulses then these trustees are less likely wasn't alan says didn't prevent them from acting on their darkest employ in other words in the darkest impulses are part of the human character i think so you think they right we're the survivors were the best that we can win out over you because we're better than you and that kind of thing is just unleashed a lot of awful thing one of it's also only is it unleashed that nationalism listen nationalism or self aggrandizement the creative spirit the thrust of the to create something new create something new i mean beethoven could have just sat down and the st symphony you had to do ninety you had to make new and you know there's a creative spirit thrusting out to make the world different somehow or something  my getting wrong because that's well that's what's an appropriate utilization of power is that power that creative power do you say what i'm saying or or the forward thrust of of the whole human experience is it's not all thousand years that we've been here homosapien we start out of africa from a common ancestor to ten thousand generations ago and it's only in your my lifetime that we finally got the destructive technological extend capability to unleash a system of destructive exchange of weaponry that would destroy the whole species couldn't do that even though i mean all life on the planet no i don't almost all no no no a cockroach well that's a big difference is a big difference because i mean if i may i don't want to be philosophical but what the elsewhere in this universe or other parallel universes or something just so we don't have contact with the seti or anything like that life itself is even more precious lay aside we can't destroy life apparently there are life forms at the lower  to smokers in the depths of the ocean deeps that are not even based on photosynthesis so there could be a continuation of an evolving over some billions of years but we can wipe out our species we couldn't do that the japanese couldn't do it they could as hard as they wanted to try wipe out everything nice person on the world but they were just important in terms of being able to do that now we can do it and we have these were so there's an existential challenge of a major species the immediate culture ethnic group that's in my book yeah you certainly these themes that well fact all of us yeah yeah and the example of the chinese is one that we can learn from and the differences between interesting china and america too because they're both  continental base huge company in the same temperate zone they got about the same temperate zone the both well and out in dust i mean they were natural resources they they sit on similar situations as far as the wind now i hear the two great superpower they powerful country next to the united states which the french now call a hyper power or superpower the united states of america what you think the prospect is for the relationship between china and the united states and what is the tung is there division there or along the lines of what those two experiences spell and has the transition from the communist model which was so popular became almost a national western imported religion in a certain sense it would seem to me want to talk some about confucianism or what the religious basis of the chinese experience is what is the what is the implications of the possibility of seeing things differently from a chinese perspective in terms of the future of that country in the world well of course no one can predict the future no one can even try to predict the future because when you try to do that you know is wrong that's right yeah you understand what i'm but i think what we sh realize is that china and the united states everything so interconnected the states are mobile economy that very quickly it's we will be you know truly part of a global village and so it's important for us to really understand the history of every country we're doing business with the cultural context and also keep in mind the overarching need to preserve in human rights a civil liberties because where really going to have to all work together in order to assure our survival and our continued prosperity there is some people take exception to the human rights record of the chinese communist forward and all the things that were attempted the attempt to bring some sort of equity to the presence of china but there's one terrible human rights abuses not only in mainland china but us of taiwan across the world this is yeah very sad legacy when you look at it it not only provides a historical context for these power struggles but lets the citizen dream know the means by which a lot of these atrocities could occur and concentration the glamorgan a power they have to call the united states of america hyper power now the french do a lot of people take exception to what we're doing the united states is doing and there's a movement against it might be a pile thing in a certain sense so much of the world was in opposition to what the united states did in iraq and what they're doing and they jumped up very quickly using the internet and there was a thing in the to too much concentrated power in the  political aspect of it is one thing the other thing is economic whether or not you can have i wonder if you can have a a political democracy or the thing if you have a in economic pollute ocracy the assets are all light with big big government and big military well that's called fascism you know what i think we're there's a danger of that don't you think absolutely yeah i would say that which you have to do is to make sure that these that there's some way of checks and balances and a hitler was voted in in germany you got the bit it is teasing there was no looking back you know and there's some people feel there's a danger of that now you know there might be a countervailing element in terms of some some people who are going to in a certain sense stand up to that and yet at the same time the american model is a heck of a model there's a it's a heck of a country there's a lot of people who come together here and the law can be learned from the american model but the american model may be going off the track some people  well i think that the american people have to make sure that that all of the standards that were set down by our founding fathers are upheld of course as you know that our founding fathers many of that was labeled as flavor so it's often they don't let your w and they're stacked oh yeah i know and that's a that's a thing that's a thing that we want to do and so in between there becomes books to give understanding like yours yours gives a tremendously nuanced understanding really highly recommend the book because it's such a good not only is the story so inherently fascinating the writing is so good i really don't know i mean it is heartfelt it's really good you can't hardly put the book down i wonder about this question of whether the relationship between china and the united states there's we have a new  leadership in china emerging now do you follow that carefully what's the situation as far as taiwan and china is concerned is there likely to be a conflict there do you have a certain kind of ethic that is representative of the kuomintang or taiwan that is different than and china what's happening in china and what happened to the the because the challenges that we may go into space the other challenge would be that we might have a human society is to make sure that we don't have plutocracies of just the elite are going to do very where everything benefits only the few i'll pass out and i like and i have an ideal jeffersonian democracy where you have a system of you know entrepreneurs keep people who  you know that are the opposite who are working the system opposite to that of a say centralized government where everything is tightly controlled by elite as you could see from rebels research in the research of others you know that type of system is very dangerous and the health to be afraid of the abuse of power by by governments by your own government is a very it's a very important you know aspect of making sure that democracy is promot started and just solved as the need for them arises and that there is tremendous freedom within every individual you know to to enter an entity and any artistic or creative or business endeavor y out you can drop out of society from the while you know you could also come back and you could start over another field some options open intrapreneur i've done that kind of mindset should be encouraged and that also is the dissemination of power and rules and absolutely and i was great israel quite straight america great read and a source of education bernie one who can get it it's highly recommended by me and i'm sure you do enjoy it and thank you really very much for every for coming in for the book and for for all your work oh it's going to pleasure your pleasure to  her perceptions were invited to and it will be coming back again next week that's it for this particular segment we're going to talk for about twenty two hours easy but we got a good start on that and you could do well to go to the book and we recommend it thanks room with you next week and they're all overlaid with the design that d n a that makes it work as a system one hundred trillion it makes internet look like a cake walk