Break the Rules Will East Beat West? Ft. Melissa Chen & Paul Rossi (+ Expat in Locked Down Shanghai)
May 8, 2022
Melissa Chen, commentator on liberalism and East Asian governance, and Paul Rossi, math teacher and writer on education and culture, join Ted, a British expat reporting from locked-down Shanghai. They debate Eastern education rigor, Confucian social cohesion, Western cultural decline, China’s long-game state power, school ‘woke’ influences, and daily life logistics under strict COVID lockdowns.
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Prioritize Core STEM Time Over Identity Curricula
- Melissa warns policymakers to prioritize core skills: avoid replacing class hours for math and science with identity curricula that undermine global competitiveness.
- She points to California making ethnic studies a graduation requirement as an example of finite time misallocation.
Humiliation Fuels Nationalist Coordination
- Paul Rossi observes national humiliation fuels nationalism; China coordinates political-economic power in ways liberal democracies struggle to match.
- He urges the West to reconnect with a shared cultural identity to regain geopolitical and cultural footing.
National Narratives Fail At Extremes
- Melissa argues both East and West distort national narratives: China externalizes humiliation while the US sometimes amplifies fault lines (e.g., 1619 Project), leaving truth between extremes.
- She recommends balancing patriotic honesty with critical reform to avoid either triumphalism or self-flagellation.