The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg · The Dispatch

What Should We Want From China? | Interview: Andrew Collier

March 2, 2026·50 min·4 clips

Jack Ma called Chinese regulators incompetent at a conference — and within days his empire was dismantled.

Kevin Williamson starts in Jonah Goldberg's borrowed chair. Jonah is away on vacation, and Williamson admits, with a dry shrug, that he is not a China guy despite somehow ending up across from China specialists. Andrew Collier is the guest. Williamson works through Collier's background in Chinese macroeconomics, Harvard's Kennedy School, Bank of China work in the United States, Peking University, and three books before opening with Jonah's usual book question. The better thread comes when he asks how to judge the old American bet that China would liberalize through trade and openness. Collier does not let anyone off cleanly. He says Americans were naive, especially about the idea that the American political model could be copied almost anywhere. The Iraq analogy matters here. Collier ties China optimism to the same habit of thinking openness, trade, or even invasion would naturally lead to democracy. Trade and the internet carried a lot of that confidence, but he does not call the whole thing a bust. China did not become a democracy. Still, his time around Chinese business life showed him entrepreneurial, competitive, often Western-oriented people operating outside the state system. That keeps the conversation from settling into slogans. In Collier's telling, the Deng Xiaoping years of the 1980s and 1990s helped build something like quasi-capitalism without producing liberal democracy. Then comes the caveat that gives the interview its shape. China is not democratic, but Collier says it is more interactive than the usual top-down account allows. Beijing listens to provinces, and provinces listen to counties and townships, partly because local governments now control far more money. Williamson lets that complexity sit. Near the end, he compares all the new China material to protein in a meal: useful, dense, and better taken in portions.

As heard by us

A sober China-policy conversation about naive American expectations, real economic change, and the limits of engagement.

What Should We Want From China? is less a China-policy manifesto than a careful argument about American expectations. Kevin Williamson, filling in for Jonah Goldberg, lets Andrew Collier press on the old hope that trade, the internet, and openness would push China toward…

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Why you'd press play

You want a sober China briefing without the cable-news panic.

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