Farewell, Reflection, Pause
As China Focus attends to events following the passing of President Carter, we will take a few weeks off from the newsletter. Plus, a reflection on the Carter legacy.
Hello!
I don’t get to write directly to our readership very often. My name is Nick, and I’m the editor of this newsletter. If you do not follow this letter through the Substack app, then you only know my voice indirectly through the interviews I help arrange and the articles I solicit and/or review.
One of my goals for 2025 is to change that and write for this publication directly more often. There are a few drafts on my desktop about the geopolitical implications of the humanities crisis in American universities and the political impossibility of any US party formulating a coherent ‘end game’ with China. I am also preparing a series of articles for this year written by Southeast Asia experts - Beneath the Wind: The US-China Rivalry from Southeast Asia. The idea is that we hear too much about US-China relations from the US and China. It’s long past time for voices from and experts on smaller countries, regions, and economic blocs to weigh in on how the rivalry impacts these places, how it can be navigated, and what is really needed from the two super powers. So far, we have entries scheduled on Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. It should be very interesting reading. (If you are an expert on anywhere in Southeast Asia and would like to contribute, please send me a pitch at nick.zeller@cartercenter.org. I’d love to read it!)
I’m writing to you now, however, to ask your patience as we step back from this newsletter for the month of January. President Carter lived a full life that impacted millions of people across the world. Although no one can be surprised at the passing of someone who has already lived for an entire century, his death for us means a great deal of reflection and a great deal of scheduling uncertainty as we rearrange normal responsibilities to attend and manage events enabling those who contributed to his cause to offer their respects. We will publish a few issues of our newsletter for the remainder of this month, but we will not resume a normal publication schedule until February.
I’ve posted a few of my thoughts on President Carter’s legacy and passing on the social media accounts life will not let me avoid (truly, LinkedIn must be the most toxic of them all). None of them, however, stray much from the first speech I gave on behalf of China Focus after joining The Carter Center last summer. I was too new and didn’t understand that no one listens to banquet speeches. Under the best circumstances speakers are ignored due to an equal mix of good food and bad audio. Under the worst circumstances, the audio is still bad but so is the food. In any case, no one listened, but I still like what I wrote.
In the bottomless depths of my own arrogance, I am providing the text of that speech below. It continues to capture how I, someone whose never met any of the Carter family, feel about Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s legacy. I hope it communicates some of that feeling to you.
China Focus has A LOT planned for 2025 - a brand new Chinese public opinion survey (coming in March), high-level and next-generation conferences, our joint conference on China Studies with Fudan University and UC-San Diego (call for papers, deadline 1/15), and much more. There’s also this newsletter, which has grown very quickly since it was launch in October. Thank you for subscribing, and I look forward to darkening your digital doors on a regular schedule again next month!
-Nick
I would like to start by thanking the organizers of this event – the American Flying Tigers Institute, the Chennault Foundation, and the American Volunteer Group Flying Tigers Association. I would also like to thank Pedro Chan and Nell Calloway for inviting The Carter Center and enabling me to be here this evening. As a member of The Carter Center and as someone who has dedicated a large portion of his life to studying Chinese history, I’m very excited to be here.
The Carter Center recently produced a memorial video for the late former first lady Rosalynn Carter. It contains a clip of her grandson Jason Carter speaking at her funeral. He says, “My grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy. Her life was a sermon.” It is a beautiful line and undoubtedly true, and it stuck with me in part because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard a great life reflected upon in this way. In the Analects of Confucius, there is a passage in which the Master is sick, and his disciple Zilu asks if he can offer a traditional prayer for his teacher. Confucius responds:
丘之祷久矣 “I have been praying for a long time now.”
In other words, Confucius believed that a life lived for the greater good was a righteous message (a prayer or a sermon) in itself. I am always fascinated by these moments when simple statements about what it means to be human can cut through time and culture to say the same thing.
According to a recent biography, in the 1960s, when Jimmy Carter was in his first term as a Georgia state senator, he became interested in the work of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He was particularly struck by the final lines of a poem Thomas wrote immediately after World War II titled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” The final lines read:
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Carter soon started pressuring other state senators into reading and discussing Thomas’s poetry and even began quoting it in speeches before the Atlanta Journal Constitution mocked him for it. His literary taste may have been a bit too highbrow for his peers, but at The Carter Center we work to preserve President Carter’s legacy in myriad ways. I like to think I am doing that tonight by awkwardly quoting the same poetry. But there is a point beyond this.
“After the first death, there is no other.” The line moved and confused President Carter. What did it mean? Certainly, Thomas was not diminishing the loss of life in World War II by refusing to count it. Instead, the meaning is the opposite. The loss of life in war is so great that one cannot fully comprehend, process, or mourn it. So, Thomas refused to mourn. The crime of war, the fact that war remained possible in this world, meant that really mourning was impossible. Here again, a similar idea can be found in Chinese literature.
In March 1926, a group of protesters gathered at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing to protest the Japanese invasion of Chinese territory and the local government’s collaboration with the Japanese military. The local government ordered military police to violently disperse the crowd, leaving 47 dead and 200 injured. Among the dead was a student of the great Chinese modern poet Lu Xun. It took Lu Xun weeks to compose an essay memorializing his late student.
“The blood of over forty youths has saturated my surroundings, making it difficult for me to see, hear, or breathe,” he wrote. “What could I possibly have to say?”
Mirroring a sentiment in Thomas’s poem, Lu Xun continued,
“I will savor the dark desolation of this inhuman world and display my utmost before this inhuman world, letting it delight in my pain. Let this be the humble offering of one still living, presented at the altar of the dead.”
Trying to come to terms with the loss of life in the events leading up to and during World War II, these two poets from opposite sides of the earth drew very similar conclusions. Although both Dylan Thomas and Lu Xun attempted to frame their grief as a refusal to mourn, their refusal is the weak protest of someone who has already lost. The truth revealed in the work of both men is that it is impossible to meaningfully mourn those lost in war.
I know this is a gloomy message. I was invited to this banquet tonight to join in a celebration of 45 years of peace between the United States and China. But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the pricelessness of what we are celebrating. Just as the importance of a life lived in the service of the greater good cuts across centuries, the importance of waging peace cuts across all other human divisions.
I may be biased, but I believe that the normalization of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in January 1979 is the most important legacy of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At least internationally, I believe it is the most important legacy of his counterpart in normalization – Deng Xiaoping. The two men worked out agreements that changed the world. The Science and Technology agreement they signed allowed America and China to cooperate in research that made immeasurable contributions to what we know about cancer, renewable energy, and environmental science. As an example of what U.S.-China cooperation could achieve, this agreement was renewed by leaders on both sides every five years until this year, when it was allowed to end. [Update: It’s operative once more with “guardrails.”]
Writing about the 40th anniversary of the U.S.-China relationship, President Carter described the peaceful decades since his presidency ended as “a testament to the ability of countries with different histories, cultures and political systems to work together for the greater good.” Normalization had never been a popular decision in the United States. Yet, President Carter warned that the cooperation of both countries was necessary in facing the planet’s most serious problems. Like Confucius, President and Mrs. Carter, the staff of The Carter Center, and many of you have been praying this prayer for a long time now. I’m so glad to be with you tonight to celebrate the fruits of that prayer – and to pray a little harder with you in the years to come.
Nick Zeller is editor of the U.S.-China Perception Monitor and a senior program associate at The Carter Center’s China Focus iniative.
The views expressed in this article represent those of the author(s) and not those of The Carter Center.
That’s it from Atlanta. Y’all be good.