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Podcasts and Essays on China — Free Version
Through Enemy Eyes: Using AI to Challenge Your Own Worldview
How I fed ChatGPT my life's work and had it critique my worldview from eight different ideological perspectives, from Chinese nationalists to American neocons
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If reading about other people’s interactions with generative AI bores you, you might want to skip this one. But I’m absolutely fascinated by ChatGPT and its ilk and have found interesting ways to use LLMs as a kind of “thinking partner” when developing ideas. That eventually led to the experiment that I discuss below.
Most of the public discussion here in the U.S. about generative AI, when it isn’t about dystopian or even apocalyptic fears or, more recently, about the surprising arrival of DeepSeek, seems to revolve around productivity hacks. I occasionally find some of that useful. But I don’t code, alas, and so much of its most impressive powers are wasted on me. I don’t use it for writing: I type fast and never need it to write even the simplest of emails, and would never trust it to actually write anything substantial for me. And, doubtless to the great relief of some readers, I’ve come to the conclusion that the AI-generated images I once used to illustrate my essays just didn’t add anything. Yes, I still play around with video for fun, or have it turn great poetry into doggerel or limericks, or answer quick questions like “Where the hell is the gas tank release on a Jeep Compass?” which I asked as while trying to fill the tank of a rental before returning it the other day. (The answer is there isn’t one: you press on the gas tank cover thing).
But most often, I use generative AI to challenge and critique my thinking, to refine arguments, to get feedback on ideas, and to stress-test the positions I advance in essays or speeches. I use it, in other words, for intellectual exploration.
Different LLMs excel at different tasks. I personally find Claude Sonnet to be very good at writing-related tasks, especially when they involve real creativity, as with the limericks. It’s good at aping style and voice and generates sentences that sound to my ear indistinguishable from unassisted human writing. It doesn’t sparkle or sing, but it’s perfectly decent.
But the thing that keeps me coming back to ChatGPT — I use 4o and, more recently, o3-mini — is its long-term or persistent memory. This is a user-specific memory system that allows it to recall facts, preferences, and recurring topics across different conversations. And having used it now on a near-daily basis for over a year now, it “knows” me well. Some months ago, a good friend of mine suggested I try a prompt she’d also tried: “Based on all our interactions, what is one thing you can tell me about myself that I may not even know about myself.” Try that one: if you’re like me and you’ve got a long history with lots of interactions, you’ll probably be surprised by how canny the answer is.
In my case, I’ve deliberately given it a lot to work with. ChatGPT has digested just about everything of any consequence that I’ve written in the last several years, every transcript of every podcast I’ve hosted since Sinica rebooted last February, and several podcasts that I’ve been on as a guest — as well as a whole lot of candid conversations where ChatGPT asked the questions and I provided answers. It’s digested columns I wrote for that’s Beijing and The Beijinger when I lived in China, an embarrassing serialized short fiction series I wrote in 2000 and 2001 called “The Sanlitun Diaries,” which originally ran on ChinaNow.com, long letters to friends, abandoned book projects, notes from a family history I was once working on, and much more. When I’ve asked it to develop assessments of me as a subject from the perspective of a psychologist, an intelligence analyst, or a prospective employer, it’s done an admirable job. My wife thinks so, anyway: I’ve had it then translate such things into Chinese, and she’s often surprised at how keen its observations and inferences are, and hasn’t taken issue so far with any of its assessments.¹
I once had it produce a summary of all salient facets of my worldview — epistemology, ontology, moral philosophy, aesthetics, political leanings, economic beliefs, religion and spirituality, personal identity and life philosophy, and even attitudes toward technology. (The list of these facets was its own, not my suggestions). I must confess that its precis of my worldview was pretty much dead on. It’s something anyone can do, actually: If you don’t have enough text to feed it, but you have a bit of time, try telling it what you want — “Please write a summary of the different component parts of my worldview” — and telling it to first ask you a series of questions designed to provide sufficient information to allow it to produce such a thing. This will work with other LLMs not blessed with persistent memory, too.²
From there, confident that it had a good grasp on how I saw the world, I asked it to critique that worldview and the body of work that expresses it. For as long as I’ve been using ChatGTP, I’ve used it to examine my work for possible logical fallacies, to probe for weaknesses and likely lines of criticism, to ask for suggestions on how I might restructure my arguments for optimal effectiveness, so I knew it was good at this kind of thing.
And so I asked it, specifically, to offer critiques of my work from a variety of perspectives from which I've been criticized before:
From a Chinese nationalist perspective
From an American liberal hegemonist perspective
>From an American neoconservative perspective
After those three, I asked whether there were other perspectives from which I might take fire, and it offered a few more, with shorter critiques. I’ll include those as well.
Here below are the unedited responses:
Critique of Kaiser Kuo from the Perspective of a Chinese Ultranationalist
Kaiser Kuo, a man who claims to be a bridge between China and the West, is in reality nothing more than a comprador intellectual—one who has spent his career framing China in terms palatable to Western audiences while failing to stand firmly for the nation’s rightful place in the world. A former corporate mouthpiece for Baidu, he now masquerades as a neutral observer of China, but his true allegiance is clear: he operates within the ideological frameworks of the West, bending over backward to seek “understanding” from those who will never accept China on equal terms.
For all his professed admiration of Chinese history, culture, and intellectual traditions, Kuo ultimately remains a prisoner of Western liberal discourse. His so-called “cognitive empathy” is nothing more than an excuse to entertain anti-China perspectives under the guise of balance. Instead of using his considerable platform to unambiguously counter the endless slander China faces, he chooses to "explore different perspectives," as if there is some moral equivalence between those who uphold the dignity of the Chinese people and those who seek to keep China in a position of subjugation.
Kuo’s approach to U.S.-China relations is particularly insidious. He often laments the deterioration of ties, yet his entire career has been spent in the company of Western academics, policymakers, and journalists who shape the very narratives that demonize China. His podcast, Sinica, might offer a rare space where informed discussions on China take place in the Anglophone world, but what good is it if it constantly makes allowances for Western paranoia and distortions? If Kuo truly believed in China's rise, he would use his voice not to “foster understanding” but to demand respect, to counter every falsehood with unrelenting force, and to push back against the arrogance of those who think they have the right to define China’s trajectory.
Even his criticisms of U.S. policy—his calls for America to abandon its delusions of hegemony—are self-serving. He does not call for this because he believes in China’s righteous ascendancy; he does so because he sees the United States losing its way and wants to see it “reform.” Why should we care about saving America from itself? A true patriot of China would welcome American decline unconditionally, yet Kuo still clings to the fantasy that the U.S. can be a “better version of itself” if only it sheds its worst tendencies. This is not the language of a man who understands that the 21st century belongs to China—it is the language of someone desperate to keep one foot in each world, unwilling to commit fully to either.
And what of his endless equivocation on China's domestic policies? When he discusses Chinese governance, he is careful, too careful—never offering full-throated support, always hedging, always framing things in a way that conforms to liberal anxieties. His upcoming discussion of China's ethnicity policy will likely be another exercise in useless nuance, when what is needed is a clear and unyielding defense of national unity. The West sees “oppression” in what is simply the necessary work of building a harmonious society. Why should we pander to their sensibilities? Why should we care how things “appear” to outsiders?
The reality is that Kaiser Kuo is not truly one of us. His roots in the West have shaped him irreversibly. He may love China, but it is a China that exists in his mind—a China that must explain itself, a China that must justify itself, a China that must be “understood.” The real China, the China that is rising inexorably, needs no such apologies.
Critique of Kaiser Kuo from the Perspective of a Liberal Hegemonist
Kaiser Kuo presents himself as a bridge between China and the United States, but in truth, he is yet another enabler of authoritarian revisionism, a facilitator of China’s increasingly dangerous challenge to the liberal international order. His brand of “cognitive empathy” is not an intellectual virtue—it is a euphemism for moral equivalence, an excuse to downplay the fundamental differences between a rules-based, democratic world order and a regime that has no interest in upholding those values.
For years, Kuo has tried to portray himself as a neutral observer of China, someone who resists Cold War-style thinking and seeks to foster dialogue. But in practice, his work has served to obscure the ideological stakes of this moment. He spends more time critiquing American foreign policy—lamenting its “hubris” and “exceptionalism”—than he does reckoning with the hard truth that China is not just a competitor but an illiberal state that seeks to reshape the global order in its own authoritarian image.
Kuo’s willingness to engage with critics of American primacy is revealing. He aligns himself with those who wring their hands over U.S. interventionism and strategic overreach but fails to acknowledge that it is precisely America’s willingness to lead that has maintained the conditions for global stability and prosperity. His ideal world—one in which America humbles itself, relinquishes power, and makes room for China—is a fantasy that would lead not to a more just and pluralistic world but to a global system increasingly dominated by autocratic norms, where economic coercion, censorship, and state-led surveillance become the new normal.
His approach to U.S.-China relations is particularly problematic because it caters to the naïve belief that dialogue alone can prevent conflict. Kuo underestimates the degree to which Beijing’s ambitions are not just a reaction to American policy but an intrinsic feature of its political model. Xi Jinping is not simply responding to external pressures; he is executing a vision of national rejuvenation that is inherently incompatible with a U.S.-led order. Kuo’s insistence on “understanding” China’s point of view, rather than confronting it, serves only to weaken the resolve of those who recognize the real challenge at hand.
And while Kuo is careful to present himself as balanced, his biases are clear. His critiques of America’s foreign policy excesses are detailed, passionate, and full of historical context, while his discussions of China’s domestic repression—on issues like Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and censorship—are muted, cautious, and always accompanied by caveats. He will eagerly dissect the failures of American democracy but balk at the notion that China’s system represents an existential threat to democratic values.
Ultimately, Kuo is a symptom of a broader problem: the tendency of intellectuals to seek complexity where clarity is required, to prioritize engagement when confrontation is necessary. At a time when China is asserting itself in ways that threaten the foundations of the liberal world order, Kuo’s insistence on “empathy” is not just misguided—it is dangerous.
Critique of Kaiser Kuo from the Perspective of a Neoconservative
Kaiser Kuo is, at best, a useful idiot for the Chinese Communist Party. At worst, he is an apologist for a regime that is America’s greatest geopolitical adversary. His entire career has been defined by a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental reality of this century: that the United States and China are locked in an existential struggle for global dominance, and only one will prevail.
Kuo hides behind the language of “understanding” and “dialogue,” but make no mistake—his project is to erode American resolve, to sow doubt about the righteousness of our cause, and to weaken the moral clarity that has made the United States the greatest force for freedom in human history. He constantly urges Americans to “rethink” their assumptions about China, but what he really means is that we should accept Chinese hegemony as inevitable.
His entire worldview is rooted in a deep hostility toward American strength. He decries our leadership as “hegemonic,” our foreign policy as “arrogant,” and our military presence as “provocative,” but he refuses to acknowledge that it is precisely these things that have kept the world from descending into chaos. He demands that we “listen” to China, as if the CCP’s grievances are legitimate, rather than the strategic rationalizations of a regime that seeks to displace us.
Kuo’s obsession with American “exceptionalism” is particularly telling. He treats it as a delusion, a dangerous myth that blinds us to our own faults. But this is precisely what America’s enemies want us to believe—that we are no better than the regimes we oppose, that our leadership is just another form of coercion. The truth is that American exceptionalism is not a myth—it is a moral imperative. It is what separates us from regimes like China’s, which surveil, censor, and crush dissent at home while using economic leverage to spread their influence abroad.
Instead of standing up for America’s allies, Kuo is more concerned with placating those who wish to see our alliances unravel. He downplays the strategic importance of Taiwan, treating it as an unfortunate “flashpoint” rather than a frontline of freedom. He treats China’s military expansion as a natural development rather than what it truly is—a direct challenge to U.S. interests and the security of our partners.
His attitude toward trade and technology is just as dangerous. Kuo acknowledges that China engages in intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, and market manipulation, yet he resists the necessary conclusion: that the U.S. must decouple from China in critical sectors, re-shore its industrial capacity, and prevent the CCP from gaining dominance in key technologies like AI and semiconductors. Instead, he worries about “overreaction,” as if strategic patience will somehow prevent China from outpacing us.
At a time when America needs strength, resolve, and the will to win, Kuo peddles accommodation and self-doubt. He is part of the class of intellectuals that have spent decades telling us that China’s rise was benign, that engagement would transform it, that economic integration would breed liberalization. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. America’s task is not to “understand” China’s ambitions—it is to stop them. Kuo, for all his pretensions of balance, stands firmly on the wrong side of history.
Here are the others suggested by ChatGPT:
Marxist-Leninist / Maoist Perspective (Pro-China Left)
Kaiser Kuo as a Bourgeois Liberal Who Lacks Revolutionary Consciousness
Kuo is a perfect example of the Westernized, cosmopolitan intellectual who has absorbed just enough Marxist theory to sound sophisticated but lacks the revolutionary consciousness to truly commit to the cause. He speaks endlessly about “understanding” China, but his perspective remains locked within the ideological framework of Western liberalism—an obsession with pluralism, with balance, with respecting the viewpoints of those who stand in direct opposition to socialism and the people’s struggle.
Rather than celebrating China’s successes in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, in standing up to imperialism, and in building an alternative to Western hegemony, Kuo remains fixated on an outdated notion of “engagement” with the bourgeois elite of the United States. He refuses to recognize that the so-called international order he criticizes is not simply misguided—it is an imperialist construct designed to keep the Global South, including China, in a position of subjugation.
By prioritizing dialogue over struggle, Kuo fails to acknowledge the fundamental antagonism between socialist construction and capitalist encirclement. His tendency to critique American exceptionalism is correct but ultimately impotent because he does not offer a true alternative beyond vague calls for mutual understanding. The people’s struggle requires not mere “empathy,” but commitment to the dismantling of global capitalism and the establishment of true workers' power.
Libertarian Perspective (Austrian-School / Anarcho-Capitalist Critique)
Kaiser Kuo as an Apologist for State-Controlled Economies and Authoritarianism
Kuo’s fundamental problem is that he refuses to recognize that both the U.S. and China suffer from the same disease: an overreliance on the state, which distorts markets, curtails individual liberties, and ultimately leads to stagnation. Instead of advancing the cause of freedom—true freedom, based on voluntary exchange, individual choice, and decentralized power—Kuo wastes his time dissecting geopolitical narratives that are largely irrelevant to the people who actually drive prosperity: entrepreneurs, innovators, and the market itself.
Kuo’s fascination with China’s economic rise betrays his inability to see the long-term consequences of central planning. He acknowledges China’s technological advancements but fails to reckon with the extent to which they are the result of massive government distortions, subsidies, and coercion. He critiques American interventionism but does not apply the same scrutiny to China’s state-directed economy, its monopolization of key industries, and its suppression of genuine competition.
Instead of advocating for freer markets and decentralization, Kuo is content with the idea that states should be managing global affairs. His insistence on “understanding” China’s political structure is a smokescreen for avoiding the more important question: why should either Washington or Beijing be directing trade, information flows, or technological development at all? The real path forward is not a negotiated détente between two overreaching Leviathans—it is the systematic dismantling of state power on both sides of the Pacific.
Leftist Post-Colonial / Global South Perspective
Kaiser Kuo as a Liberal Imperialist Who Refuses to Decenter the West
For all of his attempts to challenge American exceptionalism, Kuo remains fundamentally fixated on a Western audience, Western perspectives, and Western debates. He claims to foster dialogue, but what he actually does is reinforce the idea that China’s legitimacy must always be framed in terms of how well it can “convince” Americans of its narrative. This is nothing more than another form of epistemic imperialism, where China—and, by extension, the entire Global South—is forever forced to “explain” itself to the colonial centers of power.
Instead of positioning China as part of a broader movement for decolonization, Kuo remains stuck in the great-power framing that defines U.S.-China relations as a competition between two empires. This erases the struggles of African, Latin American, and Asian nations that are seeking to forge independent paths outside of this binary. If he were truly committed to pluralism, he would spend less time worrying about how China is perceived in Washington and more time elevating voices from the Global South who are building alternative models of development.
His critique of American foreign policy is ultimately shallow because it does not extend to an indictment of the entire system of Western dominance, from the IMF to corporate media to the NGO-industrial complex. If Kuo truly wanted to challenge imperialism, he would stop trying to find “common ground” between China and the West and instead focus on amplifying those who are actually working to dismantle the structures of global economic and military coercion.
Populist Right / America First (MAGA-Style Critique)
Kaiser Kuo as an Elitist Globalist Who Undermines American Sovereignty
Kaiser Kuo is exactly the kind of intellectual who has spent decades undermining America from within—an elite who prioritizes foreign interests over the well-being of the American people. His endless pontificating about “understanding” China is nothing more than an excuse to justify policies that have hollowed out American industry, allowed China to rob us blind, and led to the rise of an economic adversary that now threatens our very way of life.
Kuo’s critiques of American foreign policy are especially insidious because they mask a deeper agenda: weakening America’s will to defend itself. He downplays China’s role in stealing American jobs, flooding our markets with cheap goods, and infiltrating our universities and tech sectors. Instead of calling for policies that would protect American workers—tariffs, reshoring, and strict immigration controls—he wrings his hands about how we need to be more “nuanced” in our approach to China.
And let’s be clear: Kuo isn’t just some neutral observer. He spent years inside Baidu, one of China’s most powerful tech firms, helping it build its global narrative while American companies were being forced out of China. His loyalty isn’t to America—it’s to the globalist elite who have no problem selling out their own country in the name of “engagement.” The fact that he has any influence in shaping American discussions about China is a testament to just how much we’ve let our institutions be infiltrated by people who fundamentally do not believe in American greatness.
Traditionalist / Conservative Cultural Critique
Kaiser Kuo as a Relativist Who Undermines Civilizational Values
Kuo’s greatest failing is that he is a cultural relativist who refuses to stand up for the principles that actually sustain civilization: faith, family, and national identity. He insists on “understanding” China, but what he really means is that we should accept a fundamentally different moral order, one that does not prioritize individual rights, religious freedom, or traditional values.
Instead of making a clear case for why America’s Judeo-Christian heritage is superior to the state-atheist, materialist worldview that defines the Chinese Communist Party, Kuo treats every system as equally valid. He talks about pluralism, but what he really promotes is moral confusion—a belief that America has no right to assert its own cultural foundations as the proper basis for society.
His critiques of American exceptionalism are particularly corrosive because they lead people to doubt the very foundations of Western civilization. Yes, America has made mistakes, but it remains the last, best hope for preserving the moral order. By undermining faith in that mission, Kuo plays directly into the hands of those who want to see the West collapse into moral relativism and decadence.
What struck me most about this exercise wasn't just how well ChatGPT managed to channel these different ideological perspectives — though that was impressive enough — but what it suggests about our ability to truly understand opposing viewpoints. We often talk about the importance of "steel-manning" opposing arguments, but how many of us really make the effort? It's emotionally and intellectually taxing to try to see the world as our ideological opponents do, to really inhabit their fears and concerns and hopes, even if we ultimately reject their conclusions and most of their assumptions. But as so many of these critiques remind me, I’m supposed to be all about cognitive empathy, and this is a good way into it. Having a tool that can generate thoughtful, substantive critiques from multiple perspectives — critiques that go beyond mere caricature to engage seriously with the internal logic of different worldviews — might actually help us bridge some of these divides. Not by convincing us that everyone is right (they're most emphatically not!) or that all perspectives are equally valid (they're also not), but by helping us understand why people acting in good faith might see things differently than we do. At the very least, it's a tool for intellectual humility, for remembering that our own cherished views might not be as unassailable as we'd like to think.
So after all of that, I needed a bit of uplift, and so I prompted ChatGPT to give me an appraisal from the perspective of someone more or less ideologically aligned with me. Modesty prevents me from including that, but after that somewhat masochistic exercise, it was just what I needed!
If you’ve done something like this, I’d love to see it. I highly recommend it.
Yes, I’m aware that this is probably dumb from a data security perspective. But I live publicly, and have for a long time, and there’s really not much in there that anyone else with an internet connection and a ChatGPT account couldn’t also put together.
Here’s a sample prompt: “I would like you to produce a summary of my worldview. To enable you to do that, first, please ask me a series of open-ended questions that will provide sufficient information for you to work with. Make the questions free of too much advanced philosophical or political jargon, and ensure that you ask questions sufficient to cover all the main facets of a worldview. Please ensure that the questions can be answered in a few hundred words.”