ChinAI #278: Technology and the Rise of Great Powers

Greetings from a world where…

my book comes out tomorrow! Save 30% with code P327 when ordering from the Princeton University Press site

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The Margin to Fail: Reflections on Writing Technology and the Rise of Great Powers

On July 2nd, 2021, I defended my dissertation, on which my book Technology and the Rise of Great Powers is based. Due to COVID-19, defenses had moved online, so my two examiners — an internal one from the University of Oxford and an external one from another university — gave feedback via Zoom. I had moved back from Oxford to my parents’ home in Iowa City, and I was posted up in my sister’s room because it made the Zoom background look slightly more professional, as my childhood bedroom boasts dinosaur wallpaper. Still, if the examiners had looked closely, they would have seen a Shawn Mendes poster in the backdrop.

The two examiners provided useful feedback, identifying theoretical and empirical issues that I needed to fix before I could pass the defense. These suggestions were essential in helping me eventually turn the dissertation into a book manuscript. The comment that stays with me, though, is one bolded in my notes from that defense session: “We’re not convinced that this is a book-level project.” I got similar versions of that comment each of the four times that an academic journal rejected the article version of this project, before it ultimately found its home at International Studies Quarterly.

I share this story not to deliver some parable about falling down seven times and getting up eight.¹ This is not a story about one person’s indomitable will to push through rejection and fulfill his dream of writing a book. Rather, I share this because it relates to something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few years: the margin to fail. My capacity to keep rewriting, re-pitching, and revising this text —from its start as a research proposal back in 2016 to its publication as a book eight years later — came from the support of communities that gave me the margin to fail.

In other words, what matters in this story is not the act of getting up eight times. It’s the opportunity to fall down seven.

In the first pages of the book, I acknowledge most of the various support systems that provided this margin for falling down. Here, I want to focus on one community that I forgot to mention in those acknowledgements: ChinAI readers and supporters. While working on this book, there were many weeks when I struggled to make progress. Writing a single paragraph each day felt like a triumph. During those times, it was immensely sustaining to produce this weekly newsletter and share it with people who enjoyed reading about China’s AI landscape.

Sometimes, after I get a rejection letter from a journal (after six months of waiting), one thought that helps in the moping process is the reminder that writing — even a dense research paper or jargon-filled book — is a creative form. Creators produce something they think is worthy to share, to occupy someone else’s time and inbox space.

And then, at some point, whether your creation finds an audience is a matter of taste. At times, your gallery show opening runs out of cheese, so people don’t connect with the sculptures you’ve spent weeks making. Other times, you and your friends discover that you enjoy the same music. It is a magical feeling to find others who share your tastes, and I think that producing ChinAI issues provided a weekly reminder that a community of readers liked what I was creating.

Save 30% with code P327 when ordering from the Princeton University Press site

When going back through all my notes on the dissertation defense, I also resurfaced my initial book proposal to Princeton University Press a few years ago. Those familiar with some of my ChinAI rants know that I tend to straddle the line between confident and arrogant (with the balance often tipping into the latter). Here’s how I closed the pitch:

“Lastly, while I recognize that very few books can appeal to everyone, I do think a general, nonspecialist readership will be attracted to this topic. Paul Kennedy’s book (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers), for instance, was the sixth best-selling nonfiction hardcover book in 1988.”

Kennedy’s book had an initial printing of 9,000 copies; by February 1989, there were 221,000 copies in print. I know that tastes have changed since then. It’s hard to get people to purchase nonfiction books that are not celebrity memoirs or presidential biographies. But indulge me in some imagination-fueled math: 50,000 people read ChinAI over the course of 30 days; if just 10 percent of us bought a book and convinced two other people to purchase a copy, then that would put us at 15,000 copies (surely more than what the publisher had planned for an initial printing).

I know this is all a bit of a stretch. But, hey, why not aim high? After all, I’m just giving myself plenty of room to fail.

Thank you for reading and engaging.

*We’ll be back to our regular programming next week!

These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.

Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).

Also! Listen to narrations of the ChinAI Newsletter in podcast format here.

Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at chinainewsletter@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jjding99

1. The show Dave hilariously deconstructs this saying in Season 3, Episode 3: “You fall down seven times. You get up eight.” “Why would I have to get up eight times if I've only fallen down seven?”