Wang Huiyao in Dialogue with Michael Morris
January 14 , 2026Columbia University Professor joins CCG President on Trump’s populist playbook and the rise of online tribalism.
▲ Video | Wang Huiyao in Dialogue with Michael Morris
On January 14, Michael Morris, the Chavkin–Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School and Professor in the Psychology Department of Columbia University, joined Henry Huiyao Wang, President of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), in the latest CCG Global Dialogue.
The conversation was held as Morris’s book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together was newly released in Chinese by CITIC Press Group (click to buy), bringing his work on “tribal instincts” and cultural psychology to the Chinese readership.
This transcript is based on the event recording and has not been reviewed by the speakers.
Henry Huiyao Wang, President, Center for China and Globalization (CCG)
Welcome, Professor Morris, and thank you for joining us. We have this dialogue series, which was launched after the onset of Covid, when people could not really see each other. So we started this dialogue online, and then on and off we have done almost 100 sessions with global opinion leaders, former politicians, and, of course, business leaders as well.
So we are extremely pleased to welcome Professor Michael Morris to join us today. And I’d like to briefly introduce Professor Morris.
Professor Michael Morris is the Chavkin–Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School, and he also serves as a professor of psychology in the psychology department of Columbia University.
You teach MBA- and executive-level classes on leadership, teamwork, communication, negotiation, and decision-making — all very interesting areas. In 2016, Professor Morris was honoured with the Dean’s Award for Innovation in the Curriculum for creating one of the school’s most popular elective courses: The Leader’s Voice, a class focusing on modes of leadership communication.
I also know that you have published more than 200 articles in leading behavioural science and management journals on topics such as decision-making, social adjustment, negotiation, and social networks. So it’s very fascinating to see all this research on culture and cognition, which helped to spark the growth of cultural psychology, as well as your more recent research on the triggering and unlearning of cultural codes, which has helped shift the field towards more dynamic concepts of cultural influence.So basically, today we are going to talk about your book, Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, which you argue that leaders can harness shared cultural identities to unify more, and mobilise groups of people to work together. This is really fascinating. We have a group of audience here in the conference room. We are pleased to welcome you all, and welcome the audience online as well. I am very pleased to have this CCG global dialogue.
So I’d like to start with some questions, Professor Morris, if I may. First, I want to cover: when you are in a turbulent time, particularly when you see those tribal instincts, which you have studied extensively, how can we maybe take advantage of that to bridge the East and the West?
So the core argument you make in Tribal—that culture is malleable, not a fixed destiny—is impressive and offers new hope for thinking about global cooperation, which is exactly what is needed in the world today. And in this era of heightened tension between globalisation and localisation, fragmentation, and prevalent narratives of geopolitical competition, how can we apply the wisdom of this cultural malleability to proactively shape more inclusive modes of international interaction, rather than passively falling into a clash of civilisations?
Michael, why don’t you give us a first introduction to your book, but also answer those questions?
Michael Morris, Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership, Columbia Business School; Professor, Psychology Department, Columbia University
Sure. Well, let me start by saying thank you for inviting me to this dialogue. It’s a real honour to talk about these issues with someone who not only has worked on them in academia like I have, but you’ve also worked on them as a statesman, you know, as an ambassador for research in the West and in China, and as someone bringing together think tanks in the two countries. You know, I’m a big fan of Track II diplomacy, and I admire the work that you’ve done to try to keep those lines of communication open.
I really like your question. You make reference to the clash of civilisations, to Samuel Huntington’s idea that timeless civilisational cultures are going to be the site of the conflicts in the future. That’s what he thought after the Cold War. And now, you know, Huntington is one of these people that’s frustrating for me because he’s partly right and partly wrong. He’s right that culture matters. He’s right that conflicts often turn on ideological rather than economic grounds. But he’s wrong about the civilisational part, and he’s wrong about the unchanging part — you know, the part that these cultures are timeless and unchanging.
He was part of the old-fashioned political science when it was based on anecdotes, before it became quantitative and data-based. So political scientists who’ve tried to test his argument — either by looking before he wrote the book or after he wrote the book — ask: are most of the conflicts in the world, or even the conflicts between states, mostly along the lines of these civilisations? And the answer is no. You know, most of them are within these civilisations.
You know, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it’s the same part of Western civilisation. They’re both Slavic nations with the same cultural roots. Sometimes it’s the slight differences that lead to the biggest conflicts. You know, when I was growing up, I’m Irish, I have dual citizenship. And Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland were in bitter, bloody conflict. And even for people who live there, they can’t physically distinguish — even talking to somebody for a while, it’s hard to tell whether they’re Catholic or Protestant. You know, it’s a fine distinction. But sometimes the slight distinctions matter more than the bigger distinctions.
And I think that the clash of civilisations, in addition to the factual problem — it doesn’t quite fit the facts — also has a conceptual problem, and I would label it cultural essentialism. Huntington’s worldview is that every Islamic person, whether they’re Moroccan or Indonesian, whether they’re a Black Muslim in Chicago or a Hui resident of Xi’an, has the same worldview, and that it’s the same worldview that, you know, 500 years ago was involved in the conflicts with the Crusaders. And I think that’s really just a fallacy. It’s a tempting fallacy. There’s part of us that wants to believe that we are exactly the same as our ancestors, and that every member of the West thinks the same way I do. The tribal instincts that I write about in my book pull us in that direction. But it’s not a rational way to understand things. It’s not true. And it doesn’t show you the power you have when you understand culture in a more complex way.
The more complex way that I talk about in the book Tribal is that tribal living, from the very beginning, has been living within nested communities. So even our hunter-gatherer forebears lived in a band that hunted and slept together. And that band was part of a clan, and then that clan became part of a tribe — a broader network within a region. And so there were different identities that were nested within each other.
And of course, in the modern world, we have organisational cultures, we have the cultures of our professions, we have the cultures of informal social networks that we belong to and get our news from. And then we have the cultures of our nations, and we have the cultures of regions of the world that share a common history. But there’s a multiplicity of identities inside every person, and that’s important to understand.
The clash of civilisations idea, at least in the U.S., became very popular after 9/11 because people were shocked by this and were looking for a simple explanation. And the idea that there was some timeless Muslim rage against the West that had resurfaced was a tempting way to think. But if you really look at that event — if you really read Osama bin Laden’s writings or the ideology of Al-Qaeda — the whole point of Al-Qaeda was that they knew Islamic countries were divided between moderate Islam and radical Islam. And what they wanted to do was attack the West in such a provocative way that there would be a disproportionate and brutal response. And then that brutal response would move people from moderate Islam into radical Islam. That was the actual strategy, written out in great detail — to collapse the divide between moderate Islam and radical Islam.
And even today, if you look at, say, the strategy of Hamas, what were they trying to accomplish on October 7? They were trying to incur a disproportionate response that would turn a generation away from moderation towards radical opposition to Israel. So if we can understand cultures in a more accurate way — that there are divides within every nation and that every person has multiple ties pulling on them — we can understand conflicts better than if we think that all conflicts are, you know, the West versus Islam, or I can’t even remember what the seven categories were in Huntington’s writing.
So I think that understanding tribal instincts can both help us understand why people are drawn to this essentialist way of thinking about culture, and help us understand that it’s not really an accurate way to understand culture. Culture consists of nested groups and overlapping groups, and there’s a lot of potential for leaders to harness the different cultural identities that people have to lead change. And that’s what the book is about — it’s a playbook for leaders in politics and in business who want to harness cultural forces and cultural loyalties.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Excellent. Fascinating. I mean, Michael, what you’ve outlined there is really something very significant, particularly in this turbulent time in the global arena.
You’re right. You know, Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations is as if we are all doomed, because we have a few big civilisations. But now you are drawing more fundamentally, to go as early as, as far as, as deep as tribes and instinct. Human beings have instincts. And we really can follow how this can impact our lives, whether it’s peers or it’s ancestors or it’s heroes. You know, you have all those combined, and then you can really find a way to change the world. Basically, if we can really harmonise them—using the Chinese word “harmonising” so that it is really pointing to a new analytical framework, actually, for me at least, to see this new global phenomenon.
We don’t have to be so pessimistic because we have a different civilisation, but now we do have another outlook to look at those things. So this is really, I find it stimulating and encouraging that we actually must study the differences.
We have to really find the common denominator, find the common thread that we can really pull them — glue them — together. So this is really great.
And in this very interesting argument, I really find it interesting that we are getting the really major power rivalry play, like between China, the U.S., and now even the EU, and now Russia, and all those things. So, to what extent can competition, confrontation be seen as amplified tribal instinct at work? And how does tribal instinct profoundly shape and identify our own nation and our own attitudes and behaviours towards other nations?
So, as if all those countries—there are 200 countries in the world—does that mean we have 200 tribes, or what? What are we? Even China has 31 provinces. Do we have 31 tribes? So how do we really define and apply that to the modern world? I mean, that’s something we would like to hear from you.
Michael Morris
Well, it’s a great question. And, you know, I come at this as a research psychologist, as a behavioural scientist, trying to understand what are the deepest parts of human nature that contribute to the way that we live in cultures, the way that we live in tribes.
And, you know, tribe, in its most basic meaning, is the human form of social life, which means living in large communities that are bound together by a common idea, whether that common idea is loyalty to a nation, whether that common idea is a constitution, or it can be a culture that is bound together based on the love of a certain kind of music or a certain kind of hobby. So there are all kinds of tribes that people live in.
I think that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of tribes within China, as there always have been. One of my friends found a sort of anthology of Chinese proverbs that recorded which part of China the proverb was first associated with. And even though these proverbs were thousands of years old, he was able to show that there were clusters of different ideas in different provinces of China. So the eternal wisdom of China is not one thing — it’s many strands, right? Many strands. The north of China is different from the south of China. You know, people grow different crops and live in different patterns. So there’s always been pluralism within our countries.
But it is the case that our governments — and I would say that my country and your country right now both have strong leaders who find it advantageous to promote nationalism, right, to promote national identification. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, right? I mean, it helps a nation function if people identify strongly with the nation as opposed to with their local province or with broader international regions, right? So there’s not necessarily something bad about nationalism.
But what happens with nationalism is that other nations are sometimes used as a foil. So when Donald Trump is trying to sharpen people’s sense of what it means to be an American, he will contrast the U.S. with Europeans, who we’re related to, right? That’s where a lot of us came from. But, you know, Europeans are these decadent, bloodless people who have nothing in common. And Trump draws these exaggerated lines between the in-group and the out-group. And then that’s not harmless because it reduces empathy for the out-group, and it reduces perspective-taking and the ability to collaborate effectively. And, you know, our greatest allies have always been in Europe. Even Canada is, for Trump, too far away. And I know you have some history in Canada, but it just is amazing. I always think of Canadians as the politest people on earth. But Trump will say they’re nasty, nasty, nasty people. And I’m like, who are you talking about? You know, they’re polite to a fault.
So I think that whether it’s whipping the flames of nationalism, or it’s a CEO trying to create more company spirit, or it’s a university trying to get the students to be more identified with the university, there are some basic levers that leaders pull to sort of activate or strengthen an identity. And in my book, I go through them because it’s the kind of thing that I and the many other behavioural scientists who have been working on culture for the last couple of decades have been studying.
And we’ve found that somebody’s culture is not like a fixed worldview that is always affecting them to the same extent. It’s much more dynamic. It turns on and turns off. And it also can be changed over time by the signals that leaders send.
So I think that both in China and the U.S., you see our leaders sending those signals. And I can go into more detail about that. But I think that tribal psychology is very relevant to the resurgent nationalism, because the resurgent nationalism is happening because people are exploiting tribal psychology. They’re using the levers of tribal psychology to make people more nationalistic.
Henry Huiyao Wang
That’s true. Certainly, it’s true. We recognise that. As a matter of fact, the Canadian prime minister is in Beijing this week.
Michael Morris
Okay.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yeah, absolutely. I think, for President Trump, this MAGA kind of approach was probably also to explore some of the tribal or some instincts of the United States. But also at the same time, he’s bashing European heritages or historical background.
Michael Morris
Yeah. Yeah.
Henry Huiyao Wang
So, he’s very skillful applying those different perspectives.
Michael Morris
Very much. Yeah. MAGA—“Make America Great Again”—is classic divisive populism, where you paint a picture of past generations as being less diverse. You know, he paints a picture that the U.S. in the past was a white, Christian, English-speaking nation. But that’s completely false. If you look at the Revolutionary War, Native Americans died, African Americans died, Muslims died. At that time in the U.S., in Louisiana, they spoke French, you know, as they did in parts of Vermont. In Ohio, they spoke German. So there have been many religions, many ethnic groups, and many languages in our country from the beginning.
But it’s not the case that the levers of tribalism always have to be divisive. In the book, I talk a lot about some of our presidents, like President Lincoln, who inherited a very divided nation. But he used strategies similar to MAGA to bring people together. You know, one of the things that he did was he more or less invented the national holiday of Thanksgiving, which looks back to the Pilgrims and looks back to George Washington, to make people in the South and the North feel like they had common ancestors, and that it’s always been a ritual for those ancestors to meet different kinds of people and share a banquet with them. So it was a very effective way of creating a retrospective history that wasn’t completely accurate, but served the purpose of bringing people together.
And I think probably in China there’s a certain effort to make it sound like, you know, for 3,000 years exclusively Han people have lived in exactly the same way that we live today. And that kind of creates a good feeling, right? But it’s not really accurate. If you have a real historian go back, they’ll say, well, no, there were different groups, and we’re not exactly the same as our forebears.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yeah. It’s a gradual, evolutionary process. I noticed that your early classic research with Professor Kaiping Peng on East-West attribution differences precisely reveals deep-seated differences in thinking cycles. And so today, in the Sino-U.S. relations and border cross-civilisation dialogues, both sides often seem to misjudge each other’s intentions. And we know that President Trump may come to Beijing in April, and that probably President Xi is going to revisit the U.S. sometime this year, and then they can come again for the APEC summit in November, and the President of China may go back again for the G20. So they’re going to have four meetings. But how can we really use those tools as you outlined to really defuse those misunderstandings and to promote the common ground for those country-to-country relations?
Michael Morris
Well, I’m very impressed that you know about these studies that I did decades ago. Peng Kaiping and I were two students, both of us a little bit lost, and we were very curious about cultural differences. And so we started working in a way that later became this field, cultural psychology. What we were trying to do was understand the worldviews, or the cultural lenses, behind the way that when I would interpret something, it would often be different from what Kaiping would interpret from the same event. And so we were working with our own experiences and our countries to try to understand what those cultural lenses or worldviews are.
And essentially, what we came up with was quite similar to what a Chinese anthropologist, Francis Hsu, had written about decades earlier, based on his fieldwork and his living in China and living in the West for many decades. And that was the idea that, in individualistic Western cultures, there’s a very person-centred view of society. We think the essential state of the individual is to be alone, and any kind of relationship or group membership is kind of an imposition; and we are most ourselves when we’re alone. And if you want to understand anything, you have to look at individual people and make inferences about their traits, like what’s their personality, what do they care about, are they smart or not smart. And that’s the very American style of making sense of events. It’s a very personalistic, characterological style.
And I think you can see this when you look at some American leaders. For example, President Trump goes to North Korea and forms very personal impressions of the leader, and then his interpretation of the country is very rooted in his concept of that person’s personality. He always seems to be very impressed with Xi Jinping, I think, because Trump is very taken by people who are handsome and who look like soldiers. Xi Jinping is tall, he stands very strong, and he’s confident. So Trump always seems very impressed by Xi Jinping when they meet in person.
But I think what I would say now is that there’s more hope in cultural psychology than when Kaiping and I were doing this work. Back then, we thought these worldviews were relatively fixed, so we had something closer to a Huntingtonian view at the time. But in the decades since, we’ve realised that these cultural lenses are not constantly on.
And if I may, I would use you as an example, President Wang. You lived and studied in Canada for decades. So undoubtedly you have a Canadian identity, and you understand the Canadian worldview. But you also have your Chinese identity, and you understand the Chinese worldview. And you probably even know the difference between the U.S. worldview and the Canadian worldview. But which of those worldviews is going to be operative depends a lot on your immediate setting and who you’re talking to, the audience in front of you.
In the U.S., in the last decade or so, we’ve started talking about this as code-switching, which is an old idea from linguistics: polyglots switch between languages depending on the audience in front of them. And I think there’s a lot of hope in that idea. Even if we take Xi Jinping as an example, in the past, when he was an agricultural official, he went and lived in Iowa and stayed with a farmer’s family for a period of time. And in 2023, when he was in the U.S., he went back to Iowa and had dinner with his old friends there. To me, that’s really encouraging.
It suggests that the leaders of our countries are bicultural at some level, and they have the capacity to see things the American way. They won’t always do that. They will see things the Chinese way most of the time, as they should. But promoting cross-cultural understanding and intercultural experiences allows for a kind of perspective-taking that otherwise simply isn’t possible.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Okay, great. Michael, I think you’re right. Talking about these differences in thinking styles between East and West, Kaiping Peng actually launched the book at CCG a few years ago. So I know he’s been very active in talking about those psychological differences between East and West as well. But I’m thinking, like you said, the U.S. and Western countries are more individualistic, and China is more collectivistic. Maybe that’s probably thousands of years of history like that. For example, in the old days, China was a vast country, and then you had to do irrigation, you had to mobilise people to prevent floods, and then it was a highly centralised system. And so collectivism was really needed. On top of that, for the last seven decades, China has been the most populous country in the world, and today it still has 1.4 billion people. Only India recently caught up.
So do you think that collectivism, in terms of governance style in China, and basically Confucius, has some kind of values in preaching that, versus an individualistic mode of existence? Of course, we can’t say who is better or who is worse. But does that really apply to a country that has specific conditions, like China is big, China has a culture, and kind of has history? So sometimes this collectivism works here. But of course, there’s also a lot of freedom. The market economy is basically about enterprise individualism as well. So, probably China is a hybrid. It’s maybe more combined. That’s why China made a lot of progress and made a miracle.
Do you think what attributes contribute to China’s success in terms of, at least in the last four decades, becoming the second-largest economy in the world? What are the key success factors from a psychological analysis point of view?
Michael Morris
Yeah. Well, one thing I would say is that people in the U.S. often talk about the rise of China. And I always say what you mean is the return of China, because for most of the last 3,000 years, China was the most populous country in the world and the largest economy. You know, it’s only been in the last 200 or 300 years that, you know, Rome fell, and the Han dynasty didn’t fall. But, you know, in the last 200 or 300 years, yeah, China went through some troubles, largely thanks to Western countries.
But I think that collectivism and a lot of the ideas that are part of the Confucian heritage undoubtedly contribute to the success, not just in the recent decades, but the success 500 years ago and a thousand years ago in China. I think that China is an interesting case. You know, not all collectivist countries are the same, and it’s also the case—I would push back—that China is internally diverse, you know. So the stereotype of, like, rice paddy agriculture leading to collectivism—that applies to the south of China, but the north of China is wheat-growing, and you didn’t have that pressure to collaborate closely with your neighbours. And the north of China is far more individualistic, if you look at surveys. And of course, when you go to the far west of China, then there are even more differences, because people live in different ecologies, and there are different heritages that are more prominent there.
So I think that China is diverse. China has taken a lot of lessons from the West. You know, even Marxism was a kind of Western idea that China took and adapted. And so I think that, just like people say, why is the United States successful? Well, it’s successful because we’ve been open to immigration. We’ve taken the best and the brightest from every country, including China, for decades and decades. And that’s been the secret of our success—just openness to the world, not any inherent genius. You know, we’re not a very intellectual country.
So I think that China also is open in its own way. And it’s a country with a very strong achievement orientation. And that doesn’t always go along with collectivism. But China is very strong on achievement values. And there’s always been social mobility in China. You know, in the past, it came through the imperial exam system. And I think you still have the Gaokao, if I’m pronouncing it correctly, the exam. And so that is, I think, a mechanism of social mobility that is very important for sustained success. Otherwise, you have a decadent aristocracy that is not productive, and you have collapses.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yeah. Absolutely. Michael, you’re precisely on. I think Gaokao is absolutely a good example. I’m the first batch of students enrolled in Gaokao after the Cultural Revolution. There were ten years with no Gaokao. So then, luckily, we had the Gaokao restored by Deng Xiaoping, so we all got a chance to go to university.
Michael Morris
And did you find textbooks and study on your own and then pass the test? Is that how you…
Henry Huiyao Wang
That’s right. Exactly. You’re right. I was in the rural area, as a matter of fact. I was sent-down youth at that time.
Michael Morris
I recently had dinner with a friend, Jia Lin Xie, at the University of Toronto. I don’t know if you’ve ever met her, but I know that you’ve spent some time in Ontario, but she’s of your generation as well, you know. So she came back from working in the countryside and then had the opportunity to study on her own and do well enough to get into college. You know, when we talk about cultural change, your generation lived it.
Henry Huiyao Wang
We went through many changes, obviously, from a scarcity society to an abundant society. But one of the things I think absolutely relates to the Gaokao is that China is a meritocracy. You know, that practice for thousands of years. Even now, for example, you see in China, every year there are about 50 to 60 million people who go to the Gaokao, but then 30 million are admitted into the system. Then you’re going to have 3 million to 3.5 million chasing 200,000 government positions on a different level. So that system has been there for a long time.
And also, with official promotion, you have to start from a village, a county, and then a municipality, province, and then rise to the central top positions. You have to perform an exact number of years at each place. If you have a government career, you have to account for how fast you can go. That probably explains some of the success of China, this talent promotion, talent selection, and meritocracy in the system, the bureaucratic system. The officials are very experienced.
I also agree with you that the U.S. is the best taker of global talent—you know, has the cream of the cream—and then that’s one of the key successes of the U.S. Meritocracy is the success factor of China, or at least one of the key success factors. But taking global talent is the U.S.’s key success factor.
Michael Morris
And I know you’ve been a leader in China with trying to promote, you know, having foreigners come to China and build their career there, right? Because why shouldn’t China steal some talent after giving the world so much talent for so long? Right? You know, it’s only fair.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Exactly. Since opening up, China had about 8 million students who went abroad, probably over a million stayed in the US. So we actually need to also attract global talents as well. So that is a really interesting topic.
But coming back to your analysis of American cognitive tribalism, the book is really interesting, and it traces its roots to isolated information cocoons and fragmented perceptions of basic facts. Is this a common psychological mechanism behind the global waves of populism and political polarisation? With populism and nationalism rising, and more right-leaning governments coming to power in many countries, how does cognitive tribalism help explain these trends?
Michael Morris
Well, I think that, I guess, there are a lot of questions there. How do we explain the rise of populism around the world, you know, the rise of right-wing populism? That’s definitely been a trend of the last decades.
I think one way that tribalism can offer some explanation for that is that our tribal instincts, I think, are generally adaptive. They enable us to live in these large communities, these large networks, these large organisations, and they allow us to benefit from the economies of scale and the deep knowledge pool that we can tap into when we’re part of these large communities.
But each of the tribal instincts can cycle out of control. You know, each of the tribal instincts can lead to dysfunctional ways of thinking that produce conflicts, especially when social conditions change relatively quickly. And so, it’s become a sort of trope for the pundits in the United States to talk about toxic tribalism and to blame a lot of the problems in the world on tribalism, whether it’s the red tribe or the blue tribe not being able to cooperate in American politics, or it’s conflict between ethnic groups in the United States, or wars in the Middle East.
And I think that tribal instincts are not inherently bad. They are not what the pundits paint them as. The pundits talk about tribalism as though it’s a hardwired instinct to hate outsiders. To behavioural scientists or to evolutionary scientists, that makes no sense at all. The tribal instincts are instincts for solidarity, instincts that enabled us to live in these larger communities. And it’s only when these solidarity instincts cycle out of control that they lead to a kind of conflict. They cycle out of control. They kind of get into feedback loops when social conditions change.
So one of the changed social conditions in the last generation is what we call globalisation, which is that there’s been an acceleration of the movement of ideas and products and people and capital across national boundaries. It’s not like it started, you know, after the Cold War fell. Ancient Rome was an example of globalisation, right? Ancient Xi’an was an example of globalisation, right? There’s always been cosmopolitanism. There’s always been travellers. There’s always been curiosity about other countries. But it accelerated due to changes in information technology and changes in transportation technologies, so that it became almost as easy for somebody in Ethiopia. You know, it used to be if they immigrated, maybe they would go to Eritrea next door, you know, but now they can go to Sweden almost as easily.
And so globalisation has led to immigrant populations in a lot of countries where the immigrants are really different from the mainstream host culture group. It used to be that Sweden’s largest sources of immigration were Norway, Finland, and Denmark—you know, not very different, right? Other Scandinavian Protestant people, you know. But now the largest sources of immigrants in Sweden are, I think, Syria and maybe Afghanistan in recent years. So you get people who differ on many, many dimensions living side by side. And that leads to some frequent misunderstandings and conflicts. And the majority group becomes very vulnerable to right-wing populist politicians who would say, look, these immigrants have ruined our quality of life. You know, Sweden no longer resembles Sweden because we have more children named Mohammed than children named, you know, Sven, something like that.
And I think that’s an example of where tribal instincts then become, you know, I would say dysfunctional, because I think that countries like Sweden have labour shortages. They’re taking these immigrants for a reason. They don’t always expect that the first generation of immigrants are immediately going to assimilate immediately, but they know that their children will grow up and be relatively Swedish. You know, they will be fluent Swedish speakers. They will be working in bakeries, they will be cab drivers. They will be doing all the jobs that need to be filled in Sweden.
So I think that, at least in my view, I regard this right-wing populism as a simplistic way of thinking, a kind of easy way of thinking that we are tempted towards sometimes. But it usually comes from a sort of superficial read on what the cause of the problems is. And globalisation has created this new problem, which is minority populations that are very different from the mainstream population. And the rise of right-wing populism, I think, is a side effect of that.
If you look in Europe, you know, after—I can’t remember which year it was, maybe 2015—when there were more refugees going to Europe than there were refugees after World War Two, it was a huge shock. And to countries like Germany or the Netherlands, there’s been a cultural blowback in response to that sudden wave of immigration.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yes, absolutely. I think in the current world, of course, the rise of populism and nationalism is also attributed to a widening gap between the rich and the poor. And also, domestically, there are a lot of needs that have not been met, and there is too much conflict sometimes on the regional front, so that politicians can really take advantage of that. But furthermore, I think international competition also contributes to some advantages and disadvantages as well. So that’s a very interesting phenomenon, I think, to look at. But of course, we can use the tribal analytical framework to really find out what the differences are, what the similarities are, and then try to minimise the differences.
Michael Morris
But I would say again that tribal psychology can be exploited by politicians for division. But the same exact social conditions can be construed for populism.
So in New York City now, we have a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. And he was elected by assembling a coalition, mostly of new immigrants. Well, a big part of his constituency is immigrants. New York City has always been a city of immigrants. You know, it’s always been the case that the majority of Manhattan residents were not born in the United States. Sometimes New Yorkers call New York the capital of a country that doesn’t exist, you know, because we feel that there’s a character of New York that’s quite different from the character of most of the United States, in part because of this immigrant dynamism.
But Mamdani created a coalition around the issue of affordability, which touches a lot of those recent immigrants. You know, a lot of people moved to New York, they’re sending money home to their family, they’re driving a cab, they have a food cart, or they’re working as a waiter. And the price of bus fares and things like that may seem like trivial issues to a lot of New Yorkers, but they’re not trivial to somebody on a tight monthly budget, trying to make enough money to send home or to put their kids through school.
So he assembled a coalition around this issue of affordability that brought together a lot of the Muslim population, but also the progressive Jewish population, and a lot of the African immigrants. He also grew up partially in Africa, so he kind of used his multicultural upbringing to connect strategically with South Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, you know, showing through his cultural familiarity with different neighbourhood groups that he was one of them.
And there’s a precedent for this, which I think is a really important one, which is, everybody knows one of the airports in New York is called LaGuardia Airport. And that is in honour of Fiorello La Guardia, who was probably the most successful New York mayor. You know, a lot of people say New York is ungovernable, but La Guardia also put together a coalition of working-class immigrants that cut across the lines of religion, and revolved around issues that were, you know, that some people at the time called socialist, even though he was a Republican. He had the idea that electric power maybe should be a public utility, not relying on a private company that might decide to close down the power in the middle of winter. And of course, now we consider that obvious. But, you know, that was considered to be dangerous socialism at the time. But Fiorello La Guardia thought of it as necessary for taking care of the people that he was trying to take care of.
So I’m very confident that Mamdani is going to be a better mayor than our most recent mayor, who was overtly corrupt, and probably a better mayor than the mayor before that, who was a little bit passive and disorganised. So if he runs his mayoralty with anything like the degree of focus that he ran his campaign with, he will become a legendary figure in American politics.
And I think it was also very interesting that he was able to charm Donald Trump, even though Donald Trump had been calling him all of the worst names possible when he got there in person. You know, he said, “Mr Trump, you ran a campaign talking about affordability. I did the same thing. We care about the same costs.” You know, he somehow brought Trump into his coalition in a few minutes. And that was a pretty impressive example of his political skills.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yes. That’s right. He’s very impressive. That reminds me: New York, of course, is largely an immigrant city. His success has been mobilising all aspects of his instincts and also all the tribal characteristics. He’s taking it all into consideration. But again, one question I’d like to ask is: now, President Trump—we had this New Year surprise on January 3. He stormed the presidential palace of Venezuela and took Maduro to New York. Do you think that he could really, like the New York mayor, mobilise the Latin American countries by having a coalition with the other South American countries, or maybe alienate the 60 million Latino voters in the U.S., which are going to maybe make a comeback? And what do you think about this kind of behaviour, that he acted very strongly, very differently, and caught the world by surprise?
So would he be able to consolidate the Americas and create a “United States of the Western Hemisphere”? Or maybe he’s not. Let’s just talk about Greenland. But do you think, using the New York mayor’s example, those 50, 60 million Latino voters would vote for him next time or not? It depends on what he’s going to do. I know Rubio is from Cuba, from a Spanish Cuban family. Yeah. His first visit is to Latin American countries. So how do you assess this kind of situation?
Michael Morris
Well, I would start by saying that I think, President Wang, you’re thinking more steps ahead than I think our administration is thinking. I think that they can be very reactive. And apparently, Trump was very swayed by a video that Maduro posted on social media of himself dancing and saying, “Come and get me,” or something like that. And apparently, that actually affected the decision-making. I don’t know. That’s what we read in the news.
Trump did benefit in this last election. More Hispanic men voted for Trump than for Biden. And so, you know, the hot take after this election, when Trump was elected, was that, oh, the white males, you know, who’ve been left out in the era of diversity and wokeness, rebelled and put Trump into power. But, you know, the rate of voting for Trump among Hispanic men was extremely high.
And I think that partially, Trump portrayed himself as this strong, vital person, and portrayed Biden as this sick old man. And I think that resonated with a lot of men. You know, maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. But the polls in recent months show that the Hispanic vote may not be going with Trump next time. There are a number of policies that Trump has, you know, promoted that are not working in favour of the Hispanic population.
And, you know, when people see their cousins and neighbours being dragged off by ICE, the sort of paramilitary immigration authorities that we have now, which are very frightening to most Americans because it sure looks like fascism. You know, it’s a hallmark of fascism where you have this blending of military and police, and people who seem to be directly reporting to the president as opposed to the other channels—you know, the division of powers, which is such an important idea in our democracy.
So you are correct that the Hispanic vote is not a lock for Trump. And then the question is, with Maduro in New York, how will the many Hispanic New Yorkers react to that? And one thing that you mentioned when you wrote me earlier was the story in my book about Gustavo Dudamel, who is a Venezuelan composer who was recruited at a very young age by the Los Angeles Philharmonic because they knew that classical music in the U.S. was dying, that young people were not coming. And so they thought, okay, here’s this supremely talented Latino composer. Why don’t we make him music director? And then he can reinvigorate the classical music scene in Los Angeles. And that’s exactly what he did. And the Los Angeles Philharmonic has been the most interesting centre of classical music in the United States during the time that he’s been there.
But now the New York Philharmonic, which is suffering because the average age of its season ticket holders is like 75 years old, which is not a good demographic for the future, has hired him away. So we in New York are going to have our symphony suddenly directed by this very dynamic, young Venezuelan sort of rock star composer. But we’re also going to be trying Maduro from the same generation. So Venezuela is going to be in the news a lot more than it has been in the past.
I think that the crisis in Venezuela has been a problem for the U.S. in recent years because we have a really—just like it’s been a problem for Colombia beforehand—the large swathes of the professional middle class of Venezuela, which was a formerly very wealthy nation, felt unsafe. And then they had to be refugees and work as cab drivers and waiters in Colombia. And then a wave has come to the United States. And in every city, there is a large budget line in the city budget accommodating the refugees. And so it’s really weighed on cities like New York and Chicago, etc. So I think there is some eagerness to try to help resolve the crisis in Venezuela.
But I don’t think that kidnapping the leader of state was a wise idea. I don’t think it was legal. It’s certainly not consistent with U.S. foreign policy in the last hundred years. But, you know, Trump using his tribalistic playbook, he’s suddenly invoking the Monroe Doctrine—it’s sometimes called the Donroe Doctrine now, because it’s Donald Trump, which is like an old, really old-fashioned way of thinking that the U.S. should be able to meddle in the countries in our backyard. And then presumably China should be able to meddle anywhere in Asia, and Russia should be allowed to meddle in Ukraine.
And that’s not a modern idea. You know, the modern idea post-World War Two is that there’s national autonomy, and that you don’t violate the autonomy, you don’t violate the sovereignty of nation-states. And so, yeah, it’s very troubling for people like myself who think that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a horrible human tragedy. And you can imagine that for someone like President Putin, this would embolden him, right? If the U.S. is suddenly kidnapping heads of state and invading countries without a clear reason, a clear rationale, then why should Putin worry that Russia will be a pariah among nations?
Henry Huiyao Wang
Okay, yes. Probably one of the last questions I’d like to ask is that, you know, these days we see technology is really reshaping the form of tribes, and also shaping the digital tribes bound by emotions and identity, and often exert influence beyond geography and the nation-state. So does this actually fundamentally change, or even deconstruct, the modern national identity based on territory or sovereignty? How should we manage this risk of social fragmentation and extremism brought about by digital tribalism? And also on top of that, we have AI. We have robots, we have all those existing risks that go beyond borders and transcend borders. So how can we really resolve those things, have a community of shared future? I mean, how can we really come to that kind of a common understanding and then build up some consensus with those technological changes and challenges?
Michael Morris
It’s a really important issue. I think that in the United States right now, social media has been devastating. It has been devastating to the mental health of our adolescents because they engage in social comparison, looking at pictures of their peers that have been through filters. And so they have terrible body image, terrible self-esteem, terrible social anxiety. But it’s also eroded the national conversation. We used to be able to have nuanced conversations where we would try to find compromise between Republican principles and Democratic principles and try to find policies that would find bipartisan support. And bipartisan bills in Congress hardly ever happen anymore.
And ordinary people have started to think about the red tribe and the blue tribe—the Republicans and the Democrats—almost like the way people used to think about races, you know, as these defining identities. And Democrats are more worried about their children marrying someone who’s a Republican than they are about marrying somebody of the same gender or marrying somebody of a different race, you know, the things that were taboo in the past.
And so, I think social media has had this effect. Lately, in the last few months since my book came out in China, I’ve been on Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, and I’ve been getting to know Chinese social media. And the discourse doesn’t seem to be as acrimonious as it is on, say, X, the former Twitter, where you just have people castigating each other, you know, wanting to dunk on each other.
And one thing that you see a lot of is what we call virtue signalling, where if I’m a Democrat and I want to gain prestige within my blue tribe, I wait until Donald Trump says something offensive. And then I link to it, and I post, you know, “This man is not human. He is blah blah blah. He’s thinking like an animal,” or something—you know, very outrageous, outrageously rejecting what he has said with a lot of moral outrage and venom. And then I get showered with likes from the other Democrats who the post goes to. And of course, the post doesn’t really go to the Republicans, so I don’t hear from them about it.
And people have become addicted to this virtue signalling, you know, of making these really extreme expressions of moral outrage. It used to be that if you wanted to do this, you would have to go to a political demonstration in person and push yourself to the front lines and shout in the face of the other groups. And you might get shoved. But now you can do virtue signalling without any risk and reach a much wider audience. So people have become addicted to it. And so it’s an example where this age-old tribal instinct—what I call in the book the hero instinct, the desire for status within your community—has been hijacked by this new social condition of social media, and it’s leading to a very dysfunctional polarisation.
Then the harder question is, what can we do about it? I think that some of it has to do with the legal frameworks. In the U.S., when online news platforms first came out in the era of Yahoo and Google, you know, in the late ’90s, they were legally categorised as like a newsstand, not like a magazine, you know, so they are not liable for misinformation in the way that, say, The New York Times is liable. And I think that maybe that was a defensible legal standard in the old days when these platforms were relatively passive.
But since then, these platforms have become much more active shapers of which information gets to which people. And these virtue signalling, expressions of moral outrage reach much larger audiences than moderate, calm political statements, and they get retweeted a lot more, they get reposted a lot more. So people have a disproportionate picture of the opinion spectrum. They see the opinions from the extremes, but not from the centre.
So I think we need to change our regulatory standard. And in our country, that has to happen through lawsuits that make their way to the Supreme Court and that, you know, reclassify social media platforms so that they are more liable for the quality of the information that they are pumping out. And when the incentives on them change, they will change.
You know, there’s nothing inherent about the technology that causes people to polarise. It’s just that it’s very lucrative for the technology platforms to emphasise this kind of content that has kind of destroyed our political conversation. I think in China, you know, you have different legal platforms, and social media may not be having this toxic effect, but in the U.S., it has been.
And now AI is new to the scene. My hope is that AI will destroy social media because social media otherwise seems to have a lock on people’s minds. And there’s some evidence that AI can be effective at helping people get out of conspiracy theories and helping people depolarise. Because when you’re having a conversation with AI, you don’t think that you’re either talking to a red tribe member or a blue tribe member. You know that you’re just talking to a machine. And so people who have conversations with AI tend to become less extreme in their views, at least contemporary AI has that effect.
Hopefully, you know, we won’t see the same problem that once a technology becomes widely platformed, the technology changes in ways to make it profitable, even though those changes are harmful for people. So hopefully we won’t see that same change that happened to other kinds of social media in the past.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Yes, thank you, Michael. Actually, you’re right. We have seen this explosion of social media, and now AI, and all those swarms of mobile phones and everything. Everything we read and hear now. But you’re absolutely right. I think the regulatory and governing standards, we probably have to come up with that. Otherwise, as you said, it’s more, you know, hiding behind the scenes, saying whatever you want to say, and sometimes bringing out the bad instincts in people. If that is not really contained or managed to some extent, you know, we’re going to see a world probably destroyed by our own technology and advancements.
So this is probably to come to our last question and discussion. I know that, during our communication, you were asking what the world would choose for the world to use the Chinese wisdom help the world understand how to navigate the tribal instinct. So what would I choose? And how does this point to our shared future? Basically, you talked a lot about tribal instincts, and it’s an inescapable part of human nature. This era is filled with different divides and forces. So what I’m thinking now is that you talk a lot about instinct and talk about tribal characteristics and how we can make good use of it, make better use of it.
And if I’m thinking of any Chinese term for that, or some instinct of nature or family values for that, I really think that, you know, there’s a saying in China saying the universe (tianxia) is a family. Therefore, the family value attaches great importance in our society. I remember the former U.S. ambassador, Terry Branstad, who was here for a few years. When he left China, he organised a reception. He was saying at the reception, look, he spent three years in China. The three most important things which impressed him were characterised as three very distinctive characteristics of the Chinese: first is family values, and second is the education that is attached to the culture in China. And third is hard-working, very hard-working, 7/24 sometimes.
So I think human beings’ nature, or human beings’ instinct, family is universal, probably, no matter where you are: you’re American, Chinese, African, or European. They all come from their families; they have a parent. So that kind of universal instinct is a universal value.
And can we really have more emphasis on that, and maybe find more common denominators? Because that is the language you understand everywhere, and then people appreciate it everywhere. So that if we treat the world as a family, you know, if we treat the universe as a family, maybe we could say, okay, we are all brothers and sisters. We all have one nose, two eyes, and two ears. You know, we are all the same. We care for our babies, and we care for our parents. We love each other. That probably would be what I would choose if I were to choose a universal instinct that can really ring a bell to everyone on this planet. Maybe this family value, family tradition, and things like that could be really interesting.
What are your concluding remarks for our dialogue? You know, and what do you think? You know, because of this nature and instinct and everything, we can have a better world, have a better future for mankind, you know, have this kind of a learning experience of each other, a tradition of emphasis, and this kind of human being’s basic instinct. I mean, how can we maximise that — the good instinct, of course: care for each other, love each other, and stick strongly to family values?
Michael Morris
Well, one definition of tribe is family beyond family, right? It’s because you have this connection to the other. You have this trust with the fellow members of your tribe, no matter what kind of tribe it is. And ultimately, the prototype for that is family.
And I think that’s the genius of Confucian philosophy, that the basic family relationships are the prototype for thinking about the rest of society. You honour your parents, you should also honour your teacher. You should also honour the emperor. So I think that that’s a very wise way of understanding that these larger groups, like a society, are rooted in the fundamental instincts that come from the smallest group, the family.
And I think that one thing I like about when I spend time in China—and I have many old friends, you know, like Peng Kaiping and many others—is that when I meet their children, they always say, “You remember Uncle Michael, right?” You know. I lived in Singapore for a couple of years. And there they take it really far. Everybody’s an uncle or an auntie, you know. Like every person working at a restaurant, “Hello, aunty.” “Hello, uncle.” You know, so anthropologists call this fictive kin—familiarising people, you know, making somebody like family. And I think that’s a part of Chinese culture that I think is really wonderful: that you have this capacity to first understand family, but also to bring in a stranger as though they are a family member.
And I think that the hope for international commonty, the hope for international growth and respect, comes from that. We need to keep telling young people to go study in other countries. We need to have people go live in other countries and work there and become part of families, like Xi Jinping did in Iowa, right? He lived with a family.
And so that’s the best thing we can hope for, I think, in terms of not just understanding at a cognitive level how we differ, but feeling connected, feeling that connection of the heart to people, even though they may live on a different side of the world.
Henry Huiyao Wang
Okay, great. Thank you, Professor Morris. I think it’s getting late there now. It was a fascinating discussion, and we really enjoyed it. We also have many, many think-tank researchers and media friends here in this room, and we have a lot online as well. So I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy day. We also want to thank CITIC Press, our audience here, and our audience online. And we’d love to welcome you back next time, so we could do that again.
Michael Morris
Well, I wish I could be there in person and talk to everyone in the room about their questions and their interests. I’m fascinated by China, and I really wanted my book to have a Chinese edition because I feel like the largest pool of educated, curious, well-meaning people is in China. That’s the largest pool on earth of people that I want to reach with this book.
Henry Huiyao Wang
That’s true. We have 250 million college graduates among our population. So it is one of the largest.
Michael Morris
Yeah, I mean, that’s — you know, you have as many college graduates as we have people.
Henry Huiyao Wang
That’s right. Thank you. Okay. Great. Thank you very much, Michael. And we really hope to keep in touch.
Michael Morris
Thank you so much. It’s been a real honour to talk to you.
Note: The above text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. It is posted as a reference for the discussion.
